Foul Papers

There are certain necessary and recurrent tasks that are so onerous and unpleasant that they can be accomplished only by the application of external physical duress or the nearly supernatural engagement of will power.  In general, at least in my life, these have to do with cleaning up messes of one kind or another.  I absolutely hate tidying my study, for example.  My view is that if a house must look lived in to be livable, a workplace must look worked in to be workable. This theory, which aims to elevate slovenliness to the rank of the virtues, is unfortunately effective only to a limited degree.  All too soon the books and papers on the desk become so many and so miscellaneous as to form a kind of haystack in which one’s actual “work” of the moment plays the inglorious role of needle.

            Gutter-cleaning is another periodic purgatory.  Though nearly a third of our trees have been blown down by the huge winds of recent years, you would think we lived in the heart of a deciduous forest from the state of the drainpipes.  Over the years I have bought every patented “gutter-guard” device on the market.  They always work perfectly in the ads, but they somehow fail miserably on the actual gutters.  The only solution, painful and slow, is a bloguiste on a ladder, moving very slowly around the periphery of the whole house with incrementally scraped knuckles.

            Yet gutter-cleaning is less awful than desk-tidying in one important regard.  I am not personally responsible for creating the gutter mess.  To be forced to face the results of one’s own iniquity always has a special awfulnessness about it.  What all this is building up to is this: I have just completed a fortnight of torment reading and correcting the proof sheets of a four hundred page book in the process of publication. 

            As we look back on printing history we are inclined to regard Gutenberg’s great advances in creating movable type in terms of an increased capacity for production and distribution.  It took a long time to copy out a book in handwriting.  It took a bit longer to set one up in type, but once that was done you could then print off a hundred of them, or a thousand, in the time it would take to make a second manuscript.  But the early printers rarely talked about that huge and obvious advantage.  What they tended to brag about was that it was now possible to guarantee the integrity of a text because it had been read and corrected in proof by the author or editor.  Every book, in theory, had the authority of a holograph.

            But what was a great relief for a publisher might be an equally great anxiety for an author.  The “printer’s error” is, after all, a great convenience for a writer, as its invocation might plausibly shield him from the consequences of his own folly.  That is why for a long time editors actually made authors sign the corrected sheets.  I haven’t experienced that intimidating ritual in a while.  That’s probably because most printing these days involves an electronic technology in which a computer file is transformed directly into print.  Under these circumstances there are no more “printer’s errors”.  There are only author’s or editor’s errors.  And the number of them that you can rack up in four hundred pages is pretty discouraging.

            There is a technical bibliographic term beloved of graduate students in English: foul papers.   The term says it all.  Foul papers are the really messed up, crossed out, and scribbled over bundles of verbal protoplasm that were the germs of some of Shaespeare’s plays.  Once, in what I must regard as the good old days, I received from a Belgian printing house the proof sheets of a fairly long article in which the word the appeared as thq two hundred and twelve times.  Circling every one of those suckers with a red pencil gave me a considerable feeling of accomplishment.  There is no such cheap grace in finding twenty-six tabulated pages or errors in a book set directly from the computer disk submitted!

Foul Papers

            The English word proof has now wandered a fair distance from its original meaning, which still exists is some proverbial expressions often used but seldom understood, such as “The exception proves the rule” or “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”  The main challenge of proof-reading, apart from the constant danger of sudden death by terminal boredom, is that the human eye struggles to see not what is there, but what it knows ought to be there.  And if in the first place you wrote the text being eyeballed, you are fatally certain of what ought to be there.  Your eyes tend to approve some platonic version of what you think you wrote rather than what you actually wrote.  That’s why you missed it the first time.

            The only thing that allows my blog posts even a spurious façade of typographical accuracy is Joan’s eagle eye.  She has just earned yet another oak leaf cluster on her heavily laden marital Croix de Guerre by proofing the equivalent of a hundred and twenty-five blog posts back-to-back.  A masochistic friend, Eli Schwartz, likewise read the whole “first-pass” book.  The slightly scary thing is that several glaring errors appeared uniquely in each of the three catalogues of error.  Eli alone noted a passage in which I have Louis XIV, who died in 1715, presiding over certain events of the 1730s!.  But then, in the immortal words of some typographical aphorist of Renaissance, “No book is completed until Error hath crept in and affixed his sly Imprimatur”.

