A Testament for Organizers

There is a collective wisdom and lore passed down among agitators, it turns out. I associated it most with Saul Alinsky, but reading Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle -- probably the greatest literary treatment of the pre-Cold War Heroic Age of the American Communist Party -- one sees that it is in fact of older lineage than that. Indeed, it may be downright ancient. Steinbeck's organizer characters seem to have learned well the lessons of the New Testament, for instance (apart from that whole business about turning the other cheek).

We learn from the Penguin Classics Introduction that Steinbeck made the comparison himself to the original disciples, and it was not necessarily one he intended flatteringly. The two CP organizers at the heart of this novel are certainly wise as serpents, if not always as innocent as doves. One of the pair, Mac, is a kind of social chameleon. Someone accuses him at one point of being a "born actor" who, as soon as he is dropped in the midst of a new group of people, will start to imitate all their speech and ways.

American Dreamers

Saul Bellow's monumental picaresque The Adventures of Augie March is routinely described as "The Great American Novel." It is also, not coincidentally, a great novel of immigration. Augie himself is the child of an immigrant—though he is personally, and famously, "Chicago born." And among his many and varied abortive career paths, he at one point strikes out with an acquaintance of dubious character to try his hand at smuggling immigrants across the Canadian border.

This is in the midst of the Great Depression, when U.S. borders were on effective lock-down, and Augie runs no small legal risk by participating in the scheme. He needs money, however, and to the extent he has views on the people who might be paying for his services, he takes a humane and reasonable attitude: "Hell, why shouldn't they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There's enough to go around of everything including hard luck."

Active vs. Contemplative

Before J.K. Rowling penned the epilogue to the final Harry Potter book, my mom, sister, and I used to hypothesize as to the future careers of the three main characters. Or, rather, of one of the three main characters, since there could be only one with whom we all identified. And the consensus among us for years was that Hermione Granger was surely going to become a professor at Hogwarts.

Of course she would, right? Was she not that instantly recognizable type -- the "smart one" -- to whom each member of my family silently competes to have the best claim as a fictional analogue? And what did the smart ones do, other than become scholars and teachers?

Then book seven came out, and the verdict was in. Hermione did not become a professor at Hogwarts. She was, of all things, a lawyer.

"Kilt," not "whupped," Part 2

Okay my friends, I now have one further theory to posit about the Tim Kaine-quoting-Faulkner conundrum. In an earlier post, you may recall, we discussed a striking moment from Kaine's 2016 concession speech, in which he cited the words of Wash Jones, from Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, and drew cheers and applause from the audience.

As noted then, it was an odd choice. In the novel, Jones is an impoverished hanger-on to the Sutpen fortune. The phrase that Kaine quoted—about being "kilt," but not yet "whupped"—is one Jones utters multiple times with variations in the novel, and always in the context of trying to revive the Southern so-called "lost cause."

Boomers

A meme-ing came across the sky. First it happened on social media used by young people. Then, it was explained to us by a New York Times article, which recaps things that happen on social media to people who try to avoid social media like the plague, but can't. Then, it was taken up by social media used by old people. Then everyone got tired of it. Then everyone got tired of the jokes about how tired we were of it. All in the course of a week. It was the "OK, Boomer" phenomenon.

Was this phrase ever actually used by young people? I have no independent verification. What did it supposedly mean? That old people's critiques of young people could be dismissed with a hand-wave and eye-roll, seeing as old people are the ones who got us into this mess to start with. Is it, therefore, an "insolent slogan" (as the Washington Post recently dubbed it - with affection)?

Another Sighting

More than a year ago, you may recall, I began to collect on this blog an unfinished compendium of literary references to Unitarianism - for, given that this is one of the few institutions in the world with which I have cast my lot sufficiently to feel that it is in some ways very nearly an extension of myself, it is also one of the few whose mere invocation is enough to fill me with a frisson of ego-validation.

I write today to report another finding to add to the catalogue. And this one was all the more gratifying for having been unearthed slowly, by inches, blowing off the dust as I went, reconstructed from its fragments like the skeleton of an ancient saurian.

Do they date?

Over the last few years, my sister has been initiating me by stages into the mysteries of "Army" - that is to say, the maenadic cult of obsessive followers of the K-Pop boy band BTS. Oftentimes, I have made no positive effort whatsoever to be drawn into these rites, but they have managed to bind me nonetheless. For whatever reason, these BTS boys are interesting, as is the global movement of fans they have inspired. My sister and I are convinced the boys are charting the same artistic trajectory as the Beatles, and are right on the cusp of entering their more avant-garde White Album phase.

One particular event this past summer drew the coils of obsession more tightly - it was when we went to see the latest BTS concert movie. Do I love their music? No - it's fine but not really my thing. Am I impressed by their dancing? Absolutely - but mostly in the sense that it inspires abstract respect, rather than deep interest. What I found myself obsessing over on the way out the theater door, rather, was a question that has puzzled and beguiled fans the world over. In my sister's telling, it is perhaps the greatest of all the mysteries that surround the boys. Namely: Do they date?

Errata and Marginalia 008: Conrad

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2008).

If the introduction to this B&N Classics edition is to be trusted, the second half of Lord Jim has throughout the book's history suffered from comparison with the first. As Conrad's narrative turns from a focus on Jim's failure of nerve aboard the Patna to his ultimate redemption in the jungles of Malaysia, prior generations of critics have accused the author of departing from the "serious" realm of realistic literature to enter the lesser domains of romance and adventure.

