Of pigs and prodigals

I have just finished a quick lunch after a pleasingly varied five-hour drive from Hamilton, New York, home to Colgate University, to Princeton, home to the Flemings among others. At Colgate I had given an informal lecture on materials from my new book The Anti-Communist Manifestos under the auspices of the Humanities program with which I had had a brief but most pleasant association when I taught at Colgate for a semester in the spring of 2008. Colgate is a wonderful school that reminds me very much of my own undergraduate alma mater, Sewanee. It is a place where the teaching of bright undergraduates is squarely in the center of the actual as well as the rhetorical agenda of the institution. The teaching ethos of the place is inescapable and infectious.

One of my most prominent one-time graduate students, Prof. Lynn Staley, had invited me. Lynn is not just a professor. She is the Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities and Medieval & Renaissance Studies in the Department of English—which may explain why I prefer to call her Lynn. She was our domestic host for the visit—meaning that we were able to stay in her beautiful house, a gem of a characterful and tasteful place of the sort that New England villages and upstate hamlets seem to monopolize, rather than in the local hotel. Prof. Staley is among the more prominent literary medievalists of her generation, having published an imposing and varied series of important, innovative books, and all the time teaching within the context of labor-intensive college without graduate programs or a large research library. Anyone who has experienced family life has some sense for the particular quality of parental pride. The pride teachers take in their former students has a whiff of the familial, but it has another dimension, one absolutely unique—what might be called “cerebral affection”.

But I digress, and must return, or simply turn, to the iconography of pigs, a subject that plays a tangential role in the lecture on medieval imagery and scriptural exegesis mentioned in the last blog. There turn out to be rather more pigs in the Bible than you might imagine, but from the pictorial point of view the most important ones surely are those related to the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). This is one of Jesus’s all-star parables—right up there with the Good Samaritan. A wastrel younger son comes to his father, a wealthy farmer, and asks that he be given his inheritance early. I used to think this was an entirely contrived plot, but I know of at least two actual instances of the same thing among the families of my own conteporaries. This silly boy scoops up his share of the money and takes off for the Levantine equivalent of Las Vegas or Atlantic City, where he soon enough spends all his money on sloe gin and fast women, at which point of course he finds himself friendless, sad, sober, and sorry. The only work he can find is that of a migrant agricultural worker:“…and he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into the fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat; and no man gave unto him…”

I hope you know what happens next or that, if you should not, you will immediately repair the glaring literary lacuna by reading the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. The pig-feeding episode in the parable has been rendered in pictorial form by several important artists, including Albrecht Dürer—in this wonderful etching.

I grew up with pigs in Arkansas. The reason the famed University of Arkansas football team takes the name Razorbacks is that throughout the first decades of the twentieth century semi- wild razorback hogs (so named for their flat, trenchantly hirsuit dorsal construction) roamed and ravaged at will through the open range of the Ozark counties of northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. They are a thing of the past, but if you want to know what they looked like, take a look at the Dürer etching. These are not docile porkers, but vicious feral beasts, hardly a generation removed from the lethal wild boars that were their ancestors. If I were like the Prodigal Son thrown among them, I would probably fall on my knees and pray for deliverance too.

Though it was my search for pigs that brought me to this picture, it is something else, a small vegetable detail, that gave me an “Ah-ha!” moment. When I was a kid, my aunts, like most of the local country people, planted in their gardens a particularly coarse and hardy variety of turnip. This was a very bitter-tasting thing, nearly the strength of horse-radish, to which it was no doubt related. You might put one of these things in a large pot of soup or stew, so long as it could be overwhelmed by more palatable ingredients; but it was not really grown for human consumption. It was the necessary final garnish to any bucket of slops fed to the pigs. There are many questions that children might ask but never do. I simply took it as a law of nature that the one necessary ingredient of pig-swill was a bitter turnip. If you have a magnifying glass handy take a look at the thing in the print just belong the Prodigal’s prone leg, the thing toward which a particularly vicious piglet is approaching with intent. It is a turnip, precisely of the species raised by my Aunt Mildred. I have been looking at my pictures in search of the “spiritual sense”. But here, in a quite literal detail, at first unnoticed and indeed hardly noticeable, is an evidence of what the historians and anthropologists call the longue durée of peasant culture: ancient Palestine imagined as early modern Europe, then still alive in the cultural backwaters of America.

