419. Post-Hearing Wish List

I wish Christine Blasey Ford had not read "I am terrified" from a script.

I wish Brett Kavanaugh had showed everybody how courts had to look at such a case, seeing it, after all  the convincing, heart-wrenching testimony, after all the coincidence with the great cause of abused women and the tawdry cause of Trump Republicans, as still a she-said-he-said problem, even-steven until somebody could produce corroborating testimony.

I wish that Brett Kavanaugh, if he had to go into his emotional plea, would have waited until after he had ended his judicial analysis with a demonstration that there was no corroborating testimony — to the deed, not to anyone's feelings.

I wish that the prosecutor had held to the one relevant line of questioning, "Does it corroborate or give outside support in any way?"  If, for example, Ford had remembered who the driver was of the car that took her home after she had run down the stairs in distress, that person could have given support to her story  — "Yes, she was in a distressed state."

418. Ian Buruma and the Closing of the American Ear

Jian Ghomeshi, the publication of whose article got the editor of the New York Review of Books fired, agrees with his critics that he was "a world-class prick."  I want to listen to what a world class prick says about his prickhood.  Just as I wanted to hear what a world class pedophile, Humbert Humbert, said about his pedophilia.  I am a grown-up, educated person.

But no, if the moral bullies now riding the crest of feminism have their way, I won't have the chance.  Editors giving me the chance will get fired.  As the editor of the leading feminist journal nearly did for publishing a contrarian article.

What did my open ears hear that might have endangered the cause of sexually harassed and abused women, as good a cause as ever was voiced?  I heard words that showed me how a privileged male thinks, and words that showed me how that very wrong male (as wrong in his eyes as in any) gets wrenched right.  I learned what he does in his shame (curls up in a ball in the dark and contemplates suicide).  I learned how much to trust his words.

Ian Buruma, the fired editor, thought that learning would be good for me, that it would contribute to my, and any educated reader's, always expanding education.  But no, a strong hand covered my ears and a strong arm threw out speakers who might educate me into doubt.

Leaving me one gift: a perfect illustration of Hebraism, the elevation of doing right over seeing clearly.  Buruma paid the price for trying to further Hellenism, elevation of clear-sightedness, in Hebraic times.  It's not often that the meaning of Matthew Arnold's terms is exemplified so clearly.

417. Things Well-Meaning People Have to Avoid Meaning

No, no, Nike, think about what you're putting on the defiant Kaepernick poster.  "Believe in something.  Even if it means sacrificing everything."  Something.  Any damn thing?  Come on. 

Your statement covers the guy who believes that a God who loves him guides his stock market choices.  He sacrifices his savings, his car, his house.   He's under your tent, Nike.

You're like the well-meaning preacher who so believed that "we should love people who are different from us" that she had us rejecting Paul in the Bible.  He made money-making soothsayers, people who had to be distinguished from true prophets, as unlovable as he could.  Made them demons who had to be cast out in Jesus name (Acts 16-19).  But no, said the well-meaning preacher, the demons had to be loved.  They came under the tent of "difference."  (See Post 207.)

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416. Gratitude for Memory

I remember this:

    a maid tipped out water for their hands

from a golden pitcher into a silver bowl,

and set a polished table near at hand;

the larder mistress with her tray of loaves

and savories came, dispensing all her best.

I am looking at this:

young women from the college moving from table to table bringing cake, then ice cream, setting pink punch at the side, and water, "if you want it," bending to hear our feeble answers.

I remember that those serving maids served also their masters' beds, which, if they betrayed, brought death on them from the master, as witness the returned Odysseus's ready noose.

I am looking at women working for degrees in social work or geriatrics, getting a part-time job to help with the tuition, glad to get one that fits their ambition and their instinct to care for the weak

I am remembering where the maids who served Homer's men came from: possession by other men or upbringing in the household after their mothers' possession by other men, the transfer, the post-battle transfer, rendered, for once, from the woman's point of view, the woman bent grieving over the preceding man, feeling "the spear, prodding her back and shoulders."  You're mine now.

I am looking at women who have, or have not, at their choice, taken a lover.

I am remembering a John Manifold poem I loved for another reason, the calm Australian's acceptance of his fate as, with his platoon marching toward their troopship, he sees a girl:

She ran down the stair
A twelve-year-old darling
And laughing and calling
She tossed her bright hair;
Then silent to stare
At the men flowing past her —
There were all she could master
Adoring her there.

It's seldom I'll see
A sweeter or prettier,
I doubt we'll forget her
In two years or three,
And lucky he'll be
She takes for a lover
While we are far over
The treacherous sea.

             

She'll choose the lover.  Not be presented with one determined by her parents (recent past) or by battle (distant past).  Matter-of-factly assumed here, but not noticed until the memory takes in a larger swath of history and literature.  Women's years of being able to choose are so few, so recent!  Seeing that takes a while.  Not many are allowed enough years.

415. Confusion About the National Anthem

When we show respect for the anthem and the flag we are not showing respect for people we are showing respect for laws, the system that protects, among many other things, our right to protest, to peaceably assemble and speak out — as NFL players are doing.

They do this without the risk of being thrown in jail, as in other systems they might.  Here it's just a matter of etiquette where they are legally free not to stand and I am legally free to call it bad manners and confused thinking.

It's a deep kind of confusion with a long history.  Socrates' friends were confused when they wanted him to escape prison because the people who put him there were so wrong.  Socrates won't do it because it would break, and therefore injure, the laws of Athens, which he has enjoyed the benefits of.  Those who convicted him wronged him, made him a victim, as many of our juries do to people, but they were acting within the law, as our juries are.  Socrates patiently shows his friends that he is "not a victim of laws but of men."