Never mind that the shift artfully coincides with the entomologist Stein's injunction to "follow the dream," as he advises that the only cure for an excess of idealism is to plunge even further into romance—even without this, I would defend the second half of the novel on terms of literary realism as well. And that is for one reason: the character of "Gentleman Brown," who is one of the most fully plausible villains in literature.

Yet Another Dance of Death

Homage to Rethel

When Adam delved

The brief sparring in the last Democratic primary debates over the question of automation has had the effect of filling my podcast queue with episodes from various shows on the subject of the "robo-pocalypse." The consensus among most seems to be that fear of automation is a red herring. Looking at the broad sweep of recent history, the true source of our economic malaise is if anything a marked decline in the rate of productivity growth (viz. Robert Gordon), which is precisely the opposite of what we would expect to see if the great menace to employment in this country were really that machines are becoming capable of performing our jobs so quickly and efficiently that they are putting us all out of work.

The Silicon Valley "Transhumanists" may delight in scaring the rest of us with their utopian, dystopian, and quasi-religious prophecies about the coming reign of machine intelligence - when we will all be reduced - or elevated, depending on your point of view - to a condition of splendid idleness by our new robot overlords. The bigger story in technology in modern times, however, is how little it has managed to affect our daily lives. While developments in information technology have transformed communication and entertainment, they have - as Matt Yglesias and others noted in this round of the great robot debate - left mostly untouched our other core industries.

Didion and Dunne's bad movie

In the early to mid-nineties, brilliant writer and prose stylist Joan Didion decided-- in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne -- to write the script for a Hollywood film starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. I'm sure they did so for understandable financial reasons.

For less obvious reasons, the movie is terrible. It is dull, confused, and pointless. There are about five different narrative threads that you think might amount to the film's story. None of them go anywhere. There are a series of people on the screen. But you can't stand any of them.

The screenwriting pair seem to have been aware of at least some of the film's deficiencies. Dunne even devoted an entire very entertaining book to describing the process of the film's creation. While he ultimately appears to think the movie turned out as more passable than it is, he does not rate it as anything higher than mediocre.

We really need that Popular Front

I have never been more afraid for the future of our country's institutions, or more persuaded of their imminent peril. Oh, to be sure, as a teenage leftist, I actually called for, demanded, the pulling down of the entire established order. Whether in my communist phase or my anarcho-syndicalist chapter, I didn't think that any of the current system was particularly worth salvaging. And then, when Trump was sharking his way toward office, I warned on this blog frequently that we were about to descend as a nation into quasi-fascism.

Both times, I meant it. I was being sincere, up to a point. But at the same time, I thought that I would "go on calmly eating good dinners for the next fifty years," to borrow a line from D.H. Lawrence. Whether urging that we ought to bring down the system or warning my contemporaries that it might be wobbling on its stilts, I still believed deep down that nearly everything would continue on -- as I knew it, in my life -- much as it had before.

Keynes and the Simulation Argument

Earlier this year, I devoted the latter half of a long rant to an attempt to debunk the "simulation argument" - a pseudo-philosophical head-scratcher that purports to prove that we are almost certainly living inside a computer simulation of reality (à la The Matrix). I return to the argument today, not because I have fresh points to make against it, but because I've found some added weight of authority for my position.

Briefly put, you may recall, the simulation argument goes like this: There are a number of possible accounts of reality. According to one particularly popular one, the naïve realist account, we are living in a universe that is external to ourselves, and whose nature accords with our own perceptions of it. In other words, the Thing-in-Itself exists objectively in much the same form that it appears to us, after it has passed through our sensory apparatus.

Curs'd conceit

As I feared I might, I've already been hearing the chorus of Trumpists, neoconservatives, and liberal hawks start up, collectively denouncing people who were in favor of Obama leaving Iraq but who now oppose Trump's leaving northern Syria (or at least oppose his doing so in this way, at this moment, with these consequences at stake). Despite detesting each other, all three groups have this week ever so briefly united in crying "hypocrisy" against erstwhile anti-interventionist leftists (like moi) who have supported previous U.S. troop withdrawals from the Middle East, but who are now condemning Trump's betrayal of the Kurdish fighters in northern Syria.

The Trumpians, of course, think this anti-interventionist "hypocrisy" is bad because we ought to support everything Trump does. The liberal hawk and neoconservative view, of course, is that people like me are right in this instance, but that we ought to have supported a robust U.S. military presence in Syria all along, and that we also ought to have opposed previous troop draw-downs as well.

So rah-rah-rah democracy...

Okay, so, supporting a general policy of troop draw-down is one thing. Asserting that the U.S. military role in the Middle East over the last two decades has been immensely destructive is, to be sure, the only rational view of the evidence. I of all people certainly believe in diminishing the U.S. military boot-print around the world. But suddenly throwing a long-standing U.S. ally to the wolves, as Trump has done today... that is something else entirely.

Here we have a tribal people, the Kurds, fighting a decades-long struggle to achieve independence from the autocratic governments that surround them. We have an authoritarian regime in Erdogan's Turkey with an appalling record of committing human rights violations in Kurdish territory. And we have the United States (up to now at least) tacitly encouraging Kurdish national aspirations along the way, overthrowing the Saddam Hussein dictatorship and allying with Kurdish fighters in its conflict with ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

We'd Surely Have Heard

Ten years or so after Al Gore began a countdown to irreversible climate disaster, David French penned a noxious little squib in National Review, drawing attention to Gore's earlier pronouncement. What was French's point? That a decade had passed, and the planet was still here. So much for Gore's doomsday clock, he crowed.

