16, 17, 19, 20 May

Monday 16th

If you had asked me yesterday who Julius La Rosa was, I should have recognized the name but been unable to place it. A gangster? A restaurateur? A mayor of Newark? Today, I know, thanks to an obituary in the Times, that Julius La Rosa was a singer. I don’t remember any of his songs, but I feel that I can place him comfortably simply by reciting the fact, gleaned from the obituary, that he married Perry Como’s secretary.

More intriguing is the fuss that Robert McFadden, the Times writer, makes about Arthur Godfrey. The obituary is even subtitled, “Singer Who Found Success After a Public Firing.” We go back to a day in 1953. On his national live radio show, Arthur Godfrey had La Rosa sing something. Then he told his audience that it had just heard “Julie’s swan song.” Right there on live radio, he fired the guy. And not because La Rosa couldn’t sing. What interests me about this episode is its disinterment of Arthur Godfrey. Who was Arthur Godfrey? I can tell you one or two things that I remember. Arthur Godfrey was plump, saturnine man with a gentle sense of humor. He had a TV show when I was a little boy. I had forgotten the ukelele. Arthur Godfrey was just there, along with Art Linkletter and George Gobel and Dorothy Kilgallen.

I remember the morning after Dorothy Kilgallen died, reportedly from an overdose of “barbiturates.” It came on the news as I was in the carpool, going to Iona Grammar School. Except not. Kilgallen died during my freshman year at Notre Dame. That I did look up. What I probably remembered just now was listening to Breakfast With Dorothy and Dick in the car. (Woody Allen spoofed it in Radio Days). Dorothy Kilgallen was also one of the panelists on What’s My Line, the TV show on which fancy people like Kilgallen had to guess what ordinary people did for a living. When the contestant was a “mystery guest” — a celebrity, as we should say — the panelists donned little black masks to cover their eyes. I’d love to say that I’m recollecting all of this, but I’m cribbing from Wikipedia, because my memory is so unreliable, especially about these figures in the early landscape. I knew about them at the time, saw them and heard them, but I didn’t think much about them, and when I went to boarding school and lost access to regular doses of television, I began to forget about them.

I have not looked up Arthur Godfrey. I am going to treat this as a version of the “Orson Welles” problem that I mentioned in January. In the case of Orson Welles, I could remember a great deal about him, but not his name. I could have looked it up in an instant, but I waited it out. It took “more than a day” to remember. I don’t think that I’m going to fare as well with Arthur Godfrey. I know his name, and have a picture of him in my mind, and suspect that he hosted a variety show. Was he the one with the talent show? Who was the one with the talent show? Do you remember The Gong Show? I saw it once, maybe twice, and was glued to it by horror. Before I could see it a third time, it featured in an episode of the Carol Burnett show. Carol was playing Eunice, one of her stable of characters. Eunice was going to sing “Feelings” on The Gong Show. Or was it “Memories”? Vicki Lawrence played a cantankerous grandma in these skits, the very woman I’d have liked to see get the “Good Man Is Hard to Find” treatment. It occurs to me now that Eunice and her family were Trump supporters ante lettera.

In the opinion section of the Sunday Times, Neil Gross wrote a piece that asked “Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?” The answer, in a word or two, is “critical discourse.” In the pursuit of almost any advanced degree, students must master critical thinking, an approach that tests every assertion and accepts nothing as given. Once critical thinking becomes second nature, the critical thinker has a very hard time remembering how unnatural it is. It is easier, I think, to remember what it’s like to see the world as a child than it is to see the world without critical habits of mind. This obliviousness is what drives the rest of the world crazy. It isn’t that highly educated people think differently. It’s that they can’t imagine how to think otherwise. They equate “thinking otherwise” with “not thinking.” And this is insulting to ordinary people. Educated people ought to think differently; otherwise, what’s the use of education? And for that very reason, highly educated people ought to bear in mind that ordinary people do think normally. Neil Gross is almost elementary:

But Dr. Gouldner’s new-class theory should alert Democrats to a lurking danger. It is probably right that something like a culture of critical discourse can be found in the workplaces and households and in the publications read by Americans who have attended graduate or professional school. The challenge for the Democrats moving forward will be to develop appeals to voters that resonate not just with this important constituency, but also with other crucial groups in the Democratic coalition. Some of the draw of Donald Trump for white working-class male voters, for example, is that he does not speak in a culture of critical discourse. Indeed, he mocks that culture, tapping into class resentments.

The twist is that normal thinking involves placing a good deal of reliance on authorities. Normal people — people without advanced degrees — haven’t got the time to evaluate policies, and they know it. Nor have they undergone the really rather painful drilling that inculcates the habits of critical thinking — so lack of time is not the only problem. Normal people expect authorities to have the answers. But today’s élites, including the lot of highly educated people, are markedly anti-authoritarian. They neither recognize authorities as such nor occupy positions of authority with any comfort. (They recognize credentials, which is not always a good idea.) The highly educated critical thinker has a nagging sense of her own ignorance, in fact. Tapped for the answer to a question, she will begin with a self-deprecating formula. This drives normal people almost as crazy as the obliviousness does. If you’re not an authority, who the hell is? Didn’t you go to school, like, forever?

It would be fun to go through today’s paper with a fat wax pencil and circle all the instances in which highly-educated Times writers and quoted pundits declare that Donald Trump’s oratory is nonsense — by the standards of critical discourse. Even now, the professionals don’t get it. They can’t believe it. If Donald Trump is willing to present himself as an authority, then a mass of normal people, starved for this very quality, will support him. It’s as simple as that.

