Lotta talk about books being banned, and I should probably hold my tongue rather than confuse the issue by plagiarizing Shakespeare’s “pox on both your houses.”
Truth is I’m very much in the house that has Maus, The Bluest Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, and others on its shelves and tables available to children as soon as they are able to read them. Problem is that I’m also an ardent advocate of Huckleberry Finn, a book that many in that same house have wanted banned from schools due to the use of a slur common at the time it was written.
For years I marveled at the irony. Twain’s narrative of a runaway white boy who aids and abets a runaway slave is arguably the most profound statement ever made against racism by a white writer. For it to be under attack from those who profess to be against racism struck me as a self-inflicted wound, a PR gift to that other house that condemns ours as “cancel culture.”
Social media has taught me otherwise. Huckleberry Finn is as readily condemned by some on the left as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Diary of Anne Frank are condemned by the right for a reason that has nothing to do with ideology, left or right:
Very few people on either side ever read books.
Hell, few are willing to read blogs of 1,000 words or op-ed columns of 650. Notice the comments drawn on social media by links to articles of any length. For starters, the number is a fraction of comments–or likes–gained by a picture of a dog or that morning’s breakfast. And most of those respond only to the photo and the caption, maybe to the opening line, with no indication of or response to the substance of the blog or column.
Given that, how could anyone think that more than very few Americans have the attention span for books that typically range from 70,000 to 150,000 words? As the writer of books, blogs, and columns, I risk sounding as though I’m indulging in self-pity, but I can assure you that these results have no effect on me. How else could I keep at it? Why else would I?
I resolved long ago that I’ll do all I can do and let indifference fall where it may. Writers far more profound and prolific than I have and will continue to suffer the same fate. I imagine that they do it as I do it, because we cannot not do it, and because if enough people in our own house ever wake up, we’ve placed plenty of food for thought on their breakfast table.
If nothing else, at least our grandchildren will have evidence that we didn’t hold our tongues, that we made efforts, that we tried. I can hear Lachlan and Briana exclaiming long after I’m gone: “So that’s what happened on Planet Zobo!”
Between now and then, there’s a chance that what they read of Planet Earth’s history will be censored by the same people who insist that statues are the way to know history.
That’s what the residents of that other house say. It would be an easy position to discredit if not for the overly-policed language in our own overly-sensitive house that makes their claim of “cancel culture” stick. It would be taken seriously if we didn’t keep the other side laughing with our own ridiculous pronoun wars. It would be simple to show that the use of “critical race theory” is a fabricated scare tactic applied to anything about race–about slavery and Jim Crow, about segregation and discrimination–if not for our own myopic idea that language of the past should be sanitized for the present.
It would be a slam dunk to keep Art Spiegelman and Toni Morrison in public schools if we weren’t calling fouls on Mark Twain.
You cannot condemn one book for a word that creates discomfort, and then ridicule those who want to condemn other books that reveal the source of that discomfort. For that matter, this is a superficial debate that obscures the purpose of education: These are schools, not nursing homes.
Maybe that’s why I haven’t held my tongue. That, and the fact that history’s foremost recurrent lesson is that problems are never solved until those who want them solved are willing to piss people off, right and left.
If she/her, he/him, they/them think that’s a pox, so be it.
If there’s to be a new justice on the Supreme Court, why not make it poetic justice?
Whether we use the term or not, we all enjoy the concept: Someone does bad but gets away with it until something other than the law, something unforeseen, evens the score.
What makes it poetic is that the something is somehow related to the original deed. Furthermore, there’s no statute of limitations on it. On a national level, poetic justice might now prevail 30 years after the miscarriage of a judicial nomination in which a young senator from Delaware played a key role, something for which he has since profusely apologized.
To truly atone for it, President Biden can serve poetic justice along with American justice with his soon-to-be-made nomination for the Supreme Court:
Anita Hill.
Before we consider the cosmic karma for Clarence Thomas, let’s get Biden’s stipulations out of the way: An African-American woman, Hill has practiced and taught law for nearly four decades. As have all three of the women believed to be at the top of Biden’s short list, Hill has more legal experience than Amy Coney Barrett. To top that, she was practicing law by the time Neil Gorsuch saw his mother forced to resign as the head of Reagan’s EPA after turning it into a piggy-bank for developers.*
And by the time Brett Kavanaugh was forcing himself on Christine Blasey Ford.
For those too young to recall the early 90s, a quick search will tell you in as much detail as you can stand–right down to the top of a Coca-Cola can–about the sexual harassment charges brought against Clarence Thomas upon his nomination to the Supreme Court. Hill was reluctant to bring them, but a knowing reporter, depending on which account you read, either talked or forced her into it.
Making it public forced an equally reluctant Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by a young Joe Biden to hold hearings that riveted the nation for ten days in October of 1991. Walking a fine but nervous line between expediting Thomas’ nomination and not appearing to be rude to or dismissive of Hill, they implied that Hill’s memory had been magnified by time, which in turn hinted that she was a woman scorned and out for revenge. They sent the nomination to the Senate without recommendation, and eleven Democrats from otherwise red states joined Republicans to approve Thomas, 52-48.
An easy way to understand what went down 31 years ago would be to compare it to the Kavanaugh hearings just four years ago, but that would miss two crucial details.
