Filthy Rich II: Meditation on Wealth

TigerHawk is proud of making money; Andrew Sullivan ( but see update below) suggests he should be ashamed.

But it’s more complicated than that. It’s too simple to treat money as a source of praise or blame, because there are too many reasons for making money, or keeping it. Here’s a catalog, incomplete, of categories, overlapping and nonexclusive, of motivations for wealth:

Vainglory: think Rameses II, or Donald Trump. Some people just like to call attention to themselves. The Greeks were big on vainglory; they even used it as a means of taxation—get rich people to sponsor a festival or a trireme to show just how rich they were.

Vainglory may look like, but is not quite the same as

Competition: getting money is a visibile sign you’ve won a race. The trouble with competition as a reason for making money is that it never ends. There are some people who will never be satisfied with a $60,000 Mercedes if their neighbor’s Mercedes cost $100,000. So also a competitive CEO who makes $5 million a year, will go to sleep weepy if his neighbor makes $5 million and one.

At any rate, competition and vainglory both should be distinguished from

The desire to consume. “Lawyers,” they used to say, “live well, and die poor.” Point taken: I have known a fair number of lawyers who will never drink $20 Scotch if $40 Scotch is on offer. They earn a lot, they spend a lot, and they’d better hope their bookkeeper tucked away something in their retirement account. Sometimes, this desire to consume may reflect sheer brio: maybe these guys really like $40 Scotch. But often enough, I suspect it is a kind of manic insatiability that makes you just want to gobble up everything in your way. Not limited to the purely wealthy, I suppose: they say that Thomas Aquinas was fat.

Oddly, the desire to consume is remarkably close to another, seemingly rather different, motive, and that is

The desire to to good. One thing you've got to give to Aristotle: he never saw the point of poverty and innocence. Of course you want to accumulate wealth and power, Aristotle would have said--how else can you do any good in the world? So also the guy who is happy to skip his $40 Scotch and his $100,000 Mercedes so he can buy 10 million mosquito nets for the third world.

We can turn now to another motive which seems rather different from all of the above, and that is

Sadism: think “who’s your daddy?” Some people enjoy the humiliation and suffering of others. Here as elsewhere, I would concede that the quality is not solely a province of the wealthy—there are probably more poor sadists than rich ones--but wealth does allow some people to indulge a particular taste. But sadism is undoubtedly one taste that money can satisfy.

I think none of these is quite the same as a perhaps more familiar asserted motive for making money and that is

Greed: Silas Marner and Scrooge McDuck didn’t want to spend money, or even to show off. They liked to have money so they could run their fingers through it. It’s hard to guess how many wealthy people are motivated by greed because they tend not to call attention to themselves. I should add that I suspect there are more greedy people who are not wealthy and want to be, then who are wealthy per se. Greed tends to make the best the enemy of the good, and the seriously greedy often outwit themselves.

Perhaps paradoxically, I think "greed" as a motive for great wealth is close to another, superficially different, motive for making money and that is

It's fun: Warren Buffet lives in a modest house and drives to a modest office in a modest car. It isn't quite that he is a skinflint (although I guess you'd have to say "careful"), but rather that in an important sense, he is unconscious of money. He's a classic illustration of the proposition that you need to find something you love to do, and the money will follow. Best way I can tell, he has worked incredibly hard most of his life, but at something he loves. The $50 billion is just frosting on the cake.

None of these reasons is quite the same, I think, as my next reason, i.e.,

Security: some people just fear growing old and sick and poor. As with competiton or consumption, the trouble with security is that the search never ends. Build yourself a nice little farm and the Barbarians from over the border will trample your fields and set fire to your barn. Tuck away a nice 401k and some lunatic in the White House destroys the value of the dollar.

Security in this sense is close to

Independence. I believe it was Humphrey Bogart said the nice thing about having money is that it allows you to tell other people to go to hell. I remember also the Simenon story, in which the prosperous lawyer gets a wild hair for his secretary. “This is going to cost you,” his ever-so-proper wife tells him. “Never mind,” he says, “I can afford it.” I concede once again that this isn’t entirely a matter of money. Alexander the Great asked the philosopher Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him. “Yeh,” said Diogenes, “get outta my sun.”

There is yet one more motivation for getting money; it is central to our inquiry, which is why I have saved it to the end. And that is

As an index of achievement: money may be proof that you are a good fellow who adds value to society. Her, at last, I suspect we come to what TigerHawk had in mind when he showed his pride in his money. And indeed it is possible that constructive achievement may bring wealth.

But I see two problems with wealth as an index of achievement. One, plenty of achievement does not bring wealth. And two--the point of this entire exercise--it appears that there are so many motives for wealth that we can't begin to focus on just one. So wealth as an index is almost no help at all.

Reviewing, I think it may help to try to restate the terms of debate. TigerHawk seems to be saying that if you have achieved wealth, you probably did something to deserve it. Andrew seems to be saying that if you have achieved wealth, you probably have done something of which you should be ashamed (he may be channeling Balzac, who said that every great fortune is founded on a great crime).

But I like to think that I've got the true handle on the problem, which is to say I think they both miss the point. I argued earlier (link) that the main prerequisite for achieving great wealth is that you've got to want to achieve great wealth. Is the desire for wealth a bad thing? For myself I will concede (scandal of scandals?)I’m un-Christian enough to be an agnostic on the point: as far as I’m concerned the desire for great wealth is a matter of taste, like broccoli versus tomatoes. My point here is that there are a thousand roads to riches, and maybe both TigerHawk and Andrew fall short in imagination as they try to consider how one gets there. And, I might add, an issue far too rich and complicated to be captured in crude categories of "left" and "right."

Update: Okay, so Sullivan didn't say it. But he smiled while somebody else said it.

Filthy Rich

Yahoo Finance (I guess channeling TheStreet.com) has an odd story up this week headed “Ten Traits that Make You Filthy-Rich” (link). Why odd? Well, bear with me while I scan the list: Patience … Organization … Discipline … Reflectiveness …Curiosity. You get the drift: Most (maybe not quite all?) of these qualities are qualities you’d identify as part of any mature, fulfilled and fulfilling life.

But here, at least, it seems they are defined not generally, but rather in terms of their utility in developing wealth. Patience, for example,: we are told it is “one of the most important traits when it comes to saving money.” Well, yes, but it’s also pretty helpful when you are frescoing the ceiling of a chapel. So also “reflectiveness”—“it's important to be able to look at your financial decisions and reflect on their results.” Yes, and as Socrates says, the unexamined checkbook is not worth opening.

There are a couple of traits on the list that may not present themselves as quite so universally useful. “Goal oriented,” for example. If I want to capture the world market for silk purses made out of sow’s ears, then I suspect I do have to be goal oriented. On the other hand, I suspect there are a fair number of patient, reflective, curious—even disciplined and organized—people—who really do not give a rat’s patootie about achieving some goal and are pretty much content to take life as it comes. So also “Risk taking.” I suppose anyone ought to be able to cope with risk. I would assume that entrepreneurs do need to be specially equipped to step into tense situations. OTOH, so did Harry Dean Stanton in Repo Man, and he sure didn’t look rich to me.

I’m also intrigued at what is not on the list. Kindness, for example. Compassion. Of course, the author never said these weren’t good human qualities: he just didn’t think of them as among those you need to get filthy rich.

