We are, all of us, in the midst of a natural experiment in what it is like not to be in the company of strangers, and it makes us all feel very weird, and so in the need of assessing whatever it is that makes even casual interaction with strangers a component of ordinary social life. I have my family around me and I communicate with friends and relatives via telephone and email, and am able to keep up with the news even more than I think I should and have sufficient books around me and an endless supply that Amazon can deliver so that I am neither lonely nor lacking in stimulation, but there is something else that is missing and it is, indeed, the presence in my life of strangers: either just the people you pass on the street who look like they have interesting presences and lives as you catch a glance at their faces or posture, and also the occupations you run into, such as the waiters in restaurants, the tellers at banks, the woman in the pharmacy who calls you “sweetie” because you are old, the young woman at the supermarket checkout counter whose first name you know and who looks out for you because you are an oldster, she an instant granddaughter, so I fancy, in that my own granddaughter also takes an interest in my welfare. Why are these relations important?
Read MoreComedies With Music
It is easy enough to dismiss a comedy with music as not to be taken seriously, the plot just an excuse for the music. I know people who think that Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutti” is just that: a farce about feigned infidelity that the viewer puts up with so as to enjoy the wonderful music. My own opinion, not at all unusual, is that the plot delves very deeply into the nature of the relations between men and women and does not decide whether their differing roles in courtship are the result of nature or nurture, but does insist that women are not given enough credit for seeing through the men they deal with. But what if a comedy with music is indeed just a confection designed as a platform for its songs? Does that mean that a musical comedy has no meaning in the sense of a heavy moral unless it is Rodgers and Hammerstein pushing their ideas about racial tolerance? I want to pursue that question about a musical comedy that is clearly a romp, Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes”, and suggest that what it puts together, if you consider its various devices of construction, is a kind of utopian community that makes the metaphysical parameters of our lives less confining. The audience might prefer to live in that condition even if only for the duration of the performance and in our memory of the performance, it adding a little lightness to what was described in “Singing in the Rain”, another of those musicals about nothing, as “the drabness of our lives”.
Read MoreReopening During the Pandemic
Dave Konstan reminded me of what I knew but neglected in my comments about the culture of the pandemic. Not only health care workers and grocery clerks serve in a pandemic. Humanists serve as well in that they supply observations and commentary about the passing scene as well as apply old literature to current situations. So I will try that. Here are some observations about how the social world will be different when it reopens after the pandemic, we no more likely to go back to the status quo ante anytime soon just as we are unlikely to go back to airports without security checkpoints even though the threat of airport terrorism has receded though not nearly enough to let security measures lapse. For the foreseeable future, crowds will be small and people will have their temperatures taken or have to show their cards showing that they have antibody protection before they go into restaurants and, most of all, more of life will be conducted online.
Read MoreThe Psychoanalytic Movement
Psychoanalysis reached its apex of influence as an explanation and a cure for psychological ailments in the Fifties and Sixties. The usual explanations for this fact is that the psychoanalytic quest for childhood sexual traumas as the cause of later psychological pathologies had been replaced by the psychotropic drugs that became available in the Sixties and the development of cognitive therapy in the Seventies, that form of therapy replacing the analysis of feelings with practical advice of how to manage feelings. So addictions of one sort or another were no longer addressed by plumbing for the causes of an addictive personality but by advising cigarette smokers to tie their cigarette packages in rubber bands so that a cigarette was less accessible. The new therapies might have been less profound but they seemed to work better.
Read MoreThe Culture of the Pandemic
The heroes and heroines of the current pandemic are the front line medical workers and first responders who are, very properly, cheered, applauded and sung to by people trapped in their New York apartments. Also, the clergymen who try to offer comfort to those who are in some sense dying alone even if we all in some final sense die alone. The platitudes of clergy take on meaning because those clergy seem to be truly anguished. These are some of the memories we will take with us from the experience of the pandemic; they will last long after the pandemic is over. That is part of the cultural residue or, maybe more simply put, just the culture of the pandemic, along with emptied out Times Square and St. Peter’s Square and also a pathetic President jousting with his health care advisors, as well as with the press and some state Governors.