One: In 1991, Pres. George H.W. Bush was concerned about his re-election just a year away. Whereas Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett were all choices to rev up the base, Bush wanted to split the opposition. What better way to do it than to pick a conservative African-American? For a time, it worked, effectively pitting feminists against mainstream liberals.
Two: Thomas’ wife, Ginni, was already a rising star in arch-conservative circles. A lobbyist and fund-raiser for the most hardline causes all these years–pro-gun, anti-choice, pro-development, anti-regulation–Ginni Thomas is now connected to the Jan. 6 insurrection as more than a mere cheerleader on social media.
No one is yet saying whether her name appears in the many documents that were released last week to the Senate investigators thanks to a Supreme Court ruling of 8-1. That Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenting vote to keep insurrection secrets seems damning on its face, but the fact that he voted at all rather than recusing himself may have a second ulterior motive.
In the Carter years, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against Bob Jones University’s attempt to keep its tax-exempt status despite its endorsements and funding efforts for right-wing and mostly racist candidates and causes. The lone dissent was that of William Rehnquist.
In 1986, when Chief Justice Warren Berger retired, Ronald Reagan chose Rehnquist for the top spot.
The rest of us may miss it due to all the credit Reagan has received for appointing the first woman to the Supreme Court in 1981, but the lesson of 1986–rewards for loyalty to hard-right causes–was not lost on Thomas.
That’s why he should have to sit on the court with Anita Hill. Not near enough where he can whisper “Long John Silver” into her ear, but across a table where he’d have to face her.
But that’s just for starters. Although talk of stacking the Supreme Court has died down, and will stay dead as long as the Senate has two Republicans in Democratic clothing, a resurgence of progressive Democrats in the mid-term could make it happen. When the improving economic news surfaces over the manufactured distrust and paranoia, it will.
The objection regarding rules is easy to dispel. The denial of an appointment by a president with ten months left in his term has already bent the rules beyond recognition. And by the standard set in 2016, the hastening of confirmation in 2020 bent the rules yet again. Between those two was one that Republicans refused to investigate despite credible charges. In effect, we just lived through a one-term presidency that stacked the Supreme Court. Given the ages of all three appointments, that will be for decades to come.
Unless the Republicans want to prevail upon at least two illegitimate appointees to resign, the only answer to their stack is to re-stack.
Yes, I know it’s unlikely, but that’s what makes poetic justice delicious. Along with Clarence face to face with Anita, think of Brett having to hear what’s on Christine’s hippocampus. And, oh, how Neil would squirm if the truck driver he ruled against had a seat on the court.
In case you missed it, the truck broke down on a mid-winter, sub-zero run, middle of nowhere, no one on the road. The driver, freezing to death, took a ride to get help. He succeeded, but the company fired him for leaving the truck, a violation of his contract. The driver won in court, but Gorsuch dissented. When asked about it by Sen. Al Franken in the confirmation hearing, he insisted that a contract must be upheld regardless of extenuating circumstances. He dodged Franken’s attempts to make him acknowledge that the circumstance in this case was literally life or death.
Can’t help but wonder if that dissent–like Rehnquist’s re: Bob Jones–was what gained Gorsuch’s seat on the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas sure seems to think so.
As for Barrett, it really doesn’t matter who the choices are. Just cover them with red cloaks and put a white lampshades on their heads, and poetic justice will be served in more ways than one.
Looking for a biography of Herman Melville, I laughed at what I found. Out loud. In a public library.
At first I assumed that Melville in Love was misplaced, a modern day Harlequin treatment of a period romance, an American response to England’s Shakespeare in Love. The cover suggested this with a Victorian painting of a young couple on a picnic. Melville without a beard? This time I covered my laugh. With the book no less.
Then I noticed the subtitle. Novels don’t have subtitles, and this one was dead serious: The Secret Life of Herman Melville and the Muse of Moby-Dick.
To be sure, I opened to the back pages to find other items required for non-fiction, acknowledgments, notes, and a bibliography. Yes, this is real. I worried that there was no index–as they always prove useful when reading and indispensable when reviewing biographies and histories–until I saw the note on the last page: “For a detailed index, and many other extras, please see…” followed by Melville in Love‘s own website.
Already amazed that I never heard of Michael Shelden’s 2016 book, I was more surprised on the site to learn of a 2018 documentary film based on it. (Links to both below.)
Melville in Love offers plausible answers for questions long drowned out by thin assumptions. How did the popular writer of sea adventures suddenly create the wild, ferocious, philosophical Moby-Dick? How could he then write a novel on the subject of incest? Was Melville gay? Did he lose his mind?
Melville lived in obscurity for the last 25 years of his life, and not until 30 years after that did the manuscript for Billy Budd surface when a biographer interviewed his granddaughter who had just found it in a dust-smothered box in her New Jersey attic. In the early 1920s, the one-two punch of the biography and the posthumous novella roared Melville back into the popularity he had before it went down with Ahab and the Pequod in 1851.
Only this time, the critics were also on board. So, too, were fellow writers, including D.H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham who both insisted that Moby-Dick was the work of an artist deeply in love and writing to impress his muse. No, they had no proof, but on this subject I’ll take the hunches of the creators of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Of Human Bondage over those who think that stories with all male characters indicate that the writer must be gay.
