Democratic Doldrums

 

 

            This is the last thing I intend to write about the aftermath of our American presidential election for a while, but so far, so good.  I am referring here to the public reaction to its outcome.  The outcome has left millions disappointed, hundreds of thousands deeply distressed, and probably some tens of thousands in something approaching actual medical trauma.  I speak literally.  On Sunday our parish priest, speaking carefully but with obvious sincerity, spoke of the pastoral imperative of negotiating profound distress among communities united by a common faith yet divided by strongly held political disagreements.  The infliction of psychic pain on such a large swath of our national population is no laughing matter, yet so far as I know there has not been any significant civil disturbance of the sort I was anticipating.  ( I had been anticipating that Vice-President Harris was going to win the election, and that indeed some of her opponent’s most extreme partisans might well misbehave.)

 

            Let me be clear, as the losing contender in the recent election repeatedly said by way of preface to some opacity or other.  I need to make clear my sincere belief that the world would be ever so much better a place if everybody thought exactly as I do.  It is inexplicable to me that any sensible person might not think that way already.  But it turns out that there actually are these other people who do not share my views.  Lots of them.  Who knew?

 

            I read that among the “losers” of the election we must include the “legacy” press.  I must come clear and admit that I don’t actually know just exactly what the “legacy press" is, either from the point of view of legators or legatees, but I deduce that in practical terms it means the New York Times, the Washington Post, and perhaps the Los Angeles Times. While one might have thought that a hotly contested national presidential election would provide sufficient external or objective matter for any journal to try to deal with, the latter two of these papers made themselves the story by deciding not to publish an official institutional endorsement of either of the candidates from our two major political parties.

 

            A person who has loomed large in our political thinking for the past several months is a man named Robert Hubbell, who was brought to our attention by one of our old friends with whom we joined, along with another couple of close friends, in a monthly “Dinner for Six”, the main extra-gastronomic purpose of which was to review the political news, which consisted mainly in our exhaustive exploration of the latest enormities of Donald J. Trump.  Robert Hubbell is (I think) a retired lawyer living in the Los Angeles area.  He is energetic, industrious, highly intelligent.  He is a strong writer and a persuasive speaker, the indefatigable producer of his own political newsletter.  Mr. Hubbell issues a near daily political memorandum (the “Hubbell Report”), which is available on the Internet.  He is a strong supporter of the Democratic party, “up and down the ballot” as he often says.  He has particular expertise in legal matters.

 

            I presume Mr. Hubbell, in his clearly expressed unhappiness with the results of the election, probably represents in unusually articulate form, the attitudes of many other.  In one recent post he spent a certain amount of time adjudicating the linguistic distinction between the nouns resistance and opposition.  Which of the two is the right one to describe the proper stance that must now be adopted by right thinking people with regard to President Trump and his policies?  He is inclined to the former, and why not?  But in my opinion Mr. Hubbell has somewhat lost the plot.  He is insistent that the election was a very close thing.  I won’t enter a dispute as to what it takes to be a blowout.  But Trump won by a margin of eighty-six electoral votes and several million individual votes.  Harris won perhaps five states that don’t have seacoasts.  (Remember the term “coastal elites”?)  She lost every so-called “battleground” state.   Both campaigns spent an unconscionable amount of money in the pursuit of victory, but the “war chest” of the loser—more than a billion dollars—was truly obscene.  Thus she was essentially creamed by an out-spent, foul-mouthed, mendacious, and often incoherent convicted felon vociferously opposed by nearly all the elite cultural arbiters of the nation.  How, one might ask, could this happen? And one might well answer that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves, otherwise known as the demos, the people, who exercise their awkward rule by the awkward system called democracy (rule by the demos.).  

Presidential Election

 

What follows is not an essay, more like a plea or exhortation.  I began writing this on Tuesday morning shortly after returning from the poling place, a firehouse about a mile from our house, to which our neighborhood was assigned.  The few people likely to be reading blog essays this morning are well aware that yesterday was Election Day in the United States and aware as well that I generally put my post up fairy early on a Wednesday morning.  As I write, of course, the absolutely final results are not yet known, but it is certain that Donald Trump has won the election and won it big.   While I cannot say that I shall be entirely indifferent as to what the final certified results will be, this brief post is not concerned with them.  Anybody who has been “following” the election campaign closely—and it has nearly obsessed me—will be aware that it has been conducted with an intensity bordering on desperation, and that prominent supporters of both the major candidates have predicted a nearly existential cataclysm should their preferred candidate lose.  Yet it was always certain that one of them must lose.  The clear logic of the situation is that many millions of voters—probably nearly half of all voters—will emerge from the experience disappointed,  and not a few of them angry.  Many are likely to be suspicious and dubious of the validity of an outcome they have been nursed by months of extreme rhetoric to regard to be so undesirable as to be unthinkable.

 

Whatever the result, however, it is an evidence not of the death of democracy but of its practice.  One of Churchill’s more famous remarks, uttered a couple of years after the end of the Second World War, is this: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”  Our own American democracy is undoubtedly being tested.  What the current electoral campaign has revealed to me—though I have nowhere seen this as a prominent item of discussion in the press—is the inadequacy of our two-party system in its current evolution.  If the only purpose of your organization is to achieve power, you are likely to employ all legal means in its pursuit and to stretch the meaning of the word “legal” to its breaking point.  Fortunately, a genuine democratic system, truly engaged in a principled fashion, allows constant refocus and recalculation.  By this I mean it is possible to achieve a just and effective government, possible but not of course guaranteed.  When a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of a government he and his co-conspirators had come up with, he is reported to have replied: A republic, madam, if you can keep it.  Let us by all means keep it.

