Thursday, November 07, 2019
Sunday, November 03, 2019
The Impeachment Debate--a Barometer
Last week I attended a talk by General James Mattis (ret.), the former Secretary of Defense, at the JFK School in Cambridge. General Mattis is a history buff, and he talked a great deal about how history can enhance your perspective and help you make better decisions. His host was Prof. Graham Allison, the head of the school's applied history project, whose roots I helped grow myself about 40 years ago. He also talked about the crisis in our democracy and the problems of tribalism and partisanship. He did not specifically discuss his tenure as secretary of defense, although he alluded more than once to the great difficulty of making or executing any coherent policy in this administration.
I decided to participate in question time.
I began by introducing myself as a former member of the Strategy and Policy Department in Newport. "General," I said, "I share you concerns about the crisis in our democracy. Recently it seems to have entered another phase. During the next year, both the House and Senate and the American people will have to decide whether our President should continue in office. One critical question bearing on their decision--and I don't think that it should be a partisan political question--relates to his intellectual and managerial competence and whether he is really capable of doing the job. It seems to me that men like you, and General McMaster, and General Kelly, and Mr. Tillerson have a lot of information bearing on that point. Whether or not you want to comment on this now, I hope that some of you will take an opportunity in the next year to make the information you have available to the Congress and the public so that they may make a more informed decision." (That's a paraphrase but it is certainly very close to what I said.)
The general replied emphatically, making clear that he had already settled this question in his own mind. The American military, he said, has a non-political tradition going back to the Newburgh conspiracy during the Revolutionary War. It must not set itself up as some kind of Praetorian guard. I certainly did not think that I was asking him to do that. I suspect that if Donald Trump were a serving officer commanding a battalion in General Mattis's division, that he would understand that he had to be relieved, but he still feels that his years of military service debar him from exercising his rights as a citizen to pronounce upon his fitness as commander in chief.
General Mattis, then, refuses for his own reasons to enter into a discussion of whether Donald J. Trump can adequately perform the duties of President of the United States. Yet the issue of why that question isn't at the forefront of our political discussion generally, and why it seems very unlikely that it will be the specific basis for an article of impeachment, goes well beyond his personal views of the duties of military officers. It goes to the question of whether the citizens of the United States now have enough understanding of, or belief in, our government, to make it work effectively. I feel more and more forced to believe--by evidence--that they do not.
The Constitution grew directly out of the Enlightenment, the intellectual movement of the 18th century that held that human reason could, and should, order human affairs. It also reflected the experience of the unwritten British constitution, which it incorporated in many ways. Many of the words used in our constitution--including "impeachment"--can only be understood with reference to British precedents. It also reflected the experience of Greek city states and the Roman empire, which the founders had studied, and which come up in some of the federalist papers. Today, only lawyers--not students of history--know anything about British legal and constitutional precedents, and almost no one knows anything about the political history of ancient Greece and Rome. Our fellow countrymen, I would suggest, do not know about this history of legislative inquiry as a check on executive power. They see only a war between a Democratic House of Representatives and a Republican president in which they will take sides.
Our federal government as it evolved during the twentieth century is also a child of the Enlightenment, reflecting the idea that impartial bureaucracies can regulate our economy and provide public services that we all need. Neither Donald Trump nor the Republican Party, however, still believes in that model of government, and the President does not even believe in the role of the modern foreign policy and defense establishment which has taken on so many responsibilities around the world. The Republican party has been unraveling the achievement of the Progressive era and the New Deal for the last 40 years, and the Democratic party has joined in this process on crucial occasions. Bernie Sanders, who must remember Franklin Roosevelt's death, and Elizabeth Warren, who learned about some of the problems the New Deal tried to solve during her legal career, still believe in this model of government, but how many voters do? How many of them care that the Trump Administration is ignoring much of the bureaucracy and turning some of it--such as the EPA--into obedient servants of the corporate America that they were designed to regulate? Going further, how many Americans--especially better-off Americans--have a real commitment to the public educational system that Betsy DeVos is trying to dismantle? And how many of us believe in the interventionist foreign policy that has wasted so much blood and treasure and wreaked so much havoc around the Middle East since 2001? That last cohort of skeptics includes yours truly. Those of us who remain devoted to American ideals of politics and government are standing for what was, and what they feel could be again--not for what its.
Last but not least, in the last half century we have lost our belief in the superiority of reason, rather than emotion. The emotional and moral restraint of the American people struck foreign observers like Tocqueville in the 19th century, and they saw it as critical to our democracy. In the civil war, the passionate, emotional aristocrats of the South lost to the more rational merchants and teachers of the North. Now the screen has replaced the printed page as the primary medium of the circulation of information, and the educational system--especially at the highest levels--no longer forces young people to learn the experience of spending many hours with books. Without the right training, few Americans can make sense of our complex government and our complex world.
Donald Trump would never have won the Republican nomination, much less the general election, if a good majority of Americans still understood and believed in our system of government. And because we now lack any non-partisan belief in our system of government, the impeachment inquiry will most probably lead to impeachment by the House, followed by trial and acquittal by the Senate. 20 Republican Senators would have to vote to remove him to reach 67 votes, and I do not see how that could happen at this point. That will leave Donald Trump's fate--and the nation's--in the hands of American voters. Elizabeth Warren remains my candidate, but I regret that she released a detailed plan for Medicare for all. I support that policy in principle, but it seems very unlikely, in our current climate, that she can convince more than a small minority of voters, at this point, that she can make this happen and that it will be a good idea. Some restoration of trust in our system and some sense of common national purpose must come before such a sweeping change, however right and necessary it may be. The previous great crisis of our national life--the revolutionary and constitutional period, the Civil War, and the era of the Depression and the Second World War--played that role. Our own crisis has completely failed to do so. We must begin the work of restoration calmly, patiently, and slowly.
I decided to participate in question time.
