Author Archives: Countrylawyer

The Blame Game

Posted on by

The other day I was chatting with someone (yes; people do occasionally talk to me).  My interlocutor was describing a video, or newsclip, or some representation seen of the private-sector computer geeks who were called in to fix the Healthcare.gov website.  You know, the website that, four years after its authorizing statute was passed, and after a $600+ million contract (to a Canadian company that had already been fired for incompetence in similar capacity for I think it was Ontario) still couldn’t do what it was intended to do.  Apparently one of the persons in the video expressed the thought to those assembled that “we’re not here to blame; we’re here to fix.”

The statement to me was that this was such a wonderful approach and one worthy of emulation across human existence because “blaming” someone else is to “absolve” oneself from the “responsibility for fixing it.” 

With reference to the superficial aspect of the computer geek quoted by the person I was chatting with, I’ll observe:  Congratulations.  You have a keen grasp of the obvious. 

But that’s not my point.  My point begins with the observation that my opposite number in this little chat has over the past years let pass almost zero opportunities (on the contrary, has strained mightily to invent them) to blame (i) Geo. W. Bush; (ii) Republicans in any office; (iii) anyone harboring any sympathy at any level to the Tea Party organizations; and, (iv) pretty much every breathing human who is not affiliated with sundry far-left — way far-left — political organizations for everything from unusually warm/cold weather to fluctuations in the business cycle to the Iranians wanting to nuke Israel to Israel announcing they weren’t going to stand for it to . . . well, you get the point.  In short, assignment of responsibility, by which I mean the attribution of a position in which the person to whom attributed could either have helped or hindered the observable consequence in issue, is made without any intelligently articulable basis, and on the basis of political affiliation.  The Koch brothers, who buy, sell, and refine petroleum, are eeeeeeevvilllll, because racism.  And shut up.  Besides, diversity.  George Soros, a major stakeholder in a Petrobras deep-water oil field, is a saint incarnate.  Even more to the point, the person with whom I was chatting has no more understanding of the internet, or computers, than the family dog.  I say that with complete sincerity; I know this person and I know their family dog.  Daylight does not show between them on this subject.

All of which is an insufferably long way of saying that my interlocutor had no meaningful basis on which to evaluate the statement so praised.

I pointed out that the mere act of identifying What Went Wrong necessarily implies a determination of in whose hands thing went wrong.  Events, especially events such as these, simply do not happen in a vacuum.  Building a website is not an organic process where one puts into operation processes the outcomes of which play themselves out independently of human intervention.  You might not “blame” someone for a crop failure (I lied: you can jolly well blame Geo. W. Bush and the Republicans) because there are multiple factors that go into making a crop which operate and interact with each other and which are entirely beyond the ability of any person (other than Geo. W. Bush and the Koch brothers) to control, or even influence.  The Healthcare.gov website fiasco was a series of conscious, affirmative decisions each last one of which had to be made by a specific human or group of humans.  So the ACA’s website failure was wholly unlike a crop failure caused by drought.  “The crop failed because it didn’t rain enough.”  “Who decided how much it would rain?”  To say that Healthcare.gov crashed because it was, for example, incapable of handling the ordinary traffic it needed to necessary implies the question, “How was it determined how much traffic it had to handle?” (you’ve got to answer that question because you don’t want to follow the same decisional rules and replicate your problem: garbage in, garbage out).  And asking how that determination was made cannot be answered without finding out who made the decision, and how.

But I was wrong, you see:  Even that limited inquiry is to seek to “absolve myself” from “responsibility” for fixing what’s wrong. 

I pointed out that identifying those responsible for a particular mess is important if only for the reason that you do not want to hire them again to create another mess.  This is of course especially true when the pool of vendors to accomplish a particular Task X is minuscule.  Gentle Reader will recall the uproar when Halliburton was awarded a no-bid contract to re-build Iraq.  Well, that was a legitimate concern to express.  The problem of course was that there were and are very few companies out there who have the expertise, the size, and the resources to re-build an entire country and its infrastructure.  And not all of them are American; Halliburton is.  The Canadian company that got the Healtcare.gov contract was awarded it on a no-bid basis.  Of interest in this particular case is that the company in question had already been fired from one huge IT project in Canada (I think it was for the Ontario government, but please don’t quote me on that).

But no:  That, too, was just a smoke-screen to evade “responsibility” for doing something positive.

Had I not run out of time for this little head-exploding conversation (had to leave), I could have pointed out that, when you’ve spent over $600 million on a four-year project that isn’t even close to being functional for any critical task, the people who ponied up that money have a damned good right to know who took them for a ride.  Governments are trustees; what they hold they hold (at least in theory; I know better than to confuse theory with the actual world) not for themselves but for their citizens.  Accordingly all governmental decision makers have an affirmative duty to engage in the exercise of finding out what went wrong, or right, and assigning blame or praise accordingly.

But most of all, without responsibility there can be no accountability.  While we’d all like to assume that government employees and government contractors will always Go The Extra Mile, always give 115%, always ask of themselves what they can do to make themselves better and less burdensome . . . we all know that’s not how human nature is wired.  The depressing truth is that we’re no better than we ought to be, the vast majority of us.  That’s so universally the case that when we meet someone who actually does do all those things or more, we revere him or her and (inwardly, at least) hang our heads in shame. For most of us, the most immediate motivator is a high regard for the consequences that will be visited on us if we fail to perform.  And by “consequences” I don’t mean just financial consequences.  The determination that you will never let yourself be known as a sloppy plumber, or a framer who can’t build a house square, level, and plumb is every bit the moral equivalent of grinding it out so that you don’t get sued or fired.

When you add to ordinary human nature the opacity of modern government work (either within or on a contract basis) you get a brew that is toxic to civic life unless powerful antidotes are prescribed and regularly consumed.  This isn’t, by the way, anything new under the sun.  I like maritime history; I’ve got shelves and shelves, most double-stacked, of books on the subject.  For hundreds of years it was just standard practice to pawn off on the navy short weight of rotten meat, contaminated flour, defective water casks.  Even Admiralty officials made a handsome living stealing timber and cordage, selling them on the black market, and re-supplying with second-hand or cast-off supplies.  Samuel Pepys in the mid-1600s made his bones down at the Admiralty by cracking down on precisely those habits.  Later in the Soviet Union the practice of tukhta (sometimes spelled “tufta”) was such an integral part of Soviet life that Solzhenitsyn described it as one of the pillars on which the entire Gulag existed.  Even later, in MiG Pilot, the story of Viktor Belenko’s Soviet Air Force career and defection to the West, you can find stories about warplanes unable to fly because the ground staff has drained the alcohol from the cooling systems to drink or sell.  Even after the Soviet Union was dead and gone (at least until Smart Diplomacy™ came along to give it another shot), you could stay in a Moscow apartment house where there would be rotting garbage in the stairwells, for days on end.  Adam Hochschild in The Unquiet Ghost describes exactly that experience.

I would — were I to finish my conversation — observe to my interlocutor that Pepys did not make such headway as he did by piously intoning that he wasn’t there to fix blame but rather to see that the Royal Navy got anchor cables that wouldn’t part in a storm.  He made progress by finding the thieves and getting rid of them.  The Soviet Union never did manage to learn to deal with the broad absence of a sense of ownership of one’s responsibilities.  It was the ground crews’ jobs to see that their aircraft could get into the air.  They didn’t, and nothing happened.  It was someone’s job to carry out the garbage in Hochschild’s apartment building.  And he didn’t, and nothing happened to him either.  It was the job of the Gulag administrators to account for — correctly — the cubic meters of timber belled in the taiga, to pour concrete without rubbish contaminating it, to make bricks that would not fall apart in a matter of a few years.  And they didn’t, with the result that within three years of Stalin’s death the system of large-scale slave labor essentially fell to pieces.

In short, failure of accountability has real-world outcomes.  Serious outcomes.  Outcomes that can literally bring down a superpower.  Remember that there was not a single foreign boot on Soviet soil in 1991.  There was not so much as an infantry platoon poised to invade.  Not so much as an unarmed hostile airplane occupied its airspace.  It had legions of well-wishers (including Dear Leader) throughout the world.  And in the absence of all of that it literally shut up shop and went out of business.  Just like that.  I can’t think of a single other instance in all of recorded human history where that’s happened (althogh I suppose you could make something of an argument that Czechoslovakia did the same thing, but that was not a bankrupt state falling apart but rather two pretty distinct ethnic groups mutually deciding they no longer wanted to be lumped in together, as had happened to them after the Great War).