What About Us Grils?

                                                                    Jane Eyre

 

 

The essays in this blog not infrequently deal with books that I have found interesting, and not a few of them are novels.  This one was stimulated by one that I have not read, but clearly need to read soon.  I refer to the novel James, by Percival Everett.  James is of that genre of novels that belong at once to the categories of fiction and of literary criticism or literary history, for they are fictional works that in some imaginative manner interact with earlier works of fiction.  The “background” book in this instance is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a picaresque romp of high moral seriousness largely about the friendship of a young white lad (Huck) and an older black man (Jim).  A friend of Joan’s, who is reading James in a book club, asked me a couple of linguistic questions arising from her reading of it.  And as you have probably observed during the current political campaign, what you do when you don’t know the answer to a question is to obfuscate by answering a different one.

 

So I was set to thinking about a certain kind of book that messes with literary history while contributing to it.    I do not have in mind here that kind of novel in which the animation of the fictional plot depends upon an obvious contradiction of generally accepted historical fact.  These are sometimes called “alternative historical”, though I prefer the simpler “counter factual”.  Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Tower (1962), an imaginative orgy of the counter factual, depicts a world in which Japan and Germany, having won World War II, now administer a partitioned and occupied United States.  The underground opposition to the Fascists is led by a single heroic figure in Wyoming!  Who knew?  The genre of novel I have in mind—and to which (I take it) Percival Everett’s James belongs—I would regard not as counter-factional, but as counter-fictional.

 

A fairly well-known work from my own field of special interest in our earlier literature is John Gardner’s Grendel (1971).  The oldest great poem in English that most people have ever heard of is the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic poem Beowulf, dating in its sole surviving manuscript probably from about the year 1000, though likely to be of earlier composition.  Beowulf is the name of its Scandinavian hero, who battles against ferocious monsters.  In the earlier part of the poem, Beowulf as a young man takes on a terrible pair of monsters—Grendel and Grendel’s otherwise unnamed mother—who are attacking Heorot, a fabled mead-hall of the aging Danish King Hrothgar.  (In case you are wondering what a mead-hall is, it’s a place where heroic Scandinavian warriors sit around drinking mead, duh…Of course the precise recipe for ancient mead itself, a potent potion based in the fermentation of honey, is not known).  In similar fashion, the exact nature of the monstrosity incarnate in Grendel and his mother is not precisely clear, but it is formidable, terrifying, lethal, and anthropophagic (in more common parlance, cannibal).

 

Sometimes novelistic interplay can become complicated, or perhaps even puzzlingly complex. The more widely known the base or target novel, the richer the complexity is likely to be.  One of the early Victorian novels that anyone who reads novels at all is likely to know is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). There is a reason for Jane Eyre’s perennial popularity.  It is a really great novel, and its title character an enduring model of feminine pluck.  Jane has it all—meaning, in this instance, everything required of a stock heroine of Victorian fiction.  As a governess, Jane finds herself in the creepy moorland mansion of a dark, brooding, handsome, and super-sexy guy called Mr. Rochester, a man of mysterious sorrows.  Strange noises—of the “Did I really hear something?” type—occasionally float down from the off-limits attic.  Spoiler alert!  There is indeed, unbeknownst to Jane, someone in the attic-- a madwoman!  The madwoman in the attic is Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason.  She had to be put in the attic by Mr. Rochester on account of her violent mental aberrations, which are both literally and figuratively incendiary and apparently render her unsuited to what might be called normal social interactions.  And as her continuing existence might seem an insuperable impediment to the much-to-be desired hooking up of Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre, you can be pretty certain that her potential longevity will have to be dealt with.  Read the book to learn how it all turned out.

 

The novel Jane Eyre is of course told from Jane’s point of view.  But feminist literary critics have encouraged a broader perspective, such as that which might be imagined to have animated the incarcerated Mrs. Rochester herself.  One of the more important books of literary criticism dealing with the Victorian novel remains The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.  Though outside my own special field of expertise, I became very familiar with this book.  By a stroke of fate, and my good luck, I was the chairman of the Princeton English Department at the time we were trying (successfully, I am glad to say) to poach Sandra Gilbert from the University of California.  So I naturally had to read her most famous book.  She was a splendid scholar, colleague, and friend during the five or so years we overlapped.