What isn’t simple is claiming authority with a critical mind. It’s an uncomfortable fit, as I said. Playing the authority, highly-educated people come across as scolds or snobs, because they are annoyed by being asked to be authoritative. There is also the aristocratic angle. Like the earliest feudal aristocrats, round about the time of Charlemagne, critical thinkers are trained to fight. They do so with arguments, not weapons, but they can be just as ferociously single-minded. Unlike aristocrats, they don’t pay lip-service to loyalty, but while this dispenses with a lot of malodorous hypocrisy, it does not assist the struggle, which is to provide normal people with the authorities they crave. If you and I are both highly-educated critical thinkers, and I set myself up as an authority for normal people, you may take issue with my claim. This is where Donald Trump has the advantage on me. He will not respond to your arguments with arguments. He will sneer, and call you a loser and an idiot. He’d call me one, too, except in this example he is taking my place.

Kathleen used to work on deals with a Bay Area woman who could discuss her own Republican Party loyalties with candor. Presented with an unattractive Republican Party candidate, she told Kathleen, she would just “hold her nose” and vote the party line. It has been interesting to watch Republican stalwarts, from Paul Ryan to “social conservatives” decide to do the same. Unfortunately (for people with my point of view), this gift for olfactory occlusion is not common among Democratic Party supporters, especially the highly-educated critical thinkers with so much to lose.

This is why, I think, I’m so drawn to the wish that highly-educated critical thinkers would resolve to set a good example to society at large. As it is, they set such a poor example that disaster would ensue if it were followed.

***

Over the weekend, I finished reading Maeve Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories for the second time. I read the seven of them in the order in which they appear in The Rose, a book that collects several groups of Brennan’s stories. Every other Retreat story features Leona Harkey and her pet critic, Charles Runyon. Two of the remaining three provide comic relief from this gruesome pair. The story in the middle, “The Joker,” is as cruel as the others but also quite sad. Isobel Bailey may be just as fatuous as the other residents of the Retreat, but there is something sincere about her desire to be Lady Bountiful. Unlike the other women in the sequence, she is neither a harpy nor a gold-digger. As a result, “The Joker” is pathetic rather than comic. It is also closer to the New Yorker norm.

If these stories aren’t better known, one reason might be the frequency with which Brennan sings sharp rather than true. There is an extravagance that invokes the discomforts of science fiction. Do people really talk like this? Did they ever? When Brennan writes that the thirty-nine houses in Herbert’s Retreat are two hundred years old, or even older (or, at least, that some of them are), is she simply mistaken, or is she quoting the Retreat’s misleading publicity, as it were? The houses were built to look “two hundred years old,” certainly, but this is merely to say that they are much newer, and designed in the Colonial Revival style that took hold toward the end of the Nineteenth Century. An American house dating from the Seven Years’ War would be almost uninhabitably rudimentary. So it is, too, with the claim that only the Best People own the houses. You’ll have to take their word for it.

In the story that I wrote about on Friday, “The Anachronism,” the housemaid is English, but all the other maids in Herbert’s Retreat are Irish. Brennan was Irish herself, but not the same kind of Irish. Brennan was a new kind of Irish; the housemaids would have disapproved of her, if only because she went out for drinks with the men she worked with. Her lady-writer gig wouldn’t have cut the mustard, either. Brennan’s Irish housemaids seem more authentic to me than their employers do, but I grew up among the employers, and never really knew an Irish housemaid. So I tend to take Brennan’s word for the latter. It is typical of Brennan to emphasize the asymmetry between masters and servants, with the masters delusive about the admiring good will of the servants, who in fact loathe them.

Bridie (Charles liked to refer to her as ‘that splendid Irishwoman of Leona’s) clumped in with the tray. The glare of pure hatred that was her characteristic expression descended in full on Charles silky gray head, but he was indifferent and she was silent, respectfully handing him his orange juice, pouring his coffee and his hot milk […], and departing. (“The Servants’ Dance”)

That sounds right, but how should I know?

Even John Cheever’s famous story, “The Enormous Radio,” is more realistic than the pure farce of “The Divine Fireplace.” Here we have four members of the ruling class and one Irish housemaid, and when the Irish housemaid says to herself, at the beginning of the story that she will narrate to a busful of fellow servants on their way to Mass,

There will be murder here today […]. No, no, I’m wrong […] — not murder today; the murder was last night.

you know she’s right, if you’ve read the story before. Perhaps there are no actual corpses in the house, but it is difficult to imagine the survival of any of the relationships. In the living room, a young woman wearing a rather insubstantial party dress is passed out on the sofa, while a raw steak curdles juicily in the middle of the carpet. In the kitchen, the stove has been yanked away from the wall, shorting out the entire house’s electricity, and a debris of brick and blaster clouds the air. Who knows where all the car keys are — the lady of the house took them into “safe keeping” at the end of the evening. We never hear much about that. Stasia’s narrative is cut short by the arrival at church, as Mr and Mrs Tillbright, Mrs Lamb and Miss Carter bear the steak away to the living room, where they propose to grill it over the fire. They are all very drunk. They have all said terrible things. Anyone who has ever awakened after too much partying with not enough recollection of the party will cringe horribly as Brennan’s merciless dance of death gets going. Mr Tillbright comes home two hours late with that young woman in her party dress. The young woman, having made a lot of catty remarks about life in the country, announces that she has to be at another party at eleven, and Mr Tillbright implausibly insists that he will drive her to it after dinner. Instead of making allies out of Mrs Tillbright and Mrs Lamb, who are dressed in relatively shapeless country outfits, Phoebe Carter seems to provide the perfect occasion for them to launch mutual insults. When Mrs Tillbright learns from Mrs Lamb, who was a good friend of the first Mrs Tillbright, that there used to be a fireplace in the kitchen, and that her husband never told her, she throws a tantrum. “I want that fireplace, and I want it now.” Really, it’s as though Captain Smith decided that he just had to have the iceberg.