And that, perhaps, is my point. I suspect that anybody who measures up to this list is unlikely to be getting his food out of a dumpster. But rich? (And BTW, how rich is filthy rich? Better than pig rich? Worse than rich as God?) I’m not so sure. I suspect there is one quality more than any other that determines whether you will be filthy-pig rich or not. That is: you’ve got to want to be rich. If you do, I suspect a lot else will fall into place. But then, this is an outlet pre-screened for people who care about wealth…

Fn.: Be interesting to cross check this list against the “Twelve Points” of Boy Scout Law (Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean and Reverent, etc.) (link). Evidently, whatever the Scouts want out of you, they aren’t particularly interested in making you filthy rich.

A Valentine Puzzle

From my favorite online seller, I ordered up some nice music on DVD to give to Mrs. B on Valentine's Day. Being an impulse shopper, I also checked the box to send some books from my wish list.

February 14 comes. The books arrived, but no music. So I had to ask my colleagues for advice. For V day, do I give my wife

• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

• Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity

• One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Goals

The unanimous verdict: oh, give them all; let her choose.

Sadly, late in the day the music showed up. So I'll never know...

Field Guide to Republicans

Pinched from RBC: I don't necessarily buy this guy's main point about McCain (not quoted here), but this is as good an account of the Republican party as I've seen:

The VWRC is a conspiracy, composed of several factions, most of whom hate each others' guts. The economic predators sneer at the Taliban, as their lawful prey. The Taliban correctly view the predators as godless ghouls. The ultranationalists correctly view the predators as having no loyalty to the US. The neocons think that the whole pack is ni kultyurni. The ultranationalists and predators correctly view the neocons as mutant Trotskyites, useful only for propaganda. (Nobody trusts the neocons or libertarians; they are too tainted by Enlightenment ideas.)

But the VRWC still coheres as a conspiracy, because they are all willing to cede what the other faction most wants, in return for getting what they most want. The predators get economic predation: on the middle class and on other countries. The ultranationalists and neocons get their belligerency and wars, as long as it doesn't hurt the predators' balance sheets. The Taliban get their courts, as long as the predators' daughters can fly to Sweden when necessary. And so on. (The predators are more equal than the other factions.) The racists and nativists and other unpleasant sorts are not really part of this conspiracy, but the conspiracy is happy to feed them raw meat in exchange for their votes.

It perhaps remains only to be recalled that the Democratic Party in its heyday was i.e., when it harbored Theodore Bilbo and Eleanor Roosevelt, was no more coherent.

Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy

Apparently not Schopenhauer, but sounds like it should be:

Mix a teaspoon of sewage in a barrel of wine and you get sewage.
Mix a teaspoon of wine in a barrel of sewage and you get sewage.

Source: BBC, Quote, Unquote.

Et tu Maureen?

When suddenly there is heard at midnight
A company passing invisible
With wonderful music, with voices, -
Your fortune giving way now, your works
Which have failed, the plans of a lifetime
All turned illusions …

—Constantinos P. Cavafy

You might have to be alert to notice that Maureen Dowd today did what the Gods did to Antony once they decided he was beaten: she decamped (link).

She’s picked on Hillary before but she picks on almost everybody so there’s nothing to be made of that. Today, I think, is different.

She opens with an all-purpose snark: “It’s not yet clear which prejudice will infect the presidential contest more — misogyny or racism.”

But fast-forward to the bottom of the page:

Those close to Hillary say she’s feeling blue. It’s an unbearable twist of fate to spend all those years in the shadow of one Secretariat, only to have another gallop past while you’re plodding toward the finish line.

I know that the attacks against powerful women can be harsh and personal and unfair, enough to make anyone cry.

But Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this woman or because of the ick factor of returning to the old Clinton dysfunction. …

As a possible first Madame President, Hillary is a flawed science experiment because you can’t take Bill out of the equation. Her story is wrapped up in her marriage, and her marriage is wrapped up in a series of unappetizing compromises, arrangements and dependencies.

Instead of carving out a separate identity for herself, she has become more entwined with Bill. She is running bolstered by his record and his muscle. She touts her experience as first lady, even though her judgment during those years on issue after issue was poor. She says she’s learned from her mistakes, but that’s not a compelling pitch. … If Hillary fails, it will be her failure, not ours.

(Emphasis added, of course.) Translated: As Mehitabel the cat would say, Cheerio, my Deario. Or Cavafy again:

As becomes one worthy as you were of such a city,
Firmly draw near the window,
And listen with emotion but not
with the complainings and entreaties of cowards,
Listen, your last enjoyment, to the sounds,
The wonderful instruments of the mystic company,
And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria you are losing.

—Id., The Poems of C. P. Cavafy, 26
Translated by J. Mavrogordatos
(The Hogarth Press, London 1951)

Me for the Supremes

My colleague Carlton has a newspaper clip by his office door recommending Akhil Amar for the Supreme Court. The sponsor: Mike Gravel, whose chances of winning the Democratic nomination for president are, ahem, slim.

This occurs to me: my nine-year-old granddaughter told me she thought I would make a pretty good judge. Since her chances of becoming president are probably a lot better than Gravel's, I should say my prospects are looking up.

Fn.: Joel reminds me to file this along with the suggestion that my chances of buying a winning lottery ticket are about the same as my chances of finding one (link).

Alito, McCain and Alito's Neighbor, and the Rest of the Lot

Above the Law has come up with a reason why John McCain is cool towards Justice Alito: Alito doesn't like The Sopranos, the TV show about Alito's neighbor, Tony Soprano (link).

Raises the question of what kind of shows McCain does like--probably tells you a lot about the man. Much has been made, for example, of Nixon's taste for Patton. I can't remember anything at the moment about the tastes of the incumbent, except that I do recall he enjoyed watching replays of "Baghdad Bob," the insanely optimistic press flac for Saddam Hussein, who kept shouting "we will bury you!" as the pillars crumbled around him. (link) And Ronald Reagan was, as they say, the president who thought World War II was a movie.

I'm probably not hip enough on TV or movies to do justice to this inquiry. I assume McCain would enjoy Top Gun; he might not be crazy about Grumpy Old Men; I wonder what he thinks of Officer and a Gentleman? As to the others--it's a little hard to picture Hillary enjoying any TV show (except, now that I think of it, maybe Frontline or the News Hour with Jim Lehrer?). I'm hazy on Barack at the moment also, but this bit from Tom McMahon may stimulate some suggestions (link):

Another News Moment that Wasn't

CNN’s Jim Clancy thinks that Imad Mughiniyeh may not be dead (link). He does grant that Mughiniyeh (billed as “chief of security” for Hezbollah) is a marvel at media manipulation. He recalls:

Let me take you back to Beirut, Lebanon, in June of 1985, where I was covering a hostage situation for CNN.

It became the very image of terror. On the runway at Beirut International Airport, a TWA pilot looks down from the cockpit window as a "hijacker" holds a gun to his head. What a remarkable coincidence that the media was there to capture the moment.

But it wasn't what it appeared to be.

The gunman was actually a teenager. He hadn't been one of the four men who hijacked TWA flight 847. He was nothing more than a security guard for a few crewmembers left aboard the jetliner while 40 other hostages had been hauled off to Beirut's southern suburbs.

He just wanted to be on television.