As many rightfully aggrieved blacks in our day are.  As, to my understanding, the blacks in Jefferson were.  The laws about police behavior were OK; the still-white police force in a majority black community simply hadn't caught up to them.    

It would be much easier to avoid confusion if the victimized  would avoid the expression "institutionalized racism."  That's a big charge (it takes in our laws), it's much harder to nail down (I have yet to see that done), and it shouldn't be made without specifying the institution and showing how it is racist. Leave it vague and you let careless readers think their victimization is much deeper than it is.  And much harder to end.

414. Places where everybody is a meritocrat.

It's taken me decades but now I know exactly where I want to stand with respect to social constructionists of knowledge — you know, people who believe that "there is no neutral or objective rationality but rather what is understood as knowledge is a socially contingent result of prevailing power dynamics" (Wikipedia, describing critical race theorist Gary Peller's beliefs).  This rules out any objectively determined meritocracy.  I want to stand with Gilbert and Sullivan's all-powerful Mikado as he chooses the eternal repetitions in hell that will exactly fit each crime. 

For social constructionists I will seek out the places where they will cry for someone who they're sure knows what he's doing, like from their backs on an operating table, or standing on the top of a fourteener not knowing how to get down, or on the bridge of a destroyer where if you read the flags wrong you get cut in half by an aircraft carrier.

  I will put them there and then laugh as the Mikado does, on and on, at people like the proud pool shark, who must play forever "on a cloth untrue/ With a twisted cue/And elliptical billiard balls."  Ah-ha-ha-Ah-ha-ha-Ah-ha-ha louder and louder until you can't help joining in seeing the poor bastard lining up a shot and then another and thinking of the poor constructionist bastard on the table yelling, "Prevailing power dynamics my ass, do you have an MD? a certification in residency? did you show superior merit with the scalpel?  Oh my poor rupturing appendix."

Like the Mikado I realize I am letting my sadism show so I pretend that each of these prisoners in hell is presented only as "A source of innocent merriment!/ Of innocent merriment!"   Ah-ha-ha-ah.

I'd feel sorrier if there weren't such a serious point to be made here: that life is full of real hazards, and we need each others' help, and some people know the hazards better than others.  People who dismiss that knowledge deserve the laughter they get.  They are a danger.  

Are there such people?  No, they've been pretty well laughed off the stage.  Only in academia, only up the Ivory Tower, will you find them.  That's the only place where people can still get so far from the real world that they can't hear its laughter.

413. Another Last Nail in the Coffin of Cultural Relativism

So, Brazil's National Museum is burning, firefighters arrive, hook up their hoses to fire hydrants, and lo, the hydrants don't work.

Making sure that fire hydrants work is a cultural thing.  You know that when you start guessing the chances of a fire hydrant not working in Germany or Sweden or Scotland or — I won't go on; start in the north and work south, then go to other continents.  Some functionary at the bottom of the hierarchy feels miserable if he doesn't make his semi-annual check.  That's part of certain cultures, making functionaries feel miserable and guilty to the point of ulcers and complexes and national lamentations over what we're doing to our sweet children.  Oh the twisted psyches.  For what?

For museums standing with their precious contents on display for students to learn from and love.  For a population that can govern itself, and hold together, and get things done long-term.  That takes guilt and probably ulcers and turns the carefree children of the warm south into such an attractive alternative — until their governments fall apart and their museums burn down.

412. Poem: Louie and the Academic Tradition

I need to tell you that though both Louie and I still think in street-fight language (since we were both Chicago street fighters) Louie sometimes speaks it and you never know when it's going to come out like yesterday at the faculty-training session this vice-president tells us not to say “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” because it could be offensive and Louie right next to me jumps up and says, "WHA-A-A-T?  Are you out of your..." and he came as close to saying "fucking mind" as I ever saw a full professor come at a provost's meeting all he got was as far as the fricative and then he just said after a hitch "mind" and all of us who were thinking "fucking mind" said "whew" but it wasn't over because Louie who though he was like me just a GI Bill nouveau he had absorbed his Robert Hutchins (one of us Chicago guys) and believed in Great Books and Western Civilization as passionately as any of those New York guys those nouveaus (Jews) like Lionel Trilling so when this vice president who had gotten a Ph.D in academic administration learning how to do advanced group dynamics with profs says don't give voice to this belief Louie says you don't know who the hell you are talking to brother (some thought he said buster) and then I mean you don't know what you are telling me you are telling me that I can't argue out an important issue with Pete and Margaret I can't lay out my belief and they can't attack it and that's what we academics do in the tradition that's come down from Socrates brother (some were sure he said buster here) and it's called the academic tradition and I saw the vice-president turning white and Louie turning red and I thought oh-oh here we go and I started pulling on his pants but I couldn't stop him he said academic tradition academic tradition you don't understand it but maybe you can understand this and he slammed his finger at him with each word YOU...KEEP...YOUR...HANDS...OFF...WHAT WE'RE DOING...and it might have been OK if he had stopped there and maybe still OK if he had stopped after saying YOU'RE ITS GODDAM SERVANT NOT ITS BOSS even with the goddam but no not Louie he has to go on calling him a servant of pussycats, gah dam pussycats (who I want to know is going to pick up the Thurber reference?) pussycats with a chance to be bullies, while I'm damn near pulling his pants off but we don't get him in his seat until Fred gets a hand on him and then when he calms down what does Louie do he looks around like he expects applause like from his buddies in the alley what are you going to do with a prof like that?