Olivia de Havilland

           As we look for a few anchors to hold firm the various parts of our lockdown days, we have raised certain of our Darby-and-Joan routines to the status of sacred ritual.  The subliminal plan may simply be glorified time-killing, but we find it useful if not indispensable to impose a sense of order and structure on our days.  A daily walk, weather permitting, sharing a mid-morning glass of chocolate milk, deploying our awesome powers on Alexa’s “Question of the Day”—such things are the coarse straw that gives some strength to the soft mortar of the day otherwise occupied by individual “projects,” reading, writing, and a good deal of dolce far niente.  Particularly important is the reading aloud of parts of the daily New York Times over breakfast.  This is a custom of long standing, but it now has become a felt necessity.  We can barely down a mouthful of Special K on those very rare days when the paper is late.

            We usually do a couple of Trump and/or important international stories, followed by the letters to the editor and selected op-eds.  This gives us the opportunity to bicker over, first, what we are going to read and, second, what we eventually have read.  I am still in “recovery” from cataract surgery, which was a great success in removing the cataract but, so far, less so in restoring serious vision to the operable eye; so on Monday Joan did most of the reading.  The op-eds and letters are normally on the antepenultimate and penultimate pages of section one, which when open for reading reveals the whole of the back page to someone sitting on the other side of the table.  Recently this page has been given over to a few short and moving biographies of typical or interesting victims of Covid-19, but this time, as I could see with my good eye, there was a “regular” but very long obituary of a single person not a pandemic casualty: the classic movie star Olivia de Havilland, who just died in Paris at the age of 104.  This had a special significance for Joan and me, because we “knew” her—meaning that we have been in a very large space in which she was present.

            When we were living in Paris a few years ago we became attached to the lively congregation of Trinity Cathedral, otherwise known as The American Cathedral, on the Avenue George V just across the river from where we lived, and two or three hundred yards up the road from the “living flame” of the Princess Di memorial.  Ms. de Havilland had at that point been a member for roughly fifty years.  By rough and ready estimate about forty percent of Anglicans show up in an actual church building only on Easter and Christmas, and nonagenarians are generally given a pass altogether.  But at Trinity Cathedral there was a tradition, established in time immemorial (probably meaning around 1952) that the sacramental validity of any Christmas Eucharist might be dubious if Ms. de Havilland, whose voice must have been even more impressive than that of the angels who made their announcement to the shepherds, were not the principal lay-reader for the service.  This detail is alluded to in the Times obituary. 

            But there was an aspect of all this not widely known.  The dean, talking out of school, told Joan that by the 1980s the situation had become a bit delicate.  Ms. de Havilland was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause; there were certain psalms she found it inappropriate to read.  Some of them, you must agree, are a little hard to swallow, such as the enthusiastic infanticide of the imprecation against the Edomites at the end of Super flumina, “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stone”.  This is an extreme example, no doubt.  Hard cases make bad law.  Olivia de Havilland was not chary of going up against the powers that be, as evidenced by a successful lawsuit that went a good way toward taming the arrogance of some Hollywood studio moguls back in the day. 

            For many people I suppose, Ms. de Havilland will forever be associated with Gone With the Wind—a novel published in the year of my own birth and turned into a famous film three years later.  I long ago discovered that Americans are likely to put a naïve trust in cinematic versions of important novels when they ought to know there always is a big difference.   This was brought to my attention by one of my early English teachers, who for some reason took exception to the fact that in my book report on Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities, I consistently referred to an important character, Sydney Carton, as “Sydney Colman”.  (In the old film I had seen, Carton had been played by classical Thirties heartthrob Ronald Colman.)  If Gone With the Wind is the first thing that comes to mind, Ms. de Havilland’s death may have come at an inconvenient time for her reputation.  I learned from the obituary that “The 1939 Civil War epic was briefly pulled from the HBO Max streaming service last month and returned with an introduction saying that the film presents the Georgia plantation at its center as ‘a world of grace and beauty, without acknowledging the brutalities of the system of chattel slavery upon which this world is based’.”

            I am not an expert in the history of American cinema, nor am I even a competent film critic.  Among other things that the pandemic has already proved is that I will watch almost anything on Nexflix.  Nonetheless it will be a pity, in my view, if the honor due to the memory of one of the great movie stars of the twentieth century is clouded by political passions of the moment; but such collateral damage is one of the less significant hazards of a current cultural moment hovering between promise and menace.  On the other hand it is going to be highly tedious if people whose job it is to facilitate the technical transmission of visual data appropriate the role of historical censors as well.  I have little confidence in their capacities in that department.  Be that as it may, the character played by Ms. de Havilland is one of the nicer inhabitants of Tara, so there is that.  I would preserve my wrath for Anthony Adverse, in which the actress also appeared.  The novel Gone With the Wind is plenty long, but Anthony Adverse, a runaway success of 1933, was even longer, nearly interminable indeed; and its Protean hero was for a time an actual slave trader.

