Notes on Current Events

The most recent mass emotional trauma to convulse the internet was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fiasco. I wasn't going to offer any commentary on it because I am not intensely invested in the political aspect of the matter on either side, and everyone has already weighed in on it at great length, though without saying anything that is novel or interesting to me at this time in my life. In addition, given my life experience, or lack thereof, and position in society, I wasn't able to regard the controversy and all of the feminine rage being expressed as having anything to do with me. However while the immediate fervor of the days during the process has died down, it engulfed so much of the professional/college graduate social media conversation for several weeks and continues to influence it, that I thought I should try to make some note of my impressions in the case.


I have written several times that the idea of a Supreme Court made up of partisans whose opinions on cases will be predictable 90% or more of the time based on political leaning does not make any sense to me. The point of having it is not supposed to be merely to produce desired outcomes for one party or another but to subject legal questions and disputes to wise and considered judgment producing at times unexpected insights and decisions. This seems obvious, but this is not how the more energetic partisans who drive political discourse think about it at all.


Now the mid-term elections are approaching and I am least am being bombarded at all hours of the day with dire warnings that the Republicans must be defeated at all costs or unimaginably terrible things, evidently far worse even than the hell most people are already living in, are going to befall the country. I don't disbelieve this, and I certainly wish that Donald Trump were not the president. I did not vote for him, and even if the Democratic candidate in 2020 were to make skinning straight white men alive one of the campaign planks my conscience as currently manipulated would still probably demand that I vote for a third party candidate so as not to be 100% complicit in the dreadful consequences for everyone else that will doubtless follow upon a Trump re-election. The problem with all this of course is that for all Trump's awfulness the result that defeating him and his party will bring at present is the ascension to power of a Democratic coalition that appears to be out of its mind, and so hell-bent on revenging and punishing anybody who might fit the profile of a Trump supporter, that this prospect is actually more disheartening to me than even Trump is. Trump is one person who supposedly is not very organized, does not know what he is doing, and is hated by everyone who is either competent or important. This is admittedly disturbing but he will likely be gone in ten years and I doubt given the massive amount of opposition to him among powerful interests that he will be able to abolish the constitution and establish some kind of dictatorship. If anything his enemies seem almost equally likely to do this in the name of preventing someone like Trump from ever being elected again.


Kavanaugh himself seems like somebody I would probably not like if I knew him. I am not sure if jealous would be the exact word to describe the real nature of the feelings I had towards him apart from whatever popularity he had with girls, which seems like it may not have been as high as what it would have appeared to be from such a vantage as I would have had as a youth. It would have been nice to have grown up with a little more wealth and with a somewhat clearer vision of how to successfully embark on a career more in keeping with my self-perception but I got to go to pretty good schools and I was probably even handsome enough to have achieved most of my fairly modest social dreams if I had had any personality at all. I have no idea whether he is "qualified" to sit on the Supreme Court or not. The only Supreme Court Justice I have any personal experience with is David Souter, who lives near me and whom I have run across a couple of times and had occasion to speak to and to hear speak just in passing. My fleeting impression in these instances was that even in the casual exchange he spoke a very clear, precise English, with excellent diction, "proper words in proper places" such as I at least have not heard in the past twenty years. My wife and her family speak in a clipped, direct 1920s-1940s-ish idiom that when they are on is delightful as well, but the polish and fineness of Souter's speech is quite striking to come upon in one's day to day life. This may well have nothing to do with qualifications either, but it informs my idea of what a Court justice ought to sound like. I have also known a number of people over the years who went to public high school with him, and there does not appear to have been so much as a hint of scandalous, Kavanaugh-esque behavior attaching to that part of his life. Indeed to make the suggestion among people who knew him at that age generally elicits a laugh, so far-fetched apparently is the mere idea of such a thing.


But, (apart from partisan politics generally), the question hovering over this whole controversy was,  how seriously do you take the problem of sexual misconduct/criminality, and how angry are you about it? the correct answers to which of course are, Extremely seriously, and, I am furious about it, so much so that I cannot tolerate that any plausible suggestion of an instance of its having taken place at any time in the past should not have some serious consequences. Naturally I lack the full intensity of rage and enthusiasm for retribution that the times call for. Given the disparity between the number of alleged rapes and sexual assaults (and the fury these arouse) and the official police statistics on these crimes (which indicate that perpetrators can get away with their villainy 99% or more of the time in some jurisdictions), it would seem that either the legal system as a whole needs to revamp the entire way that these offenses are defined and prosecuted to satisfy the activist left and, if not send men to prison in enormous numbers, at least bar them from holding any kinds of lucrative or influential employment (what other retribution can there be?), or eventually the rhetoric and hysteria are going to lose a lot of their power, if they aren't already. I, and doubtless many other men, have long passed the point where the most obvious means of self-preservation from this ongoing crisis, for college women at least is, "how about not going to these damn frat-type parties?" But given the response any time this is suggested, one must come to the conclusion that the men at these events who are getting girls to do shots with them and go to their bedrooms at 2 in the morning--something that the overwhelming majority of men never experience--where they proceed to behave too aggressively and take things too far, are comparatively just too desirable and high status for this to be realistically considered. The object I suppose is to train these highly sought after men to behave better, or more in line at least with what the women are looking for, but what incentive is there for these guys, the absolute pick of the litter in their social worlds, to change their behavior when it has given them everything most normal boys would like to have whether they admit it or not, has done so pretty much forever, and continues to do so even in these supposedly more enlightened times. People complain that they are entitled. Well of course they are entitled. What does anybody imagine these kinds of parties are for? Why do people think that young men endure the ridiculous rituals they endure, such as drinking other people's vomit and eating grapes out of  another guy's bunghole, to get admitted to exclusive fraternities and other social clubs, for the opportunity to perform community service at a higher level? Of course not, they want access to good career prospects and to the most desirable women, that other (usually lesser) men pointedly do not have, and will never have, which is, while not a violent matter, a pretty serious one to many in the latter group as far as certain of their ultimate life prospects are concerned.


None of this, I will be told, is to the point, but unfortunately I cannot see how this is not at all times a substantial part of the point. The bad behavior, though I believe (primarily based on reading novels and memoirs from the 1960s and 70s, mainly by morally oblivious men) it to be less prevalent overall in current society, continues generation after generation among a subset of the population because for the most part it is from the male point of view rewarded by young women as far as attaining its objects goes. The movement over the past few decades to put some restraint on heterosexual male entitlement, ego, conduct, and in much of the population their comparative power and wealth, has been quite successful but I have got to think it may be approaching its reasonable limits. I am, I think, in my behavior pretty much the model of an inoffensive person and causing anybody trauma is the last thing I would want to do but still, as I get older and can see the end of the active part of my life at least in increasingly clear sight, the main regrets that I have are not having been able to more aggressively (though not violently or criminally) go after things, experiences, relationships that I would have liked to pursue. It's a big hole in my life and to have done it would have required risk, which people ultimately demand of you before giving you any respect anyway, and likely would have involved being offensive in some way to somebody. There are built-in conflicts to life, and certainly to most forms of masculine ambition, which if you forego in youth has the tendency to wither you before your time. I don't know how many more generations full of men with no role or positive expectations to fulfill, and consequently no fire or talent for living we can seriously expect to endure.