I was permitted to sit down and talk with pilot John Testrake while he was still held hostage. Testrake told me the teenager saw a television news crew approaching and insisted on staging the photo. He became agitated when Testrake refused.

So determined to get his "Kodak moment" as a terrorist, the young man had unloaded the gun and handed it to Testrake to prove it was empty. Testrake told me he only agreed when he feared the young gunman might become unhinged if he didn't get his way.

The so-called "face of terror" photo was really a picture of media manipulation.

Why does this matter? It matters, as Clancy explains, because Mughniyeh was one of the hijackers, and because the hijacking was one of the jewels of a long and vicioius career --a career in which, among other things, he proved himself a master of artifice. "I'm not declaring the story [of his death] to be false," Clancy says, "and I'm not about to tell anyone it's the truth. I just keep remembering how much deception Mughniyeh employed in his life's work."

Postscript: To further confirm my tinfoil hat credentials, I'm one of those who thinks that Mohammed Atta might still be alive.

Patrick on the Second Rate

Ooh, Patrick Kurp knows how to hurt a guy (link)! First he’s knocking my (former) chosen profession and next he’s knocking the Great American Novelist. The profession would be journalism, where I spent my 20s, and I’ll try to fashion some non-trite nostalgia about those days later. The novelist would be John Dos Passos and I have pretty much given up on commending him to any but the already converted.

But Patrick goes on to catalog a sampling of the “second-rate,” and he has set me to thinking. Okay--I’ll grant him Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, a couple of famous-for-being-famous blowhards never so well employed as when eating each others’ brains out like Dantean sinners.

Hemingway—well, I think I am beginning to see a theme here: it's not so much writing per se as celebrity: Patrick doesn’t like celebrities who trade on the false coin of writerhood without producing anything of importance. And Hemingway certainly went through something like a 40-year dry spell, during which he did little except call attention to himself and produce galumphing portentousness like The Old Man and the Sea.

But Hemingway did write The Sun Also Rises and a dozen—okay, half a dozen--stories that capture time and place so convincingly that you can’t see those times and places without him. And that is enough, I think, to give him (however grudgingly) a pass.

John Didion certainly counts as a celebrity, although it is hard to say she is insufferable is Hemingway, Mailer or Vidal. As a writer? Well, she certainly isn’t “first-rate” in the sense that Shakespeare or Chekov are first rate. But that can’t be the only test. Short of Shakespeare, I suspect she may turn out to be one of those writers who speak for a time and a place the way Hemingway spoke for a time and a place—and with a lot less to forgive.

I don’t know what poor Steven Crane is doing in this company. He wrote a couple of priceless little items and then died, without ever making a nuisance of himself in any important way. Maybe Patrick is annoyed at the way we impose Red Badge of Courage on schoolchildren. Fine, but then let’s at least keep Maggie, a Girl of the Streets—no schoolchildren there.

But I’ve got a couple of more general thoughts. One (I guess this is trite), I can’t think of anybody who is first-rate all the time. Certainly not Shakespeare or Tolstoy. Maybe Proust comes close, but even there, we have some longeurs. But two (perhaps not as trite)—for a remarkably large number of writers, I’d say that their best stuff is not their best and (if you get my meaning) vice versa. I’ve long thought that Buddenbrooks was a much better book than Magic Mountain, certainly than Doktor Faustus. Say what you will about the late novels of Henry James, I still won’t be persuaded that they are as good as Portrait of a Lady or the best of the novellas. I’m not sure Virginia Woolf ever wrote a really good book, but she wrote magnificent lines and paragraphs (okay, might be a guy thing). And Joyce—dare one say that one would trade perhaps 80 percent of Ulysses for Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist?

I almost called this post “In Praise of the Second-Rate,” but I can see that that is not quite my point. It’s not so much first- and second-rate, as it is over- and under-valued. I certainly agree that celebrity is not the same as achievement, or even talent. But I don’t want the best to be the enemy of the good, and even a fathead like Hemingway can once in a while be a pretty good writer.

The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone:Where Have You Been All My Life?

In the previoius post I referenced "the self-licking ice cream cone," hitherto unknown to me. Turns out it has a history that goes at least back to 1992. Here's an early citing, reported at
Double-Tongued Dictionary (link):

1992 Marvin Ott Wall Street Journal (Dec. 23) “Reform Task for Woolsey at the CIA” p. A8: Analysts are concerned not with a policy audience, but with the readership among their peers in the intelligence community and with fulfilling their quota of reports and assessments. Despite an elaborate “requirements” process, most of the topics that analysts address are selected by the DI itself. It is the proverbial “self-licking ice cream cone.”

Interesting that today's like, like this early one, comes from the intelligence biz. But as an audience ingrown and self-referential, I don't suppose they are any more claustrophobic than, say, academic critical theory. The only skill of the political science professor, my friend Ed used to say, is to train other political science professors. Indeed, now that I think of it, I recall a guy who knew 50 years ago who used to show cows at county fairs for a living. I remarked that they must be good eatin'. Nah, he said, these cows are so specialized that they are good for showing and nothing else. I'm sure many other examples are possible, and I wonder: can it be that we live in a world where SLICCs are more prevalent than they were before? Or are we just now noticing?

Here’s a sort-of response:

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

Outsourced

Too much good stuff everywhere else this morning:

Hackonomics

Jeff Stein on Continuing Incompetence*

Lock-in

Recognize Him? He’s “The New Face of Conservatism”

*Introduced me to the “self-licking ice cream cone.”.

I Have No Idea Why I am Doing This

I have been not-tagged by an anti-meme. Michael Froomkin directs (link):

1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Roger, copy that. Here goes:

His [Marc Antony’s] relations with Octavianus did not improve. Neither trusted the other. To counter that danger and outbid his rival the consul went further with his Caesarian and popular policy.

The book would be Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, which I quoted earlier. It is the summer of 44 BC. Caesar is dead; Brutus has fled to Greece. Against the entreaty of his family, the 19-year-old Octavianus (not yet Augustus) has taken up his role as heir. Octavianus and Marc Antony take the first tentative steps to size each other up.

Honest, it gets more interesting later.

Since I was not tagged, I will follow my non-tagger’s example and not tag.

WTF? (Clinton Campaign Division)

Brad DeLong says we can be confident that Hillary can run the world's only superpower because she can run a presidential campaign (link). Now this:

Patti Solis Doyle had been living on borrowed time as Clinton's campaign manager following the disastrous showing in Iowa and the rockiness leading up to the New Hampshire primary.

"What happened today would have happened the day after New Hampshire had we lost," one source said, adding that others may soon follow Solis Doyle's departure.

Initially, Clinton's former White House chief of staff, Maggie Williams, was brought in to run the campaign even though Solis Doyle was still there. The result was confusion and awkwardness for the staff, who weren't sure who was really in charge.

But even more problematic was the campaign's money crunch. Over the last seven years, Clinton had raised $175 million for her reelection and her presidential campaign. But Solis Doyle didn't tell Clinton that there was next to no cash on hand until after the New Hampshire primary.

"We were lying about money," a source said. "The cash on hand was nothing."

In turn, Clinton didn't tell Solis Doyle that she was lending her own money to keep the campaign afloat. Solis Doyle found out third-hand. And when she asked Clinton about it, the senator told her she couldn't understand how the campaign had gotten to such a point.