I began by introducing myself as a former member of the Strategy and Policy Department in Newport. "General," I said, "I share you concerns about the crisis in our democracy. Recently it seems to have entered another phase. During the next year, both the House and Senate and the American people will have to decide whether our President should continue in office. One critical question bearing on their decision--and I don't think that it should be a partisan political question--relates to his intellectual and managerial competence and whether he is really capable of doing the job. It seems to me that men like you, and General McMaster, and General Kelly, and Mr. Tillerson have a lot of information bearing on that point. Whether or not you want to comment on this now, I hope that some of you will take an opportunity in the next year to make the information you have available to the Congress and the public so that they may make a more informed decision." (That's a paraphrase but it is certainly very close to what I said.)
The general replied emphatically, making clear that he had already settled this question in his own mind. The American military, he said, has a non-political tradition going back to the Newburgh conspiracy during the Revolutionary War. It must not set itself up as some kind of Praetorian guard. I certainly did not think that I was asking him to do that. I suspect that if Donald Trump were a serving officer commanding a battalion in General Mattis's division, that he would understand that he had to be relieved, but he still feels that his years of military service debar him from exercising his rights as a citizen to pronounce upon his fitness as commander in chief.
General Mattis, then, refuses for his own reasons to enter into a discussion of whether Donald J. Trump can adequately perform the duties of President of the United States. Yet the issue of why that question isn't at the forefront of our political discussion generally, and why it seems very unlikely that it will be the specific basis for an article of impeachment, goes well beyond his personal views of the duties of military officers. It goes to the question of whether the citizens of the United States now have enough understanding of, or belief in, our government, to make it work effectively. I feel more and more forced to believe--by evidence--that they do not.
The Constitution grew directly out of the Enlightenment, the intellectual movement of the 18th century that held that human reason could, and should, order human affairs. It also reflected the experience of the unwritten British constitution, which it incorporated in many ways. Many of the words used in our constitution--including "impeachment"--can only be understood with reference to British precedents. It also reflected the experience of Greek city states and the Roman empire, which the founders had studied, and which come up in some of the federalist papers. Today, only lawyers--not students of history--know anything about British legal and constitutional precedents, and almost no one knows anything about the political history of ancient Greece and Rome. Our fellow countrymen, I would suggest, do not know about this history of legislative inquiry as a check on executive power. They see only a war between a Democratic House of Representatives and a Republican president in which they will take sides.
Our federal government as it evolved during the twentieth century is also a child of the Enlightenment, reflecting the idea that impartial bureaucracies can regulate our economy and provide public services that we all need. Neither Donald Trump nor the Republican Party, however, still believes in that model of government, and the President does not even believe in the role of the modern foreign policy and defense establishment which has taken on so many responsibilities around the world. The Republican party has been unraveling the achievement of the Progressive era and the New Deal for the last 40 years, and the Democratic party has joined in this process on crucial occasions. Bernie Sanders, who must remember Franklin Roosevelt's death, and Elizabeth Warren, who learned about some of the problems the New Deal tried to solve during her legal career, still believe in this model of government, but how many voters do? How many of them care that the Trump Administration is ignoring much of the bureaucracy and turning some of it--such as the EPA--into obedient servants of the corporate America that they were designed to regulate? Going further, how many Americans--especially better-off Americans--have a real commitment to the public educational system that Betsy DeVos is trying to dismantle? And how many of us believe in the interventionist foreign policy that has wasted so much blood and treasure and wreaked so much havoc around the Middle East since 2001? That last cohort of skeptics includes yours truly. Those of us who remain devoted to American ideals of politics and government are standing for what was, and what they feel could be again--not for what its.
Last but not least, in the last half century we have lost our belief in the superiority of reason, rather than emotion. The emotional and moral restraint of the American people struck foreign observers like Tocqueville in the 19th century, and they saw it as critical to our democracy. In the civil war, the passionate, emotional aristocrats of the South lost to the more rational merchants and teachers of the North. Now the screen has replaced the printed page as the primary medium of the circulation of information, and the educational system--especially at the highest levels--no longer forces young people to learn the experience of spending many hours with books. Without the right training, few Americans can make sense of our complex government and our complex world.
Donald Trump would never have won the Republican nomination, much less the general election, if a good majority of Americans still understood and believed in our system of government. And because we now lack any non-partisan belief in our system of government, the impeachment inquiry will most probably lead to impeachment by the House, followed by trial and acquittal by the Senate. 20 Republican Senators would have to vote to remove him to reach 67 votes, and I do not see how that could happen at this point. That will leave Donald Trump's fate--and the nation's--in the hands of American voters. Elizabeth Warren remains my candidate, but I regret that she released a detailed plan for Medicare for all. I support that policy in principle, but it seems very unlikely, in our current climate, that she can convince more than a small minority of voters, at this point, that she can make this happen and that it will be a good idea. Some restoration of trust in our system and some sense of common national purpose must come before such a sweeping change, however right and necessary it may be. The previous great crisis of our national life--the revolutionary and constitutional period, the Civil War, and the era of the Depression and the Second World War--played that role. Our own crisis has completely failed to do so. We must begin the work of restoration calmly, patiently, and slowly.
Friday, October 25, 2019
A blast from the past
It occurred to me this week, reading about the Republican sit-in in the Capitol basement, that today's Republican legislators are using tactics developed 50 + years ago by my contemporaries in the Vietnam era. This is not unprecedented: John Bolton led a gang of Republican operatives who descended on Miami in 2000 to stop the recount of Florida votes. Democratic Boomers either dropped out of traditional politics altogether or became respectable. Republicans, including many from Gen X, show the the same spirit, outlook and tactics that the SDS did back then. That in turn reminded me of one of the first posts I did here fifteen years ago, which follows.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
George W. Bush--Man of the Sixties
George W. Bush—Man of the 1960s
President Bush likes to contrast himself and his policies with the 1960s. “We’re changing the culture of America,” he says, “from one that says, ‘If it feels good, do it,’ and, ‘If you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else,’ to a culture in which each of us understands we’re responsible for the decisions we make,” (When Dick Cheney used the language of the 1960s in the face of an opposition U.S. Senator and defended himself because he “felt better,” the irony got less attention than it deserved.) Culturally, of course, the President rejects the sexual liberation of his youth, and portrays himself as a reformed sinner. Politically, as a conservative, pro-war Republican whose father had campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he was certainly out of step on the Yale campus of 1964-68. All this is, however, entirely misleading—and the country, particularly its younger voters, should try to understand exactly who and what they are voting for before the election. George Bush and his Administration actually represent the worst of the late 1960s—a terrifying certainty determined to repudiate the past, disrupt the present, and risk the future for an ideological ideal. His certainty is not merely, as Ron Susskind argued last in last Sunday's New York Times, a question of his faith—it is all too characteristic of his entire generation.