           

            I am a pretty old guy.  The demise of a grande dame who was already an international celebrity before I learned to walk is a sobering event for me, and one that encourages meditation upon one of the great classical themes of world literature.  I imagine that Ms. de Havilland would have approved of the thirty-ninth psalm, “…mine age is as nothing before thee: verily every man at his best state is altogether vanity.”  Gone with the wind, so to speak.

Through the Lens of the Dollar Store

           This will be an essay about the great American institution of the Dollar Store, but I must approach my subject in a manner that an ungenerous reader might find oblique or even confusing.  Among the canonical crimes of boring people is their penchant for insisting that you listen to their accounts of various medical adventures, especially if they involve surgery.  I would never bore you with an operation I had.  Instead, I’ll bore you with one I hope to have.  This is the removal of a cataract from my left eye scheduled for Friday.

            This procedure was supposed to happen months ago, but the specialized surgical center was actually closed for a long period, creating a messy backlog.    In order to be allowed to present oneself for a bloodless removal of a cataract, it is necessary first to present evidence of the negative results of a very recent test for Covid-19 and a satisfactory report on a very recent general physical examination.  The logistics of arranging and then actually achieving these ancillary events has been nightmarish.  But I emerge from them with a vivid sense of the widely diffused disruptions or “ripple effects” caused by the pandemic throughout the whole medical structure, and with a yet increased admiration for our medical professionals.  Even as I write this, however, it is not entirely certain that all preliminaries will be in place.  

            I very much hope they are, because I am having trouble reading.  Dejà-vu, so to speak, as that circumstance precipitated the removal of a cataract from my right eye some years back.  But my serious dollar store career began probably years before that with deteriorating eyesight and the need for reading glasses.  I am very careless with glasses.  I lose them.  I break them.  I scratch the lenses.  Somebody told me you could get them at the dollar store for, of course, a dollar.  I started buying them in bulk.  I have a really large bowl full of them An honest doctor told me that from the optical point a view there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between dollar store reading glasses and the ones for sale in his practice’s own upscale optical shop.  I’ll admit that the Foster Grants are superior in style and durability—but are they fifteen or twenty times better, as their prices are fifteen or twenty times higher?  Doubtful.  They practically fly off the racks in the dollar stores.

            I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to find as the leading article in The New Yorker an essay about Dollar Stores*.  A dollar store, obviously, is a place where things cost a dollar, but there is a slight nomenclature problem here.  There are several chains of dollar stores, including even some that don’t actually feature the word  “dollar’’ in their name; but some smart guy got there first with a name patent on the capitalized version.  The article, which focuses on such stores in Dayton and on several armed robberies at them, in some of which store employees were killed, does not disguise its negative view; the subheading on the title page is “A business model that harms vulnerable communities.”  I am writing about the store as a fixture of low income American life, the uncapitalized form.  I already knew without reading this article that I didn’t want to work at a dollar store, which offers niggardly compensation for tiring work in a dismal atmosphere.  Yet in my opinion this article says more about the social pathology of Dayton than the chintziness of the dollar store chains—and that is really saying something.   If you tolerate living in a filthy rich country with a large underclass living at the subsistence level or worse, what do you expect?  Merchants are in business to make money, and a business specializing in selling stuff at bottom dollar is unlikely to go top-dollar in its overhead and labor costs.  But if the answer to armed robbery is to banish the stores that get robbed rather than the criminals who rob them, the current clamor from many of my compatriots to “abolish the police” is perhaps less wacky that it has seemed to me.  You would, of course, have to be prepared for the successors to the police:  war-lords, vigilantes, and star-spangled Second Amendment Patriots galore. 

            The author (Mr. MacGillis) assumes that few readers of The New Yorker are likely to frequent dollar stores.  That is probably a correct assumption, as is its reflex: few habitués of dollar stores subscribe to The New Yorker.  At best we view one another indistinctly and partially, as through a social ocular cataract.  Here is another slightly exotic pairing of tribes or “bubbles” in which Americans seem to have quarantined themselves with evident harm to civility, empathy, and political efficiency.

