Good Show for the Brits

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The name's Regina, Elizabeth Regina

A visit to England of more than two weeks—such was my thinking as I sat down to write this morning—surely ought to provide the material for a fairly ambitious essay on “The Mood of Britain Today” or some other grand, comprehensive design.  After all, each day over my morning coffee I read such preposterous titles atop op-ed pieces no more solidly researched.  My first thought was to report on the American election as seen through English eyes.  A moment’s reflection made me realize that in addition to its narcissism, the topic brought with it the risk of acute embarrassment.  There are quite a few things about American political life that are difficult to explain intelligently to oneself, let alone to foreigners.

           

            I can, however, offer a brief summary.  The British press, which is actually worse than the American press, though usually more literate, agrees in a quasi-Hobbesean assessment of the American presidential campaign, to wit, that it is nasty, brutish, and mind-numbingly long.  It regards Barack Obama’s re-election as a foregone conclusion.  As this would appear to differ from the American journalistic consensus only in the foregone part, it doesn’t really seem like much news.  The American press appears to believe that the presidency was Mr. Romney’s to lose, and that he has lost it.  Like Mr. Romney himself, most American journalists appear to be committed to the theory of individual responsibility.

            So it’s back to “The Mood of Britain Today”.  I find that the mood of Britain today is excellent.  In contrast, the mood of America is lousy.  America’s lousy mood has to do with its politics.  No matter what happens in November about half the nation will declare disaster barely averted, and the other half lament disaster fully achieved.  That is not a situation very promising in terms of our shared national need to face up to working together to address some very real problems, many of which neither Mr. Obama nor Mr. Romney has the political courage to lay out for us honestly.

            Britain’s politics are not all that much better than ours, certainly not good enough to account for the optimism, the good feeling, and the sense of accomplishment that I encountered everywhere in my travels.  No.  The source of the quite remarkable sense of well-being in Britain at the moment is the national panache with which the Olympic Games were planned and carried out.  This was a gigantic undertaking for London and indeed the whole nation.  In the run-up to the games doubters were prone to be dubious and cynics ready to be cynical.  But the way the Games played out—from the brilliant and slightly goofy opening spectacle to the extraordinary contributions of literally thousands of intergenerational, interracial, multicultural volunteer helpers, guides, and marshals—seems to have left the country with a licit and infectious feeling of rare, communal achievement.

 Olympic volunteers

            Since we arrived in London only as the Games ended, it took me a while to grasp all this.  My understanding began with a train ride.  After an overnight with my delightful stepmother-in-law in St. John’s Wood, we set off the next morning to suburban Kent and the house of my eminent brother-in-law, John Newman in Sevenoaks.  There is a considerable commuter traffic between London and Sevenoaks, but in the morning it is mainly headed in one direction—toward the city.  There are several trains an hour, but even so the inbound trains often fill to capacity.  Outbound from London in those morning hours, on the other hand, the coaches are mainly empty.  I noted with surprise—but without actually thinking about it—that our outbound car was practically full.  It was also quite animated.   Several groups of youngish people speaking various languages, none of them English, kept up a lively buzz.  I thought vaguely that the train must be going on to Dover, and that these were middle-Europeans on their way home.  But to my surprise they all got off when we did, at Sevenoaks station.

            It took me a minute or two to figure out what was happening.  On the platform were several uniformed volunteers, who directed the travelers up a stairway, down a long corridor, and out onto the street where several specially designated Olympic buses were waiting.  Sevenoaks is not far from Brands Hatch, site of one of the well known motor raceways in Britain.  It had been commandeered on this occasion as the venue for the Paralympic bicycle races.  That was where all the surprising people on the commuter train were headed.  It is typical of the British that the general enthusiasm for the Paralympics was not less fervent than that for the “regular” Games.