Shelden offers evidence for those hunches based on six letters that Melville wrote to his neighbor, Mrs. Sarah Morewood, whom he met while on a getaway from New York City at a boarding house in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. The free-spirited wife of a rich New York merchant, she soon talked her husband into buying the house (which today is the Pittsfield Country Club) where she could avoid city-life which she detested. Hubby stayed with his lightning-rod business in the city and visited on occasion.
Upon his return to NYC, Melville immediately arranged to purchase the dilapidated farmhouse next door, which he named Arrowhead (now a tourist attraction). There he lived with his wife, four sisters, mother, and four children–with none of whom he shared a warm relationship–for twelve years, moving out months after Sarah Morewood died of tuberculosis at age 40.
The letters are racy, and by 19th Century standards they might have been rated X, although Nathaniel Hawthorne’s scarlet A would have sufficed. Irony here is that most teachers and students of American literature, including me, have thought that Hawthorne was Melville’s muse, as the effusive dedication of Moby-Dick seems to suggest. But as Shelden points out, Hawthorne lived in the Berkshires just one year and hated it. Moreover, he lived six miles south of Arrowhead, and rarely ventured out. Also, he was fiercely private and reserved. Though he respected and had high praise for Melville and his work, he never took to Melville’s gregarious, bumptious ways and avoided him.
Melville was desperate for someone to talk to about his work, about literature, about art. Living with six women who had no interest outside of hearth and home, he would have seemed aloof. That made it easy to interpret the depression after the commercial failure of Moby-Dick and the interpretation of Pierre as “his suicide note” as evidence of a man losing his mind.
But he did have someone to talk to who was as well-versed in literature as he. Thankfully, Sarah Morewood saved his letters to her and wrote many of her own that Shelden was able to glean from others in the Berkshire and NYC literary circles. Too bad Melville never saved any sent to him. Perhaps, he feared the same fate as Pierre and Isabel, characters that we might now see as stand-ins for Herman and Sarah.
Pierre, or The Ambiguities may be the most polarizing novel in American literature. Critics at the time and to this day condemn it as unrelenting, nihilistic anger and rage. But the Beat poets praised it as the beginning of interior monologue some 40 years before Henry James was credited with inventing it. Some on both sides consider the theme of incest a stand-in for homosexuality, one taboo subject for another.
With the newly surfaced letters, however, Shelden makes a strong case that incest was a stand-in for adultery, which was just as taboo at the time. To be honest, any fan of Melville might chafe at the claims of gay-rights groups these past 50 years that he is a role model for them. Not only is their premise thin–all-male crews on ships, the dedication to Hawthorne–but evidence to the contrary has always been in plain sight.
His first novel, Typee, as Shelden reminds us, featured a young, barely-if-at-all-dressed Polynesian woman named Fayaway who kept company with the narrator and gave Melville a romantic mystique which made him the most popular author in both America and England in the late 40s. In a New-York Tribune review, Margaret Fuller, America’s most prominent feminist at the time, praised the book, offering that “many a Desdemona might seriously incline her ear to the description of the lovely Fayaway.” Even the staid Hawthorne was aroused by “voluptuously colored” descriptions of “native girls.” Fayaway became the name of race horses, yachts, pets, and a private nickname for Sarah Morewood.
As for the scenes in Moby-Dick considered homoerotic, Shelden casts new light on them with the revelation that the word “reverie” was a 19th Century euphemism for “masturbation,” and that Melville, via Ishmael, was satirizing the pamphlets of moralists such as Pittsfield’s Rev. John Todd given to young boys to steer them away from carnal sin and save them from blindness.
Apart from sex, Shelden reveals another influence on Melville, that of English painter J.M.W. Turner:
Like Turner at his easel, Melville learned to make a virtue of the art of indistinctness. Moby-Dick is the literary equivalent of a gallery filled with the best of Turner’s canvases… which can be felt in the bold sweep of the story, in the iridescence of the language and in the author’s frequent willingness to cast a suggestive haze over certain scenes.
One of Turner’s paintings, The Angel Standing in the Sun, is on the wall of the Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford where Ishmael hears Father Mapple’s sermon before boarding the Pequod. At Arrowhead, Melville had a collection of engravings that included “at least 33 from Turner’s work.”
In his upstairs study at Arrowhead, Melville placed his writing table before a window facing north. From his chair, he could see, 15 miles away, Mt. Greylock, the scene of many of his walks and picnics with Sarah Morewood. The mountain, shaped like a whale from that angle, is often in a haze that renders it ambiguous, much like a whale during the hunt in a turbulent sea, much like a Turner canvas.
Immediately following Moby-Dick, Melville quickly wrote Pierre. Subtitled the Ambiguities, the novel is dedicated to Mt. Greylock. Critics and many of Melville’s friends took this as evidence of cracking up. Considering the scandal that would have erupted had he dedicated the book to a married woman, Melville in Love suggests that “Mt. Greylock” is code.
With that, Shelden answers the questions regarding the creation of Moby-Dick otherwise drowned out by thin assumptions.
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Sarah Morewood
The view of Mount Greylock from Herman Melville’s farmhouse. (Bob Shaffer/WBUR)
A year ago, Frances McDormand became the first Oscar winner ever to use an acceptance speech to plug an upcoming film.
And no one knew it.
A few film reviewers recognized that she was quoting from Macbeth but gave no indication of the film adaptation–with McDormand and Denzel Washington in the lead roles–that may not have begun production by that time. So it is with Shakespeare: An inside joke so suited to outside purpose that it was a highlight of every report:
“I have no words: my voice is in my sword,” she said, quoting Macduff, Macbeth’s adversary. She then held up the Oscar and added: “We know the sword is our work, and I like work. Thank you for knowing that, and thanks for this.”