The rest of the piece was devoted to a nonsensical ad hominem. Didn't you know: Al Gore flies around the country in planes! So much for his carbon-free bona fides! Like all argumentative appeals to hypocrisy -- the famous tu quoque -- this is a decidedly self-defeating move. Are we admitting, David French, that carbon emissions are bad? That we shouldn't fly around in planes? Therefore climate change is a serious problem?

A Lost Leader

Browsing a book of classic English poems as a teenager, which I'd found on my parents' shelves, one gem in particular stood out to me -- and has remained in my mind ever since. It was Robert Browning's "The Lost Leader." Unlike many of the other poems I tried to auto-didactically force upon myself at that age, I did not have to pretend I found this one interesting. I knew at once what it was about, without having to pore over the words. I knew the sentiments, the stirring inward sensation of righteousness and betrayal, that had provoked Browning into writing it. I knew them well, because those feelings were my own.

On the most immediate level, of course, the poem is about Wordsworth. It is devoted to condemning him, in plain enough words, for having deserted the political left. Browning was deploring the great Romantic poet of the earlier generation for having become -- in later life -- an arch conservative and pillar of the Establishment, despite having been, as Shelley wrote in a poem on the same theme, the one-time prophet of English radicalism -- the unacknowledged legislator who had "weave[d]/ Songs consecrate to truth and liberty[.]"

All Changed, Changed Utterly

I feel like something is happening. A switch was turned. The lights came on. There are suddenly a lot of finest moments going around. Nancy Pelosi had one. Mitt Romney had one. The Lawfare podcast Rational Security certainly had one. Through forty-five minutes of an usually short, abrupt episode, they were on fire. This was the historical moment a podcast like Rational Security was made for.

Listening to it was when my moment came. I too was transformed. Up until I heard it, I was still thinking about the Trump/Ukraine story as something like a permutation of all the abuses and corruption that had come before. "Just another instance of his complicity in election interference." I was trying to think of how the case might be constructed that this violated campaign finance laws.

Art and Context

A friend was telling me recently about a YouTube prank, in which the jokesters took a few generic IKEA wall-art prints or floor rugs—each with a factory-produced abstract design—and mounted them as if they were great works of contemporary art. They then proceeded to ask passing connoisseurs for their estimates of the prices of the masterworks in question. The figures quoted were astronomical, and many a would-be judge of artistic merit pronounced the IKEA prints as showing great signs of genius.

Most of us will chuckle when we hear this—partly with delight at the idea of showing up those we imagine to be poseurs, but also with the guilty thought, "better them than us." I suspect the vast majority of us, after all, would be just as likely to fail the prank's test. Even if we fancy ourselves somewhat "up on" art, we are probably more than capable of confusing an unfamiliar work of abstract expressionism —if we are told that's what it is—with an industrially-produced IKEA rug (which are, after all, designed by former art students just as museum art is).

A Poem

What I find most unforgivable about the high modern Greats

Whether Possum, Auden, Cummings, or His Royal Magus Yeats

Is how later Cold War liberals swooned o’er their purplest pessimisms

Saying forsooth! they’d foreseen Stalin Trotsky and all our totalistic schisms!

Oh ye woosiest prophets and chroniclers, ye quacks of doom, take note

Examine the true thought-odysseys of the prescient Cassandras you quote

Heed that each of them when it counted was irretrievably duped

By whatever biggest totalism had just by him, waving, trooped.

Falling Out

In one of the many extraordinary footnotes in his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James appends a story that confirms his opinion that "conversion" comes in many forms. If the gaining or losing of religious faith offers the prototypical form of the experience, and the Protestant narrative of irresistible grace its ur-text, there are nonetheless a thousand other human experiences of forming and forsaking convictions that have since been modeled on it.

Thus, James writes: "I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession, and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion, if the opposite of 'falling in love,' falling out of love, may be so termed." He goes on to quote at length from a young man's account, as he describes how he first developed an obsessive attraction to another person—and eventually snapped out of it. "The queer thing," he writes, "was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all stopped."

Pedantries

I was listening recently to a beloved Ken Jennings podcast, and I --along with the rest of the listening universe -- could not help but notice that his co-host (the also beloved John Roderick) kept pronouncing the name of the familiar brand of canned pasta-and-tomato-sauce-based-food-stuffs -- bizarrely -- as "Scabettios." I had to rewind and play it back twice to be sure I'd heard correctly. There was no mistaking it. Scabettios.

I wasn't sure if this was an inside joke or a slip of the tongue. I was certain that Ken would eventually explain it to us, if John offered no rationale. I waited. John said it again. Ken did nothing. One could almost hear him contemplating an intervention and deciding against it. John said it again. Scabettios. Still, Ken said nothing. John must have done it five or six times before finally Ken weighed in. "Why are you calling it Scabettios?" he asked.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

Consolation

I was once talking to a rather mischievous friend of mine, who had just received some bad news about a graduate program he had applied for. I texted him something like "it's their loss." And "I have so much faith in your abilities." This was followed by a pause. His eventual reply came simply in the form of a url. It took me to an opinion piece from a major newspaper. It said that clichés are the wrong thing to say when someone is going through a hard time. Well, serves me for trying.

If clichés are the wrong thing to say in such moments, however, what can be the right thing? It would seem the pitfalls of tactlessness are multiple, and exist on all sides. Some people, when clichés fail them, resort to advice-giving. We learned on day one of divinity school, however, that this is the cardinal no-no.

Data

There is a scene in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian in which "the judge" -- a psychopathic killer as well as a savant in every known field, and surely one of literature's most unsettling characters -- is glimpsed scribbling in a notebook. He is obsessively documenting specimens of various sorts that he has observed, catalogued, and killed. Some are birds, which he has shot and stuffed. Some are leaves, which he has pressed between the pages of a book. All are dead, by the time the judge is through with them. They have ceased their independent existence and been filed away to his satisfaction as data.

