A Temporizing Intervention

Rather to my surprise, an opportunity has arisen that will allow me to meet my Wednesday obligation, if only in a symbolic fashion.

I spent the last several days in East Lothian, a lovely part of Scotland twixt Edinburgh and the sea, staying with Joan's cousin Margaret Richards.  When I first met her some decades past she lived in the stunning old manse of Whitekirk, one of the few medieval churches still in service in Scotland.  She has now passed the house on to one of her daughters and taken up residence in the spectacularly converted old stables building.  The church itself once had a holy well, and was a pilgrimage site in the fourteenth century.  I attended a service on Harvest Festival Sunday, when it was decked out with floral arrangements and baskets of various agricultural products--mainly gourds and squash this late in the year.  The Presbyterian minister was a Dutch woman with a perfect Scottish accent and a husband with a pony-tail.  John Knox was not in the congregation

Off to Canterbury

Canterbury glass

“Ye goon to Cauntererbury—” says Harry Bailley, host of the Tabard Inn.  “God yow speede!”  Well, I hope so.   This post is a day early, and the next one will be very late—just how late, I am not yet prepared to predict, but more than a week.  For very shortly after pressing the fatal “PUBLISH” button on the Blogger desktop, I am leaving for the airport and a fortnight in Britain, the focal point of which is a special event in Canterbury.  I have in the past endangered my health in various pestilential continental cyber-cafés simply to achieve a regular weekly post, however feeble, but not this time. I find that the computer, while an excellent servant, is a wretched master--don't you?  The dogged search for Wi-Fi is intrinsically boring and tends to be futile to boot, at least when conducted among my wife’s nonagenarian relatives in Scotland.   So my imaginary loyal readers can expect to hear from me next considerably later in October.

            What commands our trip this time is a ceremony in Canterbury in honor of my brother-in-law, John Newman.  He is not the same chap as John Henry Cardinal Newman, and the ceremony is not beatification—though perhaps it should be.  No, the occasion is the formal recognition of the publication of the revised edition of one of the two volumes devoted to the county of Kent in the Buildings of England series.  This publication will be the culmination of John’s long association with that extraordinary project, to which he has contributed several earlier volumes.

    John Newman (center) at an earlier book launch

        The one inconvenience of having John for a brother-in-law is that the brother-in-law joke is rendered meaningless.  In a long professional life I have met few people whom I more sincerely admire.  He read Greats (Classics) at Oxford just before my time there, and set out on the career for which his education had so obviously prepared him.  He became a classics master in one of the fine public schools of southern England.  He was very good at what he did—I actually once visited one of his classrooms—but his real “bliss” was an amateur interest in architectural history, an interest he had developed as a boy on long bicycle trips through the Kentish countryside.

            So he did something very bold.  He abandoned his job teaching classics to become a graduate student at the Courtauld Institute, which is in effect the Art History department of the University of London, and one of the world’s greatest seminaries of art historians and museum directors.  He certainly could not have known then—having absolutely no formal training in art or architectural history--that he himself would have a most distinguished teaching career at that very institution, serving in time its Assistant Director.

            The Buildings of England series was the invention of Nikolaus Pevsner (1902 –1983), among the most famous of the great generation of German émigré art historians who settled in Britain and America.  John Newman became (in rough chronological order) Pevsner’s chauffeur, his assistant, his friend, his collaborator, and his successor.

 Some of Nikolaus Pevsner's "Buildings of England" volumes

One of John Newman's two volumes devoted to Kent           

 Though he has published architectural guides to several counties in the west, there is a special appropriateness to the culminating Kent volumes.  In the first place, they are major revisions his own most important original work.  Secondly, he is actually a Kentish man, with a geographical trajectory ever deeper into the Kent countryside.  When I first knew him he lived technically in Kent, but actually in the London suburbs.   His young married life was passed in New Ash Green, a community that could legitimately be described as experimental both from the social and the architectural points of view.  His next sojourn was in Sevenoaks, an old and prosperous town full of interesting buildings and estates, including Knole House, once home of Vida Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, one of the most eminent “power couples” in pre-War Britain.  Now John and Margaret have moved once again, and once again yet deeper into Kent, taking up residence in the ancient village of Wye.  At last he is in a house suitable in its antiquity for one of the world’s great experts in Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture.