Worth noting, too, that McDormand won that Oscar for her leading role in Nomadland, including an idyllic scene in a campground where she recites a Shakespeare sonnet to a shy young drifter love-sick for a girl back home. From “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” to “Out, out, damned spot!” From Fern to Lady Macbeth, vagabond to queen. So it is with Shakespeare.
The Tragedy of Macbeth now plays at theaters near you, including Newburyport’s Screening Room where your skittish projectionist just showed it twice and thought he needed therapy after watching it once.*
Since the story is four centuries old, we don’t need any spoiler alerts, nor does it matter if you see it before or after another 400-year-old tragedy. There are many good reasons to see Joel Coen’s new adaptation of the Scottish play–the acting, the pace, the cinematography–but best of all may be the comparison to Orson Welles’ Othello 70 years ago.
We may call it black-and-white, but Coen follows Welles’ lead with film that would be more accurately called shadow-and-light. Characters move across it, through it, into it, out of it. When Macbeth paces his arcade, it’s now-you-see-him, now-you-don’t–not due to the structure but to the shade its columns cast. These sharp contrasts at times give way to scenes of fog from which characters appear and into which they disappear.
This constant play of light and dark and swirling gray serve the film like a soundtrack. Scan the opening lines of reviews for the current Macbeth listed in any search and you will find words such as stark, crackling, and menacing, phrases such as lurking uneasiness throughout, bewitching craftsmanship, and, my favorite, bard noir. All of which are as accurate as toxic power couple for Scotland’s 11th Century version of Bill & Hillary.
All reviewers–okay, here’s a spoiler alert–are impressed by the three witches that Shakespeare concocted to ignite the action, mostly because Coen cast one actor, Kathryn Hunter, to play all three. Says one review, “the witches are given very corvid postures and appearances, and transform into massive ravenish creatures.”
When they open the film and deliver their prophecy to Macbeth and Banquo, it’s easy to settle back thinking that you are in for an Elizabethan treat. But by the time Lady Macbeth steels her husband’s nerve to “do the deed,” you may wonder if you are listening Shakespeare or to commentators on cable news:
But cruel are the times… when we hold rumor from what we fear, yet we know not what we fear.
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
I think our country sinks beneath the yoke; it weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash is added to her wounds.
I am in the earthly world, where to do harm is often laudable, to do good sometime accounted dangerous folly.
Alas, poor country, almost afraid to know itself. It cannot be called our mother but our grave, where nothing but who knows nothing is once seem to smile; where signs and groans, and shrieks that rent the air, are made, not marked; where violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
O Scotland, Scotland!… O nation miserable!… Fare thee well! My hope ends here!
All of those are Shakespeare’s words. But they give voice to an unmistakably modern American sword. So it is.
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*Macbeth ends its week-long run at 7:00 tonight (Thursday) but will have two more screenings: Sunday, Jan. 30 @ 4:00 pm, and Wednesday, Feb. 2 @ 1:15 pm.
Note: This is Joel Cohen’s 19th film, his first without brother Ethan. And this is the 20th film adaptation of Macbeth. The first starred and was directed in 1948 by Orson Welles who played up the role of the three witches to highlight the conflict between early Christianity and Celtic beliefs in Scotland.
“Due to high volumes, you may experience long wait times for customer support. We greatly appreciate your patience.”
So says the actual text on a hi-tech service. Such statements are common, not just in the world of hi-tech, but for utility companies, appliance manufacturers, and others. On the surface, these statements are in simple, plain English.
Below the surface, we can translate them into simple, plain economics. Here’s how Helen Highwater hears it:
In order to pay our top execs enough for them to put up with constant demands from regulators and politicians, we are unable to hire enough customer support staff–even if we had qualified candidates to fill those new positions.
This scam goes hand-in-pocket–their hand, our pocket–with claims of inflation.
We believe those claims because we have seen prices climb in every aisle of the supermarket. Within months, for example, the prices of haddock and cod–both once plentiful here in New England–have jumped from $8 and $9 per pound to $13 and $14. As bad as that is, it seems reasonable compared to the next tray where halibut has jumped from $22 to $30.
But what do fish, or fruit or frozen dinners have to do with CEOs whose income is now 350-times that of their average employees, enough to launch them into space for ten minutes before they return to thank those employees for making the trip possible?
All while many of those employees field calls from customers they’ve had on hold for far longer than the boss’s extraterrestrial fling. Customers who, through no fault of their own, have lost all patience. Employees who, through no fault of their own, suffer the brunt of unnecessary pressure.
All the recent talk of inflation begins with gas prices, which is where our abject failure to learn history may prove fatal.
Sorry, let me rephrase that: Here’s where the American public’s refusalto learn history will earn the word suicide on democracy’s death certificate.
More than a few times, this country has seen the price of gas plummet during recessions and then climb in keeping with recovery. Less economic activity means less demand for gas, and a robust economy creates more. Forget about lessons of the 20th Century. We saw this in the transition from Bush/Cheney (who tanked the economy) to Obama/Biden (who revived it) just 13 years ago.
Is it possible that a nation so proud of its history–no matter the opposed interpretations of it, or expressions placed on public pedestals or in history textbooks–does not remember the difference between 2008 and 2009?