***

Tuesday 17th

Why am I so bewildered by discrimination against women, by the notion that, when it comes to the things that men do well, and that are worth doing, women are lesser mortals? Why do these diminishing ideas strike me as ridiculous? I’m assuming that my own good sense hasn’t got much to do with it, because I’m actually a bit of a lunatic, and may not be doing women any favors by sitting here talking about them. I’m also assuming that it may have been the women in my life.

I was thinking about Sister Suzanne Kelly yesterday. Sister Suzanne taught History of Science at Notre Dame, and also moderated the Great Books seminars that took up the bulk of our time and attention in what was then called the General Program of Liberal Studies (“GP”). Sister Suzanne was a remarkable woman, working in a remarkable moment. The moment proved to be transitory, or at least premature: Sister Suzanne was not the harbinger of gender equality (or normality) within the Roman Catholic Church. So far as that was concerned, she beat a path to a dead end. But we did not know that at the time.

Sister Suzanne was a nun, a “splinter Benedictine” I think we used to say. She was one of a handful of highly-educated nuns who left not so much the cloister as the habit. They did not cover their hair; Sister Suzanne’s was dressed in the common mid-Sixties style to which the Queen of England has hung on all these years. They did wear black and white, but their white blouses had short sleeves. They wore low pumps — well, Sister Suzanne did. I don’t know how to convey how amazing this was. Sister Suzanne could be mistaken for an ordinary woman! Until you entered into discussion with her, that is, and discovered that she was a lot smarter than you were, and not shy about it, either.

I ought to add, I suppose, that Sister Suzanne was rather pretty. Perhaps “handsome” is the word. The point is that she was good-looking, and not at all plain. You never suspected for a second that her vocation might be rooted in unattractiveness.

Sister Suzanne had a favorite word, “weasel.” She used it to describe tendentious, flimsy, or spurious arguments, and she directed it quite often at me. “That’s a weasel term,” she would say, as though it were her job to point out when people farted. It was certainly as clear to me as it was to her that the charge was deserved. At that stage, I was like a lawyer who will say anything on behalf of his client, and rely on the judge to assess its validity. Sister Suzanne’s impatience with weaseling may, I’ll concede, have been a tad womanly. Women have good reason to find wearisome the mere cleverness of male show-offs. Over time, I’ve come to feel the same way.

I knew that Sister Suzanne was exceptional. But then, I was exceptional, too. Most of us were, in those classrooms. The fact that Sister Suzanne was a woman was, I’m afraid to say, remarkable. But it was not distinctive. Those of us with ears to hear came away from our classes with her with the sense that there was no positive difference between the thinking of a man and the thinking of a woman. The sexes might have different weaknesses, but their strengths could be matched.

Mine was an extraordinary experience; most students at Notre Dame never came across anyone like Sister Suzanne.

Was Sister Suzanne Kelly a feminist? That’s a tough question at the best of times, but I think that I should have to say “no.” I say that because I believe that feminism has to accommodate motherhood. Regardless of her costume, Sister Suzanne led a celibate life, and did not have to juggle the balls of home, family, and career. All she had to worry about was her career, just like a man.

***

The Book Review this weekend seemed to be full of books about women, but the Table of Contents mentions only three. There are books about particular women (Teffi, Frances Stroh), and a book on sex in Shakespeare that seems to be about spanking, but I’m not thinking of them. I’m thinking of these:

• Little Labors, by Rivka Galchen; reviewed by Sarah Ruhl.
• How Women Decide: What’s True, What’s Not, and What Strategies Spark the Best Choices, by Therese Huston; reviewed by Sheela Kolhatkar.
• We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, by Andi Zeisler; reviewed by Laurie Penny.

Kolhatkar writes,

There’s an enormous double standard when it comes to how men and women are perceived as decision-makers, and those differences can hamper much more than a woman’s career. One obstacle is the perception that women are indecisive, encumbered by their need to build consensus, weighed down by a lack of self-confidence and an inability to handle stress. The fact that Huston’s book even exists reinforces this point. Imagine, for a moment, an alternative universe in which it was felt necessary to publish a book called “How Men Decide” that dissected the male decision-making process. The very idea is laughable. Everyone knows that men simply stride onto the battlefield, survey the landscape and charge. Even if they flame out, they usually get credit for trying.

Not too long ago, I read a book that provoked some thoughts about “dithering” that are highly germane to the issue of how women decide, and I refer the indulgent reader to them here. (Search the page for “Ridley.”) Having just read what I wrote about Elizabeth I in January, it seems even more pungent in the context of Sister Suzanne and the three books that I’ve mentioned. My idea is that the first thing necessary in an evaluation of decision-making by women is to clear away the encrusted crap of masculine weaseling.

My second idea is to consider how long it has been since the world of modern decision-making came into existence. Not very long — no longer, in fact, than the professional classes, mentioned yesterday in connection with Neil Gross’s piece in the Sunday Times, have been around.

As Gross writes, the modern professional classes were developed to handle the affairs of rich people, and to handle them with discretion. That is, the professional man combined expertise in a given field with the ability to put himself in the place of the man who hired him, and to make decisions that bound that man. Prior to this development, rich people had to make their own decisions. They did, mostly, what other rich people did. Since the number of rich people was almost as limited as the number of investment opportunities, wealth management was not very complicated. The Industrial Revolution changed all that, especially when it began to produce very wealthy heirs who, unlike warlike aristocrats and agrarian country squires, might very well have grown up without an inkling about the source of their wealth. The professional’s ability to put himself in the place of a rich person was held to warrant the professional’s high fees.