One of the other characters asks the judge why he does this. His answer is simple. "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge," he says, "exists without my consent."

Words Like Freedom

A small NGO recently found itself having to look for a new name. The director approached me because they were workshopping some of the proposals. One involved the word "Freedom," and I lunged at it. I thought it was plainly the best one. When I said so, however, she told me that unfortunately some of their board members had nixed the idea. They thought "freedom" sounded a bit passé. It was American exceptionalist. It was triumphalist. It had been appropriated by neo-cons. Etc.

I gathered this opinion came from some older white folks on the board who had been leftists for a  long time. When I heard their grounds for rejecting the "freedom" proposal, long-dormant irritations arose within me, related to things I hadn't been forced to think about for several years. I sensed in some vague way that these board members were giving voice to a Bush-era view of the matter. They hadn't got the memo that times had changed.

Percentages

A representative of the RAND corporation recently stood up before Congress to present the think tank's findings related to terrorism prevention. I didn't stick around to the end of the podcast to hear the whole talk, but where it began was troublingly familiar ground enough.

There is a sort of inverted pyramid of extremism, we are told. At the widest point are the many people exposed to extremist leaders and following radical, violence-endorsing ideologies. As the pyramid narrows, a subset of people will choose to act on those beliefs. And as we approach the pyramid's tip, we find the small but dangerous number of people who carry these extreme ideologies to the point of committing terrorist violence and hate crimes -- such as recently occurred in the massacres in Christchurch and El Paso.

Interrupting People

From my own perspective at least, I never interrupt people. It is always they who won't let me get a word in edgeways. Haven't you noticed? In a room full of adults my senior, I will observe the word-swarm of the conversation gather like a cloud of flies around a given topic. I will sit in my perch, waiting for an opening, sharpening the barb of my witty and profound contribution. My arm pulls back. I see a slight part in the cloud. I am ready for the throw.

But just as I am about to release, the cloud moves on. I missed my chance! We are now discussing a wholly different topic. I have only a few options left to me. I can give up in defeat and alienation, sinking back into my chair. I can drag the rest of the swarm back to the festering corpse of the topic they just abandoned, and compel them to regard it again (which they are never pleased to do).

Warren, Warren, Warren, Warren

If there is a Six Foot Turkey candidate this election cycle, it will be surprising no one to say it is Elizabeth Warren. Whether I, as mere private individual and cowardly citizen, will actually pull the lever for her in the primaries is another matter. I may well decide at the ultimate moment that I'd rather hide under a rock for the next year, bypass having to argue about the fraught and unanswerable "electability" question one way or the other, and  emerge blinking in November 2020 to cast my vote for whoever is still standing and is not Trump - the only really decisive factor.

But speaking in the voice of this blog, where I am supposed to stand occasionally for positive ideals rather than the mere negative avoidance of fascism (though that latter goal is surely nothing to scoff at), I want to put it down in writing that Warren is my candidate. She is far and away the most interesting person active right now in politics. Most surprising and intriguing of all, she is probably the closest thing to a "distributist" we're ever likely to see this close to the White House.

Woolf Meets Dog

If I had access to artistic talent -- or, at the very least, a studio at my beck and call -- I would lead the way in the creation of the first ever animated film adaptation of Flush: A Biography. This book -- the only one Virginia Woolf ever wrote, to my knowledge, that is concerned chiefly with the adventures of a cocker spaniel - is simply crying out for the Disney treatment.

And I'm talking about the old Disney. The book would just be so fantastic for it! It has exactly the right amount of scary, and for just the right length of time. Flush's kidnapping by a gang of Victorian dog-thieves and extortionists -- known to cut off their prey's paws when their owners do not cough up the ransom -- is so vividly and unforgettably described.

Errata and Marginalia 007: Pater

Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), originally published 1873.

I recently took a foray into John Ruskin, as you know, and while his reflections on subjects moral, religious, and political are mercifully few in the Elements of Drawing (while his reflections on drawing itself are sound and interesting) -- these minor instances were nonetheless stifling enough that I could immediately understand why Pater would come as such a fresh breeze by comparison.

To set even a toe over the gloomy threshold of Victorian orthodoxy makes one rush with inestimable aching gratitude into the arms of the rebels and iconoclasts of the age, Pater among them. One can well understand the impact he made on a young Oscar Wilde and other undergraduates who were exposed to his work.

Hyper-Reality

It started with the Hobbit movies. The new HD technology was not necessarily a success. The general consensus of people coming out of the theaters was that being able to perceive every follicle and belt buckle on the corpse of an orc was not actually a desideratum. One started to hear for the first time a phrase that has since become commonplace: "It looks so real it's fake." Suggesting that the earlier, grainier CGI in the original Lord of the Rings movies actually achieved a greater verisimilitude.

Things have only gotten worse since then. "It looks like a home video," said a coworker of mine, apropos of a more recent HD franchise. She was referring to the fact that the movie had that mysterious "soap opera" visual look that is instantly recognizable, but whose technological explanation eludes the likes of me. The daytime drama look. Like it must have been shot on a glorified camcorder.

The Moviegoer (1961): A Review

On the master list I maintain of all the books I one day intend to read, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer has always had a place. When I glimpsed it last week in the surprisingly well-stocked kiosk of reading material in Boston's South Station, however, it struck me in a new way. I was looking for a novel to pass the time on a train ride to visit my sister, and something about this one's size, design, and prior reputation seemed to fit the occasion just right. Is it time? I asked the book. Is it your turn? 

