Breakfast of Champions

Frank Norris

            Now and again in a spare moment I will take from a shelf one of my beautiful volumes of the Library of America—not exactly at random but with a certain element of caprice.  It is never hard to find new things that need and reward reading.  Recently I took down the volume of Frank Norris’s Novels and Essays.  In college I learned that Norris (1870-1902) was a “naturalist” and a “muck-raker,” but as we never actually read him, that didn’t mean much.  Years later I did take up The Octopus in a “social novel” binge mainly centered on Dreiser.  I just read Norris’s first novel, Vandover and the Brute; it turned out to be pretty good for a book written in a Harvard undergraduate writing course.  The setting is fin-de-siècle San Francisco—young men about town.  Its subject is moral decay.  To one anesthetized by post-modernism, it is almost shocking in its moral clarity.  Norris seems entirely unembarrassed to use words like depravity, degeneracy, corruption, etc., and to analyze the sins of the flesh from a perspective other than the merely quantitative.

            It is, however, a very minor aspect of the material culture described that is the inspiration for this post: the carnivore breakfast.  Vandover and his pals spend a good deal of time chowing down in various Frisco taverns and bordellos.  Standard evening snacks are large platters of oysters and “Welsh rabbits”—neither Welsh nor rabbits, of course, but a delivery system for scrumptious, cheesy calories devised by our ancestors before the blessings of pizza came to the land--washed down with goodly quantities of beer or champagne.  But they regularly start off their days with a huge chunk of quadruped flesh.  The standard conversational gambit for chums meeting up during the course of the day is a report on the avoirdupois of the morning’s meat.  The fourteen-ounce beefsteak is apparently the favorite breakfast, though the odd chop or cutlet will do in a pinch.  Pork products—ham, bacon, sausage—are for people on strict diets.

            If you are used of a morning to facing half a grapefruit, a few choice grains of granola, or even a whole bowl of steel cut oats, the young carnivores of Frank Norris may be a cause for alarm.  But it was not always thus.

            In the autumn of 1958 I sailed for Europe with a cohort of my fellow Rhodes Scholars-elect.  The ship was very grand, a floating city block from the Upper East Side; and though we were in the twilight of the Age of the Atlantic Crossing, everything about the arrangements seemed specially designed to boggle the mind of a young man from the sticks.  The food, served up by an abundance of waiters clad in bright, starchy white, was endless in its variety and apparently inexhaustible in its quantity.

            I was eager for knowledge of the old culture I would soon be encountering.  Someone had given me a light-hearted book full of advice for Americans about to visit the Mother Country for the first time.  I cannot remember its title, and I lost the book itself ages ago.  Still one or two of its gobbets of advice have stuck with me.  “It is quite easy to get three good meals a day in England,” said my author, “so long as you eat three breakfasts.”  The gastronomic scene in the British Isles has long since undergone a revolution, but in the late Fifties, if you happened to be taking most of your meals in a college dining hall, the advice proved prescient. 

While I never disdain the information offered by textbooks, I try always to test theory with observed practice.  I discovered on shipboard that the “full English breakfast” invariably included—in addition to fried eggs, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, and apparently deep fried bread—both sausages and bacon, the bacon being of the genre usually called “Canadian” on this side of the Atlantic.

There was among our fellow passengers on the ship a middle-aged guy who struck me as the quintessence of Britishness.  He had a ruddy face adorned with a large russet moustache.  He was never seen without a coat and tie, and rarely without a suit of coarse-threaded tweed that looked about as thick as a Bokhara carpet and about as comfortable as a wire brush.  From his general demeanor one sensed he had not gotten the memo about having lost India.

Excess being addictive I was already by the fourth breakfast of the voyage looking for new worlds to conquer.  Eschewing the “full English breakfast” I boldly ordered from the meaty sub-section of the huge menu kippered herrings and something called “Köningsberger Klopse”.  How the waiter could accept this order with a straight face astonishes me in retrospect, but he did.  The Klopse turned out to be meatballs in a kind of caper-flavored gravy and could have on their own constituted an ample evening meal.  It’s not the kind of dish that required a supplement, especially a supplement of kippers.