           

            

Resigned to the Resignation

 

 Papal refuseniks: Benedict XVI checks out the tomb of Celestin V

As a long-time friend and admirer of the great dantista Robert Hollander, and a sometime apprentice in the fabulous summer seminars he has conducted in a thirteenth-century Tuscan castle, I have learned to sing along with the chorus of Dantolators for whom the poet can do no wrong—and I mean none at all.  Even Homer may nod, and for all his greatness my guy, Geoffrey Chaucer, published some fairly dubious stuff, such as the following account of the failure of medicine to save the dying Arcite:

                        Hym gayneth neither, for to gete his lif,

                        Vomyt upward, ne downward laxatif.

But I am required to believe that Dante never errs, that every line is spun gold, and every idea platinum.

            But as Milton’s Satan says, “The mind is its own place.”  And I have to tell you from that undisclosed location that I think there is some—not much, but some--pretty dumb stuff in the Divine Comedy.  There!  I said it!  Dante and his guide Virgil are barely through the famous gate of Hell before we get a real lollapalooza.  There in Hell’s waiting room, so to speak, are the Trimmers, the morally inert, the lukewarms, the neither fish nor fowl, the spiritual Thyatyrans of the ages. These folk are being stung by wasps and hornets.  Their mingled blood and tears drip down to attract stinking worms around their feet.  Not nice.  Dante gives us only one representative human member of these tormented sadsacks.  He recognizes “the shade of him who, through cowardice, made the great refusal [gran rifiuto].”

            Learned annotators explain that this has to be the shade of Pope Celestin V, the emaciated old man who resigned the papacy in 1294 less than a year after accepting it.  Yesterday I saw strings of interviews with people, mainly distraught, lamenting  the announced retirement of the current pope.  Two of them actually brought up Celestin V, whose name I had never before heard mentioned in half a century of loyal viewing.  I am sure these people got it from Dante, also the attitude.  Both of them were steaming mad at the pope.

            Well, not me.  I admire him.  But then I also admire Celestin V.  Celestin V was anything but a coward.  He was an octogenarian holy hermit, and it didn’t take him long to conclude that the chair of Peter was, in that age, no place for a religious person.  The cardinals agreed; they didn’t elect another one for quite a while.

            I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have had a special reason—I’ll come to it in a minute—to follow the career of Benedict XVI.  Hence I am aware that he has often been criticized as a hide-bound traditionalist trapped in yesterday’s moral theology.  Well, he has just struck a powerful blow for modernity.  The idea that the pope is a spiritual monarch who must hold up his orb in his palsied hand until dementia or prostate cancer finally carries him off lacks theological warrant, common sense, or simple Christian charity.

            Recently, when the Archbishop of Canterbury resigned and went on to become the head of a Cambridge college, I regarded it as an episode in an upward trajectory.  But of course I am a college professor, which is what the pope also was so many years ago.  That’s why I knew him before many of you did.  I knew him as Professor Joseph Ratzinger, the author of a brilliant book* about St. Bonaventure’s theology of history.  This is one of those books that—granting a preliminary interest in its admittedly arcane subject matter—simply knocks you off your feet.  There are only a few books the reading of which actually changes the direction of a scholar’s work.  For me, this was such a book.  Without it I hardly would have stuck my toe into the subject of Franciscan studies.

            I had no idea who Ratzinger was, of course.  I didn’t particularly want to know.  One of the joys of academic study is encountering the disembodied minds of other people a thousand miles or a thousand years away, completely independent of personal or biographical speculation.  He had been pope for two or three years before I tumbled to the fact it was the same guy.

 Dante checks out the tomb of Boniface VIII

          Dante didn’t really know squat about Celestin V.  He was simply furious that Boniface VIII, who he thought was a really bad guy, was able to leap into the breach.  So I’ll forgive his little poetical hissy-fit.  But whatever else resigning the papacy might be, it can hardly be an emblem of “cowardice” [viltade].  I wish Professor Ratzinger even longer life and good health, and I shall hope, selfishly, for another dynamite book.

*Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura (1959); English translation The Theology of History in Saint Bonaventure (1971)

           

"A Bloody Tyrant and a Homicide"

            KING RICHARD III

 Before

After

The latest news in medieval history appears on the front pages of our daily newspapers so infrequently that I can hardly let pass without comment this week’s truly sensational bulletin that a team of medieval archaeologists at the University of Leicester in England have convincingly identified the skeletal remains of King Richard III buried beneath a municipal parking lot.  This is an extraordinary historical discovery, and a stunning illustration of the powers of modern scholarly methods to achieve results beyond the reach of earlier generations.  So, let’s hear it for the Leicester medievalists!

            From this medievalist what you will hear is his usual eccentric meditation, which involves the vagaries of history and literature.  In the first place I am deeply gratified, as an historian of Franciscan culture, that the bones were found in conjunction with the rediscovery of the actual foundations of the long obliterated Minorite friary in Leicester.  The neighborhood was called “Gray Friars” from time immemorial, but nobody knew exactly where the buildings had been.   Nothing can have been much more politically unpopular than the mutilated body of a deposed monarch; but ever faithful in their exercise of the “corporal works of mercy” (the last of which is the burial of the dead) the friars at Leicester did not shrink from the task.  So the Order of Friars Minor, too, deserves its “shout out,” as the latest vulgarity puts it.

            The literary history of King Richard III is yet more fascinating.  Richard died in the bloody finale of the Wars of the Roses, the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485.  He was the last of the Plantagenet monarchs of England.  Henry Tudor, who defeated him and who ascended to the throne as King Henry VII, though he had cobbled together a wobbly dynastic claim, was actually a usurper.  But history is generally written by the winners, and the winners did a real number on poor old Richard III.  Some of the main outlines of the Black Legend of King Richard had been sketched by his enemies even in his lifetime.  A physical abnormality (curvature of the spine, or scoliosis), which left him with the unflattering nickname “Crookback”, is glaringly evident in the skeletal remains.  But it was his supposed moral degeneracy that William Shakespeare has made forever vivid.

            Since the Immortal Bard is, well, the Immortal Bard, it may seem churlish of me to point out that he was also a Tudor propagandist.   I say this without suggestion of censure.  If you were not a Tudor propagandist in the reign of the Virgin Queen, you would have been most foolhardy to write a play on an English historical subject.  Still, one of the most salient features of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Richard III is the gusto with which it incorporates the Tudor libels about the unfortunate king.  Shakespeare has them all, and then adds a couple of his own invention.  From the popular point of view Richard’s crowning crime was arranging the murder of his two juvenile nephews, aged nine and twelve, in the tower of London.  Famous actors have loved playing this role.  In addition to getting to utter an immortal line (“A horse!  A horse!  My kingdom for a horse!”) they have been able to vie one with another in what might be called an Ugliness Pageant.  Ordinarily making fun of cripples has been regarded as poor form, but Shakespeare’s treatment of the infanticide Crookback has given a plenary license to the make-up artists to do their direst thing.

 An authorized anthology of grotesques

           

 Thing is, Richard didn’t do it.  That is the argument of a still insufficiently known masterpiece of modern fiction, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time (1951).  This wonderful book has been called “the greatest mystery story of all time”,  and not by me but by the Crime Writers’ Association gathered in solemn conclave in 1990.  Josephine Tey was the pseudonym of a very proper and unassuming Scottish lady named Elizabeth Mackintosh.  She took her title from one of the pithier sayings of old Francis Bacon: “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.”  I would say that you can take my word for it, but it seems inappropriate to do so.

            Like many great detective writers Josephine Tey has a master detective who moves from book to book: one Inspector Grant.  But true artistic genius usually combines honored tradition with striking invention.  Part of the brilliance of The Daughter of Time is its bold upending of the conventions of the detective novel.  The classic detective novel ingeniously reveals the guilt of a perpetrator who began the book enjoying the reader’s natural assumption of innocence.  The Daughter of Time ingeniously reveals the innocence of a man universally loathed as one of history’s moral monsters.  The great detective must be a man of daring, whose bold initiatives in pursuing his investigation land him in life-threatening scrapes—a minimum of three scrapes per caper--in abandoned tunnels, spooky warehouses, and elevator shafts.  Inspector Grant cracks the case of Richard III while laid up in a hospital with a broken leg.  The greatest physical danger faced by his right hand man (an American graduate student!) is the risk of dropping a heavy folio volume on his foot.  Ms. Tey’s book carries no such dangers, and if you haven’t read it, you should read it soon.

