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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More Unquiet on Campus

 

Readers will know that I have been caught up in the news about campus protests.  Circumstances have had me reading lots of stories in the New York Times, many of which are of dubious authority as they tend to stress short moments of drama and confrontation that belie the generally static and indeed tedious aspects of the “sit-in” or “occupation” mode.   Indeed, it is rather difficult to dramatize the “hours and hours of boredom” as opposed to the comparatively rare “few moments of absolute terror” that punctuate them.  That was the formulation journalists came up with to describe the battlefields of the first World War.  And of course it is fair to say that student protests have rendered some of our campuses battlefields of a sort.

 

Surely the large majority of student protesters are idealistic and passionately sincere.  They are utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause, which also means of course of their own virtue.  They are prone to think that those who might disagree with them are bad people but that they are good people.   But those are explanatory descriptions of a mind set, not  Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards.  It has generally been a principle of American political protest when it manifests itself in the public realm that the protesters be frank and bold in their protestations—that they “claim ownership of them,” as the phrase goes.  There is a famous story involving Thoreau and Emerson, the only inconvenience of which is its fictionality, illustrating the idea.  In 1846 Thoreau was (very briefly) jailed for failing to pay his poll tax.  As he later wrote in "Civil Disobedience," he believed "it is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and . . . not to give it practically his support."  He did this to register his hostility to chattel slavery, tolerated by American law.  That is the historical part of the story.  The legend is that he was visited in jail by Emerson, who is supposed to have said, “Henry, I am very surprised to find you in this place of custody.,” to which the prisoner is supposed to have retorted, “Waldo, I am very disappointed that you are not in jail!”  The moral: when the civil disobedience demanded by justice and conscience clashes with the law, break the law.

 

The large majority of the protesters at Columbia and several other places have masked their faces.  This is not a fact without significance.  There are various benign masked figures in our folklore—Robin Hood and the Lone Ranger come to mind.  But in real life most masked brigands have not in fact robbed from the rich in order to give to the poor.  Their masking is an effort to avoid identification and legal retribution.  When cloaking violence and criminality, masking likewise heightens the terror effect.  If you knew for a fact that that menacing sub-kleagle of the KKK was actually a balding guy who sells Fuller brushes you might at least have the slight comfort of knowing something about the banality of evil.  Even if they do not fear the illegality of their actions—or even if they are performing no actual illegal actions—the protesters may fear the retribution of “doxing”.  This English neologism, a child of the Internet age, is supposedly short for “documenting” or “dropping documents”—such as name, address, etc.  “Doxing is a form of cyberbullying that uses sensitive or secret information, statements, or records for the harassment, exposure, financial harm, or other exploitation of targeted individuals.”  It is another term for public identification.  Demonstrators may well prefer that school authorities, or their parents and friends, or public safety officials, or their professors, political adversaries, or parole officers actually not know for sure who they are.  Disguised identity, however, strikes me as sinister, and at the very least Civil Disobedience Light.

 

What captures my attention today, however, is a certain body of evidence of how the general public is reacting to the demonstrations.  There is a feature of the on-line Times of special interest to a protest-watcher.  That is the “Comments” section.  For many stories it is possible for any reader to make a comment, and often some hundreds of readers do just that.  The genre of the “comment” is not friendly to subtlety.  “Both sidesism” is rare and sometimes execrated.  The “Arab-Israeli conflict” provides a kind of political Rorschach Test in the American press.   I think it is also safe to say that the Times readership tips decidedly left on the whole.  Under these circumstances I find what seems to be a decisive  majority critical of the protestors a fact of which Democratic Party officials may want to take note.  Another feature of the comments of interest to me is that what I shall call the pro-Palestinian commentators, who though in a marked minority are still numerous, not infrequently invoke their own experiences as anti-War protestors in the late ‘Sixties and early ‘Seventies.  What interests me most, though, is their frequent use of the phrase “the right side of history.”  Does history have “sides,” and if so only two, heads or tails, right or wrong?  As an historian of medieval religious movements myself, I have spent a fair amount of time studying “heresy”—deviations from orthodox religious belief or practice.  I am afraid my study has left me with what must seem a cynical definition of heresy.  Heresy is the side that loses.  In 1972, Zhou Enlai, the premier of China under Mao Zedong, was supposedly asked the question: “What was the long-term impact of the French Revolution?” His answer: “Too early to say.”  The anecdote is frequently treated as whimsical or facetious, but in fact it seems to me good Confucian wisdom.  

 

Many professors, including myself, are happy to acknowledge the huge debt they owe to their generations of students over many years.  Students are in many ways our teachers as well.   But action born of youthful passion too often claims the authority of a spurious certainty.  It is fairly easy to see that the situation in Gaza is absolutely horrible, and that the massive slaughter of a civilian population is unconscionable.  It is much more difficult to see that the current campus protests will have any practical effect in ameliorating that situation.  On the contrary, my fear is that their tendency is likely to further degrade the reputation of some of our finest institutions of higher learning in the eyes of the larger population in whose service they have been founded and to whose benefit they are dedicated.