Let’s say, then, that professional groups as we know them date to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Their roots run further back, but not by more than a few decades. By 1900, professionals were in place. Now let’s make something else perfectly clear: for the purposes of this discussion, a professional is someone who brings nothing but professional training to the table. Insofar as a professional is independently wealthy, he is outside the scope of the argument. This is a very important point, because it is intertwined with the history of ownership. As a general rule, married women (in the West) could not own property until the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Men owned almost everything. Ownership obviously conveys a very real power. The power of professional training is a good deal more tentative. Owners of some kind or another must be impressed by a professional’s skills and reputation before delegating responsibility to him. And if men are the owners, they will be inclined to favor male professionals. But this prejudice was contested almost from the beginning of the professional class. Women might have understood why they did not own things — that was the way things had always been. But this professional thing was new, and women proved unwilling to sit by while men claimed, in effect, to be more proficient at professional training. If there was one thing that smart women knew for a certainty circa 1900, it was that they were better students.

This sketch of historical developments is intended primarily to demolish any traditionalist defense of the superiority of male decision-making. Until 1900 (say), the right to make decisions at all was limited to property owners. Such tradition of decision-making as there was was carried forward by the tiny population of owners. Most men did not make decisions; on the contrary, they seemed prone to beating their wives. The fact is that we do not have a long record of professional decision-make to examine. Men have not, in fact, established themselves as default decision-makers. I don’t think that a book about how men decide would be laughable at all. As Kolhatkar states, “…the evidence shows that groups come to better conclusions when there are more women involved.” Does it? I hope that Huston’s book shows that it does. And let us not forget that the ability to make good decisions is not at all the same thing as appearing to be “decisive.” The very usage is ridiculous. Reducing decision-making to a habitual character trait makes it sound like a tic.

When my distant cousin, the late Alicia Gallagher, graduated from Columbia Law School and began looking for a job, she was rebuffed by all the prominent Wall Street firms. Why? At that time (the Forties), even the secretaries at those law firms were men, and the firms did not maintain toilets for women. Now that’s masculine decision-making!

***

Enough of all that. I want to say a word about Gambit, the 1966 Ronald Neame caper comedy starring Shirley MacLaine, Michael Caine, and Herbert Lom. Kathleen and I watched it on Friday night. I was reminded of it by something the Alan-Alda lookalike said at the cocktail party last Wednesday. He wondered aloud if he had ever re-read a book. Ever. Part of me was aghast, but I was able to keep that reaction to myself because I know that it is not uncommon among readers. (Which is another way of lamenting that most people don’t read books at all.) I thought of the related challenge, encountered occasionally at Facebook, to name films that you would consider watching again. In all fairness, the quality of the books and films that most people read and see is pretty low; it takes some education to read the kind of books that are worth re-reading. I don’t know what to say about Hitchcock, who pointedly made films to be seen the second time — I always think of Hitchcock as a popular film-maker. I usually mention his films when the subject of watching movies multiple times comes up. But Gambit is an even better example of the rewards of the second look.

There are good things to say about Gambit. It ought to be required viewing for all would-be entrepreneurs and prospective criminals. It is an object lesson in the fat-headedness of disparaging feminine decision-making. Most of all, though, it’s hilariously funny, and much funnier the second time. The story is divided into two parts, which might be called “dream” and “reality.” In the dream, a smooth customer called Harry Deane (Michael Caine) proposes a caper to a showgirl called Nicole Chang (Shirley MacLaine), the object of which is to distract an immensely wealthy sheikh (Herbert Lom). The dream also tells us something that Harry does not tell Nicole: the purpose of this distraction is to make it possible for Harry to steal a priceless portrait bust. Framed by shots of Harry and Nicole in a Hong Kong cabaret, in which Nicole says nothing, the dream also features a silent MacLaine. She is, all things considered, very good at shutting up. She snakes through the dream like a goddess, the perfect helpmeet. In the dream, everything ticks along perfectly, the obstacles to success little more than toy hurdles.

Reality takes over when Nicole opens her mouth in the Hong Kong cabaret. She is no goddess. She’s a working girl with an inquiring mind, and she wonders if Harry isn’t a crook. By the time they reach Dammuz, where the sheikh and his portrait bust are to be found, Harry is sick and tired of Nicole. At the same time, from the very moment of arrival, it is clear that things have changed since Harry — now “Sir Harold” — formulated his plans. There is no representative of the hotel to greet him. No Rolls-Royce to ferry him. No respect at all, title notwithstanding. When Nicole offers helpful suggestions (sometimes peppered with a dash of mockery), you can seem Harry straining to resist the urge to twist her head off. Because the dream was such smooth sailing, the discomfort of reality is very funny.

But what’s really funny is watching the dream the second time, knowing how things are going to work out in reality. The dream becomes astonishingly mendacious, like an advertisement for, say, the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, to refer to another movie. Harry and Nicole seem to be campiing their way through a silly silent movie. The elegance that was so impressive the first time round is now clearly sham, mere tinsel. And the sheikh (in the dream), with his fez and his monocle and his dinner suit — pricelessly wrong. The second time round, the dream isn’t impressive, as it was the first, but dim-witted. And it, too, is very funny. This time, you’re laughing at Harry from the start.

Oh, the look that Shirley MacLaine puts on Nicole’s face when it dawns on her that Harry intends to try to steal the portrait bust! She looks fit to burst! Her explosion involves only the smallest muscles. She — cannot speak.

At the end, Nicole, no longer pretending to be Lady Dean, remains silent throughout an entire scene. Or nearly: at the end, she says, “Thank you.” It is quite elegant. You don’t have to be watching Gambit the second time to notice that.

