Covid Pains

 

 

That the coronavirus pandemic is testing social resilience is perhaps an observation too banal to command your attention; but what might be called the etiology of the crisis itself is fascinating.  We have become accustomed to accepting a spurious certainty as applied to very uncertain situations, often by assigning them to the ready-made categories of our political polarization.  Two complex issues that come to mind are those of vaccinations and of school closings.

 

            After a nearly miraculous scientific feat in so rapidly developing several effective vaccines, we seem to be floundering before the requirements of mass production and, especially, distribution.  As an ailing geezer I do have a dog in this fight, or maybe only a puppy,  but I am far from having a certain idea of what should be done.  I saw a fairly convincing newspaper opinion piece arguing random, opportunistic vaccination as the most sensible course in our current circumstances of limited supplies of vaccine and makeshift protocols for distributing and administering them.  Vaccinate anybody you can whenever you can, and eventually you’ll get there.  That is not what we have, at least in New Jersey.  Here there is an elaborately bureaucratized scheme with clearly identified priority groups, telephone numbers to call, and on-line lists on which to enroll for appointments, none of which seems to have any relation to actual reality.  That reality is—if not yet quite dog-eat-dog—so opaque and capricious that it cannot possibly encourage the demonstration of patience, cooperation, confidence, and that sense of shared adversity circumstances require.  The only consistent advice one gets is to be as squeaky a wheel as possible.  There is, however, a gleam of light in my little corner.  The University has announced its intention of establishing its own vaccination center.  There is no vaccine yet, of course, and no knowledge of when there will be any; but unlike such offices of the State of New Jersey with which I have had to deal over the years, Princeton University is a highly efficient organization where most people, including several known personally to me,  actually answer their phones.  The regular annual “Flu Fest” mass vaccination organized by the University each year is a marvel of convenience and efficiency.

 

            My second topic is the mandated closure of the public schools and many other educational institutions.  I have a vested interest in this one too, as I have grandchildren in New York City and in Montreal, two cities separated by an international boundary, four hundred miles, and differing ideas of the civic good.  The issue of school lockdowns is full of paradoxes and uncertainties, though you might not know that from listening to spokesmen of the teachers’ union in Chicago or San Francisco.  The problem of protracted school lockdowns is coming to a boil in many places here and abroad, as the desperation of parents becomes more acute and the danger to children more apparent.  That there was a brief segment about the crisis on last night’s PBS “News Hour” may portend the beginning of a wider and more honest national discussion.  There are of course already some voices of troubled, honest inquiry, and I recently heard a few in some sobering interviews on the British UnHerd website.  UnHerd (you grasp the pun, of course) is an eclectic heterodox platform that the ideologues of moral certainty have not yet been able to silence on the grounds that it on occasion lets Wrong People write.

 

            You are perhaps aware that in this moment of national awokening, the woke are calling out crimes of intellectual associations.  When last summer various thought leaders signed the “Harper’s letter”-- in my opinion a rather anodyne defense of free speech and plea for civil debate about debatable civic matters--the Super-Woke attacked some signers thus: “How could you append your signature to a document signed also by X, who, as all the Enlightened recognize, is a well-known fascist shill?”  Well, how indeed!  How could you drink water?  Don’t you know Hitler drank water?  Testy old Saint Jerome, when it was pointed out that he attacked a position taken by the great Augustine, said: “I address myself to what is written, not the person who wrote it.”

 

            In the video referenced, an appealing, intelligent, and articulate young man interviews three women teachers on the question of the “morality” of the school lockdowns.  Unlike many talking head, the three women interviewed are credentialed by experience, like Chaucer’s Parson.  First he wrought, and afterwards he taught.   Of course what they wrought was also teaching.  Katharine Birbalsingh, is the head of a state school in an unposh part of London; Miriam Cates, a science teacher turned Tory MP from the north of England; and Alex Gutentag, a teacher in the public school system of Oakland, California.  All three were just as impressively thoughtful and articulate as their interviewer.  They addressed the  question posed to them—the closing of the public schools in the cause of the public good—with the nuanced thinking and acknowledgment of competing goods that it deserves.  It would be a disservice to their intellectual scrupulosity to pretend to summarize their views in a few short paragraphs; if the topic interests you, I strongly recommend the video.

