President Trump’s address to Congress last night was a dull affair. That is because he was trying to sound Presidential and so gave his standard stump speech without the insults and so came across as a dullard, the speech without any rousing rhetoric or programmatic weight. The talking heads that afterwards opined on the speech caught its gist quickly. Trump had drawn back from the offer of legalization to undocumented immigrants that he had hinted at earlier in the day and had pinched some of Paul Ryan’s talking points about what the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare would look like, but was hardly committed to that. Nor had Trump specified how to pay for an infrastructure program when the key issue there is whether to fund it through what would be very low interest bonds, which the Democrats would support, or through tax breaks to financiers, which the Democrats would not support. Trump could not bring himself to avoid telling lies, as when he said that the money from the European countries to pay for their own defense is just rolling in, because such money would not be payments to the United States but increases in their own defense budgets. Maybe Trump, as is his wont, was just speaking loosely, and so was not so much lying as misunderstanding the issue. Commentators mistake him by thinking there is much more there than there is. Chuck Schumer says Trump says one thing, his Populist message, and delivers another, which is a right wing program, but that is to mistake him as having a message at all rather than just a set of slogans that he endlessly repeats, those tied together only by Trump’s own meanness, not any ideological cogency. That’s all there is, folks. Stop expecting more.
Pretty People
Here is a controversial issue that can be illuminated through the use of sociological role theory. There are a number of asymmetries between the sexes that feminists regard as unfair or unjust or to be remedied by social action. Women have weaker upper body strength, but that should not bar them from going into combat because some women can meet rigorous physical standards. Other asymmetries are regarded by feminists as just the way it is. Women are supposed to believe in compromise while men are stuck with a rigid sense of justice. Men live, on average, seven years less than women, but that is outside the interest group to which feminists find themselves responsible.
Let us turn to what may be a more essential asymmetry in that it has to do with the everyday conduct of the sexes. Attractiveness is something with which only women have to struggle. Men may clean up for a date but hardly primp the way women do even if they are also anxious about how the date will go. Women, for their part, are the sex that dresses up in tight fitting clothes, high heels and makeup so as to appear at their most attractive to a date or even at a meeting in a workplace. So women work hard at being attractive, even if there are bounds to which men must restrict themselves in looking at well turned out women, not “checking them out” for too long, or making remarks that are too appreciative of how nice they look in their presentation of themselves, for then it might be understood that the women were being judged on their looks rather than on their other qualities, though to be judged at least passingly on looks is the reason for gussying up in the first place.
Read MoreThe Mass Deportation
Well, we had to wait a month into his term for President Trump to do something really outlandish, and he finally has. He has issued deportation orders that could affect a majority of the eleven million or so illegal aliens in our midst because it seems that he is willing to deport even those who have engaged in such minor infractions as lying to an employer about their immigration status, and so the President is going far beyond the deportation of serious felons that was government policy when Obama was President. Trump also wants to scale up the number of agents available to do the job so that it can indeed be done. So much for those who said it would be impossible to deport all those people. It can be done. If you want to do something terrible, you can find a way, and also believe them when they say they are going to do it. Millions and millions of people are going to have their lives disrupted, perhaps irreparably, by being dumped into Mexico, even if they originally come from nations in Central America, Mexico not wanting them and perhaps not providing them with resettlement services unless the United States pays for those. Fat chance. So we are facing a major catastrophe. Rescinding the Obama doctrine on people using the bathroom of the sex with which they identify is a bad and inhumane policy, but it affects very few people while the deportation orders affect, as I say, up to ten million people.
The only ones spared by the Trump deportation orders are the DACA children, though they might lose their parents to deportation. In retrospect, which means a few years time, this entire episode will be seen as inhumane as Andrew Jackson moving the Cherokees west, but in the meantime, arguments are made that Trump is, after all, just keeping a campaign promise, and that nations, after all, have to defend their borders. Well, he also promised to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem but better judgment prevailed. Why create problems where there are none? And the idea of carefully protecting our borders against immigrants is less than a century old. Immigrants entering through Castle Garden, which was the entry point to New York before Ellis Island was established, just signed in and went on their way to local hotels and rooming houses. And at Ellis Island the main concern was communicable disease. Vetting of immigrants did not start until after the First World War. Americans should be proud of their tradition of open borders even if we do need to vet against Islamic terrorists, but we already do that, so what is the problem?