I recently read Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace.  It’s a book-length treatment of the few years before the war.  In fact, the war itself takes up only the epilogue.  MacMillan’s central question is why, when so many crises had come and gone without going over the edge, did things go so badly wrong in summer, 1914.  It’s a good question and one any scientist would ask himself.  If I’ve observed X on Y prior occasions, with a range of outcomes ech time excluding Z, and suddenly I get Z, what was different?  Of the points MacMillan makes, the one that is most pertinent to this post is that the switch-points, the triggers, the places at which those paths that could have lead to peace or war went one way rather than the other, were all specific decisions made by identifiable people.  People who had options, who could have done one thing and determined to do another.  It was a consious decision by a small number of men to accept no resolution with Serbia that did not involve war.  It was Kaiser Wilhelm’s personal statement to Count Hoyos that gave Austria-Hungary the famous “blank check.”  It was Nicholas II’s choice to threaten war on Serbia’s behalf.  It was a long-thought-through feature of the Schlieffen Plan to violate Belgian neutrality for the sake of avoiding the French border fortifications.  It was a bitterly-contested question in the British cabinet and in Parliament whether to deliver that ultimatum to Berlin when Belgium was invaded.  Each and every one of those decision-points has known names associated with it.

Is it irrelevant to call those names?  Was it irrelevant to do so in 1919?  History has seen the consequences of Germany being called out for its role in starting the war.  Of all the Versailles Treaty’s objectionable points, the one that rankled more than nearly any other was that war-guilt article.  Why?  It was the stated basis for the reparations claims, but then the reparations could have been demanded in any event.  I suggest that it was the consciousness of guilt that made it so repugnant.  You can pay the reparations.  You can re-conquer lost territory.  You can negotiate down all the material clauses of a bad agreement.  You can even just give the world the Bronx cheer and re-build your military.  But it’s the accountability that sticks:  You did this; you caused this; we are not going to pretend that you did not cause this, and you can never un-cause it.  I will suggest that it was the sense of moral outrage at that war-guilt clause, the having it rammed down their throats what their leadership had done, that so altered Germany’s moral awareness that fourteen years later it could go to the polls and return the Nazis to power.  Relative morality is a siren song, and it can’t be very surprising that Germany succumbed to it.

Would we nowadays?

You can sermonize about “avoiding having to take responsibility for fixing the problem” until you’re blue in the face, but unless you hold accountable those who made the problem you will always have more problems than you can take responsibility for fixing.  Worse, over time they will become problems which deteriorate to the point of no longer being fixable.  Worse even still, without the naming of names, without the holding accountable of those who are responsible, we subvert that sense of morality which is in the final analysis the basis of free government.  I didn’t figure that out myself, either.  That point figures prominently in Washington’s Farewell, a highly instructive essay on several levels, as I’ve noted before, here.  “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. . . .  It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?”

It is thus altogether well and proper that we should ask who made a pig’s breakfast of Healthcare.gov, how they did so, and how they came to be in a position to do so.  Not to do so is to be, in Churchill’s wonderful expression, “neutral as between the fire brigade and the fire.”

And From the Department of You Can’t Make This Up

Posted on by

It’s getting alarmingly close to the point at which we can declare that the system of government-run schooling in the United States has officially gone off the rails. 

In New Jersey, a 7th-grader was suspended, strip-searched, compelled to give urine and blood samples for drug-testing, and sent to get his head shrunk.  For?  For twirling a pencil in his fingers.  In a way that some other child alleged “made him uncomfortable.”  Turns out the child alleging discomfort may have been bullying the pencil twirler; at least that’s what the suspended child is reported to have alleged.  Some educrat responded to criticism that it’s the school system’s “policy” to act stupidly “investigate” and “do our duty” whenever a child’s behavior “raises red flags.”  Like, you know, twirling a damned pencil.

I agree with Bryan Preston over at PJ Tatler:  This nonsense is not going to stop until the educrat class has to begin pondering whether any idiotic jack-boot treatment of students will or will not perhaps cost them their livelihood, their house, their retirement.  For the life of me I cannot understand the logical basis for claims of immunity for what can only be described as a child’s civil rights (and by the way, such immunity exists nowhere in the law; it’s purely a judge-concocted doctrine, one group of government workers covering for another).  Would we tolerate this behavior from, say, the staff at Home Depot towards its customer?  Why then would we tolerate it from an adult schoolteacher to a child?

Here I ought perhaps to point out that I have zero problem at all with corporal punishment in schools.  I and all my fellow students grew up knowing the (simple, short, and common-sense) rules and knowing that if I broke them I’d earn myself a trip to the hallway and three of the best, administered in drumhead court-martial fashion.  Don’t start fights.  Don’t break school property.  Don’t talk back to the teacher.  Don’t you dare strike a teacher.  When the teacher tells you to sit down and be quiet, you sit down and be quiet.  Don’t throw food in the cafeteria.  Stay in your classroom  unless the teacher gives you a hall pass.  If you’ve got a pocket knife, keep it in your pocket.  Don’t bring an actual gun to school.  Seriously, those were just about the only rules you had to keep in mind.  Many is the time I’ve sat around, at age 45+, and traded stories with others in my age bracket about whippings we took and whippings we witnessed.  And you know what?  Not a damned one of us was warped by the experience, not even a little.  None of us is or ever was any more saintly than the average run of the mill, or noticeably more stoic than normal.  Break the rules, take your punishment like a man, and go on with life.  And years later you can sit around drinking a beer and laughing about it all.

But this foolishness about “making others uncomfortable” just smacks of the 1930s Soviet Union, when wrapping a fish in an issue of Pravda that had Stalin’s photograph on it could earn you a “tenner” in the Gulag.  Or observing that a Parker pen (Western product) wrote well.  Those aren’t made-up, either.  The first is related in Solzhenitsyn, and the latter — in sarcastic fashion — in Dolgun.  Complain about the quality of boots they sell in the stores?  Counter-revolutionary agitation: Ten years.  Solzhenitsyn tells a joke:  A guard asks a prisoner what his term is.  “Five years.”  For what?  “Nothing at all.”  The guard responds, “You lie.  The punishment for nothing at all is ten years.”

The Blogfather has repeatedly observed that, with imbecility not only running rampant in our schools, but actually running our schools, the question has to be asked whether entrusting a child to your local public school system could be characterized as parental malpractice.  A child gnaws a pop-tart — a pastry, fer cryin’ out loud — into the shape of a gun.  Suspended.  A six-year-old kisses a girl in his class.  Charged with sexual assault.  A child brings a key-chain to school, on which is a tiny pendant in the shape of a gun.  Suspended.

The radical left long ago figured out that lawfare and mob action work.  Irrespective of the merits of your cause, if you can threaten others with bankruptcy, with years of litigation, with its discovery, its depositions, its time wasted in lawyers’ offices, its emotional drain, then you can force them to change their behaviors in ways you’d never be able to if you had to rely on mere persuasion or even legislative action.  To borrow a maxim from Saul Alinsky, one of Dear Leader’s heroes, pick your target, freeze it, polarize it, personalize it.  If you dig around in enough public records, you’d be able to find the names and addresses of every single educrat involved in that disgrace in New Jersey.  They need to be sued, and every dismissal appealed and appealed again.  Their houses need to be picketed, morning and night.  Their political donations need to be identified and aired.  Their pictures need to show up on billboards.  They need to be accosted in every restaurant they go to eat.  If they so much as show their faces at a little league ballgame they need to have swarms of angry citizens in their faces.

It’s time, as Dear Leader encouraged his acolytes, to punch back twice as hard.

You Know Things are Getting Deranged When

Posted on by

You read an article like this, and you look at the April 1 dateline, and for the life of you it is impossible to decide whether it’s an April Fools gag.

Alas! a quick Google search reveals that the recently-concluded White Privilege Conference, held in Madison, Wisconsin, was all too real.  The “Stories from the Front Line of Education” workshop actually happened; it’s listed as #17 on the current workshop #2 schedule for March 27, here (if you screwed up and missed it, maybe because you couldn’t tear yourself away from the pearls o’ wisdom on offer at “If Elephants Could Talk: Reducing the Stress of Whiteness in Face-to-Face Relationships,” you had another shot at Ms. Radersma’s confessions as Item #2 on March 29).  I dunno; maybe it’s just my “alcoholic-like” whiteness but I have a hard time seeing how requiring students to master ideas like the conservation of momentum, Newton’s laws of inertia, the periodic table, or subject-verb agreement is or can be racially-tinged.  Grammatical number existed as a concept for centuries before the first sub-Saharan African was oppressed by anyone from beyond that continent.  The notion that differential equations either (i) are oppressive, or (ii) have a peculiarly racial component savors more than just a tiny bit of Trofim Lysenko.  The Thirty Years War was objectively important for any of several reasons, not the least of which was the cultural scarring of Central Europe, scarring which was pregnant with implications for how German society evolved and responded to the experience of Napoleonic conquest.  Not a bit of that has anything to do with anyone’s skin color, and yet it’s impossible to get your hands around 20th Century world history without looking very closely at what happened in the area that became Germany, and why.  Unless the suggestion is that darker-skinned students ought to go through life ignorant of such matters, I don’t see how asking of them that they absorb at least the outlines of that information is “oppressive.”