 

            All three make a plea for honesty, beginning by asking whether the supposed social protection secured by school lockdown outweigh the possible long-term harms being inflicted on a whole generation of children.  Are we simply kidding ourselves that passing out free laptops is a serious educational benefit, that zoomed classrooms are sites for anything approaching adequate learning, and that on-line school really is school?  Ms. Birbalsingh, obviously a person with great experience and love of students, yet very deferential to the opinions of medical and political experts, says baldly: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as good on-line learning.”  She also points out that the neediest students—the disadvantaged and immigrants—are the most severely affected, exacerbating yet further the chasm between haves and havenots.  It is quite astonishing to hear the expression of so many deeply informed and disquieting opinions expressed with such a winning lack of dogmatism.  All three teachers thought that the situation had already created a serious juvenile mental health crisis with uncertain but likely severe long-term social implications.  Does Ms. Cates, a Conservative politician who can talk about issues of moral philosophy in a sincere and nuanced way, have any even vague analogues on this side of the Atlantic among conservatives in Congress?  “Why do we live?” she asks?  “It’s not just to avoid death.”  All three of them had strong, articulate concerns of community, cooperation, a shared aspiration  for making things better.   These are not bomb-throwers, though Ms. Gutentag shows a little edge in her lonely, brave questioning of the omniscience of the governor of our most populous state,  the position taken by the officers of her own teachers’ union, and the majority consensus of her colleagues.

 

            One of the advantages of being out of the swim is that it becomes very hard to drown.  My own uncertainty and probable fallibility on the question of school closings is without much risk, and certainly without practical import of any kind.  And even the effects of the possible incompetence and errancy of the swimmers that we spectators feel licensed to lament from the cheap seats are mitigated by the frequent demonstration of kindness and fellow feeling one finds from family, friends, neighbors, and not infrequently total strangers.  Even among the chaos we see many evidences of those “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love” that, according to Wordsworth, make up the best portion of a good life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voices of the Page

                                                      A Covidish inferno from the Hortus deliciarum
 

 

            In his viral rampage throughout the world, apparently making special exertions in our own native land, the Grim Reaper has not abandoned what might be called the normal rhythms of mortality.  Two more of my friends, both eminent scholars and one of them a close kindred spirit, have died within the past two weeks.  Covid was not the immediate cause of death in either instance, but the generalized sense of Covid gloom and constriction exacerbates all mourning even as it forbids its palliating rituals.  One of the turning points of old age comes with the somber realization that most of one’s youthful companions, classmates, close professional colleagues, siblings perhaps, other dear relatives certainly, are now gone.  Giles Constable, former Director of Dumbarton Oaks and long-time senior member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced study, was one of only two close friends with whom I have co-taught courses.  I can hear his rich, reverberating voice in my spiritual ear as I write this.  In Latin vox means both voice and sounds voiced, words, utterances, accent.  Medieval writers sometimes call words voces paginis, the voices of the page.  It is a beautiful thought that in old books we can still hear the voices of old friends, including some we actually knew.  It was with  this thought, amidst the gloom, that I took down from my library shelf two big, beautiful volumes that are among the marvels of twentieth-century humanistic scholarship.

 

            Toward the end of the twelfth century, which is to say somewhat more than 800 years ago, an enterprising and learned German nun in Alsace conceived, commissioned, and supervised the production of a very remarkable book intended for the edification of the young sisters in the Cistercian house of which she was the abbess.  Her name was Herrad of Landsberg, or of Hohenbourg, the site of the religious house over which she presided.  The religious site is known also as Mont Sainte-Odile.  (Odile is a slightly iffy Alsatian saint of pre-Carolingian times, especially helpful to those who read a lot, the saint for sore eyes.)  Herrad’s  book was a huge biblical and theological encyclopedia.  She entitled it Hortus deliciarum, The Garden of Delights.  It was remarkable for several reasons.  In the first place it was a learned work directed by a woman with females as its intended readers.  It was strikingly ambitious in its range of subject matter, anthologizing the disparate works of many famous theologians and exegetes, several of them from the twelfth century, meaning essentially the “latest word” in monastic learning.  Finally, the work was lavishly illustrated, or perhaps one should say lavishly pictorial, as the verbal texts and pictorial images collude in a shared pedagogic enterprise.  One incidental feature of the book has been very important to Germanic philologists.  The Hortus was of course written in Latin.  But Herrad’s mother tongue, and that of most if not all of the nuns under her supervision, was German.  The book contains more than a thousand vernacular glosses, or subsidiary vernacular translations, of words or phrases meant to help a reader whose Latin might not yet be perfect.  These are precious materials for scholars of the earlier forms of German.  It was a huge book on large, heavy vellum sheets, and it must have been very expensive to produce.