 Alex Zanardi (Italy) at Brands Hatch

            The whole country is basking in the sense of having come together to do something rather difficult, and in having done it very well.  You might call it “British exceptionalism”.  I wonder if we might not give it a try ourselves

Breathless--and Breathtaking

I last posted nine breathless and breathtaking days ago, but I now find myself briefly domiciled in Cambridge at the home of my wonderful niece Elisabeth and her wonderful family.  And when I say wonderful, I mean wonderful.  There is no greater act of ceremonial hospitality known to the annals of anthropology than the loan of an iMac, which I find at my disposal for the duration of a stint of child-minding.  This is particularly light duty since the children involved are for the moment all at their schools.

Only those who have travelled in Britain can fully appreciate how much rural beauty has been preserved on a small, highly populated island.  The protection of the environment has been a feature of British customary law since times immemorial, certainly since long before the concept of the “environment” even existed.  One wise historian defined patriotism and “the love of locality”; and Britain is a land of thousands of beloved geographical nooks and crannies.  Despite its dramatic urbanization, Britain is still a land a villages.  The village, as it developed in medieval Britain, has practically no American counterpart, even in New England, built by transplanted English villagers.  For the truth is that you can scarcely build a village in less than a quarter of a millennium.  American villages had hardly got started when they were overwhelmed by the architectural chaos demanded by the internal combustion engine.

Most of what I have been doing since my last post is visiting old friends.  Two of those visits—one to Mayfield in Sussex, the other to Cardiff in Wales—I shall perhaps write about on later occasions.  They were particularly intimate in character, and not the easy fare of a public travelogue.  But there has been some upscale tourism as well.  A week ago today my friend John Smith drove me to Barnes station (beyond the river from Hammersmith) whence I travelled quickly back to Waterloo Station in London, changed trains after a brief wait, and an hour later found myself in Peterfield, Hants., in serious Anglo-Saxon territory.  Here I was met by my old friend John Filer who transported me by Jaguar to his (relatively) new abode in West Meon.  You have perhaps not heard of West Meon?  Well, it’s slightly to the west of East Meon—the Meon being a sort of meandering creek that in those parts passes for a river.  It would be rash to hazard a definite opinion as to which is the more gorgeous of the two villages.

Chawton

But for us West Meon was mainly a base camp from which to set out on a day’s culture-crawl, a visit to two famous literary abodes.  The first of these was Chawton), the lovely old house in which Jane Austen spent the final years of her miraculous writing career.  The house is now a well-kept museum, and it is possible to visit every room in it, many of them filled with authentic relics  of one of the greatest novelists the world has ever known.  In a small frame on one wall, in her own clear hand, was one of several beautiful prayers she composed: Give us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray, as to deserve to be heard, to address thee with our Hearts, as with our lips. Thou art every where present, from Thee no secret can be hid. May the knowledge of this, teach us to fix our Thoughts on Thee, with Reverence and Devotion that we pray not in vain.

Historians have often taken a rather dim view of the state of English religion in the eighteenth century.  William Edward Hartpole Lecky, one of the great historians of Britain in the eighteenth century, opines that most Tories of the period probably “regarded the Church as an admirable extension of the police force.”  So it’s good to recall Jane Austen and some others like her.  One of these lived just down the road a piece, at Selborne.  The Rev. Gilbert White was a somewhat eccentric country parson. When his early academic ambitions foundered on the shoals of the eccentricity just alluded to, White went to ground in the village of Selborne where he spent the rest of his life in preaching, in pastoral work, and (above all) in recording his minute observations of the natural world around him that later became famous as The Natural History of Selborne—the pioneering eco-classic, and still the unsurpassed example of English language “nature writing”.  His house, too, along with its splendid gardens, has been successfully turned into a public museum.  In it I spent two inspiring hours.  Austen and White: an impressive cultural double-header!

 Gilbert White's house from the back lawn

Here are three more photographs of beautiful things I saw during the week: (1) Saint Dunstan’s Church, Mayfield, Sussex, where I worshipped last Sunday; (2) Daniel Gabriel Rossetti’s triptych The Seed of David in Llandaff Cathedral; (3) Renoir’s La Parisienne, one of the most famous paintings in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

           

The Para-Blogger

Here in London's it's been all about the Para-Olympics (often called the "Special Olympics" in America).  This will be a para-blog by a para-bloguiste, who finds himself at a slightly wonky machine at an Internet Cafe on the Shepherds Bush Road in Hammersmith.