Denying the Major--Also Assorted Lieutenants

 

W. C. Fields as Wilkins Micawber, deficit-scold

I have become increasingly interested in recent years in the verb deny and its nominative offspring denial and denier.  In a very funny and protracted exchange of insults between Prince Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare’s First Part of King Henry the Fourth, we get the following.

Prince:  And thou a natural coward, without instinct.

Falstaff: I deny your major…

A lot of ink has been expended in the attempt to explicate this passage.  What Falstaff means by major seems clear enough.  It comes from the technical vocabulary of the medieval logicians, and it refers to the major premise of a syllogism.    The schoolbook example of a syllogism was this:

            All men are mortal.           

            Socrates is a man.

            Ergo, Socrates is mortal.

The major premise is that all men are mortal, a fact taken to be undeniable.  The minor premise, that Socrates is a man, is likewise taken as undeniable.  The problem is that the Prince has made no syllogistic argument, except perhaps by implication: “Only cowards flee from battle,” as Falstaff has just fled in ignominious fashion.

            To deny something, etymologically speaking, is to say no to it.  Denial ought to operate with regard to actual facts, though factual denial may require yet further interrogation.  You may absolutely deny that you murdered Colonel Mustard in the library with a candlestick if (a) you were at the time of the murder fully occupied with Lady Bellebosom in the bedroom, or (b) you used a pistol.  But more and more denial is becoming a matter of opinion.  This mode of denial is often signaled by the proximity of the adverb surely.  “Surely you will not deny that Bach is a greater musician than Brahms.”  Well, you might in fact.  Maybe.

            So erratic have been the linguistic wanderings of deny-words that denial now means saying no to something that is true as often as to something that is false.  We have Holocaust-denial and AIDS-denial, birth-certificate-denial, 9/11- denial, etc.  Practically all of us are “in denial” about something or other.

            Among the privileges of teaching at a major university is the opportunity to rub shoulders with the kinds of celebrity professors and “public intellectuals” who tend to be fairly thick on the ground in places like Oxford, Paris, Geneva, New Haven, Chicago, Berkeley and other particularly lush groves of Academe.  If my own experience at Princeton is a safe guide, it is true, the shoulder-rubbing is mainly metaphorical, since Professor Famous is much more likely to be on a book tour or testifying in Washington than attending another dull meeting of the Library Committee, but we are at least all listed on the same mastheads.  My experience also suggests that it is safer to deny some things than others.

            One of my eminent colleagues, the physicist Will Happer, has gained mainly local opprobrium as a “global warming skeptic”.  In fact his skepticism had something to do with the silent substitution of the phrase “climate change” for “global warming” in public discourse.  A second eminence, the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman has gained mainly local approbation as a “deficit skeptic”, or a scold of what he calls “deficit-scolds,” folks who worry about the fact that America is many trillions of dollars in debt.

 Professor Paul Krugman, deficit-scold scold

            I am neither a physicist nor an economist but a student of literature.  Hence my possibly eccentric subordination of the theories of J. M. Keynes to those of Wilkins Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."*

            It is pretty clear where President Obama’s selective denials prevail from two passages in his much-praised Second Inaugural Address.

¶We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.  Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms… 

¶We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.  But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. 

            I am among those who fret perhaps too much about the fate of future generations of Americans, beginning with my own grandchildren.  But like Falstaff I must deny the Prince’s major.  Raging fires, droughts, and powerful storms did not begin in the Industrial Revolution.  Although the twentieth century witnessed new heights (or depths) of incendiary warfare, the possibility of a “natural” disaster such as the London Fire of 1666 or the Chicago Fire of 1871 is in fact now quite remote.

            As to “the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit”—well, call me skeptical.  Our politicians are not really into “hard choices,” since making them might prove fatal to re-election.  In my opinion, “the generation that built this country” has long since been in its collective grave.  Furthermore I find the President’s use of the word invest rather peculiar.  But there is no need to dabble in possible quibbles when there is a more obvious, simple matter of mathematical logic to be addressed.