Wye: the parish church

            This puts him, too, very much in Chaucer country.  Wye is about twelve miles south of Boughton-under-Blean, where the Canon on his lathered horse caught up with the pilgrims, and a shorter distance still from Canterbury itself.  We think of Canterbury as the ecclesiastic center of Britain, and so it is; but the word Canterbury means “the fortified place in Kent”, so that the city’s secular history is hardly less important than the sacred.  On either ground, Canterbury is the indispensable place to honor a Kentishman who is one of the nation’s great champions of its sacred and secular architectural treasures alike.

Angelic Details

             

 So what's with the feathers?

The devil may be in the details, but so far as great writing is concerned it is the angels concealed there that interest me the most.  Great writers are, before all else, masters of the telling detail.  It is a crying shame that our first superlatively great English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, is so little known today, even among voracious readers.  Superficial linguistic difficulties—so superficial that I can teach anybody to overcome them in two or three one-hour classes—keep him imprisoned in university lecture halls.

            The “Summoner’s Tale” is a brilliant satire that attacks the hypocrisy and venality of some mendicant friars, perhaps Franciscans or Carmelites.  The mendicants (beggars) took their name from their religious practice of depending entirely upon the kindness of strangers for their often quite comfortable upkeep.  As the tale begins, a particularly suave religious beggar arrives at a village house, flirts briefly with the wife, then makes himself at home as he prepares to make a serious financial solicitation of the bedridden householder.

And fro the bench he drove away the cat

And laid adown his potente and his hat     [walking stick]

And eek his scrip, and set him soft adown.   [eek=also      scrip=purse, bag]

 A frere the was, a wantowne and a merrye

As usual, learned commentary can enrich one’s enjoyment of the comedy.  It helps to know for example, that in commissioning his disciples Jesus said (Luke 9:3) “Take nothing for [your] journey, neither staves, nor scrip”; and if you’re dirty-minded enough to suspect something slightly fishy in the word potente, so much the better.  But no reader will require a footnote to savor the deliciousness of the detail of the first line—the easy presumption with which the friar shoos the cat away, so that he can sit down soft.

Or how about this one from Dante?  Is there anything more fantastic than the amazing pageant of the Church in Purgatorio xxix?  It’s so fantastic that it completely nonpluses even Virgil, whose imagination dreamed up the whole Æneid.  It features, among other things, the four feathered “living creatures” from the beginning of the prophecy of Ezekiel—with faces of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle respectively.  You probably know that in Christian iconography these became the symbols of the four evangelists.  But Dante describes the feathery parts not in the fashion of Ezekiel, but in that of John’s slightly altered reprise of the image in the Revelation (4:6-9).  Then Dante says this: Giovanni è meco, e da lui si diparte.  “John is with me [!!!], and departs from him [Ezekiel].”  Note: Dante does not agree with Saint John the Divine.  No, John agrees with Dante.  Only a genius could write that line.

Details, details.  In the second book of Gulliver’s Travels Swift is faced with the problem of convincing the reader that his narrator is in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, in comparison with whom he—a normal-sized man—seems minute.  There are only so many ways of saying “They were very big, and I was very small,” and so Swift lets carefully chosen detail do the work for him.  As Chaucer could use a cat, Swift uses a salt cellar.

  

 The court of Brobdingnag reviews the British navy

 Gulliver explains that the king of Brobdingnag, having taken a shine to his minute house guest, has had some tiny furniture made for him.   But just how tiny?  “T’is the custom, that every Wednesday (which, as I have observed, is their Sabbath) the king and queen, with the royal issue of both sexes, dine together in the apartment of his majesty, to whom I was now become a great favourite; and at these times, my little chair and table were placed at his left hand, before one of the salt-cellars.”  (G.T., ii, 3).  Gulliver dines not at the King’s table, but upon it.

            But let us turn to the world’s greatest novel, Tom Jones.  (May peace be upon the advocates of—in alphabetical order--Brothers Karamazov, Madame Bovary, Les Misérables, Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Portrait of a Lady, Vanity Fair, War and Peace, etc., etc.).   Fielding’s novel is at the very least the world’s greatest novel of amazing revelations, the chief such revelation being that of the identity of the hero.