Just as this breakfast was arriving under its gleaming metal dome the Imperial tweeded gentleman whom I mentioned earlier happened to be ushered in and seated at a nearby table in my sight-line.  We did not speak or even acknowledge each others’ presence; yet we shared a Jamesian moment.  I could not help noticing the slight recoil on this man’s face when he saw what lay on the plates before me.  He quickly recouped, averted his eyes, and gave his own order to his own waiter.  The distance between us was not great; I could not help overhearing his order.  “Please bring me a cup of tea,” he said.  “And a bowl of corn flakes.”

Historical Perspective

I remember clearly why, quite a long time ago now, I determined that Wednesday would be my regular blog day.  I thought of it as the appropriate day for what I had in mind.  Wednesday is intrinsically medial, and perforce therefore perhaps also moderate, as I fancy my topics and their treatment to be.  All well and good, perhaps, but I now see that I failed to anticipate a serious problem.  Not being of a particularly political turn of mind, I neglected to consider two salient facts: first, that in this country political elections normally take place on Tuesdays, and second, that if one lives on the East coast electoral results are unlikely to be available until well past my bedtime, let alone in time for me to incorporate them into some kind of sage or amusing commentary.

We now have the latest report on who's in and who's out.  That Donald Trump is still very much in is a cause of consternation to many in my circles.  While I have no punditry to offer, I might try to apply the balm of historical perspective.  Mr. Trump is a vulgarian whose indifference to actual facts is probably more founded upon opportunism and political indifference than on ignorance.  He conveys a tone, a spirit, an attitude.  His aim has been to represent a mood rather than to present a concrete program.  What he would actually do if elected president is hard to say, partly because his opinions stated at various times are contradictory, and partly because he seems challenged by the concept of the complete sentence.  But the idea that he has brought a new low to American presidential campaigns is a product of the shrinking historical memory.

In 1884 the presidential contest pitted James G. Blain (Republican) against Grover Cleveland (Democrat).  The rival camps had competing chants, which arose full-throated from rowdy mass meetings like football cheers today.  The Republican mobs would cry out “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?  Gone to the White House, haw, haw haw!”  The allusion here was to the bastard child sired by the Grover.  The Democrats could reply as follows: “Blain, Blain, James G. Blain!  The continental liar from the state of Maine!”  The reference here was to Blain’s denials of highly plausible charges of corrupt dealing on behalf of the railroad interest.

We can all deplore the coarseness of American democracy, but the complaints about its vanishing civility are historically ignorant.  As to political violence, of which there is a long and bloody tradition in American history, there is considerably less of it today than there was in earlier days of the Republic, even leaving unmentioned the awkward episode known as the Civil War.  I am an Arkansan.  At the first meeting of the Arkansas state legislature (1837) a heated discussion arose and the Speaker of the House stepped down from the podium at which he was presiding to engage in a knife fight with another legislator, whom he killed then and there.  Those were the good old days.

There has been a great deal of tisk-tisking over Trump’s truculently announced desire to punch somebody in the nose.   It does sound very unpresidential, but here again there are some advantages to having been around a while.  The consensus of recent American historians is that Harry Truman is among the ten greatest of our presidents.  The actual calculation of the Wikipedia chart devoted to this sweepstates has him coming in at Number Seven.  I don’t dabble in such pseudo-statistics, but President Truman is certainly high on my personal life-time list, coming in just after Franklin Roosevelt, whose unfinished term he inherited.  The President’s daughter Margaret was an amateur singer with professional aspirations.  Paul Hume, the music critic at the Washington Post, wrote an unflattering review of one of her concerts, which took place in December, 1950.  There was a certain amount happening just about then.  The President had declared a state of emergency against “Communist imperialism”.  Dwight Eisenhower assumed the supreme command of NATO forces.  The Dalai Lama had to flee Tibet in the face of an invading Chinese army.  Nonetheless the President of the United States took the time to write a threatening letter, on White House stationery, to the music critic who had panned his little girl.

