Super Tuesday?

Super Tuesday, indeed.  Do people still say “Harrummph” as they did in the old cartoons?  If not, we need to do something about reviving the custom.  Those of us who have been trying to follow the course of the nomination process in the Democratic Party find ourselves in the curious  position of discerning through the dawn’s early light that the choice has effectively been narrowed down to two geezers.  You have one crabby old man who thinks that the source of most of our ills is a system rigged in favor of “millionaires and billionaires” and one vague old man who says that 150,000,000 Americans have been killed by guns in recent decades.  He is the one who won Super Tuesday and is once again the leader of the pack.  Apparently ours is indeed the age of big data.

A crabby and vague old man like myself will perhaps be especially alarmed by the prospect before us.  We have had many chances to consider the credentials of Mr.  Biden, and I would prefer someone else.  In our household there were once high hopes for Senator Warren, who came in fourth in her native state and third in the state she represents in the Senate.  That means, in practical terms, Senator Sanders, a career politician who in a forty-year career has maintained his progressive purity at the relatively small cost of never achieving much else.  One of my sons, who commands my admiration and respect, is an enthusiastic backer of Bernie; and that alone is enough to make me take him seriously.  For me the first problem is that Sanders claims to be a Socialist, subgenre democratic Socialist; and it is far from clear what he means by that.  The pundit Paul Krugman insists that Sanders isn’t a Socialist, but just likes to say he is.

In the most recent “debate” Mayor Bloomberg (a third geezer) chided Senator Sanders for his Socialism, which he regards as a failed system.  “We’re not going to throw out capitalism.  We tried that.  Other countries tried that.  It was called Communism, and it just didn’t work.”  Mr. Sanders’s riposte was “Cheap shot!”, and indeed there is a whole rhetorical industry devoted to the search for a significant distinction between “Socialism” and “Communism”.  Before going there, as we say, one might point out that the absurd format of these so-called debates does little more than provide an arena for cheap shots.  It also encourages the fantasy, rarely acknowledged by the candidates, of a nearly omnipotent president who can single-handedly, by ukase, achieve free college, emissions reductions, “comprehensive immigration reform” and more or less any other mighty feat that enters his or her head.

Mr. Sanders, though presenting himself as the polar opposite of our current President,  has a similar penchant for impolitic praise of tyrants.  So he has praised the late dictator Fidel Castro for doing some “good things” alongside the bad “authoritarian” things Sanders disapproves of.  Specifically, he organized a literacy campaign.  Since according to the political theory dominant among Cuban refugees and large swathes of the Republican Party, it is impossible that Castro ever did anything good in his life, Sanders is feeling some heat for his attitude.  Such is the Manichaean passion of partisanship.  But I doubt that anyone has performed only evil acts.  Read the story of the Jongleur de Notre Dame.  Hitler, our chosen icon of evil unalloyed, did all sorts of good things.  So did Josef Stalin.  For instance, he won World War II, and you might want to give him some credit for that.

One still has to point out that coercion does not cease to be coercion just because you can tolerate or even applaud its effects.  And coercion is a prerequisite to Socialism.  Among dozens of explications of  Socialist coercion I recommend especially the brief and lucid chapter “Why Socialism?” with which Martin Malia began his magisterial The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (1994).  The bosses of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were unaware that it was a “cheap shot” to call themselves Socialists.

I happen to have been reading Alexis de Tocqueville this week, and he has acute remarks that are relevant here.  Socialism may rightly be called an alien idea in America.  It is a manufactured political theory or what de Tocqueville called a “general idea” in his chapter “Why the Americans have never been as passionate as the French about general ideas in politics.”  He thus amplifies: “The Americans are a democratic people who have always taken charge of public affairs themselves, and we [French ] are a democratic people who for a long time could only dream about the best way to conduct public business.”  Unlike Sanders, de Tocqueville was not terribly keen on the “revolutionary” idea.  Of course his family had actually lived through a Revolution and was probably prejudiced by the guillotining of many close friends and family members in 1794.