Read MoreThe Politics of The Pandemic
One of the lasting aspects of the coronavirus pandemic will be watching President Donald Trump standing in the White House Briefing Room holding two hour press conferences in which he delivers a mixture of buffoonery, wrong information, platitudes, and self serving rhetoric while yielding to health experts who then contradict what he has just said and can get away with it however polite they are being, keeping up the fiction and the reality of demural to the commander in chief. Fauci says weeks ago that what the President said about opening up the country by Easter was “aspirational”, while what Fauci said himself had to be based on science, and the President apparently liked that formulation, saying he was indeed aspirational and more that he was a “cheerleader” for the nation and so not a person who emphasized bad news, and so admitting out of his own mouth what he really thinks, which he is prone to do, which is that he lies to the American people. Hardly Churchillian. This practice of the experts diverting from what the President standing behind them had just said may be why the Wall Street Journal asks him to leave the press conferences in the hands of the experts because the press conferences are not winning him any votes, but the President is a showman and so unlikely to voluntarily leave the stage.
Read MoreArt Moderne Architecture
Rockefeller Center is a remarkable and lasting achievement. It is monumental without the coldness of the International Style that would in the Sixties come to dominate architecture, much less the Brutalist Style that dominated the Eighties and Nineties, much less the grandiloquent style of the decades after that, or the present Postmodern style which has bits of buildings glued onto one another as if we were living in a humongous Dickens neighborhood. What is it that made Rockefeller Center such a wonderful thing? It was, I suggest, its formal features rather than its relation to the public, which was ballyhooed at the time by the claim that the Radio City Music Hall was a “palace for the people”.
Read MoreThe Civil Rights Movement
Every social movement can be thought of as either a reflection of or an intervention into a set of changing social circumstances. The Civil Rights Movement reflected the fact that the South was industrializing after World War II and so the South had to make room for a free labor market. The Civil Rights Movement also intervened to change the hearts and minds of whites in the South so that formal social segregation might be abolished. This question of whether a social movement is a reflection or an intervention is not simply the empirical one of deciding whether the movement or changed circumstances came first. Attitudes might start to change before the Civil Rights Movement made a change in attitude into a goal, and changes in legislation may indeed have been crucial in structuring a labor market already undergoing alteration. The question is a theoretical one in that it requires a re-conceptualization of the forces that might serve as either causes or effects. The idea of intervention has to be expanded to include the dynamics by which a movement defines its own purposes.
Read MoreClips from World War II
Perhaps to distract me from the coronavirus pandemic, I have been watching numerous clips on YouTube about World War II: newsreels from both British and German sources on dogfights and artillery, on ruins and the occupation of towns, on ceremonial occasions, such as V-E Day, as well as excerpts from the musicals made in Nazi Germany well into the war, the last one I could find a production number with loads of chorus boys in top hats and tails leading the very elegantly gowned Marika Rokk around a dance floor. That one, “The Woman of My Dreams”, was released in August of 1944, at the same time that Paris was liberated, the war already clearly lost by the Germans.
Read MoreAccepting the Inevitable
How do people come to accept the inevitable, such as the fact that they will die, or that a girl they love doesn't love them, or that they will never achieve a lifelong ambition? The answer requires specifying what is meant by the inevitable. Some things, like gravity, are clearly inevitable and nobody tries to rescind Newton. In fact, philosophers might say that laws of nature are not things that can be described by such words as “inevitable” or “avoidable” or “preferable” or any other adjectives that include within them the idea of volition. Then there are practices that are clearly not inevitable and, in fact, are --inevitably-- the result of choice, as when consumers choose one brand of detergent over another, however much advertisers will try to condition consumers to choose one brand rather than another. Indeed, in our time consumer choices seems the most essential aspect of human freedom, citizens of both democratic and authoritarian nations having to make multiple choices every day, what they do in the supermarket less constrained, more an expression of the ability to be arbitrary and decide based on taste, than in any other part of their lives, where they know what their obligations are to family and job. Indeed, for a long time, voting, which is supposed to be the final point of choice in a democracy, the election not over until the voters have spoken after they have made up their minds on the way to the voting booth, was also understood as a kind of consumer choice, voters preferring a particular brand of candidate depending on the demographics of the voter, that point modified in recent years to mean that voters will follow their fancies and vote for the candidate that for the moment seems most appealing. Nothing inevitable about that. And then there are matters about which it is uncertain whether to declare an outcome or a choice inevitable or not. So not just peasant people believe that a person to whom one has been married for a considerable period of time was fated for you, was an inevitable choice despite the circumstances that led to make that person a reasonable choice at the time, both psychologically and socially, because so much of your life since then has been framed and impacted by that choice that one does not care to consider that it was not inevitable that you would wind up with this spouse. It was up there, written in the stars, like gravity.