While Joan hikes along the South Downs Trail, I have been staying for a few days in Barnes with old and dear friends, John and Fiona Smith, whom I see far too seldom.  John and I were up at Oxford together  half a century ago.  He made his career in the Classics Department at St. Paul's School, of which he was long the distinguished head.  It would be hard to imagine a more distinguished post for a classicist than that of "John Colet's Successor," as John could claim to be.

John and I had a high old time yesterday in the British Museum, where he gave me a private tour of and lecture on the wonderful relief sculptures.from the Temple of Bassai.  They are kept in a special room off the beaten track in the museum, and they are not always available to view.  We were doubly in luck.  Not only was the room open, but only four other people (out of the potential forty thousand or so swarming the museum) found it during the half hour or so we spent there.

The carvings are not of the very highest quality of their period, but they are remarkable in the completeness and state of preservation.  The chief theme of Greek political iconography is pretty easily identified: Greeks are good; barbarians are bad.   Good Greeks fight bad barbarians and win; bad barbarians fight good Greeks and lose.  Hence the recurrent subject matter of the combat against Amazons and the battle between Lapiths and Centaurs.

For many decades I solemnly misinformed my students with the etymoligical myth that derives the word "Amazon" from the Greek for a woman's breast prefixed by the negative a, as in a+theist and so forth.  The idea was the these women warriors amputated the right breast in order to facilitate the use of the bow and arrow.  It is really quite amazing that one can believe utter nonsense and teach it with gusto.  If I had spent a little more time with the macromastic warriors of the Bassai sculptures--I refer of course to iconographic study--I would have known better.  My only regret is that the primitive technology to which I find myself temporarily indentured do not allow a visual demonstration.  Like it or not, you'll have to imagine that this is an actual blog essay.

Transition: the Autumnal

           

    Abraham Janssen: Personification of Autumn  

          Today is distinctly transitional.  For starters it is the birthday of Louis XIV, supposed herald of one of the world’s more dramatic transitions (“Après moi, le deluge!”) that, so far as I can tell from the tenor of our political conventions, is still in progress.  Yes, I know it was actually Louis XV who didn’t say that, but history is much better as servant than as master.  Further transition: I have just delivered my latest opus (The Dark Side of the Enlightenment) to W. W. Norton in New York, where it will begin the copy-editing process.  Further yet, I am also preparing—or rather avoiding preparing by writing this blog essay instead--to fly off in the morning to London.  There we have before us a couple of weeks of R&R in the delightful form of visiting family and friends and simply knocking about.

            But the most conspicuous sense of transition is simply calendrical.  So much of what we think of as cultural or spiritual experience is actually climate controlled.  Somewhere C. S. Lewis points out that Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” might really be meaningless to an Eskimo.

            The current essay of my friend Kathy Taylor, a fine writer and the proprietor of the admirable blog “In 999 Words…or less,” deals with the disturbing suddenness of September.  She was writing from Cape Cod, but there seems to have been something particularly definitive about the last day of August widely through the northeast.  It was not particularly cool, but for a day the mugginess disappeared.  We certainly experienced it in the New York area, even though for me the day was blighted by an automotive disaster that preoccupied my attention for several hours. 

            Growing up as I did mainly in the South, I always found the poetic iconography of autumn (as in the justly famous ode of John Keats) strangely artificial.  That is because it derives from the fifty-first latitude north as it crosses England and not the thirty-sixth as it passes across America.  One of the major images in Keats’s “To Autumn” is that of the stubble field.  We know something of the genesis of the poem’s composition from a letter written by Keats to his friend Reynolds in September of 1819.  “How beautiful the season is now--How fine the air.  A temperate sharpness about it.  Really, without joking, chaste weather--Dian skies--I never liked stubble-fields so much as now--Aye better than the chilly green of the spring. Somehow, a stubble-field looks warm--in the same way that some pictures look warm.”  Warm might serve for the south downs of England, but it would be a distinct understatement for Arkansas.  Often enough some of the hottest days of the year came in September. 

