Shadows from My Past

Two shadows from my past crossed my bow this weekend--and from portions of my past that had nothing to do with each other.

One, Harry McAlpin, honored in memory as the first black correspondent ever to cover a White House press conference.

Say again, Harry McAlpin?  Yes, Harry McAlpin.  I knew him in my own newspaper days, in the 60s in Louisville as the executive--CEO?--as a black insurance company.  These were the years of civil rights turmoil and Louisville had its own share of the action, albeit nothing like, say, Birmingham.  The McAlpin I knew (I wouldn't have thought of calling him Harry) was self-contained, carefully put together, always correct in his public presentation.  He wasn't a barricades kind of guy.  But you quickly learned he was somebody you wanted on your radar; somebody who knew and understood the deep structure of the movement and might, if treated with proper respect, be gracious enough to explain.

Among many other things, I owe him for the gift of an important insight about the ways of politics.  As with so many other southern states, understanding the white response to racism in Kentucky required understanding at least two seemingly incompatible constituencies.  One was the silk-stocking liberals in the city, exemplified not least by my employer, Barry Bingham, the publisher of the Louisville newspapers (and a man who enjoyed having people utter his name in hushed tones).  The other was the bumptious, rabble-rousing populist streak, exemplified (and well, too) by the bumptious rabble-rousing A.B. "Happy" Chandler.

I think I had already figured out at that point that Happy, for all his cornpone manner, was purposeful, smart, funny (really funny) and imbued with a deep-seated streak of generosity, not least about blacks.  McAlpin confirmed my view. He let me understand that he liked Happy too, perhaps rather better than he liked his silk-stocking neighbors (who could also be fair weather friends).  McAlpin recalled the kerfuffle over integrating the pubic schools in Sturgis, KY in 1956, when Happy was governor.  "He sent the tanks into Sturgis," McAlpin said.  That was enough for him.  Point taken.

So far, so good, but here's the odd thing. I have absolutely no memory of having known about his White-House correspondent years.  "You're a reporter?" people will always say. "I used to be a reporter"--citing their time doing the social notes for their high school yearbook (I admit I have played this card myself from time to time).   You'd think I must have known--I once wrote a long profile about his career (it's in a box in the shed--maybe I'll fish it out later).   Or maybe--it would have been in keeping with his character--it just wasn't something he was going to talk about.

We turn next to the obituary column of the New York Times this morning,  and its report on the passing of Rabbi Myer Kripke of Omaha, whose main claim to fame in the eyes of the Times copy desk is that he invested early with his bridge-buddy Warren Buffett, and took home some $25 millions for his troubles.   "Took home" is metaphorical here since if I read this right, Rabbi Kripke drove an old Chevvie, lived in a rented apartment, and gave most of the money away.  I'd come across his name last  year in this magnificent piece of long form journalism about his daughter, who shares the queen-sized bed in her Greenwich Village apartment with one of the world's greatest collection of dictionaries.  I learned about papa there; I learned also about his son, her brother Saul, the philosopher.

I never knew the rabbi, the daughter or the philosopher (nor Buffett either, come to that).  But it crossed my mind as I read the obit--could it be? And sure enough, just a moment's Googling makes it clear that Rabbi Myer was the brother of Homer Kripke, who just might have been the smartest lawyer I ever knew.    Well: there's smart and there's smart and I'm sure there are plenty of lawyerly skills that Homer wasn't particularly adept at.  But as a book-lawyer, as a student of bankruptcy and commercial law, Homer had no master.  He came to academia only late, after long years in practice.  I can't think of anybody (well, yes I can, just one) who better married the street with the academy.

Early in my career, Homer invited me to go on one of his course books as co author.  I was flattered beyond imagining.  In the end I turned him down; I came to suspect he wanted an assistant, more than a a partner, and I wasn't disposed to do that. But also, I doubted that I would be able to keep up with the pace and acuity of his understanding.

We crossed paths from time to time in later  years, of which I remember one instance particular.   About quarter of eight one autumn morning  in the 70s, I was in my office at the law firm  when the phone rang.  "This  is Homer Kripke  You published xxx in the yy Law Review. On page nnn, there's a footnote.  It says: etc.  This is incorrect. Actually, our reasoning was just the other way around.  So the solution is not unwise, as you say.  The solution is just what it should be [click]." 

I was about to say "of course he was right," although I'm not so sure.  Fact is, I was enough diverted by the whole presentation that I don't suppose I can make an effective judgment as to whether he was right or not.   

Harry McAlpin.  Homer Kripke.  I wonder if they ever met.  Probably not.  But I met them both, and am the richer for it.

Oh I Think I Get It Now...

Recall: my generation grew up in a world where deals chased money.  Since, oh, say, 1980, we've lived in a world where money chased deals.  Like, for example, Continental Illinois, which shoveled all its (our) cash down an array of ratholes.  Like Henry Kravis and the mother of all LBOs  (on which, it seems, he in the end also lost money).  Like Robert Campeau (boy, does anybody remember him?) who was somehow able to finance "The Biggest, Looniest Deal Ever," (and wound back in his mother's spare bedroom).  