It is obvious that Senator Sanders has spent some considerable time dreaming “about the best way to conduct public business.”  I’ll take his word for it that democratic Socialism eschews all authoritarianism, let alone the mass murder that has characterized Socialism’s more notable twentieth-century forms.  But it does take a certain testy audacity, to say the least, to insist—with scant attention to detail and none to costing--upon a behemoth of a nationalized universal health care program the first requirement of which is the destruction of a vast and complicated private insurance system interlaced with most of the nation’s industrial and economic life.

            The purposes for which our government was established are clear enough in the founding documents.  They are “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  This is an agenda of liberation, not the blueprint for the imposition of a “general idea.”  A joke that has survived since the “Red Decade” of my birth has as its subject a Communist agitator orating to a crowd of workers on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  “My friends,” he said, “Come the revolution, you will have strawberries and cream!”  But a skeptical kibitzer shouted out: “What if you don’t like strawberries and cream?”  “Come the revolution,” retorted the speaker without missing a beat,” you will like strawberries and cream.”

Nel mezzo del campaign trail

Yesterday was so-called Super Tuesday.  As the readership of this blog is international, I might explain that the portentous adjective “Super” is used to designate the day on which numerous states hold their “primary” elections, those designed to arrive at a single party candidate to run in the general election in November.  I have to admit I have gotten caught up in the political excitement and was prepared to stay up late to learn the news.  This may not sound to you like a dramatic evidence of deep political commitment, but as I am definitely a Morning Person with a vengeance, it really is.  However two factors worked in my favor.   Most of the voting was being done in my own time zone, so that the voting day was done about the same time as my energy was depleted.  Secondly, we have advanced beyond the Bad Old Days of the “hanging chads”.  The technology of the voting machines now reliably yields almost instantaneous results, so that I knew all I needed to know before falling into a deep and restful sleep.

What made yesterday “super” for me had nothing to do with the voting or its results.  What made the day “super” for me was the first meeting of a six-week course I am offering on Dante’s Inferno.  The venue for this seminar is the Evergreen Forum of Princeton, one of the hundreds of Geezer Colleges that now dot the landscape of the American Senior Community.  I have written about “adult” or “continuing” education on this blog before.  I regard its vitality an impressive sign of social and cultural health.  On a day on which various pundits were predicting the results of Super Tuesday in terms of the frustrations of embittered old white people, I was standing up in front of a class of mainly old white people full of cheerful intelligence, eager expectation, and the thrill of discovery.

I asked for a show of hands.  “How many of you will be reading Dante for the first time?”  At least a third of the students—there are in perfect harmony with Dante’s own numerological aesthetics thirty-three of them—raised a hand.  I actually felt a pang of jealousy.  The cruel fact is that you can read a great work of literature for the first time only once.  And while older students are often at first a little timid and diffident, uncertain of intellectual and spiritual capacities dormant since their college days, they have a huge if unrecognized advantage as readers of serious books.  That advantage—our advantage—is a cumulative life experience for which there is no artificial substitute.

I am amused by our common use of the word adult in such phrases as “adult themes” or “adult movies,” usually signifying sexual content dealt with at an adolescent level.  If you want adult themes, let me recommend the Divine Comedy.  Its subject, according to its author, is “the state of the souls after death”.  It deals with the traditional four Last Things of Catholic theology: Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. 

Centennial years always command a special attention.  The year 1300 perhaps held more than most.  The pope had declared it a special year and offered special inducements to attract pilgrims to Rome.  They came in large numbers.  Dante’s poem, written a few years later, uses the Jubilee of 1300 as its historical setting, so that the journey of the poet-narrator has a universal symbolic suggestion as well as an intensely personal focus.  The famous opening lines of the Inferno begin thus: “Midway in the journey of our life,  I came to myself in a dark wood…”  The interplay of a shared plurality (our life) with the singularity of a first-person narrator invites, perhaps requires, that readers find their own journeys within the fantastic description of the pilgrim’s.

As is typical of this poet, what he means by midway is both personal and universal.  Life’s journey is something of a cliché and already was when Dante first picked up his pen: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...  But there is more.  Suppose that an author happened in fact to have been born in the year 1265.   Then in a poem set in the imaginary year of 1300 that man would be in fact thirty-five years old.  That is indeed exactly at the midpoint of a canonical lifespan of seventy years.  “The days of our years are threescore years and ten”, says the Psalmist; “and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.”  There is a certain pleasing lack of dogmatism in this verse.  Seventy is the norm, but you might make it to eighty.  It still has a sobering impact, especially should you, the reader,  just happen to be seventy-nine years and nine months, say.

