We can do better than this

When Christine Blasey Ford's accusations against Brett Kavanaugh came to light earlier this month, I had some reservations. 

I had, and have, plenty of reasons to oppose Kavanaugh's confirmation, aside from his past sexual conduct.  But I questioned whether a drunken incident by a teenager -- regardless of its severe impact on his victim -- disqualified him as a 53-year-old experienced appellate judge from appointment to the Supreme Court. 

I still have reservations on this point, especially if as originally appeared there had been no subsequent complaints against him, and in light of his twelve years as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- a court immediately below the Supreme Court.  What relevance, I thought and still wonder, does an incident occurring while he was in high school have on his ability to serve on the Supreme Court?

And if it does suggest that he is not qualified to serve on the Supreme Court, isn't he also equally disqualified from service on the Court of Appeals?  Should he be removed from his present life-tenured office, by impeachment or other means?

Putting aside these reservations, I now discern two excellent reasons why Judge Kavanaugh should not be confirmed.

First, assuming we believe Ms. Ford's testimony -- which most people, including the President, found highly credible, and which the on-going FBI investigation may confirm -- then Kavanaugh has been lying repeatedly, first to the press and then under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee.  He hasn't said that "maybe it happened, but if so I was so drunk that I can't remember it."  He has testified that he has 100 percent certainty that the sexual assault never occurred -- or at least that if it occurred, he wasn't the assaillant. 

Brett Kavanaugh is a highly experienced judge.  He understands perjury, and he understands what he was saying and how he said it.

Second, Kavanaugh disqualified himself, in my eyes, by his performance before the Senate committee.  He ranted and raved, he complained about a Democratic conspiracy against him, he complained about a conspiracy by the Clintons against him.  In effect, he made it clear that he was a Republican being appointed as a Republican to do a Republican's job on the Court, and that he felt he was being "persecuted" by Ms. Ford and the Democrats for that reason.

In this respect, I'm willing to take him at his word.  He hasn't been, and he knows he hasn't been, appointed because of his legal scholarship -- although his credentials are certainly adequate.  He has been appointed because the President feels assured that he has made up his mind in advance how he will rule on every matter that comes before him that would be of any importance to President Trump.

When I was a student, we studied the opinions of various Supreme Court justices throughout history, attempting to ascertain the judicial philosophy that each brought to the Court.  More and more, no one cares about judicial philosophy; we care only about political party, or at least political leanings.  But no appointee to the Court in my memory has been as blatant in aligning himself with one political party against the other during the very bipartisan hearings that were considering his or her qualifications.

Kavanaugh's testimony has made it very clear that his confirmation would serve as an assault on the dignity of the Court, its non-partisanship, and its independence as the third branch of government.

And as a corollary to this objection, I've never seen an appointee to the Court behave with such a total lack of judicial restraint and demeanor as Kavanaugh displayed -- before the Committee and under the eyes of a national television audience -- during his opening statement.  Kavanaugh appealed to the Republican base and to the Senators beholden to that base, in the angry and hysterical manner that they so dearly love to hear, begging for their support in terms and tone that mimicked his mentor -- Donald Trump.

For all these reasons, I see no justification for confirming the appointment of what would be, in effect, a Justice Donald Trump II to the Supreme Court.

White Heat

In the fall, a movie fan's thoughts lightly turn to thoughts of -- the Seattle Art Museum's annual film noir festival.  SAM once again has lined up nine movies, of which the first was shown last night.

White Heat, a 1949 gangster movie starring James Cagney, is considered a movie classic.  Cagney plays the role of Cody Jarrett, the leader of a gang of robbers whose exploits range, seemingly at will, across the western United States.  The movie starts off with a beautiful scene of a steam locomotive emerging from a tunnel in the Sierras.  The train is boarded, the engineer killed, the train stopped, and large amounts of cash removed from the mail car.  Much mayhem in the process.

Much of the rest of the film takes place in and around Los Angeles.  Scenes alternate between law enforcement officers in L.A. and Cody's hangout in a seedy motel where he is holed up with his accomplices, his girl friend, and his mother.  When it appears the law is closing in, Cody makes a dash for Illinois where he pleads guilty to a minor felony and finds safety serving a short prison term under Illinois custody.

The plot thereafter is a bit convoluted.  Needless to say, however, no one trusts anyone, and everyone's looking out only for himself.  Except Ma Jarrett.  Cody's mother has mollycoddled her emotionally fragile son since childhood, and he's still Mama's Boy.  Played by English actor Margaret Wycherly, Ma is the most interesting character in the movie, after perhaps Cody himself. 

