A Competent Admininistration

July 8, 2021

The Biden Administration is churning along on its various projects but things are in stasis, at the moment, because the fruits of their endeavors have not yet arrived with the exception of that easy one that occurred early on when the Recovery Act passed and, among other things, provided jobs for health care workers and cops, and gave everyone a fourteen hundred dollar check, and covered the costs of Covid relief. Not minor but the real test is whether Biden will get his infrastructure bill and his family plan, both of which should result whether from bipartisanship or reconciliation in late summer. As it is, there is no movement on the George Floyd Act to deal with police violence, where negotiators are still negotiating and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act seems to be getting nowhere however much Biden says he is strongly in favor of those two bills. So Biden will either be a great success and run in the midterms on his success at the infrastructure and family bills, a tribute that government can work in spite of the fifty fifty tie in the Senate and only a majority of a handful in the House, or he will be a failed President, in which case the Republicans who had blocked his efforts will run against him as a do nothing President. Either a hero or a failure rather than just middling with just some accomplishments along with his defeats. So we all wait and think that the very fabric of democracy is in the balance in that a Republican majority in Congress, most Republicans still not having pledged itself to the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and those Republicans might do any number of deplorable matters though. like as not, will do not very much other than allow states to undercut democratic elections because doing nothing and being obstructionist is what Republicans have done for a while, even before Trump, in that their creed is no longer balancing the budget or being aggressive at foreign powers or fighting the cultural wars like abortion, the last issue to be dealt with next year by the Supreme Court when its 6-3 majority will likely seriously curtail the right to an abortion just as this year it seriously curtailed the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, leaving only the possibility that the Biden Attorney General will cleverly find a way to sue states for voting rights incursions even though the Supreme Court limited that by saying these suits had to be significant and cognizant of the need to avoid voter fraud even though the Court never had to say the states had to show there had indeed to be voter fraud before restrictions to protect it from happening occurred. The Supreme Court is not simply wrong headed; it is fatuous. So we wait and so have foreboding about what will happen when events break.Meanwhile, I get some solace, despite my anxieties, for watching the Biden Administration perform itself so smoothly. It is a pleasure to watch given the chaos of the Trump Administration when that President made off the cuff and erratic and wrong and lying remarks and performances and his Executive Branch was understaffed or ever changing or riddled with ideologues and ignorant people and Trump, for the nation’s relief, was not able to control the reins of government because he didn’t know how to and so could do trivial things by clearing rioters so he could have a photo op at a church, to no effect, although reports have it that he did plan to undermine institutions, while only undercutting Bill Barr and his predecessor because of the only parochial concern over whether the two of them had supported him in the investigations by Congress of his misdeeds. No big policy agenda. Just a wall to nowhere and giving money to rich people, that last something Republicans always like to do so as to get reelected to office.

Directing, Scripting, and Acting

July 5, 2021

Henry King was a successful but rarely artistically accomplished movie director. From the time of the silence through the mid Fifties, which is an eon of changes through the talkies and then Technicolor, from slow and leisurely storytelling as in the black and white “State Fair” to the lavish melodrama of “Love is a Many Splendored Thing”, King’s movies made it at the box office but did not have the acclaim that was associated with the first rate directors like Wyler and Wellman and Ford. His movies were workmanlike but, to tell the truth, fell dead. Whether when it was a color musical such as “Carousel”, its boxy pacing and sets did not make Shirley Jones and Gordon Macrae soar. They both seemed doughty even though they were young and fresh, as Jones had shown a few years before in “Elmer Gantry”. The big interest in King’s “State Fair” was the pig. There was, however, an exception, when King seemed to go beyond himself, for reasons unclear, whereby he put it together so that the script, the cutting, the scenery and the acting made one movie spectacularly effective, ever a tribute to the mysteries of art. Here is the one that seems to me to be far above the rest of his oeuvre: “Twelve O’Clock High '', made in 1949.