As George W. Bush’s college years drew to a close, the most visible political faction on most campus was the Students for a Democratic Society, which took over the main Adminstration building, provoked a police bust, and temporarily halted instruction at my own school, Harvard, in the spring of 1969. They were distinguished more than anything else by a complete rejection of everything our parents stood for. In their eyes, the Cold War’s “defense of freedom” was greedy imperialism; civil rights laws simply masked enduring American economic racism; marriage and family were outdated bourgeois conventions; and democracy was a sham. They and they alone knew good from evil, and they had less than nothing to learn from the past. Even within their own ranks, they had contempt for democratic processes. In April of that memorable year, a vote of the SDS turned down a proposal to occupy University Hall by a vote of about two to one—but the next day, the losing minority faction undertook the occupation anyway, dragging their colleagues (and eventually most of the student body) in their wake.
A similar omniscient spirit has dominated the Bush Administration from the day it took office. One by one, the achievements of our parents’ generation—who occupied the White House from John F. Kennedy through George H. W. Bush—have been gleefully tossed aside: the ABM Treaty, the rigid separation of Church and State, overtime protection for workers, environmental protection, and especially the spirit of compromise and civic responsibility that allowed Republicans and Democrats to work together for the good of the country from the 1950s through the 1980s. In foreign policy they have even repudiated, in effect, the NATO Alliance and the United Nations. Events in the fall of 2002 were particularly revealing. Prodded by Colin Powell, who remembers the 1950s, the Administration sought a second Security Council resolution to authorize war against Iraq, but when they found they had only two other votes on their side, they simply disregarded the opinion of the world in the same way that the SDS disregarded the majority vote the night before the occupation of University Hall. Meanwhile, our Boomer-crafted new National Security Strategy gives the United States both the right and the duty to decide what nations shall possess what weapons, and summarily to remove hostile regimes. My Harvard classmate Elliot Abrams opposed SDS’s attempt to rule Harvard University according to their lights, but he is now enthusiastically doing his part to assure that he and his Administration colleagues rule the whole world in the same way.
Other memories from the Vietnam era come to me these days. One Saturday afternoon in 1970, I sat in a packed Harvard Square theater watching Sam Peckinpaugh’s The Wild Bunch. Midway through the movie, William Holden (himself a member of what we now call “The Greatest Generation”) tried to explain to his fellow gang members why Robert Ryan was now working for the other side. “He gave his word,” Holden said, speaking for an older America. “It’s not whether you keep your word!” one of his companions shouted. “It’s who you give it to!” The audience went crazy with delight. Isn’t that the same spirit in which the Bush White House has patronized the scurrilous, baseless campaign of the Swift Boat veterans? John Kerry is on the wrong side; therefore, he can’t be a war hero. And such is the partisanship of our times that even Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush Sr. have joined this campaign—although John McCain, significantly, refuses to do so.
Reality, of course, is a casualty of classic Baby Boomer thought. SDS members truly believed in 1969 that workers and students were going to overturn the established order—because it was right. In the same way, George W. Bush, in defiance of mountains of evidence that Iraq is disintegrating and that our intervention has reduced our standing in the Arab world to new lows, repeats that Iraq is on its way to a democratic transformation that will spread through the region. Freedom, he explains, is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman on this planet—an homily which leaves a calmer observer wondering why the Almighty has been so stingy about bestowing it in so much of the world for so many centuries, or whether the President believes that he is fighting Satan’s evil presence on earth.
Caught between ideology and reality, the Administration constantly resorts to Orwellian language. A loss of jobs becomes economic progress, less health care means more, opening national forests to logging becomes “The Healthy Forests Initiative,” and so on. In the same way, the SDS explained to us that dictatorship of the proletariat was the only true democracy. And the Administration cares nothing about federalism, because federalism could stand in its way. In 1960, when Kennedy and Nixon debated federal aid to education, Nixon argued that federal money would eventually mean federal control. Now a new Republican generation is using federal money to discredit and weaken public education through the No Child Left Behind Act.
The Bush Administration and its supporters are usually less obvious than their leftwing contemporaries were about their repudiation of our parents’ works, but the other day, Grover Norquist—the anti-tax activist who has bragged about his close relations with the White House for four years—let the cat out of the bag in an interview with a Spanish newspaper. The Weekly Standard has printed quotes from the tape of the interview. Here is now Norquist assessed the coming election.
And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared…
This is an age cohort that voted for a draft before the war started, and allowed the draft to continue for 25 years after the war was over. Their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations. . . . Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization--not as much centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual in America. We've spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft . . .
Norquist, a younger Baby Boomer, has actually hit the nail on the head. The twenty million men we drafted to win the Second World War (a conflict he apparently regrets) deserved, and got, their countrymen’s reward, in the form of the GI bill, 4% mortgages, generous Social Security benefits, and real pensions. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower confirmed the government’s responsibility for their well-being and that of their families. Such policies have now become “un-American” as the Bush Administration leads us towards their New Jerusalem—really a new Gilded Age. Norquist is actually exalting the collapse of civic virtue and mutual responsibility that he has helped to promote during his political career. Younger Americans should understand one thing: our current leadership is impervious to facts. Ultimately, like so many of my contemporaries, they care less about any specific changes they make at home or abroad than about simply proving to their own satisfaction that they are right and everyone else is wrong. They have already left the nation and the world a dangerous legacy.