Cody's in prison in Illinois when he finds out that his mother's been killed.  He goes to pieces -- totally.  But he pulls himself together and escapes, helped by a supposed friend who is actually a police undercover officer, and makes his way back to L.A.   After a long shootout in a Long Beach refinery, during which all of his accomplices are killed, a crazed Cody, laughing hysterically, goes up in a blaze of glory as the tank on which he is standing explodes into a ball of fire.

The scenes of post-War Los Angeles street life are fun to watch, and the prison scenes in Illinois convince you that "Crime Doesn't Pay."  Killings are brutal and rampant, but no blood is ever shown.  A scene in the prison where prisoners line up for inoculations shows one prisoner after another having his arm swiped with alcohol -- but no needles.  Display of hypodermic needles was apparently banned under the then-applicable Movie Code -- even when used only for medical reasons.

Light entertainment, but definitely entertaining. 

Fresh starts

I live within blocks of the University of Washington, and my mood waxes and wanes with its academic tides.  Today was the first day of class, and I felt as eager as a new freshman as I walked across campus.

The Seattle weather continued bright and sunny, the temperature in the mid-60s.  Since the opening of the new light rail station in front of Husky Stadium, the campus has never been as depopulated between terms as it used to be.  Non-students now cross it routinely on their way from the train to wherever they are going.  But the difference between yesterday and today was obvious.

It was most obvious at Red Square, that giant brick-paved expanse in the center of campus -- perhaps the largest paved square (trapezoid, actually) this side of St. Mark's Square in Venice.  Ordinarily, even during the term, the square feels largely vacant, with students crossing it appearing ant-like in its vastness.

Today, the square was jam-backed with booths -- like an open market or bazaar in a third-world country -- representing every department on campus, and an extraordinary number of extracurricular activities.  And students were clustered everywhere, standing in lines to get information or play games or just talk to someone about some interest they had.  The ROTC had even constructed a climbing wall that was available for those willing to risk injury on the first day of class (harnesses were provided).

Unlike the Cambridge University scenes from Chariots of Fire, there were no hustlers for a school Glee Club singing arias from Gilbert & Sullivan -- but I wouldn't have been surprised if there had been.

Mob scenes aren't usually my scene, but sometimes I get caught up in it all.  And students come in so  many age groups nowadays that no one thought twice at seeing me tottering about, pretending I was a freshman.

The first day of class.  New books, new supplies, new hopes, ... new self-delusions.  Yes, you'd say, this is the quarter that I attend every class, take great notes, begin term papers the day they are assigned, and use finals week to simply put a few grace notes on the incredible understanding I've achieved of each class's subject matter.  That euphoria usually lasted about two weeks, but it was a pleasant period of feeling on top of the world.  Then, reality set in, but that's a subject for a different essay.

Good luck, students!  I envy you your fresh-faced beginnings of a new school year, but I'll be happy to avoid experiencing your approach to the precipice of final exams three months from now.  Enjoy student life while you can.

Falling leaves

"Avoid inflation and future price increases.
Everything is handled, rest easy."

Yesterday was the first day of autumn. 

The heat of summer is over.  The sun still shines brightly, but the air is cool and invigorating.  Football is in the air.  The leaves are changing to their brilliant fall colors; some already are falling.

Falling.  Fall.  The words remind us of winter ahead.  Bleak, frigid winter, when the last leaves have fallen.  The words remind me of Charlie Brown, of "Peanuts" fame.  Charlie Brown, standing by the tree, staring pensively at its one remaining leaf.  The last leaf, the last leaf to cut loose, the last leaf to fly away, the brave little last leaf, Charlie rhapsodizes to himself.. 

"The last leaf to die," Charlie notes with a sudden change of expression.

And in that vein, what mail would be more appropriate for me to receive on the first day of fall than a reminder from the "Neptune Society" that "Time stands still for no one."  So many things to do, so little time to do them.  Ah, yes.

For example, planning for my own cremation.  That last little leaf, before departing the tree, assuming he was a prudent little leaf, would have made arrangements for the lighting of the bonfire that would consume him upon his arrival on the ground.

Or, as the Neptune Society reminds me sternly:  "You are the best person to deal with this responsibility now, while it can be handled without stress or unnecessary expense." 

Sorry, but now I already feel stressed.  Even with quite a number of leaves still to fall.  But thanks for the reminder, folks.

Happy Equinox, folks.