 

            I have had to employ all these sad preterits because the manuscript is no more.  In 1870 there was a short but brutal conflict, the Franco-Prussian War, a sad presage of the Great War that would consume most of Europe not half a century later.  The precious Hortus deliciarum, which had survived so many dangers and dislocations during the centuries—the Protestant Reformation and its attendant religious violence, the decline of monastic life in France, the neglect of secular scholarship, above all the systematic anti-religious fanaticism of the French Revolution—perished when the library in Strassburg was destroyed by artillery bombardment.  If you know even a little about medieval manuscripts and think about it for a moment, it’s really a miracle and perhaps yet another demonstration of the existence of a divinity that any of them have survived, let alone the thousands we luckily still have.

 

            About forty years ago a team of medievalists, after many years of painstaking labor, was able to bring out a stunning two-volume reconstruction of the Hortus deliciarum,*a feat hardly less astonishing than Jesus’s raising of Lazarus, and of similar genre.  These were the two volumes I took down from my shelves.  To reconstruct a huge manuscript of more than 300 folios was an audacious enterprise requiring a team of experts in codicology, medieval theology, and Latin and German philology.  It could not even have been undertaken were it not for the labors of two nineteenth-century enthusiasts working  before the Age of Photography.  A serious German medievalist, C. M. Engelhart, who published a study of Herrad in 1818, made many transcriptions and tracings of the pictures in the manuscript.  An aristocratic French antiquarian, with (for English readers) the somewhat startling name of the Compte de Bastard, who began studying the manuscript in 1840, made or had made a great many more.  Many of the copies attempted to reproduce color schemes.  A few other scholars had from time to time copied out some of the Latin text or described illustrations. So the materials for a plausible reconstruction were there, though any such project would require both textual and iconographic erudition, informed intuition, and some good luck.

 

            Two of my close friends were members of the team.  Dr. Rosalie Green, the Director of the Index of Christian Art, was the group captain, so to speak,  and the principal editor.   The Hortus was in a sense her life’s work.  She had first started pondering the possibility of resurrecting Herrad’s legacy during her graduate years in Chicago.  Some of the happiest times of my own early career were spent working at the Index.  Ms. Green was a rather private person, and after her retirement in 1981, after thirty years as Director, she became almost reclusive.  I saw far too little of her in her last years.  She died in 2012 at the age of 94.  Michael Curschmann, who was by three months my senior, was one of the leading experts of medieval art and literature of his generation.  The body of work he left behind is destined for permanent significance.  Even more important, from my point of view, was our personal friendship.  Our regular lunches were for decades nearly a weekly feature and became even more meaningful in our retirement years.   He and his wife Beryl, an accomplished potter who had been born and raised in Wales, were among our dearest family friends.  She died suddenly in 2013.  Four years later, while I was away lecturing in the Midwest, Michael died with equal suddenness, in his home alone.  The old church litanies contain a clause seeking protection against sudden death.  Its basis was the old belief that the dying person needs time for careful penitential preparation.  But as most of us must at one time or another learn, sudden death is actually a grievous assault on the living, who are often left with an inner sense of irreparable loss, of things done or undone, things said or left unsaid.  What is one to make of the statistics we read daily in our papers?  Well over two million Covid deaths worldwide, and invisible behind each and every digit grieving relatives, friends, associates, acquaintances, or mere fellow human beings.