President Bush likes to contrast himself and his policies with the 1960s. “We’re changing the culture of America,” he says, “from one that says, ‘If it feels good, do it,’ and, ‘If you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else,’ to a culture in which each of us understands we’re responsible for the decisions we make,” (When Dick Cheney used the language of the 1960s in the face of an opposition U.S. Senator and defended himself because he “felt better,” the irony got less attention than it deserved.) Culturally, of course, the President rejects the sexual liberation of his youth, and portrays himself as a reformed sinner. Politically, as a conservative, pro-war Republican whose father had campaigned against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he was certainly out of step on the Yale campus of 1964-68. All this is, however, entirely misleading—and the country, particularly its younger voters, should try to understand exactly who and what they are voting for before the election. George Bush and his Administration actually represent the worst of the late 1960s—a terrifying certainty determined to repudiate the past, disrupt the present, and risk the future for an ideological ideal. His certainty is not merely, as Ron Susskind argued last in last Sunday's New York Times, a question of his faith—it is all too characteristic of his entire generation.
As George W. Bush’s college years drew to a close, the most visible political faction on most campus was the Students for a Democratic Society, which took over the main Adminstration building, provoked a police bust, and temporarily halted instruction at my own school, Harvard, in the spring of 1969. They were distinguished more than anything else by a complete rejection of everything our parents stood for. In their eyes, the Cold War’s “defense of freedom” was greedy imperialism; civil rights laws simply masked enduring American economic racism; marriage and family were outdated bourgeois conventions; and democracy was a sham. They and they alone knew good from evil, and they had less than nothing to learn from the past. Even within their own ranks, they had contempt for democratic processes. In April of that memorable year, a vote of the SDS turned down a proposal to occupy University Hall by a vote of about two to one—but the next day, the losing minority faction undertook the occupation anyway, dragging their colleagues (and eventually most of the student body) in their wake.
A similar omniscient spirit has dominated the Bush Administration from the day it took office. One by one, the achievements of our parents’ generation—who occupied the White House from John F. Kennedy through George H. W. Bush—have been gleefully tossed aside: the ABM Treaty, the rigid separation of Church and State, overtime protection for workers, environmental protection, and especially the spirit of compromise and civic responsibility that allowed Republicans and Democrats to work together for the good of the country from the 1950s through the 1980s. In foreign policy they have even repudiated, in effect, the NATO Alliance and the United Nations. Events in the fall of 2002 were particularly revealing. Prodded by Colin Powell, who remembers the 1950s, the Administration sought a second Security Council resolution to authorize war against Iraq, but when they found they had only two other votes on their side, they simply disregarded the opinion of the world in the same way that the SDS disregarded the majority vote the night before the occupation of University Hall. Meanwhile, our Boomer-crafted new National Security Strategy gives the United States both the right and the duty to decide what nations shall possess what weapons, and summarily to remove hostile regimes. My Harvard classmate Elliot Abrams opposed SDS’s attempt to rule Harvard University according to their lights, but he is now enthusiastically doing his part to assure that he and his Administration colleagues rule the whole world in the same way.
Other memories from the Vietnam era come to me these days. One Saturday afternoon in 1970, I sat in a packed Harvard Square theater watching Sam Peckinpaugh’s The Wild Bunch. Midway through the movie, William Holden (himself a member of what we now call “The Greatest Generation”) tried to explain to his fellow gang members why Robert Ryan was now working for the other side. “He gave his word,” Holden said, speaking for an older America. “It’s not whether you keep your word!” one of his companions shouted. “It’s who you give it to!” The audience went crazy with delight. Isn’t that the same spirit in which the Bush White House has patronized the scurrilous, baseless campaign of the Swift Boat veterans? John Kerry is on the wrong side; therefore, he can’t be a war hero. And such is the partisanship of our times that even Bob Dole and George H. W. Bush Sr. have joined this campaign—although John McCain, significantly, refuses to do so.
Reality, of course, is a casualty of classic Baby Boomer thought. SDS members truly believed in 1969 that workers and students were going to overturn the established order—because it was right. In the same way, George W. Bush, in defiance of mountains of evidence that Iraq is disintegrating and that our intervention has reduced our standing in the Arab world to new lows, repeats that Iraq is on its way to a democratic transformation that will spread through the region. Freedom, he explains, is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman on this planet—an homily which leaves a calmer observer wondering why the Almighty has been so stingy about bestowing it in so much of the world for so many centuries, or whether the President believes that he is fighting Satan’s evil presence on earth.
Caught between ideology and reality, the Administration constantly resorts to Orwellian language. A loss of jobs becomes economic progress, less health care means more, opening national forests to logging becomes “The Healthy Forests Initiative,” and so on. In the same way, the SDS explained to us that dictatorship of the proletariat was the only true democracy. And the Administration cares nothing about federalism, because federalism could stand in its way. In 1960, when Kennedy and Nixon debated federal aid to education, Nixon argued that federal money would eventually mean federal control. Now a new Republican generation is using federal money to discredit and weaken public education through the No Child Left Behind Act.
The Bush Administration and its supporters are usually less obvious than their leftwing contemporaries were about their repudiation of our parents’ works, but the other day, Grover Norquist—the anti-tax activist who has bragged about his close relations with the White House for four years—let the cat out of the bag in an interview with a Spanish newspaper. The Weekly Standard has printed quotes from the tape of the interview. Here is now Norquist assessed the coming election.
And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared…
This is an age cohort that voted for a draft before the war started, and allowed the draft to continue for 25 years after the war was over. Their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations. . . . Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization--not as much centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual in America. We've spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft . . .
Norquist, a younger Baby Boomer, has actually hit the nail on the head. The twenty million men we drafted to win the Second World War (a conflict he apparently regrets) deserved, and got, their countrymen’s reward, in the form of the GI bill, 4% mortgages, generous Social Security benefits, and real pensions. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower confirmed the government’s responsibility for their well-being and that of their families. Such policies have now become “un-American” as the Bush Administration leads us towards their New Jerusalem—really a new Gilded Age. Norquist is actually exalting the collapse of civic virtue and mutual responsibility that he has helped to promote during his political career. Younger Americans should understand one thing: our current leadership is impervious to facts. Ultimately, like so many of my contemporaries, they care less about any specific changes they make at home or abroad than about simply proving to their own satisfaction that they are right and everyone else is wrong. They have already left the nation and the world a dangerous legacy.