Enough about Ms. Radersma.  While we’re looking at some of the other workshop topics (many held in “Halls of Ideas” <excuse me while I go wipe the snot off my face from that last heave of laughter>), let’s not overlook the presence of the old stand-by, viz. it’s all the Jooooossssss’ fault:  “Jews, Class, Race and Power: How it’s all connected”.  Oh dear.   As if the rest of the conference weren’t sufficiently drool-inducing, from the Get ‘Em While They’re Young Brigade, we offer this gem (#13 on the March 29 schedule): “Exploring Intersectional Identity in Early Childhood (birth-age 8)”.  You can’t make this stuff up.

What you also can’t make up, and what is truly alarming, is the list of sponsors and hosts whose logos are proudly displayed on the conference website.  It includes the Wisconsin Council of Churches, the Sinsinawa Dominicans, and the Wisconsin Conference of the United Methodist Church.  There are also a few outright tax-funded operations, from the U of W Eau Claire to the University of Northern Iowa, and a laundry list of taxpayer-subsidized — because “charitable” — enterprises, like the Sierra Club (huh? Since when do trees and wildlife have “race” or “class” implications?  I’m unaware that a grizzly bear has ever “privileged” any person of any description when it gets sufficiently hungry or angry.) and what appear to be several private colleges.

So if anyone out there gives to the organizations sponsoring this tripe, you need to bear in mind that your money is funding presentations on “Jews, Class, Race and Power: How it’s all connected”.  I’m going to suggest that you might want to reconsider where you direct your charitable inclinations.  Do you really want to support nonsense like this that’s a half-jump, if that, away from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

On Barbershops

Posted on by

This morning while brushing my teeth I realized I need a haircut.  I am convinced I am not alone in my whipsaw of never remembering I need a haircut until I have no time to get a haircut, and promptly forgetting all about when the time is there to do it.  One of life’s minor injustices, to be sure.

On those rare occasions when memory and opportunity intersect, I go to a barbershop.  A men’s barbershop.  Not a “stylist,” not a unisex, Top 40 playing in the background metrosexual personal expression facilitation operation.  A barbershop.  Since at least 1970 it’s been there, in that same location in the arcade (it’s a re-development, from back before the word was fashionable, of an old movie theater) down past the cubby-hole offices of the businesses that come and go, some on to better things, others towards the recollections of old men’s conversations that start with, “Hey; you remember when ol’ Joe Jones had that surveying business down here? ”  For decades two guys ran the shop — it’s two chairs, with a naugahyde bench running down the opposite wall — and one of them is still there.

The floor is red-and-white tile.  The red’s faded to a sort of dirty pinkish color, and the white is what some marketer at Sherwin Williams might think of as “Ancient Yellow.”  The naugahyde bench is held together in several places by duct tape (as it should be).  On the wall above the bench are (i) a pencil drawing of a much-younger Billy cutting a child’s hair; (ii) a price list for services that include things guys used to go to barbershops for but haven’t for decades now; and, (iii) a picture of some horse that seems to have won some accolade in a horse show.  They’ve been there, in precisely those positions, since I’ve been going there, which means since the mid-1990s.  On the far wall are two framed collections of arrow and spear heads.  Until a few years ago they also had one of those soft drink machines — it was an RC machine — where you put your money in, then opened a tall, narrow door and reached in to pull your selection out.  One day it was gone, and when I asked Billy said the compressor had gone out and it would have cost him too much to have it fixed or replaced.  I was crushed; so far as I know that was the last operational such machine in the county.  Now all that’s left are those ghastly behemoths with back-lit top-to-bottom plexiglas fronts and flashing lights with . . . buttons you push.  Coke machines are coke machines and pinball machines are what they are, and I disapprove of mixing media.

In election years there’s usually a piece of poster board (hand-drawn) with the local races and candidates listed on it, and boxes beside each name.  Purely on the honor system, you can go put an “x” in a box beside your candidate.  Historically it’s proven a not-unreliable indicator of the hopefuls’ respective outcomes.

Billy’s old enough to be my father.  I know that because his two children were a year ahead and a year behind me in school.  When I go I’m frequently the youngest customer by 25-30 years.  I’m turning 49 exactly six months from today.  “Bustle” is not a verb or noun you’d associate with the pace of business there.  I don’t mind sitting on the bench, waiting my turn, and I don’t mind spending 20 minutes on a haircut that a military barber would spend about 1:15 doing.  I listen to the other customers and Billy talk with each other.  I hear a lot of names, some of which I recognize, some of which are people I know, and a good deal of which are complete strangers.  At their ages the conversation is usually about who’s sick, who’s well, who just buried his wife, who’s finally too old to put in a garden this year, and so forth.  It’s the easy rhythm of sociability, of conversations that you realize are decades old by the time you hear them.  In fact, they’ve been having this conversation since the 1950s and you’re just hearing the latest 30-minute installment of it.  You’ll hear about people’s children and grandchildren, who’s married, who’s back from college, who’s in trouble and who’s taking over the family shop.  Sometimes you’ll hear about Local Characters and their doings over the years.  I still recall the time that everyone was reciting all the local businesses this one ol’ boy has been invited never to come back to.  It was priceless.

They give a pretty OK haircut down there.  I’ve worn my hair more or less the same way since about 1973 and so my standards are not very high.  In terms of self-expression I’m just happy if my hair doesn’t proclaim, “I am an idiot,” too loudly.

The boy who used to cut with Billy retired (around here we say “retarded”) and moved off to be closer to his boy who lives a couple of counties over.  I was worried because shortly thereafter Billy “taken sick” and it was an open question whether he’d be back.  But he found some younger boy (who’s actually younger than I am) who’s now got the other chair, and so it looks as though the Succession is safe for the time being.

[Aside:  Here I must pass some observations on the word “boy” and its usage.  A few weeks ago some boy name of Toobin wrote a disparaging article in the The New Yorker about how awful it is that Clarence Thomas doesn’t speak much if at all during oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court, and spends a great deal of time leaning back staring at the ceiling while $1,000+/hour lawyers drone on in front of him.  Ann Althouse, who teaches law at Wisconsin and runs an eponymous blog, linked to it and prompted a merry firestorm of vituperation in the comments section.  She’s got a pretty loyal crowd of commenters, some typically supportive, others less so, and some of whom seem to have their own axes to grind and do so, relentlessly.  Among the latter are some who are, shall we say, sensitive to issues of “race.”  A segment of the comments to that particular post circulated around the dynamic that this Toobin boy seems to expect that Thomas shall entertain him, like some minstrel show.  Within those comments the subject of “boy” came up.  As everyone knows, “boy,” like “son,” was an address of condescension employed by whites towards blacks, back in the day.  This is unfortunate, because around here every male under the age of about 75 is a “boy.”  I am my father’s boy and everyone in town knows me as such and will know me as such until I die.

I once had to explain to a lawyer from Minnesota the broad outlines of “boy” and its permutations, because they are not co-extensive.  Specifically, if you wish to understand and be understood around here, you need to know, among other intricacies, the distinctions between boy, ol’ boy, good boy, and good ol’ boy.  As mentioned, every male under 75 is a boy:  “Earnest that boy he just won’t get that no one’s gonna give him more than $1,500 an acre for that farm of his daddy’s.”  (Notice the triple subject, a common grammatical construct around here.)  An ol’ boy is generally (of course, context is everything, as usual) a boy who ain’t no account:  “Clarence?  That ol’ boy ain’t taken a sober breath since spring of 1963 and I don’t reckon he’s about to start now.”  A good boy will show up on Sunday afternoon after church and pressure wash his widow neighbor lady’s front porch:  “Junior’s a awful good boy; he’s been Real Good to his momma since his daddy passed.”  A good ol’ boy might have laid out of church because he had him a couple or fifteen too many Saturday evening, and he might be carrying a twelve-pack when he shows up, but he’ll still come over on Sunday afternoon and pressure wash his widow neighbor lady’s front porch:  “Shirley’s jus’ a good ol’ boy; he ain’t goin’ nowhere but he’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it.”]