Foreground and Background in Ozu

July 1, 2021

It is simple enough to understand the difference between the foreground and the background in a novel or a film. “Pride and Prejudice” has a background of small villages and manor houses and smaller homes who at least have a few servants, as well as roads to London and comfortable places there in which people can live, while the foreground, the action of the story, concerns how young people of various stations of life pursue courtship and marriage. That is the adventure or story of the novel, even though by the time Jane Austen does his last and best novel, “Persuasion”, the foreground of the story is about love lost and then regained has also changed its background in that a class situation dominated by property and station is transmuted into social position dominated by wealth. Sometimes, there is a novel or film preoccupied with the background rather than the foreground. Tolstoy shows the social life of upper class Russia in both “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina”, the characters appealing enough but not highly distinctive. Pierre, in “War and Peace”, is the type of someone who doesn’t belong, useful as a companion to go with and elucidate battlefields, while Levin, in “Anna Karenina”, is a type of person trying to be progressive by becoming reactionary, he becoming a bit more human when he notices that he is old enough so that his teeth are beginning to rot. (I guess there were few dentists.) The same focus on background also applies to “Gone With the Wind”, a way of life overturned and ended after what was its brief flourish, the author making believe, as it was for historical consciousness, a way of life that had lasted for only a few generations from the time when the plantations were established and the destruction of the South brought about by the war. Enough figures populate the present so that the background is explored. The same is true with much greater effect in James Gould Cozzens’ much underappreciated “Guard of Honor” where a dashing World War II Air Force officer is tested as a leader, the foreground, when the real drama is how his air base, as an organization, measures up to adapt to changing circumstances. The background, not the foreground, is the issue.

Housing is Not a Home

June 28, 2021

“Housing” nowadays is understood as a social problem. How are we to establish enough residences so as to make populations both affordable and comfortable? It is difficult to do so because there is always a tendency to build luxury housing rather than build low cost housing. All you have to do is put in gold knobs and the price jacks up, while low cost housing has a small profit margin. Moreover, people away from transit lines or commercial areas will not provide the amenities upper income people desire. That is why municipalities offer rent controls and other devices so that the populations of people will remain mixed rather than just enclaves of very high incomes, though that is an always losing battle, Manhattan, for example, replacing lower income housing with luxury housing. The drive to provide affordable and manageable housing is at least as old as the New Tenement Law in New York City in 1901 which required apartments in buildings to include running hot and cold water, indoor toilets, ventilation and other amenities to be certified for inhabiting these structures. The idea was that housing was a home in that it was a place where people felt comfortable and sufficient in that they could deal with their basic needs for food, heat and grooming. It was a place where people could be at peace when they were alone with their families rather than engaged during the day with commerce and work and schooling and all the other activities or purposes whereby people left their homes so as to joust with their incomes and their bureaucracies. That was different from what happened in mass public supported buildings in the mid Twentieth Century when housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was notorious for elevators that didn’t work and young people wandering around the halls intruding into any apartment they care to and so providing neither amenities nor security for the occupants. The entire edifice had to be torn down because it was an urban pest hole that no one wanted to live in.

Is Civic Education the Answer?

June 23, 2021

George Packer is a seasoned and judicious political journalist and has offered in the Atlantic magazine this week a very pessimistic portrait of the American scene. He says that we are engaged in an extended civil war in that people have difficulty recognizing themselves as fellow Americans because of their ideologies, emotions and customs. The other side is the enemy. Hillary Clinton’s side thought she was right to think her opponents deplorable and irredeemable while those opponents thought that the coastal elites, as they considered them, condescending and remote from ordinary life, not willing to recognize that so many families of both stripes supported Little League and soccer practice. I observe the truth of this view when I see and hear people who are committed to law and order and think the looting that occurred last summer during the reaction to George Floyd was unconscionable while those who attacked the Capitol in January were people out on a lark and visa versa, the insurrectionists unpardonable and the looters understandable. Moreover, Packer thinks this situation is likely to remain of longstanding, each side more deeply sunk into its own silo of thought, fact and observation, whatever is the order of these three perceptions, and may lead to the disintegration of the American polity and something could set off a spark that not even the military should or could suppress.