Educational Train Wreck

The question that was fluttering the pundits was “Who will win Ohio?”  I presume that the results of “Super Tuesday” mean that we can start waving  goodbye to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, though we’ll have to wait until November to say goodbye to Mitt Romney.  It’s been a real squeaker, but the Republicans, against daunting odds, have managed to pluck defeat from the jaws of victory.  Mr. Santorum self-destructed just before the Michigan primary when a series of merely unusually bizarre statements encouraged the press to dig out some of his really bizarre statements of yesteryear.  It turns out there is no operative policy of Too Weird to Fail.  Who knew?

            One of his Parthian shots related to a subject I actually know something about, higher education.  Mr. Santorum, who has two postgraduate degrees, said that President Obama is a snob (indeed, “What a snob!”) for saying that all Americans should go to college.  President Obama never said that, but what people actually say has so little to do with the spirit of this campaign that the issue seldom arises.  The President has suggested, several times, that Higher Education is a good thing, and some of his followers are now talking about it as a “right”.  So the question is worth considering. Would universal higher education be good for America?  I don’t think so.

            Among the legends of bureaucratic inanity is the story of a European governmental commission tasked, early in the twentieth century, with investigating an alarming rise in railway accident deaths.   Statistical analysis revealed that most people killed in train accidents had been sitting in the last car of the train.  The recommendation of the commission was simplicity itself.  Just remove the last car from every train!

            Agitation for a “right” to universal higher education here is of similar inanity.  What do you do if the last car in the train of your public education system—that would be public high school, if you grasp my allegory—what do you do if this car keeps derailing?  I would respectfully suggest that what you do not do is add another car.

            Our high schools are a mess—not all of them, of course, but far too many.  The mess is not one that governmental policy has directly created, nor one the federal government can directly address effectively.  While American public education is a somewhat more relevant topic for discussion in a presidential race than contraception, it’s on the same continuum.  And before the educational crisis can be addressed, it has to be convincingly identified.  If secondary education is broken, we need to try to fix secondary education, not winch the problem up to higher ground.  A generic high school diploma that cannot guarantee so much as real literacy is worthless as a professional credential; but the diploma was not always worthless.

            The notion of universal public education financed by the public purse is based in a forgotten contract.  Citizens of the Republic have an obligation to become active contributors to its social health and vigor.  The Republic has the responsibility to provide its citizens with with the opportunity to gain certain fundamental skills of citizenship.  But that forgotten contract was itself founded on something yet more forgotten: the assumption that the young would be prepared for their state education and supported in its pursuit within the context of a wholesome and caring household.

            There is a good deal of outrage about what has followed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision—to wit, torrents of fat-cat money mainly used to finance thirty-second political attack ads on television.  I share the outrage, but if we need to be protected against our own freedom I’d first look elsewhere.  I have heard no outrage, none, that even without the Supreme Court we seem content to have an electorate that casts its votes on the basis of an education gained in the commercial breaks of televised athletic matches.

            The latest in our endless series of school massacres was perpetrated by a certain T. J. Lane, aged 17, in the high school at Chardon, OH.  I don’t know what courses Mr. Lane or his victims had been pursuing.  Not long ago, however, I read the beautifully written memoirs of General William Tecumseh Sherman.  Sherman, who you will recall really won Georgia, was born in 1820 in Lancaster, near Columbus, when Ohio was still largely wilderness.  When he was five he entered the school there, a school like most in the early Republic entrepreneurially established by one educated man or woman who was often the entire faculty. 

             Sherman wrote: “I continued at the Academy in Lancaster, which was the best in the place, indeed as good as any school in Ohio.  We studied all the common branches of knowledge, including Latin, Greek, and French.”  That was when he was eleven or twelve years old.  At sixteen he left to become a cadet at the Military Academy.  “During the autumn of 1835 and the spring of 1836 I devoted myself chiefly to mathematics and French, which were known to be the chief requirements for admission to West Point.”  How many high school students today devote themselves “chiefly” to anything taxing and academic?  The relevant question about Ohio might be who lost it?