Vice-Presidential

 

Now that the ex-President and apparently certain Republican candidate for the presidency in the upcoming general election has been adjudged guilty of felonious crimes, and now that the bad-boy son of the sitting President and all but certain Democrat candidate in that election is likewise a convicted felon, where precisely do we find ourselves as Americans?  Besides in an orgy of illogical equivalation, that is?  I would like to think that profound embarrassment might be the opening bid on this one, but don’t count on it.  What would embarrass your average Washington politician would shame a hog to death.  We are not quite a banana republic, as the doom-peddlers in the press suggest, but more like the intermediary stage of an “Only Fans” republic.

 

I am among the statistical majority of Americans who seem to be in a state beginning with disquiet and then rapidly revving up from there as we think about the impending election.  Leaving aside all strictly political questions, the age and affect of the presidential candidates is a matter of concern, an entirely legitimate one.  Take it from one who knows: eighty is not the new anything; it is old age.  This perception immediately leads to a focus on the major candidates for the vice-presidency, only one of whom is presently known.

 

There is a good deal of long-accepted hypocrisy concerning the choice of vice-presidential candidates by the political parties.  The standard rhetorical position is that the person chosen, who is at the remove of “one heartbeat” from the highest office, is always someone fully and manifestly qualified to be president.  Does anyone actually believe this pious malarkey?  Certainly not the national press, whose reporters and commentators stress such matters as the desirability of regional, factional, racial, or gender diversity.  Another implicit desideratum—loyalty to the boss—seems to be the primary if not sole requirement of the most recent and currently presumptive Republican candidates.  Mr. Biden offered early and unequivocal assurance that his vice-presidential pick would be a woman.  This prerequisite reduced the candidate pool by less than a half in absolute terms, but considerably more than half in the terms of tested, experienced politicians on the national scene.  Still, my own subjective and personal observation is that on the whole our prominent female politicians are proportionally more capable and promising than the male colleagues who so considerably outnumber them.  That is of course a personal judgment without objective verifiability.  Whether that judgment be just or not, the pool was soon to be drastically reduced when a racial codicil was added to the presidential candidate’s stated will.  Very shortly thereafter the following appeared in the national press.  “More than 100 prominent Black men released a strongly worded open letter Monday, warning Biden that not picking a Black woman would cost him the election. The signatories of the letter included rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, radio show host Lenard McKelvey (a.k.a. Charlamagne tha God), actor Cedric Kyles (a.k.a. Cedric the Entertainer), commentator Van Jones, Bishop William J. Barber and civil rights attorney Ben Crump, among others.”

 

The main point of this essay is not a selective criticism of personalities, but I see little evidence that Kamala Harris has been a successful vice president or would be a good president.  Since she so far has no Republican counterpart, comparisons are impossible.  One cannot be even handed while being empty handed.  That Mr. Trump’s eventual choice will strike me immediately as “presidential” seems unlikely, but we must wait to find out.  Getting back to the current known quantity, Vice President Harris, she is less well regarded in the polls than either of the prospective presidential candidates, both of whom are “under water” as the lingo goes.  So I am in the national majority.   Part of what I sense as the near despair of the electorate as it contemplates November is a group of “under water” candidates whose primary attractive quality is in the “lesser evil” category.  My own misgivings are less directed to policies I fear than to failures in that essential part of national leadership that is clarity, power, and conviction in the articulation of those policies.  This is not an English professor’s snobbery.  The ideas by which politicians live are seldom more coherent than the language in which they express them.  Nor do I set the bar unreasonably high.  I shall presume on faith that Ms. Harris commands the orthography of the word potato, which proved to be a shoal upon which Vice President Dan Quayle’s political boat foundered; but I have to say that in terms of public oratory Quayle was a virtual Demosthenes or a Danton when compared with her.  Even in the festival of inarticulateness that is the United States Senate (a.k.a., “the greatest deliberative body on earth”) the word salads she dishes up are particularly lacking in nourishment.  "The governor and I, we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time, right, the significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires. What we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.”

 

Well, like most elderly people I in fact do quite a bit of thinking about the passage of time and the significance thereof.  “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, Bears all its sons away; They fly forgotten, as a dream  Dies at the opening day.”  Also daughters, of course, though Watts was a stickler for meter.  I try to be optimistic, but it’s often an uphill struggle.  Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614) began with a fanciful pessimistic etymology of the word world itself: it is supposed to mean “ware old, i.e., that thing that groweth worse as it groweth older.”  That is the opposite of progressivism—regressivism.  There is a lot of that around in the air today, but I do not share it.  America has been in a few tight corners in its time.  Those so confidently predicting the death of American democracy should one or the other of the two candidates win in November might remember this.  Are we really facing greater danger than in 1777, or 1858, or 1932?