“I've just read your lousy review of Margaret's concert. I've come to the conclusion that you are an ‘eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay’…” the president began.  “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” Truman not merely had his finger on the nuclear button; he is the only person in history to have pushed the button.  His threat to beat up a journalist was regarded by some Republicans as pathetic and thin-skinned and by some Democrats as touchingly human.  But so far as I know nobody declared it the end of civilization as we have known it, nor did the editorial board of the New York Times melt into a puddle of ghee. 

Trump has called Bernie Sanders a “Communist”.  It is an index of historical change, I suppose, that this remark now seems ludicrous rather than incendiary.  He might as well have charged him with Monophysitism.  After yesterday's voting Mr. Sanders would appear to me to be practically out; but lexical responsibility need not follow him.  To the degree that he is indeed actually a socialist, which is debatable, he belongs to the distinctly American school of “social democracy” represented by Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas and execrated by real Communists as “social fascism”.  But of course Trump’s own adversaries call him a “Fascist” with equal abandon and equal lack of historical sense.  To refresh yourself on how real Communists and real Fascists conducted their electoral competitions I could recommend some choice pages from Jan Valtin’s Out of the Night in which he offers an eye-witness description of the political campaign of 1932 in Hamburg.  “Early one morning a squad of seven young Nazis were on their way to distribute propaganda to the dockers at the harbor gates.  Johnny Dettmer’s crew sauntered up behind them on Admiralty Street, and shot all seven in the back…On [May 19, 1932] one Nazi had his eyes stabbed out with a screw driver… Fourteen Nazis and Communists were killed on July 31, the day of the new Reichstag election…” etc.  This too will pass.

San la Muerte

I spent many years studying the fascinating figure of Saint Francis Assisi and his impact on the religious life of the later Middle Ages.  He remains the most popular post-biblical saint not only in the Roman Catholic Church but also among the general public, including the irreligious and even the anti-religious.  Just at the moment I have been revisiting Francis’s best loved poem, his “Song of Brother Sun” (Cantico di frate sole), a lauda or vernacular hymn of praise inspired by the sub-genre of “praise poems” in the Psalter.

Francis was not a learned man.  He called himself an idiota—a word not to be polluted by its modern English reflex—using the same term applied to Peter and John in the Book of Acts.  It meant a person without formal education or intellectual pretension.  In my opinion, however, he was more simple of soul than simple of mind; and I have been trying, with mixed success, to persuade my colleagues of the literary evidence of his intellectual sophistication.  He wrote the “Song of Brother Sun” late in his life in various stages.  His hymn commands that God be praised through/by/on account of numerous items of the physical creation: sun, moon, wind and water, fire and earth.  As he neared the end of his life, he added some final lines that have proved rather mysterious, beginning Laudato si, mi signore, per sora nostra morte corporale…Be praised, my Lord, on account of our sister, corporal death…This stanza, which has puzzled some of his admirers, seems rather a downer for a nature mystic.  Hold that thought, to which we shall return.

Over the weekend we were in Brooklyn at my son’s house.  The official agenda was a quick visit with the eldest granddaughter Sophia, in for a flying visit from L. A., and a delightfully wacky play (Nice Fish) at St. Ann’s Warehouse.  My son Richard is partially responsible for my blog.  He encouraged me to start it six and a half years ago, and I haven’t missed a week since.  He is a considerable expert on the popular culture of the Caribbean.  His book Walking to Guantanamo, the travelogue of a long walk through millennial Cuba,  is already an underground classic, and can only become more valuable as Cuba rapidly becomes better but less interesting.  I expect to see his current project on Haitian barber-shop art to show up eventually in one of the New York museums.