I have one other Prodigal Son anecdote of possible interest. In the Sewanee of my day there was a famous priest, one Father Huske (the name is important), who performed his Anglo-Catholic missionary work among the mountain folk of the coves and hollows of the Cumberland Plateau in central Tennessee. One of our Sewanee professors had been in seminary with this formidable apostle, whose asceticism had become the occasion of a locally celebrated witticism. Huske, who was one of relatively small group of High Churchmen in his class, indulged in many traditional Catholic practices that some of his more evangelical classmates regarded as pure popery. One dietary point of his piety was that he would not eat flesh-meat on Fridays. Such abstemiousness, once de rigeur among Roman Catholics, has now practically disappeared. It was weakened by the tendency of the last Vatican Council, and given the death blow when Frank Perdue produced a chicken that no theologian in the Church was willing to classify as meat.

But in the late Forties, when Father Huske was still in seminary, the rule was in force, and this Anglican fellow traveler abided by it. Abstaining from the meat offered by the institutional kitchens was not always what you would call a sacrifice, but on one entirely untypical Friday the luncheon menu featured slabs of a delicious country ham. If you have ever eaten true southern country ham, you know that the adjective “delicious” is not unmerited. Young seminarian Huske, though tempted perhaps, declined this delicacy for the sake of his spiritual health, setting up for one of his classmates an immortal riposte. “Please pass the platter,” he said. “I fain would eat of the swine that the Huske refuseth.”

Not with a Blog, but a Twitter

As I begin to get some sense of an incipient and as yet inchoate readership for “Gladly Lerne”, I sense also the need to do some long-range thinking. I am genuinely grateful for such comments as that offered by Gerard a post or two ago—a suggestion, immediately adopted, on how to improve the blog’s visual readability—but I also conclude that many people are chary of offering public comment. This is not a conclusion based on clairvoyance. I have had numerous messages to my email boxes saying as much: “I don’t want to post this in public, but I’d like to suggest such-and-such.”

One of the recurrent suches is that readers might appreciate postings made according to a regular schedule, as opposed to whenever I happen to get around to it. I shall adopt this excellent suggestion as well. From now on, I shall normally post weekly--every Wednesday. Do note the weasel word normally, so beloved of college catalogues and credit card agreements. Next Wednesday is already iffy, since I shall be spending a good chunk of it driving back from Colgate, where I shall be giving a talk on Tuesday.

In fact, the next couple of weeks will be action packed for les croulants Fleming, as they prepare to remove to Paris for several months. My first preparatory gesture, as you can see, is to pull out some dated and dusty French slang. During my first visits to France many years ago I noted that irreverent youths often referred to their parents as les croulants. The normal meaning of crouler is to crumble, collapse, fall apart, rot, or decay into ruin—so you get the picture. What was metaphoric a couple of decades ago now dangerously approaches the brink of the literal.

Before I was certain I would be spending the autumn in Paris—under auspices to be explained in a future post—I had accepted a flattering and prestigious invitation to give the annual Julius Fund lecture sponsored jointly by the Cleveland Art Museum and the Art History Department of Case Western Reserve University. The topic is one I have always want to approach in a broad-brushe fashion: “The Letter and the Spirit” Pictorial Imagery and Scriptural Exegesis in Medieval and Renaissance Art.”

This will mean that I must return briefly to America after being in Paris for only a fortnight. This level of jet setting in not within my normal range. The more immediate problem, however, is to be sure that I have my lecture well prepared before I leave Princeton and the fabulous resources of its art history library. It’s more or less on schedule. As usual in scholarship, plowing a new intellectual field has inevitably turned up some curiously shaped stones and even a few fossils. These are irrelevant to the straight furrows of my lecture, but they conceivably could stimulate some interest in a future post. We’ll see next time. It all depends on how much you are into the iconography of pigs.

A Certifiable Larynx

If like me you are primarily dependent upon the New York Times for your political information you may have been unaware of the presence of one Van Jones in the Obama administration until he was out of it. Despite the fact that the “Van Jones controversy” was briefly a Big Deal, the story clearly fell outside the parameters of “news fit to print”, making it a nearly compulsory topic for talk radio, blogs, and twitters. It was out there in some murky inlet of the electronic swamp that I accidentally encountered Mr. Jones, one of President Obama’s numerous recently appointed administrative “czars”. (Actually Jones was merely a czarevitch reporting to a czarina, but the czar-metaphor was already stressed and would collapse completely if subjected to any requirement of accuracy.) Mr. Jones is a colorful character. He is an empirically black man who according to the yellow press was actually a red. He was an expert on green jobs, but he swore a purple streak as far as the You could Tube.

