Report on the Report of the Report

            Some years ago a convergence of curious circumstances led to me to write a book about some literary classics of the Cold War.  In order to write about four books that interested me greatly, I felt obliged to read many others that interested me less.  Among the large library I assembled was a best-seller of the year 1958—the year of my graduation from college.  Its author was the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, and its title was Masters of Deceit.  The masters of deceit were the Communists, particularly American Communists—about twenty thousand of them at the time of publication—but the real source of the contagion was Russia.   Hoover himself might be described as a master of the oddly constructed sentence: “Engels was tall and thin, blue-eyed, two years younger than Marx, and a lover of horses and women.”  Horses and women?   Well there’s some masterful deceit right in plain sight.

            Hoover and other prominent anti-Communists of that time saw Russian collusion everywhere.  Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, opined that Dwight Eisenhower was possibly “a conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy”.  Even then, at the height of the Cold War, sane people judged Welch to be a kook.  And I doubt that even he could have gotten his mind around the idea that a future American President might fire a future FBI Director in order to cover up his collusion with Russian politicians and espionage agents.  But in those days the peddlers of embarrassing conspiracy theories were mainly on the right.  We owe to the best minds of our contemporary moment the development of the collusionist scenario.  

What might be called the Mueller Report report issued by Attorney General Barr excited in me two unworthy reactions: surprise, followed closely by a kind of subliminal disappointment.  The latter reveals a degree of political pathology that it is hard to fess up to.   When a patriotic American citizen of conservative temperament is disappointed to learn that his President is not actually treasonous, there is something wrong—wrong with him, of course, but also, perhaps, with something rather larger.   I blame society.  Mr. Mueller and his staff beavered away for two years while maintaining an eloquent silence that our household exegetes at the New York Times and National Public Radio daily transformed for me into the unmistakable portent of high crimes and misdemeanors. 

Is there a separate Pulitzer Prize for headlines?  If so, I want to nominate the Times’s combo of “Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy Says Barr” and “Barr Clears Trump of Obstruction After Mueller Demurs”.   Who is this man Barr with his four-page masterpiece of deceit?  He’s the Attorney General, Mr. Mueller’s boss.   A dull stickler for legal formalities (often called “the rule of law” by the Times) Mr. Mueller, as required, forwards his report to his boss.  There is reason to believe that Barr had thought a bit in advance about how he would handle Mueller’s report when finally submitted.   After all, Barr had recently gone through public confirmation hearings composed in large measure of stern demands from his Democratic inquisitors that, should he be confirmed, he honor and protect the “Mueller probe”, as the press like to call it—demands to which he solemnly submitted before a televised audience of millions.   It may have been his sensitivity to the possibility of distorting in any way Mr. Mueller’s principal finding—that he did not discover that Trump colluded with Russians—that led the Attorney General to cite Mueller’s own words verbatim and punctuate them with quotation marks: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”  To attribute this opinion to Barr may strike one as rather curious: something like attributing Hamlet’s soliloquy to Daniel Day-Lewis.  “Day-Lewis Claims ‘To Be or Not to Be?’ Is Question”. To be fair, by early morning when the print copy of the Times arrived, the absurdity had been removed.  By then, however, Progressive Twitter was in full tweet.  Note that Mueller-Barr speak only of the “Russian government”.  No mention whatsoever of possible random oligarchs, the Bolshoi Ballet or the Nizhny Novgorod United Football Club.

The grousing of sore losers, however, may be drowned out by the bellowing of the sore winner.  President Trump says (or tweets) a lot of unscripted things.  Alas, frequently these things are stupid, too often they are erroneous, and almost always they are ungrammatical.   He did not fail us on this occasion.  Barr had made only two specific citations from the report, in one of which, with regard to the possible charge of obstruction of justice, he quoted Mueller as saying “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”  So, said the President: “a complete and total exoneration”.

And so, I fear, it will go on, and that is a pity.  For it is not as though the only fish our nation has to fry are red herrings.  For example, our elected politicians might address such matters as economic stability, public education, environmental salubrity, physical infrastructure, and the reconstruction of a politics aimed at problem-solving and pursued in civility.  Oh, and then there is foreign policy.  Russian interference did not elect Donald Trump.  The desperate and probably misplaced hope of millions of forgotten Americans did.  Still, our political and journalistic elites have managed to spend the better part of two years in a strange obsession.  So the Masters of Deceit in Moscow have good reason to gloat.  They are a bit short of cash these days.  And with enemies like theirs, who needs expensive friends?  I wonder: does Trump love horses?

