409. Poem: Knowing How to Do It

Man, I said, that's the  only thing we can fall back on after we've taken continents away from people and made them slaves that we know how to do things and that may not make up for our crimes but at least it keeps those people from giving up the knowing we passed on which is good for them and maybe, just maybe, makes them a little grateful and makes some of them maybe feel a little less high on their horse because gratitude heh heh lets us say aren't you accomplices, complicit in the crime and if they say certainly not we're victims we ask well do you want us to give back the continent and return the slaves' children to theirs and they say that's impossible now and we say yes and everybody knows it and a few know what a rare privilege you enjoy to be able to have the benefits of another's crime without being complicit because you would oh so willingly give the benefits back but alas you can't and we say every culture has a name for that and historians will know it and learn it and stick it under your saddle and maybe you will come down and join the accomplice party with us and we will all lift a glass to ahem American know-how but before we get on our horse you can ask how much do you know about doing funerals and I say oh oh I've known child after child who through long years had learned enough about a person as wife and mother to fill a book of poetry but the best they could say when they the center of the service got up to speak was that she was "real special" and the grateful primitives can say so you don't do ceremony or language very well do you and ask us to listen to one of their children:

She is clothed with strength and dignity;
    she can laugh at the days to come.
She speaks with wisdom,
    and faithful instruction is on her tongue.
She watches over the affairs of her household
    and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children arise and call her blessed;
    her husband also, and he praises her:
“Many women do noble things,
    but you surpass them all.”
Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;
    but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
 Honor her for all that her hands have done,
    and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

408. Let's lose the word "meddling."

As in "Russia is meddling in our elections!"  As in even the coolest news outlets.  PBS.  Yamiche Alcindor must have used it thirty times Monday night.  It was her only word for Russia's fault.  It's the alt's, it's the mainstream's, it's the commentariat's main word.  My wife walks in on a program late and picks up only the outrage.  "What have the Russians done now?" she asks. Meddled in our election.  Still.  "Indicated meddling... established meddling... denied meddling... meddle, meddle, meddle."

We've got to find another word if we're going to maintain our outrage.  Which is the purpose of it all, isn't it?  I mean, how can you win an election in America unless you can say your opponent is insufficiently outraged by Russian behavior?  How can you save your newspaper, how can you sell your newsmagazine, how can you give your program an edge, if you don't maintain outrage?  The habits of young people can take you only so far, you know.

How we forget the lessons of the past.  Do we think George W. Bush could have gotten us behind his invasion of Iraq if he hadn't kept the picture of its outrageously cruel dictator before us, the third in a veritable triumvirate of evil.  Evil, man.  If you're not outraged by that you don't deserve to live in a Christian country.

Unless you're outraged by communism, evil enough to do the job without theological support.  How could you, I ask you, how could you let the CIA land its nut cases unless it's on the shore of evil ninety miles away.  Not to mention letting Lyndon Johnson land the Marines on that farther shore.

The trouble with "meddling in our elections" is there's a limit on how long it can work.  Sooner or later somebody in the warm commentariat is going to notice or remember what somebody in the cool commentariat has said about meddling, that we meddle too.  As busily as the Russians.  All the way.

 Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favored Italian candidates. Scandalous stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets, posters and stickers printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia.  The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’ history of intervention in foreign elections. 

That's Scott Shane, in the Times (2-17-18).  He quotes Steven L. Hall, CIA chief of Russian operations, 30-year veteran: “If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,”

Loch K. Johnson, an academic and sworn to cool, says Russia’s 2016 operation was "simply the cyber-age version of standard United States practice for decades.  'We’ve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947....We’ve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners — you name it. We’ve planted false information in foreign newspapers. We’ve used what the British call "King George’s cavalry": suitcases of cash.'”

So then the dawn comes and the word crashes. We need  something that refers to actual lawbreaking. "Indictable"?  "Criminal"?  That's what the FBI is supposed to investigate isn't it, crimes?  Not reprehensible behavior.

Mueller got something specific on the twelve Russian agents, hacking into a computer network, but the words for this, "breaking our laws," lacked flame.  Nothing like "meddling in our elections."  It remains to be seen how many of Mueller's other charges will stand up.  So far the exposure is not producing many outrage bytes, and doesn't seem likely to.

"Outrage?  You want outrage?"  Oh, oh, one of our guys is heating up.  "What the hell's the idea of taking up our time with all these non-issues?  God Almighty there's a whole planet heating up under us.  Russian meddling my ass.  Get real."