***

Thursday 18th

For about twenty years, I’ve been arguing that the Democratic Party ought to have folded its tent and retired from the scene in the late Sixties, once it had completed its projected reversal of federally-sanctioned unequal citizenship for black Americans, largely in the South. I had the impression that the party had lost its way after that victory. But I hadn’t much of an argument. An image, nursed, for all I know, in my ignorance, came to stand in the place of argument. I had this notion that mother octopuses, having raised their brood to autonomy, simply perish of exhaustion, quietly ceasing to tax their environment. However misinformed the image, it was a terrible substitute for the clear answer to the question why? that my assertion prompted. Only yesterday, as the racket made by the chairs that Bernie Sanders’s supporters threw in protest echoed in my head, did what I ought always to have gone on to say become clear.

Throwing chairs — did that really happen? Rather timidly, I searched for a You Tube clip, but stopped almost immediately, satisfied with this snip from another Times story.

But the state convention, held at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel, deteriorated into chaos after nearly 60 of Mr. Sanders’s potential delegates were deemed ineligible amid a dispute over the rules. The convention concluded abruptly after security staff no longer felt it could ensure the safety of the participants, many of whom were yelling and throwing things.

That will do. Now, please don’t think that I’m refreshing my call for an end to the Democratic Party because of hooliganism. I’m not sure that the story itself has any direct bearing on what went on in my mind. It clearly served a catalytic function, though. When the racket stopped, I understood, for the first time, that the campaign for civil rights was, for the Democratic Party, a suicide mission. The suicide was at least partially successful: the party lost one of its two principal voting blocs, that of white Southerners. Almost immediately, the Nixonian “Southern Strategy” held out a net for voters who felt that their interests had been betrayed by the party to which they had been loyal for a century or more.

Now the suicide was completed by the emergence of genuinely left-wing policies in the Democratic Party program. To pick a relatively mild one, Eugene McCarthy proposed, in his 1972 presidential bid, to impose 100% estate taxes. You have to remember that there was a lot of chair-throwing in those days, or at least the expectation of it. Bombs went off; an armored car was held up, not by common criminals, but by political terrorists. This leftism repelled the other great Democratic-Party voting black, blue-collar labor. Labor was increasingly unprotected by union negotiation, and workers came to share the Southerners’ sense of betrayal.

When Bill Clinton won in 1992 — with a lot of inadvertent help from Ross Perot — he ran as a Third Way candidate. It is a pity that this Third Way never became a party, neither here nor in Britain. Roy Jenkins’s hopes for a third-way party were dashed by the trumpery of the Falklands War — very unfortunate timing. After that, liberal progressives like Clinton and Blair resolved to work within the frame of the established parties of the left, which necessarily made them look like connivers and hypocritices. They weren’t Democratic (much less Labour) so much as they were kinder, gentler exemplars of good old Rockefeller Republicanism. But their party machinery — and this is what truly ought to have come to an end in the Sixties — demanded ritual gestures that repelled moderate conservatives.

The Democratic Party has limped along, trying to present itself as benevolently egalitarian while staggering under the burden of association with “big government.” This has worked far better in presidential campaigns than it has in congressional races. People vote for presidents with their hopes, but for their legislators with their pocket books. Now the Republicans are in a position, as Jon Stewart pointed out the other day, to complain about an incapable government that they themselves have hobbled. Voters seem disinclined to force Republicans to “own” the conditions that they have brought about; incapable government still seems like a Democratic Party failing. With her mandarin backbone, Hillary Clinton seems fated to prefigure an inexorable bureaucracy that, if it were actually to function properly, would be monstrously effective. Talk about bad timing.

***

Last week, I wrote about the terrifying scenario behind the movie Kingsman, and I thought that I exhausted the usefulness of the reference when I suggested that the free Internet access offered in the film had the same pernicious effect upon social responsibility as the reduction of politics to a form of mass entertainment. But there remains something deeper to be mined, something even more disturbing. It has been noted since the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960, but instead of being questioned and discussed since then, it has quietly come to be taken for granted. But it was a little thing, a matter of interest, in 1960. It is now unimaginably more.

Pundits are not the only ones to complain about the absence of traditional authority in “today’s world.” I’m not sure that I’ve ever complained about it, but I’ve expressed a good deal of anxiety about the nature of an inevitable replacement. What would take the place of the authority that was founded on the now hopelessly corroded foundation of religious patriarchy? All the time, it was right there in front of me. Except it wasn’t, because I so rarely turned it on. The TV screen is our authority, and the cameraman the god who makes sense of everything.

I wrote a paragraph or two about this two years ago, but I see that I was very discreet about sources, so much so that the inference might have been drawn that I had been inside Madison Square Garden, which I haven’t, ever. It was Kathleen. She attended, for business reasons, a Knicks game at the Garden. Her party occupied a skybox, so she was relatively comfortable. But she was a bit disconcerted to find that everyone, not just everyone in the box but everyone in the arena, was watching a screen. The game was proceeding on the court, but hardly anybody seemed to be looking in that direction. From the regular seats, eyes seemed to be fixed on the JumboTrons suspended over the players. In the skybox, all eyes were fixed on one of the many smaller screens mounted in every direction. Kathleen had the sense that they all might as well have been in a windowless basement room.

In that case, of course, they’d have missed the cheering, and the cheering is a vital part of the game. But watching the game appears not to be vital. Why? My theory is that we have developed a reflexive preference for the mediatized image. This is not because we’re boobies. It’s because the mediatized image is the work of expert cameramen. These professionals, as athletically deft as the players they follow, know where to look. They know where things are going to happen. They cut out the inconsequential action. They present clear and compelling images of the game.

