Interim Report

A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words.  This one is worth more than that, and way more than the unwritten eight or nine hundred that I chose to sacrifice last week while I played hooky from GLGT to drop in on a road trip undertaken by our eldest granddaughter, Sophia.   She is in the process of switching jobs and coasts and was driving with all her gear from Los Angeles to New York.  According to Alexa, that’s 2,797 miles by the quickest Interstate route.  Sophia, giving the interesting priority over the hasty, added the better part of another thousand miles to that.  She picked me up in the Little Rock airport on Monday morning and we drove north to my old homestead in Baxter County, now occupied by my cousin Millie and her husband Doug, lovely people with whom we had a delightful, mellow visit.  It was a joy to introduce Sophia to parts of my youth that thus far have been for her only legendary.  We stomped around the farm a very little bit, enough to verify visually that my own couple of hundred adjoining acres still seem to be there, and indulged in a long show-and-tell with family memorabilia.  The next day we drove eastward toward Memphis—meaning that we had made half of the full circuit of the most beautiful parts of the Ozarks.  From Memphis we drove next morning to Murfreesboro, in Middle Tennessee, where we had lunch with John and Betty Dixon, the parents of our daughter-in-law Katie.  I don’t know any technical term for that particular status of relationship, so “superb hosts” will have to do.  Thence Sophia drove on eastward without me, and I flew home from Nashville the next day.  I reckon I made only about fifteen percent of Sophia’s miles with her, but I think that neither she nor I shall soon forget them. 

O, yes, the photograph.  Here are granddaughter and grandfather on the bank of the White River at the spot where the Shipps Ferry Road deadends, about seven miles south of Mountain Home, Arkansas.  The ferry had long since disappeared like so much of my childhood.  But Old Man River—he just keeps rolling along.  May the beauty last forever.

Sophia's Road Trip

This is a photograph of two of my close blood relations.  The man is my younger brother, Richard Neville Fleming, born December 2, 1941.  The woman is his niece, our eldest granddaughter, Sophia Elizabeth Fleming-Benite, born June 19, 1993.  They are standing outside a perimeter fence of the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico on January 22^nd.  Our latest ludicrous government shutdown lasted only three days, but one of them happened to be January 22^nd, so that the monument itself was closed.

            Like most family photographs this one will be of interest only to a small circle of people who actually know the subjects of the photograph and the circumstances in which it was taken.  But—as is also doubtless true of thousands of other such  photographs--it might, were it able to be given voice, prove to be an eloquent testimony to currents of social change in post-War America so powerful as to merit the adjective “revolutionary.”

            Rick, as he is known in the family, was born to two parents with high-school educations and chronic financial challenges, children of the Great Depression.  He spent the War years, while his father fought in the South Pacific, with his maternal grandmother in Denver.  After that he lived intermittently on a farm in Arkansas and in numerous places in the West and Southwest to which his parents took him in their peripatetic, rather quixotic, and (it must be said) futile search for prosperity.  The permanent results of traumatic birth injury conspired with an unsettled life, and he never finished his public schooling.  He has lived for many years in Las Cruces, N.M., the last place our parents landed.  Before his retirement he worked on the maintenance crews of New Mexico State University.

            Sophia was born in California, half a century after Rick.  Both her parents were Ph. D. college professors.  At the age of five she moved to New York.  She grew up on Washington Square and attended excellent schools.  She spent her four high-school years in Paris at a demanding and prestigious academy, at which she excelled in her academic work, became fluent in French, and generally exploited the resources of a great world capital.  She returned to America to attend Johns Hopkins, to which she was a successful “early action” applicant.  There she took her degree, with distinction, in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences.  Though the job market for new graduates was not robust three years ago, she immediately secured a dream job with one of the glitzy, fast-moving social media outfits.  Her first assignment was in New York, but she was soon transferred to the mother ship on the West Coast.

            This is not a tale of two cities, but an abbreviated account of two members of a single American family.  There is more to “diversity” than is sometimes acknowledged by our cultural arbiters.  It’s more diverse.  Sophia is at heart a New Yorker, and at length concluded that she had sufficiently imbibed of the lotus slurpies of Venice Beach.  She has resigned from the world of nineteen-year-old entrepreneurs and is returning to New York to take up a challenging executive position in a very different though equally innovative enterprise: one that deals with solid real property rather than evanescent pixils.  She has always wanted to do a leisurely continental road trip, and here’s her chance.  She had a yard sale, crammed her remaining lares and penates into a big car, and took off some days ago in a vaguely easterly direction, with the second stop being Uncle Rick in Las Cruces.  What a lovely young woman!