So far, the President has been bluster without consequence and I had hoped but not really thought that he would content himself with that. Even the order halting immigration from seven mostly Moslem countries made a certain amount of sense. A President has a great deal of leeway in determining what is and what is not a threat to the country. He can include in his calculations a hunch about where or from where an attack might take place. So it was not unreasonable to think that the seven unstable countries might be the source of attacks even if they had not been so until now, and it was reasonable to exclude Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the ban because those are erstwhile allies, whatever their histories. Consistency in principle is not the most important thing in foreign policy. We enlisted Vichy generals and admirals and made supposed common cause with Stalin all in order to win the Second World War. So why pick an additional fight with Pakistan when we don’t have to. Yes, the ban on immigrants may have made life inconvenient for some people, delaying them in their travels, but not for all that many, and virtually any act of foreign policy is going to inconvenience some people, and that is not enough reason to not go ahead with it. Yes, it was bad policy because some people were indeed inconvenienced and, more than that, frightened that they would never get to this country, but the new version of that travel ban should get rid of the obvious clinkers, like keeping out people who were already holders of green cards. So, all in all, the real problem with the ban was that there was no real point to it, no real danger that it avoided, all of it just the product of Trump’s simplistic imagination to do something no matter how irrelevant it is to the problem at hand so long as it suits his sense of what is right, which means find a way to punish people for what he takes to be the bad behavior of the world.
But this deportation edict is worse than that. It not only addresses a problem that doesn’t exist, which is that illegal immigrants bring crime with them, when in fact they commit crimes less frequently than American citizens, but instead provide workers necessary to the country because they fill jobs American citizens are unwilling to fill, but because the orders bring with them a great deal of real suffering to a great number of real people, all to salve Trump’s conscience that it is just not right for illegals to be here at all. The infliction of gratuitous suffering would seem to be the opposite of justice but it is in fact the substance of justice. Think of the Salem Witch Trials and the Holocaust, both launched in the name of solemn principles and undertaken with the sense of more in sorrow than in anger (look at the Nazi propaganda of the time), but really undertaken to alleviate in draconian manner a problem that did not exist.
Smarts
People have higher or lesser amounts of that quality that is known as intelligence or more generally and perhaps more accurately as “smarts” because the former term connotes being good at standardized tests while the latter term means being good at having insight and turning that to the solution of problems of one sort or another. People think it is important to have smarts or at least be smart enough to manage their lives. They can claim to have emotional intelligence rather than book intelligence and to intuit situations rather than verbalize a description of situations. Fredo told his brother, Michael Corleone, that he was also smart, by which he meant that he could do things: strike up deals, carry out instructions-- even though those were just the things he was bad at. People can also define their smarts by relative comparisons. The higher functioning residents of a home for the retarded will regard the lower functioning residents as "dummies". Most people infer the intelligence or smarts of people by consulting whether or not they are articulate, can memorize or master procedures, whether they have a fund of general knowledge, and whether they are savvy about managing one or another situation, whether within a family or at business. An uneducated person can be regarded as smart if he or she can get relatives to do what is wanted of them.
Read More"I Inherited a Mess"
The most startling quote from President Trump’s notably vituperous press conference last week was not his jousting with the press the way Nixon, in his last days, had jousted with the likes of Dan Rather. Instead, it was the remark that provided the New York Times with its headline the next day: “I inherited a mess”. This was not one of Trump’s many lies. Rather, it showed just how bad his judgment is on foreign policy, even if there are many voters who agreed with him about a point he had been making since the Eighties, which is that the government makes disastrous foreign policy choices all the time. For Trump, gloom and doom is a reflex reaction; for the population as a whole, I take it, it is because they have such a short term memory that they forget how bad things have been and also have a very poor imagination for conceiving just how very bad they could become again.