In the Q&A following a public address he had described Republican legislators as assholes, immediately adding the statement, which he had just rendered redundant, that he himself could be an asshole. Even before a highly partisan audience in Berkeley he surely could have found a more appropriate body part: larynx, perhaps, windpipe, jawbone, or epiglottis, something to do with the mouthiness of those who so ardently love the sound of their own voices that they will say almost anything. I shall leave the fate of Mr. Jones to the partisan bloggers who seem, in nearly equal numbers, to be celebrating or lamenting his departure from the President’s administration. It is enough that he has answered for me a question left hanging from a committee meeting I attended nearly thirty-five years ago.

It was in fact my first meeting as a member of the Committee on Discipline, a committee composed of representatives of the student body, the faculty, and the administration, charged with hearing discipline cases that fell outside the purview of the Honor Committee, which deals with cheating. The case before us had to do with an episode of inebriated fisticuffs that had occurred in the wee hours of a Sunday morning at the corner of Prospect Avenue and Washington Road in Princeton, NJ. Two drunken students, one a lacrosse player and the other a hockey player had had an altercation.

These two guys, now sober and avoiding any eye contact with each other or any member of the committee, were hauled before the tribunal to testify. The hockey player had hit the lacrosse player so hard as to break his jaw in two places. This double fracture was apparently rather sensational from the osteopathic point of view, and played a major role in the testimony. Certainly the effect was dramatic. The lower half of the victim’s face was held together by a kind of wire birdcage. They both were men of few words, and fewer still grammatical ones; and the native inarticulateness of the victim was considerably exacerbated by interference from his auxiliary chin of metallic mesh. We strained to understand him, but the story did come out.

There are moments in life when one is led in a very short time to alter an apparently sound and fixed opinion. We all began with sympathy for the guy with the broken jaw and potential hostility for the guy who had broken it. Within about three minutes those valences had been exactly reversed. That was because the hockey player came across as a penitent delinquent while the lacrosse player was such a—well, an obnoxious boor. What had seemed an open-and-shut case suddenly seemed perhaps more complex, and one of our deans, who was then a wise young woman and is now a wiser yet middle-aged woman, started asking a few questions of the assailant.

“Tell me, Mr. X,” she said, “before Mr. Y. hit you, had there been any exchange of words?”

“Uhhhh,” said the wired man, barely intelligible through the mesh.

“What’s that?” asked the dean.

“Uhhh….guess so….maybe…yeah, I guess.”

“Did Mr. Y. say anything to you?”

Long pause, followed by “Uhh, can’t remember. Don’t think so.”

“Well, did you say anything to Mr. Y? Before he hit you, I mean.”

“…Uhhgggrrr.”

“Come again?” said the dean.

Really long pause. “Yeah….sure…ahhggr.”

“Well?” asked the dean, and when there was no response she added, “I mean, what exactly did you say to Mr. Y?”

Really, really long pause. “I said…” and here he struggled to make himself clear despite the prosthesis… “I said, 'ASSHOLE!'”

This had a dramatic effect on the elder members of the committee, though the students seemed to take it in stride.

“I wonder,” asked the dean, carefully suppressing any possible sarcasm of tone, “I wonder…Have you considered whether what you said might have had something to do with what he did?”

For the first time the wounded man seemed to fully engage with the proceedings. Certainly for the first time he gave evidence of a convincing sense of grievance. He had obviously been shocked and offended by the dean’s question. Speaking slowly to make himself clear he struggled to master his indignation. “What kind of a place would this be?” he asked. “I mean, what kind of a place would this be…if you got slugged every time you called somebody an asshole?” Mr. Jones’s experience has given me the answer that eluded the flabbergasted Discipline Committee all those decades ago. What kind of a place? It would perhaps be a slightly more civil kind of a place, that’s what.

Still Digesting

In a desperate attempt to increase the readership of my blog I have taken to reading it assiduously myself. Reading my own prose as though it were that of someone else is not entirely a novel experience. The combination of a memory softened by longevity plus the longevity itself—I have been publishing stuff of one kind or another for half a century now—has on occasion led to the following weird experience. I am reading some ancient academic essay, and it begins to seem vaguely familiar. Furthermore I agree with the central idea—pretty rare. Could it be that I have read it before without remembering it? Answer: No. I wrote it before without remembering it.