Like the mortgage brokers.  Well no, wait.  Go back a bit in time.  Remember the early mortgage brokers from, say, the 80s?  Here was a guy who found a prospect who could use a loan.  He'd check the credit, he'd set some terms. Then he'd go looking for an investor who could put some money into the deal.   The investor would get his deal with his note.  Some of these brokers were crooks and a fair number of them wound up in bankruptcy.  For others, it was a living--a tough one, but a living.  But that's the thing: they were constrained by the amount of capital they could lay their  hands on.  Always looking for new money.  

Always, that is, until they were "discovered" by Wall Street and its pent-up sluice of cash.  These were the guys who transmogrified the loan brokering business--who found that anybody with a pulse and a laptop could be a broker; who ginned up Alt-A-minus, the sub-640 FICO and the whole cafeteria full of devices designed to get the borrower in through the window and the product out the door.  

You may remember: it all worked find until it didn't work any more and we are still picking up the pieces.  We've sloshed whole barge loads of money into the banks on the premise that if we All Believe in Fairies then Tinkerbell will Get Well Again.

Now this: here's Wolfgang Richter explaining how the new housing "bubble" is driven not by prospective homeowners but by Wall Street investors with more money than they know what to do with.  And  here is Sam Zell buying trailer parks.

There is a common theme here, yes?  I mean, in both cases, the trick is to capture the income stream of the poor schlepps who keep the fat cats juiced and comfy, yes?  In the old days you did it with mortgage payments.  Now you do it with rents.  Haveta live somewhere, they say, although "somewhere" can also include a corrugated refrigerator box under the expressway.  Meanwhile, folks, let's party.  Looks like the money will continue to flow.

The Jesus "Hoax"

Count on the Wall Street Journal to keep me current on early ecclesiastical history.  I'd seen some of the early stories about the Jesus-had-a-wife papyrus.  Somehow I had missed the (apparently rather sophisticated) second-round critique arguing that it's a hoax.  Comes now the Journal with a bonus cluck about all those gullible reporters and how quick they were to jump on the story in the first place.

Me, I have no business opining--ignorance, dear madam--but I do tend to suspect that it is a hoax, as the paper and informed scholars now seems to believe.  Still, I wonder when the Journal  will see fit to show the same sort of skeptical discipline to, say, Obama-was-born-in-Kenya or Hillary-murdered-Vince-Foster or Roosevelt-bombed-Pearl-Harbor or any of the rest of the army of canards that seem to be around since at least the time of Charlemagne.

And while we are at it, note, there are two separate Jesus issues on the table.  One, is the document a hoax?  And two, was Jesus married? The two are not necessarily related; that is, Jesus might have been married even if the document is a hoax.  

Me again: I don't have much doubt that there was an historical Jesus, albeit there is plenty of room for discussion about what such a person said or did.  I am inclined to think he probably was not married: wandering miracle maker, unemployed and likely unemployable--not the best prospect coming out of the gate in the connubial sweepstakes (cue old jokes about mama's boy).  But I'm a bit puzzled that true believers might want to believe that he was not married.  Consider: unemployed 30-year-old, no family man, spends all his time hangin' with his homies.   Eeuw, let's not go there.

Così Followup: What Was Eating Renée?

I've been meaning to follow up on The Curious Incident at the HD Opera the other day--specifically, Renée Fleming as intermission hostess, insisting that the libretto of Così somehow required an apology, as you might apologize if, for example, your football team bore a name that is an ethnic slur.  Of course we wouldn't say that sort of thing today, we nice people, but those were olden times and the music is beautiful so let's forgive ourselves a bit of impropriety.

Say what? Impropriety? How odd. 

The plot is easily told, almost fairy-tale in its simplicity: in the first act, the ladies promise undying love; their lovers depart. In the second a act--uh oh. At the end, a kind-of-a sort of-a-resolution, except maybe not.

Now, I suppose you might find this simply funny (cue: "You find that funny?")  Perhaps more likely, you read it (as I suspect Mozart intended it to be read) as a kind of bleak, autumnal wisdom.  It's mutable, this humanity.  What you thing will last forever--it doesn't last forever, and the chances are you don't even want it to last forever (are you really looking forward to meeting Granny in heaven?  Tell the truth, now.  Really?).  It's the paradox of existence: enjoy yourself, but don't kid yourself. Stuff happens.

With Renée, my first thought was--who wrote her script? Does she have a banker problem?  A political commissar?  But no--on second thought, my guess is that this was her doing, and that the sentiment is deeply felt.  I mentioned before that I read her memoir, which I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend.   I thought it a superb account of how to live in the arts, how to build a career.  But it struck me also as tinged with an odd note of pathos, in the sense of: if I am so successful and famous, why am I not having more fun?