Instead, we look for the easy target.
Inflation covers all of the above: Fish, fruit, frozen dinners, gas, hi-tech products and services, and on and on. And it’s just as easy to pin blame on whoever is on top at the time. Why bother with the complexities of cause and effect, supply and demand, or climate change, when you can simply look at a name? Let’s go Brandon!
If we did look beneath the surface of this plain, simple English, we would see the plain, simple economic fact that really has us on hold:
Exploitation.
Instead, we look for an easy fix: Make America Great Again! And for a Fixer: I alone…
The only way out of this would be to remember that none of us are alone. Quite the opposite. We are E pluribus unum whether we want to be or not, and the overworked agent at the other end of that phone is under the same manufactured weight that forces impatience on our end.
Failing to see that inflation is a euphemism for exploitation, we continue to target each other and settle for temporary fixes.
Could say that we are putting–and keeping–ourselves on hold.
Helen Highwater rolls her eyes as the house barista insists that only beans from Kuma, a local roaster, may be served at her favorite breakfast counter. Fine by her. She asks:
“No supply chain issues?”
He scowls: “Don’t dangle your euphemisms when you are so much better at dangling your principles. I know you are aware of the climate crisis and its ever-worsening effects on long distance trade.”
“Jack will be happy to hear you read his blog,” my editor tells him, hoping he’ll leave her in peace.
“I’m afraid your boy has barely seen the tip of the iceberg,” he retorts, taking a chair at her table. “And speaking of Titanic characters, did you know that two years ago when the pandemic first took hold, Fauci was asked what actor he wanted to play him when the movie was made?”
Highwater nearly drops her cup: “That’s right!”
The barista’s tone doesn’t lighten one wit when he finally gains her willing attention: “Fauci thought he was joking when he asked for DiCaprio, but the joke became true in Don’t Look Up. Or was it Don’t Look At? Or Around? Or Into? Or At All? Or how about just Don’t Look? What did Jack, or you, call it in that review?”
“Don’t Wake Up,” she exhales, again wishing another customer would come through the door to take his attention off her.
“Well, he needs to wake up. And so do you. All this talk about climate, about supply, but you have yet to mention nutrition. Like everyone else, you’re so caught up in quantity, you’ve overlooked quality.”
Highwater reaches into her handbag, “May I record this?”
The barista ignores the question, which any journalist takes as a yes, and launches into a tirade:
“The nutritional values of all our food will plummet in direct correlation with the C02 in the atmosphere, but who knows how that will affect taste? And the caffeine? Who knows! Shall we talk about inflation now?”
My editor gives him a quizzical look.
The barista laughs for the first time before pointing a finger at her: “You, or your boy, thought you were so incisive with your descriptions of bloated salaries for CEOs. Just 20-times the average worker to 350 in your lifetime. I’ve seen it go from just 40 to 350 in mine, but I could have tied that inequity to the word inflation, which you did not.”
“Another dangling euphemism?”
“Bingo! The term ‘inflation’ has been crafted to impose an illusion of political neutrality.”
Highwater may have mistaken the barista for me when she began filling in editorial clarification: “A word to make us think it is no one’s fault, that there’s nothing we can do about it-“
“As if it’s natural,” the barista cut in. He then called over his shoulder to two customers who wandered in, “Be right with you!”
Turning back to Highwater: “Climate crisis, inflation, and now COVID all have at least one thing in common: Devotion to capitalism paralyzes our governing institutions’ attempts to control them.”
Highwater: “Are all executives just coaches? Joy-riders exploiting the talents of their underlings?”
Barista: “I do not know. Too many layers of illusion, propaganda, and lies. Sometimes I think my thinking can get no closer to ‘critical’ than mere ‘wondering’. Excuse me.”
When my editor sent me the tape, she added a note:
He talks like that on a bad day. On a good day, he waxes on about how there are only two kinds of cherries that really matter. With one, we roast and grind the pit after the fruit has dried away. With the other, we savor the fruit and toss the pits. I never confuse him by mentioning olives and their pits.
This recalls the old song about a bowl of cherries. But there’s still no telling if the bowl is half empty or half full.
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Not sure just where my Seattle-based editor hangs out, but that sure looks like her in the lower left-hand corner: https://caffeumbria.com/
When I hear complaints over mom-and-pops replaced by chains, I hold my tongue.
Oh, I feel the pain. Years ago when I resumed teaching in Lowell after a five year absence, I drove over to the Oaken Bucket in nearby Westford only to find it a 99. Felt like a kick in the stomach–which is the same thing I could say of 99’s food. Adding insult to indigestion, 99 kept OB’s “Established in 1957” above the door.
I can list more examples, and I’ll bet anyone living within 20 miles of any American place that can be called a “crossroads” or a “downtown” can list a few of their own.
So, while I commiserate, I stop short of what I really think. Maybe it’s a disdain for stating the obvious, as when anyone complains about the loss of local shops and the escalation of big box-stores over recent decades, or the preponderance of shopping malls at the expense of city and town centers.
Maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe it isn’t obvious at all.
Sure, most everyone spits out the word “money” or “profits,” as if there’s no more to it than numbers that determine what may or may not exist. Yet we rarely make any connection to a way of life that results in the loss we regret–much less to an unquestioned assumption that makes the change seem inevitable, as if we have no say in the matter.