I could well remember writing “Difficult to Digest”. After all, I wrote it only eight days ago. But I felt suddenly uncertain about one of the claims I had made, concerning Sender Galin’s pamphlet The Truth About Reader’s Digest.

"Garlin's pamphlet has become a rare item,” I wrote, “…so the dime pamphlet now goes for at least twenty-five bucks when you can find it.” Was that really true? Perhaps the market had changed since I had to shell out big bucks to get a second copy, having mislaid a first copy (still missing in action) somewhere on my desk. I immediately checked with the indispensable abebooks.com. There were, world-wide, three copies of the Garlin pamphlet available. The first was priced as I supposed it would be in the thirty-dollar range. A single bookseller, Juniper Books in Boulder CO, however, had two copies at the incredible low price of $7.50 each! Now I was aware—and indeed I had reported both in The Anti-Communist Manifestos and in “Difficult to Digest”—that Mr. Garlin spent the last years of his life in or around Boulder CO. I immediately speculated that these two copies probably were a part of the nachlass of old Sender Garlin himself, and that Juniper Books was not entirely aware of the value of the treasures for which they had become brokers.

I snapped them up as fast as my large fingers could beat out the appropriate key-strokes, and they have just arrived. My proclivity toward what my wife calls “excess” was richly rewarded. In the first place I discover that there were at least four different printings of the pamphlet in 1943, of which I now own three. (Indeed, I may own the fourth as well, if only I can find it.) Better yet, one of these copies is signed by the author: “To a poetic organizer, Martha Millet [/] Sender Garlin”.

I don’t know, of course, whether he ever actually presented Ms. Millet with the book, or why she returned it to him if he had done so. Martha Millet was a minor Communist poet of the 1930s and 40s. Garlin uses the word "organizer" as a technical term. The job of an "organizer" was to assemble a Party cell or prepare the "masses" for political action. When the Communists disappeared, "Party organizers" were replaced by "community organizers". This is simply an etymological curiosity, not a political statement concerning any particular president of the United States. I presume that the phrase "poetical organizer" is itself somewhat poetical. One of Millet's poems (“Women of Spain”) is still to be found in anthologies of literature dealing with the Spanish Civil War. She was also one of the radical poets anthologized in a once-celebrated book entitled Seven Poets in Search of an Answer. These seven are nowadays pretty obscure. They included Alfred Kreymborg, whose testimony—along with that of other eminent Communists like the artist Rockwell Kent and Congressman Vito Marcantonio-- adorns the back of the other printing of the pamphlet I just bought. Kreymbourg pulls out all the stops in praising The Truth About Reader’s Digest. “One of the most important documents of the age. Every American should read it.” Nobody ever said that about An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages! The name of a third of the seven poets may ring a bell with some of my readers: Joy Davidman. If you don’t recognize the name, think “Mrs. C. S. Lewis”. Yes, Lewis's second Joy, supplementing the more spiritual version of of his pre-marital autobiography, Surprised by Joy! Scholarly investigations, like other mysteries of life, have the fascinating habit of turning back upon themselves. If you want to see what I mean, check out the “Recent Writing” section on the web-site.

Difficult to Digest

My number one son Richard, the formidable blogmeister of “A Brooklynite on the Ice,” drew my attention to what he thought may be a blogable item for a geezer like me in the form of an AP story headed “Chapter 11 Plan Cedes Reader’s Digest to Lenders”. From his point of view the story has to do with the preposterous nonchalance with which American corporations now file for bankruptcy. The very word “bankruptcy” used to reverberate with the terrors of the charnel house. American captains of industry now declare bankruptcy with about as much drama as they down an aspirin tablet. But Rich also knew that I had some interest in Reader’s Digest as an index of popular American culture and especially in the magazine’s role in the formation of the anti-Communist consensus of the 1950s. I touch on this subject in several places in The Anti-Communist Manifestos. It’s a little hard to believe that a journal with five and a half million readers is going under. Why, that’s even more readers than "A Brooklynite on the Ice" commands! But it’s certainly a falling away from the glory days of post-War, when it had a paid circulation of more than seventeen million monthly copies. Reader’s Digest was launched in 1922 by a husband-and-wife genius team, DeWitt and Lila Wallace. This pair was sufficiently famous to have commanded a Time magazine cover at one point.

It was the admirable Robert Hutchins who made the memorable quip about popular journalism in America. We have two great magazines, he said: Time, for people who can’t think, and Life [the great precursor of modern photo-journalism], for people who can’t read. He might have added, “and Reader’s Digest, for people in between, those who have trouble with disyllables.”