It is the display of these images on a multitude of screens that converts what the cameraman sees into something as close as we’re likely to get to objective reality — what really happened. And not only that, but also the relative importance of everything that did happen. Fans in the seats are in constant view, but because the camera is following the players and not lingering on the fans, it is difficult to maintain a sense that every fan is a man or a woman with a private life — who in hell cares about the fans! (But let them keep cheering.) Referees are something else. They, too, tend toward fanlike immobility, or at least they move slowly. But the camera looks at them. The mere shift of the camera’s gaze from herds of running men to a figure standing still, but now up close and in focus, signals trouble. We have learned to interpret the work of the cameraman at lightning speed.

It is not that nothing is real until it has been seen. Rather, nothing is real until it has been registered and implicitly approved by a cameraman (and by the producer who cuts to his camera) and then fed to a world of screens. Nothing is real that cannot be seen by everyone at the same time.

Will it make a difference now that everyone can watch the same YouTube clip any old time? I wonder — I really do. Ought we to worry a tad less because our great common mediatized experience is a football game, larded with commercials, and not a political event? Against that, how worrisome is it that an entertainment heavyweight can send ratings soaring by participating in a presidential debate, even though he is a political clown? (In my view, any political event is subverted by mediatized presentation.)

A person comes upon a newsworthy disturbance that is already being captured by a cameraman. This person immediately pulls a smartphone from a pocket or a handbag and locates the broadcast in a browser. Following my argument, we can say that the person is now — only now — in touch with reality. Can it also be said that the person is protected from the disturbance by the mediatized image on the connected phone? Feels protected? If you watch something on TV, are you implying that this is not happening to you?

Television makes it possible for all of us to see things from the same point of view, something physically impossible in the real world. It is the cameraman’s point of view, infinitely distributed. But it comes at the cost of actually seeing things. Sometimes, it is not important to be there in person. Much of what appears on television is utterly trivial. Sometimes — in scientific contexts, I surmise — it might be very useful to share a single image. But I believe that it is harmful to homogenize our experience of importance, and I insist that it is mistaken to wait to be told what is important until it appears on a screen.

***

I have read the Gospel of Mark, in the translation of Richmond Lattimore. Lattimore, who died in 1984, was an eminent translator of Homer, but he began translating the New Testament (beginning with Revelation) in the course of teaching Beginning Greek. I am reading the Gospels (and perhaps the rest of the New Testament as well) as a simple matter of cultural literacy. Raised Roman Catholic, I had no direct experience of Scripture until I went off to a Presbyterian boarding school. Sporadic attempts to familiarize myself with it were blocked by the tediousness of translations. I read the Book of Esther in the Authorized Version, and notwithstanding the occasional lambent passage I had no idea what was going on. Ten or fifteen years ago, I came upon the Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, in the Jewish Publication Society’s edition. My eyes were opened. The language of the translation was supple but grave, clear but not simple-minded. Looking for the same sort of thing in the Testament that we cannot expect from the JPS, I settled on Lattimore and J B Phillips. I read a page or two of Phillips, and liked it, but I turned to Lattimore because he begins with Mark, now understood to be the first evangelist.

I read Mark in two comfortable sittings. I’m inclined to say that it is a short, simple narrative, but many of the simplicities go unexplained. Why does Mark attend to Jesus’s missionary itinerary in such detail? The impression of constant recrossings of the Sea of Galilee is curious. I also hoped for some explanation of a recurring dual phenomenon: Jesus asks or warns those whom he has helped not to say anything about him, and yet they all do. Jesus is vexed by the size of the crowds that follow him about. Another recurring vexation is “this generation” — “this adulterous and sinful generation.” This is also curious.

At roughly the halfway point, Jesus announces that “the son of man,” meaning himself, “must suffer much.” He would also “rise up after three days.” Instead of a discussion, there is the Transfiguration. I had always wondered where that fit in. In the eleventh chapter, Jesus arrives in Jerusalem and visits the temple, upsetting the moneychangers. In the twelfth chapter, he has a confrontation of sorts with the religious authorities. The tonal shift is complete: what began as a sunny “road” narrative has become menacingly dark, with miraculous highlights. Instead of healing the sick, Jesus makes predictions about the End Times. But he never speaks of himself as God, or as the son of God. And when God calls Jesus the son in whom he is pleased (as after the baptism in the Jordan, for example), he is clearly using the word in its Mediterranean sense, where sons are anybody who will listen to an old man.

In the fourteenth chapter, the Last Supper is reported, and then the night in the Garden of Gethsemane; most of the Passion is contained in the following chapter. Everything seems to be there, from the cock crowing three times to the split in the Temple veil, but the pace is brisk, as if a student were struggling to make all the necessary points in a short space of time. In the sixteenth and final chapter, more than half of which (according to Lattimore) appears to be a later addition, the Resurrection is not witnessed; the tomb is already empty. And it is only the two Marys (neither of them Jesus’s mother) who visit. They are told by a young man in a white garment that Jesus has already gone. He then directs them to tell Peter and the others. And that is that.

Matthew and Luke, I understand, adapted Mark and enlarged upon it. Mark begins with Jesus’s baptism — there’s not a word about his birth or childhood. For those, we must look to the next two Gospels.

***

Friday 20th

Friday already! Once again, the week has zipped by. The most memorable event was a problem with the hot water on Tuesday night that had me worrying how long it would last. A couple of hours turned out to be the answer. I spent those hours in a puddle of anxiety, dwelling on decline and fall. Almost as memorable: the following night, Kathleen bought some airline tickets, so now we’re going to spend a long weekend in San Francisco next month. We can’t wait to see our grandson, who is now taller than an emperor penguin — I read Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker piece about Antarctica yesterday — and who therefore doesn’t seem very tall to me. I am hoping that he will say something outrageous. Grandparent-grandchild privilege prevents my giving examples, but I tell everyone that I get my personality from him. I almost believe this myself.