He has a library somewhat smaller than mine, but stocked with intriguing books I would never stumble upon in the daily round.  I picked up one of these in an idle moment between grandchildren and could not put it down: Prof. Frank Graziano’s Culture of Devotion, Folk Saints of Spanish America (Oxford, 2007).  The concept of the “folk saint”—a figure venerated outside the Church’s process of canonization and often enough in the face of active ecclesiastical hostility—is well known to most medievalists.  Many popular medieval cults honored mythic, imaginary, or etymological saints—like Saint Christopher the Dog-head, Saint Veronica, the Seven Sleepers, Saint Nicholas and the Pickled Boys, or Saint Scholastica.  In the German-speaking areas of late Middle Age the Vierzehn Nothelfer (fourteen saints with individual specialized helping powers, twice the repertoire of the Magnificent Seven) enjoyed wide popularity.  Many of these imaginary but earnestly venerated saints were born of the marriage of the textual traditions of nascent Christianity and ancient pagan history, folklore, or philology.

As I learn from Graziano’s fascinating book the process had a modern rebirth in the Americas with Spanish Catholicism’s coercive encounter with Amerindian religions and folklores.  The cultural historian documents a number of fascinating cults.  Old Argentina was a particularly fecund incubator of dubious saints.  There is in Argentina elaborate devotion to “the Little Cowboy” (Gaucho or Guachito Gil).  There is another, an off-the-books holy woman known as Difunta Correa who died in the desert (as Hagar would have done without angelic help) but continued to suckle her babe from her dead teat.  Her shrines are decorated with used auto parts and old tires. But the one that leapt off the page for me was San La Muerte, Saint Death, the holy skeleton, known also by half a dozen other names (San de la Muerte, Señor La Muerte, San Justo [the just one, great leveler], Pirucho [from Guaraní word for “skinny”], San Esqueleto [Skeleton], etc.)  The cult of San la Muerte moved north from the vast homelands of the Tupí-Guaraní, crossed the isthmus, and is now widespread in Mexico and our own borderlands.  San la Muerte has a strong appeal among liminal groups, including narco-gangsters.  San la Muerte tattoos are common.

Despite the shared iconography of the ossuary, the cult of San la Muerte seems independent of the macabre festival of the Day of the Dead (All Hallows’ Eve), for which there are clear liturgical antecedents in many parts of Europe.  But I am left wondering about the Franciscan “Sister Death” viewed by Francis as he approached his own demise not as the Grim Reaper but as a comforting and natural force—as natural as the very material elements of Nature itself, earth, air, fire, and water.  There are many things to puzzle me about the Mexican Muerte, beginning with gender.   The figures in Francis’s poem are “brother” or “sister” in accordance with their grammatical gender.  This is the norm for early personification allegory generally.  But the Amerindian cult turned a feminine abstract noun into a male saint, then complicated things further with gender-bending ambiguous clothing.  Like so much else in Graziano’s book, the Muerte cult is obviously a syncretism, a cultural blending of Iberian Christianity and probably unrecoverable traditions of the Tupí-Guaraní peoples.  Yet I would suggest, tentatively and without the necessary anthropological knowledge, that the beneficent aspects of San la Muerte—a helper in difficulty, a comforter in distress, an inspirer of penitential pilgrimage—may have had medieval European Catholic antecedents in the complex mind of Francis of Assisi.

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.

Free College (continued)

I want to spend a second week’s essay on the question of “free college,” as it is at least possible that someone might not have been satisfied by the answer I gave last week.  To recap, I suggested that the solution to the “student loan crisis” was to upgrade the quality of American free primary and secondary education to its level in, say, 1900, when my grandmother was teaching school in Salida, Colorado, and when a high school diploma was a significant credential.