            Even a President cannot spend the same dollar twice.  You can either use up all the nation’s money paying for Social Security and Medicare for us geezers or you can spend it on something else.  Guns or butter.  Cat scans on demand or high-speed rail.  If you want seriously to reduce the deficit, let alone retire it, you need either to increase your tax revenues significantly or to reduce your expenditures, also significantly.  In fact it’s pretty likely that you have to do both.  I want to believe our leaders when they tell us that “America’s best days are still ahead”; but it’s a little rich to claim that saddling our school children with yet more debt will usher in the millennium.  And I deny that I am in denial!

*Charles Dickens, in David Copperfield

The Patriot's Library

          

As the term "liberty of the press" is adopted in this country without being understood I will state the origin of it and shew what it means.*

Last night on Channel Thirteen I watched the concluding episode of “The Abolitionists.”  Like most of “The American Experience” offerings, it was excellent.  It had the usual wonderful old photographs and the usual rainbow coalition of American historians offering commentary.  Their fad of speaking in a chatty historical present—“So Lincoln reads this letter, and he goes ballistic…” sort of thing—annoyed me, or perhaps annoys me; but that is a mere quibble overwhelmed by the quality of the information conveyed.

            I noticed that the National Endowment for the Humanities was on the list of financial supporters for the program.  That caught my eye, perhaps, because like many liberal arts professors I myself have enjoyed the support of the NEH in years past.  I did receive a fellowship from the Endowment one year, but my more extensive experience with the organization involved teaching several summer seminars, some for high school teachers and some for college professors.  Some of my happiest experiences in a long teaching career relate to those seminars.

            I am a patriot—that is, a lover of my native land—as I would hope that most of my far-flung readers are.  I can imagine few activities more truly patriotic than studying the history of my country—seriously, honestly, and with that kind of moral intentionality that compares the words of our founding documents and the lives of our acknowledged national heroes against the background of the actual social realities of the “American experience”, past and present.

            It was therefore discouraging to me to hear a self-proclaimed patriot in our Congress, when asked for concrete ideas as to how to attack an eminently unpatriotic sixteen trillion dollar national deficit, offer as his sole specific suggestion, defunding the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The budget request made by the NEH for 2013 is, I think, about a hundred and fifty million dollars.  For that amount of money the government could get about three-eights of one F-22 fighter plane, according to the most recent figures I’ve seen.  How I do wish H. L. Mencken were still with us.  We at last have achieved a congressional boobocracy fully worthy of his scorn.

            However, the purpose of this post is not to bash the benighted but to energize the enlightened.  It is my annual call to patriotism. Among the worthy groups that have enjoyed some very modest support from the NEH is the Library of America, the non-profit publishing enterprise with the mission of making available in scholarly and beautiful editions the works of important American writers.  I cannot imagine a more patriotic mission than the preservation and dissemination of our extraordinary American literary culture, and the chaste dust jacket of every Library of America volume discreetly but proudly is banded in red, white, and blue.

            My blog has apparently gained a readership far greater than I could have imagined.  My chief evidence for this claim, though circumstantial, is to me quite convincing.  It is the increasing frequency and urgency with which I am encouraged to “monetize” the blog—meaning make money off it by opening it to commercial advertisements.  Such a suggestion is of course highly gratifying to me.   First it means that somebody out there in cyberland who knows how to count readers has counted enough of them to offer me a little money to go commercial; second, because the money proposed is so little, I can safely scorn it, and with a deeply satisfying high-mindedness.  So I continue to promise my readers: as you scroll through Gladlylerne, you will not be encouraged to drink Pepsi or undergo liposuction, even at the hands of our board-certified plastic surgeons.

            The Library of America is another matter.  I will continue to make an annual appeal—entirely unsolicited by the librarians, needless to say, or even known to them--on the library’s behalf.  If you are an American, I urge you to visit the Library’s website.  If you are a literate American, I urge you in a spirit of patriotism to join as a subscriber.  We will grant a pass to semi-literates, for whom ordering merely one or two of the current specials will suffice.  I note that Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales is among them.  If you’re the kind of patriot who specializes in musket-lore, that’s the one for you.

*Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (Library of America, 76), p. 429.