            So also did some of the hottest and sweatiest work—particularly haymaking, which might also be called “making stubble fields.”. So rapid is the pace of technological change that many of the experiences of my youth are more than forgotten.  They have actually vanished from the earth.  I go back a ways, certainly to a time before hay-balers.  On our Ozark farm we did have a mechanical mower and a hay-rake—essentially unchanged from their prototypes of the 1870s.    They were horse-drawn, though a tractor did appear in my teen-age years.

            The hay-raker first made long rows of the sun-dried grass, then cut them up as best he could into roughly similar shocks or piles.  Among these piles the horse (or tractor) pulled a large, makeshift wagon.  One man stood on the wagon and tried to distribute as evenly as possible the hay that was being pitched up by the men on the ground.  It would not be easy to say which was the harder job.  The idea was to get as much hay onto the cart as possible without risking the disaster of its tipping over on the way to the barn, where, incidentally, it was always at least ten degrees hotter than in the hayfield itself.   There still exists, somewhere, one of the few “candid” photographs depicting my teen-aged years.  I am atop a huge load of hay at least the size of that in Bosch’s “Haywain”.  The local population depicted by Bosch is vaguely  reminiscent of the Ozarks too.

            All that is gone—part of a large transition.  Tomorrow night when I step out of the plane at Heathrow, I hope to accomplish a somewhat smaller one.  I hope to to recover something approximating Keatsian autumn.  I cannot guarantee that I will find her “on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, drows’d with the fume of poppies”; but the experience is likely to be somnolent enough to make the blog schedule for the next two weeks a little casual.

Flemingiana

            Statue of John le Fleming, Mayor of Southampton (saec. 14), on the old city walls. (Sculptor: Anthony Griffiths; photographer: Brian Kernigan)

This essay starts with a common experience—one almost everyone I have ever talked with about it recognizes, though without being able to put a name to it.  You encounter an unfamiliar word, or hear of a rare medical condition outside your previous conscious experience.  Then suddenly it seems that you encounter the rare word in every book you pick up; and you repeatedly come across reports of victims of the Marburg virus or whatever.  Well, I have had such an experience relating to my possible medieval forbears, who have been hounding me for about a year.  Allow me to explain.

            Last week I received in my e-post the two photographs printed above.  They were recently taken in the English port city of Southampton by my distinguished colleague and friend Brian Kernigan as he was waiting to board the liner Queen Mary 2 to cruise home to New York.  Brian rightly thought I might be able to “relate” to a famous early mayor of the city. 

            I could, indeed.  Time flies when you are having fun.  Summer approaches its end, and it is nearly time for the Flemings’ own annual September visit to England—the meaning of annual here being that we have done it a few other years.  This year, however, I shall not take in the “Oxford Thinking” conference.  In fact, I probably won’t make it to Oxford at all.  I want to visit some old friends, and maybe a favorite old haunt or two, while my spouse, suffering from pilgrimage deprivation, takes two long hikes—one with an old school chum, and the other with our niece Elizabeth.  But my sojourn will begin in suburban Sevenoaks, Kent, the home of my in-laws, John and Margaret Newman.

             I wrote a blog post about my last visit to Sevenoaks, just about a year ago.  It was there that I found hanging on the wall of a charity shop a wooden heraldic shield with the Fleming coat of arms and the Fleming motto (“Let the deed shaw”) artfully incised upon it.  I mentioned this interesting detail, admitting that I had been unaware that there even was a Fleming coat of arms, let alone a Fleming motto. I did a little research of the whimsical kind that the Internet makes possible.  I was able to identify the artist—who turned out to be a nice retired gentleman somewhere up in Ontario—from a wood-burned signature on the back of the shield.  I had a nice exchange of letters with him.  He used to make such heraldic clan shields as a hobby, more than twenty years ago, using the models found in a standard heraldic encyclopedia.  He had done this one for some Canadian Fleming, and had no clue as to how it got to Kent.  But Canadian Flemings loom large in this tale.