Friday, October 18, 2019
The Life of Harold Bloom
I did not know Harold Bloom, who died this week at the age of 89. I have one of his books, The Western Canon, in front of me, and I have enjoyed reading bits and pieces of it, but can't claim to have read it through. Certainly he appears to have been the most brilliant and prolific literary critic of the Silent generation (b. 1925-42), and his books had an unusually wide readership. What struck me reading the fine obituary that appeared in the New York Times was how exemplary his life was--how much of twentieth-century egalitarianism and intellectual approach he seemed to embody. I could not help thinking, too, that his early life and career had some things in common with my own father's, particularly in the way they saw their relationship to the culture and institutions of the country their parents had immigrated to from Eastern Europe earlier in the century.
Bloom, the Times, records, was born on July 11, 1930, into an orthodox Jewish household in the Bronx, the youngest of five children. My own father had been born seventeen years earlier nearly to the day in Brooklyn, the ninth of ten children in a similar, though somewhat better off, orthodox family. Bloom went to the Bronx High School of Science, then as now a competitive public high school at the summit of the New York educational system, while my father graduated from New Utrecht in Brooklyn near the top of his class. Bloom won a scholarship to Cornell, while my father whose family had lost its money in the housing bust just before the Depression, went to the University of Wisconsin, which was very close to free even for out of staters in those distant days.
They were, however, different young men. My father, though a very good student, was the kind of all-around man who could, and did, win a Rhodes Scholarship, while Bloom was obviously far more singleminded in his focus on intellectual pursuits. He had discovered literature as I discovered history--at a very young age--and he seems to have been more compulsive about assimilating as much of it as he could than I ever was. He also had a prodigious memory, and claimed, pace the Times, to know the entire works of Shakespeare, as well as those of several other poets, by heart.
From Cornell Bloom went to graduate school at Yale, then the citadel of the New Criticism, which taught that the meaning of a work had to be found within itself, based on a close analysis of its language, without reference to the life of the author or developments in the outside world. He rejected that view, arguing (apparently for the rest of his life) that all great works were part of a dialogue, and a struggle, with the great writers of the past--an approach which made a broad acquaintance with western literature essential. Bloom's apostasy--his rejection of his department's prevailing approach, the preferred method of some of its leading lights--did not prevent the Yale English department from hiring him as soon as he had earned his doctorate at the age of 24, and tenuring him some years later. He remained at Yale all his life, although he severed his connection with the department in the 1970s and became a university professor. What fascinates me about all this is how Bloom evidently saw himself in relation to western society and culture--and the contrast between his views and those of the would-be scholars who see themselves as outsiders today.
Bloom, to repeat, had been raised as an orthodox Jew, a member of a minority that had been scorned and oppressed for centuries and which still faced some discrimination in academia at the time he came into it. He identified as a Jew, but he had abandoned his religion. Yet unlike race- and gender-focused critics today, he easily fell in love with the western literary tradition, found everything he needed to pose the questions that fascinated him within it, and simply tried to beat the goyim at their own game--as indeed, in many ways, he did. In return, the academy did not punish him either for his originality or for the breadth of his interests--as it surely would if he were starting out today. In the same way, my father abandoned his religion and assimilated, even to the point of marrying a gentile, and went in to public service, working in diplomatic posts in 1948-54, 1961-9, and 1976-80, an extraordinary period in American politics and history in which he was honored and fulfilled to take part. Both Harold Bloom and Philip Kaiser made their careers within important parts of western civilization, whose arc, we can now see, was reaching a climax when they were young men. Its appeal won them both over and they never looked back. Now academia in particular is obsessed with the supposed flaws of western civilization, and is filled with scholars who believe that their role is to show how it has oppressed their gender or race.
I have now read three obituaries of Bloom, in the Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian. All three summarized his career more than adequately, but none mentioned one of its highlights: that he was the dissertation adviser and mentor of my exact contemporary Camille Paglia, whom I regard as the greatest literary and artistic critic of the Boom generation. In A Life in History, I thanked my own dissertation adviser Ernest May--who was just two years older than Bloom--for his reaction, in 1973 I believe, when I told him that I wanted to write my dissertation about the relations between Germany, France and Britain, on the one hand, and the new states of Eastern Europe on the other, during the 1930s. That was enough for at least three dissertations, but instead of telling me that I simply had to cut it down--as many professors surely would have--May told me that it was a wonderful idea and that I should go ahead. Three years later, it was done. Paglia must have had a similar experience when she told Bloom that she wanted to write an analysis of androgyny in literature and art from the ancients to modern times. He too evidently encouraged her, and the result became Sexual Personae, another work that found new things to say about the western tradition without trying to repudiate it. But Paglia, like myself, found that modern academia had no room for scholars of such breadth, and she has spent her career teaching the history of literature and art and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, while postmodernists rule the nation's literary departments. She had no opportunity to inspire, encourage and train her counterparts in the Xer and Millennial generations. Bloom was fortunate to be born when he was--and he made the most of it. Some day, whether in 50, 100, or 1000 years, others like him will get their chance.
Bloom, the Times, records, was born on July 11, 1930, into an orthodox Jewish household in the Bronx, the youngest of five children. My own father had been born seventeen years earlier nearly to the day in Brooklyn, the ninth of ten children in a similar, though somewhat better off, orthodox family. Bloom went to the Bronx High School of Science, then as now a competitive public high school at the summit of the New York educational system, while my father graduated from New Utrecht in Brooklyn near the top of his class. Bloom won a scholarship to Cornell, while my father whose family had lost its money in the housing bust just before the Depression, went to the University of Wisconsin, which was very close to free even for out of staters in those distant days.
They were, however, different young men. My father, though a very good student, was the kind of all-around man who could, and did, win a Rhodes Scholarship, while Bloom was obviously far more singleminded in his focus on intellectual pursuits. He had discovered literature as I discovered history--at a very young age--and he seems to have been more compulsive about assimilating as much of it as he could than I ever was. He also had a prodigious memory, and claimed, pace the Times, to know the entire works of Shakespeare, as well as those of several other poets, by heart.