I recall when Barbershop came out.  I enjoyed it, sufficiently so that I bought the movie on DVD some time later.  In addition to being funny I thought it interesting how the character of the goof-ball white boy is handled.  Most of the time, of course, if there’s a black character in a mainstream movie he’s the one who sticks out, and it’s his mode of expression, of existence, that is “treated” as being the non-standard.  He’s the dramatic contrast, in other words.  Barbershop exactly flips that; it’s the white guy who’s the mustard splotch on the shirt front.  But most of why that movie resonated with me had Zero to do with the physical attributes of the actors and actresses.  I liked that movie because that’s where I go to get my hair cut.  And the social role the shop plays in that movie neighborhood is exactly what my barbershop plays here in my own county.  We don’t have a Checker Fred down at the arcade, but there used to be a barbershop just off Main Street here (curiously enough, the guy who ran that shop happened to be black) and there was some boy — when I met him he must have been in his 60s — who hung out there who’d bet you the price of the drink that he could finish a coke faster than you could.  I saw it done, too; he had the talent of being able to swallow without swallowing, so to speak, and he could kill a standard bottle of Coke in about ten seconds.  That’s not an exaggeration, by the way.  So when I saw Barbershop it felt like meeting a bunch of old friends.

Among the many reasons why I chose to raise my own boys back here is so that they will have — I hope — the chance to experience places like the barbershop.  They’re places which communicate, very subtly, the message that Here is Where You Belong.  You don’t have necessarily to stay here, but I suggest that everyone needs a hole, so speak, that fits his own shape perfectly, and into which he can ease himself. 

Nowadays they call it “alienation,” a fashionable name for the feeling you get when you realize that there’s no place for you, that you don’t belong anywhere.  Observe by the way that belonging everywhere is belonging nowhere.  “Alienation” is a hobby indulged in by people who spend a tremendous amount of energy contemplating how alienated they are.  I remember back in 2008, when Dear Leader was running against McCain.  I ran across a quotation from one of Dear Leader’s (apparently ghost-written, it seems) books . . . about himself, of course.  He talks about how “alienated” he felt, and I realized that there was no better contrast between the two candidates than that word.  John McCain grew up in the Navy, likely still keeps in touch with his Academy classmates, and survived years of torture (at the hands of people whose eventual victory Dear Leader celebrates) only by forging a tightly-knit web of surreptitious support and communication with his fellow prisoners (read In Love and War, Admiral Stockdale’s joint memoir with his wife; that’s what John McCain survived).  I wonder whether McCain even understands the notion of feeling “alienated.”

“Alienation” is, like so much else, something of a choice.  I have a very dear friend who recently departed from the Big City to a smallish town out in what he probably grew up thinking of as The Sticks.  Among his other hats, he wears one as Musician, specifically jazz/swing (although he also plays other stuff as well, those seem to be his home).  What with Life and All, I haven’t seen him in years, but keep up, more or less, via Facebook.  I’ve watched years of his posts now, and a great deal of them deal with the perceived contrast between Places Where There are Hep Cats, and places where there are not.  I gather his new home is a Place Where There are Squares, and he seems to lament that fact.  Poor boy.  He needs him a barbershop.  He needs to drop that Squares vs. Hep Cats shit and go volunteer at the local humane society shelter.  Get involved in Meals on Wheels.  Call the local high school band director and see if the drum line could do with a volunteer helper.  Join the Rotary or Kiwanis.  Show up at the booster club’s pancake breakfast. 

He needs to find his barbershop, and until he does, I’m afraid he’s doomed to feel “alienated.”

All Your Children Are Belong to Us, Chapter 2

Posted on by

I generally shy away from blogs that are too much about the author, his/her friends and family. Unless you’re Winston L. S. Churchill, the chances are that the internals of your life are of interest principally to you. Even “reality” television is anything but that; the producers spend a tremendous amount of time and energy concocting neat slices of “reality” that – mirabile dictu! – happen to fit into a standard television time-slot, net of advertising. Isn’t that just amazing from an evolutionary perspective? Human society, ancient as it is, has by some force of divine providence so developed that it will dove-tail perfectly into modern television’s business model.

I’ve thus tried not to clutter up this ‘umble little blog with tales of my own woes and would-be triumphs. I won’t claim the widest or most rarefied circles of acquaintance, but by a pretty depressing margin I’m the least interesting person I know. My life and its ups and downs offers the fewest useful insights to my fellow passengers on this earth. 

So when I write this, my third post in four or five which deals with a vignette from my family, I think an apology is in order. Consider it offered. 

Yesterday whilst purging my spam filter, I noticed several e-mails from my boys’ school. I generally make no effort to pull them up and read them. We live sufficiently far away that much of what we can describe as the Social Calendar aspects of their parent communications just has no relevance to me. We access what information is there about the boys’ respective homework assignments and leave the rest to sort itself out. So I’ve never released or white-listed any of the school spam. Until yesterday, that is, when I saw something from a teacher whose name I recognized as being the art teacher, mentioning something about the fifth-graders’ “film projects.” This was the first I’d heard about this, and given the sometimes easy and unwarranted assumptions that today’s school teachers seem to make about what we have lying about the house (such as shoe boxes for dioramas; we don’t have the money around here to have so many pairs of brand-new shoes that we’re awash in empty shoe boxes to cut up and make into “projects” for school subjects) I figured I’d better give it a once-over to make sure they weren’t just breezily figuring all we parents had home media production studios. 

I was relieved to discover that this “film project” is something the children are doing in a “lab,” on the school’s computers. I was less relieved to discover the due dates are next week. Around our little house we (ahem!) sometimes have trouble with getting started soon enough to make deadlines. Mommy is of the “start at 9:30 the night before it’s due” philosophy; daddy is of the “start it as soon as you know about it” persuasion. You can imagine the conflicted signals our children get. 

And then I read a bit further, and my mood became unhinged. This is the guts of the assignment: 

Objective:

Students will create a film using IMovie in the computer lab Macs. Your film must relate to the theme of the environment. The films theme should be taken seriously.No slap stick, no comedies allowed.

The film should focus on a problem that is taking place in our community, whether it’s a lack of recycling, community gardens, accessible education on caring for our environment etc.Step 1

: Come up with one problem that you see in the environment that you want to focus on in your film.Step:2

Research your problem and find out if there are solutions to helping eliminate or lessen the problem affecting the environment

Step 3

Create a StoryBoard. A storyboard looks a lot like a comic. It usually has four boxes and you draw what 4 major scenes you will cover in your film.

This assignment is for a class of fifth-graders, remember. They are supposed to “identify a problem that is taking place in our community” and which relates to “the environment.” It’s supposed to be “taken seriously.” No levity, children; remember art is never about using humor to make or illustrate a point. And what sorts of “problems” are suggested? Is the anthropomorphism of the world and non-human existence a possible problem? How about the difficult question of trade-offs and how do you keep six billion humans fed while maintaining a pre-lapsarian purity in the natural environment?

Oh no; those aren’t “problems taking place in our community.” Whose community again, sister? Out here in my “community” a lot of people still heat with wood cut from their own land. That’s not because they want to make some sort of statement but rather because they can’t afford the sky-high electrical prices which have resulted from the forced closure of scores of coal-fired electrical plants. They don’t have “community gardens” because their garden isn’t some hobby they indulge in to make themselves feel as if they’re cocking a snook at “corporate America”; it’s how they feed their families. A very good friend of mine had a father who “taken sick” (as they say out here) for the better part of a couple of years. The only meat the family had during that time was what my buddy – a teenager back then – could kill, in season or out. He got to where he could spotlight a deer, bring it down with a single shot, field dress it in the dark, and be gone before he could be caught. And so the family survived.

Apparently this goof-ball of a teacher thinks that “community gardens” have something to do with the environment, specifically that more of them would be good for it. Perhaps she thinks that you can feed much more than one family off a garden the size of the arable portion of a town building lot. Perhaps she thinks that thinning out urban population so that you have one garden per inhabited lot is a great thing for the environment. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to her that (i) having entire cities trying to feed themselves off quarter-acre gardens is about the biggest waste of human, physical, and financial capital you can imagine (it’s as if she never heard of Adam Smith’s observations about the division of labor); and (ii) when you thin the population by half you double the amount of land it occupies. That’s math, lady, and unless you can come up with some other solution to getting people co-located with their job sites, you just astronomically increased the fuel consumption associated with getting Americans to work in the morning. Remind me how this is a good thing?

“Accessible education” about “taking care of the environment” is a “problem taking place in our community,” it seems. Mind you, this is when you can’t pick up a magazine, or a newspaper, or turn on the television, or browse the internet without seeing something about how you can juice up ol’ Ma Nature. You can’t listen to a politician of any level gas on for more than five or ten minutes without witnessing some sort of genuflection to Saving the Environment. You’ve got everyone from coffee shops to your greengrocer to the hot air hand dryer in the men’s room reminding you to recycle this, use less of that, and Aren’t We Wonderful for Reducing Waste.  In short, today’s American as he moves through his day is greeted by didactic noise about “taking care of the environment” with the dreary repetitiveness and predictability of the monk scene from The Holy Grail.