The College Admissions Mess

Two circumstances conspire to make this an unusually long essay.  First, it is D-Day, D being the Roman numeral for 500 and this being the five hundredth weekly essay I have published on this site since the appearance of “On Columns, Communists, and Camões” on June 13, 2009.   Even if the chiefly remarkable feature of this performance be its futility, obstinacy, or mere curiosity, racking up a total word count slightly in excess of Gone with the Wind, even if falling slightly short of War and Peace, demands a metaphorical pat on the back.  Of course patting oneself on the back even metaphorically is rather awkward, and could easily lead to a metaphorical dislocated shoulder.

            So I’ve already blown a hundred words on that, and the more important cause of dilation still lies ahead: the “college admissions” scandal that commanded so much news during the last week.  This is, in the first place, a topic of almost universal appeal, and it offered a rarely uncomplicated opportunity to exult in moral superiority and to hate on the filthy rich with impunity.  Furthermore, I know a lot about the topic and have thought about it; so it offers me the personal bonus of imagining that my ideas—some about to be shared with you—are markedly superior to those I have been reading in the press.

The college admissions crisis obviously begins long before college.  Here’s a story from yesterday’s paper.  The keen competition for entrance to the next freshman class in the designated “elite” public high schools in New York City—the Yales and MITs of the system, as it were--yielded a cohort of which only one in ten is black or Hispanic.  Stuyvesant, for example, accepted 897, of whom seven are black.  (A quarter of the more than a million students in the City’s public schools are black).  Admission to the elite schools has long been determined by a single difficult entrance exam, as nearly objective as such things can be, in two subjects: English and math.  The utility of any exam can be questioned, but this one—in addition to being administered with absolute impartiality--is impressively coherent.  English competency is fundamental to the skills of literacy (reading, writing, and effective oral communication); math teaches numeracy and is the gateway skill for the STEM fields.   You thus could say it is a basic test of capacity for high-level work in both the humanities and the sciences.  Appalled, as all of us surely should be, by the reality revealed in the yearly results, Mayor DeBlasio suggests as a remedy chucking the entrance exam in favor of some method more effective in accommodating racial preference. 

I believe the Mayor is a man of good will and sincerely egalitarian instinct; and I presume that it is pure political duress that lies behind his dreadful muddle of means and ends.  The college admissions fraud that has been in the papers is a shameful fiasco, though one made psychologically safe for most of us by the unaffordability of its turpitude.  It is a shock, a disgrace, an embarrassment.  But in terms of actual scandal or crisis it lags far behind the general crisis of American public education.  Our high schools vary enormously in quality, and people know it.  That’s why New York parents will do practically anything to get their kid into Stuyvesant.  Meanwhile throughout the country, but especially in our large cities, schools are failing to prepare young people by the thousands with the skills and discipline to do anything that our economy needs enough to pay for.  Now that is a scandal.  Mr. DeBlasio simply cannot, or dare not, recommend that we chuck out several hundred ineffective school administrators.  And, to be fair, that’s not the root of the problem either.

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes (aka “equity”) are quite different things, and “fairness” will not be achieved by fudging the two.

There seems to be an implicit belief in some kind of free-floating inherent “merit,” untouched by social influences, that will manifest itself in the college admissions process.  That is nonsense.   All of us are the sum of our natural capacities and the efforts that we ourselves and others have expended in developing them.

I can tell you how to be a compelling admissions candidate, but you may not want to listen.  Start by being born intelligent, then cultivate your intelligence with wide reading and other demanding intellectual activities.  Live in a household with two loving parents, both of whom are seriously interested in your educational progress and willing to devote serious time to its pursuit.  Develop some wholesome, demanding and absorbing interests—sports, playing the oboe, bird watching, that sort of thing—and pursue them at a high level.  Eat regular family dinners at a set time, and include in your table talk some serious conversation about serious things.  Try to speak Standard English in complete sentences, and do not shy away from words of three syllables.  And, oh yeah, like, use “like” only as a preposition, conjunction, or a transitive verb.

This is not satire.  I am aware of the decline of the American family, but aware also of the dangerous popular fantasy that the public schools can or should replace its unique educational function.  I cannot go along with Bernie Sanders’s barmy idea of “free college for all,” but I am absolutely in favor of a variety of special, remedial, compensatory, and enrichment programs designed to repair some of the damage inflicted on young people by the social pathologies of those who have brought them into the world.  But, please, don’t call the absence of such pathology “unfair”.

This episode of flagrant cheating by wealthy parents suggests that many people have a very curious notion of the actual nature of institutions of higher education, and of the actual process of entry to them.  There is much indignation at the thought that an applicant admitted on the basis of a store-bought SAT score has violated some rigorously enforced protocol that would have otherwise guaranteed the success of an objectively “deserving” candidate.  In fact there are already so many blind guesses, fudges, finagles, and socially engineered adjustments involved as to knock that idea in the head.  The slightest experience in trying to rank-order a list of even ten similar candidates will cure you of spurious confidence in the objectivity of the exercise.  To call the admissions process an inexact science is to do violence both to science and the concept of exactitude.  We can wax indignant about a Yale athletic coach who feloniously got a house in Florida out of the slack in the system, but he did not create the slack.