 Michael Curshmann (1936-2017)

          The reconstructed edition of the Hortus deliciarum is not light reading.  It is a large, structurally complex scholarly work dense with Latin theological texts and heavy with learned footnotes in foreign languages and technical bibliographical notations.  Like all encyclopedias, it is a reference work, a highly specialized one, not something to take to the beach.  Its intended audience is pretty specialized: scholars of medieval literature and art.  Herrad's original audiene was yet more specialized: about sixty Cistercian canonesses.  Even so, leafing through the introductory essays, I could from time to time distinctly hear, rising above the decorous, dignified hum of the academic prose, the distinctive voces paginis of two old friends, still resonant from the grave.  Milton famously said that "A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life."  I have always thought that what he must have had in mind was the book's content or ideas.  The phrase "life beyond life" is of course ambiguous.  The immortality would seem to be that of the work rather than of the worker, as when Pope thus praises the Aeneid: "When first young Maro in his boundless mind / A work t'outlast immortal Rome design'd..."  But what I could at times hear so clearly in the voices of the pages of academic tomes many would regard as dry-as-dust were two old friends.  That was quite a comfort in a season of Plague.

     

 

            This post is actually a digression of sorts.   I started out to write about something in a short tale of Guy de Maupassant, whose most famous story may well be “Boule de Suif,” which is in part about the beastliness of the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War.  One form of beastliness reminded me of another: the bombardment of Strassburg in 1870, and the destruction of the Hortus deliciarum.  I’ll try to get back to de Maupassant next week. 

 

 

*Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum, edd. Rosalie Green, Michael Evans, Christine Bischoff & Michael Curschmann, under the direction of Rosalie Green, 2 vols. (London and Leiden, The Warburg Institute and E. J. Brill, 1979)

 

Keep your eyes on Saint Odile

 

Great Ladies and Little Houses

 

Little House in the Ozarks, Mansfield MO

 

Candid readers have on occasion told me that they are never quite sure what my essays are about.  So I shall tell you right up-front about today’s effort, which has three disparate purposes.  The first is simply to avoid any topic with an explicit political dimension.  Within a few hours of posting, we shall (d. v.) have a new president and the chance of new beginnings—weighty subjects, indeed, though hardly in need of explication by me.  I also want to relate a small example of  “meaningful coincidence” or Jungian synchronicity, which are perhaps over-fancy terms for certain riddling experiences we all encounter in our lives.  My third purpose is to honor the memory of two remarkable women journalists,   Rose Wilder Lane (1886-1968) and Louise Fleming (1917-2006).

 

            Though my career determined our permanent residence on the East coast, I tried for many years to make regular trips to my family home in northern Arkansas.  I continued to do so even after both my parents were dead in order to visit two beloved aunts, Edith Fleming Jarabek and Louise Fleming, who lived together to great ages and in increasingly delightful eccentricity in the old farmhouse.  Especially with my Aunt Louise I grew ever closer in affection, admiration, confidence, and conspiracy during the last decades of her life.  Our kinship was more than one of blood alone.  She had not had the educational opportunities that were lavished on me, but she was a voracious and discriminating reader, and we were bound together by books.  She was also a serious if at times acerb commentator on our national cultural and political life.  This was before the rise of Branson as a “destination”, and the nearest airport of any size was Springfield, Missouri, where upon arrival I would rent a car and drive about an hour east to pick up State Route 5, which gave you a straight shot south to the Arkansas line.  The junction point was a hamlet called Mansfield.   This place had a certain unexploited literary connection to which I had been alerted by Aunt Louise.  Mansfield was the last stop in the pioneering peregrination of the celebrated American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder.  There can be but few literate Americans, especially if they happen also to be parents, who are not familiar with the “Little House” books, first published between 1932 and 1943, which in semi-fictional form related the experiences of an American family moving from one hard-scrabble farm to another through the frigid plains and daunting backwoods of Middle America in the late nineteenth century.  Laura Wilder’s house still stands in Mansfield, and she is buried in the town’s cemetery.

 

wild prairie rose (rosa arkansana)
 

            Aunt Louise died in 2006, the year I retired.  I had already begun contemplating what turned out to be my first post-retirement project, The Anti-Communist Manifestoes, a study of four influential anti-Communist books of the 1940s and 50s.  One of them, Out of the Night, though now seldom remembered, was the biggest American best-seller of 1941.  Its author was a German ex-Communist, Richard Krebs, who wrote under the nom de plume of Jan Valtin.  In addition to being a best-selling author, however, he was an illegal immigrant with a most unsavory and mysterious background.  His book purports to be the autobiography of a Communist agitator and spy.  In his legal and propaganda battles Krebs had powerful enemies, including the American Communist Party and its legion of literary votaries, who did their best to discredit the book and deport its author.  But he also had very effective allies.  One of these was his Connecticut neighbor, Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura and  one of the more important dramatis personae in the Little House books.  My task obligated me to conduct at least a modicum of research into her life.  Among the facts I learned was that it was actually daughter Rose who had secured the Missouri property in which her parents spent their last years.  Among the suspicions I developed was that Rose had so robustly helped revise her mother’s writings as to become, in effect, the unacknowledged co-author of some of them.