From Cornell Bloom went to graduate school at Yale, then the citadel of the New Criticism, which taught that the meaning of a work had to be found within itself, based on a close analysis of its language, without reference to the life of the author or developments in the outside world. He rejected that view, arguing (apparently for the rest of his life) that all great works were part of a dialogue, and a struggle, with the great writers of the past--an approach which made a broad acquaintance with western literature essential. Bloom's apostasy--his rejection of his department's prevailing approach, the preferred method of some of its leading lights--did not prevent the Yale English department from hiring him as soon as he had earned his doctorate at the age of 24, and tenuring him some years later. He remained at Yale all his life, although he severed his connection with the department in the 1970s and became a university professor. What fascinates me about all this is how Bloom evidently saw himself in relation to western society and culture--and the contrast between his views and those of the would-be scholars who see themselves as outsiders today.
Bloom, to repeat, had been raised as an orthodox Jew, a member of a minority that had been scorned and oppressed for centuries and which still faced some discrimination in academia at the time he came into it. He identified as a Jew, but he had abandoned his religion. Yet unlike race- and gender-focused critics today, he easily fell in love with the western literary tradition, found everything he needed to pose the questions that fascinated him within it, and simply tried to beat the goyim at their own game--as indeed, in many ways, he did. In return, the academy did not punish him either for his originality or for the breadth of his interests--as it surely would if he were starting out today. In the same way, my father abandoned his religion and assimilated, even to the point of marrying a gentile, and went in to public service, working in diplomatic posts in 1948-54, 1961-9, and 1976-80, an extraordinary period in American politics and history in which he was honored and fulfilled to take part. Both Harold Bloom and Philip Kaiser made their careers within important parts of western civilization, whose arc, we can now see, was reaching a climax when they were young men. Its appeal won them both over and they never looked back. Now academia in particular is obsessed with the supposed flaws of western civilization, and is filled with scholars who believe that their role is to show how it has oppressed their gender or race.
I have now read three obituaries of Bloom, in the Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian. All three summarized his career more than adequately, but none mentioned one of its highlights: that he was the dissertation adviser and mentor of my exact contemporary Camille Paglia, whom I regard as the greatest literary and artistic critic of the Boom generation. In A Life in History, I thanked my own dissertation adviser Ernest May--who was just two years older than Bloom--for his reaction, in 1973 I believe, when I told him that I wanted to write my dissertation about the relations between Germany, France and Britain, on the one hand, and the new states of Eastern Europe on the other, during the 1930s. That was enough for at least three dissertations, but instead of telling me that I simply had to cut it down--as many professors surely would have--May told me that it was a wonderful idea and that I should go ahead. Three years later, it was done. Paglia must have had a similar experience when she told Bloom that she wanted to write an analysis of androgyny in literature and art from the ancients to modern times. He too evidently encouraged her, and the result became Sexual Personae, another work that found new things to say about the western tradition without trying to repudiate it. But Paglia, like myself, found that modern academia had no room for scholars of such breadth, and she has spent her career teaching the history of literature and art and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, while postmodernists rule the nation's literary departments. She had no opportunity to inspire, encourage and train her counterparts in the Xer and Millennial generations. Bloom was fortunate to be born when he was--and he made the most of it. Some day, whether in 50, 100, or 1000 years, others like him will get their chance.
Saturday, October 12, 2019
Intellectual and political problems
In David Lodge's wonderful novel about the academic year 1968-9, Changing Places, a party of Berkeley English profs play a game called Humiliation, in which they have to name the most prominent work of literature that they have never read. One assistant professor, Howard Ringbaum, succumbs to his competitive urge to win by naming the most prominent work of all, and declares that he has never read Hamlet. He wins the game, but when his tenure case comes up a couple of weeks later, he is denied promotion on those very grounds. It's time for me to play a round myself.
I have come to realize that I am in some ways a Hegelian, although I have never read a single work, or even part of a single work, written by Hegel, whom I know mainly as the direct ancestor of Karl Marx. Hegel believed that history consisted of the embodiment of various ideas, and I think there's a great deal of truth to that. Every era--and perhaps every generation--has certain dominant beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, that determine its approach to just about everything--politics, life, and the arts. At the same time, certain battles among various ideas continue indefinitely, with one side or another winning for a while, but without any complete victories that will endure for more than about 80 years at most. One such was identified by the historian Henry Adams, one of those people from the past to whom I feel remarkably close, in the presidential address he wrote for the American Historical Association in 1894. History, he said was trying to become a science, and if it succeeded, it was bound to reach one of three conclusions about where history was going. None of those conclusions, however, was likely to win universal acceptance. I have discussed this address here at least four times in the last 15 years here, I see, and I quote from the first time, all the way back in 2005.
"First, Adams argued, history might accept the tenets of socialism. (Something like this actually happened in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when Marxism in various forms became extremely influential in the historical professions of France, Britain, and the United States.) Yet Adams doubted (too pessimistically, as it turned out), that property owners upon whom universities depended would allow such a new orthodoxy to flourish. Secondly, historians might conclude "that the present evils of the world--its huge armaments, its vast accumulations of capital, its advancing materialism, and declining arts--were to be continued, exaggerated, over another thousand years," but that conclusion would be unpopular and could lead anyone who accepted it only to despair. Lastly, he said, historical science might prove "that society must at a given time revert to the church and recover its old foundation of absolute faith in a personal providence and a revealed religion," but in that case, the science would commit suicide."
I still think this was an uncommonly brilliant insight, but I can also see that it suffers from a disease of its age, namely, the tendency to regard human history and human behavior as subject to the same kind of immutable laws that science had found in disciplines like physics and chemistry. As it happens, human behavior continually changes because of the human tendency to react against whatever the status quo may be--a tendency which is to a high degree generational. Thus, by the time he died in 1917, new generations had inaugurated the Progressive era, and although most of the world never became formally socialist, the major industrial nations all put severe limits on the accumulation of wealth--and therefore, of political power--during the first half of the twentieth century, and inequality was drastically reduced. Then, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, came two new trends, one in the historical profession and academia more generally, the other in our politics and society. In the academy, the visions of history as a struggle among nations or among classes gave way to one of a struggle between demographic groups, including a struggle between men (patriarchy) and women. Two generations of scholars have tried to re-interpret the whole past in that light, while anticipating a brighter future in which the last would be first. But in the upper reaches of our society, the philosophy of the Gilded Age--that corporations had both a right and a duty to maximize profits, unfettered by government regulation or high taxes--became predominant once more, and inequality has now surpassed the levels observed in Adams's day, and our new corporate oligarchy is every bit as powerful as the one he saw growing around him in 1894.