407. A Poem about Trump and Putin

Where do you throw your support when an unsupportable president moves to change the least supportable policy of the four presidents before him?  I mean nobody, nobody who really thinks about it, can defend our pushing against Russia when the Cold War ended, acting as if it hadn't ended, taking Russia's moves towards accommodation as signs of weakness, keeping NATO in the same mode, pushing its borders ever eastward, threatening to make war-treaty allies of countries snug against its interior (Ukraine, Georgia, Abkasia) when there really wasn't a need for NATO at all any more?  No you can't, it's not supportable, but only a few guys in think tanks and one brain on spindly legs in Foreign Policy are saying so, nobody in public life, until along comes this insufferable blowhard, speaking in tweets saying just what needs to be said.  And you're going to say, "Amen, brother"?  How can you say "Amen, brother" to an asshole?

406. A Border Discussion Changer

Note:  Another article drawn from these blog posts has been published in the Philosophical Forum. ("Academic Freedom, Tenure, and the Unclouded Mind," Summer, 2018.)


Here's a point, made in the Saturday (6-22) New York Times by Shaila Dewan, that might color all the rest of the discussion of separating children from parents undergoing prosecution (as we are doing at the Mexican border): we separate children from their parents all the time, all over the country.

"A quarter of a million American children are estimated to have a single mother in jail."  That was thirteen years ago.  More have been added.  Every single parent had to go through prosecution.  Separation began as soon as the parent was arrested. There were many arrests from which jail time did not follow.  Separations probably mount into the millions.

Dewan forces our attention from the crying child we can see on our screens to the thousands of crying children we can't see, and count on our imaginations to produce for us. "What are you going to do — or have your representatives do — about them, aroused citizen?  Do?  Do?  What?  What?"

We're thrown into the usual sobering tank reserved for the over-indulgent.  "D0?  Well I'd just....oh, oh."  Have the children accompany the parent?  The whole way?  In the holding cell?  At the arraignment?  Through the trial?  Home each evening to the cell?

"Well, crossing the border illegally isn't as bad as the crimes that got those people in jail.  And the consequences for the children are worse."  Yes, but the crossing is still illegal and the law says nothing about changes in enforcement according to degree of severity of the consequences of the prosecution process.

"I say it's a bad law and it ought to be changed."  By whom?  You?  Me?  The good people?  If you are good enough, if your heart is touched deeply enough, are you entitled to change or make up laws?  What do you mean by "the rule of law"?  The border-crossers who bring with them these heart-breaking children are in the category of all the others Dewan talks about: "lawbreakers."

"That's hard to refute but it, like a lot of irrefutable things, is just plain wrong.  A system, a set of rules, an enforcement agency that results in suffering like this can't be right."

Yes, my own heart makes me agree.

"So what's the remedy?  So how will you avoid this heartless legalism you've been expressing."

I see nothing we can certainly trust but I see something we can probably trust and have successfully trusted in the past, the distribution 0f superior imagination in the human race.  Put enough human beings in a tight spot — physically, morally, intellectually — and a few of them are going to figure a way out.  Here it would be a way that saved the children without breaking the law or ignoring established principle or flaunting practical need or opening the door to license.  After that it would be coming up with the right ambiguous and evasive language to get the whole bright idea past the opposition.  In short, what you have to trust in a democracy.

"And, as usual, you come out with no clear victory."

No, and no clear lesson for the future.  Your leaders just muddle through, and it's very hard to draw from a muddle lessons that will be useful the next time.  The next time will be different. 

"Just one damned muddle after another.  You don't see much."

No, but I do see a constant, the sobering-up tank.  Whether you've been drunk on moral outrage or dizzy with the weight of the legal club in your hand it's good to extend your time there.  Exercising your own imagination.  That will be a help to you and your country no matter what the next tight spot is.

405. The Trumpification of Public Speech

In his memoir James Comey has filtered an editorial into what we had a right to expect would be straight news.  Donald Trump is "unethical, and untethered to truth.... his leadership is transactional, ego driven."  Strong opinions, with which many would agree, but with no more authority than any other editorialist's opinions.

Where Comey does have the authority that makes a claim on our interest is in his privileged position observing what Trump did and said.  Feed us what you know, James, let us put that with whatever we've learned from other sources, and we'll write our own editorial.

