Constitutional Review

      

For many reasons, I am loath to write on political topics.  The chief reason is that I am not an expert on politics, or even particularly “political” in the popular sense.  Furthermore, most of us are already suffocating in the foul air of political commentary, most of it evanescent and a good deal of it annoying.   But now and again I, like so many others, do get provoked by the unintelligent, inefficient, and slothful actions of way too many of our elected representatives.  That so many such people get elected in the first place is extraordinary.  The history of our country, for all its failures as yet to honor its original hopes, has been driven by intelligence, innovation, and competence.  But our current Congress is by the standards of any self-respecting body requiring reflection and cooperation to arrive at effective joint action, simply incompetent. 

         If we really revered the Founders, we might pay more attention to the dangers that many of them saw in the excesseses of party feeling.  This particular mess was principally (though not exclusively) the work of a few fanatically self-righteous Republicans; but this few is enabled by the  pusillanimity of many others in their party.  At the top of the agenda of the piously invoked “people’s business” is self-preservation, holding onto office at whatever price.  Donald Trump is not the cause of the enfeeblement of American democracy, but the result of it.  What is wrong with American democracy is the democrats.  I do not refer here to the members of a particular political party, though they do play their role, but to the demos, the people, the electorate.  We have met the enemy, and it is definitely us.

         It was never as though the continuing existence of the United States, let alone its rise to world prominence, was a foregone conclusion from the moment they cleaned up the battlefield at Yorktown.  There is a famous anecdote concerning Benjamin Franklin recorded in the journal of a Maryland delegate to the Continental Congress.  You probably know it.  I hope it’s authentic, though it doesn’t really matter, because it is certainly true.   As the Congress completed its work, a Philadelphia lady ran into the sage philosopher on the street and asked him, “Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”–“A republic,” was Franklin’s reply, “if you can keep it.’”  Well, they did keep it for a while, but it was often pretty touch and go, until by about 1858 it became obvious that for a lot of influential and unhappy campers in the South it was likely to be simply go.  Efforts to keep it had to become even more strenuous.  Was the idea of “democracy” even realistic?  In his immortal speech on the battlefield at Gettysburg—a speech more consequential even than the epic battle it memorialized, one sage auditor noted—President Lincoln characterized the still young and embattled nation as one “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the propositions that all men are created equal.”  He continued, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation , or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

         The question remains current.  History is always enriched by myth, and if the myth can contain a little something lost in translation, all the better.  The Chinese leader Zhou-en-Lai was supposedly asked what he considered the most important consequences of the Paris student “revolution” of 1968.  “Too soon to tell,” he replied.  This banal comment has become an apothegm of profound Confucian wisdom on the assumption that the question referred to the French Revolution (1789).  Because it really is too soon to tell whether our country can long endure.  The republican ideal can be kept alive only if we keep trying to refine and expand it.

“Democracy” is an imperfect system  of majority rule, not a license for minority obstruction.  In fact, Kevin McCarthy’s principal crime, in the eyes of his extreme adversaries, was the act of bipartisanship—a tepid and coerced one admittedly—that actually broke a legislative logjam, temporarily resolved the immediate problem, and allowed the House to function.  His crime was dealing with Democrats, who hold about 49% of the seats in the House and 51% of those in the Senate.  Those statistics are not of the sort to encourage any realistic, patriotic legislator of either party to claim an overwhelming mandate absolving them of the obligation of compromise, and serious compromise at that. 

That is what is required of elected representatives, but there is a prior requirement for those who elect them.  That is a certain minimal knowledge of the structures of constituted government and a certain minimal participation in their operations.  I am not talking about what is needed for a college degree in political science.  I am talking about knowing what the three constitutional branches of government are and do, the distinctiveness of our bicameral legislature, the names and broadly espoused policies of our own elected representatives, and at least a little about the systems operating in our own state and local governments.  Study after study has revealed vast swathes of the American electorate to be ignorant of these most elementary of matters. 

A march of malcontent fascists with tiki torches spewing vile into the streets of Charlottesville is hardly a good advertisement for the state of American democracy; yet I doubt that the Union troops at Shiloh would have found in them the mortal threats to our national existence that a good deal of over-heated rhetoric coming from the punditocracy now suggests.  Those men knew what a real mortal threat was.  The tiki-torchers are at best, and worst,  the emblems of serious political pathology.  But there are upwards of three hundred and thirty millions of Americans.  Surely you can find three hundred of them to march in support of any benighted idea you come up with, including axe murder.  We need a serious national “back to basics” political review.  I think what we need is three or thirty million of us marching in support of calling for a Constitutional Convention.  A certain amount has happened in the political, technological, and industrial world since the late eighteenth century.  You have probably noticed.  The authors of the Constitution hoped they were enshrining some immortal ideas, but not even the pious among them aimed for a sacred book.  The Founders believed that amendment would be continuous and frequent.  Some argued for a constitutional convention every five years by statute for purposes of review and probable updating.  For many civil libertarians the most important part of this most important document is the so-called “Bill of Rights,” the first ten amendments added to the document virtually while its ink was still tacky.  You might say the sainted Founders forgot the most important part their first try.  But all too soon a brilliantly original and experimental document became for many a kind of textual fetish.  One of the grievances of the so-called Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” was the orthographic modernization of the spelling of the name of Jesus in a seventeenth-century Bible.  So easily can the letter stifle the spirit.  We can do better—which is the meaning of the word amendment—but will we?