 

The device of telling a well-known story from a new perspective or oblique angle forces you (the reader) to reconsider what is usually a widely shared, nearly default moral perspective, often in a surprising fashion.  I first came to appreciate this literary phenomenon in unusual and certainly unsalubrious circumstances on account of something scrawled on the wall of a dirty public toilet stall.  I am of a generation so antique as to have learned their filthy language and sexual misinformation from furtive lavatory graffiti rather than from widely viewed family TV shows.  Scrawled on the wall of one particularly well inscribed public convenience, I found one day, among many other things, the following strange graffito, the product of dyslexia rather than of depravity, a benediction actually.   God bless little grils!  Beneath this, in bold majuscules, was the query DONT YOU MEAN GIRLS [?] without the punctuation mark the syntax required.  But it was the third and final sentence in what would today be called this thread that was truly brilliant.  It plaintively asked, What about us grils?  The ingenious conceit of John Gardner’s Grendel is to ask the question “What about us monsters?” in a way that makes a reader sympathetic to monsters.  The genius of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is to give a compelling explanation of how a mulatta beauty queen from the Lesser Antilles came to be locked up in the attic of a creepy castle in the British boondocks.  It sort of makes you think twice about what it might mean to be a Victorian heroine.  Remembering the grils almost always enriches the tale told and the reader’s appreciation of the manner of its telling.

Madwoman in attic

 

Election Jitters

 

Though loathe to enter the overcrowded field of political commentary, of which there is no scarcity from others more sapient than I, election day is approaching with insistence, and I fear I am in any event running short of amusing or even light-hearted subjects.  So I had best face up to my fears.  These fears are not entirely or perhaps even primarily concerned with the identity of the winner of the presidential race. With two weeks to go, the race seems extraordinarily close, and the eventuality of an outcome of impressive decisiveness seems remote.  Remote, but of course much to be desired, for the simple truth is that the less contestable the results are perceived to be, the less threatening the contestation.

         There is in my opinion not a lot of room in which to debate one’s voting choice.  In saying this, however, I am obliged to acknowledge that many fellow citizens whose vote will differ from mine doubtless feel the same.  There is, however, a great deal more room for more realism and honesty in facing our dilemma than is being displayed in most of the news stories.  Of the very few commentaries I have seen that seem to me offensively accurate is that of Lee Siegel.  “Not in recent memory has the country been offered a choice between, in Harris, a vapid mediocrity, and in Trump, an unbalanced malignity. And not in recent memory have the running mates of the two presidential candidates been clearly more qualified than the latter — though barely so — to sit in the White House.”  It is my opinion that mediocrity ought to be able to trump malignity any day.  But this truth cannot redeem the disservice of our current party system or transform pigs’ ears into silk purses.

         There seems to be no such thing as impartial or non-partisan news these days, but our son Luke put me on to something reasonably close, a web program called “Two Way” directed by the political journalist Mark Halperin.  The “two way” part refers to our two-party set-up.  The Sphinx-like Halperin, who convincingly never shows the slightest hint of his own political preferences, is joined by highly knowledgeable representatives of our two major parties, both of them partisans but also honest brokers, and an audience of some dozens of “ordinary” voters.  The only slightly light-hearted stated goals of the conversations are “peace, love, and understanding”—and these standards are in the main observed—at least the first and, to a less extent,  the third are.  There are frequent invited interventions from professionally credentialled Democratic and Republican partisan experts.

         In many recent presidential elections the distribution of the popular vote has been relatively even in its totality and reasonably constant in its geographical distribution.  Due to the peculiarities of the system of election not by absolute majority in the popular vote but rather by majority in the block distribution of the individual states’ electoral vote, it has several times happened in recent elections that the winner was not the overall winner of the popular vote.  A popular vote within a state with a ratio of, say, twenty to one, is thus no more powerful that a vote of the same total number but distributed in a ratio of eleven to ten.  Many of the architects of the Constitution were fearful of what they called “the tyranny of the majority.”  Madison and Hamilton dealt at some length with this anticipated problem, as have several other classical political theorists.  This aspect of the American system, which some foreign observers find to be somewhere between puzzling and shocking, reflects the strong sense of what in my youth in the South were called “states’ rights”, a concept that though it survived even our Civil War has given much ground to the superlative powers of the federal government during my own lifetime.  Thomas Jefferson, the chief among the geniuses who wrote our constitution, was of the opinion that it was in a sense a provisional document that would be renewed, reexamined, and refreshed by regular and timely reviews by constitutional conventions.  Instead, it has become a verbal idol.

         It is very difficult to find anything like balanced or objective political news.  Neither the national print press or the radio and television stations make much genuine effort at “objectivity.”  Many don’t even try.  And perhaps there really is no such thing as “just the news” when so many in the news business are genuinely convinced that we face “existential” and apocalyptic threats unique in our history.  There are actually times when being a medievalist has psychic rewards in the present.  Logically, after all, “things can have never been so bad” only once, and the odds that that once is right now must be statistically remote.  Lincoln—I believe he was discussing agricultural problems—told the anecdote of a mythical wise king who asked his mythical wise advisors for a bit of advice: he wanted his wisest philosophers to provide for him a sentence that would always apply to any situation, and always be relevant and never stale but always true.  The gem of universally applicable wisdom provided was the following: And this, too, shall pass away.

         Such advice is important to take to heart.  Somebody is going to win the election, and the chances that it will be Mr. Trump are far from negligible.  Halperin speaks in contexts other than those of his “Two Way” program, and in one such conversation he has expressed his opinion that should Trump win, despite the ostentatious revelations over a long period of time of a bullying , name-calling vulgarity, a nearly bottomless mendacity, and the nearly uniform hostility of the nation’s social, cultural, journalistic and educational elites—that is to say if he is democratically chosen by an electorate which cannot possibly be blind to his flaws—the results will trigger a national mental health crisis.  Among the heaviest burdens of big-D’d Democracy is the social obligation of putting up with the choices of small-d’d democrats.  We shall do well to be spiritually prepared, knowing that whatever the outcome, this too shall pass away.