But when I look over the week’s entry, Monday and Arthur Godfrey seem very distant. Surely it cannot have been this past Tuesday that I wrote about Sister Suzanne Kelly! Even yesterday’s topics feel remote. Perhaps Antarctica had something to do with it. The piece will be of interest to anyone who was engrossed by The Corrections. Alongside his trademark sourpuss travelogue, Franzen tells us how he came to treat himself to an expensive Lindblad cruise. He came into some money when his godfather died. His godfather was his father’s sister’s husband, and Franzen came to be very fond of him. Uncle Walt’s is a lovely story, and I have no intention of spoiling it. But: Aunt Irma was a piece of work. The second time that Franzen mentioned Aunt Irma’s penchant for formal furniture, I registered a connection to Enid Lambert. I seem to recall that Franzen insisted, when his novel came out, that The Corrections was not “autobiographical,” and I came to agree, on the strength of his nonfiction autobiographical sketches. But the extremely vivid portraits of Enid and Alfred Lambert are written with a child’s mercilessness. I now suspect that Franzen harnessed that mercilessness to a novelist’s imagination and spun the figure of Enid from his Aunt Irma. He never suggests having done so in the Antarctica piece. It’s just a hunch. But I shall definitely clip the piece out of the magazine and tuck it into my copy of The Corrections.

Then there is The Idiot. I raced through Part I, thrilled by its Figaro-like massings of characters, all set in one very long day, but could hardly drag myself through the early chapters of Part II. The two big scenes, first on the terrace of Lebedev’s dacha in Pavlovsk, and then in the Epanchin’s dacha, bewildered me; I’m surely not the only reader to find that Prince Myshkin is the only one of Dostoevsky’s characters in this book who is not an idiot. Now that I’ve passed into Part III, and a duel may be in the offing, I’m beginning to feel like one of the inmates. Is Aglaya in love with the Prince? Is the Prince in love with Nastasya Filippovna? Is Nastasya Filippovna insane? By the way, I learned what a fool I’ve been making of myself, ever since I began reading Russian novels. I’ve been stressing the wrong syllable of feminine patronyms. Perhaps because of my recent frolics in Italian (see “sdrucciolo”), I began to wonder if I was doing something wrong when it occurred to me to compare how I said Ardolionovich with how I said Ardolionovna. That didn’t make sense, and, to be sure, I was wrong to say the latter. But Ardolionovna is hard to say; it pushes the ‘v’ and the ‘n’ too close for the comfort of my Anglophone tongue.

Because I was reading The Idiot, I pulled out Edward Crankshaw’s The Shadow of the Winter Palace: Russia’s Drift To Revolution 1825-1917, which I came across while reshelving some history books. Reading both at the same time might have been a good idea, but it certainly made for a depressing experience. I almost miss the Soviet days, for it was possible then to believe that Russia was growing in a new direction. I did not, in fact, believe this, but the possibility was comforting. Now we might as well be back to the days of Alexander II or Alexander III. The communist experiment has been set aside. Did I mention that Crankshaw’s Shadow prompted me to resume a book that I put down months and months ago, Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life? Sperber keeps saying that Marx is brilliant, but I see only a quarrelsome bookworm. I just had a look at the opening passage of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. I always wondered what this title could possibly mean, since 18 Brumaire VIII (9 November 1799) was the date of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup. The solution to the puzzle is contained in Marx’s second sentence.

Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: “Once as tragedy, and again as farce.”

Ah. I considered buying the book, but I’m not sure that it is a book, since even the first page is littered with analphabetisms redolent of very cheap Kindle editions. Marx’s brilliance seems limited to sarcasm. He reminds me of Robert Moses, who built highways (some ruinous) without ever learning to drive.

As Chou En-lai said (and I like to put his name in Wade-Giles when I repeat this), It’s too early to tell. “Capitalism” remains an unknown quantity. It is the kind of poorly-defined term that everyone is sure of understanding. Today, it means “big corporations.” But it no longer conjures images of steel mills and automobile factories. For one thing, those factories that haven’t closed down altogether have gotten a lot smaller. And many big corporations, no matter how many “knowledge workers” are on their payrolls, don’t employ many workers. In this, capitalism has reverted to its pre-Industrial-Revolution profile, before the invention of “capitalism” as a term. In those days, it meant amassing enough money to buy low and sell high. Capitalists didn’t manufacture anything — they contracted out. Aristocrats didn’t grow their own food or shepherd their own flocks; they simply rented out their landholdings. The curious thing about the Industrial Revolution is not that it was made possible by capitalism, but that it transformed capitalism, by raising the amounts invested and the risks of failure to unimaginable levels. When people talk about the roller-coaster dynamics of capitalism, they are talking about the disasters of nineteenth-century experiments with credit. (I’ve always regarded what happened in 1929 as a crisis of consumerism.)

Has capitalism degraded the environment? I find it sloppy to think so. Mass consumption is the culprit: mass consumption has produced massive exhaust. I do not see a connection between commercial banking and the blight of plastic bags. You can work one out, but it will bypass the actual culprits: thoughtless ordinary individuals. Is capitalism responsible for income inequality? Certainly not. Today’s income inequality is the direct result of élitist amorality. You can see it in the upwardly-shooting multiple that ties rank-and-file pay to executive compensation. (“Compensation”! For what?) When I was a boy, the chairman of AT&T lived in a sober house around the corner, on a quarter acre just like everybody else. I’m not saying that he wasn’t “wealthy,” but wealth carried far fewer zeroes in those days. Tax laws and other regulations had nothing to do with the subsequent change in climate.