            At times the revelations are a little, well, delicate.  Young Tom Jones,  a foundling, is a lovely lad, but he does have a normal sexual appetite, and at one point he falls into a brief fling with a handsome woman of a certain age and of uncertain morals who goes by the name of “Mrs. Waters”.  “Mrs. Waters” is in fact the middle-aging Jenny Jones, who as a young housemaid twenty years earlier, was accused of being the unwed mother of Tom, to whom her surname was given. 

            It turns out eventually that this belief is mistaken, but not before the misinformation comes to Tom’s ears from his garrulous sidekick Partridge.  Having carnal knowledge of one’s mother, even unawares, rarely turns out well in our literature.  Think Oedipus Rex.  The hyphenated vernacular term for the taboo activity was not in the eighteenth century a commonplace of African American or any other English dialect.  Poor Tom is absolutely horrified to be told he has done it.

            “Why, then, the Lord have mercy upon your soul, and forgive you,” cries Partridge; “but as sure as I stand here alive, you have been a-bed with your own mother.”…."Sure," cries Jones, "Fortune will never have done with me till she hath driven me to distraction. But why do I blame Fortune? I am myself the cause of all my misery. All the dreadful mischiefs which have befallen me are the consequences only of my own folly and vice. What thou hast told me, Partridge, hath almost deprived me of my senses! And was Mrs Waters, then--but why do I ask? for thou must certainly know her…O good Heavens! incest----with a mother! To what am I reserved!"  Book XVIII, 2

            Fielding does not write “incest with my mother” but “incest with a mother”.  Is there a more brilliant use of the humble indefinite article in English literature?  Poor Tom is recalling as best a layman can such moral guidance as may be in the layman’s common domain.  The Anglican Prayer Book of 1662, the official liturgical and doctrinal handbook of English religion as re-established at the time of the Restoration, contained a chart called “A Table of Kindred and Affinity:  Wherein Whosoever Are Related Are Forbidden by the Church of England to Marry Together”.  There are no fewer than twenty-four relations with whom a man is forbidden to have relations, including some pretty unlikely ones such as a “daughter's son's wife,” but right at the top of the list is a mother.

 

a memorable dinner with Mom

Generational Change

 buzzing about the boroughs

In the introductory chapter of The Dark Side of the Enlightenment I had the occasion to ponder the large degree to which written history is concerned with change.  “All history must necessarily be concerned either with change or with stasis...” I wrote.  “It is safe to say that on the whole historians, particularly modern historians, prefer change.”  Our history textbooks are replete with dramatic phrases about “social transformation,” “revolutions” in mores, and the perpetual “rise of the middle classes” who have been rising so long that they by now must be well beyond Saturn, with Uranus heaving into view.

            Many of us born around the middle of the twentieth century need look no further than our own families to verify the drama of such change.  The most superficial comparison of the life experience of my parents and that of our children demonstrates numerous important developments of American life, beginning with the rapid decline of the agrarian system that defined the first century and a half of the republic. Widen the focus in both directions—that is, compare the lives of my nineteenth-century grandparents and my twenty-first century grandchildren—and the drama becomes nearly disorienting.

            I had the occasion to muse upon such matters this past weekend. Probably only a British academic in London could organize a conference of historians to be held in New York on Yom Kippur; but last Saturday that was the situation that cried out for a little extra grand-parenting and took us up to the city on a Friday afternoon in time to pick up two young granddaughters at the end of their day at the bilingual school at which they are maintaining their fluency in French.  That’s just around Gramercy Park, fifteen or so blocks from the kids’ home on Washington Square.

            New York has to be one of the world’s greatest walking cities, and when the place is on, meteorologically speaking, it is really on.  A crisp, bright autumn day is a wonder to be reveled in.  Our adventure began with a walk down Park Avenue to Union Square, then a short westward jog to University Place, then down University Place to Patsy’s Pizza—one of 171 establishments claiming to serve “the best pizza in the world” and of 46 more modestly claiming “the best pizza in New York”.

            The first thing I noted was that although Lulu and Cora Louise love to go to Patsy’s Pizza, it’s not exactly for the pizza.  Cora won’t eat it at all.  Her invariable order is buttered penne generously garnished with freshly grated cheese.  Lulu orders the smallest possible margherita—what might be described as a minimalist pizza.  But both of them soak up the vibe at Patsy’s.  I think my parents died too young ever to have tasted pizza, though my dear English mother-in-law had at least heard of it.  She pronounced it “PITS-uh.