Poor Little Rich Girl

 

The Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (1798-1860)

Of all famous quotations usually misquoted few are more popular than what Scott Fitzgerald said about the difference between rich people and “us”, meaning the not-so-rich people.  In a fictional voice, in a short story called “The Rich Boy”, Fitzgerald wrote thus:  Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

            Being one of “us” I don’t know whether those sentiments are true, but they are very modern and very American and, let me add, very different from some attitudes of our ancestors.  Fitzgerald was one of the great literary theoreticians of the American aristocracy of wealth.  Our model differed from the old feudal model of an aristocracy of blood and rank in many ways, but in no way more noticeable than in its neglect of a sense of obligation.

            This point has been driven home to me by some of my recent general reading, which has been roaming among the Romanovs.   A more dutiful bunch of autocrats would be hard to find.  In particular, I came upon a charming mini-memoir* written by the Empress Dowager Alexandra Feodorovna (1798-1860), the widow of Nicholas I and mother of Alexander II, the “tsar-liberator”.   (Incidentally, is it at all embarrassing that the Russian czarist Manifesto of Emancipation antedates the American presidential Emancipation Proclamation by two years?)  This beautiful and virtuous lady spent her girlhood as a Prussian princess named Charlotte, but everything had to change, including her name, when she fell into cahoots with the Romanovs.  Her memoir, written in French in her widowhood, deals with her early years of married life (1817-1821).

            There is a solid historical explanation for the plots of Jane Austen’s novels and most others worth reading.  I suppose that the Darwinian imperative of sexual mating is too obvious to argue.  But if you add to it a powerful religious rationale and even more powerful political, social, and economic motives you pretty much have the history of Western literature from the Iliad to Downton Abbey.

            The chief reason that the royal houses of Europe ended up in such a mess of mediocrity, idiocy, and congenital disease was what might be called the “stale blood” problem: royalty had to marry other royalty.  That had been a demographic challenge since the Middle Ages, but it became particularly acute after the French Revolution.  The chief occupation of the royal youth of the age was checking out or being checked out as a potential spouse.  Nicholas met Charlotte (Alexandra) in Berlin in 1814.  He was 18, she 16; but the families closed the deal more or less on the spot.  They were married in 1817.

            As a ruler Nicholas I can fairly be judged as a disaster, and one of the worst kind, meaning a well-intentioned disaster.  The first thing he did, on the very day of his accession to power in December, 1825, was to slaughter a few of those noble and romantic rebels henceforth known as the “Decembrists”.  In macro-historical terms that was rather like fighting for the wrong guys at Bunker Hill.  One of the last things he did was to lose the Crimean War in humiliating fashion.  But the disasters had been thrust upon him.  Like George VI a century later, Nicholas was an accidental monarch.  His elder brother Constantine had been next in line for the throne, but when the time came he abdicated for a reason far more plausible than Wallis Simpson—cowardice.           

            Before his marriage Nicholas had gone on a number of educational tours, one of which was a fairly protracted stay in England, the nation recommended to him by some enlightened advisers around the court (and there actually were some) as a beacon of “representative government”.  His host and cicerone in the industrial Midlands was the Duke of Wellington.  It will tell you something of Nicholas’s political primitiveness that what he took to be the dangerous liberalism of the Duke and of the whole setup in pre-Reform Britain simply confirmed his belief in the sacred necessity of absolute autocracy.

            Almost everything the imperial couple did was undertaken out of a sense of obligation, and sacrificial duty is actually the main theme of the Empress’s recollections of her early married life.  Poor little rich girl, indeed!  In the middle of June, accompanied by a military guard but with little you could call “emotional support”, she was sent off from her native palace in the direction of the Russian frontier, where she arrived about a week later to be met by her betrothed “with drawn sword, at the head of a guard of honor” and accompanied by various Orthodox ecclesiastics with lots of hair and weird hats.  Part of the deal of being a Russian Grand Duchess was a crash course in the Orthodox faith.  She was a Lutheran, and a serious one; but now she was closeted for five days with a priest named Moussowsky for an emergency spiritual transplant.  Five days!  Moussowsky must have been quite a guy.  I’ve been working away at the works of John Chrysostom and Basil the Great for half a lifetime, and I’m nowhere near done.

            For the whole week’s run-up to the elaborate formal announcement of the betrothal, she writes, “I did nothing but cry whenever I found myself alone; the change in religions cost me a lot and weighed upon my heart….On the 24^th June I was taken to church by the Emperor.  As well as I could I made my profession of faith in Russian.  Beside me stood a black-robed Abbess, while I, dressed in white, with a little cross at my neck, looked like a sacrificial victim.  This was the impression I produced on all our Prussian attendants, who with feelings of compassion and eyes full of tears watched their poor Princess Charlotte take part in a ceremony strange and mystical to the minds of Protestants.”  But protest made she none.