            Dayton is not all of America.  Dollar stores cater to the economically marginal and to bargain seekers, but they are by no means emblems only of urban blight.  There are several stores in my area, mainly in secondary shopping malls nestled among ethnic restaurants and big boxes.  It is true that they offer a glimpse of American life very different from that with which most middle class citizens are familiar and perhaps to some an uncomfortable one.  MacGillis leaves a reader with the impression that they are rather sinister places, and I have read other commentators who go so far as to say that they “prey” upon the poor, in whose neighborhoods they are often the only local emporiums.  But another way of thinking about them is that they offer opportunity for people who otherwise might lack it to exercise the national birthright of shopping.  In the South, where they are nearly ubiquitous, the stores often have a kind of folksy, friendly vibe, not unlike that of your local New York deli.  To a degree they serve the function of social centers.  In my experience the clientele is mainly female, but the extensive line in basic hand tools and some building accoutrements attracts men—at least this man.  From what I have seen I deduce that some people do most of their grocery shopping there.  I would not recommend this.  The shelves are bulging with sweetened drinks and junk food in many forms, and all sorts of empty calories that will fatten you, disturb your blood sugar levels, or rot out your teeth.  However, there are some undoubtedly salubrious bargains, mainly in the line of canned fruit and vegetables.  There are always some items that are alimentary equivalents of the amazingly cheap remaindered titles at the Strand Book Store, such as a ship’s container of Turkish sun-dried tomatoes that Whole Foods wouldn’t touch.   Soaps and common toiletries are also excellent, along with basic medicine chest items.  Also serviceable kitchen and table ware.  Even among the acres of Chinese plastic and tinfoil gewgags my granddaughters always find something to amuse them or to be put to some surprising artistic use.  But my top product remains a usable pair of reading glasses for a buck. 

            Of course you get what you pay for—sometimes.  Veblen’s still great Theory of the Leisure Class reminds us of the degree to which irrational expensiveness—that is, cost far in excess of what common sense would regard as actual value—is a part of upscale American commercial life.   It seems only fair that there should be a counter-market specializing in the cheap and nasty.

 

*Alec MacGillis, “The Dollar Store Deaths,” The New Yorker (July 6 & 13, 2020), pp. 20-26.

Picks of the Month

            Like many others, we tend to lose track of time during this season of plague, when one day is pretty much like the last, and the weeks pass by at once very fast and very slowly.  There is a minimal pattern.   Friday is garbage pick-up.  Recycling comes around every other Monday.  High summer should mean some official attempt at “vacation,” probably one of our rare but always much enjoyed visits to the Jersey shore.  That was, long ago, an actual plan.  We had reserved a place big enough to accommodate us and our Montrealers for a few days in July.  Then they closed the beaches and (more importantly) the Canadian border, and though both are now partially opening by fits and starts, we long since had to cancel.

            But one calendrical constant remains reassuring.  So far as I can tell, important parts of the natural world are oblivious to Covid-19.  Old Man River—he just keeps rollin’ along.  The same can be said, fortunately, for the realm of botany.  Grass keeps growing, and my lawn requires its weekly trim.

            I wrote in a couple of earlier posts about the bamboo, which launched its spring attack, as though animated by clockwork, in the first ten days of May.  And despite its heat, the month of July has been particularly comforting this year in the timely flourishing of my two backyard fruits, raspberries and grapes, the one wild and the other cultivated—sort of.

            There are several varieties of wild raspberries, including a prolific invader, but the most common one, certainly in these parts, is the north American varietal of the rubus idaeus, usually called the “American red raspberry.”  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the learned adjective idaeus there refers to the famous Mount Ida, the highest point on Crete, a mount sacred to the goddess Rhea, whose counterpart in the Roman world was the Magna Mater and in the Christian system the Virgin Mary.  I presume raspberries grow (or once grew) on the mountain’s sunny slopes, allowing a pretty good pedigree for such a common comestible; and certainly raspberry fool is divine.

            The native raspberry plant likes plenty of water during the early spring months, and its ambitious roots prefer a friable soil amended with compost.  In our neighborhood the latter condition is frequently achieved naturally, as it were, by large accumulations of decaying leaf and dead wood left untouched for years around the edges where timber-line and mowed field meet.  And this year we had a lot of spring rain.  I could tell two months ago that there would likely be a bumper crop of berries.  So it has proved to be.  Rubus, which sounds like it ought to mean “red”, is actually the generic name for bramble bushes, especially blackberries.  We do have wild blackberries here, too, but they are far less common than raspberries, and for some reason the local ones at least bear mainly stunted berries.