 

Rose Wilder Lane
 

            Rose Wilder Lane was a great original of a sort once produced in the land by the dozen but now increasingly rare.  Her pioneer youth you will know from the Little House books.  By the time she met and championed Valtin (Krebs) she had spent some years living essentially as a survivalist on a small plot of New England soil which provided her sole sustenance.  She had chosen this “life style” in order to preclude having any monetary income at all, as she regarded both the Income Tax and Social Security as monstrous impositions on her freedom.  A good deal had happened in her life since she left various little houses behind in the first years of the twentieth century.

 

            There be mysteries in this world, and so far as I am concerned one of them is that so many extraordinary women marry very ordinary (or worse) men.  The laws of demography as well as of thought would seem to require that there would be a roughly equal number of countervailing instances, but that has not been my observed experience.  There was, briefly, a Mr. Lane, about whom I know nothing save that he was soon discarded, though Rose Wilder, apparently partial to monosyllables, kept his surname for legal purposes.  Rose Wilder’s life was forever afterward what is usually called “fiercely independent”.  She flouted a world which could view an unmarried female professional (let alone a divorcée) as scandalous, earning her bread as a telegrapher, a journalist, and a novelist.  Her early appearances on the political scene are as a radical, a Communist friend of John Reed (possibly known to you as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World or as creatively trivialized for your amusement by Warren Beatty in the movie Reds).  But unlike Reed, who died before he had time to be disillusioned, Rose soon jumped ship.  She is now usually described as one of the founders of American Libertarianism.

 

            Her dramatic political peregrinations were matched by those in the geographical sphere.  Just as she did things  ladies were not supposed to do, she sometimes chose exotic places in which to do them.  She traveled, for instance, in pre-war Albania where his royal highness Zog, having promoted himself from President to King, proposed matrimony to her.   Self-proclaimed Balkan royalty had little charm for a personal friend of Herbert Hoover. She’d had better offers in De Smet, ND.  She politely declined.   Her prolific journalistic work needs to be gathered together and studied, but two of her best books can be consulted in libraries.  Let the Hurricane Roar (1933) is an excellent novel.  Give Me Liberty (1936) delineates her bracing political credo.

 

            My Aunt Louise died during the time I was “discovering” Rose Wilder, and I could not avoid thinking of the congruences between the two.  Louise, too, was an American original, an eccentric unmarried lady who lived on a modest plot in the boondocks and earned an even more modest living as a journalist.  For years she was a general dog’s-body at a paper called the Baxter Bulletin.  At various times her duties included coffee-making, book keeping, repairing a linotype machine, writing ad copy, and diplomatically rescuing male superiors from exposing in print their most embarrassing solecisms.  Eventually she began writing  a weekly column, A Little Off Center—in my unbiased opinion easily the best thing in the paper.  Her essays deal mainly with commonplace or quirky  aspects of rural life.  In one of her letters Jane Austen wrote of her subject matter as “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”  There is a similar sense of extravagant modesty in Louise’s prose.  I just looked up her little posy of on-line memorials put together by the funeral home, one of which reads thus: “I have often wished that I could have known or at least met some person that I only read about or saw on tv. I think Louise Fleming was one of those persons. I only knew her from her columns in the newspaper. I will miss reading about her wonderful life and family. I wish I could have known her in person.”