That's respecting the reader.  It's honoring the implicit promise an educated person makes when he or she communicates something to another educated person:  "I will not try to slip anything over on you."  Sliding your authority as FBI director over the weaker authority you share with ordinary editorialists, to strengthen it, is slipping something over.

Respect for the reader is what the New York Times was for many years famous for.  Along with trust that the reader would get a point without a megaphone in his ear.  Now, with Donald Trump, the Times can't seem to maintain that trust.  How else to explain the redundance of evidence about him, with only minute variations?  "Trump is an incompetent asshole, he is, he is.  See?  See?"

Redundance in the news, redundance in the editorials.  On the Op-Ed page variations, within a narrow range, on dismay, indignation, outrage.  Broader variations in wit, irony, analogy, ridicule, sneers (so witty you can't help laughing — for a while), but with diminishing returns.  Inability to hear readers like me, saying,  "Look, I already know what kind of asshole Trump is; I've used up my appreciation of easy wit on this subject."

I'm probably putting the whole load of my liberal-media reading and listening onto the Times (David Brooks and Mark Shields on PBS were as complaisant as anybody) but I think my sense of a great change in public discourse is sound.  Donald Trump has — if coarseness were ever justified, it's here — turned American public discourse into a pissing contest.

I know, this has happened before, and shouldn't exercise us.  But this time it's an accepted pissing contest.  No voice (with Comey I'm waiting to hear from the Times) is saying "they shouldn't be speaking like this"; all  are asking, "Who's winning?" or, if they've decided that, cheering their man.

For educated people, in the stands, it's a new kind of cheer.  Where once the roar came at a solid point driven home, it now comes when the stream finds its mark.  "Man, he really wetted him down on that one!"

Whatever the immediate outcome, the long-term winner is Donald Trump.  It's his game, played on his kind of ground.  And if educated people think they can, with their superior wit, at least win in the short term, they are mistaken.  Get in a pissing contest with a skunk and, as the folk axiom ought to remind them, you can only lose.

404. What to say to those who defend gun freedom.

To accomplish anything we can't sneer, belittle, or condescend.  That gets their backs up.  We can't argue the legality of their position.  They're on good constitutional ground.  It would be so good to move them from their position but we have little leverage.  

So what can we say to them?  All I can see is something like this: "Look, doesn't the issue come down to your pleasure?  Matched against the risks to these children?"

They can't argue that an assault rifle is useful or necessary to them.  They can only argue — as they do — that taking an AR-15 out on the range or into the woods is a pleasure.  To which they have a right, and which harms nobody else, and which is shared by millions who don't harm anybody.

Here's where we turn to risk.  They can't, in reason, deny that barring or limiting assault weapons will reduce the risk of mass shootings.  There's too much evidence in the experience of other countries.

So we ask them, in as public a setting as possible, "If you hold to this position are you not saying that you are willing to risk the murder of these children in order to preserve your pleasure?" 

How not?  There is nothing other than pleasure they can claim.

We have to hope that the outrageous disproportion, morally, between the claim of the children and their claim will occur to them, and change them.  Or that knowledge that it has occurred to the audience will do the job, through shame.  What other hope is there?

403. Poem: Harassment

"How Some in the Finance Industry Are Trying to Cash In on #MeToo," Business Section, NYT, 1-29-18

So these guys won't leave me alone they're waitin' at the bus stop and crowdin' around me in the supermarket how about it how about it and I got so sick of it I went to Miguel and told him the whole story to see what the family pride and joy could do and he said who knows your story and I said only Rita and he said yeah Rita the Big Mouth who took her mouth to the women's protest meeting and told your story and there was a reporter there no wonder you had all those guys after you they were quick-loan people and I say why why why they have the hots for me they're worse than convention big shots and Miguel says honey it's that story and I say how can that be when Rita didn't give any names and he said baby these are lawyers and when they hear a story with money in it they'll dig out the names and you baby you are worth plenty now because the guy who chased you around the room until you fell down turned out to be a billionaire a billionaire chasing an mother of three who after taking her broken hand to the hospital lost her cover and will lose her job and her kids baby you are worth more than half a mouse in a pizza especially now when the market for harassment is so high and I say what market and he says the justice market the justice market that's what us lawyers call the mechanism the mechanism we call it that determines the worth of jury-touching victims hot for money they can use right away and not have to wait for the end of the trial their need you know and if they have  a lot of unpaid rent and grocery bills they're not going to stop at high interest very high interest and you are at the top of that market baby and that is why you are being harassed by all those guys at the bus stop.