A Rose by any Other Name

 

 

Most readers will probably be familiar with Oscar Wilde’s brilliant comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest.  The whole play, like the title, operates on several levels.  From the philosophical point of view—if that is not too grand an approach to a work so light-hearted at the surface level—the subject is a classic one: the relation of words to the things they denote.  In a sense this is an issue raised by all nouns, the English words noun and name actually being variants.  The title of Umberto Eco’s delightful medieval romp—The Name of the Rose—reflects the medieval ancestry of the matter.  When Juliet poses her wistful question to Romeo—"What’s in a name?”—she suggests the arbitrary nature of words, the meanings of which are “socially constructed” and depend upon a general cultural acceptance for their utility.  I thought when I sat down to write about all this I might entitle the essay “The Unimportance of Being John.”

 

There are a lot of plays in the repertoire that exploit the theme of false or mistaken identity.  The ancient playwright Plautus wrote a farce about twin brothers that inspired one of Shakespeare’s early efforts, The Comedy of Errors, and has echoes in probably dozens of other Renaissance plays.  To get into my own little comedy of errors, though, I have to tell you a little more than is really interesting to you about the neighborhood in which we have lived for about thirty-five years.  It is a subdivision of about eighty houses, most of which were erected in the 1960s.  It is called the Gray Farm presumably on account of an old family farm that once filled the grounds, though I am only guessing.  Several of them were designed by members of the faculty of the School of Architecture.  Accordingly, there is considerable architectural variety among them, and even some architectural distinction, though most of them are comparatively modest in size, certainly as gauged by contemporary macmansion standards.  The Gray Farm scheme was designed to allow modestly remunerated tenured faculty members to buy and own a house, and to enjoy whatever long-term appreciation accrued to the property, within the context of an expensive real estate market in a definitely upscale place.  Naturally there was a catch.  The owners of the houses truly owned them, but they could not be sold on the open market or be transferred by testamentary will to the owners’ children.  They had to be sold back to the University at a price arbitrated between representatives of the University’s real estate department and the departing owners or their agents.  The aim was to enable faculty to own property which they could not otherwise afford.  There are other stipulations to the scheme, but those are the essentials.  With the fairly dramatic long-term improvement in faculty remuneration over half a century, a development that greatly expands the housing horizons for faculty, the Gray Farm scheme has become less popular.  There are other attractive and affordable options.

 

Of course living in a faculty ghetto means you have some interesting neighbors.  For most of our years here our two nearest neighbors were both members of the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  On the west was the eminent Bernard Lewis, historian,  Semitic linguist, neo-con guru and counsel to the Bush administration, and a chief animator of Edward Said’s disdain in his book Orientalism. It was a rare week on our street that did not see a visit from a recording truck visiting our neighbor to tape an interview with him.  Professor Lewis left the neighborhood for a retirement care facility and died several years ago.  But there are several other such eminences scattered throughout the neighborhood.

 

 

Last week, as I was getting dressed after a shower, I heard the front doorbell ring.  I knew that Joan was already out of the house, so I called out to Christie, our wonderful health aide, and asked her to answer the door.  She did so, and I could hear snippets of her exchange with the man who had rung the bell.  I heard him identify himself as from Philadelphia and from the Associated Press.  He was looking for John.  I soon was more or less dressed and able to meet him in the living room.  The man had in his hands a rather formidable camera. “John?” he asked.  So far so good.  Without the slightest prevarication I was able to answer, “Right! I’m John.”  “Well, I’d like to take your picture,” he said. 

 

Suddenly I had the feeling that this—whatever this might be—probably was, well, you know….when a photographer from the national press tells you he wants to take your picture you somehow want desperately to think of some reason why that might be true.  Milton’s last infirmity of noble mind.  The photographer, noting my struggle, began to share it.   “You…you are John Hopfield, right?”  Alas, manifestly this was wrong.  I did of course know who Hopfield was and had twice said “Good morning” to him over a twenty-five year period.   He was yet another genius Princeton physicist, one who strayed into biology before straying even further into the faculty of the California Institute of Technology before (fortunately for us) returning to Princeton.  And of course I knew that Hopfield built the house which we have owned since 1988, though it had had at least one other owner in between.  He’s the guy who saddled us with the bamboo.  I also knew, instinctively, what the photographer now was going to tell me.  Hopfield had just won the Nobel Prize.  I was able to tell the photographer that I thought Hopfield lived somewhere over on the other side of the golf course.

 

 

I then remembered years ago sitting nervously in the waiting room of a dentist’s office—flipping through a dogeared magazine of that specially trivial genre unreadable except by people desperately trying to prevent their minds from acknowledging impending root canal work.  This magazine had brief “human interest” items interspersed with paragraphs of “fun facts”.  Fun fact: Castor beans grow wild in Abyssinia.  Fun fact: Paul Revere made George Washington’s first set of false teeth.  Fun fact number three jolted me to attention.  There are more Nobel Prize winners living on Hartley Avenue in Princeton NJ than live in seven western states.  Hartley Avenue!  Our little street!  And indeed I knew of, indeed actually knew personally, two physics professors—Val Fitch (now unhappily deceased) and Joe Taylor (still going strong)—who were Nobel laureates.  Ed Witten, who lived on a cross street a hundred yards frm the corner with Hartley, had merely won the Fields Medal, there being no Nobel Prize in mathematics.