 

The office of the Vice Presidency is peculiar in various aspects, one of them being that in choosing a candidate one person, (the presidential candidate) is the sole elector.  This means that one man elects our vice president.  According to a famous indelicacy of John Nance Garner, who in 1933 accepted the job from Franklin Roosevelt in exchange for a few convention votes, the job is “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”  One doubts that we actually have a reliable economic history of this particular commodity; so I won’t go there.  But I record my suspicion of rank exaggeration.   Whether this was a more pessimistic evaluation than that of Theodore Roosevelt is debatable.  Teddy said, "I would a great deal rather be anything, say professor of history, than vice president."  In fact fifteen vice presidents have moved on to the presidency, eight of them on account of the death of a president, and four of these were later elected to terms of their own.  I’d say that’s a pretty consequential launching pad.  The vice-presidency is certainly a job that would seem to deserve a “free and fair” election of its own as opposed to the opportunity for the popular ratification of the pick of a single man.

The Ballad Hunters

                                                      Francis James Child

 

            The expression “fabled in song and story” nicely combines the twin impulses out of which our earliest literature grew, the union of music and crafted verbal narrative.  Since ancient times Homer, the great source of our epic tradition, was called the “blind singer.”  The manifestly musical aspect of lyric poetry is in the term itself, the lyre being the ancient stringed instrument to the strumming of which verse was recited.  I have been thinking about the union of music and verse in some of our older and too often neglected poetry in relation to two men—one a traditional literary scholar and the other a musicologist—who did so much to preserve it for us.

 

Harvard, the world’s greatest university, has been subjected to some hard knocks of late, and though some are unfortunately well merited they are, viewed in historical perspective, mere blemishes on the noble academic scutcheon.  Today I want briefly to remember Harvard’s very first English professor—both the man and his work.  I refer to Francis James Child (1825-1896).  He was named Professor of English only in 1876.  The president of Harvard offered him the title as a bribe, to keep him from being captured by head-hunters from Johns Hopkins, which was in the process of becoming the first German-style graduate school in our land.  That date may seem rather late.  It is not that nobody wrote, read, and even studied literature in the first century of our Republic.  But belletristic cultivation was taken for granted as a feature of general education.  You might study Latin, Greek, French, or German, but you simply read your own language.  As someone who devoted his working life to teaching literature, I came to believe that literary study—usually beginning with that in your native tongue--is the natural gateway to humanistic study writ large. 

 

Child was a Bostonian, but by no means a Brahmin.  He was a genuine democrat in the best American spirit.  His father was a skilled craftsman, a sailmaker, whose handiwork allowed such mighty Yankee whalers as the “Pequod” of Moby Dick to sail the seven seas and back.  The history of scholarship is punctuated by the appearance of great savants of modest social background, but nineteenth-century America was pre-eminent in that regard.  It was also a philological age.  The study of “English” at that time included a good deal of attention to excellence in speaking as well as in writing, and Child’s professional brief included rhetoric, logic, and oratory.  And Child developed a special interest in the language of English-speakers, in the dialects of the Old Country but also the emerging distinctiveness of the American language.  He studied, taught, and wrote about all the giants of English literature—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and others; but his democratic instincts led him to give significant scholarly attention to the popular literature of the ordinary stock of the early English immigrants to America: their folk music.  Only a few specialists are likely to have consulted his ideas on the great writers of the English tradition.  What he is famous for is his industry, skill, and erudition in seeking out and recording traditional “folk songs”.  His work has appeared in many editions, including his own five-volume collection (1882-1898); but it has been most widely read in the single (very fat) volume in the “Cambridge Edition of the Poets” series edition directed by Bliss Perry:  English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Cambridge: the Riverside Press, 1904) as edited by his daughter, Helen Child Sargent,  and an eminent Harvard colleague, G. L. Kittredge).  This edition includes, often with several variant texts, about two thirds of the three hundred plus ballads Child had collected.  This fascinating body of song is often referred to as the "Border Ballads,” as they flourished particularly in the eastern counties along the border between England and Scotland.

 

Many of the ballads are ancient, and many have been written down only in uncertain or clearly garbled form.  But they have exerted their power over writers of the highest genius, including Sir Philip Sidney who said in his Art of Poesy (1579) that he always thrilled upon hearing sung the old song of “Chevy Chase.”  The subject of this song is aristocratic deer poaching—a hunt (chase) in the Cheviot hills.  The ballads do show ancient folk culture warts and all.  It’s not all church bells and May poles.  Child himself expressed his disgust at the anti-Semitic blood libel in the confused and confusing ballad about Hugh of Lincoln—the same subject as that in Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale.”