That’s an odd position to hold in a country that prides itself on self-governance. Could call it unAmerican. And yet, most other chronic, common complaints about life in the USA today point us in that same direction:
The cost of living, of insurance, of education, of health care, of prescription drugs, of cable TV, of utilities, of tickets to sporting events and theaters, of the contracts signed by sports stars and actors, of relocations by teams, and more.
The low salaries received by teachers and health-care workers, or the low budgets of schools, of health-care centers, of recreational facilities and parks, of day-care centers and their staffs, of nursing homes and their staffs.
Any street that is not plowed and sanded as soon as the snow has stopped.
For all that, we cringe at any suggestion that American capitalism is flawed enough to enact any fundamental change that might limit those who profit from the excesses listed in that first group–or benefit those who struggle with the miserliness described in the second.
As for the snow plows, it never occurs to us that clearing or paving roads–or building and maintaining bridges–is a form of socialism, as are police and fire departments, as are our armed forces. No matter that we don’t know what it means, most of us condemn the very word, or avoid it entirely.
Worse, we equate it with communism, which makes it easy to twist the rationale of progressives such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, to some extent Andrew Yang, and any number of Scandinavian leaders who make the case for Democratic Socialism in which both markets and the public can thrive.
Where is Martin Luther King when we need him? Following the Civil Rights acts of the mid-60s, he turned his attention to economic injustices that weigh upon far more whites than blacks:
Communism forgetsthat life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis.
King may not have used the term “Democratic Socialism,” but where else are we to go with his call for “higher synthesis”?
Predictably, that critique of capitalism is not one of the lines from King we will hear quoted this weekend. Instead, we will hear the familiar lines regarding “content of character” and having “a dream.” In context, they have always been, are now, and will always be both practical and inspiring. Out of context, they have lulled us into thinking our problems have been contained if not fully solved.
This is why King’s “content of character” quote is today so easily and frequently twisted by opponents of recent attempts to introduce truthful and comprehensive American history texts in our schools–and by those now restricting access to the polls in states with increasing minority populations.
Another line they will never quote is the only one that comes up when you put King’s name into a search engine with the words “education” and “critical”:
Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to educate everyone to think critically and to think intensively.
We have fallen so far from that standard that I sometimes wonder if we think at all. Any serious, sustained thought of how money has led to every problem named above–from restaurant closings to poorly paid teachers, from cable TV bills to slow snow removal–would bring about the fundamental change needed.
Instead, even as we continue to complain, we pay the cable bills so we can immerse ourselves in distractions from all we know is wrong–and not just in the forty out of fifty states where the highest paid public employee is the head coach of an athletic team.
But that’s just the public sector. What of the private? We pay bills to companies with CEOs who make 350-times what the average worker makes. Compare that to the 1950s when CEOs made about 20-times more, or the 1980s when they made about 40-times more than the average worker.
Some of us have actively voted for candidates who make this happen–and against candidates who would rein it in. Many of us let it happen due to inattention. Either way, we have done it to ourselves.
Perhaps I hold my tongue because I’ve never had any sympathy for those who complain of self-inflicted wounds. No doubt I write about it this weekend because Dr. King specialized in treating them.
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Keep in mind that this map accounts for just the public sector. What of the private? American CEOs now make 350-times more than what the average worker makes. In the 1950s CEOs made about 20-times more, in the 1980s they made about 40-times more. https://infographic.tv/map-highest-paid-public-employee-by-state/
“If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.” Speech in support of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike on March 18th, 1968, two weeks before he was assassinated.
“I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic… [Capitalism] started out with a noble and high motive… but like most human systems it fell victim to the very thing it was revolting against. So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness.” Letter to Coretta Scott, July 18, 1952, five months after they met, eleven before they married.
There’s a fellow in Newburyport who likes to take his camera on walks around town and not far out of it for photos that he posts, usually four or five at a time, on social media.
Bob Watts takes advantage of various lighting offered by sunrises, overcast skies, and late mid-winter afternoons when the sun is at its lowest and most distant angles. He has an Orson Welles eye for shadows cast by one building on another, especially those that join farmhouses to barns and stables.
Now and then he shoots on Plum Island where he has captured the boardwalk at Parking Lot Three in the Wildlife Reserve as faithfully as the late Pat Bashford whose “Boardwalk Angel” was the featured photo for my tribute to her last month.
As striking as his nature photos are, Watts favors the fronts of houses with all of the federal and colonial architecture provided by Newburyport and its surroundings–the columned porches and walkways leading to them. Oh, the shutters he shutters!
Additionally, he pays respectful attention to the sidewalks that take him from Atkinson Common to Rolphes Lane and from High Street to the banks of the Merrimack. A nice touch for someone who likes to introduce his mini-albums with an invitation:
“Come for a walk with me…”
During the recent cold spell, Watts was back on the island where he shot a very small place, white with golden-yellow trim and wraparound windows, facing southwest upon a small incline overlooking the marsh not far from the gate to the Reserve.
Snapped awake before I poured my first cup of morning coffee, I could tell it was late afternoon because I had a thick white towel over half the middle window to block the sun’s direct glare. That meant I was lying down, as I am right now, likely sipping coffee and typing away on this iPad I hold before me–though much of what I write first occurs to me while on my daily walks, much like Watts’ film I suppose.