To which, were I her friend, I would say: Renée, love, welcome to hard times.  You are one of fortune's favored, a gift to all humanity and I delight in your success.  But Renée, love, stuff happens.  Even to the likes of you, love, even to the likes of you.

In her perplexity last Saturday, Fleming seemed to try to spin it into a kind of feminist message, as if to say not that "people don't act that way;" rather more on the lines of "women don't act that way, and it is piggy of us to suggest that they do."    Sugar and spice and everything nice (she seems not to have noticed that the men in  Così  are set forth as bearing an equal (perhaps greater) burden of comic humanity--but maybe for the men, it is no more than justice?).  But I don't think she had her heart in the larger political agenda.  It was these women she was thinking about, or this woman, Fiordeligi, whose transition is so central the theme.  Or more precisely, this woman, Renée, who has sung  the part often enough. Personal note, it was my great good fortune to see her sing it there back in '96, and I count it as one of the defining opera occasions of my life.

So, dear friend, go with the autumnal-wisdom flow.  Don't feel any need to try to explain it away and don't ever, ever, try to apologize.  If you haven't got the message yet, you might look back to an earlier New York arts-darlng:

By the time you swear you're his,

Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is

Infinite, undying,

Lady, make a note of this —

One of you is lying.

First printed in Life, (8 April 1926) p. 11

Being, of course, Dorothy Parker. Me, I think I'll revel in Fiordeligi's great (albeit ironic) anthem of faith:

Wrong-footed Harvard

It struck me the other day that Harvard University Press appears to have been caught off guard by the runaway success of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.   They moved up the publication date, apparently once they woke up to the fact that the great and good were already reading it (and in French too, not so?).  They let it go out with dreadful, amateurish, high school graphics--the kind of thing you would expect from an academic on a tight research budget, not from the nation's leading purveyor of learning.*  And now this, from today's email:

They did not add: none of which we expect to find anywhere within shouting distance of the Amazon best seller list, but hey, we never ever expected that of Piketty, either.

Afterthought: shouldn't it be "piqueté?

*But Joel suggests that the lousy graphics have more to do with the economics of publishing.  I.e., ten years ago they might have sprung for better, no budget for that any more.

There's Judging and There's Judging

A(nother) former student of mine is applying for a judgeship.  I think he's an ideal candidate and it would fill me with great (reflected) pride to see him get it, but it does set me back to thinking about a topic I guess I've written about before--namely, the characteristics of a good judge. And which I write about again now partly because I think I've just had (egad) a new thought.

Core point: people often talk about the judge in terms of how "intelligent" he is.  Fair enough: you don't want your judge dumb as a box of nails.  But "intelligence," though it may be on the list of qualities you want in a judge is not at the top of the list.  I'd put it down somewhere like fifth or sixth, behind balance, predictability, a willingness to listen, a decent work ethic.   Oh, and integrity, I almost forgot about integrity.  Oh, and a willingness to decide stuff.  Amazing  how many judges don't like to decide stuff.  A dreadful quality in a judge, like a duck being allergic to feathers.  It can turn him/her into a monster.

And an absence of vanity (I guess I am up past 5-6 now)--a willingness to work hard without letting his ego get in the way.  Coincidence, I was trying to spell this out to Mrs. Buce just the other night. Do you remember, I asked, the OJ trial (no link required)?  Of course you  remember the OJ trial, but do you remember how at the same time, there was a trial going forward in New York, some kind of mass shooting, maybe the Long Island Railroad (correct).  The defendant was a showman who saw the courtroom was his theatre.  Do you remember that trial?  Well, um… we don't have cable.

Okay, do you  remember the judge in the OJ case?  Of course.  It was Lance Ito, he of The Dancing Itos, one of the few judges with his own IMDb page.

Okay, do you remember the judge in the Long Island Railroad Case?  Well like I said, we don't have cable.  Yes, but that's the thing.  Even without cable, you knew all about Ito.  He made himself part of the story.  The judge in the LIRR case made you forget he was there.  That's a big difference.  Making you forget he was there: what I call a sterling quality in a judge.  

So far, so good.  But now a new fillip.  The topic being judges who get their name in the papers,  Mrs. Buce muttered.  "Judge Judy…"  She didn't follow up on the point, but I guess I get what she was driving at: Judge Judy is the very definition of a judge who gets her name in the paper.  And--

And what?  And, you could say, she isn't a judge; like the defendant in the LIRR case (and like everybody in OJ), she's in theatre.  The audience comes for the entertainment and stays for the entertainment and goes away happy.

But don't let the point slip away from you here.  Yes, Judge Judy is entertainment. But one thing we want out of our judges is entertainment.  Or more precisely: we want the judge not merely to decide, but to announce, to declare, to point with pride, to view with alarm, to give judgment, like the volcano in the old Tom Hanks movie.

So add a (I guess) seventh to my list of qualities.  Do I get it?  Not quite it, but it's there like infant baptism and Monday night football and a lot of other things I don't get.  Might as well learn to I've with it.

Footnote:  It was this guy.