 

Child was a literary scholar with no particular musical expertise; but the old folk songs are in fact music, and they fortunately have attracted the attention of musicologists as well as literary historians.  The second hero of this essay, accordingly, is Cecil Sharp (1859-1924).  He was born into a modest English family in which both parents were amateur musicians.  As a young man Sharp spent a crucial decade in Australia, where he established a reputation as a musician both in ecclesiastical and secular circles.  He then returned to England, and it was from England that he made his musical pilgrimages to the backwaters of the southern Appalachians in search of the old folk songs so rapidly disappearing in industrialized Britain.  Recently Sharp has been semi-cancelled in some advanced circles for his “ethnocentrism,” apparently a particularly rubricated sin for an ethnologist.  This was perhaps just payback for the attempted cancellation of Pete Seeger and some other left-wing folk singers for “Communism” by some American superpatriots of the 1950s.  But the aesthetic world that could pardon Leni Riefenstahl for the brilliance of her “Triumph of the Will,” a rank Nazi propaganda movie of 1934, is unlikely to cancel the transcriptions of the words of ancient ballads that Sharp wrote down in log cabins in Madison County, N.C. during the First World War.

                                       Cecil Sharp with his lead singer

 

  Many English writers have been keenly aware of the marriage of words and music that is a song.  Sharp’s parents were both musical amateurs, and they seem to have regarded it as highly propitious that their child was born on St. Cecelia’s day—that is, the day ecclesiastically dedicated to the patron saint of music.  So at the baptismal font they imposed upon him the masculine form of the name of that saint.  They may well have had in mind, as well, a passage in one of our language’s greatest verbal paeans to music—Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast, or, the Power of Music--A song in honour of St. Cecilia’s day, 1697”.   In popular Christian mythology Cecelia was supposed to have invented the pipe organ (the “vocal frame”) of the following lines.

 

     At last, divine Cecilia came,

      Inventress of the vocal frame;

The sweet enthusiast, from her sacred store,

      Enlarg'd the former narrow bounds,

      And added length to solemn sounds,

With nature's mother wit, and arts unknown before.

    Let old Timotheus yield the prize,

      Or both divide the crown:

    He rais'd a mortal to the skies;

      She drew an angel down.

 

 

Celebrating what can rightfully be called his epic victory over Xerxes and the once mighty Persian Empire in the fourth century BCE, or, alternatively, one of the most wanton acts of cultural vandalism known to history, the sack of Persepolis, Alexander the Great sits with Thais, his favored courtesan—so much nobler a term than today’s lackluster and all-purpose girlfriend—"Their brows with roses and with myrtles bound:/ (So should desert [prowess] in arms be crown'd.)”  Timotheus is Alexander’s court musician.  Ostensibly the feast is celebrating Alexander’s stupendous military victory.  But the real display of power is the display of music’s power, a power that overwhelms the conqueror of the world himself. What might be called the super-power of music is made perhaps even more evident in G. F. Handel’s musical orchestration of Dryden’s poem in his “Alexander’s Feast,” a concerto grosso (1736) that has been described as “neither opera nor oratorio, yet both.”  Yet the marriage of song and story is never more thrilling than in some of the old ballads studied by Child and Sharp, two deeply learned men from the highbrow world without whom we would have been unlikely to have had Country and Western or Bob Dylan.

École des Chartes

In this slow news week—yes, I am being ironic--and with the Princeton Commencement now behind us, I find myself reflecting a bit on the state of American higher education.  I did find myself rather dispirited by some of the Gaza sit-ins for the ease with which they reduced agonizing complexity to a spurious moral clarity of virtue signaling.  Education can and perhaps must lead to passionately held opinions; but without reflection, discrimination, and the nuanced differentiation of alternatives, those opinions seldom lead to enlightenment.  There is a reason that famous quotations become famous, as is that of John Stuart Mill: “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”  I have been thinking about the nature of higher education from a rather old-fashioned perspective—considering its potential for social utility as perhaps opposed to social advancement.  And I have been pondering with increasing admiration the Grandes Écoles of France, often regarded as insufferable bastions of elitism.  These “Great Schools” of advanced study have essentially created the bureaucratic and intellectual elite of a major nation.  I’ll get back to them, or at least one of them, in a moment.

It is a little more than a year ago that I was so immersed in studying the works of the late medieval French poet François Villon (1431-1463?) that I wrote a blog essay about him.  There are many things to be said about him.  He is a unique figure in the history of European poetry, and as a documented “bad boy”—indeed a capital criminal!—he has seemed especially attractive to those who enjoy a streak of the transgressive in their favorite artists.  What is perhaps most remarkable about him is that—given his social obscurity—we know so much about him.