Link (emphasis added). Say again, these ladies are on ther short list of best and most loyal friends and they are caught in a farrago of secrets and lies? Are we sure she can run a campaign?

Update: if you think this is harsh, take a look at the pile-on building up today over at Kevin Drum.

The Man Show, Circa 1500 BC

Riffing on my previous post, here's Karen Armstrong, describing party day among a gaggle of [ancient] Aryan cattle rustlers:

The sacrifice was a solemn occasion, but it was also a large, rowdy carnival. Vast amounts of wined and soma were consumed, so people were either drunk or pleasantly mellow. There was casual sex with slave girls laid on by the officiating raja, and lively, aggressive ritual contests: chariot races, shooting matches, and tugs of war. Teams of dancers, singers, and lute players competed against one another. There were dice games for high stakes. Groups of warriors conducted mock battles. It was enjoyable, but also dangerous. In this highly competitive atmosphere, mock battles between professional warriors, all hungry for fame and prestige, could easily segue into serious fighting. A raja might wager a cow in a game of dice, and lose his entire herd. Carried away by the excitement of the occasion, he could also decide to lead an attack against his “enemy,” a neighboring raja who was on bad terms with him or who was holding a rival sacrifice of his own. … A raja who had not received an invitation to a ritual was insulted; he felt honor-bound to fight his way into the enemy camp and carry off booty. … [P]eople could and did get killed.

—Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation 21-2
(First Anchor Books ed., 2007)

Hah, don’t tell me it isn’t hard-wired! But it is interesting (although I assume entirely accidental), that her title repeats the title Karl Polanyi chose for his book on how we all morphed outselves into Benthamite utility-maximizers.

Another Meditation on the Superfluity of Men

Kay S. Hymowitz has put together an insightful (and often funny) take on a recurrent favorite topic here at Underbelly Central—the increasing superfluity of (young) men (link). She reads Nick Hornby, watches The Man Show and (mostly) flips through the pages of Maxim—all in the interests of science, of course—and puts together a pretty-near bulletproof brief that men are pretty much what you always suspected: a bunch of mindless oafs.

It’s a dead-on putdown (and BTW, is there really an article entitled ““How to Make Your Girlfriend Think Her Cat’s Death Was an Accident”?). But despite a few faltering attempts, Hymowitz doesn’t seem to have much to offer about how they got this way or what to do about it. I can clarify: men are this way because (a) this is their natural state of being and (b) in the current environment, there is simply no incentive to act otherwise. More directly, men are surplus: the world doesn’t need them any more and has left them parked, as it were, in the play yard, with the earnest hope they won’t make too much of a nuisance of themselves.

In earlier times (somewhat oversimply, before birth control), women had to make deals with men; to pretend to tolerate, even to admire, some of their goofier habits. For their part young men found themselves faced with a juggernaut of constraints—the threat of prison, starvation and celibacy—designed to turn Big Bad Bill into Sweet William. Pretending to Be Nice was part of the package. I have some dim, not entirely pleasant, memories of those days: the responsibilities of adulthood falling on me around the age of 25, like a landslide in an earthquake. But I didn’t know any alternative.

Both sides of that bargain have broken down. These days, there is simply nothing women need out of men that can’t be accomplished with a high school chemistry set. Always ahead of her time, Malvina Reynolds saw it coming 50 years ago (link):

They can come to see us
When we need to move the piano,
Otherwise they can stay at home
And read about the White Sox.

Malvina understood: even with threats or inducements, men are a damn nuisance. So without them, they are impossible. For their part young men have figured out that the threats or inducements, however strong, are simply not enough to overcome their natural tendency to oafishness.

I grant this is a somewhat Eurocentric view of things: in some other parts of the world, the phallocentric posse appears to continue to (oh tee ee) hold things well in hand. But unless (not an entire impossibility)—unless we slide back into a world of total male domination, I can’t see any reason why women won’t, after another generation or two, just breed ‘em out.

Credit Watch--Law & Order Department

Neglected to mention that while I was beavering away at a student problem sheet Wednesday night, the TV cop show (I assume it was Law & Order) on the other side of the room seemed to be showcasing the mortgage meltdown. Seemed to turn on a con artist who deceives homeowners in trouble into quitclaiming their homes, which he promptly resells.

But the plot quickly vectored off into international terrorism and a turf war with the Feds. And a lawyer who comes to court with a man's sock on one foot and a woman's sock on the other. Evidentl y this was a plot point. But query, can you tell the difference between a man's sock and a woman's sock? Across a crowded courtroom?

First You Do it for Love, Then for a Few Friends,The Next Thing You Know, You're Doing it for Money

Well hey--it looks like I'm now a professional blogger. Here's a note from Google AdSense telling me they owe me--um, let's just say, enough to by Mrs. B a nice bottle of wine, though not as nice as this one. At any rate, I'm makin' more off this blog than I ever made off the best book I ever wrote.

Playing the Racism Card

Ivan rescusitates this gem:

Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers, every keeper of Libby, Andersonville and Salisbury, every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labor performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child  every solitary one was a Democrat.

That would have been Robert G. Ingesoll (link), undertaking to save the nation from tyranny by recommending the candidacy of James A. Garfield. For perspective, that is just four years after the Republicans bought the presidency by agreeing to let the Bourbon aristocracy do any damn thing it wanted in the old Confederacy. Oddly enough for so confirmed a Republican, Ingersoll was famously opposed to mainsream religion. "An honest god," my notes quote him saying, though undated, "is the noblest work of man."

Obama: I Drank the Bong Water!

The NYT has the goods on Obama. I suppose there are a lot of crotchety grandpas who try to curry favor with the kiddies by exaggerating the tales of deviltry from what may have been a pretty humdrum youth (moi, your honor?). But is Obama the first presidential candidate ever to squeeze himself into this ill-fitting suit? I can't think of another, but here's the headline: Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama's Young Life (link).

Eeuw--but it’s a difficult call. A few years ago, I sat on some committees to screen candidates for judgeships. We used to have to ask them if they ever did drugs. A few would say—Drugs? Nope, sorry, end of story. A good many would say—Um, well, but that was a long time ago and never very much blah blah. Once in a while, you’d get the guy who would say—You kidding? I drank the bong water! That last response was novel enough to be refreshing, but you did suspect that some of them were prevaricating as much as the minimizers.

I see that Obama does, however, have at least on guilty secret to live down: he read Nietzsche. No, no, I tend not to regard a youthful flirtation with Nietzsche as a disqualification from high office, any more than I would an adolescent fling with Ayn Rand (you should stop sometime, though). Kind of touching, actually—all those sober- and pimply-faced infants with black overcoats and a little wisp of grey on the upper lip, packing a battered Vintage paperback edition of the Gay Science:

Horizon: infinity.—We have left the land and taken to our ship! We have burned our bridges—more, we have burned our land behind us! Now, little ship, take care! The ocean lies all around you; true, it is not always roaring, and sometimes it lies there as if it were silken and golden and a gentle favorable dream. But there wil be times when you will know that it is infinite and that there is nothing more terrible than infinity…Alas, if homesickness for land should assail you, as if there were more freedom there—and there is no longer any “land!”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science 124 (Vintage Paperback ed. 19--)

Come to think of it, I’ll bet there is a good chance that Hillary Clinton read the same stuff.