            This year there is a bountiful raspberry harvest to be had within a hundred and fifty yards of my house, some of it in my own yard.  I am amazed that none of my neighbors show any interest in the freebee delicacies surrounding us.  There does remain of course a keen competition for this succulent food between bird and man, with each side having its advantages.  The birds, naturally, are greatly favored.  There are many, many more of them.  They fly.  Their vision is amazing.  It is rare to come upon ripe berries on a bush that does not also reveal the evidence of previous avian scavengers, the tell-tale sign being the tiny, conspicuously bare pale yellow cones from which the berries have been plucked.  The principal human advantage is our comparatively gargantuan size and strength, and above all our ability to penetrate and probe the interstices of bushes impenetrable by our feathered friends.   It is not easy to pick berries while wearing gloves, and should the picker happen to be an old guy on a blood thinner, the sanguinary results, though superficial, may appear rather dramatic.

            The wild raspberry is small, and seedier than its commercial counterpart, but also more authentic in its sweetness.  However. it takes a lot of them to make a pie, so that efficiency in the gathering becomes an issue.  First you have to establish in your mind a color benchmark.  The darker the berry the riper and sweeter it will be.  If you have any doubt about a berry, leave it; it will be ready in another full day of sun if you return.  Next, operate according to the “spilled milk” principle: make only one swipe at any single fruit.  If you miss or if the berry falls to the ground, simply go on to the next.  You need to maintain a sense, even if an illusory one, of steady, unbroken, inexorable progress.  I learned this tip as a child from an old man who had done time in the Missouri state penitentiary, where he developed a whole philosophy of life based in his compelled cotton picking.   Always prefer the bunches to the singletons.  On many inner sprigs you will be surprised by bright crimson clusters of as many as ten ripe berries.  Here the trick is to make gravity your friend by placing your gathering receptacle precisely beneath the cluster so that when with one finger you nudge the fruit free from the stem it falls into captivity rather than through the brambles to the ground.

            More or less in synch with the reddening of the berries is the purpling of our Concord grapes.  We have many semi-wild vines, all of them originating from a single root wrested twenty years ago from the ruins of an abandoned communal garden once attached to a now razed apartment house.  I don’t know whether you can properly call these “heirloom” plants; maybe “recycled” is more accurate.  It is practically impossible to kill these hardy grapes, but you would be wrong to underestimate my abilities in this line.  Mostly I have them trailing over stone walls and climbing trees, but I do have one especially constructed trellis.  Though this year I didn’t get around to pruning its vines properly in April, it still seems to be really loaded.  The fruit, however, is notoriously susceptible to some kind of blight that hardens as many as half the grapes in what starts out as a big, luscious bunch.  I’m afraid I am an anti-vaxer when it comes to the back yard. 

            There are still new worlds to conquer.  On Monday we were at our son Richard’s fabulous place near Frenchtown.  He has discovered a nearby forest of chanterelle mushrooms, apparently huge in its extent.  Only once in my years of local mushrooming in Princeton have I encountered chanterelles, and they were given to me by a friend who found a modest mess of them in a residential area on a new construction site.  In my view, chanterelles are the fungal gold standard, and I am reanimated to search further around here.  But that is for another day or, perhaps, another life.  Just now what I seek is some kind of convincing temporal grounding.  Yesterday I encountered my first seriously overripe berry.  That would mean it is pretty close to the middle of July.

Hunterdon County chanterelles, processed and preserved by R. A. Fleming (July 2020)

Death and the Virus

           

            All politics is local, and so at heart is most journalism.  I once read an anecdote concerning the reporting by a regional paper in New York State of Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic flight in 1927.  Its headline was “Lindbergh Flies Over Poughkeepsie on Way to Paris”.  Ever since I can remember I have been struck by a kind of morbid parochialism in the way our papers treat disasters: “Four Americans Die in Crash of Pan-Am Flight.”  When you read the story, you learn that there were thirty-six others who lost their lives as well.  The daily pandemic statistics of recent months have also tended slightly in this direction.  American leadership in coronaviral morbidity may be humiliating, but it is also fascinating, and certainly fully reported.  Beyond that I have wanted to know what has been happening specifically in New Jersey.  How about in my immediate community?  In both instances the answer has not been good.  But our own most distressing experiences have not been local.

            Our second coronavirus fatality—I’ll come to the first in a moment—occurred during the past week.  The man’s name was Eric Dean, a South Carolinian, and he was an uncle of one of our daughters-in-law, Melanie.  I did not know Mr. Dean personally.  From all testimony I have heard he was a lovely fellow.  I perhaps met him at the wedding, but if so I have no clear memory of doing so.  There is a lot I don’t recall these days.  Yet despite the lack of any actual relationship with this man, news of his death has brought vivid grief to our house.  Friendship and kinship are broad channels of vicarious experience and sympathy.  Melanie’s distress, amplified by that of her father, who had been very close to his brother, radiates out into our home and no doubt many others as though conducted by shiny copper wires.  To say that our nation has suffered a hundred and thirty thousand coronavirus deaths is a somber but somewhat abstract statistical statement until you think of the intricate emotional networks and sympathetic grids through which each individual loss crashes down on half a dozen, or twenty, or a hundred concerned neighbors, friends, and family relations.  From this perspective the statement that “the nation is grieving” or even “the world is grieving” moves from metaphor to simple fact.

