Icarian Flights

Saturday's episode of the Slate Money podcast led off with a discussion of President Biden's recent decision to grant partial debt relief to some student loan borrowers, provided they are earning below a certain income threshold. The chief point they wanted to stress was that—however much the policy may seem to benefit a relatively privileged subset of the community (we live, after all, in a society in which only about half of the people will ever attend any amount of college)—we shouldn't be deluded into thinking this partial debt cancellation is a giveaway to the upper-middle class. To the contrary, the hosts emphasized, many of the people who will benefit most from the policy are those who enrolled in a program and never completed it—ending up with debt but no degree to reward them for the expense—and those graduating into low-wage professions. 

The policy is manifestly not, therefore, what it is often portrayed to be in the right-wing imaginary: a free gift of taxpayer money to spoiled kids with professional parents who saddled themselves voluntarily with debt in order to get MFAs. Such a person, the Slate Money hosts emphasized, is as much a fictitious bogey of right-wing punditry as the hypothetical food stamps recipients buying lobster and steak in the check-out line. It is, that is to say, a figment used to mine the rich vein of social resentment upon which conservative rhetoric feeds, not an accurate picture of the debt relief policy's typical beneficiary. 

Cold Calls

 In the lead-up to law school, as people learned I was planning to attend, everyone had something to say about "cold calls." A memorable scene from 1973's The Paper Chase shows the young protagonist caught mortifyingly unprepared to answer a question in class, and rushing off to the bathroom immediately afterward to vomit in anxiety. Lawyers would regale me with anecdotes from their law school days about embarrassing or particularly memorable times a professor stumped them. And probably an actual majority of our orientation week, as we were readying ourselves to finally begin, was spent listening to various people—everyone from professors to the dean to 2Ls and 3Ls—tell us "not to worry so much about cold calls."

Inwardly, I rolled my eyes at all this. The Paper Chase kid? What a whiner! Boo hoo. What, had he never been called on in undergrad? What's the problem? All the lawyers telling us what a terrifying yet formative experience it was to be put on the spot during a 1L doctrinal class—how could it possibly be as big of a deal as they said? Hadn't they ever done public speaking before? I assumed the problem was simply that they had started law school so relatively young. Once you've been, like me, inured to the workforce for several years—I was telling myself—a professor asking you a question can hardly be the most terrifying thing you've ever endured, in the scope of life's challenges. 

An End in Themselves

We are now a full year past the U.S. withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan, and it seems that the Afghan people are once again to be made to suffer for the actions of their rulers. And, just as on all the previous occasions, this will be an injustice piled atop an injustice, since ordinary Afghan civilians are already the primary victims of Taliban rule, then as now; and, just as before—they are to be punished for the deeds of the very people who are victimizing them. 

Because of the Taliban's actions, the Afghan people were punished with twenty years of war, occupation, innumerable counts of collateral damage and U.S. war crimes, the full extent of which may never be known. Because of the Taliban's actions, the Afghan people had the assets of their central bank—which, because of the unique structure of the institution in Afghanistan, includes the savings of innumerable ordinary Afghans—frozen, destroying much of the economy. 

I Will Set My Bow in the Heavens

I of course don't really believe in divine signs or portents, or in a divinity capable of dispensing them, but I cannot deny that my heart was lifted on some pre-rational level, when I saw this rainbow set above a liberal church, on a late June day, in a city known as "Providence." It did indeed feel as if some deity were smiling down upon the liberal faith. 

In a society where the culture wars have once again put LGBTQ rights in the crosshairs, it seemed moreover to have a special meaning that the symbol took the form of a rainbow, and that it appeared above a congregation whose wayside pulpit supplies a constant stream of gender- and sexuality-affirming messaging. Moreover, the photo was taken—as I mention—last June; that is—in the midst of Pride Month. 

Sacrifice Zones

 If you were following the news these past few weeks exclusively through the mass mailings in your email inbox, you might be forgiven for thinking that there were two quite different climate bills pending before Congress. 

On the one hand, you would have seen news headlines informing you that the most historic, generation-defining climate legislation ever to pass a chamber of Congress had just become law. You would have been told that climate activists were thrilled at the bill, which was the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history and would likely slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 30-40% by the end of the decade. Great news!, you would have thought. 

Escalation

 At some point after Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the rumors started flying: do you think Taiwan will be next? Mostly, though, I only heard this possibility mentioned in order to pooh-pooh it as an example of right-wing paranoia. Some extreme hawks were apparently making the argument that, if Putin were not immediately ousted from eastern Ukraine—including the areas he unlawful seized in 2014—then China would leap to the conclusion that the West posed no plausible deterrent threat to their own territorial ambitions, and they would invade their quasi-independent self-governing island neighbor. 

As I say, though, I rarely heard anyone take this argument seriously; they mostly just brought it up as an example of needless fear-mongering. As grand strategy, after all, it relied on an overly simplistic model of deterrence, and elided the differences between heterogenous situations. Besides, this sort of "domino theory" wasn't necessary to make the moral or strategic case for supporting the Ukrainian defense in the first place. Putin's invasion was and is wrong intrinsically: not because of what signals it might or might not send to other global powers who have an eye on expanding their sphere of influence. 

Ready When Trouble Came

 Browsing in a bookstore yesterday, I picked up a paperback copy of Don DeLillo's 2020 lockdown novel, The Silence. It turned out to be a fortuitous year to find it. The book—really more a novella or long short story than a full novel, brief enough to be read in a sitting—is set two years in the future from when it was published: 2022. Thus, we are now living in the not-too-distant future DeLillo described, and can compare it against his vision of what the next two years might hold. 

Despite being projected two years ahead, though, DeLillo's novella is unmistakably a product of its own moment: the first, vaccine-less year of the global pandemic. It is, as I say, a lockdown novel. It is not so relentlessly topical as to refer to COVID-19 by name. Rather, its characters are trapped in place by a mysterious blackout seemingly caused by a simultaneous worldwide failure of electronic technologies—what one character describes as "the total collapse of all systems." 

Insider Knowledge

 A friend is always accusing me of the annoying authorial habit of writing on this blog with a presumption of “insider knowledge.” That is to say, instead of simply explaining clearly what I mean by a particular reference or allusion, I will drop some offensive adverb that hints that the reader is supposed to already be familiar with the work I am about to cite. When my friend is not in fact familiar with it, he takes it amiss. 

What my friend resents most is a phrase like: “As Yeats famously observed….” I suppose he would prefer I say, “As William Butler Yeats once wrote”—and perhaps add an “the Irish poet” after the surname for good measure. He is convinced that such explanation is the least I owe my reader, and that my reluctance to append it can only stem from a craven impulse to seem au courant—to try to establish myself as part of an “in” crowd: one of the ones who “know.”

Explaining Oneself

 There is a scene early on in Sartre's Nausea, in which the angst-ridden narrator sits regarding a group of young people at a nearby café table. He wonders at the seemingly effortless flow of their conversation. One will ask a question, and the other does not struggle to answer. How, he wonders, are they able to provide such ready accounts of themselves? "[T]hey tell clear, plausible stories," he remarks. "If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren't embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd fall over myself." (Alexander trans.)

This is, as they say, the story of my life. In any social situation involving people I don't know well, I struggle mightily to answer even the most basic questions. "How was your weekend? What did you do?" "What's that book in your hand? What's it about?" It's not that these questions have no answers, or that I could not possibly supply them. It's that the answers defy any simple explanation that could be conveyed in the setting of a light conversation. To every one of these innocuous bids for small talk, I'm inclined to reply: "I'd love to tell you; how many hours can you spare?"