Met HD Così

We took in the Met's HD showing of Così fan tutte and it certainly lives up to its notices: it's a bravura performance and the star of the show is James Levine, powering both the orchestra and the cast with a grit and drive that I've never seen before. Someone in an intermission interview said that it's the rhythm and I bet that's right: for such a spare and elegant story there are some fiercely complicated intertwinings in the score and it's possible for even the best of singers to get lost in a puddle. Not so here: everything fit together. The Levine story is an opera-sized story itself, of course: after two hers, during which most people thought we'd never see him conduct again here he is back again, evidently to show himself that he's still got it and that he is determined to squeeze the juice out of any chance that remains to be offered him.

The singing itself was fine, but that's the thing: I've seen better. I still think Cecelia Bartoli owns Despina and  I'd say that Paolo Montarsolo brings a dark elegance to Don Alfonso that his hard to match.  The only one in the current cast who seems so exactly suited to his role would be Rodion Pogossov as Gugliemo.  But it hardly mattered; Levine (or whoever it was) succeeded in teasing a fully realized performance out of everybody on the stage.  It must be a delight--and a challenge--to work for this guy.

Wrapping Up

Well, that's it.  I'm done. Finished.  Kaput. Cashed  in my chips.  I've hung up my dialectics; I've parked my doctrines and principles in a rented shed.  Which is to say, after 45 years. I have taught my last class.  I'm over it or, or as we say in the trade "retired."

Well.  Like all such bald assertions, this one is a grotesque oversimplification.  I actually signed the papers 10 years ago but they've let me double dip.  I also am,  I admit, booked to go back into the classroom next Fall but that's a volunteer stint in a different place and so it doesn't quite count. As far as the University is concerned, it is for real in that I suspect I will never again take the King's Shilling to impart knowledge/wisdom  in one of his schools.  

So in the narrow sense, yesterday was the last day.  My Chinese grad students gave me a bottle of wine--"we don't know anything about wine but this one was expensive," they explained (I assured them  that Mrs. Buce and I would quaff it with enthusiasm). Also pictures: I am memorialized in a number of cell-phone photos, by now ensconced (I suppose) in other cell phones all up and down the East Coast of China.  A good bunch, these Chinese grad students, even if I don't have the foggiest notion whether they are (were) enjoying it most of the time.  I choose to assume they must have enjoyed some of it; else they wouldn't have sprung for the wine.

Meanwhile--of course I like to think of myself as unique but I open this week's Economist and find that I am part of what the E calls "a striking demographic trend."  That is:

… for highly skilled people to go on working well into what was once thought to be old age. Across the rich world, well-educated people increasingly work longer than the less-skilled. Some 65% of American men aged 62-74 with a professional degree are in the workforce, compared with 32% of men with only a high-school certificate. In the European Union the pattern is similar.

Well, that would be me, sort of.    I haven't been working full time (only four months a year).  But I'm even older than 74 (in base 12, I'm 65; I feel about as old as my Volvo, so in Volvo years, I'm 20).   But I have been doing it for the sheer fun of it, thankyouverymuch, and the bald truth I might have been  willing to do it even if  I had had to do it for free.  Day to day, I still enjoy (did enjoy it). But the plain truth also is, I'm tired. Moreover, I can tell I've been winging it; too many war stories, never a good sign.

Do I have a bucket list, they ask? Well, sort of, except that most things on my bucket list, I have already done.  I am willing to do some of them again.  I do have a few other projects in mind, and I do enjoy being free to read any damn thing I want. For the moment, I suppose my real bucket list is a coffee shop with Wifi.  Meanwhile, there's this:

Megan's Myopia

I feel inhibited about joining the affray over Megan McCardle's non-review of the Piketty sensation.  Unlike Megan (and unlike her most affectionate critic), I actually have read the book--okay, 80 percent of it.  Enough to know that, whatever one's tendency to mock, she probably has read enough (i.e., zero) to permit her to mount her soapbox and deliver her exhortation on the virtue of not giving a rat's ass about indifference to the privations of the great unwashed.  She knows, in short, that Piketty thinks there are too damn many rich people and she's willing to go to the mattresses to make sure that none of their comforts and consolations are disturbed.

She knows, in short, all she needs to know for her purpose and reading more wouldn't be likely to improve her understanding.  I'll grant her that and I'll grant her more; she actually sketches out an attractive model of the good life:

1. Finding a job that allows them to work at least 40 hours a week on a relatively consistent schedule and will not abruptly terminate them.
2. Finding a partner who is also able to work at least 40 hours a week on a relatively consistent schedule and will not be abruptly terminated.
3. Maintaining a satisfying relationship with that partner over a period of years.
4. Having children who are able to enjoy more stuff and economic security than they have.
5. Finding a community of friends, family and activities that will provide enjoyment and support over the decades.

Yes, well put, dear heart, and thanks so much for saying so.  But it would be fine to hear you say just a word as to how we got pushed so badly off track on this one or, perhaps, just who it was that gave us all so abrupt a nudge in the direction of that particular cliff.