Much scorn has been cast upon parents who hired SAT-preppers for their kids.  Really?   For what other major life trials do we consider a lack of preparation to be virtuous?  We have managed to create in the college application business an experience that is an ordeal for most applicants and an actual trauma for many of them. That is why there is a burgeoning private industry of educational consultants, advisors, and consultants.  They offer clients strategic advice, sample SAT exams, mock interviews, critiques of personal essays, and psychological hand-holding.   Only some applicants can afford to make use of these services.  Is this unfair, that is to say, an offense against justice?  You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.  Yet people who undertake strenuous training before trying to climb Mount Everest or auditioning for first violin in the symphony orchestra tend to have better outcomes than those who do not.  There is a certain contradiction in the fact that everybody wants to get into an elite school while nobody wants to be elite.

It’s hard to get into Stanford, but so what?  Few people have an accurate idea of either the large number of American colleges nor of their extraordinary variety.  My dramatic education in these matters derives from nearly a decade’s service as a commissioner of the Middle States accrediting body, when I became aware of all of the colleges in several populous states.  Consciously picking a low and conservative number, I will say that there are three hundred terrific colleges in this country, most of them unknown even by name to most high school seniors.  How could anyone shed a tear at failing to gain admission to Duke?

On the one hand you have armies of parents and counselors desperately trying to get their kids into certain schools.  On the other you have each year another group of financially beleaguered institutions desperately trying to recruit enough students to keep in business.  Hampshire College, which early in my career was a trendy, pace-setting, wave-of-the-future kind of place, is in the process of going belly up.  With an endowment of roughly fifty million, Hampshire is not without resources.  But perhaps a private institution that doesn’t have a minimum of, say, a quarter of a million per undergraduate might as well close up shop.

            One emerging attitude that particularly takes me aback is that our private colleges and universities—still the envy of the world—should adopt admissions policies that take no account of their history, customs, or traditions.  But think about this for a second.  What sort of place is Harvard, founded 1636?  Is it a public amenity like any other?  Consider the toilet facilities at Interstate Highway rest stops; consider the Emergency Room at any hospital.  You want and expect such places to exist, and that they be clean, safe, and available indifferently to absolutely anybody needing to use them.  Then there’s the little restaurant where you always celebrate your anniversary.  You have been on friendly terms with the proprietors for years.  Your children and theirs were on the same high school athletic teams.  Consider the parish church, civic club, political party, or do-gooder organization to which, on account of your belief in its ethical mission, you give generously of your money, your time, your leadership talent, possibly as an elected officer, director, or trustee.  These are all public venues.  All colleges in theory share the same mission: the preservation and transmission of knowledge.  But the very essence of a college, as its published propaganda will tell you ad nauseum, is community.  Human community is based in more or less intimate personal relationships, very often extended over considerable periods of time.  In admitting a freshman class, an institution is grossly remiss if it does not give serious thought to the nature of its community.  That is far from “perpetuating the old boys’ club”—one of the more tedious canards I have heard around here for years.  On the whole the Ivy League institutions were remarkably lithe in evolving from small theological seminaries at the nation’s founding to huge charities and engines for the redistribution of their wealth in the form of social capital.  The racialized “affirmative action” of recent decades is but one aspect of the extraordinary role they have played over the generations.  Maintaining some sense of communal continuity over decades of revolutionary change requires a balancing act.  It requires, too, abandoning pseudo-scientific pretensions about a process of admission along with the odd neo-Bolshevik notion that the virtues we believe to be inherent in the education we offer our current students become despicable in our alumni.   So if old Gotrocks Schnakenfuss of the class of ’24 thought so much of his education that he gave you twenty-four million dollars for scholarship grants for penurious undergraduates, that should not be a strike against his accomplished but far from penurious great-granddaughter now a supplicant at your gates.

Troping the Light Fantastic

The Venerable Bede, bagging a trope 

American political discourse has arrived at what used to be called a pretty pass.  Though few political speakers are very good at saying things themselves, they are daily more certain about what other people are under no circumstances allowed to say.  The Hon. Ihlan Omar, temporarily incumbent in Paul Bunyan’s old Congressional district, keeps making anti-Semitic comments.  Or comments alleged to be…or perceived by some as…They are to be forgiven, according to the Speaker of the House, because she doesn’t understand the meaning of her words.  Ms. Pelosi’s intersectionalist lieutenant, Mr. Clyburn, explains it all in terms of the relative remoteness of the Holocaust as compared to the immediacy of Africa’s suffering.  Yet to anyone measuring the historical perspective of our national oratory with an instrument less fine-tuned than a micrometer, an American politician making anti-Semitic remarks perhaps attains at best the novelty of “Dog Bites Man.”   Rev that up with a little global or intersectional fine-tuning (Muslim politician makes anti-Semitic remarks) and you’re closer to the level of  “Dog Bites Alpo”.   If in doubt, read the “debates” of any meeting of the Arab League.  Since my field is philology rather than politics, I shall comment less on Representative Omar’s content than on the terminology journalists choose to characterize it.  Hers are not “controversial remarks,” accusations, insults, slurs or even mere characterizations; they are “anti-Semitic tropes”.  In fact tropes are all the rage these days.