It is not surprising that the documentation of a figure like Chaucer is voluminous enough to require a heavy book (Chaucer Life Records.)  That is mainly to be explained by the fact that he was a prominent man in what we call the real world; only some of his fame and reputation derived from his poetry.  Chaucer even had a legal document attesting that he had not raped Cecily Chaumpaigne, as confirmed by Cecily herself.   (Naturally such a curious document has encouraged scholars of a certain bent to conclude that Chaucer was a rapist—or at least a kidnapper, as the Latin raptus might mean either.)  On the other hand, William Langland, Chaucer’s great contemporary, the author of Piers Plowman, is obscure almost to the vanishing point.  We are not even entirely sure that the name is right.

     But how is it that we know so much about Villon, a citizen much less prominent than Chaucer?  And why does so much of that knowledge date precisely from the decade of the 1870s—just in time to make Villon a kind of “culture hero” for a number of the more edgy writers of the French Third Republic and in the high Victorian era in Britain?  Part of the answer is that nasty always seems more interesting than nice.  Villon was not exactly nasty, but he was certainly wicked.  He was a violent felon (homicide) and habitual criminal (thief).  And among the most thorough bureaucrats in late medieval France, and probably in most other places and periods, were the police authorities.  They kept voluminous records.  But it is one thing for the police to write things down.  It is quite another for scholars to be able to find them four hundred years later.  This where Napoleon and the Grandes Écoles enter the picture.

            For such a bad man, Napoleon had a remarkable number of good ideas.  He was in his own peculiar way an heir of the Enlightenment.  Perhaps because he was so convinced of his own historical importance, he saw the desirability of carefully conserving all the national records of France.  He was very keen on the preservation of archives, beginning with his own.  He was also aware of the tremendous damage inflicted on the “national patrimony” by the Revolution, the destruction or dispersal of so many monastic libraries and royal offices, and the looting and vandalism of the seats of aristocrats.  He thought that there ought to be a special branch of study that would train scholars in the discovery, decipherment, exploitation, and preservation of old documents.  This aspiration was achieved by Louis XVIII—quite without reference to Napoleon of course, a couple of months before Napoleon’s death in 1821—with the establishment of the École Nationale des Chartes (The National School of Charters).  The French word charte, deriving from Latin carta as in Magna Carta, came to be applied to all manner of old legal documents.  So the province of the chartist institution was, and is, the study, decipherment, and publication of historical records of all sorts, not just charters.  Naturally a school of documentary studies  required of its small and highly select group of students and professors serious linguistic skills (especially in Latin), wide historical knowledge, and paleographic expertise.  It makes these same demands  today.  The description of a “chartiste” may sound like Professor Dry-as-Dust on steroids, or at the very best Melville’s “sub-sub librarian,” and I have heard some hip contemporary scholars speak of it in those scornful tones, but its achievements have to dazzle any medievalist.

 

Auguste Longnon

 

            In any event, in the 1870s a chartist named Auguste Longnon published two breakthrough books about Villon.  One was mainly about the historical figures who feature in Villon’s most famous poem, his semi-mock, but only semi, last will and testament.  Here was a window on a seldom viewed life of the medieval Parisian demi-monde.  The other book was entitled “A Biographical Study of F. Villon Based on Unedited Documents in the National Archives.”  These were preparatory studies for a major edition of Villon’s poems that Longnon published in 1892.  Of course scholarship is mostly tentative and dated.  Only a few scholarly books have an indefinite shelf life.   Such books (Darwin’s Origin of Species, say) then often are culturally upgraded and  move on to become the objects of intense scholarship themselves.  Longnon’s biographical studies have long since been left behind.  I had to appeal to one of my own indispensable sub-sub librarians—a priceless if too often unsung asset category in any serious university--to search it out in a rarely visited depository annex.  But not one of the many biographies that have superseded Longnon’s could have been written without his work and that of others like him, scholars trained at the École des Chartes or in institutions molded by its spirit.  For me as a scholar it is rather exhilarating to know that, for some moments, even I myself have briefly carried the baton in some worthy effort or other, to attempt some small increment, the grand totality of which is what Francis Bacon called “the advancement of learning.”  It is only since our own daughter became the chief executive of one of one of America’s major institutions of cultural curation that I have begun to appreciate some of the wider implications, challenges, and ambiguities of our difficult but essential accommodations of the past to the present.  Institutions dedicated to this subtle but crucial task deserve the admiration and support of all thoughtful people.