Read MoreOne or Two States
The self inflicted crises in the still less than one month old Trump Administration keep coming so fast and furious. There was the immigration ban, now pushed out of the news, though there still remains on the table whether the scale of deportations has increased since Trump took over. There was the Flynn resignation, the furor over which suggests that that there is much more to be said about the connection of the Trump campaign and the Trump Cabinet with the Russians than has yet been made public, but that insiders already know there is something to it, for otherwise why care so much that one official proved unsuitable for his job. Then there is Netanyahu coming into town to announce with the President that the time of the two state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over, to be replaced, possibly, by a one state solution. This, actually, may be a good idea, even though the New York Times dismisses it simply because it is not what has been United States policy for twenty years now. Let us sort out the meaning of the proposal, Netanyahu, we may assume, fully comprehending what this initiative is while the President, as usual, falls for a phrase and can’t look beyond that.
Read MoreA Democratic Resurgence
Democrats are down in the dumps that they lost the Presidency to such an unworthy contender. It is one thing for Hillary to have lost the Presidency the first time to Barack Obama, who is so charming that he could have won a third term if he had been allowed to run. After all, the economy is chugging along and foreign affairs are under control, Obama having declared the Middle East a place to stay out of. But it was quite another thing for her to have lost to Donald Trump, the most unqualified candidate in history, who is boorish and inarticulate even if also outspoken. The Donald, all the prognosticators said, would have to pull an inside straight to win, and that is just what he did.
Read MoreMovies Then & Now
My friend Dorothy Glass, the art historian, is not as big of a movie buff as I am and so asked me a few years ago when movies became mature, by which she meant when they became of interest to adults and not just simplified dramas used to show off the visual power of film. I gave what I thought was a glib answer, that it occurred about the time of “On the Waterfront”, in the mid-Fifties. My answer was glib because I wasn’t sure her’s was a real question. Film, from the beginning, had been worth serious consideration and been filled with real themes and real emotions, “mature” in that sense to be awarded to D. W. Griffith and “The Big Parade”, however much they were melodramas, with too readily recognized villains and heros (or heroines).
Read MoreWhat To Do With the Supreme Court
Democrats are wondering whether and how fiercely to oppose Donald Trump’ nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Some say he is too far to the right; others say it is revenge time for Republican blockage of Merritt Garland who was nominated by Obama but never given even a hearing before the Republican controlled Senate. As Rachel Maddow pointed out, approval of Supreme Court nominees has become particularly contentious since Gore v. Bush, but it goes back to the denial of a seat to Robert Bork, who was extremely well qualified, a quality which Trump pointed out about his own nominee last night. So the debate is about Senate politics. Should the Democrats oppose the nomination and possibly get the Republicans to change the rules, which is the so called “Nuclear Option” because it would mean that so many of the customs by which the Senate operates would no longer be respected by one side or another and the Senate might well as a consequence grind to a halt.
Read MoreCab Confessions: Ethnic Ripostes & Making Assumptions
Memorable conversations with cab drivers are an emblematic New York experience available to both tourists and long time residents. A few days ago, I climbed into a cab whose driver began by telling me how crowded with traffic were New York streets because of all the construction of new residential buildings. I demurred that new building was a sign that New York was prosperous, whatever the state of the Great Recession, and the new residents supplied more business for cab drivers such as himself. He said he would prefer less traffic and fewer customers. He said that the city was filthy and stank, which I readily agreed was particularly true in the summer, but a small price to pay for living in this glorious city. He said he was going back to his native Armenia after his thirty years here so that he could live in comparative quiet and calm. I said no one had to live here.
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The First Week
The things the President has done during the first week of his Administration are mainstream Conservative or largely symbolic and so do not yet set forth changes of policy that are as radical as the Trump posturing would have the citizenry believe, though it is also the case that really bad things may well arrive in our future, and so justify Liberal forebodings. Trump is, for the moment, instituting the policies he campaigned on, which is something for which new incumbents of the Presidency usually receive compliments because they have remained true to their promises, but Trump’s campaign issues were largely jokes, not of serious moment, and so it is largely of no consequence that he is carrying them out.