Yes, I know, this still has nothing to do with the topic in question, the women that Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted 35 years ago and whether this should have disqualified him from sitting on the court. If the accounts were true, given today's environment, and the circumstance that he does not appear to be regarded as such a superlative legal genius that there might be cause to overlook some (quibbles?--there is another word I am looking for here but I cannot think of it. I cannot remember words anymore), I would probably think it prudent to move on to someone else, though Donald Trump's own acknowledged behavior, to name but one example, seems to be considerably worse, and his followers don't care, or don't care very much, so why would he do that? But I don't have any cause to say whether they (the accounts) are true or not in the exact way and using the exact terminology which was used to recount them. So I wouldn't do it.

Stella Dallas (1937)

I have ten movie notes to catch up on. Rather than stuff them all into one big post that will take a month to write I am going to just do short commentaries on each one separately.

Stella Dallas had been sitting in the 'unavailable' section of my movie queue for about three years when it suddenly turned up in the mail one day. Based on a novel by the once-popular Olive Higgins Prouty, whose name has turned up in these screens (those being the ones on my site) before, the 1937 movie was the second adaptation, following a silent version that had come out in 1925. King Vidor, probably better remembered among the serious now for his silent masterpieces, was the director, and the star was the great Barbara Stanwyck, who is much-loved among internet film aficionados. There were a few moments here where I thought I might be beginning to glimpse the genius of Barbara Stanwyck, though on the whole I was still not possessed by it. I thought, for example, that she often overplayed the vulgarity and low breeding of Stella Dallas, which would have been obvious at a much lower degree, though I guess the spectacle and her contrast with the country club set would have been considered humorous at the time. Even more than other movies from the Depression era, there is no ambiguity in this one about how better it is to be rich and go to the best schools and run with the best people than otherwise, even to the point of giving up your sixteen year old daughter who is all you have in the world, and renouncing all claims to seeing her again, because your social background and position is too awful and contaminating an influence if your daughter is to have any hope of a desirable life (the plot of the story is that the son of a disgraced millionaire, temporarily self-exiled to a nondescript mill town, impulsively marries the working class Stella and has a daughter with her, soon after which however their impossibly disparate backgrounds cause them to drift far apart. Stephen Dallas eventually re-unites with his old horseback-riding flame, who is conveniently widowed as well as possessed of her own millions, and the latter part of the movie concerns Stella coming to realize that of course she must give up her daughter to go and live her father and his new wife and partake in the superior life they know). This attitude is consistent with Olive Higgins Prouty's other work that I know, all of which involves to some degree the Boston Brahmin circles in which she moved, and involves a character, or multiple characters, who are the inheritors of this exalted blood, or spirit, but due to one circumstance or other need time and the undergoing of some ordeal before they can rise to the exalted level where they inherently belong.

This movie has a lot of the expected studio charms of its era, music, sets, the sense, especially pronounced in this, that there are some people out there who have pretty swell lives, and the idea that these exist should give you some twinge of happiness even if one personally is not capable of living that way himself. They really understood social humiliation back in the 30s. Modern scenes of humiliation where someone is getting mercilessly taunted and laughed at by a mob or having his manhood, either physically or intellectually, eviscerated by some alpha male or female, tend to annoy me, but the scene of the 10th (?) birthday party where none of the classmates showed up because the other families did not accept the mother, Stella, as worthy of their patronage really got to me. And the scene at the end, Laurel (the daughter)'s wedding, where Stella is forced to stand outside in the cold looking in on the service though a window, and the new rich mother demonstrates her humanity by asking the butler to leave the shades open, is incredible, because it is played as though this would be the absolutely natural thing to do in such a circumstance.    

More on Envy, or, I Have So Much of it I Can't Stop Writing About It

I hate taking so long to do each of these posts, but I feel obligated to try to work through to some extent any theme I have felt a compulsion to take up. Also the new baby is currently providing still another (temporary) distraction preventing me from being able to immerse myself in thinking and writing.

I am clearly bothered by this question of envy from below being the real ugliness and cancer afflicting economic and political life, and the horrible suggestion that I am myself afflicted and necessarily even further reduced by this poisonous condition. It is a condition I have always wanted very much to avoid succumbing to, knowing how much it is despised by the enviable in all ages. This avoidance involves in most instances a fair amount of self-persuasion (if no credible reassurance from one's own social community is forthcoming) that one's life is to some degree a success, his occupation and romantic life and intelligence worthwhile. My success as far as this self-persuasion goes wavers. When one has reached this state, he has no ground on which to defend himself against charges of envy. If you concede your own life and thoughts to be entirely inadequate, and yourself to have failed to attain any degree of self-mastery, but must confess that those of another are perfectly adequate, even powerful, it seems inevitable but that you must be overcome by envy, to some degree.

The alleged envious reveal themselves to be resistant to what the markets and other competitive measures ubiquitous in society have determined to be just, and refuse to take responsibility for their shortcomings in these areas, it is strongly suggested. They have been granted the liberty, and encouraged besides, to develop desires that have proven to be unattainable for them, and they have no alternative, more solid self to contrast against the slightest demonstration of wealth, before which they fold immediately in tacit acknowledgement of their essential worthlessness. "How much of what I earn do you think you are entitled to?", says the productive citizen to the redistributionist. Nothing, nothing, provided we are not speaking of contracts and obligations already in place, though personally I would prefer to live in a society where the powerful few were not quite so dominant, and the mass of the population did not appear to be, and was not treated as quite so weak and insignificant. In brief I should like the general organization and tone of whatever society I inhabit to tilt more favorably in a direction where I could claim more of a sense of identification with and participatory role in its successful functioning. This does not seem to me envy, but basic human nature.

The distortion in the extremes of income and general remuneration that different individuals have access to while being forced to spend/pay for the rudiments of life, as well as legalities, fines, etc in roughly the same economic milieu at some point leads to a situation and society that is highly undesirable and unpleasant to inhabit. It is a sign of how confused and muzzled the spirit of the American commoner is that he has such a difficult time standing up for his own self-interest, even though he can sense that the most brazen capitalists are not nice men who care nothing for him and would have him and his entire family impoverished or imprisoned or even killed and think nothing of it if his/their continued existence became too inconvenient to their interests. Yet there is a fear of making any demands on or heartfelt criticisms of these people, who make endless demands on the American public to accommodate and enrich them beyond what most other first world societies find it necessary to do, because you will expose yourself to their ridicule and brutal judgement, though judgement passed by way of a very narrow vision of acceptable humanity that most people by definition have no hope of attaining.

I keep harping on this point, but the ability of certain individuals to generate these massive sums, equal in some instances to the GDP of entire nations of 10 or 20 million people, and keep  nearly all of this money for themselves, with which they are able to dominate and distort national political and civic life to an uncomfortable extent, should be resisted and stopped by the mass of the populace for their own preservation, and dignity.