 

The distinguished scholarly journal of the ÉC
           

Showing the Flag

 

 

    One of President Clinton’s most famous quotations can serve as the epigraph for this post: “That depends on what the meaning of is is.”  He was ridiculed for it at the time, but it was in fact a recognition of the desirability and often enough the necessity of precision in linguistic communication, too often incomplete, unclear, or ambiguous.  So let me move on to the two SAs (Saint Augustine and Samuel Alito) and the upside down flag.  Considering such topics inevitably raises the status of human language as a system of signs and the larger question of non-verbal sign systems generally.  It should be obvious that the study of language must involve the study of sign theory.  One of the Greek words for “sign,” sema, is the root of the technical English linguistic term, semantics.  A famous Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure used the term semiology to refer to both verbal and extra-verbal sign systems.  It is interchangeable with another fancy word, semiotics.   It means: the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation.

 

Around the year 400 Saint Augustine wrote one of the most brilliant books about language and signification the world has yet seen.  Its title (De doctrina christiana) is usually translated as On Christian Doctrine, but this is misleading.  Latin doctrina does not mean “doctrine” as that word is now mainly used.  It means “teaching” in the active sense of pedagogy: how we go about teaching and learning.  Augustine intended it as a preface to biblical study.  All teaching, he says, is about one of two matters: either res (things) or signa (signs).  “But things are indicated by signs.”*  Augustine was trying to defend the adequacy of human language to communicate truth.  Ancient Sophists, like their modern progeny, the so-called deconstructionists, liked to argue that precise communication was impossible because it depended upon the use of words, which are by nature fatally ambiguous.  “Words are explained only by other words”.  In terms of achieving clarity, that is like “bringing an unlighted candle into a dark room.”

 

Augustine makes a distinction between two kinds of signs.  Some signs are natural, meaning deriving from the world of nature.  Think for a moment about fire.  Smoke, heat and visible combustion are all signs of fire.  They are natural signs of the thing, fire.  They are easily interpretable by every human being on earth.  But what about the word “fire” itself?  It is a sign of a different kind.  It is a conventional sign—meaning one that has been established by the agreement of a certain group of people, namely English-speakers.  Speakers of other languages will use other signs: (ignis, pyr, feu, fuego, Feuer, etc.).  If someone offers you a gift, you are more likely to be pleased if you are in Birmingham than if you are in Berlin, as Gift is the German word for poison.

 

Of course, there are many non-verbal signs that play important roles in all our lives: traffic lights, for example, and many road signs, among a myriad of others.  The other SA of this essay, Samuel Alito, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, is currently involved in a controversy with broad semiological implications with a non-verbal sign: our nation’s flag.

 

The flag, it turns out can do much more than indicate national identity or patriotism.  And the marked “indeterminacy” of the idea of “patriotism” is suggested by the fact that the January 6^th invaders of the Capitol sincerely claimed it as their motive.  The only demonstrator actually shot dead by the police, Ashli Babbitt, bore no conventional weapon but was said to be using a poled American flag in an aggressive fashion.   Clear video evidence records others using flag poles as clubs.  Now it is not suggested that Justice Alito committed any violence; but his private residence does have a flagpole, and there are photographs clearly showing the American flag flying upside down (i.e. with the blue quadrant with the fifty stars at the lower right rather than the upper left.)  Now, it is not easy to produce a simple meaning for the American or any other national flag.  It is a national symbol, but different people will have a variety of different associations with it.  But by semi-convention an inverted flag is “a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."  This is the language of the semi-official “American Flag Code.”  But we already now have two semis—meaning (for me) that there is no definitive meaning to the display of an inverted flag, an ambiguous act subject to much subjective interpretation.  Alito’s critics claim that since the inverted flag was carried by some of the Capitol rioters on January 6, 2021—a claim that seems plausible, though one I have not been able to confirm from easily available iconographic evidence—the flag so displayed is an approbation of unlawful insurrection.  So Justice Alito must be a—a what?  According to his own testimony this whole thing had nothing to do with him—it was his wife!—not that he acknowledges any impropriety or assigns any definite meaning in her flag display.  The meanings being imputed to him are murky, but in every case unflattering.  Even if he is not an insurrectionist, he must be expressing a belief that the nation is in mortal danger?  Of course, a number of the most vociferous complaints about Alito’s signals come from folks who subscribe to their alleged content—that our nation faces a serious, indeed an “existential” threat, should Mr. Trump be elected to a second term.  This concern parallels that of many others who find a similar threat in Trump’s possible re-election.