You there, Megan?  No: she seems to have only one positive message: pay no attention to the grinning clown behind the curtaian.   She is, put differently, right enough to say that vulgar wealth transfer is not going to solve the problems of a sick society (though I'd add that it might help a bit at the margin). Yet she seems unwilling to reflect--or to want us not to reflect--on how it is that such absurd imbalance may generate the kinds of problems she professes to abhor.

She doesn't seem to consider, for example, that a society with this (our) kind of wealth imbalance is bound to be a sick society: that the imbalance leeches away not just money but the very civility and good order for which she professes to desire.  She doesn't seem notice the erosion of trust, of civility, of common decency that she so much laments, are perhaps the product of the distortion she wants us to ignore.   We're all hurtling somewhere in this handbasket together; count Megan among those willing to tap the driver on the shoulder and say "tut tut--drive on."

Afterthought: I wonder why she focuses her laser-like attention on "the middle class."  Do we assume that the poor are those who do  not want to find a job, to find a partner, to maintain a satisfying relationship, blah blah?  Perhaps she needs to meet a better class of poor people.  

Why I'm Just as Glad I'm Retiring:

From an inter-office e-memo sent (and received) on April 23:

Christmas cards and other types of greeting cards should not be sent from one department to another.

 

Shakespeare: Oh I Think Not

We've Found Shakespeare's Dictionary!--We got it on Ebay!  So goes the headline (lightly paraphrased).  Well you never say never, but my guess is no.  Not that I've done anything like actually review the evidence, but the very idea seems to fall foul of my favorite first principle of Shakespeare scholarship: it misunderstands who Shakespeare was, and what he did.

Repeat after me, children: Shakespeare was first and last a working hoofer, intent on making money by pleasing the crowd.   From the start he seemed to know the stuff of stagecraft: how to make a scene, how to get a character on and off stage. From early on, he seemed to show a knack for poetry and the craft of dramatic writing--he got much better at it as he got older.   He seems to have had a natural ear and there is no doubt he was a great responder: to his sources (Holinshead, North, Montaigne) but also to his ragged, raucous but enthusiastic audience.

In short, the last guy you'd expect to find hanging around the library.  He didn't bother with the things he didn't bother with.  Had he been a "university wit" (as the misunderstanders said he must have been), he would have been a more disciplined, fastidious and duller writer (I read this somewhere--Jonathan Bate?).

In short, the last guy in the world to sit around annotating a dictionary.  Shakespeare was, in short, not a consumer of dictionaries but a generator of them.  He certainly sopped up words but more than that he improvised and created them.   Had he constrained himself to run off to the authorities in time of trouble, he would have missed out on the electric urgency that gives him so much of his appeal.

I see the folks at Folger share my skepticism.  Good on them, and tell them Buce said so.

Afterthought:  My goodbuddy Carlton reminds me that there was a stir a while back about Shakespeare's Bible.  No, wait, Edward DeVere's Bible--he being, of course, the true author of the plays that the bumpkin never could have composed on his own (snark)  Haven't heard much of that one lately, I'd say. 

Fn:  Happy 350th 450th (heh!), Will.  It's tomorrow, isn't it? Oh, you say we don't know that one either?

Reasonable Stalin

HG Wells' interview with Joseph Stalin, lately rescusitated by the New Statesman is a delight in many ways, not all of them predictable.  We have Wells' callow, self-admiring pomposity, like a giant gaseous Lieutenant Fuzz--no surprise there, but it's an amusing nostalgia trip.  What is perhaps surprising--startling to me--is Stalin.  He sounds reasonable. Not just reasonable but as well-informed as you might have been entitled to expect from any contemporaneous leader.  Also with a sense of history remarkable in a former bank robber and seminary dropout.

Read that again:  I didn't say he was reasonable; only that he seemed so, to a reader informed 80 plus years and so much savage bloodshed.  I really don't know quite what to make of all this.  One's first thought is that must be some sort of boy-Stalin: a bit bluff and perhaps unwilling to suffer fools (or at least one fool) gladly--perhaps the kind of guy who could mousetrap those who underrated him, not yet a paranoid monster and madman.
  
But this can't be right: we know now that Stalin was already well into the great terror-famine that Robert Conquest so damningly documented in Harvest of Sorrow. --and which Walter Duranty worked so hard to conceal from the readers of the New York Times.  So we know that Stalin already possessed the barbarity necessary to execute a program of mass murder but also the duplicity necessary to put a benign face on it.

Can't Anybody Play This Game?

I read Rick Perlstein's Goldwater book a few years back with pleasure and profit.  I picked up a copy of Nixonland but it has been languishing on the shelf.  Seeing that he has another on the way, I figured it was time I played catchup.

Short take: I'm sorry I waited. It's superb.    Perlstein has Nixon's number.  Which is to say, he captures not only the subject;s own creepy-crawly self-pitying, vindictive, resentful self, but he puts him into the context of his times: Nixon with his base.   Perlstein shows--I wouldn't say exactly how Nixon and his base "created" each other, because they were both fully formed when they met. Perhaps better to say "discovered" each other and nurtured each other's grievances into a political revolution.