             Saturday, the actual day of our grandparental command performance, dawned even more brilliant than the Friday.  When the kids arose after a “sleep in” authorized by a seriously hard school week, we got organized for the day’s activities, exiting the house about eleven and heading westward toward the Hudson River at a leisurely pace.  Shortly before you get to the West Side Highway on Christopher Street there is a magnificent old brick commercial building which now houses, among Lord knows whatever other important cultural institutions, the American Tap-Dance Foundation.  Eight-year-old Cora has no lesson today—her specialties being violin, tutored Italian, and the sushi-making seminar offered as an extracurricular at her school--so we leave Lulu to spend an hour working on her stamps and stomps while the three of us cross over to a particularly exciting stretch of the Hudson River Park.  It features (among other things) heavily used soccer fields, tennis courts, boat-building ateliers, and stretches of the river dedicated to sailing, kayaking, and sculling.

            Merely watching the exertions of so many fit young bodies soon becomes tiring, and we started circuitously back toward the Tap Dance Foundation, stopping off briefly in the thrift shop of St. Luke’s church on Hudson Street, the church where Cora (we remind her) was baptized.  At this charity shop you can buy an excellent used white dress shirt for $18.  I was unmoved, however, as my wardrobe mainly comes from St. Peter’s Thrift Shop in Freehold, N. J., where the going price for the identical item is $1.50.  It’s called the “Manhattan Mark-Up”, I believe.

            The best part of the day still lay ahead, of course.  We picked up Lulu (from her Terpsichorean tutorial) and some cream cheese bagels (from a deli) and set out, via subway, for the Wall Street Station.  This is but a short walk from Pier Eleven at the South Street Seaport, from which the free shuttle ferry leaves on a regular schedule for Red Hook in Brooklyn.  This remarkable amenity was dreamed up for commercial reasons by the Ikea megastore in Red Hook, and the ferry now makes a preliminary stop at the even newer huge Fairway grocery there.  Fairway just happens to be at the end of Van Brunt Street, a few hundred yards away from the house of our son Richard, his wife Katie Dixon, and their beautiful babe Ruby.

            So my nieces had the great pleasure of sitting on the open benches of a jazzy new ferryboat as they zipped through New York harbor, skirting Governor’s Island, nodding “hello” to the Statue of Liberty, and arriving soon at the Fairway gangplanks to see their aunt, uncle, and baby cousin coming on foot or stroller from the landward direction down Van Brunt Street.  We consumed our bagels while our hosts downed roasted corn and spare ribs at an outdoor table of the Fairway café.  The scene was lively, colorful, picturesque; a cheeky breeze fluttered the numerous flags and pennants.  Here was something of the flavor of Seurat’s famous painting of “Sunday Afternoon at the Grande Jatte”--but none at all of the cotton fields down home.

            It was by now midafternoon, but the feasting was still not quite through.  We spent another delightful hour strolling over the sun-baked cobblestones of Red Hook in search of some supplementary “dessert” calories.  These were easily to be found in bakery or bodega, but our granddaughters set the bar pretty high.  Most strollers held out for Steve’s Key Lime Pies, just beyond Rich’s house.  This internationally famous emporium, housed in a minimally renovated brick warehouse that looks like an abandoned set for “On the Waterfront”, is another that plausibly proclaims its products “the best in the world”.  There was apparently not room on the signboard for a word about prices: highest in the world.  But of course that kind of penny-pinching thinking is my hang-up.  It is much attenuated in my children’s generation, and seems to have disappeared entirely from the mental landscape of my grandchildren: the rise of the middle classes.

 key lime pies to the left; Jimmy Hoffa's tumulus--straight ahead

Good Sensa

domes, sweet domes

            I had intended to comment on the Middle East fiasco like everybody else, but apparently while I slept Mr. Putin, playing the King’s Syrian Defense, achieved a cunning fianchetto that has for the moment transformed the board, leaving Secretary Kerry dumbfounded by his own prescience, leaving President Obama temporarily grasping a red life-line, leaving the members of Congress undisturbed in their pusillanimity, leaving Mr. Assad in power and in a strengthened position, and leaving Russian influence in the region enhanced: quite an achievement for a single move of a pawn.  So I’d probably better write about the Venetian Republic instead.