            Realizing that a long drive could be a lonely drive, Sophia has lined up several other visits with friends along the way—a way that includes Marfa, TX, Austin, Dallas, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, and Washington.  Those are only the stops I know about.  Her plan to avoid solitude likewise exploits the madcap nature of her family.  Her young sister Cora will fly out to Dallas (or is it Austin?) to hang out for a day or two in Austin (or is it Dallas?)  And her grandfather, who has clearly lost his mind, will next Monday fly out at the crack of dawn to Little Rock, where in theory he will get into Sophia’s passenger seat to be driven north to his old stomping grounds in Baxter County and an overnight with a cousin.   We then hustle across to Memphis (Graceland being a must), and the following day on to Murfreesboro in Middle Tennessee, the site of a significant Civil War battle and—of more immediate relevance—the home of our friends the Dixons, whose daughter Katie vastly enriched the social cachet of the Flemings by marrying our son Richard.  There Sophia and I shall part, and I shall return from Nashville to Newark on Thursday while she speeds ever eastward through the Cumberland Gap and into some state or another that borders on the Atlantic.  In telling you all this I am under no illusion that it is comprehensible, let alone engaging, but I hope to explain in advance why there will be no timely post next Wednesday.  I mean, what the hell?  If you can’t let your hair down a bit in your eighties, when will it ever happen?

Miss Martineau and the Martyr Age

Anna Jameson (1794-1860)

Last week’s essay about an icon (a real, painted one) set me to thinking briefly about Anna Jameson, an early Victorian “independent scholar” (to use the current term) who introduced me to the fascinating topic of Christian iconography long before I had developed any serious leanings toward Medieval Studies.  Two of her books in particular—Sacred and Legendary Art and Legends of the Monastic Orders—opened up for me a world of early European painting years before I would ever lay eyes on an actual painting.

So persistent was the male domination of her cultural world that her title pages generally identified the author as “Mrs. Jameson”.   That put her in the same class with several other Victorian writers I stumbled upon in my early years, including the poet “Mrs. Hemans,” the novelist “Mrs. Humphry Ward,” and the novelist and popular historian “Mrs. Oliphant”.  Anna’s most famous work, a study of Shakespeare’s heroines, is enjoying a revival in the feminist turn taken by literary study.

One thing (Anna Jameson) leads to another (Harriet Martineau).  During the week I was surprised to come upon a review from the pen Henry James of a biography of Anna Jameson (1878).*  The biographer was Anna’s niece Geraldine Macpherson, one of whose principal motives, according to James, was to do “justice to a memory cruelly disparaged by that very heavy-handed genius, Miss Martineau…”  A “very heavy-handed genius” being even more intriguing than a “very stable genius”, this naturally sent me off to search for some cruel disparagement in the pages of Harriet Martineau’s memoirs.

      

         (Harriet Martineau, 1802-1876)

But I never got there, having been providentially sidetracked by an extraordinary essay by Martineau entitled “The Martyr Age of the United States”.  There are not too many obscure nineteenth-century journal articles that every thoughtful American ought to have read, but I dare suggest this is one of them.  Martineau published it in the December, 1838, number of the London and Westminster Review.  She had made a long visit to the United States in the 1830s, her fame preceding her.  Her fabulously successful Illustrations of Political Economy (1832) was a great international best-seller, which in its sales left the novels of Dickens in the dust.  

Ostensibly “The Martyr Age” is a review of three anonymous pamphlets she attributes to the Boston abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, each entitled “Right and Wrong in Boston in ---,” the blank being filled by the dates 1835, 1836, and 1837.  It is actually a spirited account of the principal abolitionists in New England, their character, their modus operandi, and their tribulations.  Martineau hardly suppresses her own attitudes toward chattel slavery, but she writes as a sociologist, not as a polemicist.  “There is a remarkable set of people now living and vigorously acting in the world, with a consonance of will and understanding which has perhaps never been witnessed among so large a number of individuals of such diversified powers, habits, opinions, tastes and circumstances,” she writes.  “A well-grounded faith, directed towards a noble object, is the only principle which can account for such a spectacle as the world is now waking up to contemplate in the abolitionists of the United States.”