Perlstein tells me a lot of things I had forgotten, or perhaps never knew (and some I would be glad to forget) about Nixon and his history: how he was the only marquee Republican who actually campaigned for Goldwater in '64; how the CEO of Pepsi muscled Nixon into his interim job at (what had been) Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander that sort of thing. Re "the base" in particular:  The Reagan fanbase (to draw a contrast) is well remembered, partly because they're still with us, and they love to talk about it.  Nixon's--I think we may have forgotten that Nixon didn't do it on his own. He had his own cadres, playing out their own game--not perhaps with the Reaganite buoyancy but with a sullen kind of devotion that stayed with him to the end.

Perlstein is also first-rate in showing how skilfully Nixon wrong-footed his adversaries--not Kennedy, of course (whom Nixon seems in a way to have admired).   But the comfortable and (dare one say) clueless Democratic establishment who were just never able to get it straight in their mind what Nixon was, nor the depth of the currents that he excited.

I want to extend the point, but I need to go forward carefully. I want to say something about our own times, but I want not to be read as saying "it's all just the same."  It's not the same and to pretend that it is would be to sacrifice indispensable nuance.  But there are lots of echoes: we certainly have an army of the insulted and the injured--some really so, some in their mind's eye, some perhaps both. And we have--perhaps this is where I was heading--we still have that barrier of incomprehension. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, those legions of the serious and the well-intentioned who 
still can't get their mind round reality of the legions of the resentful.

So it is we've come up with that parade of appalling mediocrities who have carried the banner in so many Presidential campaigns.  Yes, yes, they too are serious and well-intentioned--Kerry, Gore, Mondale, Carter, the little guy in the tank and of course.the great Adlai himself, once the very cynosure of liberalism, yet now (for anybody under, say, 60) almost as forgotten as Alton B. Parker himself (oh, Google it).  [

It's a selective list.  I don't know quite what to do with Hubert H. Humphrey (but who he?).  Clinton is almost everybody's special case, but he did have the capacity to connect so lacking in almost all the others. Kennedy and Johnson--for all their differences, I'd say they held in common the kind of toughness and meanness so lacking in so many of the others.  Indeed I've often thought it was precisely because of this toughness and meanness that they almost get a bye from their Republican adversaries--the adversaries who hold so much of the rest of the list in such contempt.

Still at the risk of oversimplifying, it's a shame to see the old resentments still there in the baggage. And it's even more dismaying that we don't seem to have figured out any better way to respond to them.

Ingham's The Nature of Money

Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money,  I think this is a remarkable book.  I'm a little out of my depth here (and actually, I haven't finished it) but it's the most useful thing I ever read on the topic.  Put narrowly, it is just what its title says it is: an attempt to probe beneath the surface of a subject so manifestly cloaked in opacity.  It's written by a non-economist, which is good.  It's written by a self-admitted sociologist* which is better.  And perhaps even more remarkable: non-economist academics who stray into the field often stumble into a bog of abstract fulmination which suggests that after all, they really don't know much of what they are talking about.  Ingham by contrast sounds like a sociologist who has been locked up with economists for a decade or so and lived to tell about it (from what I read somewhere, I think this last guess is more or less correct, but I can't put my finger on the source just now).

You don't read many pages of Ingham without thinking that this is the kind of book that David Graeber thought he was writing, or perhaps should have written.  It isn't really; Graeber is must much more scattershot richer in detail, far more intent upon testifying to his disaffection with the current system.    I don't remember Graeber citing Ingham, but god bless Kindle search, it takes just a moment to determine that--there he is, some 15-plus citations text and footnotes together.  It's none too few: I can hardly accuse Graeber of ripping off Ingham but on the whole I'd say the most arresting and/or engaging parts of Graber's book are the parts he gets from Ingham.  I see that Ingham reviews Graeber here; I  haven't read beyond the ungated first page. But I see he wants to  "focus particularly on what I take to be the underlying threads--his analysis of the nature of money, its relationship to debt, and the moral basis of economic life."  Exactly. Although actually I haven't seen that much in Ingham yet about "the moral basis of economic life;" but as I say, I'm not finished.

Continuing what I guess you could call this chartalist bent, I've lain my hands on a copy of Keynes' Treatise on Money.  Eeuw, do I really need to read all of it?
---
*Did I just compliment a sociologist on his writing style?  Yes, I believe I did.

And BTW:  Pardon the even-more-than-usual array of typos.  I should not blog after 9 pm.  Or wear white after Labor Day.

One More: One hundred and seven dollars? You gotta be kidding.

No Time like the Present

   "October: This is one of the particularly dangerous months to invest in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February."