I turned it over and read on the back cover that the novel's protagonist is twenty-nine years old. Never mind, I thought. This book is for when I'm older. Save this one for later. Then: Wait a minute, with a hideous jolt. I'm twenty-nine! I'd almost forgotten. In my head I'm twenty-five. Or maybe nineteen. When I realized I was exactly Binx's age, it seemed to confirm the novel was speaking to me. It was a sign. I bought it and began consuming it on the ride.

And When Did You Last See Your Father?

Homage to Yeames

Ghostwriters

Last weekend, a friend sent me a message that contained what must be the most potent and enticing combination of words it is possible to send in my direction. It was a "job" listing from Craigslist, and its pitch was simple. "Ghostwriters wanted," it read. "No experience necessary." Seldom have I responded to any summons with such alacrity. An email was off within fifteen minutes, followed by obsessive re-checking of my inbox every couple of seconds.

For those who do not suffer from exactly my combination of personality traits, it may not be immediately obvious why this would be the response. For me, however, becoming a ghostwriter for some faceless online entity was one of the most dream-fulfilling ambitions I could contemplate. Had I not just a few days previous been talking with another friend, who expressed aloud our shared thought: "I wish being a hack writer was still more of a professional option."

"White Noise" and the Fear of Dying

On two recent cross-country flights, I began and then finished Don DeLillo's justly famous 1985 classic, White Noise. Reading this darkly hilarious book on a plane ride was not only a source of great pleasure, it was also a test of sheer white-knuckled fortitude, for someone who once struggled mightily with a fear of flying. DeLillo's book is a meditation on the fear of death, after all, and one of his more vivid scenes to illustrate the concept involves sudden plunges on commercial airliners through tens of thousands of feet.

To plow with glee through several hundred pages of such reflections, while being jounced about in turbulent air at thirty thousand feet, is to marvel both at the extent to which one has managed to conquer one's own previous phobia, as well as at the delight of DeLillo's prose. Who else could make this forbidding topic so riotously funny?

"The Malthus Factor" by Eric Ross: A Review

Eric B. Ross: The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics, and Population in Capitalist Development (Zed Books, New York/London, 1998).

At long last! One has unearthed a book that contains one of the most salutary arguments in the contemporary world -- an argument one has long desired to hear. One only wishes that argument were somewhat better made.

Dr. Ross's book can't always be described as felicitously written; it has its share of copy errors, which for once I won't bother counting up. It also makes its claims with a stridency and absolutism that it hasn't always earned. In other words, at several critical junctures, the book seems to assume the argument it should be presenting.

This is particularly a shame, though, because that argument is an important and much-needed one.

Errata and Marginalia 006: Steinbeck

John Steinbeck, The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), originally published 1957.

Yes, that's right, it was Steinbeck's first and only political satire set in modern France. The forgotten not-quite-jewel in the great author's crown. The rough in the diamond, if you will. I have to love this book simply for the fact that such an oddity exists. This is sufficient to my mind to forgive the book its faults.

Of which there are many. An unprepossessing man, in fulfillment of his creator's slightly Hadrian VII-esque fantasy, is suddenly elevated into the position of King, under the newly-restored French monarchy. Not-quite-hilarity ensures. The satire of this piece, if not altogether toothless, is certainly gummy.

Sri Lanka

The horrific attacks on hundreds of churchgoers this Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka has prompted some much-needed examination of the persecution of Christian minorities around the world, as well as some timely self-reflection on the Left's relative quiescence -- if not silence -- on their plight as a human rights issue. Instead of playing into narratives that exaggerate the reach and ideological coherence of the threat of "global jihadism," the New York Times ran a thoughtful piece Sunday that framed these attacks within the context of threats to religious minorities in the region generally, and called attention to the parallels between the violence Christians face and the oppression of other religious groups.

Across South and Southeast Asia, the piece argues, religious minorities face a shared threat in the form of rising ethnic nationalism, chauvinism, and majoritarianism from the dominant religious community in each state. Thus, a Christian living under Hindutva ideology in Modi's India or the official doctrines of political Islam in Indonesia or Bangladesh has as much in common with a Muslim in today's Buddhist-dominated Burma or the Han ethno-state of contemporary China as they do with their co-religionists in Christian-majority countries. It is a point, of course, that could be extended to the whole world.

This is Also Just to Say

I had a box of Ritz I wanted kept.

Upon a morn in Seoul I found it torn.

Who did this crime while I and England slept?

My sister - she had left the crumbs forlorn;

With not a note - unlike in Williams’ poem.

I gathered up the final bag, with grief.

Our mother asked if I would bear it home.

A quote from Wordsworth came to my relief.

I thought that yes, somehow I’ll have to find

Some joy in what remains – and never mind

That 'strength' - not joy - I learned - was the true line

(I looked it up); the sense still seems quite fine.

And as with crackers, so with trips and time

All things must end - and world itself, some say

By entropy or chewing up divine

Will pass or whither like the state - away.
Perhaps the ancient oracles were right.
Such ends come just like a 'thief in the night'.

Dr. Death: A Review

As we've discussed before on this blog, I have a doctor fantasy. And it doesn't seem to be going away either, no matter how hard I try to convince myself of its patent absurdity. I keep hoping that if I make fun of myself enough for my own implausible new-found aspiration, I will stamp it out, but it actually seems to thrive under ridicule, like a flower soaking up rain and sunshine. After all, it is precisely because it is ridiculous and unlikely that it exerts its inexorable charm.

The process goes something like this. My brain -- plus everyone I know -- tells me: "Josh, never in 29 years of living have you displayed the slightest aptitude, interest, passion for, or knowledge of the field of medicine." True. And I have not exactly gained any of those things either, since this perverse fancy suddenly blossomed within me last year. So why does it appeal?