            What I now regard as “my” first coronavirus death was of a different sort, beginning with the fact that, so far as I know, the cause of death was not coronavirus.  It happened on April 10 in New York, though I did not learn about it until mid-June and then only fortuitously.  All this requires some explanation.

            I shall identify him only by his first name, Eli.  I know little about his background, but I suppose he was of that second-, possibly even first-generation of American-born offspring of the large Eastern European Jewish immigrantion so important to the cultural history of the country, and to New York City in particular, the subject of Irving Howe’s memorable book The World of Our Fathers (1976).  Eli and I met while serving together on the board of the Association of Princeton Graduate Alumni.  His graduate degree had been in Politics.  Only our American educational meritocracy, imperfect as it is, could have brought people of our very different backgrounds together—or put us on the board of anything.  I mention this sociological detail as it is relevant to the larger anecdote.  Eli and I became “periodical” friends, getting together at widely distanced board meetings.  He got interested in my blog and, especially in my work on The Anti-Communist Manifestos, which he proofread for me in galleys.  His interest stemmed from the fact that he was a 1959 graduate of Hunter College, one of the oldest components of the City University of New York, a conglomerate of institutions significant in the history of American Communism, with a radical political tradition from the 1930s not yet entirely dead in his own day.  Hunter was long an all -female institution; Eli became the first male president of its alumni association.  He was a great cataloguer, and he played a prominent role in the herculean task of organizing Hunter’s alumni records. 

            Time passed.  We rotated off the board.  Illness prevented me from attending some meetings at which we might have met.  In short, we fell out of touch for a few years.  Then, in the initial stages of soon aborted research into decipherers of mystery languages, I came upon a letter (published below in an appendix) written by a grateful student to her old teacher at Brooklyn College, Dr. Alice Kober.  Both Professor Kober and her admiring correspondent Mrs. Green (née Popper) were typical products of the magnificent free New York City university system, which had taken as its explicit mission the advancement through education of the city’s large population of youth of modest means, most of them the offspring of immigrants.  As you can see from the letter, however, this was not exactly what we usually regard as vocational training.  Kober was a great classical scholar, long under-sung, who did important work on cracking the ancient Minoan script called “Linear B.”  There’s an excellent popular book dealing with this adventure, but I wanted to know more.  Alice Kober was a Hunter alumna, and I personally knew the world-class expert on Hunter alumni.  So about the beginning of June I wrote a “catch up” letter to my friend Eli, its centerpiece being an inquiry about Kober.   One of his eccentricities was that he did not use email.

            Should you be puzzled about the relevance of a seventy-five-year-old letter to coronavirus death, it is this: although a wild good chase never ends in bagging a goose, it sometimes stirs up other interesting game.  About ten days later I got a letter back from Eli’s sister, with whom he had lived in Woodside, Queens.  She told me that Eli had died two months earlier.  He had been overwhelmed by a sudden debility, gone into hospital and, after a few days, died.  She had been late in answering my letter because she, too, had been in hospital. This news was abrupt, brutal, and final.  I had heard nothing of it because the normal channels through which I might have were disrupted during the coronavirus crisis.  I tried to learn more from one of the deans at Hunter with whom Eli had worked.  He had not learned of the death either.  I scoured the Internet and eventually found a brief obituary in one of those sad little sites established by funeral homes for “memory books”.  The only memorial then registered was that of a hospital transport worker, limited in education perhaps but rich in human decency, relating his brief moments of friendly exchange with a dying patient.  “Rest in peace friend,” he wrote, “in your ‘Deluxe Apartment in the Sky’.”  Whatever actual ailment was fatal for Eli, this, too, is “coronavirus death”: abrupt, capriciously communicated, forbidden such public solace as customary obsequies foster, caught up in a vast and undiscriminating sadness, rushed over, passed by as we stumble on to the next stupefying statistical chart.