             About three weeks later a stranger I met somewhere, upon learning my name, asked me if I were “connected to the Fleming of Fleming College.”  I had never heard of that either, so I just said “No”.  Then the previously unknown (to me) Fleming College began appearing everywhere in my field of vision.  It seems to be an important technical institute in Canada, or rather confederation of colleges, taking its name from an eminent Scottish-Canadian engineer of the nineteenth century, Sir Sandford Fleming, a bridge-builder, the Roebling of the North.  Fleming College naturally has the essential perquisites of a North American institution of higher education, namely sweat-shirts and a coat of arms, both of which I then began to encounter on a seemingly daily basis.

 

             

I had supposed that “Let the Deed Shaw”—literally let the deed be manifest--must mean something like “Handsome Is As Handsome Does,” or “Actions Speak Louder Than Words," or “Walk the Walk” or some other such sentiment of Presbyterian uplift.  Then—in the accidental course of some of my reading in medieval history--I learned how Let the deed shaw actually became the Fleming motto!  On February 10, 1306 Robert the Bruce had an arranged meeting with his rival John (“Red”) Comyn at Dumfries.  In order to guarantee the peaceable nature of their parley the Bruce had established its venue as the chancel of the impressive Franciscan church in the center of the town.  The men naturally unbuckled their swords and left them at the church door.  Unfortunately for Comyn, it turned out that Robert the Bruce had neglected to set aside his smaller dagger.  The meeting did not go well.  A violent quarrel (rixa) irrupted.  The Bruce stabbed Comyn with his dagger, apparently next to the high altar.  He then walked out of the church to his waiting kinsmen and said the equivalent in Middle Scots of “Oops!  I lost it.  I think maybe I killed him.”  The exact words of his cousin Roger de Kirkpatrick have happily been recorded.  Crying out “I mak siccar!” (I’ll make sure) he rushed into the church, sword in hand, and, well, made siccar.

That is how “I mak siccar” became the Kirkpatrick family motto, but there was still a small margin of yet further certainty left for the Flemings.  Sir Robert Fleming then went into the church, sword in hand.  He decapitated the dead or dying body of John Comyn and brought his dripping prize to the church porch.  Dangling the severed trophy by its gory locks, he spoke the immortal words: “Let the deed shaw.”  There are practically no limits to the eloquence of which a Fleming is capable if you only give him his head. 

            The interesting point that the legal historian W. D. H. Sellar draws from this history is that Robert the Bruce cannot have been regarded by knowledgeable contemporaries as guilty of murder, since he acted in hot rather than in cold blood. Medieval murder required premeditation.  This is an important point for the technical legal vocabulary as it develops in various parts of the English-speaking world.  What Robert the Bruce did in the greyfriars’ church was to be sure “inappropriate” (to use the current term of art of academic discipline committees) but it was not enough to get him excommunicated.  So after a few compulsory Anger Management Seminars he was able to go on to become the great Scottish National Hero.

            What I take from the story is a little different.  Can’t we come up with an alternative Fleming family iconography?  How about Sir Alexander Fleming holding a steaming Petri plate of penicillin with the device Let the wee gerrrms perrrish?

Misspeaking

William Archibald Spooner

      Eminent for the Spoken Word

Todd Akin

The verb misspeak does not appear in my desk copy of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.  But then it’s only the ninth edition, from 1987.  If I am going to continue to follow American politics I am going to have to get something more up-to-date, because recently our politicians have been misspeaking all over the place, with a promiscuity that makes my oak tree’s annual production of acorns seem parsimonious.  From the look of things, to misspeak ought to mean to mispronounce, as President Bush used to misspeak nuclear and as practically everybody misspeaks kiln.  Another familiar form of misspeaking, one at which I myself am expert, is to call one offspring by the name of another, or in the climactic sentence of a brilliant lecture on St. Bonaventure’s theory of something or other, to attribute it to St. Thomas.