 

 

 

 

 

Sit and Weep

 

After a week of screaming headlines and an inundation of appalling, indeed frightening newspaper articles, gruesome photographs, and television reports, we still have no coherent sense of the disasters playing out in the Middle East, and no confident sense of likely developments in a setting of such volatility and unknown unknowns.  Just at the moment the focus is on the horrendous death and destruction being visited by Israeli air power as the ground forces of the IDF stand by  near the barrier fence for an expected massive land invasion of Gaza.

 

The barbarous acts committed by Hamas against young children, including babes in arms, have incited a special revulsion in many, and what I regard as a perplexing silence or even semi-justification among others.  There is every possibility that open warfare could expand to Israel’s northern border (with Lebanon).  There are many other dangerous complexities.

 

A few years ago I published a book on a topic that is likely to seem to most people arcane rather than simply specialized.*  The subject was a brilliant religious poem by the Portuguese poet Luis de Camões, who died in 1580.  The poem is a commentary in 365 lines of polished verse on the nine verses of the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the Waters of Babylon”), number 137 in most English bibles.  The psalm is in the voice of a Hebrew captive, part of a group being transported by their captors from their sacked capital to Babylon.  At some point along the river the captors ask (or order) the Jewish captives to perform one of their traditional songs.  But the speaker declares this impossible.  For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.  How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?  If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.  If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.  I provide the full text of the psalm in a modern English version (New International) at the bottom of the post.

 

Portuguese literary scholars have often called this poem “Zion and Babylon,” the two cities (Zion being another name for Jerusalem) constituting a binary opposition with obvious moral dimensions—and some not so obvious ones.  It has been very highly praised. The Spanish poet  Lope de Vega (d.1635) called it “the pearl of all poetry.” As the psalm is itself a beautiful song about music, it is hardly surprising that is has captured the interest of dozens of musicians from Palestrina to Bob Marley.  I well remember when I first saw the poem. It was on a long flight from California to New York.  I had been reading Camões’s famous imperial epic (the Lusiads) in the splendid verse translation of Leonard Bacon (Hispanic Society of America, 1950).  In order to give his readers a demonstration of the poet’s prowess in forms other than the epic, Bacon appended at the back of his book “A Note on ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’” along with his own translation of the poem.  Reading it had an electrifying effect on me.  In the popular expression, I was blown away.  I spent several hours of the flight studying the English text.

 

Expanding nine verses of biblical Latin into 365 lines of Portuguese redondilha gave Camões a pretty free hand.  So different are the techniques of medieval exegetes from modern practice that following its thought is not always easy for us.  They prefer the allegorical, hidden meanings of Scripture to the apparent literal meaning of the text.  Any modern reader of Super flumina has to be startled if not repelled by the psalm’s final two verses celebrating infanticide.  Bacon wrote thus:  “The poem is, of course, an expansion of the 137^th Psalm, every verse of which, with one exception, is quoted in it.  That Camões left out the conclusion of the psalm has an interest.  One is apt to believe that his mind and heart were revolted by the barbaric savagery of the 6^th Century before Christ, but in any case such a piece of sadism would not have harmonized with the Poet’s visionary ecstasy.”  Actually, the poet spends eight ten-line stanzas “translating” these lines! But as he regards them as allegorical—betokening the obligation of all believers to root out and destroy all the moral imperfections within their own souls by smashing them against “the Stone that was Christ,”—he pays scant attention to the literal sense certainly intended by the psalm’s unknown author.  I say “unknown author.”  Some Renaissance exegetes insisted that King David was the author.  They knew David died centuries before the Babylonian Captivity, but claimed that he had written this song as prophecy.  And prophecy of a sorry sort it is.

 

Today we look on, appalled, at the Slaughter of the Innocents in the kibbutz villages of southern Israel and in the bombed-out buildings of Gaza City.  Twenty-five hundred years without much moral progress to show.  How long, o Lord, how long?