My objection is of course to the transparent use of school as propaganda forum. The issues this assignment allude to are incredibly complicated, and to start the reasoning (to give it an undeserved credit) process halfway down the line – that lack of X or the prevalence of Y is prima facie a “problem” – is the height of dishonesty. Even more so do I resent the presence of this assignment in an “art” class. What does making a documentary have to do with “art”? What is artistic about a polemic? Ding-Dongs and Zingers bad; granola bars good. Whatever else you might call that, it is not art in any meaningful sense of the word.

This woman is not teaching art with this assignment, but rather schooling the children in a catechism.

If you really wanted to have this sort of assignment and have it be relevant to the subject matter of a specific class, it ought to be in social studies. It should be part of social studies because of all the inherently social, economic, and political issues it implicates. Social studies is (or ought to be, if taught honestly) about little more than the trade-offs that humans make in their effort to live with each other without devolving into a Hobbesian state of nature. “Lack of recycling” as a problem? Well, what are the alternatives with which recycling has to contend? What are the relative burdens and benefits of taking a used plastic trash bag and turning it into a usable something else? Where are those burdens felt and who enjoys the benefits, and how are those groups/places determined? Is there something to be said for answering the questions to those questions in one fashion rather than another? These are not questions of art but of human interaction. To treat them as properly the subject of art – which can have neither right nor wrong “answers” – is to divorce them from the realm of decisions which have measurable consequences for living humans. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the only reason we do not enjoy starvation – not mere hunger, but true starvation – on a massive scale in the United States is precisely because our agricultural system is so highly mechanized, centralized, and commercialized. If you’re looking for what a society of “community gardens” looks like, you needn’t look much past the nearest UNICEF fund-raising poster. Those bloated-belly stick children lying in the African dust, their eyes staring blankly as they feel themselves dying by inches? They’ve been fed from “community gardens.” Way to think it through, lady.

All of which to say is that the nostrums so loyally parroted by this art teacher are not self-evidently value-positive to society. But you wouldn’t know that from the approach this assignment takes, would you?

Finally, I object to this kind of assignment being foisted onto children much, much too young to understand the implications of the pat answers their teacher so obviously expects of them. There’s something more than just vaguely Komsomol about the whole exercise, when you ponder it. Let’s all have “community gardens” and every household on the block can raise three-sevenths of one row of string beans. That’s really going to feed the world. I don’t want to go too deep into the weeds of imagining what’s going through this commissar’s teacher’s mind, but is it too much to speculate that she sees herself as training this generation’s Pavlik Morozovs, lurking behind the living room drapes to see if mommy and daddy are engaging in Trotskyite counter-revolutionary failure to recycle last Sunday’s New York Times Review of Books? And then dutifully reporting that to their pediatricians when such questions are mandated by whatever amendments to the “Affordable” Care Act are cooked up by the lunatic fringe (don’t laugh; pediatricians are already being leaned on – hard – to pepper their patients about whether mommy and daddy have guns! in the house).

Not only is there the creepy recitation of Mao Thoughts aspect of this. In point of fact this assignment is not age-appropriate. As a group fifth-graders are not at the point where they’ve been exposed to enough of the world’s hard lessons to understand the nature of trade-offs. At eleven or twelve years old they’re still by and large in the phase of “it would be really neat to have X; therefore let’s have X.” [N.b. Sadly, we must point out that most government entities do their budgeting on precisely that basis, which explains way more about the state of our republic than is very comfortable to think about.] Don’t get me wrong, though; there are out there children of that age who understand that in order to have X you’re going to have to give up some Y, and maybe some Z as well. And while doing that you’re going to put yourself in a position that A, B, and a good bit of C are going to be out of your reach either temporarily or forever. There is an expression for children who have been sufficiently exposed to Life that they understand such things at that age: “old beyond their years.” They’re not to be envied, those children. The husband of a friend of mine was his family’s principal means of support from the age of twelve. That family had nothing – nothing – but what he could go out and break his back to earn. They didn’t have a “community garden”; they had their own garden and they had it in order that they did not starve. They didn’t recycle to propitiate Gaia; they recycled because they couldn’t afford not to use everything to the point of disintegration. They weren’t worried about “accessible education about taking care of the environment”; they were worried about accessible heat for the winter.

Years ago my mother, who was a junior-high English teacher for about 182 years or so, assigned her little scholars, in lieu of a “What I Did Over the Summer” essay, to interview an old person. I think 70 was the minimum cut-off. One of her students’ mothers was a nurse in a VA hospital in the area. Among the resident patients was the widow of one of the most famous American war heroes of the entire 20th Century. So this 8th-grade kid interviewed her. Riffing on that same notion, and if you want to assign the children something that is (i) true, (ii) relevant, and (iii) important, all while tying the task into another school subject area, assign the children to do an oral history project. Here are some suggestions for interviews:

  • a World War II combat veteran (they’re dying at the rate of over 10,000 per month, and just for example the last surviving Medal of Honor winner from D-Day just died);
  • a Korean War combat veteran;
  • a former prisoner of war;
  • a surviving German, Italian, Russian, or Japanese soldier from World War II (growing up a buddy of mine had a grandfather who lived one street over from us and who had been a machine gunner for the Kaiser; I still kick myself for not getting to know him);
  • a displaced person from Eastern Europe;
  • a Holocaust survivor;
  • someone who participated in a lunch counter sit-in during the Civil Rights struggle;
  • someone who was at Selma with King;
  • someone who grew up without electricity or running water.

People like that are all over the place. Some years ago I did a will for an older fellow, a widower. He was ethnic Ukrainian, but his village ended up in the reconstituted Poland after the Great War. They were right in the path of the southern invasion from the former Czechoslovakia in September, 1939; he told me the entire countryside was littered with corpses, everywhere you looked. His village ended up just on the German side of the German-Soviet partition line. His eighteenth birthday was June 25, 1941; that night a German slave labor battalion swept through and grabbed every male eighteen and up. He’d never seen his village or his family again. The only reason he survived the war was that he was sent as a slave laborer to a farm in Austria. He stayed there for ten years after the war and married a local girl. In the mid-1950s he signed up for a DP program and ended up with a job at a meat-packing company near here. He’d since retired, but there was a former slave, who had lived through some of the most horrific times in Western history, right there in my office. I told him I wouldn’t charge him for the will if he’d promise me to sit down in front of a tape recorder.

I have an aunt by marriage who is East Prussian. She, her mother, and her three sisters (the father had long since been killed on the Eastern Front) made it out on the last airplane to leave the airfield. A friend of their father’s was on the local commanding general’s staff and hooked them up with an officer who would have an airplane available when the Red Army got there. The oldest sister married an American after the war and she and my aunt ended up living here permanently. When I did the sister’s will I got her memories fired up after we’d signed everything (I’d motioned our staff to sit tight and listen). She talked about looking back through the staff car’s rear window – before it was strafed by a Soviet fighter, killing the driver – and seeing the entire horizon lined with pillars of smoke and flame from burning farms and villages.

But let’s keep the fifth-graders’ minds focused on the important things, like “accessible education about taking care of the environment.”

Collectivists of all stripes have understood that you have to get them young, and you have to get a wedge in between them and their parents. My children’s art teacher gives all appearance of being a willing stooge in the Greater Effort. Maybe they’ll let her stand a few rows higher on the bleachers, next May Day parade.

Now It’s Getting Serious

Posted on by

BREAKING NEWS:  In the latest escalation of the sanctions and counter-sanctions imposed by Russia and President Mom-Jeans on each other’s citizens, the Road Superintendent of French Lick, Indiana has been denied entry into Russia.  President Putin announced this most recent measure in retaliation for President Mom-Jeans’s announcement that a week from Thursday he will freeze all assets of the Novosibirsk garbage collector.

O How Frightfully Clever and Witty

Posted on by

I can never quite make up my mind whether the spectacle of someone thinking he’s funny when he’s really not — but being encouraged by his bystanders who also don’t realize how not funny he’s being — is itself funny (call it meta-humor) or just uncomfortable.  I lean towards uncomfortable if only because a common thread in such situations is that the performer does not understand the subject of his would-be humor.  When you think about it, a central aspect of something we think of as funny is viewing a world in which the actors do not understand something about their own world which we, The Observers, do.  That’s true of a Three Stooges short; it’s true of an ethnic joke; it’s true of Lord Emsworth at his club simultaneously trying to order lunch and watch another member take enormous bites of his food; it’s true of a Monty Python sketch or movie.  We Know and They Don’t, and it’s the movement of the actors through a universe the rules for which they don’t know and the operation of which they cannot therefore predict which produces the humorous dramatic action.