            But political misspeak, like political speak altogether, is of a different genus.  To misspeak politically is to get caught out in a lie, or in nonsense so appalling that a coherent lie would be preferable to it.  The latest example, as the whole world now knows, features the idiotic remarks of Congressman Todd Akin (R-Missouri), now a candidate for the Senate, concerning pregnancies eventuating from acts of rape.  “From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

            Within a few hours just about everybody in the Amerian political world, led by such vestigial voices of good sense as remain within the Republican Party, was counseling Akin’s immediate if not retroactive retirement from politics; but he still had one staunch supporter.  That was his electoral rival Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), who had just been transformed by fifty-eight words of voodoo gynecology from dead duck to soaring eagle.  Mr. Akin apologized for having misspoken.  But of course he had not misspoken; he had merely spoken idiotically.  I presume he had also fibbed in citing the opinion of “doctors” to authorize the idiocy, but I hope that whoever regulates medical licenses in the state of Missouri has launched a vigorous investigation on the off chance he spoke truth.

            There is of course such a thing as real misspeaking, which can be quite interesting.  In English there is often a considerable gap between the way a word looks on paper and the way it is voiced by native speakers.  Americans misspeak about half the topographic names of England, often to the visible amusement of the locals.  We are also weak on certain surnames.  Why should Saint John be Sinjun, or Taliaferro Tolliver?  Brits wreak their revenge by pronouncing the largest city in Texas as though it were house + ton, which of course Houston Street in lower Manhattan really is.  Curious, that.  I used to listen to Books on Tape as I drove around in my pick-up.  I listened to the British actor Jeremy Irons read an English version of Stendahl’s The Red and the Black.  By this accident I learned that Irons, who is a very classy Shakespearean actor, labored under the misapprehension that the city of Besançon in the Franche Comté is pronounced Bezankon.

            A special category of misspeaks—the spoonerism—is named after William Archibald Spooner (1843-1930) an Oxford don and editor of Tacitus, who allegedly had a penchant for confusing the initial consonants of words in his intended sentences.  Most of the misspeaks attributed to him are probably apocryphal, but the following outpouring of affection for the aging Queen Victoria may be genuine: "Three cheers for our queer old dean!"

Our dear old queen

Our queer old dean

            When I was young there was a radio program called “Pardon My Blooper” that collected many of the verbal blunders recorded from live broadcasts.  Although most of them seemed to feature ribald double entendres, some were charmingly innocent.  One I remember came at the end of a religious program—they used to exist on the major networks—with the announcer signing off with a biblical citation (Ecclesiastes 11:1):  “Remember—cast your broad upon the waters.  This is the National Breadcasting Corporation.”

            I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the best spoonerism that has come my way, allegedly attributable to the Foreign Language Services of the BBC.  It is in French, but French of the very best kind—meaning French that you don’t have to know any French to understand.   The announcer was discussing demographic developments in southern Africa, and in particular the burgeoning population in what are today the coastal provinces of the Cape of Good Hope—the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal.  Intending to say “la population énorme du Cap,” he said instead “la copulation énorme du Pape”!   Perhaps that was what Akin had in mind by “legitimate rape”?

Cap

Pape

Enough to Make One Veep

James Gillray on political campaigners (1795).  Plus ça change...

Political journalism, though specializing in the vacuous, abhors a vacuum. It rushes toward whatever specks of matter become visible at the horizon of the void.  Hence this week it’s all about Congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican vice-presidential candidate-elect.  As careful observers will have noticed, Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche is a radical blog that eschews all issues trivial and superficial in its beeline towards the essential.  I do not intend, therefore, to join the gaggle in a discussion of Mr. Ryan’s possible actuarial and accounting prowess, his presumed behavior, cliff side, to little old ladies in wheelchairs, or the arcana of tax law as it relates to living in a “listed” historical house.  Instead, I want to wonder aloud why Americans are so careless with their democracy.  This topic occasioned my only attempt ever to publish an op-ed piece in the national press, four years ago.  The pain of rejection left permanent scars.  Fortunately the editorial board of Gladly Lerne Gladly Teche is more visionary.

            The hypocrisy surrounding vice-presidential “picks” is egregious.  The chosen person, we are told, stands “one heartbeat away” from the presidency, and thus must have the potential to lead at a moment's capricious notice.  In fact the person is chosen to “balance the ticket,” “help out with the blue-collar vote”, “appeal to women,” “attract evangelicals” or serve some similar function helpful to the aims of the presidential candidate.