Maria Weston Chapman (1806-1885)

While is it historically inspiring that a woman of Martineau’s moral character could so praise a large group of our American forebears, there is a cascade of less welcome news around the edges.  Some of the sobering facts that a reader picks up incidentally in reading the essay include the following.  She entitles her piece “Martyr Age” because of the great physical danger that faced public opponents of slavery not in Charleston or New Orleans but in Boston and New York.  Abolitionist meetings in the North were frequently barracked and mobbed, sometimes with lethal violence.

The abolitionist movement, though broadly based, is extraordinary for its female leaders.  Such famous male abolitions as William Lloyd Garrison and the Unitarian clergyman William Ellery Channing were generally shunned by elected politicians (all of whom were of course male).  The abolitionist movement was overwhelmingly and explicitly Christian in its inspiration, but it was vehemently deplored by many church leaders.  As at so many other moments of social crisis, the conflict tended to be “generational”, and in a way that sheds little honor on the elders.  At a Presbyterian seminary in Cincinnati (Lane) virtually the entire student body was expelled by a scandalized faculty—the offense being the public endorsement of the words of Jesus and Paul.  Large swaths of the white population of the northern states opposed slavery but were more or less enthusiastic proponents of various “resettlement” schemes, often thinly disguised efforts to transport as much of the black population as possible to Africa!  Even among highly educated Americans belief in the social equality of black and white, even of its eventual possibility, was exceedingly rare.  That is another way of saying that white supremacy was the national default.

  Martineau reports that in 1834 a group of “Young Men” in New York City “pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, (in the language and spirit of the Declaration of Independence), to overthrow slavery by moral assault, or to die in the attempt.”  Whether Henry James would hold that Harriet Martineau is “heavy-handed” in her essay on “The Martyr Age of the United States” I cannot say for certain.  But given its power to startle and shame an American reader a hundred and eighty years later, and to remind us that the “words and spirit” of the Declaration still await plenary fulfillment, I’d say that heavy-handedness is perhaps a virtue.  I’ll have to wait for another day to find out what Miss Martineau said about Mrs. Jameson.

*Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature /American Writers/English Writers (Library of America, 22),  pp. 1067-68.

Iconization of Thomas Ken

 

    Saint Thomas Ken by Michel Lafleur (2017) 6" x 8", oils on toile

Thomas Ken (1637-1711), though a somewhat obscure English ecclesiastic, is nonetheless a household name in certain obscure American households, and one particularly well known to me: viz, my own.  A saintly character who became the Bishop of Bath and Wells, he was most notable for two public acts of conscience.  In the summer of 1683 he refused the request of King Charles II’s advance man to give temporary housing to the famous royal mistress, Eleanor (“Nell”) Gwyn, maintaining that “a woman of ill repute ought not to be endured in the house of a clergyman, and especially the king’s chaplain.”  More famously he was one of the non-jurors: a few bishops who at the time of the Glorious Revolution refused to take an oath of fealty to the new king, William of Orange, on the grounds that the old monarch, James II (abdicated or deposed, depending upon your ecclesiastical politics) was still alive.  When I was talking about the inconveniences of resolutions and vows last week, I should have included oaths.

Both of Ken’s actions, and especially the second, took cojones; but his fame in the Fleming household is based on mere calendrical accident.  Ken’s is remembered in the Anglican calendar on March 20.  That is the day Joan happened to be ordained to the priesthood, making him a kind of spiritual patron for her.

That is the first part of the “set up” for this essay.  The second introduces the “Haitian barbershop art” project of our formidable son Richard.  He spends a good deal of time in Haiti, and has taken a great interest in the Haitian art scene, being a regular at the Ghetto Biennale.  There is on the island an amazing flourishing of “tonsorial art”—that is, paintings (rather in the genre of British pub signs) identifying and adorning barbershops and beauty salons, very numerous in Haiti’s service economy.  Richard has been trying to connect some of the artists with potential American clients.