            The Republic of Venice endured for a thousand years, expiring in 1797, just as our own was still taking its hesitant toddler’s steps.  We shall before too long have made it to the quarter-mile post, but though I am a patriot and try my best to be an optimist, I must in imagination tremble before the uncertainties of the long three-quarters of the race I shall never see.   As the world becomes more complicated the work of democracy, which we already shirk, becomes ever more demanding.  The possibility of self-destruction sounds melodramatic, but it is in fact a banal reality.  We very nearly tore ourselves apart once before.

           

            The fifteen minutes of fame of an obscure Michigan representative named Bart Stupak ended on March 21, 2010.   That night the House of Representatives approved H. R. 3590, a motion to concur in the Senate’s amendments to the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” (alias ObamaCare),  by a vote of 219 (all Democrats) to 212 (178 Republicans and 34 Democrats).  The country has not had a day of political peace since then.  As for Mr. Stupak, he did not seek reelection, moving on to the “private sector” to become—no prizes for guessing!—a lobbyist.

            Some people, including even some members of Congress, eventually got around to reading the Affordable Care Act within the first three years after its passage, and they were alarmed by various things they discovered there.  House Republicans began the charade of repeated votes to repeal the law.  President Obama was sufficiently alarmed to decide that certain parts of it don’t really count, at least for the time being.

            In a democracy, the majority rules.  The Affordable Care Act is the law of the land.  Were it not for slim majorities, very little would get done.  And in fact very little does get done.  According to one common analysis, the chief engine of “Washington gridlock” is the Senate rule—an extra-constitutional custom, not a law—that in effect requires a sixty percent super-majority for the completion of much important business.   But effective government requires not merely constitutional agency but wisdom—which is, alas, extra-constitutional, and perhaps extra terrestrial.  “He made him lord of his house, and ruler of all his substance,” writes the Psalmist.  “To bind his princes at his pleasure, and teach his senators wisdom.”  But who will teach ours?  The legality of the Affordable Care act has now been resolved according to our system.  But just how wise is it to effect “fundamental transformation” on a party-line vote with a majority of seven out of four hundred and thirty-one?

ceremony of the screwball

            Things were ordered differently in old Venice.  The chief man there was called the doge (as in dux, il duce, or the Duke).  He was the equivalent of our POTUS, except that the civic rituals of Venice were much more interesting than those in Washington.  The President of the United States throws out the first pitch of the baseball season.  Standing on the poop of a magnificently decorated barge, the doge of Venice each Ascension Day (Sensa, in the old Venetian dialect) threw a wedding ring into the Adriatic, thus confirming the marriage of his maritime republic to the waves through which its merchant ships plied their lucrative trade.

 ceremony of the Sensa (by Canaletto)

The office of the doge was elective, but the Venetians chose to dramatize  those elements of whimsy and chance that lie just beneath the surface of all democratic endeavors.  Here is how the ten steps of the election deployed.

¶ 1º, 30 electors were chosen by lot from the Great Council (Concilium Sapientis or Senate), an enclave of the hereditary aristocracy

¶ 2º,  a second lottery chose 9 of that thirty

¶ 3º,  the 9 placed 40 names in nomination

¶ 4º,  twelve of the forty names were chosen by lot and forwarded

¶ 5º,  the chosen 12 nominated 25 candidates

¶ 6º,  from the 25, nine names were chosen by lot

¶ 7º,  these 9 then put 45 names in nomination

¶ 8º,  from the list of 45, eleven names  were chosen by lot

¶ 9º, the eleven appointed 41 electors

¶ 10º  the 41 electors elected a doge.

In several old history textbooks these Venetian protocols were offered up as light relief, curious divagations of the medieval mind unthinkable in modern rationality.  More recently, however, they have been seriously studied by economists and applied mathematicians who note that their consistent tendency is the requirement of a super-majority of at least 61% in the final vote and as much as 81.8% at various earlier stages of election.*  There were no squeakers in ducal elections, only landslides.  Several historians have concluded that the long stability of republican government in Venice, as compared with the notorious and often violent volatility of that in some other Italian civil corporations, is to be explained in part by the hyper-legitimacy of a doge elected by hyper-majority.  Let me remind you: the Venetian Republic did last a thousand years.

*See for example Jay Coggins and C. Federico Perali, “64% Majority Rule in Ducal Venice: Voting for the Doge,” in Public Choice (1998):709-723.