 

            I, who was lucky enough to do so, would apply to her the farewell that one of our language’s greatest writers, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), gave to one of our literature’s greatest heroines—the central character in Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke.  Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

 

View from Louise's front door; now the home of beloved niece Mildred Jarabek Rockafellow
 

 

           

Mob Epiphany

 

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Choosing Wednesday as blog day, I mean.  Middle of the week, a day fair and balanced, avoiding the tawdry extremes of a Saturday or a Monday, giving me the time to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest some recyclable Weekend Something on a slow news day.  So naturally the Barbarians arrived at the gates a few hours after posting time on a Wednesday, the Day of Epiphany.  The show they put on was so grotesque, so violent, so unaccountably unopposed, indeed so appalling in every way that I probably could have nothing interesting or novel to say about it in any case, but certainly not after every scribbler and talking head in the land had had a six-day-and-twenty-hours head start.  Yet it is too big an event to pass over in silence, even if my only contribution is some reflection on the shared opinions of the scribblers and the talking heads—two of their widely shared opinions in particular:

 

            This was a coup or, at the very least,  an attempted coup.

            This is not America.           

 

            Calling this violent but inchoate melee a coup is an insult to lexicography that, if uncontested, threatens to besmirch the reputation of all acts of violent and illegal seizure of power.  Real coups always begin with the capture or effective disruption of some important center of power, communication, or transportation.  Readers of Joan Didion may remember the American lady in A Book of Common Prayer who hangs out in Boca Grande, an imaginary Central American banana republic with a political culture we ourselves, after several near misses, have at last achieved in actuality.  One day she rushes to the airport to fly to Miami and get away from the latest coup, leaving the sardonic narrator to point out that if the airport is still open, it’s not a coup.  At first glance it might seem that the Capitol is indeed an important center of power, but think about it a little.  If the Viking, or the guys with the Stars and Bars or the one with the “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirt, were serious about power,  they wouldn’t be vandalizing Nancy Pelosi’s office or being photographed in boorish postures in the swivel chair of the President of the Senate.  They would go after power.  They’d be out in Silicon Valley arresting Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg.

 

            Read about the famous revolutions, coups, and putsches of history.  They all start with busting open prisons, capturing the post office, the telegraphy center, the telephone exchange.  Lenin, in one of history’s more unhappily consequential coups, seized the Smolny Female Seminary for the Education of Noble Ladies.  So it was perhaps fitting that among the first international expressions of Schadenfreude that came to my attention—including  solicitous inquiries from the Turkish Strong Man concerning the health of American democracy—was a sincere private communication from a friend in Paris.  He is an American ex-pat who teaches English at an institution very like Smolny, the  Maison d'éducation de la Légion d'honneur at Saint-Denis, one of the prestigious schools established by Napoleon for the female offspring of the copious numbers of dead heroes supplied by his endless military adventures.  How was my friend to explain all this to his highly intelligent girls in this elite institute, many of whom, despite a shared national default anti-Americanism often only skin deep, were actually secret admirers of our great nation with its punk rock and its fecund invention of emojees for text messages?  The poor best I could come up with was to point out that at least we didn’t kill any Carmelites.

 

            Yet what killing there was was more than enough.  Some unknown rioter killed a cop with a fire extinguisher.  A policeman shot a woman armed with wild conspiracy theories and an American flag.  These are hardly laughing matters, but some things are sad beyond tears, a thought that brings me to my second refutation: “This is not America.”

 

            Partly because of a demographic background that leaves me with Trump-supporting relatives and some partial understanding of the way they see things, and partly from weariness of long years spent in a  burgeoning illiberal academic monoculture, partly because I am a genuine democrat, and one well practiced in being  on losing sides, I was more disposed than many were four years ago to cut our new president some slack.  Though I could not vote for the man, I thought that, duly elected, he deserved the time and opportunity to show us a competence, or normal human empathy, or simple fidelity to some recognizable and consistent political principles of the sort that perhaps cannot shine through the fog of a chaotic and partisan election campaign.  But disillusionment came rapidly, and was repeatedly reinforced by the President’s improper,  boorish, or dangerous behavior, which has not stopped short of incitement to sedition.