Lost in Translation: The Democrats

Gotta be the weirdest headline I read all week:

Don't reduce Democratic primaries to 'skirt or negro'

Link. Thanks, Dave.

Women are from Alpha Centauri, Men are from Aye Phelta Thigh:Katie Roiphe and Elizabeth Gilbert Department

Here’s a teaser from Katie Roiphe’s Slate review of Eat, Pray, Love (link):

Before [Elizabeth] Gilbert's marriage fell apart and she began her epic travels, she led a fairly conventional life: She had a husband, two homes, a successful writing career, and was contemplating having a child.

If you find that fall-down, water-through-the-nostrils hilarious (as I do), then you may be a candidate for the long version: a three-way audio dialog (a trialog?) about what must (I infer from secondary sources) be the most pernicious piece of literary nonsense since Gibran’s The Prophet, or perhaps The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (link).

A woman leaves her husband and discovers fulfillment through meditation and pasta—and zing to the top of the charts. I admit that an hour is a long time to give to a discussion of such arrant nonsense, but I found myself riveted in horrified fascination hearing Roiphe and Steve Metcalf as they repeatedly butt heads in their Upper-West-Side Punch-and-Judy Show. I don’t suppose this is 100 percent a boy-girl thing—allow more like 97.5 percent, recognizing the saner comments of the third party, Julia Turner, who sometimes sounded less like a full participant than some sort of astonished couples-therapy referee.

I guess I knew about the underlying epic of self-discovery because every third woman on the tour buses in India this fall seemed to be sporting a copy. I made it a point not to inquire at the time, and my judgment is vindicated: the audio, and, a fortiori, ultimately the book, bring back to mind any number of face-ripping brawls I have had with women over a long and not deeply corrupt career (though not, I am at pains to note, Mrs. Buce, who, I suspect, would snort even harder at this stuff than I do).

And, yes, I have no idea why I would want to remember all that?

After That, It's Turtles All the Way Down ...

My friend Margaret monitors the computer security mail in the Federal court system:

Please note information, below, from the weekly JASIRC Computer Security update.

Item this Week (just one)

New Spam relating to “Microsoft Security Update”

Several federal courts have recently reported getting a spam email regarding a purported critical Microsoft Security Update for Windows pc's.

The fraudulent email copies the Microsoft Update graphic to make it appear to be an official Microsoft notice. These types of email rely on a user’s sense of urgency in order to install unauthorized software on a victim’s computer.

Uh, but how do I know that this is not a fake? Did someone say “infinite regress?”

Markets in Everything: The Dagenham Smile

Kottke tells me that “plumber’s butt” is also known as the “Dagenham smile,” I assume due to the prevalence of building trades in the London East End.

The reference prompts me to remember a novelty shop—I think it was near Eighth Avenue and 36^th Street in Manhattan, but the NY Crank tells me I am wrong—where you could buy as it were a “prosthetic Dagenham smile,” to delight your friends at parties. Manufactured, I assume, by the same guys who produced those weird and wonderful fake abs for the fight scene at the end of Branagh’s Hamlet.

Now my friend Anon advises me that you can also buy this.

[Consider yourself lucky that I do not have a graphics-friendly broadband connection this morning.]

It's the One on the Right

They say that Karl Rove distrusted Hans Blix because Blix is a Swede and Rove is Norwegian (link). What’s the difference? Well, which is closer, Jupiter or Saturn? For most people, the distinction is too small and it’s just too hard to remember. I think I know, because my mother was a Swede, but for those who need a little refresher:

I’m sensitive to the problem because I come from New Hampshire, which people keep confusing with Vermont, but Vermont is upside down (I was going to do a cute graphic here, but it would take too long).

From DieselSweeties, and HT BoingBoing.

PS: Jupiter.

Presidents with Good Intentions

Who said this? No, it is not George W. Bush. But consider:

I meant well … . My conscience was clear as a crystal glass, without a scruple or doubt. I was borne along by an irresistible sense of duty. God prospered our labors; and, awful, dreadful, and deplorable as the consequences have been, I cannot but hope that the ultimate good of the world, of the human race, and of our beloved country, is intended and will be accomplished by it.

After digesting that little wonder, consider the passage that precedes sit:

Have I not been employed in mischief all my days? Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolations to the human race and the whole globe ever since?

—John Adams to Benjamin Rush, August 28, 1811,
quoted in The American Enlightenment 211
(Koch. Ed., George Braziller Inc. 1965)

Have always wondered whether JA was pulling our leg. Wonder what he would have thought of the Russian Revolution.

Romney Arithmetic

AP reports that Mitt Romney spent $40 million of his own money in his presidential race and got 294 delegates (link). That pencils out to $136,054 per delegate. That’s very likely more than the average American family holds in net wealth, including bank savings, home equity, and pension funds (link). Wonder how things would have been different if he had just given 294 families an endowment.

Update: or for each delegate, he could have built half a dozen seats at the new Yankee Stadium.

Why Not Accept Euros?

Mark Perry raises his eyebrows at the news that they are accepting Euros at liquor stores in the East Village (link).

Okay, granted, he caught my attention, too. But on second thought, why not?

I suspect the correct response depends on your view as to why the retailers are taking Euros. When I was in Turkey in the early 90s, the locals were desperate for dollars, Deutschmarks, Swiss franks, even Italian lira--anything to get themselves out the inflation spiral that governed Turkish currency for so long: better to have the foreign currency than to have to run to the bank.

On the other hand, anything is a worth dollar (or a Euro) at the right price. In this age of free convertability and ready access to the facilities of exchange--and of ready-configured conversion cash registers--it really shouldn't matter: or at any rate it is nothing more than a little teaser to the customer, like the bowl of mints at the hostess podium. In five-star hotels in India, my impression is they'll take any of a half dozen currencies at the market rate, and with little or nothing by way of exchange ripoff in the process.

My guess is that for present purposes, we are Indians and not Turks. But I have to admit, I stopped to read his blog post.

Afterthought: I wasn't there, but I am told that in Slovenia in the early 90s, they got shirty about foreign currency, especially Deutschmarks. "We have our own currency now," they would say. A matter of national pride, I suppose. I assume there are motel operators in West Texas who will insist on the dollar as a matter of national pride, but mine doesn't run that far.

Update: FP falls for the weak-dollar explanation (link). And fn to FP: coins don't crumple.

Baby Needs a New Pair of Provinces

Augustus—C. Julius Caesar Octavianus, Caesar Augustus—first and greatest emperor of the whole Roman Empire, descendant of Julius Caesar, the “august” one—liked to shoot crap. See Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution. 376 (Oxford Paperback ed. 1986).

Bye Bye Brumberg

Larry is up early reading the New York Times obituaries again:

Problems of Communism was founded in 1952 by a forerunner of the information agency, which was established the next year. Mr. Brumberg was the journal’s editor in chief until 1970. (Currently published by M. E. Sharpe Inc., the journal is today called Problems of Post-Communism.)

—From the obituary of Abraham Brumburg here.