APPENDIX

Readers sometimes ask me, no doubt in puzzlement, where I get my topics for blog posts.  The answer is: mostly from my random reading.  The letter below, which is of a kind any old professor would practically die for, is available on-line in a scholarly archive at the University of Texas devoted to materials relating to archaeological discoveries in Crete  and elsewhere.  The archive was founded by the great American archaeologist Emmett Bennett and is now curated by another distinguished scholar, Thomas Palaima.  It has no relevance to Linear B or any other object of Kober’s scholarly research, but it is a delightful testimony to her accomplishments as a teacher.  My small effort to identify Fritzie Green was without success.  But her letter, written three weeks after D-Day, is replete with tidbits of social history.  If you do what I did—use the Google Maps function to check out the two addresses in the letter—you will see something of the “two Americas” that are troubling so many of us today.

 [Printed Letterhead]

Lawrence Green

3221 Gladstone

Detroit 6, Michigan

[The rest of the letter is in longhand]

Dr. Alice E. Kober

Brooklyn College

Brooklyn, N. Y.

Dear Miss Kober,

                                                                                                                                                Tuesday 6/27/44

                                 This letter has been so long in the process of being written and yet so very often thought about, that I find it at once difficult, yet easy to put it down on paper.

                                 I know that name and address on the top of the page mean nothing to you and even though I would amplify and write Mrs. Lawrence Green  neé Freida (Fritzie) Popper of 208 Avenue I Brooklyn, that too, would probably not strike a familiar chord.

                                 However, my identity is not really important.  I was just one of that group of Latin students who, during less troublesome times six or seven years ago, enjoyed Horace and Plautus and Terence under your capable guidance in the evening session at Brooklyn College.

                                 I want you to know how much it meant to me when you carried us through so that we had  [ p. 2] sufficient credit to consider Latin our major—despite the fact that you no longer wanted to teach at night.

                                 I hope this letter reaches you because I do want you to know, even at this late date, that I was one student who never believed or considered that Latin was “not practical” and that whatever love and understanding I have for the classics, I attribute for the most part to you.

                                 Thanks so much.

                                                                                          Sincerely,

                                                                                          Fritzie Popper Green

Pasts Imperfect

        

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              The most precious book in my library is a small format edition of Petrarch’s famous Canzoniere, or book of love poems, brought out in Lyon by the French humanist printer Guillaume Rouillé in 1551.  Though it qualifies as a “rare book,” its value to me is mainly sentimental.  It was given to me as a gift, probably in 1959, by my future wife.  She found it in a little shop in Arezzo while on a singing tour with the Oxford Schola Cantorum.  What made it affordable were certain imperfections.  Most obviously an earlier reader had cancelled one of Petrarch’s sonnets in heavy black ink, scratching so heavily as to tear a hole in the page.  Only recently did I discover that another leaf of the book containing a sonnet on each side had been very tidily cut out nearly without leaving a trace.  A theme in all three “disappeared” poems, one of Petrarch’s persistent criticisms, was the equation of the migration of the papacy from Rome to Avignon with the Babylonian captivity.  This may not strike you as a hot-button issue, but some deeply offended papalist, possibly as late as the eighteenth century, found Petrarch’s hate verse intolerable.  This unknown censor was probably a high-minded and educated man.  John Ruskin certainly was, but that didn’t stop him from ostentatiously burning a rare collection of Goya’s etchings called the Caprichos, now regarded as a harbinger of modern art, though it does contain some pretty disturbing stuff, including, famously “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”.

            The paradoxical demonstration of virtue through the venue of vandalism was already on my mind with regard to press notices concerning the attacks on commemorative statues in various parts of the country when a somewhat cognate local issue captured my attention.  I received a courteous and confidential advance notice from the Princeton Dean that the University would very soon announce the removal of the name of Woodrow Wilson from our School of Public Affairs and from the residential college of which I was the master fifty years ago.  I don’t live in my email box these days, and the deed had probably been done by the time I read the message. I do not fault a decision thoughtfully deliberated by diligent trustees both morally and legally authorized to make it.  Four or five years ago I could make a case for retaining the Wilson name, which was originally proposed not by university officials but by idealistic undergraduates in the Woodrow Wilson Society seeking a more mature, democratic and inclusive social scene on campus.  But an argument based in local subtleties cannot withstand the urgency of this terrible national moment, and I believe the trustees acted wisely.

            Even such urgency, however, should not induce the Sleep of Reason.  If you want to deface a book you own or incinerate etchings which you have purchased especially for that purpose, you may be a philistine or a prophet or a self-righteous prig, but you have not committed a tort against a fellow citizen.  The officers and trustees of an educational institution are specifically charged with ordering institutional affairs, and they can hire and fire, build and demolish, institute and terminate, christen and dechristen with broad legal latitude.  The destruction of public property seems to me something else.