So Mark Twain, or so it is said.   Compare:

Black Monday
Black Tuesday
Black Wednesday
Black Thursday
Black Friday
Black Saturday
Black Sunday

One event makes the list twice. That would be Black Monday/Tuesday, the occasion of the world's largest stock market decline, which straddled the International Date Line. Thursday seems particularly bad for investors.  Blame it for the collapse of Jay Cooke & Co. Investment House on Sept. 18, 1873 (setting off the "great depression," i.e., the one that preceded the  "great depression"). Also October 29, 1929, the mother of all stock market crashes.  And the Moscow interbank crisis of August 24, 1995.  Oh, and the "flash crash" of May 6, 2010.  And if you like, also Sept. 30, 2010, when the Irish learned the truth about their banking crisis, causing their deficit to spike to 32 percent of GDP.    

But Sunday, unless I misread, is the one that has no connection with activity in the market.  On the other hand, there's this:

DeLong on Piketty; Economist on Banks

Two can't miss weekend reads:  One. the  "Economist Essay" on the history of financial crises; and two, DeLong on Piketty--i.e., P's magisterial new study of inequality.  The Economist piece explains itself and I stand ready to offer it to anybody who needs an updated analysis of why banks ye have always with you and why they are such a damn nuisance. DeLong is a bit more technical and abstract, but he makes a couple of thoroughly accessible points that I hadn't seen elsewhere. One, that Piketty (this isy) seems to assume that “wealth” in a society = concentration. Perhaps it does, but it need not; we can imagine a society that piles up wealth and spreads it around so everyone becomes a rentier. Likewise I suppose we could imagine one where wealth concentrates even as it declines.

Two, DeLong points out that Piketty is shaky on what means by “return.” DeLong suggests four candidate-meanings and I think I get the drift although I'll admit I'm a little unclear on just how he draws his lines (hey, I was a little drunk last night and I didn't get to class until half an hour late—can I come by your office hours?).

Cowen's Sicily and Mine

Tyler rolls his eyes at an NYT account of prodigal misspending at the Italian Tourist Board, particularly in respect to the South and Sicily.     He's right of course, but here's a guilty secret: hang the Tourist Board, I'd list Sicily as one of my own favorite tourist destinations.  I first stumbled on it alone back in 1985, diverting myself with a long weekend away from a work assignment in Rome.    I told Mrs. Buce we had to get back there together and indeed we've traveled the island a couple of times since.  In all, I've pretty well scoured the place by car bus and train and I'll go again tonight if you are offering.  

There are tourists in Sicily and facilities sufficient to care for them--Taormina is the first place where I ever stayed in a hotel with a rack rate of 800 Euros, though happily I was not paying rack rate.   Things do seem to have gotten busier with time: in '85 I had the sere, spooky unfinished temple at Segesta all to myself; two years ago we found it equipped with full tourist array.    One thing Sicily mostly does without:  the walls of high-rises one finds blazoned along the Costa del Sol.  Too bad for Sicilians who want to make a few coins, but I say thank heavens for waste and sloth at the Tourist Board.

Bibliography:plenty of good stuff to read by Sicilians or about Sicily but I have a nostalgic soft spot for Goethe's Italian Journey, my companion on that solo first foray 29 years ago, and still the only bit of Goethe that I can say I unreservedly enjoyed.  Here's a brief appreciation of the Sicilian chapters.

An Homage to More or Less Everything

Somewhat against my better judgment, I  trekked off behind Mrs. Buce to the Plookaville Multiplex this afternoon for a screening of Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel.  I was probably being too fussy. Ir's a good-natured entertainment with lots of comic side effects.  But I'll sign on with others and say I just don't get this hat tip to Stephan Zweig.  It's not that the movie is not derivative.  No: it's a virtual tropical rain forest of homages: Laurel and Hardy, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, Holmes and Moriarty, Alfred Hitchcock, I'd say even a little of the early Disney: Pinocchio for sure, maybe a little Fantasia and I think I even sniff a little Lady and the Tramp.   If there is a hotel in the background, I suppose it would be the Hotel Savoy of Joseph Roth.  If on a mountain top, then Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain.  Or if he is just trying to make a buck on the hotel theme, then I suppose it would be The Best Exotic Marigold.  But Zweig, oy.  My guess is that he's never so much as read him.  And it doesn't have much of nothing to do with Budapest, either.

Larry on La Différence

Larry the Barefoot Bum takes me to task for my suggestion that some disparities in male-female payscales might be "justified."  He says:

When we are talking about establishing differences between classes of human beings (which seem, quelle surprise, to usually be construed as inferiority), our null hypothesis should be that there are no differences, until evidence compels us to reject the null. I do not believe that we have anywhere nearly enough evidence to conclude that that women are substantively inferior... oops... different in capabilities than men.

I'd agree 95 percent, maybe 97, maybe 94, whatever.  Assessing differences is a perilous business at best, and turns invidious at the flick of an eyebrow.  It's  very like (but perhaps not quite like) the Hegelian insight that we can't know what "man (sic) in the abstract" looks like because nobody has ever seen man in the abstract, nor women neither, for what it is worth.