*A Czarina’s Story, trans. by Una Pope-Hennessy (London, 1948)

           

In Re: The United States versus My Grandchildren

 

After a long hiatus in grandchild production, a blessed industry in which our daughter held a family monopoly for nearly two decades, her two brothers began in the second half of the last calendar year to redeem the time.  For the roughly five months since jolly John Henry arrived in lower Manhattan followed roughly six weeks later by radiant Ruby in Red Hook, Brooklyn, their pixilated paternal grandparents have been spending as much time as possible adoring them, an activity that has had a particular appropriateness as the season of Epiphany ran its course.  Should any friendly pagan need an explanation of my allusion, it refers to the liturgical memory of the legendary visitation of the three magi kings (Caspar, Balthasar, and Melchior) to the newly born infant Jesus.

            Unlike the magi our mode of travel is not stellar.  We travel at the sufferance of the New Jersey Transit Corporation, and we must open our coffers to their hungry ticket machines.  For your bloguiste there is one other slight inconvenience.  Should visiting day fall on Tuesday, that is to say yesterday, with a New York overnight, he is unlikely to start thinking about his Wednesday post, let alone writing it, until he’s well south of the tunnel on the return trip.

            Such is the present circumstance, though “current events” practically dictate the subject.  For what we have just witnessed as the New Year began—the orgy of fecklessness, incompetence, and poltroonery summarized under the general rubric of “the fiscal cliff”—relates to my newest grandchildren in a very poignant way.  It means that little John Henry and even littler Ruby will spend the first years of their American citizenship in a land where the rising public debt is already greater than the annual gross domestic product.  Along with their birth certificates each one picked up a congressional Visa bill of about sixty grand.  Head start?  No child left behind?

            The disgrace of our federally elected officials is fairly ecumenical, but I have to say that the spineless Republicans take the cake.  Can a political party that preaches fiscal responsibility and then proposes Mitt Romney for the presidency and actually re-elects John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives have any claim on serious men and women? 

            Some of you will be old enough to remember Spiro Agnew, one of our most disgraceful and disgraced of Veeps.  Long before he was exposed as a crook he had been widely recognized as a dolt.  But when publicly taxed for his “mediocrity,” he in no wise contested the charge.  On the contrary, his view was that the large numbers of mediocre people in the country deserved to have their representative too.  He must have alluded to that large majority of our fellow citizens who have come to the consensus that every American has a natural right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—and, oh yeah, a free lunch.  Lest I seem to speak obscurely, I mean an unfunded welfare state.  Perhaps Agnew had a point.  Such people do need representation.   But do we need four hundred of them in the House alone?

            Sadly, we probably have the Congress we deserve.  We have an electoral system that does an excellent job of pre-screening out intelligence, moderation, imagination, and any traditional sense of public service.  Once elected, most Congressmen soon reveal by their actions their one unfailingly constant motive: getting elected again.  As we voters seem happy enough to collude with this system, we perhaps have merited our loathsome reward.  But surely the children of our nation deserve something better.

            My own grandchildren will, I devoutly hope, survive the malfeasance of their government, for they enjoy some powerful advantages.  They all live in stable homes with two loving parents who are committed in marriage to their well being, their education, and their moral training.  They will do some family travelling.  They will have books in the house.  At the family table where they will regularly take their evening meal, they will join in intelligent conversation sometimes characterized by complete sentences and disyllabic words.  They thus will find themselves endowed with a certain amount of what is called “social capital”.  That fact alone may make them members of a generational minority, but it should help them to seize such opportunities as appear on the constricting horizons of our national life, as in happier and more generous times their meritocratic forebears of earlier generations once did.

            It is the fantasy of a large swath of one of our political parties that “government programs” can do nothing to replenish the sadly depleted social capital of millions of our children, and the fantasy of a large swath of the other that they can do everything.  Perhaps one early locus of the compromise which will be imperative for any real progress might be an agreement that at the very least we will not bury the newborn under a mountain of prenatal debt.