Burnt-Out Cases

Back in January, there was a Buzzfeed article about millennials being the "burn-out generation" that everyone read. It discussed, among other now-famous things, the difficulty most millennials seem to face in learning how to "adult." You know, things like paying taxes, cleaning up after oneself, returning emails, and the other mundane tasks that are inescapable in life.

Like every other member of the vast totality of internet users that one means by "everyone," I found the article independently - through browsing. And then I became convinced that it had been written just for me. Yes! This is so my life! I thought. I too am burnt out - burnt to ash! Later that day someone else in the office shared the article around. "This is so my life," she said. Within a week or so, I was hearing it dissected on a podcast. So it goes.

Miller, Steinbeck, and Immigration Enforcement

This past week began with Trump announcing that he is going to terminate humanitarian aid to Central America, and it ended with the largest single workplace raid on undocumented workers in a decade -- awakening shades of the Postville raids.

In this as in other ghastly situations we face as a nation, we are often too quick to assume they are unprecedented, and that the writers of the past will have little direct light to shed upon them. I have been reading these past two weeks, however, two works by our Great American Authors that provide more insight than one might expect on our present historical moment. 

Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge (1955) and Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent (1960) are both products of the American mid-century; other than that, they would seem at first glance to have little in common, and to belong to very different milieux. Miller's play is set among longshoremen on the New York docks and depicts the consequences of an incestuous obsession within a working-class Italian family in Brooklyn. Steinbeck's novel -- his last -- describes the social rise and moral decline of a Yankee WASP living in Long Island.

Cenotaph

Carved out of a block of styrofoam after French Enlightenment architect Étienne-Louis Boullée's thrilling visionary design for a funerary monument to Sir Isaac Newton. It was supposed to be bigger than the pyramids. It would have put Epcot to shame. Tragically, it was never built. But a miniature carved out of styrofoam is a bit more doable. So I did it. Had we but world enough and time, I think this would be marketable as a pencil sharpener, with the writing implement entering the small portal. Or, dreaming big like Boullée, I think this would be an awesome plan for a doghouse.

UDS

So, back in 2016, I wrote a post of which I was intensely proud. Its subject was the range of distinct emotions and physical sensations that I know by inward knowledge I have experienced, but for which there didn't seem to be any word at present in our language. At the time, here is one I described:

Whenever I am alone with someone and they become consumed, of necessity, with some task involving intense concentration -- doodling or writing, say, or showing me something on a map, or finishing the drafting of an email (I first remember experiencing this feeling while watching my kindergarten teacher check something in her calendar, for example) -- I have a tingling sensation of pleasure somewhere in my abdomen. It's not like any other sensation of pleasure one obtains from any other satisfaction, however. It is a ghost's pleasure -- a thrill of temporary non-existence. I can sort of hover there, peering over the other person's shoulder, with one foot inside my being and the other outside of it. Then they close the laptop or the sketch book or calendar, turn to me, and the feeling evaporates.

After I explained all of this recently to my friend Seanan, he suggested that maybe there was a German word for it, since they are so good at coming up with compound words that lack precise English equivalents. Failing in our efforts to find one, he made one up: Über-die-Schulter (over-the-shoulder). And we'd better go with that, since we have no other. 

Have any of you ever experienced it, that is, a touch of the old Über-die-Schulter? "Ah, I had such a case of Über-die-Schulter at that meeting today." I could see it catching on.

Let us call it UDS for short.

Titus Andronicus

Most "great" famous authors really are great when you finally get around to reading them. And this is always a dismaying realization, since it defeats one's attempts to excuse the fact of not yet having read them by passing it off as a product of superior discernment.

For my young self, the trouble in this regard was always that I could never bring myself to touch Shakespeare. Of course, I read some of it in school, and saw some of it in plays I was taken to - that is to say, I absorbed the unavoidable quota in our society. But I never of my own volition made a concerted attempt upon the bard. The fact that the insidious educational Establishment wanted me to recognize Shakespeare's genius made me hate him on principle.

Venezuela, a postscript

Earlier this month, I wrote a short post about the humanitarian and political crisis in Venezuela. I was trying my best to play my usual aspirational role of a post-war Camus, planted between the Scylla and Charybdis of right- and left-wing tyrannies and delivering a firm and impassioned ni to both. Neither Franco nor Stalin! Neither victims nor executioners!

As applied to the present catastrophe unfolding in Venezuela, the Camus principle led me to try to communicate that both the Maduro government and the U.S. strategy of trying to topple him through sanctions -- and replace him with a man who has never been elected to the presidency -- are morally abhorrent.

Mending fences

In my limited backyard, a small portion of a white fence abuts in one area a next-door neighbor's property. It is a flimsy thing to start with -- made of some kind of plastic -- and when I keep my windows open on a windy night I often hear it creaking eerily outside my bedroom. Therefore, I wasn't entirely surprised -- actually, I didn't even notice -- when on a particularly blustery evening a few months back, a whole section of the fence popped out of its bracket, leaving a top corner of a section of the fence to flap occasionally against the column that otherwise sustained it.

This is, in fact, very much the kind of thing that I would never have noticed or fixed at all. Years might have gone by without my caring. I realize now that I was hearing it flapping at night all that time, but as I have mentioned, there was so much spooky creaking and rustling going on already, that my brain was willing to just add it to the mix.