Walter and Me

 

What Joan calls with a slight edge my “empire,” and I more accurately call my “library” or “the press room” is an ample book-walled space, about thirty feet square, that does not even try to disguise it origins as a garage.  There are two doors at its southeast corner.  One opens into the kitchen and beyond that into the “real” house, the other into the laundry room; both the kitchen and the laundry are our own major renovations of about a decade ago.  I never was one of those hermetically sealed scholars, and I usually keep those doors open.  I like feeling in touch with the real life of the domestic establishment.  So I have become accustomed to kitchen sounds from one doorway, and from the other the deep-throated pulsings of the washing machine, and the higher-pitched swish of the spin dryer.  Except that not infrequently the dryer’s swish is interrupted by randomly spaced, atonal metallic clatter.  I then get up from my great thoughts, walk over to the dryer, stop its motion temporarily, and remove from among the half-dried undies a quarter, well circulated at high speed, or maybe a couple of hot pennies.  This is an experience that puts flesh on the bones of the concept of the “coin wash”.

            This phenomenon, naturally, reminds me that about ten days ago Anna Gunn published an odd op-ed essay in the NYT.   Ms. Gunn is a television star, currently famous for her major role as Skyler White in the blockbuster serial Breaking Bad. This is an artistic work of considerable genius about a cancer-stricken high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, Walter White, whose response to the adversity of cancer is to become the methamphetamine kingpin of the Sun Belt.  The bluish crystals of his manufacture are apparently to die for, and quite a few people do.  Talk about “better things for better living through chemistry.”  Yes, I know…I didn’t believe it either until earlier in the summer I binged my way through all the early episodes free on Netflix.  Just believe me, it’s brilliant.  Think “Portrait of Dorian Gray” by way of Doctor Faustus or All the King’s Men.

            Anna Gunn’s fictional character, the chemist’s wife, is one of very few people who know about her husband’s mind-boggling criminality, and certainly the only one to call him on it—which she does sometimes vehemently, but also intermittently.  In her op-ed essay, Ms. Gunn reports her astonishment at the discovery that thousands of viewers of Breaking Bad hate Skyler White, and that the hatred for her fictional persona sometimes seems to extend to her factual person.

 vox populi

            Ms. Gunn’s animadversions on this phenomenon might well win her a high grade in a Women’s Studies course, but I don’t find them very convincing.  The consistent aim of American popular culture, after all, is to demolish whatever thin barriers may still separate fantasy from reality, and Breaking Bad seems to have achieved this goal early on.  The online “hate boards” that alarm her are actually monuments to her remarkable powers as an actress.  She brilliantly simulates a forceful and complex woman thrown into a grotesque situation in which her stress not infrequently surfaces.  If Ms. Gunn can land a comparable gig in a series about Joan of Arc, Florence Nightingale, or Little Orphan Annie, she’ll be overwhelmed by “love boards.”

            But the truth is that Skyler White is by no means unequivocally lovable.  Her own hands are not clean, even if her car is.  For Skyler, too, can find piles of money a turn-on.  In Breaking Bad she has intermittently cooperated with her husband’s plan to set her up in a car-washing business that can help rehabilitate the sordid C-notes distantly deriving from the pawned plunder or welfare checks of meth addicts all over the Land of Enchantment and beyond.  (It is typical of the cerebral wit of the people who write the show that the vehicle for criminal money laundering should be a Car Wash!) 

 The Whites in marital conference: ablution without absolution

            Say what you will about Walter White.  I’ll grant you that he is a ruthless gangster, a fraud, a liar, and a killer, and that the use of the product of his manufacture may be harmful to your teeth.  But cut the man a little slack.  It is no easy thing being married to a money launderer.  Believe me, I know.  For the spin-dried dimes are only the beginning.  Hundred dollar bills are not as common in my corner of New Jersey as they appear to be in Albuquerque, but I not infrequently find a desiccated single plastered against the dryer drum, along with the occasional plastic card (credit, subway, driver’s license, whatever).  Fortunately these tend not to crumble into confetti, to show up as white specks among the meth-blue fibers on the lint screen, as irreplaceable bibliographic notes and used Kleenex tissues are  wont to do.