 

Blessed Beasts

 

 

            After nearly two decades of retirement I can hardly talk about a “professional life,” but I found myself in an odd position this week.  I have involved myself in two public events of at least a semi-educational nature.  The fancier of the two, in fact, indeed will be seriously scholarly.  I have agreed, with pleasure, to give a “Work in Progress” seminar to the faculty group of medievalists at Princeton.  It will take place a few hours after mounting this post, actually, and will deal with the fifteenth-century French poet François Villon.  This obligation will explain why I have mentioned Villon in my essays a couple of times in the recent months .  A topic once raised in one’s mind has a tendency to stay there until resolved in some way or other.  But other things have also been on my mind.  Topics to which I devoted a lot of time years ago were the cultural impact of the Franciscan Order on the cultural life of late medieval Europe and the colonial evangelization of Spanish and Franciscan missionaries in the “New World,” including parts of our own country, in the wake of the Iberian voyages of discovery beginning at the end of the fifteenth century. 

 

This interest was for me intensified when in 1992 I was one of the co-curators of a major exhibition at the Library of Congress: “1492, An Ongoing Voyage”.  The invitation to undertake that task was nearly inexplicable, but I undertook it as an educational opportunity in several different senses.  I can only hope that that exhibition, which got good reviews,  was at least as partially enlightening to its many visitors as it was to its curators, or at least to this one.   The Columbus of my boyhood, to the extent that I was aware of him, was a much admired figure.  In 1893 the Columbian Exposition in Chicago—basically a world’s fair designed to showcase the dynamism and artistic, industrial, and political ebullience of a muscle-flexing United States of America—had presented Christopher Columbus in heroic terms.  The fifteenth-century Catholic Italian mariner was more of an ingenious and resourceful Connecticut Yankee type.  Samuel Eliot Morrison, Harvard Ph. D., and a popular historian, himself a reserve admiral in the United States Navy won a Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for his biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, a book still in print and still being read eighty years later.  This book is not hagiographic, but it certainly is admiring and still admired.  Morrison, who I thought probably ought to know, clearly regarded Columbus as one hell of a sailor.  Which he was.  But by 1992, the historical tide had turned, so to speak.  In some important historical circles attitudes toward what in my youth was universally called “the discovery of America” had changed radically.  Just because benighted Europeans didn’t know anything about the rich cultures of the Guarini, the Incas, the Mayans, the Aztecs and so many other inhabitants of the Americas didn’t mean they needed discovering.  From this perspective the mildest accurate term for what happened was encounter, but better ones would be invasion, conquest, oppression, colonization, and of course genocide.

 

Such meager credentials as I had for the assignment derived from my study of late medieval apocalyptic thought, much of it stimulated by Franciscan friars.  These are the same credentials that allowed me to accept an invitation from the organizers of the adult education program at my parish church to offer an adult forum before the Sunday Eucharist, on the topic of Saint Francis of Assisi.

 

 

Changing attitudes about Columbus should alert us to the reality that no historical personage, whatever good press he or she has in the past enjoyed, is immune from the trashing of “revisionist” history.  The late Christopher Hitchens, a man I much admired, cancelled the much admired Mother Teresa, so there’s no telling.  Still, I think that Francis of Assisi ought to be safe at least for the time being.  He is not merely the all-star historical saint of the Christian churches.  He has “crossover appeal” to the spiritually indifferent and even the positively irreligious on account of his legendary gentleness, low-carbon (bare)foot print, and above all, his love of animals.  He used to address them with the titles of “brother” and “sister”, as though they were fellow-members of his religious order.  This was part of a radical egalitarianism in his personality that could not be constrained even by the rigorous hierarchies of medieval society.  Among the famous episodes in Franciscan history is the report that Francis once delivered a sermon to the birds.  (We have all heard sermons that are for the birds, so why not?)  His disciple Anthony of Padua—who actually came from Lisbon, a major maritime center—specialized in preaching to the fish.

 

In many churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, there has emerged a popular homage to Francis, celebrated around his feast day (October 4), called the “Blessing of the Animals”.  It is exactly what it sounds like.  Animals—mainly household pets in our suburban contexts—are brought before the altar to receive a sacerdotal blessing.  Having constrained animals present at a eucharistic celebration does invite certain possible risks, but I have not yet seen a real disaster.  The adult owners of the pets are sometimes slightly awkward and tentative during the procedure, but youngsters seem uniformly enthusiastic.  And, obviously, they are the ones who count here.  Let the little children come unto me.  In fact, on Sunday a few small children, not wanting to be left out but not actually owning pets, presented the priest with stuffed animals.  Dramatic showmanship was a marked feature of Francis’s personality.  He was the first to popularize the Christmas creche.  According to a still influential book by O. B. Hardison (Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages) the whole of the Eucharist is mimetic and dramatic.  In any event, this is what the week has held for me thus far.