That glare comes right through the rickety old shade, which would block the entire view. When I’m at my table having a meal or fashioning these scribblings at my laptop, I notice passersby. Had I seen Watts aiming his camera upward, I’d have stood so he would have noticed and waved hello.
Yes, I have many pictures of The Shoebox, as I dubbed it 34 years ago, including several from the Snowpocalypse of 2015 when it was nearly buried in snow–days when the front windows needed no shades or towels, and when you could have walked atop a frozen drift onto my roof without realizing it.
But Watts caught it on a day when a lone, narrow, four-foot icicle hung from the southwest corner. Shaped by the gusting wind at the start of the cold snap, it angled about 15 degrees toward the south away from the windows.
Like a flag or banner waving in the breeze, the icicle proclaims something. Neither Bob Watts nor I can tell you what that is, and now that the icicle is gone, there will be no chance for anyone to study it.
But I like to think that it might stand for all these scribblings I do here, from lying down to sitting down, as if to say:
Come for a walk with me…
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Photo by Bob Watts, member of the board of directors of both the Museum of Old Newbury and the National Society for the Preservation of Covered Bridges.
Photo by Kim O’Rourke, next door neighbor, February, 2015.
Classified as science-fiction, Another Now describes the world we now inhabit as accurately as any book on the New York Times best-seller list or by the Times itself.
As often happens in sci-fi, it also describes an alternative world. In this case, one that began in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008. If you ever wondered how things might have gone had the new American president’s promise of “change” been applied to America’s top-heavy, frequently failing economic system, this book offers a credible answer.
A former finance minister of Greece and a current member of the Greek parliament, Yanis Yaroufakis is known internationally for his nonfiction best-sellers, including Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism. He turns to fiction now to show not just what could have been, but what could yet be.
Another Now is set in 2025 but rooted in the early 1980s when an arch-conservative British prime minister’s “greatest triumph… was that she had made it impossible to imagine anyone doing anything unless there was something in it for them.”
Six years ago, America reduced that concept to just two words: “transactional presidency.”
Margaret Thatcher may not have controlled Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush, but it is no secret that both American presidents took their cues from her. Reagan’s inaugural address is most noted for a line that Thatcher had been using for years: “Government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.”
So starts the avalanche of financial deregulation that would bury both nations in 2008.
Hi-tekkers might either marvel at or have a field day picking apart the AI formulas that Yaroufakis conjures up to create a portal into an alternative world. Held to that standard, would Jonathan Swift have written Gulliver’s Travels? Would Kurt Vonnegut have given us Slaughterhouse Five?
Literary critics might complain that competing theories of economics drown out the action–something that did not stop Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle from being a reformist sensation a century ago. They will also claim that 230 pages comparing the economies of “our now” to this “other now” stunt Yaroufakis’s attempts at character development.
Foremost of those characters is Costa, a scientist who goes rogue when he learns that his own medical advances are withheld by employers who stand to gain more from treatments of disease than from cures. When he discovers the “other now,” he finds that he can communicate with himself years into the future, and he shares his secret with his two closest friends who can then communicate with their parallel selves.
As my friend who recommended the book says, Yaroufakis is more likely to win a Nobel prize for economics than for literature. To which I would add that it may be another category altogether when the novelist turns character development into pure comparison and contrast. Are we to regard Costa and his friends as six characters or three?
What Another Now describes in 2025 and 2036 are far from pure flights of fancy. We are reminded that
Up until the end of the sixteenth century, even global trading outlets like the Levant Company were guilds or partnerships, whose members pooled their resources to do things that none could accomplish in isolation.
But in 1599, just around the London corner from where Shakespeare was asking “the question,” mercantile capitalism mutated from practicality into speculation when
A company was founded whose ownership was cut up into tiny pieces to be bought and sold freely and anonymously, like pieces of silver. One could own a piece of the new company without being involved in it, indeed without even telling anyone.
In economic terms, the founding of the East India Trading Company parallels the tasting of forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Following Eden, Adam and Eve had to fend for themselves, and one child warred on another. As of 1599, shareholding begat the “constant struggle to accumulate power over others.”
To counter this, the “other now” is founded upon markets that are free of shareholders and other ruinous forms of speculation. They operate as part of the communities in which they exist and are rated according to “Socialworthiness” described by laws such as the “Social Accountability Act,” regulated by “Citizens’ Juries.”
May sound beyond fantastic, but it’s not that far from the re-emphasis on stakeholders–as opposed to shareholders–that Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren proposed. While reading this, I couldn’t help but wonder if Yaroufakis borrowed from ideas expressed by Andrew Yang in the 2020 Democratic primaries or if Yang borrowed from him.
No doubt right-wingers would slam and ridicule Another Now as rose-colored glasses through which the likes of Stalin and Mao appear appetizing. And no doubt centrist and moderate Americans would recoil at the idea of “markets without capitalism.”
However, we know that economic history works in cycles. America’s economy crashed in the early 90s and again in 2008. With a pandemic wreaking havoc, with many Americans yearning for authoritarian rule, and with the menace of climate change–or “supply chain” as we lately soft-pedal it–hanging over us, it will crash again.
When it does, we can repeat the folly yet again and let our grandchildren suffer the consequences, or we can look elsewhere for a permanent solution.
Yaroufakis offers one–as well as ideas for others–with Another Now.