            Deep down everyone knows that there is not really such a thing as a free lunch, just a lunch that somebody else has paid for.  Certainly Senator Sanders knows that.  When he talks about “free tuition,” he really means tuition that has been paid, through the federal government, by people who buy and sell stocks and by “millionaires and billionaires” generally.   Senator Sanders’s suggestion has initiated a useful conversation, rather sloganish for the moment, but full of potential.  What it has not done is led to the public recognition of a crucial fact about American higher education in its present imperfect and unreformed state.  That is that many of America’s leading liberal arts colleges and, without exception, all of its most famous private universities, are already complex charitable institutions.   Over the past century and more they have effected a dramatic redistribution of wealth, and an alchemical transformation of financial to social capital.

            I know.  It’s a little awkward, not to say hypocritical, for me, personally, to argue against “free college” seeing as I had nine years of it.  Four years of undergraduate college were paid for by George F. Baker, an obscenely wealthy banker who died before I was born.  Then I had three years at Oxford thanks to Cecil Rhodes, a much reviled British imperialist.  I don’t actually know who, specifically, paid for my doctoral education.  The fellowships bore the names of famous scholars in whose memory or honor the donations had been made.  What came as a perceived gift rather than as a perceived entitlement animated in me an almost joyous sense of responsibility to repay as best I could in such coin as an education creates.

            There are not too many large aspects of American life which the rest of the world still acknowledges to be the best to be had.  Our political institutions and personalities are not much to brag about.  The shared physical infrastructure vital to a continental country is mediocre at best.  We can hardly boast of our court system, our penology, our primary education, or our mass transportation.  But one thing the world still rightly admires is American higher education.  Its greatest strength is its diversity, if that word has not yet been misused into meaninglessness.  There is every kind of college and university you can think of, including incidentally a few free ones.  Before one buys into a radical revision of educational financing, it might be a good idea to try to clarify some fundamental educational goals—beyond the implicit desirability of college degrees for all. 

            The Sanders plan would make public institutions tuition free.  “In fact”, says his website, “it’s what many of our colleges and universities used to do. The University of California system offered free tuition at its schools until the 1980s. In 1965, average tuition at a four-year public university was just $243 and many of the best colleges – including the City University of New York – did not charge any tuition at all. The Sanders plan would make tuition free at public colleges and universities throughout the country.”  This statement has some accuracies, but it doesn’t take into account the dramatic rise in real educational costs of the last half century and the huge growth in the number of potential students. That a proposed system founded in a supposed universal right could surpass the social achievements of our erratic meritocracy—even if the astronomical amount of money needed were as readily gathered into a strong box as written into the plank of a political platform—is far from obvious.

There is not a major university in this country that is not already entangled in ambiguous financial relationships with the Federal government, principally though not exclusively in the realm of Big Science.  I say “ambiguous” because such relationships have both good and bad outcomes.  On the one hand they enable a level and ambition of research that would otherwise be impossible.  On the other they have the potential to distort institutional mission, and there always follows in their wake a distracting level of bureaucratic red tape.  Governmental over-regulation is not a figment of the tortured Republican imagination but an inevitable reality of an ever-burgeoning bureaucracy.  The more that college becomes “free” in Bernie Sanders’s sense—meaning the more the intermediary bursar of actual educational costs is a federal bureau—the clunkier, more intellectually constipated will be the operations of our institutions of higher learning.

Should College Be Free?

 The Old High School, Mount Pleasant Texas*

Like most American citizens, I have a certain interest in national politics and in the political campaigns that are so much in the public news in these long preliminaries to the general election nine months from now.  And like most people I have opinions, sometimes strong opinions, about the issues and candidates.  As I am not an expert in political science, I rarely can claim any greater authority for my opinions than those of any other attentive and reasonably well-informed observer.  This year, however, American higher education, or at least the financing of higher education, appears likely to become a seriously debated issue.  I devoted my professional life to higher education, so that if I have any claim to professional competence, this might be the field in which to attempt to deploy it.