Critical to the process is also that any intermediator — the author, teller of the joke, or director — is also in on the joke, in that he understands with us.  He’s one of us, and the set-up just doesn’t work if he buys into the subjects’ understanding rather than ours.

Which is why this The New Yorker piece fails so miserably as satire.  Satire of course is the straight-faced depiction of a world-state which the depictor does not believe valid, but which those depicted do.  Crucial to success is that the world-state ape, except for the point(s) of invalidity, a state of things that is True.  It’s the difference between a fly in the punch-bowl and a bowl of flies covered in punch.  Again, we are invited to partake of the mediator’s superior understanding that here’s this wonderful painting of a young woman by an open window reading a letter, and oh by the way, did you notice the tattoo on her neck? 

The linked piece is an attempt at satire of the argument that Government as such is not a desirable thing, and that less Government is, all else being equal, preferable than more.  The specific satirical device employed is one we can call Ironic Substitution.  One element is substituted for another; we are invited to conclude that the elements are equivalent and from highlighting the grotesque effects of the one we are to conclude that the other is likewise grotesque.  Ironic Substitution is of course a first cousin to Ironic Insertion.  In a thorough examination of the latter, Paul Fussell spends a great deal of time in The Great War and Modern Memory on the ironic use of the pastoral in World War I poetry to suggest the horror of the trenches, a horror so profound it cannot be Got At any other way.

The author of the piece in question sets about his goal by substituting in the argument something that, like Government, is as much a concept, a state of understanding, as a physical reality:  Texas.  He then, with an exaggeratedly straight face, descants on all the wonderful things to be accomplished by reducing Texas, by having less Texas rather than more.   The piece goes off the rails, however, in two respects:  First, the philosophical mind-set of the medium — The New Yorker — is profoundly in agreement with the alternate argument which we are supposed to conclude is invalid.  It would be like having Ernst Jünger as the narrator of Siegfried Sassoon’s war poems.  Doesn’t work, guys.  The element of We’re in the Know and They Aren’t fails in that set-up.

The second place this The New Yorker article gets off the reservation is that the substituted element is not, in fact, the equivalent of the original.  I’ll lay it out:  Texas has never required that the toilets in my house use so little water per flush that they do not function off a single flush.  Texas has never come knocking on my door to tell me I must part with even more of what little I can earn because . . . it knows better what to do with it than I do.  It wasn’t Texas who caused our firm’s health insurance carrier to send us a letter to the effect that our health plan, which worked well for the constellation of individuals in this office, no longer existed, but hey! your 78-year-old father now has maternity coverage.  Texas did not, in the wake of an economic crisis instigated by its own agencies, decide to destroy an entire industry which is a core constituent of our firm’s client base (community banking; Dodd-Frank is a slow-motion shot to the base of the skull to your locally owned bank, when 75% of all the toxic subprime mortgages out there were Fannie and Freddie).  Texas has not used its coercive power to shut down the participation of an entire segment of the political spectrum in the national argument.  Texas is not in possession of a single one of my e-mails.  Texas, as a place, actually creates wealth and opportunity (seriously: an enormous proportion of the total jobs created since 2009 are in . . . Texas), instead of expropriating it from some to hand over to others.  Texas did not steal General Motors and Chrysler from their respective secured creditors under personal threat of ruinous IRS and SEC audits.

In other words, the contrast between the alternate argument and the satired argument does not show what the author thinks it does.  The alternate argument can be shown to be idiotic, even on its own terms.  The argument we are invited to conclude is therefore likewise idiotic can be shown to be correct, or at least more correct than not and in more instances than not.  It’s why you cannot satire the Pythagorean Theorem or the periodic table.  Or The Federalist Papers.  The former can be proven correct by measurement and scientific method; the latter has been proven correct not only by the past 225-odd years of American history but by several centuries of world history.

Let’s nail this down as a Formal Proposition:  You cannot be funny about things you do not understand.  Our would-be o-so-sophisticated author does not understand his subject.

 

In Which it Gets Personal, Ch. 2

Posted on by

I’d thought of doing this as an update to my earlier post, but on second thought decided it needed its own separate billing.

My prior post was about the adult reaction to a playground scuffle.  This post is about the impact that reaction has had on the central participant in it.  I think it demonstrates how insidiously corrosive are the messages that the “educational” system desires to bludgeon into little boys’ heads.

Last night the wife was working late.  So after supervising supper and hectoring the boys through their showers, I addressed myself to the topic of homework.  Our middle child, No. 2, is in fourth grade.  Each week they have a “spelling packet,” consisting of a list of words to learn, all supposedly organized around some particular phonetic or orthographic principle(s).  There follows a set of exercises using those words.  The final item in the packet is a paragraph the young scholars are set to write on a specified topic; they have to use four of that week’s spelling words.  The completed spelling packet is due on Thursday.

No. 2 had mostly already finished his spelling packet when last night I asked him if he were done.  Almost.  Well, what is “almost?”  He wanted to wait until mommy got home.  I told him that mommy wasn’t going to be home until late, I was all he had by way of help, the work was due today, and get himself in to the kitchen (where I was) and let’s get this wrapped up.  So we did.  The paragraph topic was to write about someone the student knows or has read about “who was treated unfairly.”  Only stipulations were that it must be a real person and cannot be a family member.

After he’d drawn a blank, and I’d drawn a blank, and No. 1, whom we’d called in for purposes of inspiration, had likewise come up empty, I had an afflatus.  This is a Roman Catholic school.  Why not Joan of Arc?  I mean, leading your country’s armies to victory over the invader, personally seeing to it that your king is properly crowned in Reims, and then for your troubles getting turned over to that very invader who burns you at the stake:  If that isn’t “unfair” I’d like to see what is.  So we looked over the spelling words list and figured out which words we could work in to which parts of a paragraph.  At my suggestion he broke out a sheet of scratch paper to put his draft together.

Everything went swimmingly until the very end.  He ended the narrative by saying just that she “was killed,” without mentioning how or by whom or who enabled it.  You know, kind of the central part of the story about why she’s a saint and not just another military hero.  My fourth-grader’s explanation?  He was scared that if he wrote she’d been burned at the stake he’d get in trouble at school because of what’s been going on with him.  After I re-assured him that he wouldn’t get in trouble for it, he re-wrote the final sentence.

Can you believe that?  I mean, this little boy has so internalized the message that There’s Something Badly Wrong With Me and I’m just this horrible violent person and I’ll get in trouble if I even truthfully describe something that actually happened to a major historical personage that he can’t even tell the truth about France’s national saint.  What the hell?  I mean, what the everlasting billy blue hell?  Those hand-wringing bastards have wounded my boy’s soul, and for no other reason than that they don’t have enough spine to tell some over-wrought mother to get a damned grip on herself and be grateful her precious little DNA receptacle learned him a couple of important life lessons on the playground as opposed to some dark alley.

If you raise the next generations to be too rabbit-craven even to describe evil, treachery, and ingratitude, precisely how on earth do you expect them to engage and defeat it successfully?  Or does “Education” School theory now teach that we won’t have to worry about such distressing phallocentric oppressive behavior now that we’ve effectively criminalized being a boy?

Woodrow Wilson’s Long Shadow

Posted on by

So I recently finished reading Wilson, A. Scott Berg’s new biography of Woodrow Wilson – actually, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. It was a Christmas gift, along with Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 and Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia (in the middle of reading which last I now am).

This book was only my third extensive exposure to the life and thought of a man who comes as near to American beatification by serious thinkers as any politician since Lincoln. FDR’s reputation rests more on what he actually accomplished than on his character traits. Kennedy is mostly a media creation. Wilson is, in common with Lincoln and Jefferson, revered for what are represented to be his thoughts. What those thoughts might be are commonly – and vaguely – understood to be very high-flown notions of the unity of all men, the need for collective security, and of course at the center of it all his Fourteen Points. 

The careful reader will notice that all of those hazily understood concepts have one thing in common: the Great War. Specifically, they’re all outgrowths of Wilson’s contemplation of Europe’s four-year suicide bid. Lincoln, by the time he got to the White House, had spent years engaging with slavery, abolitionism, and the political tensions those forces generated. His 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas remain among the classics of Western political discourse, and that senate campaign was far from his first debate. With one portentous exception, Jefferson’s most creative political thinking was several years in the past by the time he got there. Until August, 1914, however, Wilson had never had occasion to devote much energy at all to international affairs and certainly none to the implications of an entire culture immolating itself. He came to the office with the expressed intention of spending his efforts on purely domestic issues. 