 

                             "Signs, Signals, and Code" Merit Badge Patch

 

But there is a branch of sign theory that does deal with non-verbal signs of this sort extensively.  Nonverbal communication is important enough to merit its own Boy Scouts’ merit badge.  “The Signs, Signals and Codes merit badge covers a number of the nonverbal ways we communicate: emergency signaling, Morse code, American Sign Language, braille, trail signs, sports officiating hand signals, traffic signs, secret codes and more.”  Quite a lot more, if you think about it: thumbs up, thumbs down, middle finger, cut throat, clenched fist, index finger sealing lips, etc., etc.  When you come right down to it, signs, signals, and codes seem the very essence of Augustinian linguistic theory.

 

A major component of the preparation for the merit badge is the study of flag-talk, or semaphore.  The word means “sign-bearing,” and signifies a system that tries to convey verbal messages by means of creating a conventional alphabet of corporeal gesture by waving colored flags. This system grows ever more obsolete in an age of electronic communication, but it still exists.  The purpose is to achieve significant verbal communication over fairly long distances where the sender is visible but not audible, especially between ships at sea.  The would-be communicator holds the brightly colored flags (usually red and yellow) and “spells” out the message by moving body and flags in conventionally agreed upon patterns.  An adaptation of the technique for nighttime use employs flashing lights patterned to the alphabetical Morse code: most famously, SOS!  You might say our nation began with such a signal: One if by land, two if by sea…

 

Semaphore alphabet

 

            The subject of interest to the old Stoic logicians, and to their critic Augustine, was the possibility of precision—and thus lack of ambiguity—in human verbal constructs.  But the “meaning” of flags, and of the motives for their display, is often anything but clear.  So I must conclude that flag-waving is a rather poor way of communicating complex or nuanced ideas.  It is also manifestly subject to gross misunderstanding and practically invites intentional distortion. 

 

 

In a very crucial moment of Virgil’s Æneid, the hero’s meeting with Cumaean Sibyl, the hero begs that she deliver her prophecy in oral rather than in written form.  We may find the implied idea that spoken language is invariably clearer than written language surprising; but we have no Demosthenes, no Cicero in our public conversations.  I wish I could believe that the two verbal “debates” agreed upon by Presidents Biden and Trump promised substance and clarification, but on the basis of past experience, I cannot.  It is that fear that my quotation marks hope to imply.  More like bringing an unlighted candle into a dark room.

 

...and I on the opposite shore will be...

 

 

 

 

*Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa discuntur.

 

 

Menendezes of New Jersey

 

 

What’s in a name?  Juliet wants to know.  You may have had reason to ask this question with regard to your own surname and come to the same conclusion as Juliet: that a family name is an arbitrary denominator.  The word name, indeed, is simply a grammatical term for one of the parts of speech—usually called a noun these days—denominating a person, place, or thing.  A few of our classier verbs reflect actual surnames.  A wonderful word too seldom used, burk (to murder by strangling, throttling or suffocating) goes back to the murderous activities of Burke and Hare in the early nineteenth centuries.  This gruesome pair supplied Scottish medical schools with corpses for anatomy classes.   Later in the Victorian period a certain Captain Boycott became the object of a well-organized shunning campaign that added a new word to the English vocabulary.  I presume it is on the model of burk(e) that the verb bork occasionally still appears in the press.  This refers to the techniques used by Ted Kennedy and others to defeat President Reagan’s nomination of the conservative jurist Robert  Bork to the Supreme Court in in 1987. 

 

On August  20, 1989 the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, teamed up in killing their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in their upscale family home in Beverly Hills.  The weapons used were matching Mossberg shotguns, twelve gauge.  Mr. Menendez was shot six times, his wife ten times.  If you know anything at all about firearms you will know that a twelve gauge shotgun is a formidable weapon with the power to kill a deer with a slug and the spread to obliterate a covey of quail with shot.  I speak of the effect from one shotgun shell.  The brothers used shot, some at point blank range.  The scene was, shall we say, messy.

 

This event proved to be a sensation throughout the whole country, but it was of special interest in our town because the Menendez family had for a time lived in the Princeton area.  The fraternal murderers had both attended the Princeton Day School, and Lyle had attended Princeton University.  Indeed, I had personal knowledge of one of the assailants.  When I returned for a second stint as the Master of Wilson College (the oldest of the residential colleges among which all Princeton undergraduates are distributed during their first two years)—this would have been in 1987 or ’88—I was greeted in the pool room by an obnoxious fellow who seemed to think he owned the place.  This was Lyle.  Lyle did not achieve a Princeton degree, having been suspended for plagiarism; but he continued to like the place.