            There are really two questions here.  Should college be free?  And what would be the effect on American higher education if college were free?  The latter is in my mind as important as the former, but I must leave it for another day.  The issue of the moment is “free college”, and it has arisen not in a context of educational theory but in the face of economic reality.  A college education is expensive, and many young people have burdened themselves with crippling debt in order to achieve it.  Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the two men who must be credited with making the tone of this presidential campaign unlike any other I can remember, wants to solve the problem by making public institutions tuition free.  His argument in a nutshell is this.  In today’s economy a college degree is essentially a required entry-level credential for the adult workforce.  Its role corresponds to that of the high school diploma in earlier generations. 

            This is true, but we need to ask “why?”  The conventional answer is that our world has become much more complex and demanding, more high powered and high tech, than that of our forebears.  The real answer, in my opinion, is that the quality of our secondary education has deteriorated badly—in many parts of the country disastrously--since the time of our forebears.  We have in this country a virtually uncontested consensus in favor of universal, free education; since 1918 it has been a mandatory universal requirement.  However we no longer seem to have the consensus that free public education ought to be good enough to create an educated citizenry in a state system competitive with those of other leading nations of the world.  My parents were high school graduates, and proud of it.  They considered themselves privileged.  Many of their peers had dropped out of school at the first legal opportunity on account of limited capacity, disinclination, or cruel economic necessity.  My parents, though faced with large financial challenges and the social upheaval of a world war, could read and write, and never ceased to do so.  If like me you have ever taught a college “freshman composition” course you may find that claim incredible.

One of the reactions shared by many of the first viewers of the Ken Burns serial on the Civil War, in which contemporary documents were frequently cited, was amazement that the private letters of so many of the common soldiers, not one in a hundred of whom had experienced “higher education”, were beautifully written and rhetorically powerful.  At what Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference did Indiana farm boys learn to write like George Eliot?  The answer is: a village school.  Some years ago, when I was reading the memoirs of W. T. Sherman, I was struck by his brief account of his early education in a schoolhouse on the Ohio frontier in the 1830s.  This education had supplied him with sufficient mathematical and engineering training, by the age of fourteen, to work on a surveying crew prospecting the path of a proposed new canal.  On the humanities side, “We studied all the common branches of knowledge, including Latin, Greek, and French.”

The last year for which I was able to find complete statistics was 2012.  In that year there were 17.7 million students in undergraduate degree programs in the United States.  That is roughly five percent of the national population.  Of these 13.4 million were in public institutions.  There were 4.25 million in private colleges and universities including the (to me) staggering number of one and a half million in for profit colleges.  This represents a very large proportion of the cohort of high school graduates in this country.  That is, there are not too many young people who graduate from high school but who do not go on to college.  Most people don’t even think of the high school diploma as a respectable terminal accomplishment.

I am not so naïve as to think that reclaiming the lost standards of American secondary education would be easy.  Perhaps it would not even be possible.  But with all due respect to Senator Sanders, whose intelligence, sincerity, and idealism I greatly admire, I think it would be both more sensible and more politically practical to try to direct the huge financial resources needed to the free education we already all believe in, than to apply it to a revolutionary new program of massive “social promotion”.  You should not have to go to college to learn the names and functions of the parts of speech or to solve an equation with two variables.

I first grasped the depth of the hole we were in back in the Seventies when I found myself, in my early forties, at a large undergraduate musical party with hundreds of young people mildly lubricated with alcohol and cannabis.  The music was very loud and for the most part very bad.  But the DJ put on the Paul Simon song “Kodachrome”.  At its opening words, the crowd went wild.  “When I think back/On all the crap I learned in high school/It’s a wonder/I can think at all.”  I could tell that the enthusiasm arose not merely for a song they liked, but for sentiments they shared.  High School was crap.  And of course I had to think back myself.  What I remembered chiefly were two rather conventional and unglamorous middle-aged ladies in Texas, one of whom had taught me the subtlety of the “formal conjunctive adverb” while the other led me to grasp the sheer genius behind the periodic table of elements.  I wondered then and wonder now whether in my highfalutin university I myself have ever taught anything so effectively.

*photograph stolen from an engaging, stumbled-upon, and apparently defunct blog entitled "Exquisitely Bored in Nacogdoches" (http://exquisitelyboredinnacogdoches.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html).

