Dr. Metablog

Undergraduate Squalor

An "orphan precinct" is one that lacks a regular committee and chair. We have one nearby, and I've been recruited to walk the neighborhood and deliver GOTV flyers to registered Dems. I'm natively shy and I hate knocking on doors, but there are votes to be had and lordy-mercy don't we need every single one. The neighborhood in question is near to the university, high-density, undergraduates mostly -- 98% of the people on my lists are under 25 years old. But the squalor! Here are these beautiful old 1910s and 1920s arts and crafts bungalows, or the remnants of them, and they've been allowed to go to seed, or way past seed -- bricks unpointed, wood unpainted, porches sagging, screen doors ripped and hanging off.  And then the beer cans, the cigarette butts, the newspapers that have been decaying in their plastic sleeves for half a year. Garbage strewn everywhere, foul odors. It's disgusting, an affront to the decent citizenry. Who are these children?  How can they live in such cisterns of filth?

I was working myself up into quite a fit until I started to think about the conditions in which I lived when I was in college, back there in the just-barely-post-diluvian 1950s. I didn't drink alcohol, even then, or smoke cigarettes, but I lived amongst as much dirt and disorder as any modern undergraduate could manage. When I concentrate my mind, I remember the floor of my room littered with every garment I possessed. Every sock and every shirt grey with dirt, sweat, food droppings. I remember an ancient tattered rug that was not swept or vacuumed a single time in two consecutive semesters. I remember a bathtub that was so foul that it was shunned by the roaches. And am I right (my apartment mate Otis J. Brown might be able to confirm this) that we found two hundred empty Coke bottles strewn around Terry Cannon's room after he had cleaned up and moved out. And also that our back stairs were littered with a thousand dog droppings, around which we maneuvered in and out, not thinking that such pollution was a circumstance that we might think to remedy.

Is it possible that these degenerate kids are no filthier than their venerable grandfathers? Gives one pause. Well, who cares, really, just so long as they get their pathetic drunken butts in gear and vote for Obama.

Incidentally, for anyone who cares: I'm now compulsively neat and cleanly.

Reading Trollope

I would have thought that there wasn't a novel by Anthony Trollope that I hadn't read, but browsing the library shelves, I found one that was unfamiliar to me.  It's a short, late novel called An Eye for an Eye. It dates from 1878 (Trollope, born in 1815, died in 1882. 

Trollope wrote forty-seven fluent novels and thoroughly mastered his craft. An Eye for an Eye reprises familiar motifs, most notably Trollope's favorite situation of the weak hero torn between private and public callings. Shall it be love, this time, or shall it be duty? In this particular case, the hero is young, uncommonly simple Fred Neville, who promises himself to the Irish beauty Kate O'Hara but also agrees that he will never dishonor the Scroope name (he's the heir to the Earl of Scroope) by marrying beneath his station. It's a typical Trollope situation but daring for its time, because Fred impregnates Kate (when?  between chapters?Although I thought I was reading attentively, I missed the moment). 

Trollope creates an awkward situation, but I'm sorry to say, gets himself and Fred off the hook by throwing one of the major characters under the metaphorical bus, so to speak. I don't like it when novelists sidestep the dilemmas that they create. Trollope clearly admires the aristocratic Scroopes, but either volitionally or unconsciously (it's hard to say which) manages to persuade his readers that they're better off giving the upper classes a wide berth.   

Trollope was not a learned or innovative thinker, like his greater contemporary George Eliot, but in his later novels he pushed, a little, against Victorian prudery.  His last novel, Dr. Wortle's School, which I've recently re-read, deals with the potentially shocking question of bigamy. 

I often wonder why I'm such a Trollope fan. There's so much about him to dislike: his crude anti-feminism, his condescension to people of other colors and to non-English nations, his obsessions with class and cash, his disgust with Jews, his ridiculous worship of horses and hunting, etc. And yet, he tells a great story, he loves his characters, and his dialogue is always bright and witty.  

Although he is not an author who transcends time and place, Trollope is still the best writer to investigate of you want to learn about both the strengths and the weaknesses of nineteenth-century England. 

The Libertarian Universe

Out here in the west, social services are administered by the county commissioners.  At a candidate forum last night, libertarians running for commissioner opposed a .05% (i.e. a penny on a $20 purchase) extension of a sales tax that would go to support battered women, the alcohol recovery facility, mental health, walk-in clinics for the poor, etc.   The libertarian argument: "charity" should be voluntary.  When the government collects taxes, it will be elected officials not "the people" who decide which "charity" to support.

It's a truly grotesque argument.  Of course elected officials (democratically-elected officials) decide.  Its their job;  we've delegated it to them.  We elect officials to to decide how to spend all public revenue.  What exactly is the problem?

Moreover, I know of not a single instance in which a complex society such as ours has been able to support the less able and less fortunate with strictly private charity.  It hasn't happened and it's certainly not going to happen soon. 

Is private giving morally superior to public intervention, as the libertarians assert?  I don't know that it is.  Most of us express our commitment to the general welfare by paying our share of the burden. 