Good Times / Bad Times

As I've discussed before, when I write a book review here in my blog, I also copy and paste it over onto Goodreads as well.  Sharing my wit and wisdom with a wider audience, right?  But books I review for this blog are books that have made an impact on me, in one way or another, and that I'd like to discuss at some length.  Books I read that I may or may not have liked, but that don't seem worthy of lengthy comment, I just summarize quickly for Goodreads, and award the proper number of stars under that site's grading system.  

However, once in a while I start out doing a short blurb for Goodreads which, once I get going, ends up longer than intended, and I'm tempted to add it here as well, with the warning that I'm not certain of the book's importance or, more important, of its appeal to my readers.

Thus it was with Andrew Smith's weird fantasy, Grasshopper Jungle, whose Goodreads review I posted here after some contemplation in February 2014.  And thus it is with the book I review today, Good Times / Bad Times, published in 1967.

James Kirkwood is known primarily as a playwright, winning a Tony award for the Broadway musical A Chorus Line, and producing a number of other shows.  But he was also an author, perhaps best known for a semi-autobiographical novel, There Must Be a Pony.  I haven't read that novel, but it's received reasonably good reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.  A television series was produced based on the novel, which received uniformly abysmal reviews.

I suspect that the book reviewed here also has its autobiographical aspects, simply because the details of 1960s prep school life are so detailed and abundant.  I gave it only three out of five stars on Goodreads.  I don't enthusiastically recommend it, but it has its strong points if comic-tragic coming of age stories appeal to you, even when they seem a bit far-fetched.  And the subject of a teacher's attempt to abuse a student certainly has some topical interest.  I enjoyed it enough to finish it, and with me I guess that carries a certain cachet.
----------------------------------------------

Peter Kilburn, sitting in jail awaiting trial for the murder of his headmaster, writes a 309 page (in my paperback edition, written in small font) letter to his attorney explaining what happened.

Peter, son of a Hollywood actor, explains how he showed up as a senior at a small, isolated, New Hampshire prep school with a declining reputation -- "tacky," as he describes it -- and met the surprising disapproval of his headmaster, Mr. Hoyt. Over the first third of the book, he overcomes this initial disapproval by his grades, his ability as a tennis player, and his desperately reluctant but successful participation in an inter-school variety show competition.

But he's a lonely and unhappy kid.

Then Jordan arrives at the school. The friendship between Peter and Jordan is instantaneous and understandable. They are both considerably more intelligent than their classmates, and have similar senses of humor, of irony, and of the absurd.

Their friendship is so close that Mr. Hoyt concludes it's a sexual relationship. Peter assures his attorney (and us) it was not, and to assume he was lying about this fact (as some readers suggest) would destroy the credibility of the entire story. Yes, high school boys are capable of intense but platonic friendships.

It soon becomes clear that Mr. Hoyt's own feelings toward Peter are not platonic, and that his hatred of Jordan is based on vicious jealousy.

Peter tells us at the outset that Jordan has died, which he does -- of a congenital heart condition -- near the end of the book. The last forty pages or so become a horror thriller, with Peter desperately fighting off Mr. Hoyt's advances, and culminating in the headmaster's death.

The most enjoyable portions of the book, by far, are the scenes between the two boys as their friendship deepens -- their humor, their intimacy, their sophisticated (for their age) knowledge of the world, their ridicule of most of the other students and of the somewhat bizarre faculty. The book also presents an interesting picture of prep school life in the late 1960s, at a somewhat inconsequential school.

In my opinion, the book could have been edited much more carefully. Too many of the scenes drag on interminably, without advancing the plot or developing notably the characterization. As examples, Peter agonizes for page after page, repetitively, at being required to deliver Hamlet's soliloquy on stage. Less would have been more. And the two boys get embarrassingly hysterical while watching a rather pathetic Indian pageant put on by some decidedly non-Indian New Hampshire residents. We don't really need to know their reaction to every absurdity as the pageant progresses.

The verbose padding dilutes the impact of many of the scenes. The conclusion, however, was described vividly -- if melodramatically -- and certainly kept me turning the pages.

Careful what you wish for

1936 General Motors Parade of Progress "Futurliners"

I can imagine myself being introduced to my executioner -- not knowing, of course, the vital role he was to play in my life (or end thereof) -- and feeling that he was a splendid person, lots of ideas, and someone I hoped would be my friend for years to come. 

I would be an idiot, but then I came from a town full of idiots.

Earlier today, I recalled the time -- I think I was a sophomore in high school -- when General Motors came to town.  I'm serious.  It was like a circus or a carnival.  General Motors vehicles pulled into a large empty lot next to the post office and began setting up their show.