The biggest insight in the piece, however, was that any truth arrived at would be unpopular. Here I find two very important sources of our current discontents.
The New Deal, which now looms as an interregnum between two Gilded Ages, was not based merely on moral principles--the idea that some should not have too much while many more others had too little--but on a particular view of economics. The economy was better off when workers and their families could afford to buy the products they made. Corporations contributed more benefit to their workers and the public when executive compensation was effectively capped by taxation. Securities markets needed tight regulation to prevent catastrophic panics. The experience of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s had proven all these things to be true--but some corporate interests refused to accept them. They formed networks and devised strategies to push free market views, and succeeded in making them first mainstream, and then orthodox, in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, we have more inequality, richer financiers, and, from time to time, threats of financial collapse again. Contrary ideas now have a following among young people in particular, but I am afraid that they may be decades away from becoming dominant again.
An even broader truth, however, may be causing bigger problems because people cannot accept it--especially in the midst of the inequality that has now risen.
Modern society is based on the equality of every individual, and on the individual as the basic social unit. This is far more true today than it was 100 or even fifty years ago, since family structures have tended to break down, and fewer people define themselves based upon family relationships. That gives every individual both a great opportunity and a tremendous responsibility, which can be a huge emotional burden. I remember that when I first read Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution, I was struck by his appreciation of a society of orders in which everyone had a particular place. In those days, it occurred to me, men and women thought their place on earth was ordained by God or nature, and did not have to blame themselves if it seemed unfair. In the modern world we are encouraged to blame ourselves, since we theoretically have the same chance as anyone else to reach the top. The self-made man has been an American ideal, in particular, since the beginning of our independent history.
Unfortunately, even at the most egalitarian of times--the mid-20th century--a big gap between the rich and poor persists. We can only have social peace and consensus, I think, if we keep that gap within reasonable bounds, keep ways to rise alive, and, crucially, provide a reasonably secure and happy life to the majority of losers in our ongoing competition, as well as the winners. In the last 40 years we have stopped doing those things. More people are out in the jungle of the workplace competing for at least a decent life, working longer hours, with more needs. Higher education, practically free in mid-century, has become disastrously expensive. Fed by the new ideology I discussed above, millions of women and minorities have come to believe that their demographic status, not our economic system itself, is the source of their problems, and they have sold the Democratic Party on that idea. That in turn has bred resentment among millions of white people who blame solicitude towards nowhites nad immigrants for their declining economic status.
What makes the issue of mobility, and the related issue of ability, so fraught, in my opinion, is this. History shows that in any complex field of endeavor, a small minority of people are much better than anyone else. I have written an entire book showing how true this is in baseball, and I have seen it in my own profession and as a spectator in many other fields. These people are different not because of their race or gender--much less their sexual orientation--but because of almost unique personal characteristics that are scattered more or less at random throughout the population.
As I write the city of New York is wracked by controversies over admissions to its elite high schools and over the Gifted and Talented programs in all its schools, because they are filled with disproportionate numbers of white and Asian students. In my opinion, test scores must continue to determine who gets into those top schools, so as to give the smartest people in our society an opportunity to develop their skills further. We need that minority to perform many important tasks at the highest level, and to teach the rest of us. But those of them that decide to use their skills to maximize their income must face some pretty strict limits on how much they can earn and how much wealth they can acquire. At the same time, we must all pay attention, not simply to letting more representatives of unrepresented groups into a tiny economic elite, but to giving those who will never reach the elite a chance at a decent life. If parents regard an elite school or elite program as their childrens' only hope, most parents will never be satisfied. I do think, by the way, that the admissions process and the college admissions process could changed in one way to make it much fairer. Standardized tests should be varied very significantly from year to year, in form and in content, to make it impossible for targeted test preparation to be more than a long-shot gamble. That would take away the very real advantage of richer kids whose parents can afford such classes.private instruction.
We shall never, in any case, end inequality or injustice on this planet, nor shall we create a Utopia that lasts for more than a generation or two before younger people overthrow it. I wrote 15 years ago that Adams's three alternative views of history might be describe as the utopian, the stoic, and the religious. "Unfortunately," I wrote then, "the stoic view--which I personally believe to be the most useful and accurate, since it alone recognizes limitations on our power to control people and events--while it has nearly always produced the best history, seems, especially during periods of crisis like our own, to suffer from a fatal disadvantage in a contest with either of the other two--its inability to satisfy the eternal human fantasy of living happily ever after." This seems to be more true now than it was in 2005--but I remain stuck with own form of stoicism, which can drive old friends crazy, but still enables me, I think, to provide something here every week that you won't find anywhere else.
I have come to realize that I am in some ways a Hegelian, although I have never read a single work, or even part of a single work, written by Hegel, whom I know mainly as the direct ancestor of Karl Marx. Hegel believed that history consisted of the embodiment of various ideas, and I think there's a great deal of truth to that. Every era--and perhaps every generation--has certain dominant beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, that determine its approach to just about everything--politics, life, and the arts. At the same time, certain battles among various ideas continue indefinitely, with one side or another winning for a while, but without any complete victories that will endure for more than about 80 years at most. One such was identified by the historian Henry Adams, one of those people from the past to whom I feel remarkably close, in the presidential address he wrote for the American Historical Association in 1894. History, he said was trying to become a science, and if it succeeded, it was bound to reach one of three conclusions about where history was going. None of those conclusions, however, was likely to win universal acceptance. I have discussed this address here at least four times in the last 15 years here, I see, and I quote from the first time, all the way back in 2005.
"First, Adams argued, history might accept the tenets of socialism. (Something like this actually happened in the middle decades of the twentieth century, when Marxism in various forms became extremely influential in the historical professions of France, Britain, and the United States.) Yet Adams doubted (too pessimistically, as it turned out), that property owners upon whom universities depended would allow such a new orthodoxy to flourish. Secondly, historians might conclude "that the present evils of the world--its huge armaments, its vast accumulations of capital, its advancing materialism, and declining arts--were to be continued, exaggerated, over another thousand years," but that conclusion would be unpopular and could lead anyone who accepted it only to despair. Lastly, he said, historical science might prove "that society must at a given time revert to the church and recover its old foundation of absolute faith in a personal providence and a revealed religion," but in that case, the science would commit suicide."