In this linguistic turn a medievalist finds news good and bad.  The good news is that the power of the trope (even abused) may banish from polite usage the even more annoying meme, which was threatening fatally to infect the prose of the semi-literate commentariat on whom I depend to keep my blood pressure up.  The bad news of course is the debauch of the term trope.

If you want to get the real dope on the trope you have to do what few journalists have done and read a book by the Venerable Bede, published circa 710 CE, called De schematibus et tropis*.  It’s the first, and so far as I am concerned, the last word on tropes.  In it we learn that trope (tropos) is a Greek umbrella term for various figures of speech abundant in the Scriptures.  “The Greeks pride themselves on having invented these figures or tropes,” says Bede. If you want to know the Greek tropes, specifically (and, believe me, you don’t), they are prolepsis, zeugma, hypozeuxis, syllepsis, anadiplosis, anaphora, epanalepsis, epizeuxis, paranomasia, schesis onamaton, paromoeon, homoeotelon, homoeoptoton, polyptoton, hirmos, polysyndeton, and dialyton. 

 Bede continues: “A trope is a figure in which a word, either from need or for the purpose of embellishment, is shifted from its proper meaning to one similar but not proper to it.  There are thirteen tropes which Latin custom and usage recognize: Metaphor, Catachresis, Metalepsis, Metonymy, Antonomasia, Epithet, Synechdote, Onomatopoeia, Periphrasis, Hyperbaton, Hyperbole, Allegory, Homoeosis.”

The controversy in the halls of Congress is being prosecuted in the murky borderland between classical anti-Semitism and political criticism of the current Israeli government.  With a daring trope constructed of implied epithet and a pariphrastic onomatopoetical catachresis Representative Omar had some harsh things to say about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), formerly known to me as a hard-driving lobbying outfit but now, possibly, a semi-sacral institution of the American civil religion enjoying a protected status and exemption from criticism somewhere between that of Smile Train and the Sierra Club.  Specifically, Ms. Omar’s trope posited a possible connection between lobbying and money: “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”  Being a pensioner rather than a politician, I required a few moments to absorb the force of this particular trope.  Benjamins?  Then (thanks to T. S. Eliot) I got it! O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag--My daughter! my ducats! my Benjamins!  You see, down our way, so far from the corridors of power, it tends to be mainly about the Georges, although now and again, during the week when the Social Security checks show up, it sometimes rises briefly to be about the Abrahams.

It’s all about the Benjamins, baby!  Political controversy aside, that’s a fantastic trope, and one that can illustrate the extended meaning of the term as it later developed with regard to the liturgy.  A musical trope is a kind of pleasing metrical filler—think of it, perhaps, in terms of the chorus of a folk song—that adorns and amplifies the primary text.  Here is the textbook definition: “in medieval church music, melody, explicatory text, or both added to a plainchant melody”.  The technical term for this kind of musical elaboration, incidentally, is farsing.  I don’t know how glad you are to learn this, but you do need to know.

You find tropes attached to psalms and other liturgical hymns, and there are whole books (tropers) full of them.  But what medieval chant could this farce farse—which is to say, could this trope trope?  Well, consider the well-known liturgical hymn “Sed et Omnia Vasa”.  The text for this hymn was taken from the account of the fantastic wealth of King Solomon’s (3 Kings 10:21), a man whose conspicuous consumption included the biblical equivalent of lighting his cigars with banknotes.  “Sed et omnia vasa de quibus potabat rex Salomon erant aurea…non erat argentum nec alicuius pretii putebatur in diebus Salomonis.  “Moreover all the vessels out of which king Solomon drank, were of gold:…there was no silver, nor was any account made of it in the days of Solomon.”   A suitable trope for this text could be “Et omnia erant de re aurea:—it was all about the gold, baby.  

*”Bede’s De Schematibus et Tropis—A Translations,” by Gussie Hecht Tanenhaus, in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 48 (1962): 238-253.