 

Passion of the Prexies

 

A week or so ago Pamela Paul, an opinion editor at the New York Times, wrote a piece that caught my eye: “It’s Easy to See What Drove Jonathan Holloway to Quit”.  Though I correctly anticipated what her essay was going to say, I was eager to read it and happy to have done so.  In the broad sense the subject of the essay is a troubling aspect of American higher education, the field in which—as a classroom professor, not an administrator—I pursued a long career.  Few of the newspapers’ readers are likely to have recognized Holloway’s name immediately, but of course I did.  That is because Mr. Holloway, a distinguished scholar and seasoned university administrator, is the President of Rutgers, which is in effect the University of New Jersey, the main campus of which is in New Brunswick, about fifteen miles from where I live.   I do not know him personally, but most professionals in American higher education, and certainly most people even vaguely aware of the leadership class in our state, would be familiar with his name.  President Holloway is much admired by many people I know in the Rutgers community.  Since the default stance of American professors toward the higher echelons of their institutional administrations is often, unfortunately, one ranging between indifference and disdain, I find that significant testimony. The presidency of the state university of a large and populous state is hardly the kind of job that most able and available academics would disdain.  But I have known or known of several other manifestly able, high-ranking university administrators who have “quit” or very much wanted to.  Why should this be?

 

All situations have their distinctive attractions and unpleasantnesses.  Yet the reasons behind President Holloway’s announced retirement are probably relevant to situations facing the presidents of most large and complex American colleges.  I am invoking his story not for its individual singularities but for what I suspect are broad commonalities.  According to Ms. Paul’s account, President Holloway has soured on his job  because some circumstances do not allow him time and space to exercise leadership as he would like to do, while others require that he spend much time doing things he does not find congenial.  Several high-ranking administrators of my own acquaintance have told me in so many words that the job is simply not as much fun as it once was and as they would want it to be.  In these instances “fun” means productive as opposed to unproductive workaholism.  A good deal of the disenchantment is in fact exacerbated by what might be called the politics of college presidencies—a topic to which I shall briefly return.  But as higher education has in this country become bigger, more expansive, and more sought after, institutional life has become more ambitious, more demanding, more complex.  Imagine trying to “lead” the University of California, for example.  Dwight Eisenhower probably had an easier administrative task in supervising D-Day.  Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor or mega-president of the UC system, famously summarized the disparate interests of the major constituencies with whom he had to deal as follows.  The undergraduates were interested in sex, the faculty in parking, and the alumni in football.  Joking, yes, but….You may notice that quantum physics, business accounting, and Sumerian syntax are not on the list.  In fact, a college president has quite a long roster of chores that, at first glance, may seem to have little direct connection with education.  The first of these, in most instances, is of course fund raising.  As is the situation currently with regard to major political candidates, the ability of a “leader” to rake in dough is taken as an emblem of a wide range of other desirable abilities.

 

For one thing, the job has simply become more complex and demanding over the years.  Education has become ever more expensive and ever more bureaucratic—the latter feature very often having to do with the increasing role of government agencies.  Without declaring that government interaction with academic finances and organization is either good or bad, it is manifestly complex and time-consuming.  Political considerations, especially in state-financed institutions, are of course simply part of the job, but they are also time-consuming distractions.

 

This has been going on for quite a while by now.   The incrementally increasing commerce between government officials and college administrators is always burdensome, increasingly complex, and sometime distracting.  Only rarely is it amusing, and then often in a noirish fashion.  It is more than fifty years since Tom Wolfe published his trenchant essay entitled “Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers”, and I suspect that by now even the essay’s title might seem mysterious.  Mau-mau was an African term used to refer to the Kenyan rebels and/or their guerilla tactics in their struggle against British colonists beginning in the 1950s.  In Wolfe’s metaphoric usage it meant the bullying, harassment, and intimidation of the mainly white bureaucrats by the mainly black activists with whom they dealt in the administration of supposed anti-poverty programs which had swiftly descended into graft mills.  Canons of politically correct political discourse had not yet become so rigid as to banish entirely the recognition of the grim humor in such sensitive topics.  (The companion essay by Wolfe—"Radical Chic”—was about a cocktail party thrown by the famous musician Leonard Bernstein at which the guests of honor were prominent Black Panthers.)

 

What is the appropriate political role of a college president?  Expecting people to be apolitical is like expecting them to be ahistorical or asexual.  The late Robert Goheen was a president of Princeton with whom I worked but whom I came to know well and admire exceedingly only years after he had retired.  When criticized for allowing it to be known (when asked repeatedly) that he preferred the Democratic Party candidate in the election of 1968, he memorably defended himself: “A college president is not a political eunuch.”  The Ivory Tower was not completely immune from political consensus, but promotion to tenure in the sociology department was not always invariably dependent upon the obligatory but insufficient prerequisite of being a card-carrying member of the Spartacist League—presuming that that sodality even issues membership cards.  In our national politics, which for my lifetime have been dominated by two political parties, a vote split of 55/45 is likely to be described as a landslide.  On college faculties the faculty split along political lines is twenty, or more likely fifty, to one.  In my judgment, actually, the much discussed lack of political “viewpoint diversity” in academic institutions is less the fruit of an ideological conspiracy than a natural expression of the voluntary affinities of self-perpetuating powers.  Just saying…The theoretical basis of the idea of faculty appointment on continuing tenure is that it might protect qualified scholars with eccentric, unpopular, or controversial, or heretical ideas.