 

                                   

   

 

*Luís de Camões as  Scriptural Exegete (Tamesis/Boydell and Brewer: Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester NY, 2017)

 

Psalm 137 [Super flumina Babylonis]

¹ By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
    when we remembered Zion.
² There on the poplars
    we hung our harps,
³ for there our captors asked us for songs,
    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the Lord
    while in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, Jerusalem,
    may my right hand forget its skill.
⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
    my highest joy.

⁷ Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
    on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
    “tear it down to its foundations!”
⁸ Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
    happy is the one who repays you
    according to what you have done to us.
⁹ Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.

The Reading Group

 

Youth is wasted on the young.  Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that, and I suppose he probably did.  But it’s one of those supposed “quotations” that I have seen only as a quotation, and it has no firm location in a primary text that I can cite.  I have a heretical addition to this thought: Education is wasted on the young.  That’s sort of a joke, obviously, and hardly an idea that someone like myself, whose life career has been teaching young people, is likely actually to believe.   But it points to a truth of which I have become ever more convinced over the years, and especially since I retired from teaching.

 

            It is this:  the four-year liberal arts curriculum that a large number of Americans have experienced is a beginning, not an end, a foundation, not a finished edifice.  How many clichéd graduation talks each year have as their structuring cliché the fact that the word Commencement means “beginning”.  The thing about clichés, though, is they are mostly true.  What you learned in college demands continual renewal and replenishment, sort of like putting more money on your Metrocard.  Take Hamlet, for example.  I think it is important work of English literature, and everybody ought to read it.  I have spent a lot of time teaching it to eighteen-year-olds, and reading their sometimes brilliant essays about it.  But what is an eighteen-year-old really likely to know about the “the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune”?  It is only when you yourself personally encounter some of life’s hardest knocks and most painful abrasions that you really begin to see the bigger picture.  At least that has been my experience.

 

            I have been moved to think about all this because of a pleasant experience I had about a week ago.  I retired at the age of seventy mainly for my own personal reasons, but I still want to claim a little civic virtue in the decision.  You may be aware that for many years now young Ph.Ds in the humanities have had difficulties finding faculty positions commensurate with their training, or perhaps any positions at all.   I think it is often self-indulgent, and in many instances simply selfish, for professors to hang onto their tenured positions into their later seventies, and in some instances, their eighties.  But of course I did miss teaching, and welcomed incidental opportunities as they came along.  Obviously, I was already aware of various civic “Adult Schools” and other organizations in our town devoted to “Continuing Education” or “Life-Long Learning”—the monickers vary—and had taught in several on an occasional basis.  But I had been unaware of the scale of these activities.  The Princeton Adult School claims to offer 250 courses a year to a total enrollment of about four thousand!  That was approximately the size of the Princeton undergraduate body during most of my career.  I was attracted to a slightly smaller but in my view classier operation called the Evergreen Forum.  In it I taught numerous courses, some of them related to the particular book I had most recently published, but others devoted to major authors like Dante and Chaucer.  Just about the time I was already beginning to think that I was a bit long in the tooth for this kind of teaching as well, fickle Fortune made two malign interventions.  I fell seriously and for a time alarmingly ill; and then the whole country, indeed world, became the victim of a protracted viral epidemic. Teaching days really were over.

 

            But I had by then reflected on what was so pleasurable about my experience in teaching fellow “seniors”.  Partly it was simply the confidence that they had heard about World War II and knew who the principal combatants were.  That is, they tended to have knowledge based in an already comparative longevity.  But it is also a matter of attitude. These people do want to be there; they are interested in the subject, or sincerely interested in getting interested.  They also are nice, genuinely amiable people.  The nice experience to which I earlier alluded was an invitation from the well-named Reading Group, a local club of well-educated, dedicated readers.  The club seems now to be composed entirely of women, though not, I think, by statute or design.  Few of the members are as old as I, but some are, and all are seriously “adult”.

 

Their mode of procedure is as follows. They pick a book,  some agreed upon title of general interest that has created a buzz in the book reviews or otherwise become prominent.  Everyone in the group reads the book.  I presume there is general chit-chat about this book among members; but some if not all of the selected books become the subject of a general meeting.  At it some allegedly knowledgeable person gives a short talk about the chosen title and/or broader literary and historical issues it may raise. Sometime last year a friend who is a club member asked me if I would give a talk relating to a new Princeton University Press title that was enjoying a large degree of “crossover” success in book stores: Marion Turner’s The Wife of Bath.   Marion Turner is a famous Oxford professor, author of an impressive biography of Chaucer.  The Wife of Bath is probably even more famous—one of the most memorable characters in English literature, and certainly in the Canterbury Tales.    Of course I agreed, and as the proposed date was months in the future, didn’t think a lot more about it.  I had given such a talk to this group once before.  Although I do not remember much about the event, it would have been the early 2010s because the book I was talking about was Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, published in 2011.