I still think this was an uncommonly brilliant insight, but I can also see that it suffers from a disease of its age, namely, the tendency to regard human history and human behavior as subject to the same kind of immutable laws that science had found in disciplines like physics and chemistry. As it happens, human behavior continually changes because of the human tendency to react against whatever the status quo may be--a tendency which is to a high degree generational. Thus, by the time he died in 1917, new generations had inaugurated the Progressive era, and although most of the world never became formally socialist, the major industrial nations all put severe limits on the accumulation of wealth--and therefore, of political power--during the first half of the twentieth century, and inequality was drastically reduced. Then, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, came two new trends, one in the historical profession and academia more generally, the other in our politics and society. In the academy, the visions of history as a struggle among nations or among classes gave way to one of a struggle between demographic groups, including a struggle between men (patriarchy) and women. Two generations of scholars have tried to re-interpret the whole past in that light, while anticipating a brighter future in which the last would be first. But in the upper reaches of our society, the philosophy of the Gilded Age--that corporations had both a right and a duty to maximize profits, unfettered by government regulation or high taxes--became predominant once more, and inequality has now surpassed the levels observed in Adams's day, and our new corporate oligarchy is every bit as powerful as the one he saw growing around him in 1894.
The biggest insight in the piece, however, was that any truth arrived at would be unpopular. Here I find two very important sources of our current discontents.
The New Deal, which now looms as an interregnum between two Gilded Ages, was not based merely on moral principles--the idea that some should not have too much while many more others had too little--but on a particular view of economics. The economy was better off when workers and their families could afford to buy the products they made. Corporations contributed more benefit to their workers and the public when executive compensation was effectively capped by taxation. Securities markets needed tight regulation to prevent catastrophic panics. The experience of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s had proven all these things to be true--but some corporate interests refused to accept them. They formed networks and devised strategies to push free market views, and succeeded in making them first mainstream, and then orthodox, in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, we have more inequality, richer financiers, and, from time to time, threats of financial collapse again. Contrary ideas now have a following among young people in particular, but I am afraid that they may be decades away from becoming dominant again.
An even broader truth, however, may be causing bigger problems because people cannot accept it--especially in the midst of the inequality that has now risen.
Modern society is based on the equality of every individual, and on the individual as the basic social unit. This is far more true today than it was 100 or even fifty years ago, since family structures have tended to break down, and fewer people define themselves based upon family relationships. That gives every individual both a great opportunity and a tremendous responsibility, which can be a huge emotional burden. I remember that when I first read Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the French Revolution, I was struck by his appreciation of a society of orders in which everyone had a particular place. In those days, it occurred to me, men and women thought their place on earth was ordained by God or nature, and did not have to blame themselves if it seemed unfair. In the modern world we are encouraged to blame ourselves, since we theoretically have the same chance as anyone else to reach the top. The self-made man has been an American ideal, in particular, since the beginning of our independent history.
Unfortunately, even at the most egalitarian of times--the mid-20th century--a big gap between the rich and poor persists. We can only have social peace and consensus, I think, if we keep that gap within reasonable bounds, keep ways to rise alive, and, crucially, provide a reasonably secure and happy life to the majority of losers in our ongoing competition, as well as the winners. In the last 40 years we have stopped doing those things. More people are out in the jungle of the workplace competing for at least a decent life, working longer hours, with more needs. Higher education, practically free in mid-century, has become disastrously expensive. Fed by the new ideology I discussed above, millions of women and minorities have come to believe that their demographic status, not our economic system itself, is the source of their problems, and they have sold the Democratic Party on that idea. That in turn has bred resentment among millions of white people who blame solicitude towards nowhites nad immigrants for their declining economic status.
What makes the issue of mobility, and the related issue of ability, so fraught, in my opinion, is this. History shows that in any complex field of endeavor, a small minority of people are much better than anyone else. I have written an entire book showing how true this is in baseball, and I have seen it in my own profession and as a spectator in many other fields. These people are different not because of their race or gender--much less their sexual orientation--but because of almost unique personal characteristics that are scattered more or less at random throughout the population.
As I write the city of New York is wracked by controversies over admissions to its elite high schools and over the Gifted and Talented programs in all its schools, because they are filled with disproportionate numbers of white and Asian students. In my opinion, test scores must continue to determine who gets into those top schools, so as to give the smartest people in our society an opportunity to develop their skills further. We need that minority to perform many important tasks at the highest level, and to teach the rest of us. But those of them that decide to use their skills to maximize their income must face some pretty strict limits on how much they can earn and how much wealth they can acquire. At the same time, we must all pay attention, not simply to letting more representatives of unrepresented groups into a tiny economic elite, but to giving those who will never reach the elite a chance at a decent life. If parents regard an elite school or elite program as their childrens' only hope, most parents will never be satisfied. I do think, by the way, that the admissions process and the college admissions process could changed in one way to make it much fairer. Standardized tests should be varied very significantly from year to year, in form and in content, to make it impossible for targeted test preparation to be more than a long-shot gamble. That would take away the very real advantage of richer kids whose parents can afford such classes.private instruction.
We shall never, in any case, end inequality or injustice on this planet, nor shall we create a Utopia that lasts for more than a generation or two before younger people overthrow it. I wrote 15 years ago that Adams's three alternative views of history might be describe as the utopian, the stoic, and the religious. "Unfortunately," I wrote then, "the stoic view--which I personally believe to be the most useful and accurate, since it alone recognizes limitations on our power to control people and events--while it has nearly always produced the best history, seems, especially during periods of crisis like our own, to suffer from a fatal disadvantage in a contest with either of the other two--its inability to satisfy the eternal human fantasy of living happily ever after." This seems to be more true now than it was in 2005--but I remain stuck with own form of stoicism, which can drive old friends crazy, but still enables me, I think, to provide something here every week that you won't find anywhere else.
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