 

It is the ambition of the professionals in higher education to broaden the intellectual and cultural horizons of their students.  One way they continue to do that for some thousands of them is through the competent teaching of foreign languages and “study-abroad” years.  One can hardly overpraise these staples of the liberal curriculum.  But that is different from saying that a college president should be required to preside over a quasi-official, independent foreign policy.  That, however, is what many of the protestors at prominent institutions, now temporarily rudderless, have been demanding.  I am referring to Harvard and Penn, whose prexies were essentially canned, and Columbia.  Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik—in my opinion the most impressive of the three—simply gave up in disgust.  At least I think she was disgusted.  Certainly, a lot of other people were, starting with me.

Biblical Invective

 

I have spent a good deal of my life reading books, a certain amount more talking about books, and even a certain amount time writing books.  Books have even been, directly or indirectly, an important subject in many of my blog posts.  Today I turn my attention to the most widely printed, translated, and distributed book in the world: the Bible.  Although publication statistics are not always the same as reading statistics, the Bible also is probably still the most widely read book in the world—or at least read in.  Because, of course, the Bible is not a single book, but an anthology of books.  The word biblia is a plural noun meaning “the books.”  In fact, there is considerable generic differentiation among the biblical books, which date from different areas and reveal the influence of the varying historical and cultural eras in which they were written.  There are various “through lines” in the Bible, but it makes little sense to sit down and read through its thousand plus pages as one might try to read through War and Peace.  Large parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament in the terminology of most Christians, are legal, ceremonial, and genealogical compendiums that are pretty tough slogging.  So the question arises: what is the most widely read book in the Bible?

 

            I think the answer to that question,  approached from the historical point of view, must be the Book of Psalms.  Anyway, that is the one I’m going with.  The Psalms are, in the first place, a vital bridge between Judaism and Christianity, as they continue to occupy a vital role in both Jewish and Christian worship.  Some of the few words uttered by Jesus on the cross were psalm verses.  Paul likewise cites psalm verses.  Furthermore, the psalms have had an enormous influence on world literature, most especially of course its poetry.  My own last book was devoted to a magnificent poem by the Portuguese Renaissance poet Luis de Camões, often entitled simply “Babylon and Zion,” that is a meditation upon, and exegesis of, the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the Waters of Babylon”), number 136 (137) in the psalter.* 

 

In 1903 Rowland Prothero (the Lord Ernle), a Conservative M.P. and first-class cricket player, published The Psalms in Human Life.  (Literate holders of public office, though on the wane even in Britain, were once thick on the ground.)  This particularly invaluable work of amateur Anglican scholarship I keep on a shelf beside a bilingual edition of the Psalms in the Socino Bible series (1950), a copy that once belonged to a congregant of the Etz Chaim synagogue in Flatbush, Brooklyn.  (One of the pleasures of having a library gradually constructed over many years, mainly from second hand and “bargain” books, is that provided by tracking down the connections of former owners.)  As for the psalms, I have never mastered the original Hebrew, but this translation is authoritative, and the commentary of the editor, the nearly anonymous Dr. A. Cohen, is invaluable.

 

            In the long tradition of Christian biblical scholarship, the psalms have been assigned to various categories.  One important group is called the penitential psalms, typified by the Miserere, “Have mercy on me, o God” (50, 51), traditionally thought to be the anguished cry of David as he reflected on what was in effect a homicide he had arranged to facilitate adultery.  But the group that has attracted my attention this week is that of the imprecatory psalms.  If you are familiar with any of the psalms at all, chances are that it is the very reassuring “The Lord in my shepherd…”  One doesn’t usually link the biblical spirit with violent imprecations—that is, curses—but there are some doozies in the psalter. 

 

            The fifteenth-century French poet François Villon, whom I have mentioned a couple of times in recent months, begins his most famous poem with an attack on Thibault d’Aussigny, the bishop of Orleans, from whose dungeons he has just been liberated--by nearly miraculous good luck.  (By ancient custom prisoners could be released on the occasion of a royal visit to the city.)  We do not know how Villon came to be incarcerated by the Bishop of Orleans, but my default suspicion is that it was for some very good reason.  He was, after all, a murderer and a cat burglar when not writing ballads.  Villon’s poem, of course, waxes indignant in its insistence that he was a victim of episcopal injustice.  He summarizes his poetic attack somewhat obliquely by referring readers to “the seventh verse of the psalm Deus laudem”.  The psalm to which he refers, a “psalm of David,” is Deus, laudem, meam ne tacueris…(O God, whom I praise, be not silent…), number 108 in the medieval Latin Bible.  In it, the psalmist, ostensibly King David, really unloads on his enemies, who “have opened wicked and treacherous mouths against me.”  If your idea of David is a nice little boy with a slingshot, this psalm may shock you as much as the behavior of its author.  The eighth verse is “May his days be few.  May another take his office [episcopatum].”  But that is only the beginning of the biblical invective.  Here are just a few clauses in the storehouse of Villon’s scriptural  invective: May his children be fatherless…May his children be roaming vagrants and become beggars…May the usurer ensnare all his belongings…May there be no one to do him a kindness…Let not his mother’s sin be blotted out…And that is just a sampling! Villon probably had the whole of the psalter by heart.  The feats of memory that were commonplace among the learned men of pre-Gutenberg times may seem to us astonishing.  Most “clerks” (i.e., educated people, including many women) had the psalter by heart , and you would too if you had recited it in its entirety week after week for years on end.  And there was within the book a poem precisely suitable for every mood and vagary of our human life.  Villon simply assumed that alluding to the title of the psalm would do the trick for him.