Historical Mysteries

June 19, 2021

An historical mystery arises when historians consider why events happened and, after considering all the forces that are at work, there is no satisfactory explanation for why the event or events took place. A good example of an historical mystery is the outbreak of World War I, a topic rigorously investigated from the overly ample materials of the circumstances and events of what is called The July Crisis that occurred after Prince Ferdinand (and his wife) had been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 and had for some reason precipitated a World War from which we might say we did not all recover until the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany was reunited in the late 1980’s. How had this apocalypse, none of its member states believing it would happen (Germany mistakenly thinking it would be a short war), had nevertheless occurred?

Criticizing Critical Race Theory

June 14, 2021

When critical race theory was a manifesto proposed by Black lawyers and other Black intellectuals in 1980 to set straight American history, claiming that Black people were the backbone for creating American society and yet its endemic racism had turned the tables and victimized Black people and it was time to restore to Black people the rightful historical and present order of things, I thought the theory, though it was not worked out well enough to award that term of praise, was both jejune and meretricious, and I thought the so-called theory destined to fall on its own weight and to be overtaken by more enlightened Black intellectuals because its success would turn back race relations for generations. The movement it has inspired, however, has become hallowed in its brief history and has inspired a counter movement to abolish it, in school boards and state houses, both the advocates and their opponents neither of them appreciating history as the way to see history is complicated but instead think of history as a way to take sides on peoples and races and so the controversy has indeed set back a more enlightened view of race relations and so there is indeed a need to point out the shortcomings and malice of the movement and the same of its opponents. It is just another case of bad ideas continuing to fester and we would all be best rid of it, which is also the case of Naziismand Qanon. Bad ideas, after all, do matter. I will grant, however, that the two sides are ignorant rather than as meanspirited or vicious as those other benighted movements.

Communism and Qanon

June 10, 2021

Frank Lovejoy was a mid-level supporting movie actor whose base voice, prominent chin and dour personality should have given him more recognition, much more so than Robert Stack, who also developed a persona as a stone face and became a Hollywood fixture for twenty years. But Lovejoy did manage to act as the star of a minor movie, “I Was a Communist for the FBI”, made in 1950, close to the top of the Second Red Scare, and he portrayed a Communist undercover agent for the FBI so as to let the audience see both the workings of Communism in the American midst as well as how the hero persevered to finally reveal himself as a true patriot, something all right thinking people would endorse because all the Reds were bad and devious and violent while the FBI and civilians understood that all Reds were bad, no ambiguities allowed. As Whittiker Chambers put it, the real war was between Reds and ex-Reds. They would decide the fate of the world. Other movies such as “I Led Three Lives'' and “Dear John'', which starred Helen Hayes and the last year of the overweight Robert Walker, made the same point: monolithic heroes and monolithic villains in our midst. The point of these movies was to see the Communist side as impenetrable, beyond the ability to understand what ordinary people thought of them, and nothing redeeming about them, and so it was that there was a gnostic divided between the two that was not mediated by ideological interchange or mixed feelings, the female Communist in the movie realizing it was a lost cause as soon as she realized what the Party was doing, never wondering whether allowances might be made for its imperfections after she had joined its initial idealistic enthusiasm. Even German generals within a few years of the war were recognized as having human touches and mixed feelings and a kind of honor, but not so for Communists.

The Iron Laws of Emotions

June 6, 2021

The theory of emotions is a field of endeavor that concerns the causes of emotions, whether they are responses to physiological events, or are mediated by thoughts, or some combination of the two or is impacted by some other kind of factor offered for consideration. Are you anxious because you sweat or sweat because you are anxious or because you think there is a reason to be anxious? I want to suggest a different approach. Consider the nature of emotions rather than the cause of emotions. What are their basic characteristics? Identifying those is, first of all, possible and, second of all, result in non-obvious findings about emotions.