            The heated nature of our presidential campaigns creates at least a plausible illusion of democracy in action.  We really are allowed to choose between two contenders.  The outcome is seldom a foregone conclusion, and sometimes it is a real nail-biter.  Even the process by which the presidential contenders emerge has some democratic features, however attenuated.  But the process by which vice-presidential candidates are chosen is one that Louis XIV might approve.

            At the moment, Mr. Romney, Mr. Ryan’s sole elector, has not even been nominated for president by the Republican Party.  We may judge this a mere technicality; but it underscores the blatantly undemocratic nature of the process of selecting vice presidents.  To show how it can be anti-democratic as well as undemocratic we need look no further than the history of the current incumbent.  I have never met Mr. Biden, but I am inclined to like him.  His classical pseudo-proletarian bonhomie is attractive, and there is a humanizing quality to his frequent verbal gaffes.  He has some admirable goals and seems to work hard to achieve them.  Sam Rayburn, Mister Democrat to his generation, was famously reported to have told John Nance Garner that the vice-presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm spit”—in which “spit” was actually a cowardly journalistic substitution for what Rayburn had actually said, what Shakespeare had called the gilded puddle that beasts would cough at.  Well, Mr. Biden proves that it is worth a bucket of warm spit.  But how does he come to stand “a heartbeat away from the presidency”?

Sam Rayburn with osculating veep

Vice President John Nance Garner: FDR never kissed him
 

            Though elections may suggest, vaguely, people the voters want to be president, they are usually less clear in identifying people they don’t want.  But this generality is contradicted by the political history of Vice President Biden.  He twice ran for the presidential nomination, first in 1988, and again in 2008.  In 1988 his candidacy foundered on the exposure of his plagiarism of his own biography!  He had lifted it from the campaign propaganda of British Prime Minister Neil Kinnock.  There is no space here for the details, though I can recommend them to the genteel reader, who is likely to find therein an amusing gloss on the current flap about “You didn’t build that!” Candidate Biden, having been caught in an act of intellectual dishonesty for which most of my academic colleagues would severely discipline, perhaps even expel, a sophomore undergraduate, chose to drop out.

Even Kinnock thought it was funny

             

Twenty years later cultural amnesia had done its healing work, and Mr. Biden once again entered the lists in the Democratic Party’s presidential primary.  Here he faced such awesome competitors as Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and the little known but incandescent Barack Obama.  Biden did not get to first base.  It is debatable whether he made it as far as the batter’s box.  His fatal compliment of his rival Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” was widely suspected of crypto-racism by fellow Democrats.  His showing in the polls was abysmal, though he was slightly ahead of fellow single-digiteer Stephen Colbert, the comedian.  (Is it relevant that Colbert was not actually a candidate?)

            The electors of the Democratic Party in 2008 took quite a while to decide on the person they wanted to be their president.  On the other hand they reached early agreement on some they did not want, Senator Joe Biden conspicuously among them.  One may fairly point out that Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain, who showed considerable staying power in their primary campaigns and gained large numbers of actual votes, enjoyed more democratic legitimacy to stand “one heartbeat away from the presidency” than did Joe Biden.

            Within the context of a system of presidential politics savaged by the symbiosis of the power of Big Money to buy unlimited advertising time and an electorate sufficiently ignorant or indifferent as to form its political decisions on the basis of thirty-second television commercials, the undemocratic mode of anointing vice-presidential candidates will not seem a matter of high priority.  Yet it is odd that nobody even mentions it.  Is our current system really so superior to that of my sixth grade homeroom?  There the person with the second number of votes was vice president.  That imitated the original scheme of our national government, incidentally, under which each elector in the Electoral College cast two votes: most votes, president; second most, vice president.  I am not sure John Adams was a bad vice president just because George Washington didn’t pick him.  Though we are short on bipartisan solutions, we are long on bipartisan problems.  Perhaps the return to a little built-in bipartisan cooperation wouldn’t hurt.