           

A Patriot in Song

Professor Francis James Child (1825-1896)

The sense of the word “hero”—once limited mainly to famous warriors, explorers, and self-sacrificing patriots--has apparently expanded so considerably as to include any member of our armed forces and most civilian “first responders”, at least the ones who are not racist pigs, another category of the lexical growth industry.  I do not begrudge the generous instinct to create more heroes.  Indeed, I want to add yet another subspecies: the academic hero.  That is the category to which one could plausibly assign Audubon, to whom I devoted a recent post; and it is certainly the category for Francis James Child.  Child was born in Boston in 1825.  The Republic was not yet half a century old.  Though he would become a famous Harvard professor and the bosom companion of Brahmins like William James and Charles Eliot Norton, he was born into modest circumstances and was a product of those democratic and meritocratic impulses that continue to animate our higher education at its best.  I, of all people, can “relate” to a nation that values the pursuit of old Germanic philology as well as the pursuit of the almighty dollar.  If you can believe Thomas Jefferson, he was not less proud to be president of the American Philosophical Society than to be President of his country!

Child was of a scholarly generation that treasured the primary text.  That is, literature itself was more important to him than the ingenious prolusions of professors upon it.  Therefore he was first of all an editor.  But it was impossible to do groundbreaking editorial work on Chaucer from America in 1850.  He therefore brought out five annotated volumes of Spenser—no trivial task.  Then, both as scholar and as patriot, he designed a vast project of unique American significance.

Most of us know something of the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England.  We tend to be less knowledgeable about succeeding generations of British immigrants, mainly from the North of England, from Scotland, and from Ulster, the so-called “Scotch-Irish” whose arrival antedated the large Catholic immigration of the potato famine.  They were mainly no-frills Protestants used to very plain living, and they swarmed westward through Tidewater Virginia and the Carolinas to the Appalachians and the Cumberlands, into the Ohio Valley and the lush forests of Kentucky and Tennessee.  These pioneers travelled light: a Bible, a gun, agricultural tools, spindles and sometimes even a spinning wheel.  More than a few, though, had musical instruments, and practically all carried within their memories an invisible inner treasury of popular song passed on to them by family elders and hayseed bards from the time of the War of the Roses to the Battle of New Orleans.  In the Faerie Queene Spenser had deployed one kind of epic.  In his huge edition of the transplanted English and Scottish Ballads (8 volumes, 1857-59, later 5 volumes of larger format) Child laid out another: the epic poetry of the young American republic a-making.

The cultural importance of folk music, real folk music, not its pallid contemporary simulacrum, is impossible for us to understand today.  The commodification of popular music, and the big business that generates and distributes it, were unknown before the Civil War, and hardly known before the twentieth century.  Child, though a polyglot, was a native speaker of American English and a scholar of early English dealing primarily with printed texts; but his enterprise inspired, and sometimes provoked, those field-workers who eventually would be called ethno-musicologists to try to preserve native Amerindian traditions and to study the musical archaeology of large and disparate American populations of African and Iberian origin, among others.  The English musicologist Cecil Sharp, an early twentieth-century heir of F. J. Child, went ballad-hunting in Appalachia during the First World War, recording a vast repertory of songs to be returned, marvelously preserved, to the crofts and cottages whence they had migrated a century earlier.

The old ballads are about everything under the sun: battles, sea voyages, hunting parties, public executions, country fairs, and supernatural events galore.    Chevy Chase, based in a half-remembered anecdote about an obscure fourteenth-century battle as reduced to a brawl between two great Border chieftains, is a tale of a great slaughter of deer that turned into a great slaughter of men.  Yet what power it has.  It was already old in the sixteenth century, when one of that age’s most elegant poets, Sir Philip Sidney, said this about it: “Certainly I must confess mine own barbarousness; I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?”

But mostly the old ballads are about the two great themes of world romance: Love and Death.  “Would you, my lords”—so begins Bédier’s reconstruction of the medieval Tristan and Isolde—“would you hear a fine story of love and death?”  And, boy, do we get one.  “Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” says the Song of Songs, “for love is as strong as death”.  My grandfather Fleming used to sit on his porch in Arkansas half mumbling, half crooning “Barbara Allen”.  I wish I had paid more attention.  “Barbara Allen” is apparently the most recorded song in musical history.  I could wish to have added to the repertory.  I don’t know whether any two singers have agreed as to its words.  Like many old ballads it is an at times inchoate verbal quilt.  Yet a discernible plot forces its way like a red cord through the song’s peripheral incoherencies and shifting points of view; and it is the plot of tragic love.  Cruel Barbara Allen makes all the lads sing “well away” or “lack a day” or, presumably, any trisyllabic bit of verbal stuffing that could rhyme in -ay.  All that is the noise.  The signal is that cruel beauty must come to know the everlasting sorrow of love and death, must find indeed that they are the same.  “My true love died for me today,” she tells her distraught mother. “I’ll die for him tomorrow.”  Though she spurned him in life, they will lie till Judgment Day in contiguous graves in the old churchyard; yet even now the bard is not finished, for “out of his grave grew a red, red rose, and out of hers a briar.”