The American Scheme

A coworker and I were trading podcast recommendations the other day, and as usually happens in these sorts of conversations, mine all seemed to me stale and obvious and old-hat, whereas she dropped a single name that has since then already changed my whole understanding of life and the world and American society. It was The Dream -- the podcast about Multi-Level Marketing (MLM). I'd never heard of it before, but I have now spent more than a few prolonged evenings binging its eleven episodes. Having reached the end, it now seems to me that MLMs explain everything about our national character and the political age in which we live.

But what exactly are MLMs? It turns out they include those great all-American corporations you've vaguely heard about from the distant past, but which are apparently still major players in our economy, including Amway and Mary Kay. It turns out they -- Amway specifically -- are the source of the DeVos family fortune that has bankrolled Republican politics in this country for the last half-century; that has staffed the Chamber of Commerce; that put my family's home town of Grand Rapids, MI on the map; and that catapulted our current Secretary of Education into a cabinet-level position. They are the companies that have won accolades and swelling praise from the likes of Donald Trump (no surprise there), George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon...

Eliot, Allusions by and to

Perhaps you are like me, and you have a general interest in literature, and therefore in your younger days you made a few valiant efforts to scale the tallest peaks of High Modernism, T.S. Eliot's poems among them, and when you did so you came away with a few memorable quotations and passages, and a great deal of other stuff that was wholly impenetrable and useless to you. And perhaps, if you are even more like me, you now find yourself approaching thirty, and are increasingly filled with a superstitious feeling that there are certain things that you just want to be able to say you did while you were still in your twenties, and you unexpectedly had a snow day from work today, and you are encouraged by seeing from the book on your shelf that the "Complete Poems" in Eliot's case are really not so great in number, even if they are dense in mystification, and so you decide to make another attempt upon that mountain that defeated you in the past, and you open the book and read.

Strategy, in the Face of Novelty

I am utterly sure that Democrats have done more to create the myth of the Republican master strategist than members of their own party ever could, or would want to. Since the 1990s, hand-wringing liberals have cried up the awesome power of the Frank Luntzes, the Lee Atwaters, the Roger Stones of the world-- burnishing their images more no doubt in the eyes of prospective clients than anything their promotional materials could achieve. "Look, Republicans are so evil!" this line of liberal argument runs. "They have these Machiavellian geniuses." And then the usual corollary, added with a twinkle: "Couldn't we get one of those for ourselves?"

We are like distressed villagers calling in the services of the Magnificent Seven. We need an outlaw gunslinger of our own, but fighting on the side of good rather than evil. Or, less sympathetically, perhaps we are like Denethor, contemplating the prospect of laying hold of the One Ring: the Democratic version of Lee Atwater could be "hidden deep in the vaults, never to be used, unless at the utmost END of need." You could trust us with one!

Venezuela

On a news digest I receive at work that features any and every story each week involving the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, I noticed a headline a few days ago that made me wince. Not with the usual feeling of righteous dismay, I add. But with something more akin to shame.

The source in this case was in no way reputable, but far from this lessening my embarrassment, it sharpened it. There's something particularly nausea-inducing about being criticized in a way that you half-way recognize as true by someone otherwise distinctly lacking in the moral upper-hand. You have a right to be awful, you think. You have a right to attack me, hate me, malign me. I'd expect that. But you surely don't have a right to be right, while doing so.

The Military Mind

A Quaker friend of mine is always trying -- with success -- to point out to me that mainstream society really needs to abandon its hero-worshipping attitude toward the military mind. He is particularly annoyed by the current school of thought promoted by the Bob Woodwards of the world, which insists on seeing the handful of generals and commanders that have periodically been appointed and then ejected by the current presidential administration as the "adults in the room" -- that is, the intellectually and spiritually mature overseers of Trump's puerile tantrums.

My friend's point is that actually, the vast majority of things said and written by ostensible military thinkers in recent years has been "totally nuts," and just nobody pays enough attention to it to notice -- despite the fact that it exerts direct influence over the actions and decisions of the world's largest and most powerful military, as it projects its might into every corner of the globe.

"Kilt," not "whupped," etc.

As you may have noticed by now -- either from reading this blog or from witnessing my attempts to harangue a crowd in different fora -- I am always on the look-out for the use of the perfectly apposite literary quotation in public life. I long to pull one off myself. I want this beyond reason, beyond anything that can be explained by the normal pathways of human psychology. So when a high-profile politician extracts just such a gem from the pages of written lore, I always pay attention.

I therefore perked up tremendously back in 2016 during Tim Kaine's concession speech, when he dropped a line from Faulkner on the crowd  -- "They killed us, but they ain't whupped us yet." To my glee, not only was he not booed off the stage -- not only did it fail to elicit groans and eye-rolls from the audience at this display of needless and irrelevant erudition. Instead, he actually got a rapturous cheer.

And the crowd said, Crucify

“Their criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. And when I asked President Xi, I said do you have a drug problem? No, no, no, I said you have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem? No we don't have a drug problem. I said why? Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs, end of problem. What do we do? We set up blue ribbon committees."

Donald Trump, February 15, 2019.

(Homage to Francis Bacon.)

Yes, it happened fast. You might have missed it. But the president of the United States just endorsed the mass execution of non-violent drug offenders. In a racist impression of broken English no less. Using as his exemplar a contemporary authoritarian regime currently holding more than a million people in concentration camps in its western provinces because of their race and religion.

Sometimes, one doesn’t have the words to express the disgust and contempt that a statement deserves. That’s when one turns to Francis Bacon.

Bad arguments about the End of the World

A friend has sometimes accused me of only having a few cards in my philosophical deck, and thus of overplaying them. (One of my favorites, as discussed before, is the "sawing off the branch you're sitting on" move. Someone makes an argument, and I look for the way in which -- in the very act of making the argument -- they already assumed its refutation. That sort of thing.)