Read MoreThe Poor Suffer More
When I taught sociology of disasters, which covered everything from the Black Plague to Chernobyl, my students insisted that disasters were times that brought people together in a cooperative spirit. That is what the media would like you to believe, showing anecdotes to that effect so as to calm down the population, but it is the opposite of what usually happens, which is that disasters intensify whatever are already the lines of conflict in a society. The rich become richer; the poor suffer more. And political conflicts grow worse.
Read MoreThe Nature of American Painting
National traditions of art in the West have the same subject matters. There are landscapes and seascapes, portraits, battle scenes, disasters. apocalyptic and utopian imaginings. This differs from Chinese art, for example, which emphasizes landscapes and seascapes, and also from Arab art, which neglects the human figure. The Western national traditions are distinct, however, in that each has its own themes and its own artistic resources, and so a Dutch Golden Age portrait looks different from, let us say, a Nineteenth Century American portrait. A Vermeer would not be confused with an Eakins, and not just because of the way people are dressed or the settings in which they are placed. Vermeer gives his models a quiet grace that is emphasized by his subtle colors while Eakins makes his people impressive because of their carriage and the solemn colors in which they are painted.
Read MoreThe Origins of Romance- III
Scholars have found other times and places to set the origin of romance than at the dawn of civilization. Each of these theories has a certain attraction because each does capture certain aspects of the experience. But none of the alternative theories explain why full blown romance appears by the time I have suggested, which is with Samson and Delilah. The theories for a later time of origin, rather, are add ons in that new features are included in the basic formula for romance, which is dedication, even beyond self-interest, to the emotional needs of the partner, as that is associated with the exchange of sexual favors. Moreover, all the theories have to deal with the problem of how to relate cultural changes to structural changes, which means what actually happens in social life.
Read MoreThe Coronavirus Pandemic
A disaster occurs when the public resources set aside to deal with any upending of social life prove insufficient to deal with the extent of the insult to the social structure. That makes a real disaster different from what might be called a local disaster, such as the forest fire that consumed Paradise, California, because that was very restricted, there not being enough fire engines to save the houses in the area, but also because local forest fires are already baked into the social structure of California in that people buy a lot of insurance and are not surprised if they have to move from one abode to another in the wake of a fire that burns up parts of the Oakland Hills. Also to be distinguished from a true disaster is what might be considered the collective tragedies regarded as just part of ordinary life, as the fact that tens of thousands of people die every year from influenza, hospitals and morgues and funeral parlors prepared to deal with the influx and processing of victims. And then there were the people who died during summer heat waves in cities because of the lack of air conditioning, that absence not considered a failure of public services to intervene in what was a public health emergency.
Read MoreRoth's "The Plot Against America"
I have seen the first episode of HBO’s film version of Phillip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America”. It is presented as a shocking tale of what might happen to Jews if Charles Lindbergh had been elected President of the United States in 1940. It is a dystopian vision that concentrates on dread and foreboding and does a lot of plot exposition while Roth tells a crisper tale that hinges on what is the difference between illusion and reality. Philip Roth must be laughing in his grave. He fooled the clucks one more time. They didn’t see the irony in his telling of his story, however adept he was at constructing a plausible story of the details of what would happen under and to a Lindbergh Administration. He was pointing out that America would come to the aid of its Jews rather than victimize them if a Nazi sympathizer came to power. So I am posting most of the review I did of the novel back in 2005, soon after the novel came out, for those who want an accurate account of what Roth was up to. (Beware. There are spoilers therein.)
Read MoreThe March Democratic Debate
The idea of “The Loyal Opposition” emerged in early parliamentary government. It meant that whatever the issues that divided the major parties, whether that was based on their different class interests or ideologies, both of those holding for Tories and Whigs and Labor in Great Britain, the parties would come together in some national emergency in the interests of the nation, to which all parties felt themselves loyal. That certainly played itself out in World War II when Clement Attlee, the leader of the Labor Party, took up his role as the Deputy Prime Minister in Churchill’s Government of National Unity, even though it was clear that Churchill was calling the shots. The same thing happened in the United States during World War II. Frank Knox, a former Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, took over as Secretary of the Navy in the FDR administration, and Henry Stimson, a long time Republican Party stalwart, who had been Secretary of State under Hoover, became Secretary of War, which meant the civilian in charge of the army and air force. The two managed production and procurement and manpower for the armed services, although it was clear that FDR reserved grand strategy to himself. Other issues than warfare are regarded as ones about which men of good will can disagree and that they do so should not prevent any of them from being considered people with the best interests of the nation at heart.