I know now that this event was called the "General Motors Parade of Progress," a traveling extravaganza that had been wowing the yokels since the mid 1930s.  It arrived in town in a fleet of vehicles called "Futurliners," some of which are still floating around in private hands.  In fact, if you try to find out much online about the Parade of Progress, you mainly read about Futurliners, their care, maintenance, ownership, and sales opportunities. 

But I've learned online all I need to know.

No one realized it at the time, but when the Parade arrived during my high school days, it was pretty much the last year that GM was to put on its show.  The competition from television discouraged folks from leaving the cozy darkness of their living room sofa to wander around a field looking at exhibits.

The Parade apparently arrived in twelve Futurliners, each with a separate theme.  But the only Futurliner so impressive that I still remember it to this day was Futurliner No. 2, entitled "Our American Crossroads."  The exhibit folded out from the side of the bus (I mean Futurliner), to display a model of a small American town.  Sort of like an elaborate electric train layout, without (GM executives shudder) the trains.  As I recall, the town had several narrow streets, with a main road passing through its center.  Various small businesses lined the streets.  Imagine how a town of a couple of thousand souls somewhere in the mid-West prairie probably looked shortly after World War I.  Imagine the set for Thornton Wilder's Our Town. 

You watched a show, maybe 20 or 30 minutes long, with a recorded narration.  The plot was simple -- the automobile was bringing modernity to Hicksville.  With each change, an old building or a narrow street rolled over and was replaced by something New and Modern.  As time passed, these changes went through several iterations.  By the end, we had reached the late post-World War II era, the era we now look back on as the Golden Age.

Throughout the narration, the voice of an old codger kept breaking in to complain about all these damn fool changes, to lament the end of the old ways, to predict things wouldn't work out well in the future.  He was intentionally annoying -- the voice of the past -- and we teenagers naturally scorned him. 

Not all Cassandras are female.

The show was fascinating.  I visited the Parade of Progress at least three times during the week or so it was in town.  Once alone, once with my family, and once with one of the high school groups that arrived in waves on school buses to stare with awe at how General Motors was remaking our world.

And as GM's president, Charlie Wilson, reminded us, in so many words: What's good for General Motors is good for America.  Maybe he was right, but the goodness was not unalloyed, not experienced equally by everyone .

My town was already well into the transformations shown in the exhibit, and within five or ten more years we were "thoroughly modern."  Our streets had been wide and straight from the town's origin, but the little picturesquely dingy, locally-owned stores were increasingly being replaced by larger, standardized buildings of boring concrete construction -- frequently no longer locally owned, and increasingly part of national or regional chains.

It became rarer for my family to know the proprietor of the stores we shopped in.  Shopping became more impersonal.  Competing stores which had once been fun to shop in because of their peculiarities of merchandise increasingly all carried the same national brands.  No longer could you enter a family grocery, as we often did, and see a washboard for sale, hanging from the ceiling, or a dusty toy train set in a corner waiting year after year for someone to buy it.

What happened next wasn't discussed by the Parade of Progress.  Maybe GM's foresight didn't extend that far.  Or maybe it did.  A developer built a shopping mall just outside of town -- plenty of free parking for all your Chevys and Buicks -- and suddenly no one was interested in the little concrete shops on Main Street.  And then the progress in highway construction that General Motors promised for the future kicked into gear, and the trip to our nearest large city (Portland) was suddenly a breeze.  Why buy shoes from the limited stock of a local merchant, when it was nearly as easy, and much more rewarding, to shop from unlimited stocks in Portland's big, beautiful department stores?

So when GM comes to town, promising a brilliant future, don't forget to ask "brilliant for whom?"  Ask not for whom the bell tolls, and all of that. Right?

My home town's commercial district isn't much to look at now.  Not a place you'd want to go shopping.  Main Street is dead.  Even that "new" shopping mall outside town is moribund. 

To be fair, I suppose that General Motors didn't really cause all the changes -- their Parade of Progress just predicted, in a limited way, what, like it or not, was coming down the highway.  So to speak.

Resistance was futile.

But anyway, for a teenager, at least, in a boring small town, it was a darn good show.

Names on a Map

The big, graceful buck cautiously and gracefully approached the water hole.  Gustavo, then age 15, had tried to make his father happy by joining him on a hunting trip.

And then I heard the shot -- deafening -- as it echoed in the dusk.  The buck looked up, took a step -- then stumbled to the ground.
This -- this was why we had come.
It was a beautiful thing.
I never went hunting again.