 

But time does move on, and by the last week in September I had to turn my mind to the task.  I think it was a pretty decent talk; it was certainly generously received.  But it wasn’t dumbed down.  If you are going to talk about the Wife of Bath you have to face up honestly to some very complicated aspects of the medieval literature of asceticism.  It is nearly miraculous that Chaucer could make a masterpiece, at once comic and profound, out of such materials.  My audience was not a graduate seminar in medieval literature, but a group of mature, very well read general readers.  They were not merely capable of tolerating some rather arcane “background”, they seemed eager to engage with it.  Reading is a cooperative venture between author and reader.  A good read is much less like eating lunch—like it, don’t like it—than like having a conversation with an interesting friend.  We all want to get something out of a book we read; but the degree to which we can do so depends in part on what we ourselves are willing and able to put into it.  And that in turn depends in part on the wisdom gained from life experience and the reading of many other books.  I guarantee you that reading Hamlet when you are fifty-eight is a different experience from reading it at eighteen.  And giving a lecture at eighty-seven is a different experience from giving one at twenty-seven.  Indeed, a lecture is like a mini-book.  The word lecture itself is French for “reading” and preserves the memory of the teaching methods in the medieval schools.  Anyway, my thanks to the Reading Group and to all reading groups.  That there are hundreds, possibly thousands of such self-animating reading clubs and study groups throughout the land is a comfort in what so often seems a coarsening national cultural landscape.  Indeed "Reading Group" sounds   like a fair title for civilization generally.

 

 

Tea Party

 

I don’t believe that I had ever downed a cup of hot tea before I set foot on English soil, by which time I was already an adult.  Iced tea there had been aplenty, especially in the heavily sweetened  form once (and still, for all I know) common in the South.  However, I have made up for my earlier abstemiousness with a vengeance.  In fact, I have become nearly addicted to Lipton tea, seldom beginning any early morning without downing two huge mugs of the stuff.  I got on to Lipton because as it says right there on the package, it’s America’s favorite tea.  I also remember it as rather cheap, though that is no longer conspicuously true.  For the same money I could probably be drinking a high quality boutique Earl Gray if I just cut back a bit on the quantity.

 

            For I have no illusions concerning the actual quality of “America’s Favorite Tea.”  If I ever did, they were dispelled in 2013 on a visit to Sri Lanka.  I say this very casually, as though I travel frequently to exotic places.  In fact this trip was unique and  for us a big deal at the time.  It is my only experience of Asia, assuming that Turkey, where we had a wonderful trip in celebration of our fiftieth wedding anniversary, doesn’t count.  In 2013 Luke and Melanie, with the newly arrived  infant John Henry, were on research leave in Sri Lanka, residing in post-imperial splendor in Colombo.  Luke, a linguistic anthropologist, was fascinated by various aspects of the linguistic scene.  The population of the country reveals the palimpsest of its colonial history.  The first Europeans to arrive in large numbers were the Portuguese.  Today many of the Sinhalese natives of the cities have surnames like De Sousa, Barros, Gomes, and Oliveira.  There was an important Dutch period.  One still saw on the streets occasional striking Eurasians looking to  me like characters from a Conrad novel as I have imagined them.  A huge old stone Dutch Reformed church, beautiful in its unexpected vastness, rises on the Colombo waterfront.  But of course it was the traces of the British presence and the lingering whiff of Victoria Regina that provided the heaviest Western overlay.  They are everywhere, and one Sri Lankan intellectual told me, casually, that colonial remnants of the civil services are “the only things that work in the country now.”  He was perhaps having a bad day.  English, the “link” language between the majority Sinhala and the minority Tamil (the two official languages) seems to be spoken by almost everyone in public or commercial life. 

 

 

Luke and Melanie had invited us to spend a week with them on a private hired van tour of some of the island’s major attractions, and a fascinating week it was.  It was in some ways a staggering experience.  Oddly enough Sri Lanka, under the name of Ceylon, was a distant Asian land about which I had fantasized as a child.  The springboard of my interest was a set of beautifully engraved postage stamps from the early 1940s featuring George VI’s cameo head against a variety  of picturesque backgrounds, one of which was an elephant herd.  Miraculously. I still have the stamps, of scant financial value of course though forever a young boy’s treasure.  I found in Colombo a fascinating, hyperkinetic, dirty city almost overwhelmed by the internal combustion engine.  Though everyone told me that the density of population of the place was as nothing compared with their experience of India and China, it was enough to overwhelm me.  Genuine squalor is not far to find,  but so also are many elegant sights and private residences.  Americans no longer deserve the right to comment on huge and obvious disparities of well being.