The global inequality issue, which compares the American middle class with slum dwellers in India and Brazil, and asks, what has the average American ever done to deserve the lifestyle he has? and concludes from this that the American needs to be reduced to a considerably more humble diet and material existence, is little more than a brazen ploy to further attack, under the guise of reason, the confidence of the American citizen to believe that his life and labor have little more value than that of an animal, and to sap his will to insist upon being treated as a free and noble citizen, which all people have difficulty doing when they are financially weak, but Americans especially. The American continues to have to live, be educated, receive health care, go to prison, etc, in a specific economy where these things remains expensive and that are not showing indications of re-adjusting their costs (and the consequent salaries of the leaders in those industries) in anything like a satisfactory manner to accommodate the reality of a declining personal income. It is certainly possible to lead a worthwhile and even a serious life at a material level far below that of the American middle class, but the culture of capitalism that prevails in the country will make it very difficult for the rank and file to ever do this.

Maybe there is a germ of an essay somewhere in these two attempts to deal with my feelings on this subject, which did not however much get at what bothers me so much about it. However I need to leave it off and move on to something else now.

Long Post Nominally About Envy

The idea is commonly put forward by lovers of the idea of free markets that any expression of dissatisfaction with the degree of income inequality generated by the economy in its current form is attributable to nothing more than envy; and envy being a base emotion that can by definition only have origin in inferiority, either inherent or demonstrated, and failure, it is not a ground from which legitimate complaint or criticism can be launched. Given the variability in thought and behavior among human beings generally, as well the widespread concern permeating even into relatively thriving quarters of the population that at least some aspects of this inequality are contributing to serious problems, this dismissal is a little too aggressively simplistic for my liking. To the extent that envy is ever the ruling passion it is asserted as being here, my sense is that it tends to surface rather higher than lower on the scale of accomplishment, among people who actually have attained some desirable position relative to the general population, but simply not desirable enough to themselves. To be truly consumed with envy about another person's money in the sense that free market champions want to ascribe to its critics would appear to require a certain degree of passion or obsessiveness about, and the conception of oneself as a genuine competitor in, that arena. In most instances, and certainly at my level of society, I suspect that the prevailing emotional response to the spectacle of ever-phenomenally expanding wealth for the few who have grasped either how to create or lay claim to a share of some torrent of revenue while the remainder of the cognoscent feel more palpably the extent to which they are being left behind not just financially but intellectually, socially, politically, etc, every day, and the non-cognoscent descend into a state of existence only tangentially related to any kind of advanced civilization at all, would properly be described as anxiety rather than envy. Anxiety does not carry with it the same sting of reprehensibility that envy does, and is a deeper set state of mind, less susceptible to being overcome by mockery or dismissal as well. Grown large enough, unlike the rank envy of petty individuals, I do not see how it will not have effects on the public mood and discourse.

Still, this does not address the popular arguments that are always pressed, such as that income inequality, or at least the amassing of incredible wealth by the savviest people, is not a problem and not only has no significant effect on the life of anybody else, but in fact improves the lives of the lower orders in ways that they are usually too dense to perceive.

First I will speak for myself, since with regard to envy I suppose I might be considered by the productive class a prime example of a person who must be seething with it towards every more realized person around him based on the disparity between my private self-conception and actual demonstrated value. And when placed in very near proximity to men with some similarities of background to myself who are very popular with women, who live in New York, who work or are otherwise involved in the arts or Bohemia to some extent (and consequently socialize frequently with the sophisticated and artistic women of those circles), who seem to be able to travel a lot, who are notably brilliant or at least are widely considered to be so, I have probably felt some twinges of jealousy for the things they are able to do that I am not, though in doing so I am usually acknowledging the superiority of these rivals and not attributing their success to undeserved luck or scheming how to cut them down to my level. But I am rarely in proximity to such people, especially in recent years, and real envy seems to have little pull when remote either in physical space or cultural background. Again most of what might be attributed as envy on my part seems to me much more like anxiety.

Around the time I began plotting this essay, I came upon this nasty article, which gives some examples of this attitude that petulant envy is driving most of the expression of discontent with the current direction of economic life. Like most people who hate anyone with the vaguest leftish sympathies, the aiuthor's ardor is mainly directed towards people who are as worked up on behalf of their own world views as he is for his own; still I don't like the overall tone of the piece and think the point with regard to inequality concenr is as usual missed entirely.

First there is the inevitable comparison of inequality complainers to Holden Caulfield, whose supposedly  whiny and passive aggressive, competition-averse persona has long since become a cliche for manly right wing pundits to tag their enemies with. Holden Caulfield is a teenaged character in a novel who suffers a nervous breakdown because his mind is out of step with the prevailing society all around him. I suspect he would have had little more use for modern day leftists than he would even for Republicans. The idea that there is a large class of adults, developmentally delayed or not, in 2015 that deeply identifies with this character to the point that he informs their politics to a delusional and unhealthy degree, strikes me as improbable. His book retains its popularity among some reasonably intelligent people because it is a good read, is funny, and nowadays evokes strong nostalgic associations about things like New York City and boarding schools and the 1940s, though the book nominally does not intend for them to be regarded in this light. Perhaps it appeals to people who lean somewhat leftward to begin with (though the boarding schools and the socially unjust world of the 1940s would seem to be counterintuitive or at least problematic as sources of leftist nostalgia), but its main character hardly represents the default personality of all people who are not absolutely worshipful of capitalism in the form it has taken over the last twenty years.

The hostility about the supposedly misattributed Balzac quote was bizarre. I admit I assumed that Balzac was the source of the "behind every great fortune there is a great crime" quote since everyone has always attributed it to him (the author implies that he knows this because, unlike all of the people who flourish this statement as if it contained any truth, he has read a great deal of Balzac's corpus; for my part I must confess I have only read Pere Goriot, though I did perceive the genius in it, and  Cousin Bette and Eugenie Grandet at least are on my list for someday--what I gathered from Goriot was again that the author tended to view everybody as more or less equally petty, selfish, and slavishly striving after social status, regardless of political orientation). Anybody who is a semi-conscious adult  has seen examples of moneyed interests using their resources to circumvent or otherwise protect themselves from the consequences of breaking existing laws to preserve and expand the wealth that they already possess, so it is not too far-fetched to imagine that the same ethos might in some instances have been applied in the course of amassing the original fortune. But even granting that the origins of all great wealth are founded purely in solid business acumen, at a certain level of the game artificial advantages begin to accrue to existing wealth that considerably aid the multiplication of that wealth, and enable its possessor to generate sums of money in a hour that a laborer could not make in ten or twenty years. It is this aspect of the business that I most dislike because it seems more excessive and unnecessary in its unfairness. The unfairness lies in the circumstance that all people need money, and most have a devil of a time trying to get any of it, while some few have access to sums larger than the economy of entire nations or regions. Surely there is some point at which this becomes ridiculous, if it cannot be demonstrated to be wrong or applicable to any moral system at all. But there is at present no unified movement of capable people able to apply any restrictions on its practice, which dearth of ability devoted to organizing a more empowered and juster mass society I think will eventually bring our civilization to doom.