A further point of distinction is not insignificant, I suggest. Jefferson and Lincoln both had the experience of years of head-to-head engagement with ideological foes and allies who saw themselves, and with whom Jefferson and Lincoln engaged, as peers. Their thinking benefitted from the crucible effect of, in Jefferson’s case, his exposure to an historically unique constellation of statesmen, and in Lincoln’s his experiences riding the circuit from county to county, arguing and debating with peers, juries, and the public. I could not tell from Berg’s biography that Wilson ever really engaged with the welter of thought around him. The life Berg describes is one spent lecturing (remember this was an era in which the public lecture was very popular entertainment among most levels of society). As a classroom teacher he grew accustomed to being acknowledged as a if not the fount of wisdom by his pupils. Except for one brief period in Georgia in which Wilson practiced law – if having a single probate case as one’s entire professional experience counts as “practiced” – he never really held a job outside academic circles and elective office. Combined with his ecclesiastical family background his formation as the layer-down-of-rules seems to have left an indelible mark on how his mind worked. 

And it doesn’t appear to have been just that. Even as a child Wilson was big on setting rules for others to follow. One example is given of a group of young boys, his peers, who got together for I no longer recall what, and Tommy (as he was known until his graduation from college) makes it among his first orders of business to promulgate a written constitution for the club. “Promulgate” seems to be precisely the correct verb, too; in all of Wilson there’s not a whiff of his even seeking input, let alone consensus from anyone. Contrast Lincoln circulating his first inaugural address in draft to several of his prospective cabinet members, or Jefferson working as part of a committee to draft the Declaration. If Americans had coats of arms, Ipse dixit would be on Wilson’s. 

Wilson was greatly enamored of both his wives. After his marriage to Ellen, to the extent he needed human interaction, he seems to have derived nearly all he required from her, and then within a few months after her death he was consumed with ardor for Edith. While that’s enviable in some respect, it is also not necessarily a desirable character trait in a political leader. Certainly his interactions with adults seem to break down into two overall groupings: (i) those who fawned on him as the Sage of New Jersey, and (ii) those to whom he laid down the rules. Even the two men with whom he was closest, Edward M. “Colonel” House and John Grier Hibben, a fellow junior faculty member at Princeton, do not seem to have broken the pattern, although perhaps of all men Hibben came closest. 

In short, I get the profound impression that Wilson’s life experiences did not sufficiently expose him to the friction and concussion of dealing with men he regarded or had to regard as his equals. 

Largely if not entirely without actual adult friends, it’s hard to get a sense that Wilson ever had the daily experience of emotional closeness to another person whose ideas were not die-stamped by his own or just parroted back in hopes of a good grade. In all of Berg’s book I don’t recall a single instance of a peer acknowledged by Wilson as such telling him he was talking through his hat and kindly leave off gibbering. Predictably, he does not seem to have accepted the notion that reasonable men could disagree with him in good faith and were entitled to pursue their own notions of what was necessary or proper in any particular circumstance. When he was appointed president of Princeton he was treated as walking on water and parting it for those who couldn’t. That’s always a dangerous brew to serve to anyone and especially to someone whose resistance to it seems to have been roughly similar to the resistance to alcohol on display by the Indians in Betty McDonald’s The Egg and I. When the inevitable disagreements occurred, there was never any question of collectively making the decision and everyone living with the outcome cheerfully. 

The most dramatic instance of this (apart from the fight over the Versailles treaty) involved, as does so much else in academic settings, a tempest in a teapot. Wilson believed the off-campus clubs were fostering a spirit of elitism at Princeton. He believed they were exclusionary of the less-affluent students, the less-socially-gifted ones. So he set out to undermine them by denying them a recruiting pool. Wilson’s notion was to build large, self-contained student living facilities, what we today know as quadrangles. There the underclassmen would be obliged to live with each other, their company not self-selected but chosen for them by whatever mechanism the university chose to adopt from time to time. Hardly surprisingly this idea did not meet universal approval, and some intense politicking went on. Eventually Wilson couldn’t carry the issue. Hibben, by that time senior faculty, sided with Wilson’s opponents. Wilson never addressed another personal word to him for the rest of his life, and even in the White House tackily avoided meeting the man whom he had once described in almost amatory terms. 

How Wilson treated Hibben over what was, after all, a relatively trivial issue and one which was not a decision that could never be re-visited (there was no reason the trustees couldn’t decide at some later point to go ahead and build quadrangles and implement Wilson’s vision for them in whole or in part) demonstrates what I’m going to say was a deep character flaw in Wilson. His enmity was not at all feigned; when he had occasion to allude to Hibben in later years (nearly always elliptically, it seems) he never backed off from the accusation of betrayal. 

Compare and contrast Wilson’s treatment of Hibben with the relationship that grew between Jefferson and Adams. True, it took a number of years after both men were out of office, but once rekindled their friendship produced hundreds of letters and thousands of words over the course of many years. They wrote each other about nearly everything and although they still disagreed on many things, by the time they died, on the same day and within hours of each other, each died with the other’s name on his lips. And Jefferson had run the original dirty, slanderous campaign which destroyed Adams’s political career. Not that Adams wasn’t as prickly as they come, but he’d been a farmer, a courtroom lawyer, and a diplomat for decades before he came to office. Each and all of those provided him with the experience of contradiction, frustration, and engagement with fundamentally opposed and well-defended principles.

Wilson thought House got above himself at the Paris Conference in 1919. He wasn’t entirely unjustified, either. For several weeks Wilson had to come back to the U.S. to attend to matters for which the president was indispensable. While Wilson was gone House had very consciously made deals that he must have known Wilson would never have countenanced if present. Recall that House had no official position, at all; the White House porter was more a government official than he. House was only in Paris as Wilson’s alter ego; the actual secretary of state, Robert Lansing, was side-lined, treated as a cipher, a nullity. So while House must bear the blame for having exceeded his phantom remit, it was Wilson who put him in the position of being able to do so in the first place. Had Wilson not been so adamant on denying any scope to the feller who was, you know, the lawful official to discharge that function, Lloyd George and Clemenceau would have no more listened to Edward House than they would Wilson’s barber. Whatever the who-shot-Johns of the matter, the fact remains that after their return to America Wilson never addressed another word to House. 

After Wilson left the White House, his long-time aide, Joseph P. Tumulty, was scrambling to find some hand-hold. The country had swung wildly Republican in the 1920 elections. The Congress was solid Republican and Harding’s White House was dedicated to undoing as many of Wilson’s policies as it could. Tumulty had been with Wilson since his nomination to the New Jersey governor’s mansion ten-plus years before. He’d been loyal, self-sacrificing, incredibly hard-working, discreet – in short, everything you could possibly want in a confidential secretary. And now he was out of work and out of favor in the only town he knew how to navigate. Wilson wouldn’t lift a finger to help him, and when Tumulty finally went too far, publicly attributing to Wilson statements that Wilson had pointedly refused to make at Tumulty’s request, Wilson cut him out of his life. Yes, what Tumulty did was wrong, but how much a strain on common decency is it to see to it that the people who have sacrificed their existences and fortunes to advance your own are taken care of, once you no longer have need of their services? Fairness, however, requires that I mention two other prominent personages who are known to have sinned in this regard, viz. Churchill and Wm. J. Clinton. Churchill never obliged people to commit crimes and take the fall for him, as did the latter, but once Winston was done with you, you were pretty much done with (for a better look at this disappointing aspect of him, see Troublesome Young Men, Lynne Olson’s book about the small number of men who clustered about Churchill during his Wilderness years . . . which of course makes his treatment of them all the more unworthy). 

There are very few words that adequately describe someone who treats people like Wilson treated them. “Vicious” is one that will fit the bill. 

A good deal of Wilson is naturally devoted to the war years and their aftermath, and a central part of that period was Wilson’s growing dedication to the notion of what we now call “collective security.” At the Paris Conference he more or less insisted that adoption of the League of Nations and its incorporation into the final treaty itself (as opposed to making it a side bargain) be the first order of business. He carried that point; the League was adopted pretty much as he’d demanded it be. From that point things didn’t really go his way very well. 

Over the decades Wilson’s taken a good drubbing as some starry-eyed naïf, a little boy in short pants who blunders into a lion’s den with the idea that if they’ll all just take turns licking on his lollipop everyone will do just fine. There is a bit of truth in that. Wilson represented – very simplified – the notion of peace without victory. The problem was, the situation on the ground, both on the former battlefields and behind doors in the chancelleries, just would not admit of that resolution. Every one of the belligerents was a parliamentary democracy, and two of them – Italy and France – were notoriously unstable democracies at that. Even Britain was still operating with its makeshift wartime coalition (how cohesive could a government be that had both Lloyd George and Lord Curzon in it, after all?). Bluntly, they had to answer to their voters, and those voters had just watched most of an entire generation of young men be slaughtered, maimed, gassed, and shell-shocked into twitching bags of nerves. Two of the Allies, France and Belgium, had endured physical destruction on a scale never before seen in human history. Wilson doesn’t seem to have accepted that those populations were just not going to be satisfied with not having won the war. 