I'm not a philosopher and am mostly willing to accept this criticism in good humor. The one thing I will say in my defense, however, is that there is a kind of unity to bad arguments, as much as there is to sound thinking. Bad arguments have a family resemblance. And therefore, it shouldn't surprise us to see similar argumentative moves coming up frequently against them. They can often be defeated with a similar set of tools. 

400+ Pages of Dominick Dunne

Reading 400+ pages of Dominick Dunne is a bit like drinking a pitcher of gravy. It felt good on the way down. Now I am sitting here clutching my stomach and feeling queasy.

I came to the great Vanity Fair crime reporter/gossip king Dominick Dunne through reading his younger brother, John Gregory Dunne, whose book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen -- a work of droll and meticulously crafted prose about Dunne's role in creating an utterly mediocre Hollywood movie -- reawakened dormant longings in me to become a harried and tormented hack screenwriter someday (never one of my top five career fantasies, even, but always there in the background, ever since my teenage obsession with the legends of the early days of the Simpsons writers' room. Or maybe since Barton Fink).

"Useful Idiots"

Checking a coalition listserv the other week, a message came through from the head of a small left-wing group that primarily collects testimonies of human rights abuses in U.S. prisons. He had been angered by a recent article in Lawfare that he claimed unfairly stigmatized a radio segment to which his group contributes. As he portrayed it, with an attempt at acid sarcasm, the Lawfare writers seemed to think any criticism of the U.S. prison system was playing into Putin's agenda. He apparently saw himself and his group as the victims of a kind of neo-McCarthyism; a witch hunt committed by U.S. security hawks looking for Russians under the bed.

One crucial detail he forgot to mention: the segment ("Criminal Injustice") airs on Sputnik Radio. Which, in case you couldn't guess, is a subsidiary of Russian state-owned media. 

Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine (1988): A Review

Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine is the sort of book that captures one's heart long before one has read it -- even before one has seen it. All it takes is to read the first line of a summary of its contents somewhere. It's a novel that takes place almost entirely in the time it takes to travel from the bottom to the top of an escalator. 

Wonderful! Brilliant! I wanted to read this book however long ago I found out about its existence, based solely on the strength of this paraphrase, in the same way I still know I will enjoy Oblomov, when I get around to it some day (it's a novel where the main character never (or at least, not for a very long time) gets out of bed -- sign me up!).

The Wilt Chamberlain Argument in 2019

I was listening to Vox's The Weeds podcast this week -- as has become a commuting ritual for me this year -- and they brought up Robert Nozick's famous Wilt Chamberlain argument for libertarianism in the context of contemporary debates about taxation. (They also mentioned similar lines of thinking advanced by Greg Mankiw in more recent times.)

The argument was familiar to me in paraphrase (you know how it goes: people want to go see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball; he has a special and rare skill that people will pay good money to watch him perform; should he not, therefore, keep all of this money that is paid to him for this skill?; is it not in fact iniquitous and morally abhorrent for the state to take some of it away in the form of taxes or in the name of distributive justice? Etc.), but I had not given it more than a moment's thought in the last few years.

I kind of hate The West Wing

A podcast I was listening to this morning ended -- as so many conversations do these days -- with the millenial-ish presenters all talking about how much they miss The West Wing, and how much they love The West Wing, and how painful it is to watch The West Wing, because it is so beautiful and crystalline an image of what responsible, functional government might once have been, and maybe even what it was, when the Clintons were in power.

But let's not go nuts.

Errata and Marginalia 005: Dorfman and Mattelart

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (New York: OR Books, 2018).

OR Books brought out a new edition last year of the Marxist pop culture criticism classic by famous playwright and author Ariel Dorfman (best known for Death and the Maiden) and Belgian Marxist critic Armand Mattelart, and I knew I had to get a copy (apparently the first to appear in English since the extremely limited print run of the English translation in the '70s that survived Disney's notorious copyright lawyers).

It is, perhaps, a book more delightful in premise than in execution. And perhaps Marxist cultural critics are not a group known for their felicitous literary style. And perhaps this book -- though written by a famous author when young -- does not entirely fulfill one's hopes that it will break the mold.

A Sonnet

May I, dear friend, express sincere despair
At reading Reihan’s well-intentioned words
They start off so compassionate and fair
Condemning cruelty that from Trump disturbs.
He says he gets the reasons for their flight;
Why some leave home – but more than that, he’s found
Circuitous, a way to put it right
We wait, breath held, for oracles profound.
It turns out that the path was plain to see:
In, half-baked, Paul Romer’s hell-fired brain
A neoliberal lawless sub-country
Where sweat-shops surely shall abolish pain!
  So doth all like unasked-for meddling end
  Quoth Claude McKay: ‘God save us from our friends!’

When they go low...

I was talking politics with my brother-in-law the other day, as we do, and he shared with me his strategic analysis of the 2020 election. "Donald Trump is not invincible," he said. "He's like one of those bosses in a video game where you have to shoot off the armor until the weak spot opens up, then you just hit that over and over again. Like in Star Fox." I giggled tremendously. I knew exactly the analogy he had in mind. The core has appeared, I said in a surfer drawl, stand by to attack!

He then proposed an example of what he has in mind. If Trump has a fundamental weakness, it is that he actually does have a dread of humiliation. Anger, fear, condemnation seem to feed his sense of power -- power as it is always understood by people who are essentially weak in character. But actually being slighted, snubbed, mocked... there's a reason Chaplin perceived that parody can be as effective a tool against dictators, if not more so, than vilification.