I can only conclude that the libertarians, at least the ones that I heard last night, live in an alternative and wholly theoretical universe.  They're in thrall to a foolish and impractical ideology -- one that renders their actions unintentionally hard-hearted and cruel. 

And what makes them so damn angry, intolerant and insulting?

Non-Existent Republican Friends

Although I'm not a particularly sociable individual, I have friends all over the U.S and a few in other parts of the planet.  I have friends of various interests and complexions and ethnicities and ages and of both (or all) the genders.  Although religion is said to be great divider, and I'm not in any sense a believer, I have maintained rewarding and intimate relationships with people who are regular churchgoers -- even with some who are devout beyond ordinary devotion.  But there's one class of people with whom I share no friendships -- I have not a single friend who is a Republican.   

I don't that think it's merely a question of opportunity or proximity.  I think that there are such fundamental differences between the way Republicans and Democrats see the world that it's nearly impossible to create a basis for friendship between the two groups.  A while back, we traveled to Bulgaria.  There were some thirty people in the group, who, within a day or two, had sorted themselves into two distinct clans. In the bus: Repubs together, Dems together.  In the restaurants, same thing.  Walking, talking, visiting the museums and archaeological sites -- the same.  It was a clear case of mutual affinity and mutual repulsion.

There were no overt political discussions, no debates on the issues. What, then, were the cues to which we (and everyone else) responded?   

At heart, I think, It's the difference between those who see the world as necessarily competitive and those who think that it can be cooperative.  The crucial sign is the way that people think of money and taxes.  As soon as someone started to talk about his money, I became wary.  When the same person complained about his taxes, I knew that he was never going to be my friend.   

A Republican responds positively to a candidate who announces that he's going to let people "keep more of their own money in their own pockets."   The phrase "your own money" gives me the willies.  I don't think that anyone makes money on his own -- he makes it because there's an enormous public investment over many hundreds of years that has created  the opportunity to "make money."  Our taxes have supported this titanic effort.  I think that the  standard of living of many Americans -- certainly of those who can afford to travel to Bulgaria -- is high enough that they can think about improving the living standard of others,  and stop thinking first of their own pockets.  People who have enough and yet continue to prioritize their pockets are simply selfish. 

It's the difference between a Hobbesian universe -- a war of all against all -- and a universe in which competition is no more real than altruism.   Republican electioneering is designed to appeal to the worser side of human nature, not the better, the more community-minded side.

Hobbes believed that men were so depraved and competitive that they required authoritarian government to keep them in check.  Is that why Republicans are so tolerant of government intrusion into their personal lives?  And why they profess liberty but continue to fall in love with simplistic heavy-handed nationalists?   

In Bruges/ Don't Look Now

We enjoyed In Bruges for its black humor, its witty profanity, and the unpredictability of its plot (that is, until the mandatory chase scene).  And especially for the lovely views of medieval Bruges, an old Hanseatic town.

In Bruges contains a film-within-a-film which is described by Chloe, the handsome drug dealer and thief, as an imitation or a homage or a 'nod of the head' toward Don't Look Now, Nicholas Roeg's scary-as-hell Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland masterpiece.  I've been racking my poor brains, trying to decide whether there's a meaningful connection between the two films -- or whether the writer-director Martin McDonagh is just planting red herrings.

Bruges and Venice (where the earlier film is set) are old, architecturally rich, becanalled towns and both directors make much of their warm civic atmosphere.  The plots of both films are initiated by the deaths of young children.  In each film, an important character is a dwarf who is, one case, the perpetrator of violence and in the other its victim.  That's all that I can come up with at the moment, so I'm leaning to the red-herring theory. But I'd be interested in other people's views.

Lessons from R. B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes, whose biography (by Hans J. Trefousse) I have just read, was a an intelligent, well-meaning, but not very imaginative president.  It's a blemish on his record that he compromised his principles and allowed ex-Confederate leaders in the southern states to install Jim Crow policies that would take a hundred years to undo.  He should have fought much harder. 

Hayes' most famous sentence dates from his 1877 inaugural address: "He serves his party best who serves his country best."  It's an admirable principle -- and one that that has been thoroughly violated by Mr. Bush and the pack of clowns and schmegeggies that he has installed to ruin our government.

After Hayes left office, he wandered to the political left.  Although as president he had intervened to crush the railroad strikes, he later came to believe (according to Trefousse) that "the taxation system was unfair, taking a much smaller share of the estates of millionaires than of ordinary people." "The real difficulty," Hayes wrote, "is that vast wealth and power reside in the hands of the few and unscrupulous.  Hundreds of laws are in the interest of these men and against the interest of the workingmen.  Lincoln was for government of the people.  The new tendency is for government 'of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.'" 

These are words of remarkable pertinence.  It woult appear that we haven't moved very far from the mark -- the more shame to us.  If Hayes had said these same words today, he would not doubt have been accused of fomenting "class warfare."  (Class warfare: redistributing money from rich to poor.  Normal state of affair (not class warfare):  taking money from the poor to give to the rich.)