The riot was a complex event animated by varied and incompatible motives, extending over several hours.  Despite the fact that only a minority of the huge crowd gathered before the Capitol actually attacked, vandalized, and looted it, one can understand the press’s reserve in  withholding their customary “mostly peaceful protest” label in the journalistic take that has already jelled.  No such violent action in history has been uncorrupted by the madness of the mob, though not a few have been retrospectively  sanitized in the history books by partisan or romantic sensibilities.  At this point no clear path to national moral rehabilitation is discernible, but we might start with some wise advice from Mark Twain.  “When in doubt tell the truth,” he says. “It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.”  I suppose it was inevitable such a shocking event would require some pious prevarication from our President-elect, many other political leaders, and a large choice of pundits and “influencers.”  We certainly got it.  This is not America, says Joe Biden.  We are better than this says Kevin McCarthy of the minority party.  This is not the only America, nor is it the essential America.   But it certainly is America.  Our much vaunted “diversity” extends to the ethical realm.   Our history of violence, including political violence is pretty appalling, from the French and Indian War to the latest drive-bys in Chicago.   We are better than this usually. The unpleasant but necessary task of the moment is not to seek refuge in the rhetoric of our aspirational best but to face with honesty the bitter truth of actual gross turpitude.  Cheap grace is no more efficacious in politics than in religion.  No cross, no crown.  There are three parts to penance, the first non-negotiable being genuine contrition, which requires real soul-searching, and the second confession, requiring truthful speaking.  One wonders whether our Vice President, whose toadyism endured so long and so heroically through four years of humiliations, could clearly hear the raucous chant of the flak-jacketed patriots echoing through the Capitol corridors: Hang Mike Pence!  Did there flicker through a sensibility so well versed in the Bible that awful question: What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world if he lose his own soul?  And to have made the bargain for a short-term lease on a house in the Naval Observatory!  Do Vice-Presidents read Shakespeare?  Or even Hilary Mantel?  “Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”

 

            Meanwhile in my little locked-down Covid world it is once again Wednesday, and foolish consistency, the hobgoblin of my little mind, requires me to post this essay rather than to wait some hours to see whether the President is impeached.  Looking further ahead, I foresee missing the Inauguration next Wednesday in similar fashion.  But anyone seeking commentary on these subjects is unlikely to be in want.  I shall try to search out some eccentric topic more in the spirit of Gladly Lerne.

 

 

Dilemma (cont.)

 

            What is often called the “race problem” in America is a whole anthology of questions, some of them more tractable and others less so.  In 1944 the Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, a Nobel laureate, who was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to provide a dispassionate foreigner’s view of our uniquely national sickness, used a more appropriate word in a massive and highly influential two-volume study entitled An American Dilemma.   Questions and problems sometimes have relatively simple answers or solutions.  A dilemma always signals arduous, uncomfortable work, and resolutions that are not without friction.  Though certain racial issues that became prominent in public action and discussion during the pandemic spring and summer are no longer the invariable daily fare of the press, they have not gone away and they cannot go away unless and until they are addressed with a determination and an honesty neither easily found nor comfortably pursued.

 

            Speaking of honesty, it is not easy to avoid the two most flagrant topic of the moment.  The first of these is the publication of President Trump’s astonishing telephone conversation with Georgia’s Secretary of State.   From my point of view the economic and cultural decline of my native country may be regarded is an additional sadness of my old age.  Its moral and political degradation as revealed in what sounded like a presidential supplement to the John Gotti tapes comes closer to tragedy.  Then, just as I am publishing this post, there comes news from that same state of Georgia of a very different tenor.  But the shake-up of the Senate will hardly lack for public commentary far better informed than my own.  Persevering with the topic already contemplated, I found that once past the banner headlines in Monday’s newspapers, I could find at least two items of relevance to our racial dilemma, one a breaking news story, the other a cluster of letters relating to an earlier news story continuing over many months.

 

            A front page article announced that “Lawsuits Target a Covid Fund Meant to Help Black Residents”, with a subhead elaborating: “A Cry of Discrimination over the Economic Aid in Oregon”.  It has been widely reported that African-American and Hispanic communities have been “disproportionately” affected by the coronavirus, the gauge of proportion being by percentage of the entire American population.  With this in mind, Oregon state legislators earmarked sixty-two million dollars (out of roughly a billion and a half total allocation) for the exclusive relief of “Black residents, business owners, and community organizations enduring pandemic-related hardships.”  One especially hard-hit group, throughout the country and necessarily through all ethnic groups, have been the proprietors of small businesses. The crisis has been acute in the alimentary sector, dealing financial devastation to the owners of or workers in restaurants, diners, cafés, snack carts, and so on; but of course very few economic sectors have been unscathed.  One does not require a Yale J.D. to sense a potential problem with the legislature’s plan to distribute public relief funds on an exclusively racial basis.  Indeed, you probably need that degree to avoid seeing a problem.  It is inevitable that such a plan would meet with prompt opposition, as it has.  It is utterly irrelevant from the legal and constitutional point of view that the presenting plaintiffs are “one Mexican-American and two white business owners,” but the obvious sense of importance of that fact to the New York Times is probably shared by most Americans likely to read about it.  Less likely to achieve consensus are attitudes toward the justice of the plan or the appropriateness of the objections to it.  The admirable motives and good intentions behind the legislation can hardly be doubted.  But by the standard of “equal justice under the law” the initiative seems a non-starter.  To categorize it as an exercise in affirmative action, as the Times does, requires an understanding of that term far different from the one I have encountered in many years of discussing the college admissions process.   So, a dilemma.