Department of I Don't Get It (John McCain)

I never saw this eight-year-old piece by Michael J. Lynch until today, but I’d say Lynch has got John McCain’s number:

For John McCain, principle is fundamentally about honor—personal honor: about keeping his word, about doing what is right and doing it well. "Principle" combines honesty, stubbornness, and loyalty. This notion of principle is very different from adhering to a consistent political philosophy. … McCain's view of principle grows out of an aristocratic code of virtues, which in turn informs the ethics of the military, the institution within which McCain was born, raised, and spent much of his life working. The heart of the aristocratic code of ethics … is that one doesn't let people down. Obligations, in this view, are not owed to abstract systems of belief. They are specific, personal, owed to individuals or institutions: one's troops, the Senate, one's country. By this definition of principle, McCain's story shows him to be quite principled indeed.

I think this is wonderful (and kudos to any journalist whose work can bear rereading after this span of time). But it leaves open the question—why, exactly, do conservatives hate him so much?

I mean—I can see why the libertarians at Cato hate him (he’s not afraid of government power), but they are no more than a matchstick in the conservative forest fire. I can see why the oligarchs on K Street hate him (tobacco regulation and McCain-Feingold—and the fact that he is just too ornery). I guess I can see why a serious Christian moralist might have reservations about his free-wheeling horndog youth (which, refreshingly, he has never tried to conceal or explain away).

But none of this is enough to give a plausible explanation as to why the mass of conservative voters would turn their back on a guy with a near-impeccable conservative voting record in favor of Mr. I-used-to-be-more-liberal-than-Ted-Kennedy. One more proof that I don’t know squat about politics.

Fn.: conventional wisdom, says that McCain is embarrassed about his linkage to Charles Keating (link; cf. link). FWIW, I always figured McCain took a bum rap on that one. Seems to me that everything he did was well within the limits of the rules of the game, at least as they stood at the time.

Victor Serge and his Contemporaries

NYRB Classics is bringing out a new edition of Unforgiving Years, which I haven’t read yet but probably will, to accompany its reissue of his The Case of Comrade Tulayev, which NYRB reissued a while back, and which I did read a while back in a battered old second hand paperback. Of Serge, the NYRB Classics editor says (link):

He is one of the greatest of twentieth-century political novelists, and his work more than holds its own—I'd even say overshadows—that of contemporaries like Andre Malraux and Ignazio Silone, not to mention such fading Cold War relics as 1984 and Darkness at Noon.

Hm, let me think about that. I resist calling 1984 a “relic.” I haven’t read it in years, but I’m one of those bitter-enders who thinks that Orwell was and is just as great as we always thought. Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is, perhaps, a different sort of creature. It was surely an important political statement in its place and time, although I suspect serious readers recognized from the start that it was more important due to its context than it was for any possible intrinsic merit.

Silone—I wonder if anyone under 50 has even heard of Silone? He is perhaps a classic exemplar of the category of “troubled liberal,” and we know those guys all get chewed up by events. I read Bread and Wine a few years back and found it naïve—but it had a kind of charm about it, a good deal of the flavor of a certain time and place. I read Fontamara a couple years back in an Italian student reader, and made it the subject of my first-ever substantive blog post. I don’t suppose it was a “great” book—it seemed a bit manufactured, as if produced for a show—but its compassion seemed sincere and some bits were telling, and some bits tellingly funny. So, I’d say Silone is a keeper.

Malraux. Ah, Malraux. I certainly remember when we treated him like an icon. But I also remember assigning Man’s Fate to a class of undergraduates years back—it was for one of those get-to-know-the-faculty seminars that meet in your living room—and finding it almost indefensibly false. Good writing in its way, I suppose, but preening, self-aggrandizing moralism in a style that makes my skin crawl. I suspect in general, Malraux’s reputation as fallen pretty low.

So, where does Serge fit? As I say, I haven’t read Unforgiving Years, but on the strength of Comrade Tulayev, I certainly want to. Like the other authors mentioned here, I suppose he is in some sense a product of his time. But then again, who isn’t? The best of these—certainly Orwell, probably Silone—have a way of at once capturing and at the same time transcending their time, allowing them to reach forward and make contact with a very different time. On that score, I’d say Tulayev measures up. I think he did a good job of capturing some of the deceptions and of what Auden called the “Low, Dishonest Decade”—and, more than the deceptions, the self-deceptions that allowed some people to get themselves sucked into it.

I certainly wasn’t politically conscious in the 30s (!) but I was by the 50s (at least in a childish way) and I knew old lefties who said “We never knew! We never knew!” Serge is living proof that somebody knew, and tried to tell the truth before it was fashionable. That’s enough reason for Serge to survive and, I hope, to endure. I look forward to Unforgiving Years.

Postscript: The introduction to Tulayev is by the late Susan Sontag. NYRB calls it one of Susan Sontag's most ambitious and thoughtful late statements. I’m not persuaded: if I had read the intro alone, I might well have skipped the book. But that might just be a thing between me and Susan. Read the book because of Susan if you like, or in spite of her if you prefer. But do read it. And, probably, read the new one, too.

Cat's Out of the Bag Note

The Cats Out of the Bag, so I can join the chorus of those offering their salute to the cat--that would be Frank Wilson, book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and proprietor of the estimable Books, Inq. weblog. Frank is ground down, I believe, between the upper and nether millstones of daily newspaper economics. Booklovers will cluck over the demise of another showcase, but I figure it is, or was, inevitable. I gather he intends to keep his bloggy essence active in some form, and he assures his friends that he won't be dining on, well, cat food. I've not yet met him, but I've corresponded with him and I can testify that he is civil and affable, and he has certainly presided over a fine salon.

Clash of Civilizations Note

Here's something probably everybody else knew, but just occurred to me. Reading some stuff about Caesar Augustus, it has come home to me how many defining battles in the history of Western Civilization were fought out in and around what we now call Greece.

There was Thermopylae, of course, and Marathon and Salamis, the three battles that defined Greece against Persia, and had a lot to do with shaping our notions of “East” and “West.”

But a little later, there is Actium, where Augustus toppled Marc Antony. To characterize Actium as a battle of East versus West is partly a cynical (and successful) public relations travesty manufactured by Augustus. But it seems likely that Actium extended “Western” control over the “Eastern” empire for hundreds of years beyond what we might otherwise have expected

Actium is critical, but Pharsalus (where Caesar defeated Pompey) and Phillipi (where Antony and others defeated the assassins of Caesar) belong somewhere in the same catalog.

And it doesn’t end there. A millennium and a half later, Lepanto pits “Turks” against Western Christians in the same part of the world.

Although it occurred nearby off the coast of Venice, I don’t suppose I should include Chioggia, because it pitted Venetians against Genoese—an all-Western extravaganza. But by only a little stretch, I can pick up the Battle of Blackbirds Field, Kosovo—Serbs versus Ottomans in a conflict whose history still haunts us today.

Are there more that belong on this list?

Is DeLong Being Coy?

Brad DeLong does something odd. (link). Weighing Clinton v. Obama, he says:

[T]he Hillary Rodham Clinton who made such an administrative mess of health reform in 1993-1994 could not have run the campaign she has run over the past two years. Thus I am now confident that either has a reasonable shot of being in the top 20% of American presidents.

Why is this odd? Let’s go to the tape:

My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994—is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

You anticipate me: that is Brad DeLong, writing in 2003 (link). Now, I have a high regard for DeLong, even if he does get off the reservation every once in a while (link). But I think he deserves to be taken seriously—and indeed, I have long regarded him as a principal component of a mosaic that helps to shape my own view of Clinton. In particular: it has always impressed me how much she is disliked by those in a position to know—those who were close to her in the Bill years (if you doubt me, check the list of Obama supporters from a year ago, back when he was still the outsider). In this picture, DeLong counts as a vital component.