His father had already assured Gustavo, when he was only ten, "You just don't understand the aesthetics of being a man." That night, young Gustavo looked up "aesthetics" in the dictionary.

Benjamin Sáenz's adult novel, Names on a Map (2008), explores at greater length and with greater sophistication many of the same themes he has developed in the Young Adult novels discussed in my earlier posts.  Sáenz, both a poet and a novelist, writes in simple language and short sentences that, much like the poems of Robert Frost, convey with great sensitivity and restraint a depth of feeling for his characters and an understanding of the inescapable tragedies of human life.

As in his YA novels, this novel -- taking place in 1967 El Paso -- shows us the lives of a middle class Mexican-American family, a family that escaped from Mexico and bribed its way across the U.S. border while fleeing the leftist revolution of the early 1900s.  Gustavo's paternal grandmother, who dies near the end of the novel, was the family's last living tie with Mexico.  His father Octavio -- stern and rigid, loving but unable to communicate his love and distant from his children, and his mother Lourdes, softer and more expressive, but with firm principles of her own -- were both brought as children to America.  Gustavo, now 18, and his twin sister Xochil are two sides of the same coin -- different in personality in  many respects, but bound so closely that they virtually read each other's minds.  Both of them intelligent, literate, thoughtful, and little affected by peer pressure.

Their 13-year-old brother Charlie is the least complicated member of the family -- loving, happy, and optimistic -- considered by others to be the most "American" of the kids, although he himself feels himself closely attached to the Mexico that his grandmother had described to him in stories of her youth.

The framework of the novel is the war in Vietnam and its effect on America's young people.  But the real themes, attached to that framework, are many of the same themes to which Sáenz has returned in his other writings -- the bonds of family, both joyful and stifling; young people's struggle to become adult; the sacrifices that teenage boys make of so much that is good and worthwhile in their lives -- in the name of "manhood".

Each chapter is narrated by a different character, allowing us to understand and empathize with each.  Despite much conflict and argument, and frequent hurt feelings, there are no villains.  We understand the father's belief that every American boy should fight for his country -- not only as a civic duty, but as a means of establishing his own manhood.  As his wife observes somewhat bitterly:

Octavio believed that wars cleansed the world like a good rain and it was our duty to sacrifice our treasure and our sons and saw the whole matter as resembling the story of Abraham willing to sacrifice his son on the altar of God.

We recognize the pride of those boys who joined the Marines, partly because they wanted to fight for their country, but largely because they wanted to show themselves, as much as show others, that they were truly men.

We understand as well the conviction by both Gustavo and Xochil that true manhood didn't allow you to fight a war, to kill people, just because everyone was doing it, or because the government said you must, or because it was a rite of passage like killing a deer.  But Gustavo always understood both sides of every argument, and he always attacked himself with the full contempt of his potential adversaries.  Xochil felt her principles more single-mindedly, and with fewer scruples.  She saw the true bravery and intellectual honesty -- the manliness -- Gustavo always displayed, in both small and large matters.

The story is not a political, anti-war tract, as a few reviews have suggested.  The war in Vietnam is just the accidental subject on which the family differences are played out.  This is a story of a most believable family, with all the happy and sad moments that every family experiences.  But it is a family drama revealed in the context of its being a Mexican-American family living in the fraught year of 1967.

Sáenz once again demonstrates how "American" second and third generation Mexican-American families truly are.  Gustavo and Xochil and Charlie are Mexican only in superficial aspects of family traditions.  President Trump would see their family, and the people they know, as a slap in his face, rendering absurd his claims that immigrants across the southern border were largely murderers and rapists.

In a wrenching conclusion, Gustavo receives his draft notice.  The decisions he makes in reaction tear him apart from the family that has meant everything to him for 18 years.

You have left everything you have ever known.  You are taking a journey that millions of immigrants have taken.  Immigrants who leave behind their homelands for reasons that are known to them alone.

A strong and deeply moving story.  A tragedy in the Greek sense of good people facing and accepting the conflict between their conscience and the implacable forces they confront. 

And thus their ultimate fate.

Tutoring

 

Docendo discimus.
--Seneca

"While we teach, we learn."  So true.  And that's the reason I'd like to be a tutor.

One of the most interesting courses I took as an undergraduate, and the one undergraduate course that has probably had the most lasting impact on me, was a mandatory freshman course -- History of Western Civilization.  As the name suggests, the course covered the entire period from earliest historic times up until, approximately, the early twentieth century.