And yet I do believe that, in most sectors, capitalism has had its day. The only way to prevent the predations of private-equity firms is to eliminate the profit, the rente, the return on investment. I’m not saying that enterprises oughtn’t to “make money”; but the money left over, when all the bills have been paid and, yes, the managers handsomely paid, ought to be treated as capital, not profit. It belongs to the enterprise, not to investors. Obviously, you need investors to get things going. But when growth levels off, then it’s time to exchange equity for debt, and then to pay off the debt and be done with it. No large enterprise ought to be in the business of enriching investors. It doesn’t work.

That’s to say that it doesn’t work for anyone but the investors. It doesn’t work for workers, or for the towns that workers live in. It doesn’t do anything for customers, either. An enterprise ought to be in the business of providing goods and services that customers want while adapting these goods and services as needed with a view to stabilizing the lives of workers. Business enterprises know best how to train and retrain their workers, and they know best how to conduct research into product and service development. Investors’ demands for higher returns, at the expense of this training and research, is a horrible, even damnable distraction. When you get down to it, investors are business pollution.

So how is a rentier to make any money while eating bonbons on his chaise longue? There used to be something called “clipping coupons.” Bonds. Debt. When you buy a bond, you are guaranteed a return, in the form of an interest payment, for your investment, which is called a loan. That’s where your engagement with the issuer stops. So long as the interest is paid, you have nothing to say. It is not very exciting, and that is a very good thing. Rentiers who crave excitement can always invest with venture capitalists.

***

This evening, we are hoping to catch up with old friends whom I haven’t seen in ages. Originally, of course, I was going to serve a nice dinner. As recently as last week, I was still planning to cook, notwithstanding the lack of a proper stove. But in the course of fixing breakfast over the weekend, I learned that there is still much to learn about operating electric appliances in a kitchen not wired for the purpose. I didn’t throw any circuit breakers, I’m happy to say, but that may have been thanks to surge protectors, which did shut off when I tried to do two things at the same time. I may have four appliances — a kettle, a hotplate, a frypan, and a convection over — but as a rule I can use only one at a time. If the gas is out for a long time (as I expect it to be), I shall gradually develop an expertise of workarounds. But gradually, and certainly not by tonight. So we’ll go out.

Since I won’t be doing the ironing, we won’t be watching a movie. But we watched one the other night. Passing by the Video Room on Wednesday, I stopped in and rented Joy. David O Russell’s latest movie features some principal members of the little rep company that he has been building up since Silver Linings Playbook. In American Hustle, these actors, Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert de Niro, were united with two of the stars of The Fighter, Christian Bale and Amy Adams, and it’s interesting to think of The Fighter, because, as in Joy, parents can be the source of the worst career advice. I wanted to smash de Niro’s head in for his shambling, Teflon apologies to his daughter, Lawrence, pretty much as I had wanted to shoot Melissa Leo.

Joy is an interesting blend of realism and kabuki. The performances — the ways in which the characters speak and move — is realistic, but the set-ups are very stylized, so that scenes that seem natural on the surface are inflected with ritual power. Characters encounter and confront each other. They brandish arguments instead of swords, but they are framed in a formal manner. A clear example is the graveyard scene. When Joy, flush with newfound success at QVC but devastated by her grandmother’s death, sits down next to her father, he mumbles about some business trouble that she’s facing, and how he has attempted to “help her out.” What he has done is to send Joy’s resentful half-sister, Peggy, to deal with the problem, something that Joy knows Peggy will screw up. And voilà, Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm, also a member of the rep company) arrives in a taxi, straight from the airport, dressed in black but carrying a wildly blue suitcase. Peggy takes a seat on the other side of the grave and stares at Joy with mindless defiance. Was Russell thinking of Kurosawa? The ensuing argument takes place in Joy’s living room, where it belongs, but its initiation in a scene of actual ritual fuels the rest of the film — the dénouement to which it directly grinds. If we didn’t know going in that things are going to work out for Joy — Joy Mangano, the true-life inventor whose story Joy adapts, was an executive producer of the film — we’d never make it to the end.

Watching Lawrence play the scene in which Joy introduces her fantastic mop to QVC viewers is an experience of great cinema. At first, Joy is abashed; as she was warned, the lights are very bright, and she can barely move. Her Pygmalion, played by Bradley Cooper, is losing it — he has given Joy’s mop a second chance and it is sinking! The situation is saved by “a call.” A viewer calls and is put on the air, to talk with the person selling the product (who might be Joan Rivers — played by her daughter!). This caller is in fact Joy’s oldest friend (Dascha Polanco); we’re not told if the maneuver was preconcerted by the two women or a desperate save by the friend. Anyhow, it works. Joy perks up, slowly at first. As she finds her rhythm and gets into the shtick (and the orders start pouring in), Lawrence shows us that some things are better than sex. She is mesmerizing. It’s like watching a horse nose its way to the front near the finish line. Russell is very good at getting you to root for his characters, but Joy isn’t fighting anyone but herself. She’s fighting her doubts and what she has internalized of her sister’s doubts and her father’s doubts and her father’s girlfriend’s doubts. (The girlfriend is played, with indie bravado, by Isabella Rossellini. She is all kabuki.) Joy is fighting the natural instinct to cut and run. You know just how she feels. You know as if it were you, standing on the stage. And you’re as thrilled as she is.

I must mention two other performances. Diane Ladd is superb as the grandmother, and I apologize to her for thinking that she was dead just because she wasn’t there at the Oscars last year to stand with Bruce and Laura on the red carpet. I guess it’s a case of old-fashioned divorce. There is nothing remarkable about a superb performance by Diane Ladd, except, of course, the performance. The other delight was Virginia Madsen, who was truly wonderful as Joy’s dotty, self-absorbed mother. She exemplifies the movie itself: the weird strangeness of banal people.

How can I buy one of those mops?

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2016 at 2:20 pm.