Now, I don’t pretend to be a master of the entire DeLong oeuvre, but I’m not aware of any place where he squarely and explicitly addresses his change of heart. In a cursory Google search, I do find one occasion when a commentator threw these words back in DeLong’s face. DeLong’s response? Actually, I am not clear there is a response. DeLong enters a comment—the single word “touché,” but it isn’t clear whether he is responding to this post or another (link).

A Google search for the critical phrase turns up 1,000 hits—a great many, it seems, from Clinton enemies delighted to find such sharp language from someone you might expect to be a friend.

I don’t suppose you would say "friend" just yet (are the Clintons ready to forgive?), but you’d certainly have to say "friendly." I really think the situation calls for a bit of clarity—more explanation on how he got from “there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president,” to now, where she is looking at the top 20 percent.

Postcript: I see that Kevin Miller picks up on the point in the DeLong comments (link).

Sighting: Gentle Knight, Pricking on the Plane

Link to the blog of a guy who is reading, actually reading, Spenser's Faerie Queen.

Making Money By Giving Stuff Away

I read this a couple of days ago but it sticks in my mind; the best explanation I've ever seen as to how you make money when you give stuff away for free (link) (and H/T Jim Fallows).

Remembering Earl Butz

I see that Earl Butz is dead at 98 (link). I remember him as the guy who got sideways for a vulgar joke but I had forgotten: he actually got sideways for two vulgar jokes but the first did not get him fired. You can find details (with elision) at Wiki (link). Tim Noah puts it elegantly (link), declaring that Butz "portrayed black men as lazy, shiftless, and priapic."

Noah does an unobjectionable job of sketching the racist content and context of the remark and the evolution thereof, but I have often wondered--what if Butz had said it not about blacks, but about men? Would he have been forced to resign? Would he have been wrong?

Stuff You Can't Do Without the Internet: All the Murders

Jill Leovy has a riveting story in the LA Times (print edition) about how she covered the murders--all the murders--in LA last year (link). The print version ordinarily covers only about 10 percent:

I wanted readers to see all the killings -- roughly 1,000 violent deaths each year, mostly of young Latinos and, most disproportionately, of young black men. The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space.

So the Homicide Report, as it was called, began with the simplest of journalistic missions: exposing a painful, largely unseen problem.The first list of homicide victims, published just over a year ago, contained the names of 17 people. Eight were Latino. Six were black. Two were of Cambodian descent -- killed in a double homicide. None were white. Most were in their 20s. ...

Two or three homicides occurred in the county per day, on average. As the report developed, I filled notebooks with police jargon, scrawling the same details over and over. "Male black adult" or "Male Hispanic" -- accompanied by addresses in Compton, Florence, Hawthorne, Boyle Heights or Watts. ...

Detectives routinely admitted that the names and ages they had recorded for victims were, at best, conjecture: Many victims, including illegal immigrants or career criminals, had lived entirely underground.

Leovy says her bosses moved her on to other things (why, I wonder?). But, she says, "none of the more ambitious stories I'd previously done for the paper seemed quite as effective as simply listing victims, one by one by one."

Sho

I’ve always thought that William Faulkner has an uncanny ear for the rhythms and patterns of Southern speech. But he doesn’t do it (as Mark Twain does it) with “dialect spelling;” he trusts the language to carry itself.

One noteworthy exception is the N-word for African Americans (Faulkner wrote before “black”). Most of the time, Faulkner says “Negro” (which, I assume, most of his characters would have pronounced “Nigrah.”). Sometimes he says “Nigger.” I don’t think this happens by accident: I think Faulkner is very particular about when his characters say which.

Another possible exception is the word that Faulkner rights as “sho.” This is a word that looks like “sure,” as in “yes, certainly.” But I call it only a possible exception, because in context, I am not at all sure that “sho” does mean “sure.” Rather, read in context, you can hear the word taking on a subtle and complex network of meanings that tell you a lot about the characters and the world they live in. Here are some examples from the opening pages of Light in August, the current readaloud selection at the Buce library, together with suggested translations:

“I reckon I got a few days left.”

“Sho.” (15) [Lady, you’ve got a peck of trouble ahead, but I am not going to aggravate the issue by rubbing your nose in it.]

I wouldn’t be beholden,” she says. “I wouldn’t trouble.”

“Sho.” (Id.) [In fact, you will be trouble, but I will not embarrass you by saying so.]

“I’d sho by that cultivator at that figure. If you don’t buy it, I be dog if I aint a good mind to buy it, myself, at that price. I reckon the fellow that owns it aint got a span of mules to sell for about five dollars has he?”

“Sho.” (11) [You’re baiting me now, but I won’t take the bait—and note the earlier “sho,” meaning (for once) just “certainly.”]

“You’ll have to say goodbye to her for me. I had hopened to see her myself, but …..”

“Sho.” (25) [It’s lucky for you she is not here.]

“It’s been right kind,” she said.

“Sho.” (Id.) [Thank you.]

As it happens, all these examples come from the speech of Henry Armistead, the kindly farmer who comes to the aid of Lena in her distress. But Henry is not the only one who says "sho." Talking about the mysterious Brown who gads about like “a worthless horse,” Byron says “But I reckon maybe the mares like him.” Mooney the foreman responds “Sho,” as in “Ha! I’ll bet he’s got girls in trouble all over North Mississippi!” (40) And on the next page, Mooney himself says “sho,” when he means “you’re probably right.” (41)

There is so much going on here—such a network of overlapping meanings. There is a kind of civility and tact, or at any rate disposition to sidestep conflict, but also a thread of irony, sometimes bitter, almost always stoic. Someone (Cleanth Brooks?) has argued that Faulkner characters are passive, witnessing and accepting the world and not doing much about it. This is true in its way, but most of them are also dirt-poor, uneducated and unskilled, not knowing how to do much except to bear with dignity. It’s a tough like. It’s not going well, and it won’t end well. But there is no point in making a fuss over things you can’t change. Sho.

Page refs are to the Vintage Books paperback edition, 1987.

Bank History in 30 Seconds

Did he miss anything important?

[B]anks need to hold only a fraction of their liabilities in reserve .. [The system] is known as “fractional reserve banking” … . The modern version dates back to the days when merchants traveled the country weighed down by bags of gold coins. They realized that the safest place to store their gold was with the people who had the strongest safes: the gold merchants. In return for storing the gold there, the merchant would give them as slip of paper-effectively an IOU. As the system gained in popularity, the IOUs became a currency, relieving people of the need constantly to take out or deposit the gold itself.

The gold merchants, over time, realized that they were storing far more gold than was ever taken out. So, rather than issue IOUs on a like-for-like basis with the gold deposited, they began to issue (sell) far more IOUs with a far greater total value than the gold they held, profiting handsomely from the proceeds.

From a letter to ther editor of the London review of Books by one Rob Best of Morpeth, Northumberland, otherwise unknown to me, published in the edition for January 24, 2008, pp. 4-5.

The Old One Resigned To Spend More Time With His Family

Times (London) headline:

Society of Jesus Seeks New Leader

From BBC News Quiz.