            None of this was at first in my mind as I slowly was developing an idea for the perfect Christmas gift, the idea of a commissioned icon of Thomas Ken.    I knew that, if nothing else, such an image would be unique.   Initial investigation revealed problems.  The first was the problem of a model or prototype.  Ken’s extant iconography is meager.  There is a portrait in New College, Oxford; but aside from that there is little more than the usual author’s portrait etchings in old books--a gloomy-faced senior citizen wearing what look like ecclesiastical pajamas.  The second is that there are not all that many Anglican icon-makers.  I did come upon a very promising one, a woman in New England who does exquisite golden pieces in neo-Byzantine style.  She was game to give it a go, but at a price I could not afford.  Then I thought of the Haitian portraitists with whom Richard is connected.  

            Richard has been helping some of the Barbershop Painters to supplement their income by doing commissioned portraits, based on photographs, in their distinctive vernacular styles.  You send an artist a photo of Uncle Fred with a few general suggestions about size and so forth; the artist does the rest. 

            The word “icon” perhaps requires a little demystification.  It is the Greek word for pictorial representation as image (imago) was the Latin word.  It has come to mean particularly a “religious picture”, though we also have “Civil Rights icons,” computer icons, and other secular icons galore.  In Christian history icons/images have been used both in the decoration of churches and for private devotion.   In popular thought they are particularly associated with the eastern Orthodox churches, though in fact the surviving iconography deriving from Latin (Roman Catholic) traditions is more extensive and more diverse.  Religious pictures have been controversial.  There were major movements of theological image-smashing (iconoclasm) in the East in the eighth and ninth centuries and in the West in the sixteenth.

            We do not know the names of most of the creators of medieval religious art, and the small works of Orthodox devotion we are most likely think of as “icons” may seem characteristically anonymous.  But the name of the fifteenth-century Russian painter Andrei Rublev became widely known through a famous Soviet film.  We think El Greco began as an “icon”-painter, and there are others.  The creator of the world’s first known commissioned icon of Saint Thomas Ken is named Michel Lafleur, and more of his work (both tonsorial and portraiture) can be seen here.  

            The process by which he created the icon was wonderfully medieval.  In writing a doctoral dissertation on the illustrated manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose I discovered the extraordinary degree to which medieval painters regarded themselves as technicians rather than expressive creators.   A scribe needing an image of Lady Fortune might write the simple instruction: “Draw a picture of a woman with a wheel here” and get what he wanted.  Above all, the painters were expert copyists of approved models.  Unfortunately, the only model I could provide for M. Lafleur was a grim neo-classical line-etching.  He did a wonderful job of “byzantinizing” with golden hues; but he couldn’t do much about the weird cameo thing at the bottom of the oval architectural frame.

           

Best Intentions

Some of the new lockers in Dillon gymnasium

 

When it comes to New Year’s resolutions I am a bit of a trimmer.  While I recognize the logic and perhaps even the inevitability of making a mental connection between the desire for personal reformation and the rebooting of the calendar, I grow wary.  The problem is that I have an exalted understanding of a resolution.  In my mind a resolution is the secular analogue of a religious vow.   A good deal of my academic work has concerned medieval monks and nuns for whom vows were inflexible moral contracts imposing awesome responsibilities that ordinarily could not be abrogated without invoking a terrible social opprobrium in addition, of course, to the mortal sin.

  

   Linguistic manipulation frequently offers an excellent salve to the conscience.  You have undoubtedly run into the remark of the historian Tacitus concerning the Roman mode of military pacification.  “They create a desert and call it peace.”  So I do not speak of New Year’s resolutions.  My term of art is intentions.  We all have intentions.  Some we achieve, others we fail to achieve.  Such failure may be disappointing or discouraging, but it carries no necessary moral indictment.  I won’t list all my current intentions, but they include remembering that garbage pickup day is Friday, hanging no more than three garments from the back of any one chair, flossing under my dental bridges, and reading Don Quijote in Spanish.  My intention most like to succeed is to continue regular physical exercise at an early hour in the Dillon Gymnasium swimming pool.

  The gym is never open on New Year’s Day, but I have noticed over the years that on the second of January, the number of people who show up as the door opens is considerably larger than at any other time of the year.  This augmentation in pre-dawn athleticism generally lasts about ten days to two weeks: the average time a New Year’s resolution takes to fall by the wayside.  Well, yesterday morning I supercharged my intention by deciding that I would be the very first person to enter the men’s locker room in Athletic Year 2018.  So I set off especially early into the frigid blackness intending to be at the very front of the line.  There is a walk of two or three hundred yards from car to gym door.  The campus was very dark, very cold, and very empty.  I saw not a soul, and I was at first simple enough to believe that I had indeed achieved my intention. 