On the other hand, and in Wilson’s defense, the objectives of Lloyd George and Clemenceau were no less unrealistic. In a fight, you haven’t won until the other guy acknowledges you’ve won; until then the fight is still on, even though you might not actually be trading punches. The way the Great War came to a close, with an armistice instead of a surrender, with the German army marching home in formation and under arms, and with the social power structures – for which read: the pervasive dominance of the military – still intact, whatever the outcome was, Germany was not in a position of being compelled to acknowledge defeat. And it didn’t. We all know how the poisonous “stab-in-the-back” conspiracy theory came to be seized on in later years, first by the army and then by the Nazis. On a more immediate level, though, Lloyd George and Clemenceau were trying to impose the kind of peace that you would achieve after an unconditional surrender. In a supreme irony, “peace without victory” is not just what Wilson was advocating – it was exactly what Britain and France got. Which is to say that they got neither victory nor peace. 

On a final note of irony, given the personality of the man – remember how he treated Hibben, the closest he ever had to a friend other than his wives – how would Wilson have fared if the U.S. had ratified the Versailles Treaty and joined the League? He couldn’t bear contradiction or defiance. Wilson couldn’t take it when the Princeton trustees wouldn’t let him build residential quadrangles, fer cryin’ out loud. How would he have reacted to the post-war chaos in Eastern Europe? Would he have quit communicating with his fellow heads of state? Would he have recalled the American representative to the League? Would he have taken the U.S. right back out the first time the steeped-in-gore-up-to-the-shoulders politicians of Europe heard one of his sermons and either laughed in his face or gave him the Bronx cheer? How would he have dealt with the Imperial Japanese delegates, men representing a society both incomparably more ancient than Wilson’s own and at the same time aggressively expansionist? 

I understand that in writing a one-volume biography of someone who lived a life such as Wilson’s there’s a tremendous amount that you’re simply not going to get in. So I don’t say this by way of faulting Berg (what I do fault him for are his not-terribly-subtle digs at one end of the modern partisan spectrum, such as by pointing out that Wilson played more golf while in office than any president before or since, or his reference to the second Iraq war), but one thing I looked forward to reading more about were Wilson’s ideas about government, the relationship between the citizen and the state, and the nature and proper purposes of political power. 

Because you see, there are some dissenting voices, even here in America. Not everyone agrees that Wilson was Solomon reincarnate, a veritable saint of equal parts brilliance and compassion. A few years ago I read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, his 2007 tome on the intellectual roots and modern manifestations of the ideas which gave us most famously Mussolini and Hitler. The book’s dated, however, by including a great deal of material on the intellectual antecedents and pronouncements of one Hillary Rodham Clinton, who back then was “inevitably” going to be the 2008 Democrat nominee. Don’t get me wrong: Goldberg’s done his work on Clinton’s intellectual and moral background, and what he lays out is pretty sobering stuff. But unless she’s nominated and elected in 2016 those portions of the book will not age very well. 

For me the by-far most interesting part of Goldberg’s book is Chapter 3, “Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism.” You see, before Wilson was appointed president of Princeton, he was a prolific writer on political subjects; in fact, he’s got a good claim to be godfather of “political science” as a specifically academic subject. Among his most famous works is an 800-page doorstop entitled The State. As a graduate student at Johns Hopkins he produced Congressional Government. Other significant works include Constitutional Government in the United States. Wilson also wrote numerous essays, and his speeches were, in the fashion of the times, compiled into book form. Among the former Goldberg mentions “Leaders of Men,” an 1890 effort, and among the latter The New Freedom, consisting of his 1912 campaign speeches. I’d wanted to see some significant time spent by Berg on those writings, because Goldberg actually quotes from them and from Wilson’s speeches. What he quotes is, to put it mildly, unsettling. 

“No doubt a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as a fundamental principle.” Compare and contrast: Independence, Declaration of. 

The constitutional structures of what we know as checks and balances among the three branches among which coercive power is divided had “proven mischievous just to the extent to which they have succeeded in establishing themselves as realities.” 

“[L]iving political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and must obey the laws of Life . . . it must develop. . . . [A]ll that progressives ask or demand is permission – in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word – to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.” Substitute the German völkisch for Darwinian and you’ve got the “national” part of “national socialism” in a nutshell. 

The “true leader” uses the masses “like tools,” Goldberg quotes. Further, from the same source (“Leaders of Men”): “Only a very gross substance of concrete conception can make any impression on the minds of the masses. They must get their ideas very absolutely put, and are much readier to receive a half truth which they can promptly understand than a whole truth which has too many sides to be seen all at once. The competent leader of men cares little for the internal niceties of other people’s characters; he cares much – everything – for the external uses to which they may be put.” Oh dear; that sounds distressingly like a first cousin to Hitler’s große Lüge – the “big lie.” It also stands in a straight line with “fake-but-true,” the mantra of the modern American legacy media. 

From a speech given in New York during the 1912 campaign, we have, “You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible . . . . But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise.” Tell that to Steve Jobs. Hell, tell that to Oprah Winfrey, for that matter. 

Except for that last one I cannot recall seeing any of those quotations mentioned in Wilson. Goldberg’s endnotes suggest a wide range of further reading on the subject. Not having the time to parse through all of them myself (or maybe not; many are still available on Amazon.com), I was hoping that Berg would do the heavy lifting for me. He didn’t. Again, as the author he’s got to leave something out or he’d never finish the book. On the other hand he does spend a great deal of space on Wilson’s moralistic approach to his political thought. And of course Wilson made his name first as precisely a political theorist. The last line of Berg’s book refers to “the lengthening shadow of Woodrow Wilson” over Washington, DC. It’s exactly because I think Berg’s got that observation just right that I find his omissions in respect of Wilson’s expressions of theory to be especially unfortunate. 

Maybe it’s time for me to mich auseinandersetzen (that wonderful German reflexive verb for which I can’t think of an English equivalent; transliterated it means “to take oneself apart,” and it means to engage in a subject or person fully, by completely unpacking all the components and examining them in the closest detail) with Wilson’s actual writings. Notwithstanding our present Dear Leader’s self-description, no one has come to high office a blank slate. Each person’s road there formed how he or she thought about the world, how it works, how it ought to work, and what measures are necessary or permissible to make it conform to one’s own vision. Wilson was no different. 

My very last semester in college I took one of the most interesting courses I’ve ever taken at any level. History 366 it was, “20th Century American Wars as a Personal and Social Experience.” Two observations by the professor I still remember. The first was that, until the Great War, most Americans’ only exposure to the federal government was in the form of their local post office. The second was that a huge number of the men who made the New Deal cut their teeth in the World War I mobilization effort. Jonah Goldberg makes the argument – which if perhaps a tad overdone isn’t so by much – that World War I was America’s first taste of totalitarian government. 

By “totalitarian” Goldberg means a frame of thought and action which does not view any aspect of human existence as not being appropriately the subject of political (and therefore coercive) control. The war years were years in which Americans were encouraged and recruited to spy on each other. The post office was given carte blanche to monitor and censor Americans’ communications with each other. Loyalty oaths were imposed. Industrial relations were controlled, as were entire swathes of the economy (the railroads were outright seized for the duration). You can make a valid argument that most of those measures were in fact necessary in order to take an economy from peacetime to war mobilization in a matter of months.

The point is that men such as Wilson – “Progressives,” they called themselves – viewed the mobilization effort not as a temporary disruption of an otherwise largely unguided constellation of private arrangements, but as a template for human existence. Remember Wilson’s comments from 1912, well before the war, about how America cannot any longer be a place of unrestricted (highly important word selection there, by the way) individual enterprise. A good deal of the wormwood of the 1920s for the American left was watching the policies of the Wilson years get unwound, first by Harding out of corruption, and then by Coolidge out of principle. You can’t more clearly draw the contrast between Wilson and Coolidge than Silent Cal’s speech on the Declaration’s sesquicentennial (which should be mandatory reading in every American high school, I suggest).

Compare Wilson’s statements on the need for a völkisch Darwinian interpretation of the Constitution and the “nonsense” of inalienable rights with Coolidge’s observations of the same questions, in the context of the Declaration:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

This has turned out to be a bit more than just a book review. I’ve spent more time on other’s treatments of Berg’s subject than is properly done as a general rule. It wasn’t done to suggest that Berg’s written a poor book, but rather to observe that I wish his publisher had let him write a longer one. Berg does a very good job showing us the gauges and needles on the dashboard and how the windows silently slide up and down and where the heater vents are, but I wish he’d popped the hood a bit wider open for us, and shone a stronger drop-light into the engine compartment. I still highly recommend the book, to be read together with Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (speaking of Margaret MacMillan), and Chapter 3 of Liberal Fascism.