Reflections on New England Democracy

          I awoke this morning to learn that “New Hampshire has spoken.”  Fortunately, unlike most of the candidates themselves, New Hampshire spoke sotto voce, not nearly loud enough to disturb my slumbers.  Indeed to say that New Hampshire spoke is to indulge in the classical rhetorical figure of synecdoche—the one generally known as “the part for the whole”.   My rough-and-ready extrapolation from the newspaper charts is that approximately thirty-seven percent of New Hampshire spoke (sort of)—that is, thirty-seven in one hundred of a population about that of San Antonio. 

            Still, given the anemia of our national political participation, that is a not unimpressive number.  The victories of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were not merely decisive but crushing.  And to be clear, as scornful as I may sound, this essay is more of a confession than an indictment.  For I have followed all the primary events slavishly in the newspaper and on the PBS “News Hour”.  I have attended to most of the so-called debates on the Tube, and digested column yards of posterior analysis and exegesis.  My attention has been bi-partisan, though this year the Republican “debates” have been more interesting than the Democratic “debates” rather in the way that Paradise Lost is more interesting than Paradise Regained--simply because of the raw materials of the two poems.  Milton’s politics were intense but from our point of view perhaps somewhat incoherent.  Although he was a spokesman for a revolutionary regime, and even an apologist for regicide, the actual operations of his imagined divine government are autocratic in the extreme.  On the other hand democracy of a sort does characterize the political operations of the demonic world.  Milton invented the word Pandemonium—a place bringing together all the demons—as the name of the diabolical congress or parliament in which the fallen angels meet to cook up their plot.  It is the raucous character of their debate that accounts for the meaning of the word pandemonium in ordinary discourse. 

            In the shouting match of the last Republican forum the governor of my state, Chris Christie, seems perhaps to have pulled off a successful kamikaze attack on the S. S. Marco Rubio.  Rubio is not exactly dead in the water, but he is listing noticeably, at the bottom of the mediocres, and (humiliatingly) just below Jeb Bush, who is in the middle of the mediocres.  Does anyone still read Matthew Arnold these days?  I am thinking of Sohrab and Rustum, the oriental tale that reverses the archetype of Oedipus Rex.  In this one it is the father who unknowingly kills the son.  Mr. Christie himself is way out ahead of his fellow single-digit also-rans, but the world is rarely impressed by a sixth-place finish.  It worked for Dante Alighieri*, of course.  But I knew Dante Alighieri.  He was a friend of mine.   And, Mr. Christie, you are no Dante Alighieri.  Please return immediately to New Jersey, where we languish for want of executive direction.

            Tremendous amounts of money have already been spent on these preliminaries.  It is hardly worth saying that the money could have been put to better purposes, because that is true of so many of our expenditures, public and private alike.  But the figures are staggering.  In the Iowa contest Jeb Bush received 5200 votes, less than three percent of the total votes cast and about one tenth the number secured by the “winner”, Ted Cruz.  It is hard to assess precisely how much money the Bush people spent in achieving this result because “the Bush people” include both the candidate’s official campaign workers and the administrators of an opulent Political Action Committee technically independent of that campaign.  The published figures I have seen range from a low of $2800 per vote to a high of $5200. It is probably closer to the latter than the former, though either end of that spectrum would seem to me to deserve the exclamation point that is so ludicrous in its collocation with “Jeb”.  Whatever became of the frugal good old days of the ward bosses, when you could secure a vote for a bottle of whiskey or, at most, a Christmas turkey?

            There is little faith left in what is usually called the “conventional wisdom”.  How could there be?  Wisdom itself has become so unconventional.  But I am at last vaguely apprehending what people smarter than I have noticed for some time, and that is a fundamental congruence between what superficially seem like such starkly divergent candidacies as those of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.  You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.  Unfortunately the hard part is not the egg-breaking but the omelet-making.

*See Inferno 4.102