 

It is not easy to get the sense of a place on a short visit, especially under the privileged circumstances we enjoyed, but there was still a slightly disturbing feel.  A single sprawling family, the Rajapaksas, long held most of the power in the country.  Their stranglehold may have been ended by the crisis of the summer of 2022.  At the time, there seemed to be a general awareness and begrudging acceptance  of the inevitability of a corrupt government—one sensed this instinctively in the air rather than by vivid personal experiences-- and perhaps even still some hint of the violence with which the Tamil rebels had been slaughtered in the civil war hovered over the place.  Melanie, as a Tamil specialist and Tamil speaker with many personal and scholarly friends among Tamil experts, perhaps felt this more keenly than others.

 

We saw many beautiful things, natural and man-made, in Sri Lanka.  A visit to the temple of Kandy, in which the great relic of the tooth of the Buddha was being ceremonially venerated, was necessarily one of the highlights.  The cascades of flowers that seemed everywhere a feature of Buddhist devotion were almost overwhelming in their effect.  We stayed  overnight at classy resorts, where Chinese tourists have replaced my countrymen and assorted eastern Europeans as the obnoxious loud-mouths of international travel, and where I earned the gratitude of a young doctor in her medical sari by giving her a few tablets from a prescription bottle containing something vital for one of her patients but unavailable in her country.  But we also spent time in the lovely countryside, and especially in the “tea hills,” so-called, of course, for the many tea plantations undulating over them.  Most of these, we were told, were at least the remnants of the vast holdings of Victorian Scottish entrepreneurs.  A visit to one of them was a part of the tour, and remembering it allows me to return to the ostensible subject of this essay.  We visited a large tea factory which consisted of one huge sorting or grading machine that gave off the vibe of a long toy railroad which, with every shake and jerk of its serpentine progress shook off differing grades of the dried tea leaves constantly being cast by the bushel upon it.  The machine itself, powered by electricity,  was a work of art, its flawlessly burnished teak bars looking like museum pieces.  Surely the date of its creation had been nearer to 1880 than to 1980?

 

The guide at the factory was a beautiful young woman wearing a beautiful sari, the classiness of which derived from the fact that the gold from which it appeared to be made was so tastefully unburnished.  She obviously knew everything there was to know about discriminating among the qualities of teas, and displayed her expertise in a voice that would not have been out of place in a drawing room of Lambeth Palace or at a seminar led by John Ruskin.  Never had I encountered a commercial pitch so upper-drawer, and it was impossible to leave without purchasing a specially prepared and outrageously expensive house selection.  What she said at the end of her  spiel sticks in the mind.  She was concerned to stress the ecological purity of the enterprise.  Everything was perfectly natural (or “organic” as we ludicrously say in this country), and everything usable was used.  There was no waste.  She had given a long list of the European tea retailers to whom they sold their product, few of whom I had heard of before.  “And we keep perfectly clean even the leavings.”  She explained that the leavings were the tiny bits of crushed leaf and stem incidentally caught up in machine parts.  “Nothing is wasted,” she said proudly.  “We sell the leavings to Lipton’s.”

                                 

  

So Long to Solon

 

Newspapers need “lead” stories, and it is often difficult to assess whether they are really important stories or simply the closest thing to something important that some editor could come up with on a slow day.  Despite the fact that the United Nations General Assembly was in session, this week’s blockbuster would seem to be the criminal indictment of Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) on charges of various acts of corruption. 

In response to his indictment Senator Menendez has been vigorous in indignant denial.  He immediately played the race card.  I didn’t know that there even was a race card for Cuban-Americans, but I should have known.  According to the Senator, he was being persecuted by unidentified enemies indignant at the achievements of an uppity, up-by-his-bootstraps Latino.  Even my Menendez, Lyle Menendez, a former Princeton student of mine (presumably no relation to Senator Bob), a man of Cuban “heritage” who in 1989 murdered his own parents with a Mossberg shotgun fired at point blank range in the living room of their Beverly Hills mansion, didn’t try that one. (He went with paternal sexual abuse.  And so far as I know even Representative Santos is not alleging anti-Luso-Americanism). 

Are we to believe that the senator is really guilty? The time- honored  presumption of innocence is a legal fiction that sometimes is very fictional indeed, as it seems to be in this instance.  Senator Menendez himself appears to have pivoted from the preposterous theme of racial persecution to that of “rush to judgment,” which is nearly as preposterous given the average time elapsing between criminal indictment and trial jury verdict in well-lawyered cases.  But is Menendez guilty as charged?  Probably.