            The desecration of the dead is a widespread anthropological atavism from times we otherwise consider barbarous.  The police agents of Louis XIV dug up and scattered the bones of the Jansenist “saints” buried at Port-Royale.  At the time of the Restoration of 1660 British crown agents disinterred the rotten cadavers of dead regicides and exposed them for the unhygienic gratification and political instruction of the crowds crossing the Thames bridges.  This is not exactly the same as defacing the effigies of Confederate officers practically nobody has ever heard of sculpted by artists absolutely nobody has ever heard of, and in actual practical terms more important to pigeons than to people; but it has spiritual echoes.  Lynch law exercised on cultural artefacts is obviously less grave than lynch law exercised on human bodies, but hardly more attractive as a civil practice.  If a monument has been commissioned and erected by a legislative body or established by a recognized civic society, is it right that “any eight guys with ropes,” as a friend of mine has put it, should claim the authority to remove it without further consultation?

            The means of redress already do exist, democratic means.  It is all too easy to break eggs without getting omelets, but even in this long moment’s pain there are signs of hope in a vigorous, youthful generation rededicated to the old proposition.  There was a great photo in the paper the other day:  two Mississippi state legislators hugging each other in congratulation over the landslide vote to remove the “stars and bars” motif from the state flag.  Yes, Mississippi: Senator Theodore Bilbo, author of Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, the White Citizens’ Councils, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, that Mississippi.

            Passion is not the same thing as purpose or persuasion.  We have had passionate iconoclasts and vandals galore.  Some smashed exquisite marble heads in the Via Sacra in Rome.  Protestant fanatics shattered the glorious Gothic windows of the churches of the Scheldt.  Spanish missionaries torched the manuscripts of the Mexica.  German military engineers transformed a Jewish burial grounds into a latrine.  The Taliban blew up the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan.  And these things were not done furtively, but brazenly and with utter certainty of moral superiority. 

            Erasures, cancellations, book burnings, the creation of “former people” and Unpersonen, airbrushing Trotsky out of the photograph—we generally think of these things as characteristically totalitarian.  But an honest engagement with our past can have other foundations than self-righteousness, one of them being righteousness without so much self.  To attempt to understand the past with some sympathy and humility is hard work, and I know many historical scholars who regard it as no large part of the job.  Indeed life is for the living.  We cannot incubate diphtheria on the grounds that it played an important role in our medical past, but we better not forget how to make the vaccine. 

            In his inaugural address President Trump deplored a state of “American carnage” and promised that with his advent it would now end.  I did not actually understand what he meant by “American carnage,” presumably something metaphorical.  But Lincoln, in his great second inaugural, did know what carnage was.  Try to imagine the mood of Lincoln’s audience.  We have now been living in anxiety and constraint for several months.  They had been fighting a bloody war for years.  The country was far past Gettysburg with its fifty thousand casualties, more than six thousand of them corpses on the ground.  How many who heard the President speak had not lost a father, brother, son, or friend?  One can imagine that the audience was a pretty sick and tired and angry bunch.  And still the president proposed that the war must end—though that end was not yet clearly in sight--with charity for all, with malice towards none.  I say this not to make an easy point about contrasting “leadership styles,” though that is a subject to make the soul weep, but to remind myself of still available reservoirs of true American greatness.

American Democracy, the Next Take

            A special commission or committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has recently published a hefty pamphlet entitled Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21^st Century.   I think every voter in the country should read it.  The AAAS, one of our nation’s oldest cultural institutions, was founded two hundred and forty years ago by various worthy colonials—including Sam Adams, John Hancock, and James Bowdoin—who, one might think, could have been too busy with the rather strenuous efforts then in progress to become post-colonial to indulge in such luxuries.  But the Americans prevailed in their Revolution, and the AAAS, with its geographical headquarters in the new nation’s version of Cambridge, was there at the birth.  As with the French Legion of Honor, whose numbers are legion, at any given moment several thousand people at least somewhat prominent in the arts and humanities, sciences, business, industry, public service, philanthropy, etc., are elected members of this august fellowship.

            I was very pleased to be elected some fifteen years ago or so, and I enjoyed the induction ceremony and conference at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge.  Since then, however, my association with the Academy has been limited to that of a debtor, chased down once a year for my dues and a second time for a voluntary contribution.  From time to time the Academy issues special white papers on miscellaneous topics, and I do frequently read its intellectually upscale journal, Daedalus, which often has interesting essays, and not all of them written in the leaden prose apparently favored by academic social scientists and economists.  This booklet entitled Our Common Purpose, however, is the best thing I have seen to issue forth from the Academy.  I speak of its thoughtful and exciting ideas.  The last committee to achieve memorable English prose were the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible working for James I in 1611.  The Common Purpose generally achieves clarity, which is all one can ask for.  Admittedly, there are a few passages like this (Strategy 1.1, p. 13) speaking of the historical ratio between congressional representatives and those they represent, that take a minute to soak in:  “While the original proportions are no longer achievable, the goal of closer connections between members of Congress and constituents should not be.”

