Two metaphors for politics are that politics is like a sports competition and that politics is like war. Neither of these metaphors get to the core of things. Yes, politics is like a game in that there are winners and losers and that skill is combined with team cooperation and luck in some uncertain proportion so as to make for a win, but the reward for athletic achievement, aside from the hugh salaries for those who are the very best, is the medal or the certificate, a bit of prestige that lasts a lifetime, while there are more significant impacts for politics, which can lead to programs where people starve or are made well or wars that lead to cataclysmic disaster. Nor is politics like a war. The means to the end in politics are more restrained than they are in warfare and in politics it is not always clear who won and who lost in that people can reinterpret their programs to be, when legislated, what they wanted (or didn’t want) in the first place. Romneycare became Obamacare and that was reason enough for Romney to denounce it. That is what happens in politics. But these two metaphors are the best we can do and so let us consider what we might call the first skirmish of the Trump Administration as being over Russian hacking, understanding a skirmish as a miniature battle used to probe the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy while one moves one’s own forces into a more advantageous position for a major encounter of forces.
Read MoreThe Talking Pineapple & Standardized Testing
Everybody, apparently, except those who make money off of them, is against standardized testing. Most teachers and administrators criticize the tests for the burden they place on teachers to raise the test performance of students ill equipped to take such tests, the teachers blamed if kids don’t do better than students with the same demographic characteristics have done in the past. And that is not to speak of the unreliability of the tests and the control variables used to make comparisons between student groups possible. Reformers, on the other hand, criticize the tests for not allowing teachers to teach the students as they are or in creative ways, the tests measuring minor skills rather than the overall intellectual growth of a child, something that may not show up until years later.
And it is easy to ridicule such tests simply by calling into question a particular test item that seems particularly foolish. This has happened in the past week because of a reading passage called “The Hare and the Pineapple” that appeared on a standardized eighth grade reading test. The somewhat whimsical story told of a talking pineapple who challenged the hare to a race. The surrounding crowd of animals assumed the pineapple had some secret plan to win the race, but he (if it were a he) didn’t and so the hare won and the crowd ate the pineapple. One of the questions the students was asked was whether the crowd ate the pineapple because they were annoyed, amused, hungry or excited, which is the way Gail Collins put it when she reported on the test item in her Times column. How were the students to figure that out? Collins interpreted the failure of the test item as a result of the test preparer, Pearson, getting so many large contracts to construct tests.
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Art, Entertainment & the Distinction Between
Renee Fleming was singing a second act aria during her well reviewed performance as Manon. A member of the Metropolitan Opera audience yelled "Spectacular!" after the first chorus; there was a brief murmur in the rest of the audience. The same man interjected another "Spectacular!" after the next chorus; the murmur in the audience was intense and unfavorable. Why criticize the man? After all, the stars pause after their arias to receive applause, and thereby break the notion that the audience is overhearing a story rather than present for the performance of a story. The singers also take bows after every act and the intermissions at the Met go on and on, breaking whatever mood might be sustained over a shorter intermission. What the man had done was break the conventions for suspending the performance, that's all, but in theatre, we abide by the conventions, for otherwise we would not know what we were up to.
Opera is a performance in that we have come to hear the singers do their stuff, whatever their material, and to take pleasure from their skill and only secondarily take pleasure from what is signified by the use of their skills, which is the experience and appreciation of the conventionalized sentiments that accompany the plot and the music. Music critics, by and large, accept the hackneyed or contrived plots or the melodramatic emotions so as to concentrate on the spectacle of the singing and the setting, mentioning the acting as an afterthought--this singer also something of an actress. Otherwise, it would not be possible to see these old warhorses--really, chestnuts--over and over again.