Biden's New Deal

June 2, 2021

Before assessing Biden’s initiative to change America’s social structure through government, let’s stand back and consider these other initiatives to do this in the course of, say, the last hundred and twenty years, when government emerged out of a Wild West culture where businesses jousted with one another to industrialize America without much government intervention. Remember that wars, or the Space Program, or establishing national parks, or conventional infrastructure, such as building the Continental Railroad or the Interstate Highway System, however admirable they may be and of considerable consequence, are not part of these social initiatives, all of which, whether Republican or Democratic, failed or successful, have tried to expand entitlements and regulations, where an entitlement means awarding money or some other favor, such as ten points oxtra on a civil service exam for veterans, and a regulation is the stipulated procedures for an organization, such as regulating the way to calculate utility charges for the consumer, and these entitlements and regulations have been opposed by those who had preferred whatever had already been there, or thought government was too intrusive and so a danger to individual liberty, or were simply oppositional, in that the other party was always to be opposed against the incumbents for that reason alone, and that is the present case, where Mitch McConnell is against Biden’s programs just because Biden is proposing them, and think that Republicans can win the Congress and the White House just by being contrary.

Jane Austen's Sexual Morality

May 29, 2021

“Sense and Sensibility”, which is the first of Jane Austen’s novels, is a fully developed work. It has the brittle and humorous dialogue, the vivid characterizations, the plot twists, and the deep penetration into the social life of the time, that mark all of Austen’s completed novels, even if there are later novels that include even deeper and more complex people than is the case in “Sense and Sensibility”, such as Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park'', or themes very different from supposedly sunny Jane Austen, such as when death and despair provide the tone for “Persuasion”, the last of her novels. In “Sense and Sensibility”, Jane Austen had already established herself as the best author since Shakespeare. Moreover, “Sense and Sensibility” is clearly grounded in and expressed in its moral lesson and so the novel has the weight that other of her novels have about the meaning a reader is to infer and to contemplate, even if this meaning is one that current readers might find uncomfortable or even repugnant.

The Anger of Rashida Tlaib

May 25, 2021

An event in current events prompted for me a consideration of the nature of anger. Rashide Tlaib, the only Palestinean American person in Congress, was at the tarmac in Dearborn, Michigan meeting with President Biden a week or two ago when he was touting the recovery and promise of the Ford River Rouge auto plant and she was reported to have had a heated exchange with him about what was the then continuing war between Israel and Gaza, she reported to have claimed that Netenyahu was a “aparteid prime minister”. Afterwards, at the auto plant, Biden had publicly praised Tlaib as an eloquent and passionate spokesperson for her own point of view and that he hoped her family on the West Bank was doing well. The question is how she would have taken to his response, putting aside that the meeting itself, as that had been engineered by the President, allowed the congresswoman to be known as someone expressing the concerns of her constituents in a particularly pointed manner. Quite aside from these politics where one hand washes the other and that Biden might need a favor from her later on for his having given her the opportunity to speak out, a deeper question is whether she would have felt the President was to be noticed as having been gracious rather than angry for what she said, certainly not how Biden’s predecessor would have done, which was to angrily chastise Tlaib for her point of view. Rather, Biden and Tlaib had acted in a civilized manner to one another. Biden had in effect said that being cordial whatever are the political differences, however emotional they can become, and that recognizing familial loyalty is something everyone can embrace. Biden. In his brief remarks, refused to villainize an opposition just as George Bush ‘43 had done when he did not villainize Arab Americans after the World Trade Center disaster. Biden, I might take it, was binding wounds and making all of us feel better, rejecting animosity in favor of mutual respect. That is the way I first took it. Biden’s remark was to remind us that American politics can put aside personal rancor while pursuing the political process, each of those who hold positions in the government to be treated as worthy of dignity. We all become warm, or many of us do, for having risen to this occasion.