            I first learned of this document from an Academy email, but I really took notice when it was featured on the PBS “News Hour”.  Judy Woodruff, the program’s anchor, was actually on the Commission.  Even more interesting to me was the fact that Danielle Allen, who appeared on the PBS program, was one of its three co-chairs.  Professor Allen is a superstar classicist at Harvard, but she gained something of a popular reputation a few years ago with a terrific book entitled Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality.  I came to know her reasonably well and admire her greatly when she was an undergraduate at Princeton and a member of the residential college of which I was allegedly in charge. 

            Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear knows that our country is in a real mess from which our current dysfunctional politics is incapable of extracting us.  We have a President that a majority of our citizens disapprove of and a Congress that a huge majority disapprove of.  They are symptoms of the mess rather than its causes.  The causes are the infirmity and failure of American democracy.  There is no substitute for reading the Commission’s document, a task requiring perhaps half an hour, and I shall mention only a few of its six major clusters of recommendations or “strategies” as the committee calls them.  The overarching goal is the actualization of democracy and the fullest possible participation of informed citizens in it.  The suggestion of a significant expansion in the size of the House of Representatives, already noted, aims to make possible nearer equality in constituency size and some actual possibility of a vital connection between citizens and those who represent them.  At the moment the average member of Congress has three quarters of a million constituents.  Another proposal that wins my assent is term limits for justices of the Supreme Court, organized within an orderly schedule of transition.  The authors call for a compulsory, universal, and compensated civic obligation of national service.  And they get serious about “campaign finance reform”—which is not their term, but the ludicrous one we keep hearing from our do-nothing politicians compromised to their eyeballs in their scramble for money.  A large part of the genius of the Commission’s recommendations is that they could mostly be achieved by legislation; but this absolutely indispensable cleansing of the political temple does require one constitutional amendment.  They recognize that this would be a heavy lift, but it really is worth the while to duke it out, if necessary, and this time one hopes metaphorically, over whether we actually believe that all men are created equal.

            Constitutional knowledge is a good thing, constitutional idolatry less good.  As more and more Americans have abandoned the more traditional ideas of transcendence illuminated by a sacred text, they have turned in their bereavement to the Constitution, apparently regarded not merely as infallible but probably also untouchable.  But we have plenty of real sacred texts still available: the Bible, the Koran, the I-Ching, the Rig Veda, Moby Dick, To Kill a Mocking Bird, The Fountainhead, The Awakening, and Beatles lyrics.  Invest your transcendental hopes in one of those, or another of your choosing.   It would be best to regard the Constitution for what it is,  a highly contingent practical rule book designed for real people in a rapidly and unpredictably changing world.  It may still be valid even if the word “Congress” is not printed in eighteenth-century Caslon type, Congreff.  That is why such Founders as Jefferson thought that, as a matter of course, there should be frequent periodic constitutional conventions to review and update it.

            Before immediately obsessing over dubious and debatable interpretations of “what the Founders intended” by “a well-ordered militia” or an “establishment of religion,” it might be better to start with one certain and indubitable intention: the achievement of a more perfect union.  They knew that their bundle of bright ideas and painful compromises was far from the last word on this topic.  That is why they included an amendment process and got off to a flying start with the Bill of Rights.  What amendment means is improving, making better.

            I agree with most though not all of the recommendations; and I doubt that the report will be greeted with unqualified enthusiasm by any large number of its readers.  Unanimous votes are generally characteristic of “people’s republics” and other sham democracies, not real ones.  But my general reaction is enthusiastic, as I hope it will be for most Americans.  What shines through the recommendations is something very rare in recent political discourse.  Some very smart people, coming to their task from differing perspectives but united in patriotic ambition, have thought long and hard about the nature and causes of our obvious national malaise, but also tried to seek its potential remedy.  The document is not merely intelligent but civil and optimistic.  In the constricting mental framework in which everything must be either reactionary or radical, bright red or deep blue, this proposed enterprise for the “reinvention” of democracy presents a challenge of classification.  It is a deeply conservative reaffirmation of the radicalism of our nation’s founding as famously described by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  Lincoln did not use the word “reinvention”; his better phrase was “a new birth of freedom.”

The following video presents an introduction to Our Common Purpose:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbEfJ0et1Hw