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The Southern Electorate
It is easy enough to find fault for Hillary losing the election. Her staff did not spend enough resources on Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, and so Trump took the election because of narrow margins of victory in those three states. The media did not do their job in that they first treated Trump as a clown and so gave him too much air time and never properly vetted him. And, of course, Hillary failed to provide either a galvanizing positive message or personality. Couldn’t the campaign have turned the corner by turning out some twenty thousand more women taken with the idea of the first woman President? The campaign was not able to make them care. But the real culprits, which is always the case in a democracy, is the voting public, which did not turn out because of insufficient enthusiasm for Hillary as a candidate or else decided to vote for someone who is a bigot and an ignoramus. Mind you, that does not make the voters bigoted or ignorant. It just means that is who they voted for and that is condemnation enough.
Read MoreThe Fight Over the Cabinet
Given the way he came to the Presidency, as an insurgent candidate with, at best, the tolerance of the Republican Party and its Congressional majorities, rather than with their blessings, Trump could have gone either way in choosing his Cabinet. He could have picked people just as much on the fringes of the party as he is, filled with the wacky ideas that inspired his supporters, even if those ideas hardly constituted an ideology in the sense of a coherent set of ideas that Trump felt obliged to carry out as best he could when he won the unlikely victory and became President. Or else he could choose a cabinet drawn from the permanent Establishment so as to carry out a traditional Republican, which means Conservative, political program, which is what Eisenhower did and what Reagan did, Reagan able after picking his Cabinet to sit back or clear brush at his ranch. If Trump had decided mostly on the latter course, that would be much to the relief of onlookers like myself who prefer competence above everything else and think that the Republic is therefore likely to muddle through, especially because the Conservative economic program, I believe, is so mistaken that it might drive us into a recession but likely not worse, and that the foreign policy program would probably not be much more belligerent than what it would have been with Hillary, although one can never count on foreign policy principles not going off the deep end, which is what happened when the George W. Bush people, who had seemed quintessentially Establishment, took power and get us entangled in a way it would take eight years of a successor to Bush to get us out from under.
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Silences
There was a newspaper report of an armed gunman who said, when told by his victim that it was a policeman that he was holding up, “You know, now I have to kill you.” That is the stuff of gangster melodrama, and may even be true. The exchange reminded me of "The Asphalt Jungle" which was a remarkable movie because, among other things, it violated the movie convention whereby people who have others at gunpoint keep talking until the person with the gun pulled on him finds a way out of the situation. Rather, Louis Calhern just starts to sweat and lose his game face as he realizes that his erstwhile comrades in crime are going to kill him. However much they talk, the gangsters in "The Asphalt Jungle" don’t talk about what they are doing while they do it.
Why does the movie convention violated by "The Asphalt Jungle" make sense? Why do characters say what they are going to do rather than just do it? That is the same thing as asking why such dialogue occurs in real life, because the movie convention is simply exploiting and adopting a usage of everyday life, in that dramatic tension arises from whether an assailant will speak or not. So why did the gunman in the newspaper report act the way he did? (Here, I am engaged in applying Georg Simmel’s dictum, which is contrary to the accepted wisdom, that the sociologist can analyze fictional as well as real situations because both make use of the formal properties of social life.)
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Compensating Mechanisms
Let us posit the following characteristics of the incoming President. He is mean spirited; he doesn’t know very much about any of the issues he will have to address; his own words and actions will be uncoordinated and arbitrary, subject only to his own whimsy; he will only reluctantly listen to his advisors but will, hopefully, accede to their greater knowledge and judgment. How will his administration, his political allies and adversaries, both foreign and domestic, cope with these facts, given that they want the administration to act rationally if for no other reason than it will serve their interests for it to do so? What are the compensating mechanisms which will settle in so the Trump Administration is not as out of whack as it might be?
Read MoreGovernment by Tweet
The press, and especially the cable channels, are feeling guilty for having given Trump so much space and air time at the beginning of his campaign so he could make a fool of himself before he burnt out as a Presidential candidate, never to be more than a sidebar, sort of like Herman Cain. Now, to compensate, they find everything he says the result of ignorance and bad judgment. And that is true of much of what he says, but much of it, so far, is on the mark. Save your ammunition until he does or says something really bad.
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