 Everyone seems critical of trying cases in the newspaper, but that mode of proceeding does have one clear advantage over the regular judicial system.  Unlike that system, it usually honors the guarantee promised  by the sixth amendment to our Constitution that criminal defendants be provided with a speedy trial.  The newspaper reports are practically billowing dark, acrid smoke.  I doubt that the Times’s lawyers would have let the story be published were they not pretty certain of the blazing fire the smoke temporarily obscures.  It’s been a while since such succulent corruption in which New Jersey specializes has appeared on the congressional crime blotter.  George Santos (R-NY) has been more conspicuous in his mendacity, but Menendez wins the prize for the classiness of the evidence for the criminality involved, which includes gold ingots, a Mercedes-Benz convertible, and a strangle-hold on the halal meat concession for the whole state of New Jersey.  There is also a cupidinous Lady Menendez, not quite up to Lady Macbeth standards, but apparently aspiring.

Several weeks ago, in a post praising Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), whose staff helped me get my passport renewed in time to allow our recent and wonderful trip to France, I wrote the following: Of course, in a state where the baseline for satisfactory senatorial performance is simply to remain unindicted, [Booker] would be a natural superstar under any circumstances. The exaggeration in that sardonic remark was meant to be humorous; but as a constituent who in my layman’s role was pretty sure that Menendez was guilty of the crimes for which he was tried and not found guilty in 2017, I certainly had him in mind when I wrote it.  So if I failed as a humorist, give me credit as a prophet.  And Senator Schumer (D-NY), leader of his party in the Senate, reminds us that “Bob Menendez has been a dedicated public servant and is always fighting hard for the people of New Jersey. He has a right to due process and a fair trial.”  One can certainly get behind that second sentence.  And for all I know evidence of Menendez’s agonistic efforts on behalf of “the people of New Jersey”—even those not trying to corner the market in halal meat—may actually exist somewhere.  But one doubts somehow that the people of New Jersey for whom this dedicated public servant is always working hard are the intended beneficiaries of the $480,000 in cash discovered by investigators in the Menendez domicile, “ ‘much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets, and a safe’.  Agents found envelopes of cash inside jackets bearing Menendez’s name.”  I honor the distinction between conviction in a criminal court and the appearance of impropriety, even here where the circumstances stink yet worse than they look.  The Democratic governor of our state, along with two Democratic senators and six out of nine of the New Jersey Democratic House members (who outnumber their Republican colleagues three to one) have “rushed to judgment".*   Caesar divorced Pompeia for allowing herself even to fall under suspicion.

 

Power tends to corrupt, said the great nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton.  The corruption of politicians is ageless, international, and in our own country among the last remnants of the genuine bipartisan spirit.  The more the power, the more importunate the temptations and the higher the stakes for the powerless.  Menendez has been the chair of a very important Senate Committee, that on Foreign Relations,  Among the suggestions arising from his latest indictment is that he may have influenced American policy toward Egypt from corrupt personal motives. 

I know this isn’t really very funny, but as with so much of the political life of the country in recent years, one has to choose between tears and chuckles, and the latter are probably better for one’s health.  I thought that American policy in the Middle East was complex and challenging enough even without having to factor in a senator’s wife’s lust for a convertible.  Mr. Menendez has resigned from the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee but is for the moment emphatic in his denial that he will resign from the Senate.

Among the most famous lines in literature is Francesca’s lament in Dante’s Inferno: “There is no greater sorrow  than to recall our time of joy in wretchedness”.  But to an extent it works the other way around as well: “wretched” events, if you are not too close to them, can invite happy memories.  The committee chairmanship from which Menendez has at least temporarily stepped down has been filled by some distinguished senators from both parties.  Indeed it was long held by the only senator I have ever known personally, and someone I long admired.  I refer to J. William Fulbright (D-AR), who died in 1995 at the age of ninety.  Fulbright was very interested in higher education, and especially in the many dimensions of international study.   He was in his day the youngest college president in America, and his name lives on  in educational circles in the Fulbright Scholarships, designed for Americans wishing to study abroad.)  He himself had been a Rhodes Scholar in the 1920s, and he took a special interest in Rhodes Scholars-elect from Arkansas, the most famous of whom was Bill Clinton in 1968, but the most grateful of whom must surely have been I myself, in 1958.  It was through Fulbright that I got a patronage job in the summer of that year, before sailing for Europe in the fall.  The job, working as a clerk in the Senate Document Room, was a bit more than a sinecure but hardly high stress.  I doubt that the Senate Document Room still exists, but in those pre-computer days every bit of proposed legislation originating from either legislative house was printed in all its successive amended versions and was available for distribution upon request by any legislator’s office.  There was a significant volume.  A single proposed bill could go through ten or even twenty versions in successive amended forms.  The documents were identified by branch of origin (HR or S) and number.  The phone was always ringing with requests, which would usually be handled immediately by dispatch in interoffice mail, which was sent out several times a day.  Now and again an importunate congressional staffer would show up to fetch a document personally. The business was fairly brisk at times, but there were a lot of semi-official “breaks”.  The physical location of the Document Office was very near to the door of the  entrance to the Public Gallery, where we all spent plenty of time and whence as an observer I gathered a lifetime supply of anecdotes involving the lords of the Senate.  It was the heyday of William Knowland (R-CA) and Lyndon Johnson (D-TX).