This Week in History

May 18, 2021

Here is a record of what happen this week that might be worth remembering fifty years from now, just as I wish I remembered vividly some week’s events in 1962 when people like me were wondering whether Kennedy would push for some civil rights bill, that mounting sense of disappointment occurring at the same time of heightening tensions while there were rumors and reports that the Soviet Union was placing missiles in Cuba. I have also repeatedly seen the record captured in the footage of George Stevens of the ravages of Berlin and Munich in mid 1945. Women send bushels of rubble from one hand to another in a chain of workers so as to clear some of the debris (I understand they were paid a day wage by the American government so that some people could get some work). Stevens also, at the time, filmed German POWs, smiling perhaps because they had survived the war or, perhaps, only angry that they had lost, not yet rehabilitated from Naziism. Like every moment, there was a knife edge on whether Germany would change what was not at all inevitable, which is to return to a democratic society. The Stevens films conveyed the tenor of the times, more accurate than a reconstruction through history. I also remember having read the next day of the New York Times reporting on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in 1911, when 146 girls died and 78 were injured in a sweatshop factory where the doors were locked so that the girls could not take bathroom breaks. Journalism didn’t only provide “the first draft of history”, a phrase invoked to praise journalism. Rather, such journalism or newsreel footage or memory provide but facts that might otherwise ever escape notice and retain the character or flavor of the concatenation of events that make the period of a time as being such.There were reports of girls jumping off the building, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was housed, to their deaths so as to avoid the fire, just as people did when they also jumped from the World Trade Center on September 11th, teachers not telling the children who saw it that these were not birds. That immediacy of experience is not as well captured as happens in, let us say, the 9/11 Commission, and so should be treasured for what is established as a record just last week too.

Jane Austen's Fantasy

May 11, 2021

Jane Austen published “Persuasion” posthumously in 1817, which meant that the novel was composed by her in her late thirties, far beyond when she was likely to marry, but she seems still in her later years to have pined about having never managed to marry. She was, in fact, a maiden aunt, tending the children of relatives, which is just what Anne Eliot, the fictional heroine of “Persuasion” believes has begun to happen to her, nursing children and putting up with her whiny and self indulgent sister as best she can. Anne’s is a rather grim future, even if Jane seems to have gotten along with her real life sister. So Austen, so committed to the notion of bourgeois matrimony, as it includes both romance and children, crafted “Persuasion” as a fantasy about what might have been: how a lover she jilted comes back on the scene and after a while she and he reawaken their mutual sense that they were meant to be together, that they both had persistence in their mutual devotion despite the fact that people will persuade them to be otherwise and so lose several of their years before finding one another again. Anne gets everything: a suitor arises before she gets the man she wants, and even gets the childhood estate she wanted as the place where she and her new husband will live. What makes the story other than a silly girlie romance is the perspicacity whereby Austen looks into family dynamics and the context of the times that make what is happening to the characters’ individual lives. First off, however, is how harsh Austen is to the people in this last of her novels, much more so than was the case with other Austen figures who are also undeserving. Mr. Collins is a clown and so is so patently insufferable that he is amusing. Even Mr. Wickham, who is a cad, is discovered to be just what he is and so to be avoided or sent away, his main purpose is to let Darcy to be seen as how noble he is. But the people who surround Anne are dangerous and insufferable and deplorable and it is a wonder that Anne can follow through the crowds of ingrates and social climbers so as to find her own true love. The main setting for the romance of Anne and Frederick Wentworth is set in Bath, the fashion spa developed only recently in the 1770’s,where the wealthy live in what we would call a planned community of mostly grand apartments, as accompanied with musicals and shops. The poor are there only so as to provide service., as is the case with a modern ski resort. As in all of Austen’s novels, the pace races ever more quickly towards its ending, and Anne does so, going to see Frederick before he will leave and admit to him that she loves him even as he is trying to send him a letter admitting that he loves her, and so both of themselves proposing to one another, which is just a perfect thing. The anxiety comes from all those other people interfering, and most of them malicious, including a distant relative, a Mr. Eliot, who is told by another that he was a cad who wanted her title and would have had a mistress if he had married Anne. It would not seem that it was much too fit that Anne learned he was right to distrust Elliot, but Austen tends to do that, making who was good and bad all too certain rather than left murky, as happens when Mr. Wickham is not just an opportunist but a seducer and the good people overcome the bad rather than just do what they do while the particularly good people find one another. In “Persuasion”, there are so many bad people, and we have to sort out their kinds of badness. Jane is getting bitter.