 

My ideas about the LA police were molded in my youth by watching Jack Webb play Sergeant Friday on Dragnet.  For some reason it took the actual sleuths investigating the Menendez murders a surprisingly long time to do what Jack Webb always did in about half an hour.  Before being arrested the brothers had enough time to blow through roughly seven hundred thousand dollars of the family estate and made various improvident investments, including the purchase of a greasy spoon specializing in chicken wings—Chuck’s Spring Street Café—a block north of the Princeton University campus.  This place is still going, but only a tiny cognoscenti still refer to it as Parricide’s Palace.  Very good wings, though.

 

When I met Lyle Menendez in the bowels of Wilcox Hall I did not ask him if he was related to the senior senator from our state, Bob Menendez, because Bob Menendez was at that time famous only in Union City, where he was the mayor.  I had never heard of him.  In fact, I became aware of him only in 2006 when he was appointed to fill out  the term of Jon Corzine, who was moving up to be our governor.  At the next election Menendez was chosen for a full six-year term.  I only sat up and took notice in 2015 during his first corruption trial, which ended in a hung jury.  This was more or less business as usual.  One of the expectations of living in the Garden State is that one of our major state politicians—impartial as to party affiliation—should be under indictment or threat thereof at all times.  The alleged sleaze on that occasion was of the common or garden variety.  Not so the corruption alleged by prosecutors in the trial now underway.  The operative adjective describing the case might be “bizarre.”

 

The pay-to-play schemes with which Senator Menendez is charged, along with his wife Nadine who is to be tried separately later, are pedestrian enough; but the details are fascinating.  Menendez, who has not resigned from the Senate but has given up the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, is charged with major influence peddling on behalf of three businessmen with ties to the Egyptian government.  (There is a sizeable population of Egyptian immigrants and nationals in north Jersey.)  The alleged bribes include a snappy Mercedes convertible in the possession of Nadine.  More fascinating to the police investigators are stacks of gold bars and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cold cash, much of it found stuffed into envelopes and semi-secreted all over the Menendez residence.  The senator was born in New York, and grew up in New Jersey, but has explained his curious banking arrangements by alluding to the alleged experiences of his father in Cuba, where his banked money was confiscated by the government.  That is, a United State senator, the chairman of one of its most powerful committees, is fearful of the possible confiscation of his money by the government of which he is a member.  It is hard to tell whether this claimed fear is more alarming as fact or as fiction.

 

I have written before about my own brief employment in the Senate Document Room in 1958, in a patronage job arranged by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, then chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.  The office joke in that ancient era involved the comparative amatory stamina of Representatives and Senators.  The former tended to be younger, and the latter elder.  Hence the House has a Committee on Foreign Affairs.  The best that the Senate can do is a Committee on Foreign Relations.  Get it, get it?

 

            The senator’s lawyers insist that Bob and Nadine Menendez are far from Bonnie and Clyde.  It has just been reported that Nadine has received a diagnosis of breast cancer, a devastating development that surely demands universal sympathy.  Yet her husband’s lawyers seem to be planning an Adamic defense: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”  The claim that the Senator was entirely unaware of dubious or felonious arrangements being made by his better half may seem to an outsider less than chivalrous, among other less thans.  But it cannot be wholly surprising. A great philosopher-poet reminds us of a hard truth of conceivable relevance here: “When love congeals/ it soon reveals/ the faint aroma of performing seals/ the double crossing of a pair of heels.”

 

 

            The presumption of innocence is a valuable feature of our legal system.  As of this writing, Senator Menendez has been convicted of no crime, and Nadine Menendez’s trial is in the indefinite future.  We cannot apply to the Senator’s wife the unreasonably high standard once set for Caesar’s wife.  So, I return to the philological theme with which I began: proper names that have become naturalized in the English vocabulary.   However the court cases go, it is doubtful that “Menendez” is likely to become a transitive verb like the monosyllabic burk or the disyllabic boycott.  It has too many syllables.  The only trisyllable that immediately comes to mind is an inexact but vaguely similar one: to mirandize, meaning to remind a criminal suspect of his specific rights before proceeding to interrogate him.  Mr. Miranda was a low-life, all-purpose habitual criminal who died in a barroom brawl, but his name will be forever remembered in connection with our most cherished civil rights. 