It was a full year, four credit course -- one day per week was devoted to a lecture by specialist on some aspect of the period then being covered, a lecture attended by the entire freshman class.  Three days a week were devoted to small discussion groups.  Participation in group discussions contributed to forty percent of the grade, which -- together with the desire not to be considered an idiot by your peers -- inclined us all to do the assigned readings.

Our readings were drawn from four course books, plus readings available only for two-hour check-outs from the "Western Civ Reading Room."  The course books -- titles printed here just because I spent some time searching for them -- were (1) a standard college text, Burns, Western Civilizations; (2) Knoles & Snyder, Readings in Western Civilization; (3) Columbia University, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West; and (4)  a standard art history book.

That was a lot of reading for a four credit course.  By the time I had finished college, one of my peers was an entrepreneur who saw a way to make money off freshman insecurities.  He hired someone to prepare a summary of the salient points in the Burns text, and hired me to summarize, and describe the significance of, each of the readings assigned from items (2) and (3) above.

The job sounded interesting, and so I agreed to do it.  I ended up spending most of my Christmas vacation re-reading all the assigned readings I had once read as a freshman, and then writing a few paragraphs about each, enough to enable the purchaser to keep his head above water in a group discussion.  I had, and still have, some qualms about the ethics of both preparing and using such a crib, but it was sold -- as I recall -- through the university's on-campus bookstore, so I suppose I tend to be overly fussy.  Possibly, buyers used it merely to help prepare for final exams, reminding themselves of what they had once read fully and in careful detail.

Yup.

But my point, for purposes of this essay, is that the time I spent writing those summaries was extraordinarily useful in recalling what I had read as a freshman and fixing it more or less permanently in my long-term memory.  Also, after four years as a history major, I was able to read those assignments in a context that I simply didn't have as a kid just out of high school.

And that's why I'd like to tutor.  Virtually any subject that I've ever studied.  Just to remind myself of facts I once knew and had forgotten, and to appreciate what I had earlier studied in light of the experiences of my life to date.

I've had only one experience as a tutor.  A neighbor once asked me to tutor her son in his high school math class.  He was a nice kid, and we got along well.  We went over his homework each session, and I took him through it step by step.  I was pleased that he seemed to understand what he was doing.

He flunked the course.  It wasn't easy to fail a course at my high school.  I didn't want to keep the money his mother had paid me, but she felt that I deserved it for my time and effort.  If I ever tutor again -- unlikely, I suspect -- I would re-think my approach to teaching.  I would consider the difference between teaching and -- in effect -- doing the student's homework for him.

And I confess -- ideally, I'd be tutoring a kid with an IQ of 160 who wanted help raising his grade from an A to an A+.

Revenge of the nerds

Stanford 17; USC 3.   A football win, early in the season.  Who really cares?  Why do I care?

You who have attended schools like Michigan, Alabama, Ohio State, Notre Dame,  or Nebraska -- traditional football powers -- won't understand.  But I began rooting for Stanford back when they still called themselves, without embarrassment, "Indians." 

How interesting, you yawn.  So how was Stanford football back then?  You want to know, I reply?  In my years there we had seasons of 2-8, 3-7, 0-10, and 4-6.  Attending football games was like being a Chicago Cubs baseball fan.  An entertainment, if you looked at it the right way, but an exercise in futility if winning meant anything to you.

Which it did, to me, to some extent.

But the real issue was USC.  USC in those days wasn't just a good school with a history of winning conference championships.  At least as I viewed it, USC was evil incarnate.  I believed, as did all of my classmates, that winning was secondary in Trojan players' minds as they entered our stadium. Their primary goal was to inflict as much pain and personal injury on our players as possible.  They were animals.  Blood lust.  There were unspeakable occurrences, reported in newspapers, that could be adduced to support our belief.

It made you want to hit back.  But they were huge and mighty.  Our players were slender (relatively) and geeky.  If we had all gone to the same school, Trojan players would have broken our players' glasses and slammed them into lockers.

And so the years passed.  Stanford had some good years -- Elway comes to mind -- but these were isolated periods.  More characteristic was "The Play" at Cal, where our fellow geeks across the Bay stole the 1982 Big Game by a series of questionable laterals on the last play of the game, running  around and through our marching band (which happened to be prematurely on the field).

But then came 2007, annus mirabilis, when USC got its come-uppance.  As I noted in a blog post for that year, Stanford -- 42 point underdogs -- upset USC 24-23.  Often called the greatest upset in college football  history.  USC has had great moments since that game, but it has never quite regained its self-confidence.  It seems quieter, more subdued.  Tommy Trojan doesn't gallop around in his absurd armor with the same gusto. 