With regard to his point about Harvard and Yale and a handful of other prized colleges, while it is true that I know a few people, albeit in my own generation, who made it into those schools from relatively ordinary backgrounds as a result of their talent and hard work, I do not know that their efforts, coming from a similar background, would be sufficient to land them there now. There does seem to be more of a suspicion than there was thirty years ago, at least when it comes to native born Americans beyond the first or second generation, that if the family has not been able to accede to some prominence by now that perhaps there is something deficient in its genetics that the top institutions would be better off not associating themselves with, apart obviously from the very rare cases where some overwhelming talent has been demonstrated during the teenaged years. I do not see how people can claim that having important or significantly wealthy parents is not a marked advantage in being admitted to these schools, even if the talented aspirant without good connections is perhaps not completely devoid of hope. I am not even going to argue in this instance that it is wrong that the children of the best people are given some priority, since wherever they congregate is naturally going to be desirable. However the entering classes at the most coveted schools remain so small that after they accomodate all of these people there are not very many spaces for the remainder of the top 1-3% of the intelligence distribution that is scattered out in the hinterlands. Despite the fearsome reputation for snootiness of Oxford and Cambridge, something like 2% of all 18 year olds in Britain matriculate at one of these two universities. That is ten times the percentage of US 18 year olds in the entire Ivy League. The anxiety about the Ivy League among people in these top few percentiles of the intelligence distribution clearly stems from the circumstance that graduates of these schools, which are inaccessible even to most people in the very top percentile of smarts and achievement, appear to be disproportionately represented among the powerful and influential (and the merely gainfully employed) in government, journalism, finance, certain fields of the arts and so on, and in many instances offer a much surer entry into these professions vis-a-vis other individual schools, many of which have many times the number of students. Part of this effect is exaggerated because media such as The New York Times cannot resist identifying people as Harvard or Princeton educated even in stories where it is not otherwise relevant (such as people taking winemaking seminars in France) which they do not feel a need to do if the person is a graduate of the University of Minnesota. There is also a degree of hype regarding products of these schools that gives them an aura of being almost superhuman in intellect and ability compared to everyone else just as a result of their school connection which is decidedly more pronounced than it was thirty years ago. All of this contributes to anxiety among people who want to be recognized as mentally capable but do not know any surer way than through academic credentialing.

He also states that the middle classes inherit a much higher percentage of their wealth than the mega rich. I am not sure where the cutoff between one class and another is in this instance, but this seems like one of those sleight of hand arguments aimed at people without any grasp of mathematics. There is a lot of ground here on which to shift. Some relevant data here would be actual figures of cash dollars, which are not given. Obviously if a middle class person has no essential wealth from his $50,000 a year income, any inheritance will make up the vast majority of his overall wealth. I do not pretend to know anything about the finances of whenever constitutes the wealthy in this statistic, but it makes it sound as if either no one is passing on these massive fortunes, or they are being passed on to people who are independently even more successful than the original bequeathers, all of which sounds suspicious to me...  

Right wing thinkers really do seem to crave a docile underclass that eagerly and cheerfully works for low pay, with no hope or expectation of that pay ever increasing unless the worker demonstrates such truly superior skill that his employer determines him to merit it, goes devoutly to church, marries in the traditional sense and sets a sober, humble example of behavior for their lower class children, asks for nothing in social services or assistance of any kind, seeks no health care or retirement that is not self-funded, and does not demand schooling for their children at government expense. That kind of society requires the underpinning of a serious and fairly deep cultural structure, which on the whole business is not commited to nor interested in developing or upholding. So that isn't going to happen anytime soon.

I have not even addressed the argument that in global terms the American middle class is the 1% and that their wealth and income, if we want to be truly just, should be cut down and redistributed to people in Indonesia and the like. But after two weeks of trying to write this post I need to end it and move on...

Fish Tank (2010)/Remains of the Day (1993)

Modern Britain has, by reputation, the most depraved white underclass this side of Cherepovets. The data on educational attainment, employment, criminality, and other markers of social well-being indicates that this group has devolved to a far worse condition than their counterparts in America, which would seem to take some doing. Fish Tank is set in this milieu. It is a movie of the probing, grimly realistic, not particularly concerned with being entertaining type that is more common in the U.K. than it is here. One feels that is good work, that it approaches its material in a more original and intelligent way than most writers and directors can muster, and that it confronts sides of life that a mature adult ought to be able to look at unflinchingly and have some knowledge of and ideas about. Whatever humor or joy is in it, or is supposed to be in it, is inaccessible to me, and I was glad enough to move on from it. That said, its director, Andrea Arnold, has a real talent for conceiving plots and for carrying the most potentially unpleasant scenarios much farther than one suspects most mainstream artists and audiences have the nerve to pursue, or stand. One of her short films, called Wasp, that was included in the Criterion DVD, was very good in this nerve-wracking sort of way.

The people in these stories are perhaps a little too authentic--their lives are so hopeless and joyless and artless that there is no ground (or air) on which to feel anything that might draw me to care about them or find them interesting.

As a rule-following middle level person terrified of the consequences of ever stepping out of line with regard to anything, I was struck by how much stress I felt just watching the various criminally negligent behaviors and potentially violent or sexually dangerous situations in which the underclass persons continually found themselves (or brought upon themselves), which was probably greater than what the characters would have felt at the time. In these Andrea Arnold movies a lot of the stress originates from the circumstance that these situations involve children, or teenagers that the respectable classes still consider to be children who require to be protected in matters of sex and violence at the very least, and we see them decidedly not being protected from those things. If you are the sort of person however whose instincts for any rawer and more spontaneous brand of violence and sexuality, assuming you ever had any, never achieved expression in actual life and died stillborn somewhere in your desiccated soul long before you were twenty-five, it is disconcerting to see them alive in other people, even if it is, by the standards you have adopted as sacred, destroying their lives.

I always thought The Remains of the Day was the best of the old Merchant/Ivory movies. I thought that their Forster versions were all right at the time, though Howards End seems either to have dated noticeably or does not hold up well on a second viewing, but that their Henry James adaptations were kind of pointless. I am not an expert on Henry James either, but even after reading and probably not understanding The Golden Bowl, I was pretty sure that whatever they were going for in the movie was not really what the book was about either. This (Remains) is an almost perfect contrast to Andrea Arnold, especially given the English setting of both (Fish Tank was set in Essex, and I believe the house in Remains is supposed to be in Oxfordshire), being highly mannered, even prissy, self-consciously literate and historical and mature and serious. Acting on an impulse, or even being so undisciplined as to allow oneself to have any, is beyond unthinkable. After seeing Fish Tank, this feels like a lightweight production, perhaps because it is, perhaps because it is so doggedly old-fashioned in its artistic values that one feels it cannot possibly be addressing anything important. However I still like it, and I think there is a good deal suggested in it that one can talk about, even if the film itself does not face these matters with a penetration or intensity that would be satisfactory to us.

