Medford

 

Doing Nought

 I found myself with some time off work this past week, and since geographic location has become irrelevant to my job in the age of Zoom, I decided to light out for Florida and spend a month or so with my parents. Thanks to COVID, flying was not an option, but no matter: I had plenty of time to spread out a multi-day socially-distanced road trip. I therefore evolved the following scheme for how to do a 21-hour drive in a relatively civilized manner. I would make the journey over four days, stopping in a (suddenly cheap) hotel each afternoon. I would listen to audiobooks in the car, read a novel into the night, and otherwise make full and pleasant use of my vacation days. 

The reality was something different. I had not fully taken into account what it would mean to perform this odyssey in the midst of a pandemic. To be sure, I was in a mask and hand-washing the whole time. The hotels seemed relatively deserted. But that did not prevent my paranoia from running away with me. Sitting up late nights and early mornings obsessively scanning every inch of my inner state for possible signs of COVID was as much fun as it sounds. I therefore hit upon a different plan, after keeping two days to my original hotel schedule. Instead of spending two more days on the road, I would just make a 12-hour-long bee-line for Sarasota. 

Ruthless

The other week my sister showed me a YouTube video that used a compelling example to make a semi-familiar point about contemporary liberalism. In brief, the argument runs: Republicans play dirty, and therefore so should we. It is a notion I disagree with, but in the wake of the horrible news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing, I fear it will only gain adherents.

Taking the example of Obama's response (or lack thereof) to the procedural chicanery that Mitch McConnell pulled at the end of his second term to deny him another Supreme Court appointment (the Merrick Garland atrocity), the YouTuber was arguing that instances like these show how liberals will continue to "get rolled" (to borrow a term from a recent discussion on The Weeds podcast on this theme), so long as they retain their devotion to a set of procedural norms. 

Obsessions

I have always been obsessive. This blog should testify to that claim if it conveys nothing else. For most of my childhood, however, my obsessiveness continually ran up against a problem: the vehicles I selected for it were too small. There's only so far you can go with an interest in, say, the quadratic formula. First thing you can do is you can write it. After that, however, there isn't much else apart from writing it again (which I did, many a time). As a result, I frequently exhausted my chosen obsessions, and was forced to move on to fresh ones. 

At some point toward the beginning of high school, however, I at last settled on two subjects that seemed capacious enough to permit me never to get to the bottom of them: literature and politics (more specifically, political morality, by which I mean those aspects of politics that do not require math, or anything other than a humanistic education). You may think I have violated the obsessives' rules already by choosing two topics—isn't that cheating?—but you must understand that for me the two formed one continuous entity. 

The Enormous Doom

In the renewed scrutiny last week of Trump's previous comments on the military, one older, on-the-record remark of his kept coming up: a 1998 conversation with Howard Stern in which Trump—riffing on his deferment from the military draft—said the struggle to avoid sexually-transmitted infections in the dating scene was his "personal Vietnam." It's the kind of comment that, coming from a comedian, might be funny in a grotesquely poor-taste kind of way. Coming from someone who claims national leadership, it is repellant (though what else is new?)—but we will come to that a bit later.

What I want to point out first is that Trump is not the first to make this "joke" (or whatever it is) upon the vaunted glories of military service. Reading E.E. Cummings' memoir of his war-time internment in France, The Enormous Room, I discover the following observation: "This Great War For Humanity, etc., did not agree with some people's ideas, and [...] some people's ideas made them prefer to the glories of the front line the torments [...] attendant on venereal diseases." 

Trump's "Have You No Decency" Moment?

Ever since the Trump phenomenon began, we have been waiting for his Face in the Crowd moment—the big reveal when a hot mic catches the populist demagogue blabbing his true feelings for the American people writ large. 

We are all Patricia Neal after having switched on the broadcast, screaming, "Talk! Talk, damn you!" Show the people the true face behind the con! Show us what we knew all along—that you care about no one other than yourself, that you have nothing but contempt and loathing for anyone halt or unwell, anyone with less power and money than you!

Convolutions

In his unfinished final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert confronts his two eponymous clerks with the outraged priest of the village, while they are busy expounding a position of modern skepticism. In the course of the book, the two men have undertaken a study of the totality of human knowledge, passing from one subject to another until each has been thoroughly consumed and exhausted. 

At the time of their argument with the cleric, they have just finished with geology and biblical history, and the experience has turned them into village atheists. As they seek to confound the town notables with their new insights, one of the local aristocrats ventures to observe, "Take care [...] you know the saying, my dear sir; a little learning takes you away, a lot carries you back." (Krailsheimer trans.)

Lost Weekends

 Holiday weekends are always a time of paralysis by freedom. I can spend weeks suffering acutely from the apparent scarcity of time. With work hours occupying a good part of every day and a thousand other necessities crowding out the evenings, I find myself making the fullest possible use of every interstice of time. I write at improbable and inconvenient moments—lunch hours, late nights. 

I find myself sleepless at 5 am, and I seize upon this gift of unexpected wakefulness to read another 40 pages of whatever book I started earlier in the week. I am like the art historian Winckelmann as Walter Pater portrays him in a classic study—oppressed by teaching duties by day, forced to forego sleep at night in order to nourish his mind with tomes of history.