The Rack

 James V. Forrestal with Harry S. Truman

Shakespeare’s famous “Seven Ages of Man” have through the wonders of modern science been augmented by an eighth: the ætas medica, for the variable duration of which one’s chief occupation is being transported to and fro various modern day temples of Asclepius.  Last week I had a kind of medical version of a busman’s holiday.  Given a week’s reprieve from my wonted regime, I spent my Wednesday instead in a gleaming new wing of the Langone Hospital in New York having what is best described as a micro-collander infiltrated into my cardiac appendage.  There are not too many things that leave you happy to get back to your good old chemo, so when one appears it needs be noted.

            But today I’ll be back to chemo, which takes place in a medical suite in Plainsboro, some three miles south of my house.  When I first arrived in these parts Plainsboro was a small village clustered around an old church and surrounded by potato fields, presumably the “plains” alluded to in its romantic name.  All that has changed, and it’s quite a bustling place now.  Gone are the potato fields.  They put up a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot.  Actually it's a Marriott, a CVS pharmacy, and a Panera, but same idea.  Also numerous medical offices, always to be found in proximity to retirement communities and nursing homes, of which there are several round and about.  The opium den I frequent—euphemistically denominated an “infusion lab”--is a spacious well-lighted place divided into semi-private cubicles, each furnished with a sybaritically luxurious high-tech chair with built-in butt-warmer and more bells and whistles than First Class on Air France.

            To get there involves driving through Princeton’s Forrestal campus, the site of the Plasma Physical Laboratory and its Project Matterhorn’s continuing efforts to achieve fusion and an energy bonanza of mind-boggling opulence.  Few humanists have even been there, but I am lucky enough to have a most remarkable friend, a retired physicist, who has shown me around a couple of times.  The campus is named for James V. Forrestal of the Class of 1915.  The origins of my interest in Forrestal are eccentric; he is the only famous person known to me with the initials JVF.  He was a genuine war hero, the brilliant Secretary of the Navy more consequential for the defeat of Japan than even Admirals Halsey or Nimitz.  He then became the first American Secretary of Defense.  He deserves to be memorialized by the academy; he was a great proponent of government support for scientific research.  Unfortunately he is today more remembered for his death than for his life.  On May 22, 1949, he appears to have leapt to his death from a sixteenth-floor window of a hospital in Bethesda, MD.  I say “appears,” though suicide is not in much doubt—just enough to float a dozen conspiracy theories involving Harry Truman, the embryonic Israeli Mossad, and/or extraterrestrials.

            Soon after I arrived in England in 1958 there appeared on the cultural scene a literary sensation in the form of a novel: The Rack, by A. E. Ellis, the pseudonym of one Derek Lindsay.  So far as I know, the literary world never heard of this one-book wonder again; but sometimes one book suffices.  The Rack is the story of a tubercular English military officer, Paul, who survived the War but is unlikely to survive the “cure” of two years of gruesome therapy in an Alpine sanatorium.  It naturally invited comparison with the great Magic Mountain (1924) of the great Thomas Mann, so I will offer one.  Mann’s sanatorium is all about philosophy, Ellis’s about tuberculosis.  Seldom has such a repellent subject received such a tragicomic treatment.  For the comedy part you might begin with the daunting advice in a brochure prepared by the institution’s weird superintendent.  “Sexual activities are strongly discounselled during illness and convalescence.  Patients should at all times bear in mind that a single orgasm (male or female) is equivalent, in energy expended, to a five-mile walk over rough country.”   The tragedy part, of which there is considerably more, is the remorselessness of suffering inflicted by a dread disease exacerbated by human folly and cruelty.  The reader very soon suspects that by the last page Paul will be contemplating self-destruction.  And so he is, and in a dauntingly literary fashion.  He reads on the last page of the Memoirs of the painter Benjamin Haydon the artist's anguished misquotation from the last page of King Lear written, perhaps, only minutes before he killed himself: “Stretch me no more on this rough world.”  Paul realizes the citation is slightly wrong.  Shakespeare’s phrase is “upon the rack of this tough world.”

            I read The Rack and numerous other books in paperback Penguins shared among a circle of friends.  One particularly brilliant member of this group, speaking of the novel’s ending, said to me: “He must have been thinking of James Forrestal”.  For the evidence suggests that Forrestal spent his last moments alive copying out some twenty choral verses from Sophocles’s tragedy Ajax, foreshadowing the warrior’s suicide, the subject of the play.  It little surprised me that he knew about Forrestal, for he knew about practically everything; but it does rather haunt me.  My friend’s name, too, was James; and less than a year later he put the muzzle of a fowling gun to his head and pulled the trigger.  Vex not his ghost: O, let him pass!  He hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.