According to my wife I talk and act just like the Anthony Hopkins character in this movie (the talking with a Mid-Atlantic accent), which I don't think is meant to be a compliment, though at least the guy is about as good as he can be at his job, and he has a well-developed sense, albeit an extremely narrow and limited one, of who he is. I suppose one of the questions suggested by the movie is whether it is better that people like Stevens, and myself, should be exposed to a slightly more expansive view and understanding of the world, and live as confused, undefined men, or be narrowly brought up to do particular tasks, for which they are supremely fitted, extremely well, but be at the same time unable to act as free men with political, or even very much moral agency. The movie, not surprisingly, I think would say that Stevens would have definitely benefited from some liberal arts type training in his upbringing, that this would have been good for society and helped to avoid some wrongs, etc. And he does give indication of desiring improvement in his education and speech and level of culture in the movie, though it is clear he does not have much real sense of the best way to go about it.  However that was 20 years ago, when Western affluence vis-a-vis the rest of the world allowed us the luxury--which was never exactly indulged in too excessively even then--of wondering whether the servant class ought to be afforded a greater degree of intellectual development. The trend since then has been so severely in the other direction, to the point that even most people with college degrees do not seem to have any sense of why liberal arts departments even exist in colleges, or ever existed, at least since the invention of science.

Checking Up on my Class Markers

I'm suddenly missing some big ones.

My passport expired last summer, so I now make part of that oft-cited figure--is it 70%?--of Americans, most of whom are presumed to be benighted, who don't have one. Sadly, I probably won't be getting another one any time soon either--certainly I won't need to--unless something spurs me with great force to desire to go to Canada again, as I think you need one even for there now.

I also don't have a master's degree, which I did not think of as a socially crippling lack formerly, but it seems in the past few years, especially since women have started getting the sizable majority of them, to be the new cutoff in some quarters for qualifying as officially educated. Real men don't care about this, but lacking a high degree of authentic competence, as well as basic horse sense, I have a pathological need to retain some means by which to plausibly deceive myself that I can claim to other contemporary people to be an educated person, or at least comparable in mental development to what they are themselves. It is doubtful that my projected M.A. in theology or whatever will make much of a difference in how I present myself socially, but by not having one I am almost making it too easy for people to dismiss me out of hand.

I went to my local Borders the other day, which is already in full-fledged shutdown mode--they have already taken out all the chairs. While I haven't spent as much time in bookstores in the last couple of years because seeing all the books that had made it successfully to publication was depressing to me, it never impressed itself upon me that they would literally begin disappearing. Librairies doubtless will be next to go--I think half the people running for my local city council in the next election are doing so just so they can close the library down. A lot of people want to put college online too and turn the current campuses, or least the non-STEM portions of them, into tract housing or something. When I was young of course these places were inspiring to me--wrongfully so, apparently, though in my defense children generally are still not allowed to hang out in and poke around insurance offices or medical research labs or other places serving useful purposes--and these are very sad changes and passings for people like me (I seem to be too old to be able to imbibe from the computer screen the physical and aesthetic atmosphere and more appealing conception of life that the presence of actual books, pictures, oak reading tables, etc, suggests, and while it doubtless sounds ridiculous to someone who did not pass many significant hours in one's early life in such places, I do experience many aspects of the new age as a loss which I won't be able to wholly recover with the new and improved methods). I do enjoy tormenting myself by reading the myriad commentators who find these developments cause for celebration, directing laughter and a surprising amount of contempt at English majors and other sensitive idiots whose cherished and already irrelevant world continues to collapse around them. I can sort of grasp the hardcore technophilia, and the exhiliration of feeling one is fully on board with the creative destruction ushering in a new cultural paradigm and all that. The total disdain for the era that is passing away does always catch me off guard. I don't get that.

As I had another weekend of staying behind to work whilst the family was away I tried going out to dinner again. This place was not as bad as the Olive Garden though the dining room was full and I had to sit at the bar, which I would have preferred not to do. There were a pair of distracting TVs on--in my inexorable march to unmitigated crankiness, I find I increasingly dislike televisions on when I am eating in a restaurant, which formerly did not bother me, and which indeed I often enjoyed, especially when in a foreign country--one of which had on COPS, which really puts one in a great frame of mind for enjoying one's dinner, and the other was showing a competition from the "X Games" in which a bunch of guys oozing some kind of I'm-better-than-you attitude whom I still have no real desire to be like other than that they get to sleep with tons of the kinds of girls I would have wanted for myself were doing some skateboarding thing on a U-shaped wooden track kind of structure. Shaun White, the multiple Olympic snowboarding gold medalist, was one of the competitors in this event, though I did not notice where he finished. This guy seems to get a lot of publicity, and I don't really see why. Is he genuinely popular among any segment of the public? I have seen that he also has a clothing line with an alternative sportswear type theme at Target. There isn't a lot in his presentation that I can see would be appealing at all. He is the dominant figure in his sport, but what kind of a sport even is it? I did watch his turn at skateboarding expecting to see clear evidence of unique athletic abilities, but nothing jumped out at me. It does seem to be true in general in the winter sports, especially those contested on mountains, that the most skilled practitioners are the kingpins (and sometimes queenpins) of a fairly vibrant social scene, with groupies and disciples and the rest of it. This is not the case in every Olympic type sport. Top runners are greatly respected by other runners, but as compared to skiers their lives seem rather boring. They neither rule over a desirable party scene nor exude much sexual charisma. But does Shaun White exude sexual charisma, or any other kind? He probably does, but it's so original I can't even see it.

The main thrust of this post was going to be a short discursion on the subject of immigration, but there really is no short discursion on that subject. Politically I have the problem that I can rarely refute the arguments of either of the more extreme positions, so I end up having to stake the moderate ground where you mainly hear the furious demands coming from both sides simultaneously that you grow a pair and declare for one side of the confrontation or the other. None of this namby-pamby I-can't-make-up-my-mind-stuff. So my article, at least for now, was not going to be intentionally inflammatory, and indeed likely would not have had anything in it that hasn't been written a million times. It would mainly have served the purpose of adding support to a few particular positions which already exist, and which strike me as reasonable enough, and not callously offensive. Questions such as What is the plan in instances when say, several thousand Somalian refugees begin turning up in places like Lewiston and Portland Maine? Should there be a plan? Why are the perfectly legitimate and natural concerns of the native population regarding quite drastic demographic changes as well as strains on existing institutions not treated seriously, and indeed with contempt, by so many of their fellow citizens, including most of those in positions of influence? What is the source of the ideological refusal to even address these concerns as adults and equal partners in the future of the country. Why has the leadership of the country seemingly given up on developing intellectual talent and other desirable qualities for a vital civic life in the native population? or, Why has the human capital and spirit of the native population collapsed so spectacularly that the top people increasingly prefer to deal with any other people but them? (For me a lot of the emotion on this subject is the sense of shame and rejection by the elders and leading people of my own country and seeing them extol foreigners as preferable and better than I am. I can't claim that I didn't deserve this rejection, I guess, but it still hurts).

All of this would have taken a long time to write.