 

            I doubt that even among professional medievalists one in a hundred has run across the name of the once high and mighty Thibault d’Aussigny.  But most educated people have at least heard of the obscure university hanger-on, François Villon.  The poets usually win.  That is why Shelley calls poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

 

 

*There are 150 psalms, but there is a slight difference in the internal numeration in Catholic and Protestant bibles.  In earlier historical periods psalms were often cited by their incipits (initial verses) in Latin, as Villon does here. Thus the first psalm is called Beatus vir (“Blessed is the man…”), and that practice continues among many medievalists.

Strange Flesh

The American presidential campaign has witnessed what is apparently a second serious threat within two months against the life of candidate Trump, but thus far most of the news coverage about it seems concentrated upon the level of competence demonstrated by Secret Service officers in nipping it in the bud.  The press’s attitude would seem to be that since the only gunshots actually fired were those fired by the security forces, the real subject of interest continues to be the candidates’ debate held about a week previously. According to presumably reliable statistics, slightly more than sixty-one million people in this country watched the debate on television.  I will not put the well-deserved quotation marks around the word debate, even though the event had little in common with what happens regularly at the Oxford Union let alone what happened in 1858 at five venues scattered through the state of Illinois when Lincoln dueled with Douglas in an earlier set of American presidential debates.  From among the plethora of pressing national, international, and indeed inter-galactic political and socio-economic problems that potentially face the next occupant of the White House, the one that was discussed most memorably, and most thoroughly featured in the press, was the putative diet of recent immigrants to the small city of Springfield Ohio.  Mr. Trump imputed to a group of recent immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, a canine/feline diet.  According to Mr. Trump “they are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” 

 

What goes without saying too often goes unsaid.  So before advancing in this brief essay I suppose I am obliged to tell you that this is utter rubbish.  Neither the newest residents of Springfield, Ohio (most of them immigrants from Haiti) nor the native population (mainly though not exclusively of European ancestry) are eating dogs or cats.  This is just one of those things Mr. Trump likes to say in aid of wresting defeat from the jaws of probable victory.  From what might be called the ethical point of view, one does not know whether to hope that Mr. Trump actually believes what he claims or that he is merely making it up with gusto.  Yet more discouraging in my view is the fact that millions of his supporters greet Trump’s declaration with a yawn.  He probably was talking about hot dogs slathered with catsup.  So far has political deviancy been defined downward.  “Democracy,” said Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” 

 

From the historical point of view, however, it is likely, nay certain, that at some places and at some times on this large globe, people have indeed eaten cats and dogs.  Quite apart from the fact that the human diet throughout the world is as diversified as is human language, if you are hungry enough, you will eat anything edible and a few things that are not.  In fact, inventiveness of diet when in extremis has often been regarded as ingenious and gutsy.  Shakespeare’s Antony, rendered ethically feeble by his all-consuming passion for Cleopatra, is thus chided by Caesar.  Caesar is reminding him that he is supposed to be a tough guy, as indeed he used to be before he lost his mind over this woman:

 

…Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once
Wast beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
Did famine follow; whom thou fought'st against,
Though daintily brought up, with patience more
Than savages could suffer: thou didst drink
The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at: thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge;
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed'st; on the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this—
It wounds thine honour that I speak it now—
Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank'd not.  (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 4,  485f)

 

Even without the gilded puddle chaser, such victuals do not sound exactly appetizing. Of course military power and cultural prestige have been wielded by many civilizations of beastly feeders in the past.  The Aztecs of Mexico, notable warriors, poets, and even astronomers, created a major empire powered, at the alimentary level, mainly by acociles (a very dubious looking crayfish thing thick on the bottom of Lake Texcoco), and spirulina algae transformed into a kind of flour suitable for baking.  Armadillos were a delicacy reserved for special occasions.  I must regard this menu item, though far from unknown in the American South of my youth,  as a bit iffy.  Armadillos are known to carry leprosy, and although the incidence level is “fairly low in most regions” there is apparently still a risk of transmission in handling the carcasses.

 

            One of the terms of opprobrium among the volunteer critics in our universities is “cultural appropriation”.  Recently young kids have needed to be very careful around Halloween time if they want to avoid cancellation by their second-grade confreres.  South-of-the-border sombreros are definitely out, and pirates’ eye-patches risk grave offense to the otherly abled.  You probably remember a highly televised fracas along these lines at one of the undergraduate colleges of Yale University not too long ago.  Despite this, it seems to me that cultural appropriation is a fecund force in human development, and often a very good one.  I am very glad we in this country appropriated the wheel and penicillin, to cite just a couple of examples out of many.

 

            I am now quite old, and for many decades I have had a professional interest in the English language.  Under these circumstances I am personally aware of the extraordinary increment in the vocabulary of our widely shared English language, just during my own lifetime, brought about by the American naturalization of an international cuisine.  Is there anybody who doesn’t know what a tortilla, a paella, or a barbeque is?  I could list a hundred more.  When I was a kid the only Chinese dish I had ever heard of was chop suey.  Is that even a thing now?  When it comes to gastronomic appropriation most Americans are all for it.