Stanford and USC play more or less as equals now, each of us sometimes winning, sometimes losing.

But guys who were bullied as kids never quite get over it as adults.  For those of us whose memories go back through the fogs of yesteryear, our school is still a bunch of four-eyed weirdos -- "nerds" as our quarterback Andrew Luck so candidly put it -- and USC is still the class bully.

So even a victory like tonight's, between two decent teams, neither of which is apt to be crowned as national champion, still registers in my mind and within my emotions as a case of Harry Potter defeating Voldemort.  Zowie!  We did it!  Once more, we have saved civilization as we know it!  Begone, Trojans, back to your Coliseum, your filthy Den of Iniquity.

A political fantasy

--Hey, Barron, on your way to school?  Got a second?
--Um, I dunno.  Who are you?
--I'm Jim Roberts from the Washington Post?
--Yeah?  I heard you guys eat babies for breakfast.
--[laughs]  Well, only once in a while.  But not 12-year-olds; they're too tough.
--[laughs]  What do you want?  [to Secret Service:]  It's ok, I want to see what he wants.  Hey!  Don't. Touch. Me. Again!  I'm twice as tall as you and you don't @#$%-ing scare me.   And I don't think you're allowed to shoot me.
--The President says that the article by the anonymous op-ed writer in the New York Times was really just a childish prank by you?  Is that right?
--Dad said that?  [long pause]  Yeah I guess.
--You wrote it yourself?
--Ok.
--It sounded pretty grown-up.
--I'm supposed to be an autistic idiot, right?  I can write.
--Why did you write it?
--Why wouldn't I?  You said it was a prank?
--The President said that. A childish prank.
--Ok.  Yeah it was a prank. A childish prank.
--How did your father react when he found out you wrote it?
--How does he ever react?  Yelling, screaming, throwing stuff, red face?   But that's like every night anyway.
--He says he's grounded you for the next six years, right?
--[pause]  Ok.
--So does that mean you shouldn't be talking to me now?
--What's he going to do?  @#$%-ing ground me till I'm 50?.  [laughs]
--Spank you?  Slap you around?
--Dad?  Get physical?  [laughs]  He's got bone spurs, remember?
--[laughs]
--Or maybe he'll tweet me to death?
--[laughs again]  Well, I don't want you to be late to school.  I'll bet your school friends are impressed, huh?
--Impressed?  About what?
--That you're the President's son?
--That Donald Trump is my dad?  Oh yeah, totally impressed!  They're so completely @#$%-ing totally impressed that I can speak in complete sentences. And can read more than one page before I get bored.  [rolls eyes]
--[laughs]  Ok, Barron.  Thanks.  You sound like a smart kid. And you've got a good sense of humor.
--Well, thank you.  You’re ok too. For a baby-eater.

Labor Day

Eisenhower meeting with labor
leaders George Meany and
Walter Reuther

I'm a member emeritus of two labor unions -- the Aluminum Workers of America, and the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite, and Paper Mill Workers.  I had summer jobs in mills in my home town.  All the mills were union shops, meaning I was required to join a union after being employed.

Union membership never seemed like an odd or unfair requirement.  I was obtaining the benefits of union contracts; in return, I was agreeing to a small deduction of union dues from my paycheck.  Unions were a familiar part of the American scene.

On a more macroscopic scale, the front pages of newspapers were full of stories of union-management conflict.  To a degree that now seems odd, huge industries dominated America.  Huge unions kept them in check.  When industry wide contracts in steel or autos or coal mining expired, strikes were almost inevitable.  These strikes were orderly affairs, more so than strikes we read about at the time in Britain and other countries.

Contracts were negotiated, with the possibility or reality of strikes an inducement to all parties to settle.  Strikes were a careful dance, with ground rules enforced both by the NLRB and the mutual self-interest of workers and management.  Even so, nationwide strikes in major industries were threats to national security, and a matter of concern far beyond the parties involved.  The most famous example of public concern was the looming steel strike in 1952, leading to President Truman's temporary seizure of the steel mills.

We no longer have unionized nationwide industries of such importance.  We no longer have strikes with the potential of devastating the economy.  We also no longer have a vast number of industrial employees protected from unfair practices and able to earn middle class wages thanks to their membership in unions.

Labor Day is no longer a celebration of labor.  We no longer see photos of smiling presidents, both Democratic and Republican, meeting with union leaders.  We no longer rejoice in unions' contribution to the American dream.  Labor Day is just a holiday. 