            Perhaps only a man can understand the function of a shirt pocket, which since time memorial has found its station on the left breast.  There are dozens of quotidian chores, many of which must be done in a hurry, that practically guarantee that at any moment in the day there is a forty percent chance there will be some legal tender in a shirt pocket.  Joan takes the view—superficially plausible--that I should empty my pockets more carefully, when all the while the real problem is the too frequent lavation of garments that could easily get by for three or four weeks on their own.  Or perhaps the solution is a pocketless T-shirt?

College Cost Crisis

I have more or less sworn off political topics, as there is already a surfeit of opinionated grumpiness available on other blogs.  I may have views on the candidates to head the  FED, or suspicions concerning the probable economic results of Obamacare; but I don’t flatter myself that they have authority, much less general interest.  Just now, however, the President in his recent remarks concerning the daunting cost of higher education has taken up subjects to which I have given a certain amount of serious thought over many decades of my professional life as a college professor.  Putting it rather bluntly I don’t think the President sees the fundamental problems facing American higher education very clearly.  Furthermore the steps he proposes do not seem to me very promising in addressing even the secondary problems he does see.

            The President correctly notes that (1) college costs, already high, are rising; (2) many students can attend college only by incurring crippling debt;  (3) college admission does not necessarily mean college completion; and (4) a college degree does not necessarily guarantee a job.  He then proposes that the Department of Education should start evaluating colleges in terms of their cost containment, retention rates, and vocational effectiveness.  Only students matriculating in high scoring institutions would be eligible for government-backed student loans.

            I tremble at the prospect of being dependent upon the evaluation of the Department of Education for almost anything, but never mind.  The President is trying to address real problems, but is he really doing that?  For instance, how good an indication of institutional quality is “graduation rate”?  Less good than you might think, and certainly less good than President Obama implies. 

            The highest tier of selective colleges and universities is so high that some institutions could fill the freshman class with valedictorians.  The second tier might have to stoop to the occasional salutatorian.  I spent most of my career in the top tier, but it is largely irrelevant to the current discussion.  My first academic job was relevant.  It was at the huge University of Wisconsin in Madison.  The great state universities are one of the glories of our unique American democracy, and the University of Wisconsin was, and still is, among the great ones.  I was very impressed by the institution’s admissions policy at that time, which in a nutshell was this.  Any certified graduate of a Wisconsin high school was guaranteed admission to one of the campuses of the University; but applicants were encouraged to evaluate their preparation and motivation realistically, since they were not guaranteed to succeed at course work or to graduate.  They were offered an opportunity, not a meal ticket.  Flunking out was an actual possibility.  The world is full of people who had “a year or two” at such institutions.  They are witnesses to educational integrity, however, not institutional failure.

            The continuing rise in college tuition has many causes, but one of them is undoubtedly the easy availability of cheap government money.  Institutions of higher education long ago became past masters of the “government grant”.  So have professors.  This is especially true of scientists and engineers, but I myself have more than once enjoyed largesse distributed by the National Endowment of the Humanities.  Getting the government to pay undergraduate tuition fees, if only by proxy, is already keeping more than one marginal institution in business.  Encouraging institutions to “teach to the test”—that is, to define their educational mission as the eligibility to be supported by government-backed tuition loans—strikes me as bad policy.

            A large, stable, and financially viable middle class is an indispensable rather than a merely desirable condition of American democracy.  And home ownership is certainly a laudable and realistic middle class aspiration.   It is not, however, an inalienable right.  A few years ago a lot of greedy bankers, egged on by governmental cheerleaders, decided they could make a ton of money by pretending that it was.  The devastating result was the mortgage crisis.  Already some voices are proclaiming—one hopes in ignorance rather than in demagoguery--that college tuition should be free for all.   

            We do have free education in this country.  The trouble is that quite of bit of it is appallingly inferior in quality.  We are shocked, rightly, at the huge disparities of wealth we see around us.  We should be no less shocked at the huge disparities (eventually related) in the quality of public education.  A high school graduate of the class of 1913 knew how to read and write.  Basic literacy—on which all learning depends--was not the province of “higher education,” as it increasingly is in America in 2013.  It should not be necessary to incur crippling debt to learn the multiplication tables to eight or ten, or how to write a simple declarative sentence, or how to distinguish between its and it’s.  A high school diploma was once a serious credential in this country.  It still is for some, but for far too many it is a mere calendrical marker and a license to apply for “higher”—and very costly—education.