The basic idea, simple and brilliant, anticipated the Internet in certain ways. Reader’s Digest would gather and “condense” interesting articles from the whole range of American journalism.There are numerous books about the Reader’s Digest, which must be regarded as a phenomenon unique in the annals of publication. Academics love "the masses" in principle; practice proves a little more difficult. Many scholars seem to think that there must be something morally dubious, and certainly politically incorrect, in a journal read by so many millions of their compatriots. The fullest study is probably John Heidenry’s Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest. Full does not, alas, always mean accurate. Unfortunately, on the one point which most interested me (Jan Valtin’s publication of “American Dawn”) this book turned out to be woefully errant. Joanne Sharp’s Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity has the virtue of revealing its simple (not to say simple-minded) thesis right up front. The implication here is that the Wallaces were the grandparents of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

From nearly its very inception the Reader’s Digest was the magazine that left-wing intellectuals loved to hate, and they have been constant in their disdain. They couldn't stomach its combination of saccharine patriotism, hick religiosity, and fantastic financial success. As I wrote in my book “As late as 1982, Susan Sontag caused an uproar among progressives by suggesting that 'the émigrés from the communist countries we didn’t listen to, who found it far easier to get published in the Reader’s Digest than in the Nation or the New Statesman, were telling the truth.'” In the 1950s one recurrent theme was the battle of the FBI against domestic Communism. The magazine's tendencies are memorialized in an imaginary joke title of a typical article of the 1950s: "I Slept with a Bear for the FBI, and Found God."

I first encountered this curious political bias when I was writing about Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had first been introduced to a Communist Party meeting in the 1920s by a strange character named Sender Garlin. This man was a Communist Party apparatchik for many decades. He only recently ended his days as an elder statesman of the progressive community of Boulder, Colorado. In the 1930s , Garlin and Chambers worked together on the Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party. In 1943 he published a dime brochure entitled "The Truth about Reader's Digest". What that "truth" was was spelled out in a prefatory letter by the famous novelist Theodore Dreiser. "Just now, from reading your booklet, I gather the publication's true attitude and import. It is all so fascinatingly sly, and to my way of thinking, criminal--since plainly it labors to belittle our chief and most valuable ally, and to forward the desires of the capitalistic group in this country that seeks--and has sought from the very beginning--to establish money-plenty and money-authority for the few as opposed to poverty and slavery for the masses here as elsewhere on earth."

"Sly" is not the first word that comes into my mind with regard to the magazine. Most Digest articles had all the slyness and subtlety of a hydrogen bomb or perhaps the Bubonic Plague. One of my heroes, Max Eastman, who enraged the Left by moving from being editor of the Masses in the 1930s to being a frequent contributor to Reader's Digest in the 1970s, put it thus: “Writing for the Reader’s Digest while not exactly an art, is a highly specialized craft. The magazine is largely concerned with the life of ideas, but as it is addressed to some 50 or 60 million readers—the actual copies printed number over 17 million—the ideas have to be presented with a self-explanatory simplicity. I have learned this craft by thinking of myself as a teacher when writing essays of this kind for the Reader’s Digest.”

Garlin's pamphlet has become a rare item, in large part no doubt because it features three line etching caricatures--of Franco, Charles Lindbergh, and Jan Valtin, who happened at that moment to be the CPUSA's fascists du jour--by the brilliant Communist artist William Gropper. Gropper is particularly "collectible" at the moment, so the dime pamphlet now goes for at least twenty-five bucks when you can find it. I, alas, have had to chase down two copies. It's a thin little thing, and I lost the first one somewhere among my books. Let me heirs be put on notice. By the time they find it, it's bound to be worth a C-note. This Gropper cartoon called "May Day" gives a good idea of Gropper's power and economy of line.

What had particularly enraged Garlin was the fact that the Reader's Digest was prominent in the promotion of the Communist renegade author Jan Valtin (real name Richard Krebs). The Wallaces had "digested" bits of Valtin's famous anti-Communist "autobiography" Out of the Night, and undoubtedly helped increase its circulation. To make matters worse they then published in the May 1941 number Valtin's essay entitled "American Dawn"--one of the most fantastically successful pieces of American boosterism ever penned. "American Dawn" is the story of a repentant ex-Communist who longs for nothing more than to be allowed to become a good American citizen. It worked wonders in helping Krebs to get around very serious immigration problems. At that point the magazine was being distributed in just over four million copies, but the Wallaces were worried that that might not be enough. So they had 750,000 copies of the article made up as offprints for free distribution. I was able to track down on eBay a copy of the original issue in all its dull typographic respectability.