Now we have a president -- elected by the descendants of yesterday's unionized workers -- who celebrates Labor Day by sitting alone in his office, tweeting his disdain for the President of the AFL-CIO.

  Unfortunately, to date, the things that he's done to hurt workers outpace what he's done to help workers.

His contempt for the person holding an office whose occupants were once among the great power brokers of the nation reveals the changes in America over the past half century -- changes both political and economic.

Stranger in paradise

A young Austrian-Jewish journalist's move from Vienna to Berlin in 1920 might seem, in retrospect,  a poor career move.  But Joseph Roth -- born in what is now Ukraine but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- wrote for a Vienna newspaper, and a move to the capital of the German-speaking world would then have been the equivalent of moving to New York for a young American writer.  Five years later, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for the prominent German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung. 

Unexpectedly, apparently, Roth experienced a sense of exhilarated relief upon arrival in France.  Paris (and France) was everything that Germany was not -- "free, open, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in its magnificent pathos," as he wrote to his editor in 1925.  He apparently did not sense the undercurrents of French anti-Semitism that had been made obvious during the Dreyfus Affair, and were to prove still lingering during the days of the Vichy Republic.

Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939 is a mixed collection of Roth's short essays and letters.  The section of the book entitled "In the French Midi" contains feature articles written for his Frankfurt newspaper discussing in lyrical detail the cities and their inhabitants visited while traveling through the south of France, from Lyon to the Riviera.  These short articles were expanded in an even more "literary" style and language in a series of essays entitled "The White Cities," never published before Roth's death in 1939.  The expanded essays made even clearer Roth's disaffection with Germany and the trends he saw developing there.  The last half of the book contains newspaper articles, written both for Frankfurter Zeitung (the last dated 1932), and increasingly for German language papers in Paris, the Netherlands and Prague.

The arc of his writing from 1925 to 1939 shows the progress of his thought from an excitement about the grace and beauty of France as contrasted with the dullness and sullenness of Germany-- a contrast with his adopted home shared, of course, by American expatriates in Paris escaping their own homeland -- to an increasing alarm about developments in German life and politics even before Hitler assumed power, to his eventual realization that as a Jew and a liberal,  he no longer could return to Germany.  It becomes clear to him that Germany was destroying -- deliberately and methodically -- a pan-European culture that had been developing across the continent.

I won't bore you with obvious analogies to the world today.

The book is fascinating today, of course, first because he wrote from an unusual perspective about developments between the two world wars -- not so much about political events, because he wasn't a political journalist, but about cultural trends and differences among nations and between eras.  But it is also worth reading because of his lyrical descriptions -- ably translated to English -- of art, architecture, street scenes, and the people he observed about him from all strata of French life.

No one who hasn't been here can claim to be more than half human or any sort of European.  It is free, open, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in its magnificent pathos.  Every cab driver here is wittier than any one of our authors.  We really are a miserable lot.  Here everyone smiles at me ….  I feel at ease with everyone, even though we continually misunderstand each other when we talk about practical things, just because we understand each other so perfectly on every subtlety and nuance.  …  The cattlemen with whom I eat breakfast are more aristocratic and refined than our cabinet ministers; patriotism is justified here, nationalism is a demonstration of a European conscience, every affiche is a poem, court announcements are as elegant as our best prose, cinema billboards display more imagination and psychological insight than do our contemporary novels, the soldiers are like whimsical children, the policemen witty editorial writers.

The fact that there was a German audience back home for such critical commentary reminds us that not all of post-war Germany awaited hyper-nationalistic fascism with enthusiasm.

Also interesting -- and to me unexpected -- was Roth's nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian empire -- an empire of German culture and refinement, as he viewed it, comparable in some ways to his beloved France.  He hates that "German" had come to mean, in the world's eyes, "Prussian."  He notes that the Austrians were speaking a refined German back when the Prussians were still speaking their own Slavic language along the shores of the Baltic Sea.  Although proudly a Jew, he displays an enthusiasm for Catholicism -- not only as an offshoot of Judaism, but as a promoter of the cosmopolitan, pan-European civilization, and an antidote to a narrow and violent nationalism, that he longs for.

Roth died in Paris, probably from complications of alcoholism, in 1939.  He was spared the spectacle of yet another war between France and Germany.

Roth is best known today for novels and short stories, written in his final years, that evoked the Austro-Hungarian era.  His best known novel is Radetzky March (1932), described as an epic following three generations of a family during the rise and fall of the Empire.  Not only have I read none of his fiction, I confess I'd never heard of Roth himself until this past week.  I'm tempted to read further.