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From Václav Havel: “Does not the perspective of a better future depend on something like an international community of the shaken, which, ignoring state boundaries, political systems, and power blocs, standing outside the high game of traditional politics, aspiring to no titles and appointments, will seek to make a real political force out of a phenomenon so ridiculed by the technicians of power: the phenomenon of human conscience?”
If there’s one thing the right gets right, it’s this:
Liberals are stupid.
Not all of us, perhaps not even the majority, but enough to keep us from effecting anything more than superficial change. And when that change disappoints or fails, the right can shut it down and double down on what once was.
Most glaring example was in 2009. Wall Street had just collapsed, and the titans of capitalism faced ruin. A new, liberal president had a chance to hit a reset button, a whole new economic order that would have eliminated the speculation of shareholders, leaving only the investments of stakeholders with first-hand involvement in the business from which they earned income. Without shareholders, markets would thrive as employees thrive. Customers would benefit from lower prices, and communities would not face threats of re-location.
We don’t need to look to Denmark or Sweden, much less Cuba or Venezuela, to know how that would look. Instead, we can turn our own American clock back 70 years when corporate CEOs made a healthy 20 times the average income of workers who back then had plenty, enough to be unanimously considered a thriving middle-class. All that was during the two terms of Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican president in the 1950s that many think of as the “again” in the MAGA phrase.
It began to unravel under a liberal Democrat named Kennedy who slashed corporate tax rates in the 60s. Even the saintly Jimmy Carter aided corporations with deregulation in the 70s. By the time antigovernment Ronald Reagan took over, CEOs made 40 times what workers made. Who could tell Republican from Democrat during the 28 years that Reagan, two Bushes, and one Clinton served Wall Street as dutifully as well-trained dogs. So dutiful that CEOs now make 350 times more than workers who work second and third jobs to make ends meet.
And we wondered why people in the Rust Belt wouldn’t vote for another Clinton?
Obama seemed different in 2008, but in retrospect, he had the presidency handed to him. In the primaries, his opponent was part of that 28-year, if not 48-year corporate binge. In the general election, his opponent chose a certified looney-toon as a running mate. And, from his election right past his inauguration, America’s economy was in the tank.
Some will want to add race and age as factors, but whatever the case, Obama had a chance to take this country off the narrow and ruinous path followed by the last nine presidents–four Democrats, five Republican–and return it to the wide and successful path blazed by two Democrats and one Republican who preceded them.
Instead, he fell in line with the nine and shored up Wall Street. To do it, he needed a slogan, and who could argue with “Too Big to Fail”? There was the promise of immediacy, of jobs protected and restored, not to mention the convenience of keeping everything as it was, no hassle of paperwork that any real systemic change would require in anyone’s bank accounts, mortgages, insurance policies. All so easy with tax revenues to shore it all up, no matter that most of those revenues now came from the general public rather than from corporations as would have been true in the FDR-Truman-Eisenhower years.
“Too Big to Fail” paved the way for “Make America Great Again.”
No, liberals never fell for the second slogan, as much a lie as what we now call “the Big Lie.” But most of us remain silent while our senators and representatives compromise public interest with that of corporations. Because we are so quiet, those who represent us have little to bargain with, like poker players dealt a weak hand. Meanwhile, we know that the other side is as loud as can be. What president other than Donald Trump has ever had his name, sometimes his face, superimposed on an American flag and flown from roof tops, porches, front-yard flag poles, pick-ups, and boats?
When has the threat of violence ever before gripped town halls, election boards, and school board meetings across the country?
What makes liberals stupid is the belief that, in the face of all this, after we cast our votes, we can let our Joe Bidens and Kamala Harrises, our Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers, our Bernie Sanders and Liz Warrens confront it for us–as we remain silent and smug that we are on “the right side of history.”
What if, in the weeks following his inauguration, Obama heard from just half of us who voted for him insisting that any bailout had to be of the middle class, not from it? What if, in the months following that, every Democrat in congress heard from half those who voted for them during the debate that began with universal health care, before it began to be watered down? Phone calls, letters, emails, letters to newspapers, peaceful assemblies in town centers, town halls, as or more frequent and relentless as the MAGA crowd but without MAGA’s threats of violence and expressions of hate?
Instead, we expected it to be done for us. Therefore, we ended up with the middle-class bailing out the corporations, and with the uncertainties of “Obamacare.”
Even when one of us does speak up, others consider it a chance to excuse their own comfortable silence. So it was following a letter that appeared in my local paper that refuted an earlier letter’s claim that mask mandates and vaccines are “government overreach.” The rebuttal was strong and spot-on, as I made sure to let the writer know–my way to encourage her to write more.
A week later, another letter appeared on the editorial page which identified the second writer without ever mentioning the subject before declaring:
I totally agree with her, and now I don’t have to write a letter of my own.
For all the times I’ve used the line, “Sometimes the jokes just write themselves,” I never thought it could be literally true.
Meanwhile, others who agreed with her blamed the newspaper for printing the first letter to begin with. In effect, they would prefer that editors do the work of democracy for them. Come to think of it, why should the First Amendment matter to those, liberal or not, who think democracy is a spectator sport?
Ever since the red MAGA caps first appeared, I’ve joked that they are 21st Century dunce caps. Liberals aren’t so bad that any one of us should be wearing anything like that on our head, but we sure are good at stuffing gags in our mouths.
The right could call them “dunce gags,” as they may as well be indicative of our collective IQ.
Mouth of the River 