Read MoreDrawing
Drawing, as an art form, is somewhat like silent movies or black and white movies in that they call attention to their artiface until they have established themselves well enough in your mind so that a drawing can be appreciated in its own terms, as a full blown kind of art. In the case of silent and black and white movies, these limitations are imposed by the limitations of the technology of that time, it taking a while for sound and then color, a mere ten or fifteen years later than color, to come to the movies. But even during the silent era, where films were interrupted by dialogue cards that had to keep talk clear and crisp, film had already developed most of its techniques: close, medium and long shots; novelistic story lines that combined public events with private life; deep investigation of character; angle shots so that railroad trains moved from upper right to disappear lower left; and so on. The audience adjusting its expectations of verisimilitude so that it could engage with very delightful stories, just as happened when audiences accepted the richly textured black and white of film noir so as to enhance its eerie and emotionally dark qualities, forgetting that it needed to be black and white after all, regardless of the mood conveyed, even though black and white musicals had been aglow with the lights and elaborate costumes designed for how they would look in black and white. The limitations of the technology did not seem so harmful that some directors, including Woody Allen, preferred to make their early films in black and white, to work under its limitations, rather than risk getting color wrong before they were ready to do it that way.
Read MoreThe Second Super Tuesday
The results of Tuesday’ selection, what with clear victories for Joe Biden in Mississippi, Missouri and Michigan, led James Carville to say that the Democratic Party had decided to move on from contesting who would be the nominee to opening the general election campaign against Trump. The Democrats had settled on their candidate. The end, to all intents and purposes, of the primary season, gives time to pause to consider the shock that was delivered to the political system by the fortunes of some of its contenders. Elizabeth Warren did not get many votes, She had about eight percent of the male vote in North Carolina, and even if you doubled that so that her female vote was 16%, that means she just wasn’t a popular candidate, regardless of gender. That may be because her policies were not all that attractive, or it may be because the electorate will not abide a woman candidate. Warren herself said that if you say that sexism played a part in her political race, you will be considered a whiner, but the truth of the matter is that the American people, male and female, just don’t accept the idea of a woman President. A woman in that role just does not sit well with them.
Read MoreThe Origins of Romance- II
So as to show that romance is a historical concept that was born at the dawn of recorded history, refer to the documents in the Hebraic tradition. It might seem, in fact, that the earliest stories in “Genesis” were already devoted to this notion of romance. Remember that in the creation story, God creates Adam to be on his own even though he would soon create the other animals with their mates and only then does He decide that Adam is alone and so needs a companion. Why had that not occurred to God in the first place? Perhaps because Adam was supposed to be a figure who got to rule over the animal kingdom without being a member of it in other respects. But God changes his mind because Adam seems lonely, which is a spiritual state. Adam needs someone to cling to, or as the Bible puts it, to “cleave” to, and that is as full a definition of romance as one needs, even if “Genesis” is, as usual, notorious for its brevity. So move on in the Bible.
Read MoreSuper Tuesday
The past week in national political events has been satisfying to me because it put my candidate, Joe Biden, back in the race, and I saw the week before last that something like this was necessary-- either a Biden resurgence or a Bloomberg surge-- so that Sanders would not run off with the nomination because and I thought, as apparently did so many other people, that Sanders was the candidate most likely to be defeated by Trump. Most voters, I think, are not like me, who will support anyone but Trump, but will instead settle for the known evil rather than what they suspect to be the worse evil of a Democratic Socialist. Now we will see what happens with Biden. The week has also been satisfying because it provided a splendid example of political drama, something that happens more often than we might expect because the forces that make it a drama are arranged fortuitously rather than by the hand of a playwright. This political drama brought together engaging and distinctive personalities, noble rhetoric, a clash over issues and constituencies as well as personalities, all occurring, mostly in public view, in the course of a brief period of time that allowed for plot complications as well as for the reversal of expectations. Playwrights should do as well, and certainly Shakespeare did in “Julius Caesar'' and Oscar Wilde did in “An Ideal Husband”.
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