The Death of Ajax (Greek krater)

Fish and Fowl

John James Audubon, American Patriot and Hero

One spring day a few years ago I stepped out into my back yard and saw some large whitish thing, roughly football size, lying on the grass.  It was a large fish.  It appeared to me to have been gutted and beheaded, halfway on a journey to becoming two generous filets.  I was puzzled.  Just then I became aware of a large shadow moving across the grass, along with a kind of hooshing noise above me.  A bald eagle alighted on a dead branch of a larch tree some forty yards away, looking down menacingly at me or the fish or both.  I rather divined what was happening.  In the first place I was laying eyes on the eagle reported to have taken up residence down by the lake.  More accurately, that eagle was laying eyes on me.  That was plenty exciting in and of itself.   Secondly, the eagle had to be responsible, somehow, for the fish on my lawn.  This likely supposition gained greater strength yet when, after I had absented myself for ten minutes to attend to a chore, I returned to the yard to find neither fish nor fowl.

            This was not an experience soon if ever to be forgotten, but it was brought back to me in a delightful way by some reading I was doing over the weekend.  Alice Ford, the biographer of Audubon, put together a marvelous volume entitled Audubon by Himself, a kind of bricolage autobiography cobbled together from a variety of the ornithologist’s large and disparate body of writing.

Audubon describes a “stake out” below a cliff side above the Green River “near its junction with the Ohio”.  He and a birding companion lay in wait for impatient hours in hopes of spotting the adult eagles returning to the nest they had noticed there, in which there appeared to be at least two babes left on their own.  At last the male parent arrived, bearing a fish for his young.   He was soon followed by his mate—his peer in piscatorial prowess, but his superior in size and sharpness of eye.  A keen human-spotter, she caught sight of the imperfectly concealed birdwatchers below.  “She dropped her prey with a loud shriek to the male, and together they hovered over our heads and kept up a growling cry to intimidate and foil our suspected designs...We picked up the fish that the mother had let fall, a White Perch of about five and a half pounds, its head broken in, and its back torn…”

            This anecdote, which in a flash illuminated my own mysterious experience nearly two hundred years later, leads Audubon to some surprising remarks regarding the bald eagle.  The slow but apparently decisive recovery of our national mascot, which until recently seemed doomed to extinction in the ecological maelstrom of contemporary America, has me and most other armchair naturalists filled with pious joy.  It is rather sobering to hear the following from Audubon:  “I grieve that [the eagle] should have been selected as the emblem of my country, and agree with Franklin that it is a ‘bird of bad moral character’…. not a proper emblem for the brave and honest Cincinnati of America, all officers of the Continental Army, who drove out the British ‘King Birds’ from our country, although these are perfectly suited to represent those French knights called Chevaliers d’Industrie.”

            This literary flight may require some explication.   For Audubon, born of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the recourse to zoological political allegory`, such as that of Gulliver’s sojourn among the Houyhnhnms, was perhaps nearly instinctual. If Bernard Mandeville could write a major work of political theory called Fable of the Bees, Audubon could find his own fables among the birds.  For him, It was always more than just zoology.  As a lad, he had been encouraged to study the birds by his enthusiastically ornithological father.  “He excited me, to make me study them and to raise my mind toward their great Creator.”  And of course he had more than a patina of classical learning.  Most people who have thought about it at all probably think, as I once did, that Cincinnati, OH, must have been named after the Roman farmer-general, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who under importunity set aside his plowshare to take up the sword, only to return to the land the moment he had secured victory for his compatriots.  Of course the city was so named, but only at one remove.  Why the plural form?   I learned the answer to that question a few years ago when I gave an after-dinner talk to theNew Jersey Society of the Cincinnati.  The members of this Society, of which there are autonomous chapters in all the colonial states, must demonstrate a direct line of ancestry to an American officer of the Revolution. The Cincinnati were veterans of the officer corps of the Continental Army, a group very numerous among the Virginians and Carolinians who were the principal pioneers in the Ohio Valley.  They named the largest city on the river after—themselves.   Some of them were redeeming land grants promised to them for their heroic war service.  These “brave and honest” men were nothing like rapacious eagles in their deportment.  Audubon, though a quintessential American, spoke the heavily accented English of a native Francophone, and he occasionally indulges his French erudition.  The phrase chevalier d’industrie, which has now entirely fallen out of usage, sounds pretty good—unless you grasp the specialized sense of Latin industria from which it derived.  Audubon refers to the “knights” of—well, the knights of monkey business, funny business, shady business, flim-flam, sharp practice, strong-arm stuff.  Audubon thought the bald eagle, a raptor and a bully, had the morals of a magpie or a blue jay!  Eagles, he suggests, are the mafia of the skies.  And he knew a fair amount about birds.