What had actually happened was that the guy who monitors the door had opened it some minutes early, doubtless as an act of charity, as the temperature was, I believe, seven degrees Fahrenheit.  As I entered the locker room I could hear door-clanks from several quarters, and my friend Gary, already in his workout gear, greeted me with a hearty “Happy New Year!”  I was big enough to admit to him that the irrefutable evidence that I was approximately the eighth person to enter the locker room in AY 2018—evidence of which his mere presence was a crushing part—had already made it less happy than it might have been.  This confession elicited friendly guffaws from other, unseen sooners behind various locker banks.  The locker room is fairly small, and has annoyingly good acoustics.

But there was further unintended mirth ahead.  I had not been swimming since before Christmas.  I was in Montreal for a week, and the gym was shut over the long New Year’s weekend.  I had taken the opportunity to put my favorite swimming trunks—actual a pair of green Champion athletic shorts inscribed with fading letters that read COLGATE ATHLETICS—through the washing machine.  I do this on general principles a couple of times a year whether they need it or not.  Naturally they went through the tumbler dryer as well—a material fact relevant to this narrative in a Chekovian sort of way.

For as I stood in the buff preparing to put them on, surrounded by the overachievers who had already and quite without malicious intent blasted my own New Year intention, a funny thing happened to me.  The swimming suit, which I had carried to the gym rolled up in a towel, seemed slightly heavy to me.  I was puzzled.  I shook it a little with both hands.  From one of its legs a kind of neutral colored satiny something slithered to the floor.  It was unmistakably a pair of women’s panties.

You have doubtless yourself experienced the odd effects of static electricity on the well-spun contents of a clothes dryer.  Ours is a somewhat unusual locker room.  Here “locker room talk” sometimes includes disquisitions on Kant or the Kuiper Belt.  One of the gawking sooners was actually an electrical engineer, and could have made of it a teachable moment; but no matter.  The whole room went momentarily silent.   For of course we are absolutely culturally au courant around here.  Among the improvements made to the Dillon Gymnasium during its long rehab was the installation of a “gender inclusive bathroom”.  I nonetheless gathered up the fallen garment as quickly as possible.  When later I related the anecdote to my wife, she was mildly amused.  “But what I am really missing,” she said, “is one of my black stretch socks.”  I intend to keep my eye peeled. 

           

A White Christmas and its Deneigement

Though I have managed to post a few blog essays under unprepossessing circumstances, I must acknowledge defeat when it is staring me straight in the face.  I lack the leisure to explain, even in the most cursory terms, how I came to find myself celebrating the Feast of the Nativity in Montreal, where it is the bleak midwinter (despite the fact that the season has not yet completed its first week).   Nor can I give any account of my state of digital deprivation.   The circumstances allow me, at best, a meteorological anecdote.   A Bing Crosby song of my youth, still soupily revived on AM stations throughout the Season, seriously oversold the idea of the white Christmas to at least three generations of my compatriots.  I can remember a few other white Christmases, but none so ferocious as this.

Snow has indeed fallen, snow on snow.  There are mountains of it.  It is also colder than the proverbial well-digger in Montana.  But the Canadians take this stuff to an altogether new threat level.  Rather remarkably, the ordinary locals seem to pay the snow no mind, aside from devoting a couple of hours a day to digging out their buried vehicles.  But there is also a professional corps of de-snowers.  That's my rough-and-ready English translation of what they call the practitioners of deneigement around here.

Deneigement is a very serious business in these parts, and it has been going on, rather ferociously, since Christmas Eve.  It is mainly a nocturnal event, partly because vehicular traffic is marginally subdued after nightfall, but mainly because Canada in the wintertime seems to be a night sport.  The services de deneigement have at their disposal various mechanical aids--ranging in size from feather-light plastic shovels to major earth-moving equipment designed to aid in the construction of hydro-electric dams.  The preferred machine appears to be the largest size of road-grader manufactured by the Caterpillar Corporation, equipped with blinding flashing lights and, quite literally, bells and whistles, in addition to the more conventional horn.  If you are having to get somewhere in the deneigement zones of the darkened city--as we were having to do last night--it is really pretty scary: loud metallic scraping noises, blinding lights shining out of the freezing void, the blaring of mechanical blarers.  If they could only manage to work in a few snarling German shepherds, you would have nearly the full aesthetic of a transport arriving at Sobibor.