 

            Another form of the dilemma dominated the letters section of the op-ed pages of that same issue, where several articulate readers  responded to an editorial that ran on December 26 entitled “Elite Schools Don’t Need to be Exclusive.”  The subject here is one I have written about before: the composition of the student bodies of great, selective public high schools in New York City, such as Stuyvesant and the Bronx High School of Science.  Admission to the schools is made on the basis of a single competitive examination in two broad subjects: the levels of competence and distinction in the skills of English language literacy (reading and writing) and mathematics.  No examination is an entirely adequate gauge of a student’s abilities and preparation to do advanced work at a high level; but this one is about as objective a predictor as I can imagine.   It reveals with some clarity a student’s potential for successful pursuit both of the  humanities and the crucial STEM fields.  It is not culturally insensitive to expect competence in our national language, which also happens to be the world language of learning.  But the problem is that a “disproportionally” large number of Asian-American students win places and only a tiny number of African-Americans do.  The remedy proposed by the Mayor and the Superintendent of Schools is to get rid of the admissions test.  All of the letters published recognized the scandal in the situation, but most of them also derided the speciousness of the mayor’s solution.  The retired principal of one of the schools wrote thus: “The mayor’s plan to remove academic admission screening for middle schools for at least a year does nothing to address the deficient preparation that too many Black and Latino students receive, and that is where our effort and finances should be directed.  There are no shortcuts.  Attacking entrance standards is simply a cover-up, concealing the financial and moral commitment the city has been reluctant to make.”  That devastating statement, particularly with regard to moral commitment, has broad applicability to the national scene.

 

            Whoever penned the title “Elite Schools Don’t Need to be Exclusive” apparently doesn’t know what the word elite means.  Or perhaps exclusive either.      The dictionary definition of elite in its nominal form is “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.”  I presume that would characterize the Times’s  view of its own editorial board.  The adjectival form means “chosen” or “elected/selected”.  When Joe Biden was chosen as the Democratic presidential candidate, that action excluded twenty other people actively seeking to be chosen.  When the electorate gave him the presidency, it necessarily excluded Donald Trump from that office.  Because it is only in Alice in Wonderland that “everybody has  won, and all must have prizes.”  Any truly democratic system—that is, one that elects people by preferential choice—is necessarily an elite system.

 

            It is the natural impulse of the social mind to want to solve problems and the nearly invariable desire of the political mind to want to solve them as cheaply as possible with cosmetic applications or outright leger-de-main, which is French for the light touch as practiced by card-sharps and magicians.  Mayor De Blasio’s proposed solution to the admissions dilemma at Stuyvesant High reminds me of a legendary anecdote from an earlier age of train travel, partially founded in partial fact.  As the number of passenger lines proliferated in the nineteenth-century European rail system to accommodate an ever-growing ridership, so also did the number of fatal rail accidents.  Neither pedestrian nor equestrian travel was without its risks (consider the implications of the English word travail), but train wrecks could be very gory and cause multiple deaths.  Furthermore, train wrecks were a journalistic sensation and therefore a political problem.  If it bleeds, it leads.  Today a statistically rare air disaster is international news.  Meanwhile millions upon millions of uneventful flight miles are racked up every week, but that is not news.  In any event legend has it that in the Low Countries about 1900 a royal commission set up to study and solve the problem of frequent fatal train wrecks discovered that most fatalities occurred in the last car of the train.  The commission’s recommendation was simplicity itself.  Just remove the last car from all trains.  Problem solved.  But not our dilemmas.  Those will take unstinting hard work on the part of generations younger than my own.