Green New Deal

If the intention of the proposers of the Green New Deal (GND) was to initiate a debate, they were wildly successful in this household.  Joan sees it as welcome evidence that important people are finally getting serious about the climate crisis, and that consciousness-raising is more important than the specific proposals.  I view it as a formula for disaster and national bankruptcy, and since I am the one writing this essay, it will be my perspective you have to endure.

                    As the debate is already off to a bad start, let me say that I find in Ms. Ocasio-Cortez many attractive features of youth, including vivacity, idealism, sincerity, good humor—qualities far from conspicuous in many of the grim conservatives whose criticisms of her often combine a personal element of churlishness with condescension.  Admittedly her plan’s rollout was so maladroit that its proponents had to remove all specifics from the Internet, leaving only a feel-good congressional resolution.  It is easy to play “Gotcha!” with such clauses of the now vanished GND document as a guaranteed income for those unwilling to work.  I thought all along that was evidence of hasty copy-editing.  What excites my incredulity are features the plan’s authors undoubtedly do mean.  In an op-ed in yesterday’s Times David Brooks pretty well identifies those points, though even he falls for the suggestion that the “GND” is plausibly modeled on FDR’s New Deal.  The New Deal was never a comprehensive program based in a fixed theory, let alone in “science”.  Roosevelt himself frequently admitted its improvisational character and spoke without embarrassment of the experimental, trial-by-error nature of many of its disparate parts.

Most people I talk with do not recognize the origin of the phrase “New Deal”.  They think it has something to do with the sort of deal-making supposedly associated with great deal-makers.  In fact, it is a term borrowed from various card games, especially poker.  A “new deal” is a fresh distribution of resources, allowing a new chance to players unsuccessful with the hand they were first dealt.  It is thus a fresh beginning or a radical “reset”.  Brooks also seems to accept the greenists' poor analogy between their program and the national effort demanded by World War II.  As prodigious as the war effort was, it pales in comparison with what the GND would demand.  In fact of all the pharaonic enterprises recorded by history, only one strikes me as vaguely analogous: Stalin’s Five Year Plans, which, though somewhat less radical than the GND, approximated its proposed duration.  The Five Year Plans were designed to transform a vast agrarian nation whose land-use customs had developed over centuries into a heavy industrial powerhouse, and to do that in a very short time.  A sideline was the pseudo-industrialization of agriculture.  The plans were successful to the degree that they greatly increased the production of pig iron and electrical power.  They certainly helped enable Soviet victory in the world war. But the human costs were obscene even for the criminal state established by the Bolsheviks.  In order to prosecute a pharaonic project successfully it is necessary to gain or compel popular buy-in and get rid of all critics of Pharaoh, real or potential.  There were hecatombs of the purged and liquidated, and armies of the enslaved.  Stalin “reformed” agriculture by murdering or exiling millions and by turning the breadbasket of the Ukraine into a wilderness.  It is inconceivable to me that Americans will voluntarily sign up for the GND.  And if not voluntarily, under what duress?

            This melodramatic question brings us to the larger issue of Socialism and its strangely recidivist appearance on the American political scene.  Here we shall get nowhere without agreement on definitions.  “Communism,” said Lenin “is Soviet power plus electrification.”  Socialism is not elective democracy plus widely supported social programs, as in Scandinavia.  It is not even the Welfare State program of the post-War Labour Party in Britain.  No people has ever freely elected Socialism, which according to Marxist theory can be born only in violence.  The fundamental requirement of Socialism as imagined by its inventors and implemented by its historical practitioners is total State ownership of the “means of production”.  Its necessary corollary requires unchallengeable coercive State power to administer that arrangement.  Those are both terrible ideas, and the fact that Donald Trump opposes them redeems them not one whit.

The history of Socialism—not the theory, but “actually existing Socialism” as its proponents called it—has been calamitous.   Let me recommend two heavy academic books in defense of that sweeping condemnation: The Black Book of Communism (1997) and Martin Malia’s The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia (1994). Nor was it any accidental aberration or external intrusion, as opposed to the essential features of Socialism—state ownership of the means of production and state coercion demanded for their operation—that doomed the USSR, the East Block, Cambodia, half of Africa, Cuba, and, yes, Venezuela.

Yes, I know, it can’t happen here.  In truth, I actually don’t think it can; and I am reluctant to engage further in competing apocalypticisms.  The “road to serfdom” is certainly the last thing on the minds of the well-meaning proposers of the GND.  But I fear a great deal else must not have been on their minds either—such as the potential damage that vatic half-bakedism can do to a very serious cause.  To be fair, the GND is not half-baked.  It’s been nowhere near an oven.  As Brooks puts it: “The authors of the Green New Deal assume that technocratic planners can master the movements of 328 million Americans and design a transportation system so that ‘air travel stops becoming necessary.’  (This is from people who couldn’t even organize the successful release of their own background document.)”