In any event, out of this cold Québecois night we send our friends and readers our very best wishes for the inception of the New Year, when I shall hope to be able to return to the blog entirely deneiged.

TR and the Tax Bill

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I have more than once mentioned in these essays my extensive if unsystematic collection of our national literary patrimony in the Library of America.  Now and again I take one down from the shelf more or less at random.  This past week it was one of the two volumes of Teddy Roosevelt, the one containing The Rough Riders and his autobiography.  I found the latter, first published in 1913 not too long before his death, beautifully written, full of fascinating anecdote, and frequently rather profound in its political philosophy.  That this final quality should so surprise me is partly an indictment of my ignorance and partly an evidence of the degree to which I and many others have come to “define deviancy down”, in the memorable phrase of Patrick Moynihan.  The last place one seeks political profundity is in an American politician.

To the degree that I had already formed a conception of TR when I picked up the book, it was of a rugged individualist, outdoorsman, horseman, “environmentalist”, great white hunter, and ninety-seven-pound weakling transformed into a war hero in an embarrassing war.  There was nothing particularly mistaken about this conception, except for its utter inadequacy.  In his opening chapter, entitled “Boyhood and Youth”, he writes thus:  “As regards political economy, I was of course while in college taught the laissez-faire doctrines—one of them being free trade—then accepted as canonical.”  He is speaking about the intellectual atmosphere of his years at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1880.  “All this individual morality I was taught by the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard.  But there was almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility there is a collective responsibility.  Books such as Herbert Croly’s ‘Promise of American Life’ and Walter E. Weyl’s ‘New Democracy’ would generally at the time have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy.”

            I did not know who these guys were but soon found out.  They were progressive pundits and philosophers associated with the early years of The New Republic.  Weyl began his book (1912) thus: "America to-day is in a somber, soul-questioning mood. We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions.... We are profoundly disenchanted with the fruits of a century of independence.”  Well, it is now a century later.  During that century America fought two world wars, experienced the dislocations of profound and prolonged economic depression, confronted the twin political pathologies of modernity, experienced mind-boggling technological and sociological change, largely abandoned its spiritual heritage, and more than tripled its population.  That hardly describes a century of stasis.  Yet, plus ça change.  America today is in a somber, soul-questioning mood, with nearly bottomless wells of clamor, bewilderment, tremulous unrest, and profound disenchantment.

            In my opinion, a genuinely humble one, a large part of our dilemma is a failure to recognize a truth that Theodore Roosevelt stated as “the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility there is a collective responsibility.”  How can it be that the greatest democracy the world has yet known—a nursery and proving ground of seemingly infinite industrial, intellectual, and artistic invention and innovation--has a legislature that simply doesn’t work?  How can it be that for all our political passion, principles, polarities, and processes, not to mention the tweet storms, we seem incapable of addressing, or for that matter honestly identifying, the most acute actual problems our nation faces?  As I write this, our Congress is poised to enact “historic tax reform”.  Though they are readily available in our overheated press, I share no apocalyptic interpretation of the pending legislation.  That it will unleash a gusher of economic growth strikes me as most unlikely.  That it will make sharecroppers of the middle class is hardly less so.  Rearranged tax policies are not exactly irrelevant, but there are many more important things we should be talking about.  However, one thing about this legislation is indisputable.  The process by which it has been created is disgraceful.  You or I could make important decisions concerning our personal or professional life by analogous procedures only by abandoning all self-respect.

            “I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself,” Roosevelt writes.  “But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few.”

            The question of the relationship of the individual to society, the stuff of political philosophy and for that matter most great literature, likewise features prominently in the preamble to the Constitution.   Its authors there announce as their intention the formation of “a more perfect union”.  They were using the word perfect in its old Latin sense of “finished” or “complete,” and they could modify the adjective—more perfect--because they knew that the perfection could never be, well, perfect.  This left them, and us, to concentrate on the concept of union.

            Merry Christmas.