There were a lot of “temps” like me working in the Senate Document Room, but also a certain number of full-timers who greeted each summer temp with a riddle upon our arrival.  Why is it, went the question, that in the House of Representatives there is a Committee on Foreign Affairs and in the Senate a Committee on Foreign Relations?  I had no clue, of course.  The supposedly hilarious answer was that the senators, who as a cohort tended to be considerably older than the representatives, lacked the sexual vigor to conduct affairs and had to be satisfied with occasional relations.  Even though the mustard-cutting capacities of our aging leaders continues to be a lively topic, that’s not what you might call a really great  joke—nor as offbeat in its humor as getting rich through the certification of halal meat.

 

                                             

  

 

*I wrote this yesterday afternoon (9/26).  As I slept, apparently, the dam of damnation was bursting, and many other legislators are now calling for Menendez’s resignation from office.  Crucially among their number is the soon-to-be-promoted  junior senator from New Jersey, Cory Booker.  Well, I was in need of a catchy title.

 

 

Descent of the Dove

                                         Piero della Francesca (15th c.)
 

 

The two blog posts I mounted from Salernes were achieved only under acute technological distress.  I cannot explain its nature, of course, since if I could, it would not have been distress.  If the situation led me to draw any general conclusion, I suppose it would be this: an octet of octogenarians rarely includes sufficient technological expertise to resolve computer mysteries.  (All the news is not so discouraging: we do continue to be able to change a light bulb if allowed to mass our forces first).  But I am now home and in a more friendly cybernetic landscape. I hope for the best. We arrived last Thursday evening just a little later than we had hoped for.  The flight from Nice sat on the tarmac blasting its fumes into the otherwise refreshing air of the Cote d’Azur for the better part of an inexplicable hour, then dawdled a while more at Orly Airport (Paris) where it stopped to refuel and pick up the bulk of the passengers bound for Newark.  So I felt that I had already put in my sufficient daily quota of airline-seat torture even before we took off for an eight-hour flight to Newark.  But the ground transportation arrangements worked like clockwork—or, if my own twelve-dollar watch counts—better than clockwork.  And there is always something sweet about returning home, even if it isn’t the Provençal countryside.

    

Indeed, a very sweet event was awaiting us: the baptism of nine-year-old granddaughter Hazel was scheduled for the next Sunday.  There was a slight wrinkle in this event, so far as we were concerned.  Hazel lives in Montreal, and the baptism was to take place in Christ Church Cathedral in that city; so our participation in it would be as spectators via Youtube.  But if computer technology had challenged me in France, Covid had made us all reasonably competent at Zoom, and watching a video is a piece of cake.

 

Baptism is the rite of Christian initiation, and since the Middle Ages, in churches of Catholic tradition, it has mostly been administered to infants, with the vows being made by proxies.  The real meaning of “god parent” is baptismal sponsor.  Like millions of others, I have to take my own baptism on faith, bolstered by the “oral tradition” and written testimony registered on an ancient paper certificate.  But in the early Church this was not the case.  Preparation for receiving the sacrament—the rite often was administered at Easter—was generally rather demanding.  Augustine’s philosophical seminars at Cassiciacum, touched upon in my last post, were a prelude to his baptism.  Hazel, though not yet up to Augustine’s erudition, was old enough to make an uncoerced volitional choice.  To the extent that anyone can be said to know the meaning of spiritual events, she had to know what she was doing and want to do it.  So I’m a little jealous.  How proud were her grandparents when we heard her, speaking with a clear and confident voice, promise to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil.  I can but hope that she will be more constant and successful in this intention than I have managed to be.

 

            Baptism is the first sacrament of what eventually became seven.  The word is derived from the Latin “solemn oath” and the equivalent of the Greek word for “mystery”.  Indeed it is both.  One theological definition of a sacrament is “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”  Though there are seven sacraments, only two (baptism and the Eucharist) are by biblical warrant required for all Christians.  As a student of poetry, I am inclined to think of a sacrament  as a material allegory in which meaning is conveyed not only by words but by things like water, bread, wine, oil, and so forth.  The most “sacramental” writer with whom most readers are likely to be familiar is Dante, a real man who in his famous poem becomes an allegorical emblem of the human situation.  Early in his poem, when he finds out he is required by Virgil (another real/fictional character) to undertake an arduous journey for which he feels incapable, he cries out in distress “Am I Paul?  Am I Æneas?”  The answer implied by the logic of the poet is: “Yes, you are both of those real  people”—symbolically or sacramentally, without ever ceasing to be “Dante”.