Shelley--"Ozymandias" (1818)

A few years back--maybe even 10 by now--I went through a phase of trying to memorize various poems, memorizing poetry being one of those myriad skills--none of which I ever seem to have--that it is continually insisted one must be able to do if he has any hoping of possessing a first rate mind. As I still considered myself a literary person at that time, it especially galled me that the mere neglect of poetry memorization--which could not possibly be that hard, I thought--was giving my rivals and enemies such easy grounds on which to be dismissive of me. As I often do when starting from pretty much nothing, I determined not just to memorize a few poems but to render myself invulnerable to any suggestion from anybody that I somehow had not learned enough. This meant ultimately the bulk of Shakespeare and Milton, and I even entertained the thought of storing away a sizable amount of Spenser just to make sure there would be no level of literary discourse from which I could be excluded. I did start small however, and within a couple of months I could pretty fairly recite "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Spring and Fall: to a Young Child", the first part of "Dover Beach", "Jerusalem", "La Ballade des Dames de Temps Jadis" in French (believe it or not, this was actually the easiest one to get), "We Real Cool", and, of course, "Ozymandias". Though other than 'Jerusalem', 'La Ballade' and 'We Real Cool', the recall was never completely perfect or smooth, and the upkeep in the memory even of seven short poems I was already finding difficult. I had not even gotten to my intermediate steps, in which I intended to achieve mastery over several dozen Elizabeth sonnets and odes as well as delve into numerous longer passages from the likes of Longfellow and Tennyson. As always happens, once I began to see how truly daunting the task was that I had set for myself, and to perceive the unlikelihood of attaining it in any form in the desired grand and timely manner, I quickly abandoned the hopeless pursuit, and except for a few snatches of verse which settle especially into the mind, allowed even the few poems I had secured so tenuously to fall away again.



Ozymandias, as doubtless everyone knows, is the Greek name for the legendary pharaoh Ramses II, who was the Louis XIV of the 1200s B.C., only probably more so. The beginning of the famous inscription on the ruins of the colossal statue of this king as reported by Diodorus Siculus, by then already 1,300 years old--"Basileus Basileown, Ozumandyus eimi (I am Ozymandias, king of kings)" is one of the very few Greek quotations I have ready to whip out in good company should I ever have occasion to do so, though I probably never will, as my wife has begged me to resist any temptation I might have to do this. The poem, a rumination on the fleetingness and insubstantiality of human existence even in its most powerful and significant manifestations, is one of Shelley's most celebrated, and of all his poems perhaps the one that has the most resonance with contemporary readers. I used to think there was also intermingled an air of romantic lament with regard to the puniness of modern man's capacity for self-generated and self-contained personal grandeur on the level of the supermen of the past, and there may well have been, this being a poem written by a 25 year-old, and that is how 25 year-olds think, though right now, today, I would be hard put to make the case that there were anything of real wisdom or truth in the idea.

The poem I guess is in the form of a sonnet though the rhyme scheme is a little unusual and other than between lines 8 and 9 there are no obvious breaks to divide the poem into distinct sections with little subsets of even numbered lines. Well, it is short, so maybe I will do a little line by line commentary pointing out some of the things I like:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--

I believe this is what is known as 'framing' the story. Now you've only got 140 feet to work with in a sonnet, and you've just used 12 of them introducing this other narrator, which does two things that I like, i.e., bringing a sense of movement, conversation, etc, into the poem and also further tightening and concentrating, even just a little, the main object of the piece. "Antique" is just a slightly less commonplace word than all the others here, but is just enough so that it stands out and dictates the sense of the entire introduction:

"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the Desart (sic) ...

Obviously here is the contrast between the image of stone, which usually represents permanence, though here pointedly trunkless, with the desert that clearly represents the temporal nature of all things. These are simple enough little ideas, but to paint the little pictures or the little songs so as to make them memorable and vivid and pleasing at some level to contemplate, that was the task, and that is not so easy to do.

Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

The half-sunkeness of the visage is a concession that its owner, while fading from memory, is not entirely forgotten yet.

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on those lifeless things,

Passions here probably refers to 'traits of character'. Still, it is notable that romantic Shelley emphasizes that the only aspects of this monument 'which yet survive' are the work of the anonymous artist.

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

The closing line of the poem's first part, as well as the only one in the poem whose meaning even at the basic level is somewhat of a challenge to tease out, both of which may indicate that the poet intended the thought presented here to be significant. The hand it is generally agreed refers to the sculptor, and the heart to the pharaoh. To be honest I do not like this line; it is likely that I just am not seeing clearly what it means, but it doesn't seem to me to fit well with the rest of the poem, and what I can make out of it seems redundant to the impression made by the previous four lines while adding nothing to it.






She's cute, huh? I like.

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

For the opening of the second part (the final six lines), as it were, of the poem, you now have the traveller introducing a third "speaker" as it were, the inscription from the remote past, which besides creating a very satisfying sense of symmetry in the body of the poem generally, is also one of those little devices that aids in memorization, for anybody who cares about that sort of thing.

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

The intention of course is ironic. This is an excellent line. Clean, powerful, and laden with double meaning practically on the surface.

Nothing beside remains.

Is this literally true (regarding Egypt and the monuments of Ramses II)? I actually don't think it is, but it probably is not important as far as the meaning of the poem goes, which is only loosely concerned with the reality of any one specific ruin. I also don't think Shelley actually ever went to Egypt, for what that is worth.

Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

The sands of time clearly being evoked again. Excellent image on which to end the poem, again simple, but visceral, because I have no doubt that many people, when contemplating the idea of death or eternity, are not far off in their mental imagery from a kind of endless desert. Many have commented on the coincidence that the 3 great monotheistic religions emerged out of the traditionally rather thinly populated desert regions of the Middle East, which landscape doubtless encourages a sense of the constant presence both of death and the eternal that has been hard for those of us accustomed to well-forested and water-rich countries to tap into.

Two Brief Observations I Omitted From My Tiger Mother Article.

1. I thought the tiger mother's restrictions on being in plays/acting was odd, because unlike apparently a lot of people, I do not see acting, if pursued at a somewhat serious level, as a waste of time or a bad pursuit at all, and would even encourage any of my children if they wanted to pursue it even if it caused them to miss out on medical school or establishing their accounting practice before age 30. First of all, simply from the cultural point of view, the theater almost certainly has a greater tradition in the English-speaking world than any of the other major performing arts. Really, it is an incredible and I would say underutilized source of riches that belongs to us, and I do include Americans in this because--1) our native theater, in the 20th century anyway, was actually pretty good, and 2) the language and performance standards of the classical English theater are not so inaccessible to us that we do not stand to profit much by a little exertion to try to study and attain them. Secondly, almost all of the people I know who have done some pretty serious acting have excellent personality/social skills relative to the general population. Of course there is a marked tendency among some of these people towards self-absorption, being intolerant of boredom even for a couple of seconds, etc, but as someone whose life has been largely crimped by the inability to speak to other people or present myself publicly in a lively and engaging way, these traits are very attractive when one sees them in others, and to me they would even compensate somewhat for having to live in comparative material penury in our barbaric society.

Thirdly, serious/professional serious theater people have often memorized huge amounts of Shakespeare, as well as translated Greek tragedies and other plays, which is supposed to be such a beneficial accomplishment for the mind.

2. To all the people who say American parents aren't competitive enough, are too soft to push their kids and teach them to win like the Indians and Chinese, hey, whenever my children are about to play a game, enter a spelling bee, whatever, I try to tell them that I don't just want to see a victory, I want to see the opponent children psychologically crippled for life, etc, but my wife makes me stop and I cannot seem to steamroll her and get my messages across on the importance of developing the habit and expectation of winning and destroying any rival who presents himself in your path. So while you can blame me for being too weak-willed to win the game, you can't blame me for not understanding the game.

Education as Social Darwinian Death Match?