 

Summer Camp Early Report

 

 

 

This will be an essay without a topic, more along the lines of the kind of extorted report that might be a parent’s best hope from a twelve-year-old at summer camp.  Since I never went to summer camp, I never had a chance to write one myself, and so leap at it now.  One of my granddaughters has familiarized me with the genre.  I am on my own in Princeton and feeling rather unconnected.   Joan, accompanied by elder son Richard, flew off to England on Thursday morning.  They went to visit granddaughter Lulu, a Barnard College junior who is spending a happy term abroad in Pembroke College, Cambridge.  Telephonic and email reports from various the principals suggest that visit is a great success, and everyone is having a great time.  Richard has even seen a life-list bird, an increasing rare event and one usually requiring geographical exoticism beyond East Anglia.  They will be home by the time I post this.  I do wish I could be there, but I I am fortunately not entirely on my own.  My wonderful health aide, Christie Kadelu, had been keeping me out of trouble.  But I still have the feeling of Life on Hold.  And after a couple of days reaching the high seventies, the weather turned rainy and cool again, and in general I feel the week has actually conspired against me. 

 

I had a rather bad twenty-four hours on account of what I call my “electric foot”.   This is a a neurological aberration the medical name of which may or may not be a neuroma.  It is not uncommon among the aging, but has been considerably exacerbated by some of my other difficulties.  There is the sensation, beginning abruptly,  of a sharp, short electric sting in the toes, foot, ankle, or lower leg.  It is intermittent, with the little shocks spaced with a more or  less regular rhythm at intervals of about a minute at its height and three minutes at its mildest.  At its rare worst it I painful enough to make the leg jump, and even when relatively mild it makes falling asleep difficult or impossible.  The mind cannot relax into somnolence as it anticipates the next jolt.  This episode, the first in many months, was also the most painful I can remember, inflicting its intermittent short sharp stings to my lower left ankle with a real malice for several hours.  It then decreases both in frequency and in the sharpness of the sting and generally disappears entirely within twenty-four hours.  It had been so long since I experienced this annoyance that I was rather offended by its return.  I lost all but a couple of hours of a night’s sleep.  However, it is now reduced to a sleepable level.  Unfortunately, you don’t get a memo from the universe alerting you to the corporal insults awaiting you in old age.  But even amidst all this self-indulgence, I must not drift into an organ recital, as an elderly wit of my acquaintance characterizes the typical conversation of seniors.

 

Two major events in the public sphere have dominated my attention, along no doubt with that of a great many of my fellow Americans.  As my last couple of essays must suggest, I have been very concerned about the student demonstrations on many of our campuses.  I will say what worries me in a moment, but I think a sigh of relief is perhaps in order.  That is, I think that the weekend just past was relatively reassuring on the protest front. Protestors were allowed to make their point, and most institutions were allowed to make at least a gesture toward theirs—the point of an academic commencement being ceremonial and quasi-sacramental.   So far as I know, and despite the apparently high hopes of several thousand journalists and the malicious actions of a very few bad actors, dozens of institutional celebrations took place in an atmosphere of reasonably good order.  I will breathe a little easier if the next weekend transpires as the last one did.  There is serious potential mischief awaiting us at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late summer, but sufficient unto the day…What worries me about the protests had no direct connection with Israel, with Gaza, or even the horrible slaughter that initiated the war and has characterized its prosecution.  I fear that this particular form of campus disorder is likely further to alienate an important segment of the American population who already have a dim view of academic self-righteousness and self-satisfaction and will be further put off by this episode.  There are already enough cynical politicians fanning these flames.  I want our colleges to be, and to be seen to be, the great national treasures that at their best they are.

 

            There is, however, a big however.  Though my opinion is that the protests have often been wrong-headed and transgressive, they evidence the moral seriousness and idealism of at least many of the youthful protesters.  The other major news story of the moment is the continuing trial of Donald Trump.  It is generally called the “hush money trial” though it is technically a “falsification of documents” trial, there being no precise actual legal category for what it is really about, which is sleaze, personal and political.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m as much of a voyeur as any tabloid reader, even if my tabloid is the Times.  The latest reports I have read concern the testimony of Mr. Trump’s one-time lawyer, Michael Cohen, who is of course a felon, a perjurer, a former convict, and now a kind of male version of Alecto or Tisiphone, remorseless in his vengeful mission.  Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted that in his choice of lieutenants he takes only the best, and Cohen does seem to have been very good at what he did, at least for a while. 

 

The headline on one Times story reads thus: “Trump Told Cohen Disclosure of His Fling Would Be a Total Disaster.”  This headline seems hyperbolic in at least two ways.  Few disasters are actually total.  Indeed, the testimony is that Mr. Trump and/or his advisers thought that most potential male voters would be okay with the story, but that it might not go over so well with women.  Do you think?  My real objection is to the word “fling”.  Surely a fling has a little more going for it than this?  Surely “a drop” would be better, or at best a “toss”.  Best of all would be best to drop the whole subject.  It’s funny that so many things that aren’t funny are so laughable.