Gold for Geezers

ABOVE the oracular cave at Delphi, we are told, was inscribed the fundamental atom, or perhaps even quark, of all wisdom: NOSCE TEIPSUM, “Know thyself!” For some reason the Greeks thought it cool to write their mottoes in Latin, just as the Romans often opted for Greek. But whether in Latin or Greek (γνῶθι σεαυτόν, if I am provoked to a display of pedantry) the injunction to self-knowledge has a long and venerable history in the western philosophical tradition.

Self-knowledge is of course the hardest of all knowledge to obtain. “O wad some Power the giftie gie us,” wrote the immortal Robbie Burns, “to see oursels as ithers see us!'” Most of us are pretty good at some things, and not so good at others. But what a rare ability it is to have a clear and accurate view of which is which. In fact the more things we are good at, the more lively is the danger that we will think we are also good at vaguely related things. For example, I am pretty good at eating. Indeed modesty alone keeps me from saying “very good”. Eating is logically connected with cooking, but it would be most rash of me, and even rasher of you, to suppose that my prowess at eating implies an equal prowess at cooking.

National political developments of the last month have encouraged me to think about the Delphic injunction with regard to our much-admired president. Barak Obama is a very able politician. In fact he is a superb politician. But even though he is very good at most things political, he is not, alas, very good at all such things. Contrast, for example, the lavish praise that has greeted the “Cash for Clunkers” program with the controversy and dramatized divisions ignited by his Medical, well, Whatever. I speak thus irreverently only because the Democrats seem to have abandoned what was formerly called their “Health Care Plan” in favor of their “Medical Insurance Reform”. I am not sure I like the switch, because I am a man with a prostate; and if I have to be in the hospital I’d prefer being treated by a doctor rather than an insurance agent. I can hang out with any number of insurance agents at the Rotary Club.

Still, there does still seem to be, camouflaged amidst the Delphic obscurity, an actual medical dimension to Health Care/Insurance Reform. The trick is figuring out what it is. There is light-hearted Saturday program on NPR (“Wait, Wait—Don’t Tell Me!”) in which one of the segments tries a contestant’s ability to pick from three preposterous stories the one that (in addition to being preposterous) is an actual news item. President Obama has assured me of three things: (1) he will give health care insurance to about fifty million currently uninsured people; (2) this change will have no effect on my own personal medical arrangements unless I want it to, and (3) nobody making less than a quarter of a million dollars per annum will be asked to pay a penny more in income taxes to pay for the program.

The problem is to figure out which one of the three highly popular possibilities could conceivably be true. I have no intention of going to a Town Hall Meeting, and I certainly will not foam at the mouth if I stumble into one by accident; but as an Obama voter I do have to inquire whether lobotomy will be a precondition for my support of the president’s good intentions?

The question Mr. Obama should be discussing with Messrs. Rahm and Alexrod, not excluding of course Speaker Pelosi, is how to make the Health Whatever as attractive as “Cash for Clunkers”. The popularity of “Cash for Clunkers” has nothing to do with the free lunch aspect. It is the intellectual elegance of the concept. Toward the beginning of the last century one of the European governments, concerned with the frequency of fatal railway accidents, established a commission to look into the matter. The commissioners soon discovered that by significant proportion most people killed in railway accidents had been sitting in the last car of the train. In a flash the elegant, cost-free solution to the problem flashed through the mind of the chief investigator. The commission would recommend that in future the last car be removed from all trains. Voilà!
A clunker: $4500 max

That’s the kind of thinking that has made “Cash for Clunkers” such a success. The beauty of it is that the model can be applied to the Medical Whatever at the slight cost of a few modest adjustments of vocabulary. Everyone agrees that the killer cost in health care is geriatric medicine. But “geriatric medicine” is merely a euphemism that may disguise rather than identify the problem. Let’s call a spade a spade. The real problem here is geezers. First they get old. Then they get sick. Then they expect to see a doctor. Give them an inch, they take a mile. The suggested plan to create a special group of thanatological shrinks (commonly called the Kevorkian Corps), while undoubtedly well intentioned, is actually an inadequate response. The health care crisis demands something more fundamental. The solution is obvious, though it may at first seem a little startling. Eliminate the last car on the train. Get the geezers off the road in the same way you are getting the clunkers off the road. Give the program a snappy title: “Grants for Gramps,” perhaps, or better yet “Gold for Geezers”.
A geezer: $450 max