I was going to offer some commentary on the recent brouhaha over the Tiger Mother and her unimpressed evaluation of what passes for child rearing among Americans more than a generation or two removed from their immigrant roots, but, as if to further hammer home the point, this has proven a task that at this point may be too overwhelming for me to carry out, at least in the space of a week. So my comments are going to appear in much truncated form.

My intention, like that of probably most people who felt compelled to weigh in on the topic, was a weak attempt to justify--mainly to myself--my own comparatively lackluster approach not only to my own life, but to those of my numerous children as well. The young ones may yet develop in such a way as to justify themselves, but it is likely that any credit I might claim for such a happy event would be purely incidental, and certainly I have no conception, not having been able to do so for myself, of being able to will the children to great heights of tangible accomplishment, the understanding of how to do which is but another of the many built-in advantages our various overclasses now have over the perpetually confused and disorganized legions of the population.

Before I had children, I had actually envisioned subjecting them to a similar program of my own of deep learning, high culture, etc, though without quite the same take-no-prisoners spirit as the tiger mother. Didn't there used to be an ethos, or at least a faction, in intellectual culture which held that constant emphasis on economic competition was in fact mentally, not to mention spiritually, enervating, and that one of the purposes of education was actually to provide the mind with an alternative and defense against a purely materialistic understanding of the world? Obviously whatever interpretation I made out on these lines was hopelessly simplistic and naive. Nobody in the upper reaches of this scoiety has been promoting this kind of worldview, successfully anyway, for thirty years. But getting back to my program of instruction: my models for the kind of intelligence and conception of the world I thought I would like my children to have were still primarily English, especially the 18th century humanists, with flourishes of the energy of the Victorians and the wit and artistic sensibility of the 1920s Evelyn Waugh crowd, some of the rigor and penetration of the Germans, the eye for the telling detail and sense of exquisite as well as precise thought of the French and Russians, and the sense of self-possession and confidence of the humbly-born but irrepressible old Americans, people like Franklin, Lincoln, Mark Twain and so on. These were just notable models, not specific goals; the idea was not really to take the most prestigious institutions and professions of the present moment by storm but to have a mind that is neither complacent nor thrown into a flutter by every unforeseen question or challenge that presents itself. One hopes this kind of training would help promote economic and formal academic success, or at least render one capable of achieving these if he desires, but I could not bring myself to set out with that as the main end in view. I am still held back by a sense that there is something base in it, which is really a very foolish way to go about it, since, at least if you have any ambition, determination, capacity, etc, it is the expected and approved attitude, while my attitude suggests nothing but evidence of personal failure and a lack of the qualities necessary to compete in and master the conditions of life. Whatever elevating effect the mental strength and culture of the current best and brightest men is having on our society and its institutions as a whole, is somehow not speaking to me, who should be receptive to it more than most individuals.

Anyway I have not, of course, as yet followed through on more than a few token gestures of my own intended program. And why not? Well, first of all it was never more than a vague conception of some things I wanted to do, which I saw myself introducing naturally into the routine of life at such time as it would be apparent to me that the children were ready. Life does not really work that way unless you have extreme control over the various circumstances of it that play on you, however, which I do not. Secondly, a good number of these areas of study, such as classical languages, math and science at a level approaching seriousness, and the tiger mother's own pet discipline, classical music, I had intended, even if an advanced state of mastery of them was impossible, to attain a passable knowledge of certainly by the time I was thirty, which I failed to do. I suppose I could still reasonably be of some help to an intelligent child in a few areas, French grammar and reading comprehension, introductory poetry, literature, and history, and the rudiments of logic, rhetoric and other properties of formal philosophy, and probably some outline versions of these subjects will be introduced into the general family discussion in time. However, even from this shaky level, my mind suddenly and severely imploded right around the time the children were born--the children, the internet and the ascendance of George Bush and his friends all occurred around the same time and I suspect all three factors contributed to this crisis--and ever since I have barely been able to maintain even a loose control and direction over the day-to-day workings of my life, especially because this dimunition of capacity coincided with a precipitous drop in my level of mental energy, which was also not phenomenally high to begin with. So while we may make some forays into the wider world of humanistic learning, it does not at this time anyway form the solid core of how we understand and approach the world, which would be the main object in undertaking such a program of study.



The main problem with me, and I assume my children, in forging ahead in the world--I do not use the world compete, not because I do not understand that American life at least is competition, but because I truly think it is not useful to approach education in this mindset until one starts reaching extremely high levels in one's fields of study. People seem to perceive that there are fewer worldly prizes to be attained by traditional education, and that if they fail to gain any of these prizes, or such ones as they want, anyway, then their particular education, or that of anyone who failed to gain the prizes, or has not been able to produce new prizes either for himself or others, has no value or meaning. In any case I believe the entwinement in the majority of the public mind of economic competitiveness as the primary concern of schooling is unfortunate. But as I was saying, what I perceive to have been my own great problem in developing, and what I hope to correct in the children, was my poor work ethic, which even more than superior innate intelligence is the great advantage most people have over me and perhaps my children. We are all fairly well set up to thrive in the world if the conditions of 1950 still prevailed, but in 2010 and especially looking ahead to the 2020s and 30s, evidently not so much. I also believe I was hampered by a weak background in some important academic subjects as well as some significant, though I believe avoidable, personality/character issues. The personality issues I have tried to address by having more children so they will all be used to being around and dealing with other people their own age, providing greater stability and overall educational support in the family, giving them a mother and generally surrounding them with people who have more energy, optimism, well-developed intelligence, etc, than I was under the cloud of as a child. This is actually a lot, and it should make a big difference, though I suppose I could still get divorced. I am also confident that even if they are not to have the full John Stuart Mill/Wittgenstein treatment from age 3 onwards, that I can help point out the gaps in their learning, keep abreast of useful opportunities to gain exposure to smart people, social polish and so on, better than my parents did. But inculcating the kind of work habits you seem to need today to indicate to people that you are worthy of their respect/patronage I do not know how to do. I read and write a lot, it is true, and from about the age 14 to 30 I found these to be generally improving habits in myself, though obviously it did not raise me to any very high level vis-a-vis other people, and since I reached 30 while I am still occasionally able to find pleasure in these activities, the sense of any kind of forward transformation of my intelligence or character has largely ceased. In other words, while I can provide an example of a fair amount of activity, in me it is not especially productive activity that ever leads anywhere, which is not, I don't think, the way that successful people work.

Of course the largely unspoken crisis of confidence in the gentile white middle class, exacerbated by the unstable economic situation, are the increasing signs that its children on the whole may not just lack the work ethic but the innate intelligence to compete with the most talented of the Asian ethnic groups as well as Jews. It is not a secret that the top universities and professional schools are already around 40% Jewish and Asian, and would be more so, probably much more so, if these schools were to select their students purely on test scores and grades. The political implications of this are pretty staggering, and indeed the effects are already being seen, as the populist white right desperately seeks an alternative source of political and economic power outside the current structures that they increasingly have no prayer of dominating. Many of these same people, burdened with debt and disappointed in their own outcomes and places in society, and deeply confused about their function in the same, have begun to sour on traditional college and the whole system of expensive credentialing and are groping around for which direction to go in. It is very difficult to convince most people that they are not as intelligent, do not have as much potential, etc, as they think they are/do; and contrary to popular belief, the middle class is actually told this by conventional wisdom, economists, college professors and so forth, all the time. The schools are atrocious, your kids are not special, don't get your hopes up (because we all know, if you aren't special anymore, there probably is nothing to hope for) we need to import talent from foreign countries to keep the economy running because there isn't enough in the native population, and all the rest of it. It is very hard to accept it even when the evidence that it is true is overwhelming, because other virtues, apart from physical beauty, do not generate much respect/status in current society, in large part because they too are seen as undeveloped compared to what they were formerly/ought to be.