Read MoreKahneman's Fallacies, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Daniel Kahneman, as well as being a winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, is one of the subjects, along with his longtime collaborator, Amos Tversky, of Michael Lewis’ latest book, “The Undoing Project”, and so his work has drawn even more attention as the way to see through biased behavior and show how irrational people are in the conduct of their everyday lives. I want to suggest that Kahneman is dead wrong on substance, that people are reasonable rather than overcome by bias, and his deeply mistaken supposition is the result of a method that boxes his subjects into corners so that they cannot but seem hopelessly irrational. This essay, reprinted from westendejournal.com is an attempt to bring down what has been offered up as an important icon of contemporary thinking about mental and social life.
Read MoreThe Radicalism of Donald Trump
No one knows what Donald Trump will do when he assumes office this Friday, which for me and the people I know seems like the first day of the Apocalypse, the sun darkening at high noon and the ghosts of FDR’s euphonious arch-villains, “Martin, Barton, and Fish”, arising from crypts beneath the Capitol Visitors Bureau to carry out their job of stripping America not only of Obamacare and what is left of the Great Society but also of the legislation that goes back to the New Deal and to the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt. The Cabinet appointees said about as much in their confirmation hearings. The nominee for Interior Secretary talked about how much he admired Theodore Roosevelt but also said we have to rethink the use of national lands so as to allow for more drilling. Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services made clear that he wants to gut Medicare. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education wants to reverse the seventy year old Supreme Court decision that government cannot support parochial education for children. So what his ultra-right Cabinet wants to do is clear, but what Trump wants to do is not.
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Irony and Superiority, High & Low Culture
Irony and sarcasm are used in everyday life to indicate that a person is in the know and in that way superior to someone not in the know. When I was a preteen I was a member of a stamp collectors club, none of us very knowledgeable about the hobby. One of our members sarcastically noted that a non stamp collector might take a stamp with a reverse postal mark because the stamp had been affixed upside down on an envelope as making it more valuable even though that happened all the time. My fellow stamp collector had immediately turned an insight he had just had into a criticism of people who had not had that insight. He had used sarcasm to establish his superiority. All people fall into that trap from time to time, most clearly and with much consequence when they turn limited knowledge about how government works into cynicism about the political system and so support whomever will overturn the idols.
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Untrustworthy People
All people are to some extent or other trustworthy. We trust people to keep their word or show up at work or to respect a confidence-- most of the time. It would be very difficult for social life to proceed if this were not the case. We would find ourselves in some feral case of society, a Hobbesian world where all doors had to be locked, people always asked to show their credentials, people always looking over their shoulders, unless there were an all pervasive state to look to the enforcement of what are generally considered normal states of freedom or lack of fear. And all people are also sometimes or other untrustworthy in that they lapse in picking up things at the store, can be unfaithful to their spouses, and in many different ways shade the truth to leave an impression that does not square with the truth.
Read MoreThe Normalized Presidency
The whole notion of discussing an issue is an idea that eludes Donald Trump, and that served him very well during the campaign, where he reduced his opponents to discrediting adjectives, and pronounced policies that were more sentiments than plans to be carried out. Yes, he would build a wall and the Mexicans would pay for it, but that was just a way to express his disdain for illegal immigrants rather than the glimmerings of an actionable plan. Hillary couldn’t get him to engage on issues because those are objective matters about which you might draw up better or worse plans, and so she instead, perhaps on the basis of her focus groups, decided to point out the flaws in his character, but those arguments did not have much impact on the voters she needed however convincing they were to the voters in the coastal states that she easily won.
Read MoreOld People
Old is a demographic category and as such is a role based on a noun, just as are the roles of mother and soldier. People are old when they are eligible for Social Security, which was set at sixty five when the Social Security Act was passed in 1935 and is moving up from there. Old is also when one has reached retirement age, which used to mean, in the academic community, reaching the age of seventy. Old is more imprecisely defined as when one's body shows the signs of aging to the point that it makes sense to prescribe drugs on the basis of protocols established for old people rather than protocols designed for adults. Age is not just a number but it is that as well. Ask a seventy year old whether he or she would rather be thirty.
Read MoreThe First Skirmish
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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