Tragic, to be Blunt

Among the last week’s news stories that most captured my attention was the announcement by the British Library that the manuscript of Anthony Blunt’s memoirs, deposited there in 1984, has been released to public availability after the twenty-five-year temporal buffer to which the library authorities had agreed at the time they received the document. Such waiting periods are not uncommonly applied to controversial materials that have the potential to cause distress or embarrassment to living persons or even cause legal difficulties for those who publish them. But such arrangements can be unfair in another way. The gossip of a dead man, after all, now beyond all power of direct interrogation, may be more dangerous than that of the living.



Most of us, I suppose, would be more in favor of virtue if we could postpone having to face virtue’s inconveniences, preferably indefinitely. Saint Augustine had famously prayed, “Make me chaste, O God, but not just yet!” Anthony Blunt and hundreds of others have said in effect, “I want to be truthful and straightforward, but of course not right now.”

Blunt was a most distinguished art historian. As director of the Courtauld Institute (the art history department of the University of London, so to speak) he greatly advanced the cause of academic art history not merely in Britain but wherever his many distinguished students extended his influence throughout the world. As the socially upper-crust conservator of the Queen’s own private collection of paintings, a function he performed so satisfactorily as to earn him a knighthood, he was a star of modest magnitude in the BBC’s night sky of television public intellectual luminaries. But Blunt was several other things as well. He was most notoriously a Soviet spy and a traitor to his country.

The Internet is already abuzz with Anthony Blunt, and I presume to add to the chatter only on account of two accidental circumstances. The first is familial, and it suggests that the "six degrees of separation" theory is far too conservative. My brother-in-law John Newman, a distinguished architectural historian and the current editor of the well-known series on The Buildings of England, was for some years Blunt’s junior colleague at the Courtauld Institute in London. He greatly admired Blunt as art historian and academic administrator and was of the view that the public rhetorical violence that followed upon Blunt’s tardy public exposure in 1979—which Blunt in the newly released memoir apparently says drove him to contemplate suicide—was in large measure sanctimonious and unreflective. John’s opinion is not one I would dismiss lightly. Furthermore, among our personal friends is a woman who (I learned many years after first meeting her) is a blood relative of Blunt's. A second circumstance tends in another direction. I happen to be in the process of publishing a book (The Anti-Communist Manifestos, with an official release date less than a month away) in which I touch upon the thought processes that led many able and accomplished western intellectuals to invest their deepest allegiance in the unspeakable tyranny of Stalinist Communism. In preparing this book I had to read literally dozens of autobiographies, confessions, apologies, explanations, or reaffirmations of an unrepentant defiance written by 1930s and 40s Communists. I have of course not yet seen Blunt’s memoir, though it is bound to be in bookshops nearly as fast as computer keyboards can clatter, but from its characterization in the press it appears likely to fall into a familiar self-serving genre.

I mention Blunt in The Anti-Communist Manifestos only in passing. What I say of him specifically comes in a discussion of the social myopia that kept American and British authorities from exposing damaging Soviet espionage in a timely manner. The Cambridge spy ring should have been shut down in 1940 if not before. “Unfortunately,” I write, “one of the spies, Anthony Blunt, a sort of British Alger Hiss, whose extraordinary distinction and public reputation made the very thought of his disloyalty impossible, was one of the foxes overseeing the operations of the MI5 henhouse.”

The parallel between Blunt and Hiss, while imperfect, is apt. Neither man was an open Communist, and Blunt was not a Party member at all. Anyone familiar with the patterns of Communist espionage and front organizations of the period will recognize the practical insignificance of this fact. Communist sympathizers and some actual Communists were often more useful to the Party if their allegiance was not explicitly known. Hiss and Blunt also shared the arts of practiced liars. Blunt lied about his espionage for as long as he could, through several incompetent security inquiries. Hiss continued to lie until his dying day, even after he had been found guilty of lying by a jury of his peers.