                                                              

  

            Baptism is, of course, a pre-Christian rite, versions of which or parallels to which are found in many of the world’s religious traditions today.  Perhaps the first act of Jesus’s public life was his baptism by the desert prophet John in the Jordan River.  According to the gospels, the spirit of God audibly approved the ceremonial act while descending on Jesus in the form of a dove.  This is a not infrequent scene in Christian iconography, my personal favorite being a great painting by Piero della Francesca.  The descent of the divine dove, a bizarre event, is naturally much discussed by early theologians.  One of the evangelists, John, adds a detail likely to disquiet anyone who has ever seen the effects of pigeons repeatedly taking roost on public monuments: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him”.  Many commentators were eager to insist that the bird was wholly spiritual and immaterial.  But Thomas Aquinas insisted otherwise.  The dove was literal, an actual bird of bone and feather.  That was because it would be beneath the dignity of the Divine Artificer to use anything that wasn’t real.  A famous Dante scholar of an earlier generation, Charles Singleton, used this theological argument in explaining the nature of Dante’s Commedia, a poem in which “real” history and allegory are sutured into an indivisible unity.

 

            In this instance the binding was also generational.  The figurative language of the baptismal liturgy is in the strange word that Dante used of his own poem—“polysemous,” having many layers of meaning.  Baptism is a symbolic cleansing or washing.  It is a symbolic death, burial, and resurrection.  It is a renovation of what is old.  It is the spiritual exemplification of being “born again”—a concept that must have baffled many of Jesus’s first admirers.  “Nicodemus saith unto him, ‘How can a man be born when he is old?  Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?’”  It is easier to see that Nicodemus didn’t at first get it than to get it oneself.  His words are just as strange to an eighty- as to an eight-year-old, but strange in a very different way.  Grasping the  idea of putting off the old self in favor of a new self requires living for a few seasons in the skin of an old self.  Wordsworth knew this and expressed it in a few short lines of what seems on the surface a rather simple poem, a verbal sacrament:

 

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

 

Cassiciacum in France

                                            at Cassiciacum today
 

We approach the end of our Provençal idyll. Two of our number left early this morning for the station at Les Arcs, thence to be whisked by TGV to Paris and some quick museum hopping before a later departure on the Eurostar and home to London. We who remain—Joan and I and the hosts—are feeling more than a little wistful suddenly facing the approaching end of another—another what exactly? House party? Long country home week-end? How to characterize a unique event that is at once refreshing and exhausting, at once a party and a taxing seminar? A partially useful parallel comes to my mind. Just about this time of the year somewhat more than sixteen centuries ago, in a landscape not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves, the young Augustine began an extensive rural vacation at a large country house near Milan in northern Italy. The spot was called Cassiciacum, and it deserves its place in the geography of intellectual history alongside the Stoa, the rue Saint-Jacques, the Berlin Akademie, or the two Cambridges. For it was at Cassiciacum in the year 386 that the young Augustine came to certain conclusions destined to have a huge impact on more than a thousand years of our intellectual history. Augustine retreated to Cassiiacum with quite an entourage in tow: including his mother, his son, his frequent sidekick Alypius, and another friend and colleague, a rhetorician named Verecundus. The seekers after truth met daily, mostly in the open-air classroom of a small garden nook. But sometimes, presumably led by Verecundus, their discussions took place in the partial shade of the still laden or recently despoiled grapevines that were an important part of the place’s agricultural activities. Just as the poetry of Homer has played an important role in all aspects of Greek education—including that being pursued by doctors and lawyers in training—the Aeneid of Virgil had become the fundamental textbook for Latin learners. How we might wish to have the lecture notes of Verecundus or of Augustine himself! How sweet an idea it is: reading through and discussing a book of Virgil’s epic lounging among the vineyards! Our daily seminars at Salernes in the “middle” Var, though perhaps less philosophically consequential, were probably a good deal more vinous. We have been a smaller group than that organized by Augustine, smaller and considerably older. There are, or were before today, eight of us distributed into four couples, We are all octogenarians, Some of us have been friends for more than sixty years, with the origins of friendship in our shared undergraduate days at Oxford. Several others are united by collegial ties in the British business world going back many decades, And the topics we have discussed endlessly have been fairly light on theology and very heavy on politics. With the world in such a mess this is perhaps inevitable. From that point of view the parallel with Augustine’s Cassiciacum is inexact. But there was also much great talk about books and music, endless captivating anecdotes from personal and professional experience. We are emerging from a fortnight’s festival of friendship. And, given our ages and the way of the world, we can hardly be certain that there might be another, or even others, in the increasingly uncertain future. So we face our own departure for America tomorrow with hearts full of gratitude to our hosts Andrew Seth and his partner Lee Godden, but also with a wistfulness ever to see associated with the unique sights, sounds, and perhaps above all the smells of an old Provençal farmstead.