But there is a dangerous slippage underfoot here.  Back in the 60s (say) we all learned (or were taught) that we shouldn't assert differences between men and women.  We subtly tramsmogrified that mandate into the proposition that there are no differences between men and women.  Narrowly interpreted, this little two-step is incoherent: if we cannot know that any categorization of men versus women is empirically based, how can we know that it is not?

Actually (one reason Hegel doesn't apply here) my take is that there are a few--perhaps very few--differences that we simply cannot explain away as matters of culture.  My pet is the fetal damage through drug use.  So far as I know, there is no dispute on the proposition that the male fetus is more vulnerable to such the risk of such damage than the female. I first ran across that one about 20 years ago.  I haven't yet run across any possible basis on which this variation could be cultural.   It's small potatoes I suppose; I suspect there are others but for the moment I only need one to make my point.

Larry is quite right that we have a long history of using this kind of stereotyping in ways that are adverse to women (Does Senator Dianne Feinstein fail to understand torture because she is "too emotional?"  No, I think not.)  But Larry might be overlooking an important cultural shift: these days, it's at least as likely that the stereotyping is used in ways that are invidious to men.    On that latter point, FWIW, I'd have to confess that I am a culprit.  I do tend to think that men are on the whole idiots. their minds clouded by sexuality and a tendency towards violence.  I suspect (though  certainly can't prove) that traits like this are hard-wired.  I think we'd make a mistake to say that of course it can't be so when the fact is we don't know at all (nb, I think I have just said that I'm not sold on Larry's "null hypothesis," supra).

By the way, does anybody remember Ashley Montagu's Natural Superiority of Women?  It was published in 1952, i.e., when I was just starting my senior  year in high school; when I was, in other words, obsessively alert to the question of the truth or falsity of just that proposition.  I see there's an Amazon review saying that "Most men will not care for [the book] at all."  I'm not at all sure that that is true: I suspect that most men know they are oafs and are not pleased with themselves for being so.  Stereotyping again.

Fair Game

Here's an email from Elizabeth Warren that will not surprise: 

John,

When I started teaching elementary school after college, the public school district didn't hide the fact that it had two pay scales: one for men and one for women.

I can't believe we're still debating equal pay for equal work 40 years later.

She's right, of course. The disparity does persist, and it is unfair--it cannot be fully justified (though I think it can in part be justified) by factors that have nothing to do with gender.  It's another one of the facts of life I came up against in the City Room of the (notoriously liberal) Louisville Times back in the 60s.

I think I understood the unfairness to women in the regime as it subsisted.  But I was more alert to the unfairness to me. The boss would have said (I think perhaps he did say) that it was only right that he paid women less because they didn't have families to support. True as a matter of fact, but it also glosses over the point that I did have a family to support, and all this low-price scab labor was undercutting my paycheck.  I think the boss felt pleased with himself for providing jobs for women when they weren't all that common.  I don't think he minded pocketing the extra change that came from hiring (at my expense) on the cheap.

A Short Guy

One more thing about Jay Gould: he was short.   Certainly by the standards of our time and even by the standards of his own--he apparently charted in at just about exactly five feet (so that instructive biography I'm reading). Which puts him right up (heh)( there with his contemporary, Andrew Carnegie, whom I have always thought of as short--he also was five foot.

Which set me to wondering: were we really shorter in those days?  The usufruct of some desultory research is: well, yes and no.   Wiki has a chart of Presidents by height. Abraham Lincoln was, of course (tied with Lyndon Johnson) our tallest President, standing 6' 4".  The rest of the 19th Century lot count as what might think of as "average,"  though there are a few more in the 5'6", 5'7" range than later--at 5'6", Benjamin Harrison is shorter than any later president (and also more forgettable)?  Shortest  was James Madison at 5'5".

Maybe the Presidency is special because it is such an alpha-male role. Supreme Court justices are  bit more remarkable.   We can discount the girrls because they are, you know, girrls (though Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to stand about 5'1" and Elena Kagan, perhaps just a tad more-Justice Thurgood Marshall, Kagan's old boss, called Kagan "shorty").   Anyway, they can't compete with  Alfred Moore, elevated to the court by John Adams: he was 4'5".

This being the 21st Century and the age of the internet and all that, wouldn't you know it didn't take me any time at all to come up with a "who's who of short people," running all the way down to Gul Mohammed who measured one foot (sic) 10.4 inches--though it appears he must give way to  Chandra Bahadur Dangi, said to  measure just 1'9".  

Moving away from these total outliers, it's interesting to note those who leap out because they don't actually seem all that short.  Who would have guessed, for example, that David Ben-Gurion was only five foot?   Or my favorite engineer?  Or Steven Douglas, the man who was not Lincoln in the 1860 Presidential race?  And is Steve Schwarzman, the Blackrock billionaire, really only 4'8"?

But one could just as well play the game the other way round.  I certainly wouldn't have expected, for example,  that this guy was a strapping 5'4",.

I end wit the canonical place-marker for any discussion of height in our time.