Dinosaur Sighting

From the obituary notice of Andrew Downey Orrick, who served for six years on the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Eisenhower:

He then returned to the law firm but made a moral choice to get out of the field of securities law, one of the firm’s specialties, said his nephew, attorney William Orrick III.

“My uncle was a very ethical guy,” he said. “He decided he would not practice in that area because he thought he would be using influence he had gained as a result of his governmental position in a way that would be unethical …”

—San Francisco Chronicle, page B3, February 2, 2008

The last of the gentlemen.

The Weblog as New-Age CB Radio

Laura Kleiman says she is reading less blog stuff (link).

Anyone find that their blog reading is going down? I for a while now have found myself scanning maybe four sites a day, and really finding very little worth reading. Like gossip reporting, it has its place, but it is all so ephemeral and vapid too. A large part of the problem is, I just don't care about the opinions of most people who write these things, and want information -- high-value, hard-to-get, not-speculative, real information -- not their opinion, which they are often with some exceptions not in the business to offer. .. As for opinion, I'll take investigative intelligence and reporting tenacy over it any day. Expect I'm not the only one who's found their reading habits have significantly changed.

Interesting. But I have been wondering if the blog will turn out in retrospect to be like CB radio—huge flash in the pan, followed by precipitious decline. Other models might be ham radio—I suspect there are still people out there and saying blah blah blah blah, do you read me? Or community access cable—does anybody watch that any more (setting aside Wayne and Garth, did anybody ever?)?

Apparently I still read more blog stuff than Laura (although I wonder if perhaps I never did read as much as she at her peak). But I do note some trends: I’ve got a Google aggregator with a whole lot of links; I tend to skim most of the link titles and read only a few—just as, in another time, I might have canvassed my daily newspaper. For example, I think it is amusing to read those daily headlines from BoingBoing, but I certainly don’t feel the need to follow through every time with the item.

I still tend to pay a lot of attention to a few sites I think I really learn from (Mark Thoma is still an unbeatable aggregator of economics stuff); or that I watch out of a sense of professional responsibility (that would be you, CreditSlips), or for good company (that would be you AE). But there are several blogs that I read with a lot of care a few months ago from whom I have seemed to have gleaned most of what they can offer—on the same principle that you don’t want to take every course from the same professor, because you may just learn the same stuff over and over again. In a way this is just a matter of getting more discriminating with experience: I once thought I had to read every book in the library. Lately I’ve come to understand that a lot of books just have little or no reason for being.

Meanwhile, I find there are other new-agey things that are getting my attention: Mrs. B gave me my first Ipod for Christmas, and I have begun to discover downloaded university lectures. Haven’t actually done an online course yet, but I’m thinking about it.

On the other side of the equation, I admit there are places where print seems to retain its advantage. Example: right now I have online subscriptions to both The Economist and the Wall Street Journal. I have to admit I’m reading both less than I did when I had access on paper.

One small contra-indication to Laura’s point: the hit count on this site seems to creep slowly up, though still in the class of minuscule or derisory. I’ve always referred to it as a “friends and family” thing, but in truth I can’t imagine why anybody reads it: when push comes to shove, it is all about me, all the time. But it’s an entertaining daily exercise, a kind of mental zen: I find myself thinking as I observe just anything, “hm, can I package a snippet about that?” And, I guess I could say, “I think I just did…”

On Not Rounding Up The Usual Suspects

I resisted blogging on this, but I now remark on the fact that the skinny blonde lady has said she might even support Hillary. And the fact that the fat guy with the cigar fetish is throwing his considerable weight into the balance against McCain.

At first glance, I admit I am baffled by this. Do these guys really think McCain will lose? Do they really want a President who does not have to kowtow to them? I really do not get it.

But let it be. On second thought, I recall that Barack Obama, for his part, has made it this far almost entirely without needing to cozy up to the traditional black leadership (link).

It’s something to consider. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could go into the election season assured that neither Ann Coulter, nor Rush Limbaugh, nor Al Sharpton, nor Jesse Jackson—that none of them would have the secret handshake?

Of course in an Obama administration we would have this lady as Secretary of Cool.

Who Supports a Housing Bailout?

Scanning foreclosure news, I find opposition to a bailout bill coming from a Representative from Modesto (link).

Say again, Modesto? Modesto, which just might be the foreclosure capital of the planet? Can he get away with that? Apparently he is willing to try. Reading stories like this (and listening to California voters on PBS tonight), it sinks in on me that not every voter may support the idea of a housing bailout. I suspect a lot of voters don’t cotton to the idea of saving shareholders of lenders (and I suspect they are a little hazy about arguments on preventing a bank meltdown). I’ll bet there are quite a few who see no compelling need to help those who used their houses as ATM machines.

There might be a little more compassion for first-time homebuyer, particularly if you can fudge the issue with mirror tricks like “stretchout plans” that don’t seem like real money.

On the other hand, I wonder if there may not be more leeway than usual for a candidate in either party who just says “sorry, tough luck.” I wonder how it is playing in Modesto.

Don't Throw Away Those Cliffnotes!

Evidently a British department store has had to withdraw a little-girl bedroom suite because they didn’t know they’d named it after the poster girl for child sex abuse.

The value of a liberal education. Remarkably, I see that Tigerhawk, too, supports this porridge of soft leftism.

If You Look too Long into the Abyss ...

You know, the Administration has been telling us since forever that we have to fight rough because the enemy fights rough, and sentimental attachment to the pieties of due process is a delusion of the fastidious. Extraordinary rendition? Not a big deal. Concentration camps? Oh, don’t call them that. Torture? Well…

I wonder, can we now expect an Administration mouthpiece to tell us that in order to fight terror in Iraq, we will need to start recruiting mentally retarded female suicide bombers? Hanson? Krauthammer? Yoo? Anyone? Anyone?

Afterthought: Just occurred to me that this is one more way in which Joseph Conrad was way ahead of his time.

Update: Uh oh.

Say Again?

I’m still working on this one:

The only sure and solid pleasures of life—the only ones of which you cannot be deprived by any metaphysician—are those of the chase, of war, of love, of the table, of religious intolerance and of the stage.

Ford Madox Ford, Provence 185 (Ecco Press Ed. 1979)

Thanks for the Shoutout

Thanks to Anecdotal Evidence for a generous shoutout (link), but my wife and my dean would be happy to offer some acerb comments on the virtues and challenges of multitasking. And let me return the compliment: if you like this blog and have not visited AE, you are missing a treat.

Afterthought: Oh, and I am remiss in thanking Bob Lawless at CreditSlips (another daily read here) for shipping a nice chunk of traffic my way (link).

First-Ever Underbelly Sartorial Comment

I see that a law professor is publishing an article arguing that law professors ought to dress better (link). As a charter member of the unmade-double-bed school of academic attire (and frequent winner of my own school’s worst dressed award), I need to remind the professor that:

• There is an inverse correlation between quality of costume and prestige of faculty: the fancier the school, the scruffier the costume. So if the dean does want his faculty to dress up, he had better make sure they don’t do it when the accrediters are around; and
• Neckties cut off blood flow to the brain.

And if he is looking for allies in the law firms, he is fighting a losing battle.

Nostalgia note: I was walking down the street in Istanbul once when a voice yelled out: hey, you look like a professor, you want to buy a carpet?