"2034" Is About The Past

May 6, 2021

I read a recently released future history novel about a naval conflict between the United States and China. “2034” was written by Eliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavrides. The novel was entertaining even though it had very elementary skills at fiction writing and so provides a good sense of how elemental are the properties of fiction, that fiction is an enterprise that is pleasing in its basic idea, and so to be examined to find out just what that is. I think of it as “painting by the boxes” which was a pastime of some decades ago when people would use the paints provided by dabbing each of the thousand square boxes with the number designated in each square. The painter, not really an artist, found some satisfaction from completing the project. It was less demanding than doing a crossword puzzle. And what resulted was a picture that had the elements of painting, however rudimentary and mechanical was the process. The painting had color, texture, composition and emotional tone, which is what emerges from any painting even if there is little art that makes it deeply feeling or thinking. The same is true of this novel which alludes to the elements of the novelistic style rather than freshly or vividly engaging it as that of a distinctive accomplishment, but satisfying nonetheless. Moreover, it also has a moral theme and a sense of war that at least reminds the reader of more significant fictional and real events and are worth noting because even people, including writers, also have takes on the military life and the history of nations that are worth observing because they render cliches rather than insights.

Victimized and Non-victimized

April 28, 2021

Critics have a way of judging with hindsight what writers said or should have said about them while knowing what has happened since. A case in point is a recent article of The New York Review of Books which reappraises what Faulkner should have done about segregation during the period in the early Fifties when he thought in favor of a gradualist approach to restructuring the South. What I too him to mean was that Southern whites were soon to undergo an agonizing reappraisal of the South and that we should not expect them to readjust quickly, to which I would have responded, as MLK did, to ask how long are Blacks to wait to get their redress of grievances, but that was a consideration at the time, to easily dismissed nowadays as Faulkner simply being not up to the moral and political challenges of his times. I want to generalize this problem. Like Faulkner, there are some people that have to deal with the fact that they are now to recognize themselves as having been exploiters, and how they are to regard that fact. Southerners have to come to terms with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Other ex-exploiters include those who ravaged the American Indians and Germans have to deal with the Holocaust and the British with what to say about the imperial control of Africa. Other people, on the other hand, are those who are or are the children of those who were the victimized, such as blacks and native americans and Jews and so they also have to deal with the psychological and structural advantages and disadvantages of being in those roles. Lets elaborate the ways in which people of either sort understand these roles: the ex-exploiter and the ex-victim.

Race Relations Today

April 23, 2021

There have been much congratulations offered by Black activists and observers as well as the President and Vice-President about the fact that Derek Chauvin was convicted on all charges for the murder of George Floyd. Those surrounding Floyd’s family think that this decision was pivotal. Police officers whose actions that illegally kill Black citizens are usually covered up and police officers charged with such a crime are usually vindicated. This time was different and the conviction will increase the pressure for Congress to pass the well crafted and long overdue George Floyd Act which would restrict police violence. But remember that we just barely missed the bullet shot against both social order and equal rights for Blacks and whites under the law. The building where the trial was held and the decision delivered was crowded with National Guard members and other kinds of police officers because there might have been significant rioting if the verdict had been otherwise, whether to acquit Chavin or just to convict him only of manslaughter. That shows there is an imbalance of forces in that the Black community has a sense of justice on its side and also a threat of rioting while the white population has an ingrained sense that the Black community is not on the side of social order and that its grievances are exaggerated even if the outrage against police violence is eloquent. The combination of justice upheld and violence deterred suggests that race relations are very bad. Blacks have a justified grievance against persistent police violence and whites think that Black neighborhoods are suspect because there are hoodlums and gangsters among them that the rest of the community cannot control. And Black advocates do not help the matter because they come up with preposterous slogans that offer justice or nothing instead of a balanced and nuanced presentation of the issues as they were once proclaimed by the Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and especially by Dr. MLK, Jr.

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