A point frequently encountered in histories of the Nazi regime concerns Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography, which he published in his late thirties. The point is that all the horrors of the evolving regime, though European observers usually reacted to them as developments wholly unpredictable if not actually inconceivable, are clearly adumbrated in Mein Kampf. Mein Kampf was not an obscure book. On the contrary, it was a huge best seller in German-speaking countries, and widely available in translated form in the other major European languages. Hitler’s plans were quite clearly spelled out in the book, but the foreign service professionals in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay paid no attention to it. The author of such a book couldn't be serious.
During the research for my book I encountered a sort of minor league Mein Kampf published by Anthony Blunt in 1937. Actually, it's only a short essay; but nobody who read it and took it seriously could have possibly been surprised when Blunt turned out to be the "Fourth Man". George Orwell said that there had been more lies published about the Spanish Civil War than any other event in history. That was undoubtedly hyperbole, but it is certainly true that in the late Thirties a lot of famous people published a lot of stuff they later regretted. One well-known example is Auden's poem "Spain", which the poet later spent several years trying wish away or to revise retrospectively. In 1937 the (at that point) Communist poet C. Day Lewis edited a volume of essays entitled The Mind in Chains. The title referred to the supposed state of things under capitalism. Essays by various hands addressed the fields of education, literature, art, drama, cinema, music, and so forth. In a fascinating introduction the editor began with the mythical chains of Prometheus as developed by Shelley and ended with the metaphoric chains of the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto. "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win." The authors were not all Communists--according to Day Lewis they represented the full socialist coalition of the Popular Front--but they shared one fundamental assumption. Western capitalist society was either actually dead or near death. Hence the essays followed a roughly similar format: a description of current capitalist sterility, followed by a blueskying projection of a future socialist vitality. What "vitality" seemed to mean to all the writers was the Soviet Union--yes, the Soviet Union of 1937! "The Mind in Chains could never have been written were it not for the widespread belief of intellectual workers that the mind is really in chains to-day," wrote Day Lewis, "that these chains have been forged by a dying social system, that they can and must be broken--and in the Soviet Union have been broken..." Day Lewis seems not to have read or credited Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform: a Study of Literature and Bureaucratism (1934), in which the ex-Communist editor of the Masses had made an empirical study of the actual state of art and literature under Stalin. As for Blunt, artistic uniformity seemed to be the artistic goal.

Certain changes will inevitably take place in the forms which artists use to express the ideas of the classless society. The conception of a painting as a unique private possession will disappear....The easel painting, which was the particular art-form evolved at the time of the Renaissance when art became essentially private, will become of secondary importance, and instead mural painting will be developed in a form suitable to the decoration of the communal buildings devoted to the culture and recreation of the workers. But it will still, of course, be true that people will want something to decorate the walls of their houses, to which large scale murals are not generally appropriate. This need will probably be satisfied by the creation of what may be called publishing firms of painting, whose function it would be to commission originals in order to have them copied in large quantities by some process of colour printing....By this method the idea of the unique original with great scarcity value would be avoided, and the original itself would probably be kept in the state museum as a help in the training of other artists. In this kind of production much of the process will be mechanical and the same will probably be true of many other kinds of painting. [120-121]

It is fascinating to learn from one of the great art historians of the last century and the future Surveyor of the Queen's Paintings that the art of the socialist consummation so devoutly to be wished for would consist chiefly of post office murals and the polychrome print rack at the National Gallery souvenir shop. When Blunt turned out to be the infamous "Fourth Man" incredulity trumped consternation in the British press, but no one who had read the essay entitled "Art Under Capitalism and Socialism" need have been all that surprised.

Political belief should never be criminalized, even if that belief is invested in the benignity of the international criminal conspiracy that was the Comintern. But ideas do sometimes have consequence, and active participation in criminal conspiracy is not an exercise of a civil right. In what he came to call the greatest mistake of his life, Anthony Blunt became a criminal and a traitor. Like so many others he sought to justify his actions on the basis of high political and moral principle. The political principle was "anti-fascism," the moral principle "personal loyalty to one's friends." He apparently never pondered the incoherence of the two principles.

A certain quotation from E. M. Forster has become de rigueur in discussing the Cambridge spies. Forster was another Cantabridgian, though of one generation older than the spies, another genius, another (with Burgess and Blunt himself) tortured and furtive homosexual. In a provocative essay Forster had written: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." What was already an arresting apothegm later took on an aura of prophecy when it turned out that Anthony Blunt had indeed made that choice. And here was something extraordinary. The same man who in 1937 was articulating a Marxist artistic theory in which the individuality of the artist and the particularity of subject were to be made entirely subordinate to mechanical reproduction and the satisfactions of the "workers" took as his highest moral principle, one that trumped any larger social obligation, loyalty to a coterie of highly privileged personal friends. Here was a tragedy much larger than politics, one that would require a Shakespeare or a Goethe to probe.