All right, it has been a week. I have to end this post. I have believe the current conditions which are so terrifying to parents--shortages of jobs/income opportunities, college & housing costs, the outrageous debt system--will be overhauled within the next 15 years, as the baby boomer elect's death grip on society finally starts to slack. My own generation is largely hopeless--I don't think they are actually evil, but they do strike me as rather mean-spirited and very stupid--but the people ten and more years younger than us will be hitting their 30s and 40s exhausted, stifled, having lived most of their lives in precarious and what they will more easily perceive to be unfair (people my age have I feel largely internalized the Republican propaganda that has been drilled into us for thirty years, that taxes, government intervention, high wages, health care benefits, etc are unreasonable demands to make on productive, i.e., rich people) economic conditions. They will address income disparities. They will address the inflated costs (relative to median income) of basic needs in a strong modern society, whatever form it is going to take--housing, medical care, education for such people as will benefit/are needed by society to benefit by it, and strengthen the institutions, public and private, which support these goods. Even if there is to be a downscaling of economic life, as some predict, I do not see why it must necessarily fall brutally and with no societal organization/support on the mass of the population while a sliver of the upper crust maintains all of their privileges. This may well be the result but I don't see it as inevitable.

All right, I have to stop now.

On Competitive Families

The other day I was reading something about Rahm Emmanuel--not much; he sounds like a pretty big-time jerk, and seeing as I may already be in the homestretch of life and do not figure to be improved much further by reading about people whose dominant quality appears to be that they are jerks, I try to make it a point not to waste too much times on such pieces. Still, my attention was grabbed by the information that he is a product of a high-achieving family--doctor father, civil rights activist mother, one brother who is a molecular biologist or something like that, another who is a millionaire Hollywood agent--that emphasized competition and the idea that the purpose of life is not some fuzzy, weak pursuit of love or happiness or being nice, but to accomplish things far beyond the reach or ambition of ordinary men. Many prominent people are reported to have grown up in this kind of household: the Kennedys, Hillary Clinton (though in her case the exacting standards apparently only applied to her), the founder of the Papa John's Pizza chain. In such families the sons are expected at a minimum to maintain straight A's, win at sports, date the prettiest girls (with the Kennedys, "date" was replaced by a more explicit verb), and to always assume the leadership role over other boys in every situation. I used to wonder what would happen if a person like me who might be truly incapable of winning at sports or dating the prettiest girls should be born into such a family; would I have been disowned or banished, my name never to be spoken of again? But then I supposed that perhaps if I had been born and lived always among people who simply knew how to win and get what they wanted nearly all the time, and assumed these things their birthright, such triumphs would have seemed much more readily within my grasp. Also if it had appeared I might have issues with social awkwardness I might have been set up by my socially confident and important parents on things like tennis dates or been secured invitations to small tea parties where one or two appropriate young ladies would have the charge of entertaining me for the afternoon. The singer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers's father supposedly began providing him with girls and drugs when he was 12 or 13, and whatever one thinks of this method, it was certainly not long before the son was able to procure both of those things by himself without any problem.

In any event there is no doubt that the attitude of the parent plays a great part in creating favorable conditions for relishing competition as well as succeeding in it. There is also no doubt that it helps if the parents themselves have been in the long habit of succeeding and dominating the vast majority of their own peers in competitive endeavors, both to set an example for the children and for their practical knowledge of how to win at such levels where winning really means something. I am not completely sold on this approach to child-rearing as the optimal one, in any case; however, I also have three sons myself, and without some degree of aggressiveness one gets into a habit of losing and conceding to the more forceful boys everything you will one day want to have back--girls, games, jobs, leadership position, fields of study--before you really realize you have done so, and which once you have done so it is very hard to take back again without having to overcome--in effect kill--most of your real personality, which is on the surface no great loss, perhaps, but the effect on meeting people who have done something like this is very strange and unsettling. My wife, whose outlook on life is that of a popular heroine from a story out of pre-1945 America, believes that things like stability, a consistent quality and richness of minute by minute daily experience, competency in a variety of traditional skills and activities, examples of industry and virtue, even if humble, etc, will make one strong enough to contend on equal terms against people who have been driven and groomed to succeed more purely in the popular attitudes of the 2000s. I would certainly like to believe that this is true; I think in rare cases something of the sort can occur, and it is certainly an encouragement to go on in life when one comes across such a person who has attained excellent and beautiful human qualities through forces and practices and habits that seem accessible to one's self and one's own offspring. Can it realistically be said that this was ever the way of the world though?

Doctor Dream
It is pretty standardly accepted that there is nothing more boring than reading or being told about someone else's dreams, but I had one the other day that was so ridiculous and illustrative of the petty nature of my true mind that I thought I had better write it down. I have noted before that on occasion I have some doubts as to whether I ought not to have been a doctor, though this would have required adopting a completely different mindset and mode of life years before even going to college, though I actually care nothing about people's health, though I find the entire subject of sickness and disease singularly uninteresting whenever it comes up (indeed even with the most boring people, unless some monstrous growth has broken out on their face, their illnesses are still more boring than anything else about them), and though I hardly would want to wake up and perform the actual tasks and duties of being a doctor every day. What I want of course when I have such thoughts is to be in the position to make people feel they have to watch their behavior and words around me, to consider that I am every bit the serious adult that they are and indeed probably much more so, to make them feel that they and their children will never be able to overcome me and my children either intellectually or in any other competitive arena--in short, to be able to make other people feel as inadequate and bad about themselves as I have generally always felt around substantial people. This is an awful spirit in which to think about anything, and I usually beat it down within a few minutes and try to turn my attention to some improving and more uplifting subject; but still it is there and obviously it floated somewhat to the surface in this dream.

In the dream I was, although I am now 38 years old, in the science classroom of some high school--it had sinks and bunsen burners and glass cabinets and all that sort of thing--taking my medical school examination. I found I was quite giddy to be doing so, all my fellow test-takers (we were all wearing white doctor coats) being obviously intelligent and capable people, and indeed, at my table were two men I had gone to college with, neither of whom to my knowledge became physicians, though either certainly could have, and both would, if they had, probably been as trusted and beloved by their patients, nurses and community as Dr Kildare or any of the other superdoctors of 1960s TV. The questions on the test were not in the least difficult--indeed they were trivia questions--however the test came in a little metal sliding-box in which the letters of the alphabet were all jumbled and one had a pair of tweezers with which to rearrange them quickly to make the right answer, sort of like the game Operation. This is the extent of detail that my mind is apparently capable of conceiving where the study of medicine is concerned.