I TAKE IT BACK

Shortly after the Newtown horror, I wrote an angry post in which I, in effect, accused Obama of sacrificing those murdered children in order to make progress on economic problems facing the nation.  I was wrong.  He and his administration are moving with commendable speed and energy to seize this moment and convert it into lasting gun control legislation.  He may fail, of course, but not through any inadequacy of his effort.  I am delighted to be able to take back what I said and -- should he be listening -- apologize.

Now, on to the trillion dollar coin.

SENATOR BARNEY FRANK

Liberal hearts have been swelling and beating faster with Barney Frank's surprise announcement that he would like Governor Deval Patrick to appoint him to John Kerry's Senate seat for the three months or so until a special election can be arranged.  Kerry will shortly be confirmed by the Senate as Hillary Clinton's replacement at State.  The very thought of a Massachusetts Senate delegation consisting of Elizabeth Warren and Barney Frank, even if only for a few months, must be causing widespread indigestion on Wall Street.  It is enough to give this old leftie fleeting hopes of Resurrection.

Massachusetts is one of those states [I think there are a number of others] in which politicians for the most part wait their turn patiently for the opportunity to clamber up the electoral ladder another rung.  When I arrived in Western Massachusetts in 1971 to take up my new position as Professor of Philosophy at UMass Amherst, the huge First Congressional District, comprising everything west of Springfield all the way to the New York border, was represented by benevolent Silvio Conte, a Republican who had held the seat since 1959 and had moved steadily to the left as the political complexion of the Massachusetts First shifted.  Conte died in office in 1991, and immediately office holders up and down the ballot started making their calculations.  John Olver, a former UMass chemistry professor who had served as a liberal Democrat in the Mass House for 14 years and the Mass Senate for 18, made his move.  Hew ran for the Democratic nomination to replace Conte, and when he was elected [there was never any doubt that the Democratic nominee would win the seat], that opened up a Massachusetts State Senate seat.  Stan Rosenberg moved up from the Massachusetts House to take Olver's seat, leaving open a House seat for the district that included Amherst.  Ellen Story, a wonderful, very liberal woman strong in the Pioneer Valley's women's movement, ran for and won Stan's old seat.  I worked on Ellen's first campaign [since then she has been a shoo-in].  You will know how low-tech the operation was if I tell you that I was the campaign's computer expert!

Ed Markey, a strongly liberal long-time member of the Massachusetts House delegation, has announced for Kerry's seat in the special election, and Kerry has endorsed him, which pretty much forecloses a contest for the nomination.  Even so, I cannot help dreaming that after several months Barney decides he likes it in the Senate chambers and makes a run for the seat.

A READER RESPONDS

Ron Irving, at the University of Washington, wrote a very interesting email response to me about my Andrew Sullivan remarks.  With his permission, I am reprinting it here.

Dear Bob,

I believe you have somewhat misrepresented the history of Sullivan's blog, for you have described the history (or so I imagine) from when you showed up at his door, rather than from when he began. Like you, I tend to think of it as an Atlantic enterprise that moved, but he started it years before he joined the Atlantic. Like the Daily Beast, the Atlantic was just a temporary home. Perhaps it's better to think of Sullivan as a version of any number of faculty members we both would have encountered over the years, ones who move from university to university every 4-5 years, always getting a good startup package, higher salary, and so on. Suppose one such faculty member got tired of negotiating with the current or a prospective new university and decided to strike out on his or her own, making a go of it with books, online courses, and a staff that helps generate the material. Maybe we'll see that before long.

As to the substance of your argument for not paying the $20, it leaves me puzzled. If Sullivan were a lone blogger presenting his views (without all the mirroring that occupies much of his space), he would then occupy a role similar to the many bloggers I read daily, some of whom I have happily contributed to (Greenwald, Atrios, emptywheel). If he asked for donations or had fund drives, as they do, I might contribute. But he isn't like them, because of all the extra baggage. And with this baggage, to my mind, he appears to be more like an independent magazine than a lone blogger. A Reader's Digest if you will. On this basis, it strikes me as entirely reasonable that he is proposing a subscription fee. Of course, no one has to pay it. I don't subscribe to Reader's Digest. But what he's doing, in effect, is leaving one online magazine and starting another. I don't think he's making us pay for his opinion. He's asking us to pay for a wide array of services.

Now, as to what I think of those services, I believe that as his operation has grown, the quality has steadily declined. More and more of the material he and his team put up is presented without any consideration of whether it's true. If someone writes garbage, they don't edit or reflect on it, they throw it up there. Well, there's editing of course in the decision as to what to put up, but as far as I can tell, there's no effort to consider whether the underlying information or data is correct. The team doesn't have that capability. And in this respect, I agree with you, which is why I may choose not to pay the $20 either. They are adding to the hall of mirrors effect of the internet, letting garbage spread along with the good stuff. I find it infuriating. All I really want to read are the posts (fewer and fewer it seems) in which Sullivan actually says what's on his mind. I wish they had a separate channel for that.

I suppose in the end, then, I reach the same point you do. And that's without even mentioning Sullivan's pomposity. But I suppose we all struggle with that condition.

Sincerely,

TECHNICAL REPORT

I solved my pop-up or banner problem the old-fashioned way.  I paid someone to fix it.  More precisely, I used a service I had already paid for.  When I bought my computer at Best Buy, I signed up with the Geek Squad for a service contract.  I called them with my problem, and a very nice geeky guy took control of my computer remotely [a kind of weird experience] and spent half an hour or more rummaging around in it until he found a menu of enablings and disablings.  He disabled the enabled banner option, and that did it.  Then, while he was in my computer, he spent half an hour more deleting about a gig and a half [his term] of unneeded garbage.  My computer now is super fast with no irritating popups or banners.  I must say that for a geezer like me, that was terrific.

THE FIFTH VOYAGE OF GULLIVER

Readers of this blog, I am sure, will be familiar with the great eighteenth century satire of English politics and culture by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels.  Lemuel Gulliver, the hero of Swift's novel, takes four voyages:  to Lilliput, to Brobdignag, to Laputa, and to the land of the houyhnhnms and yahoos.  Let us imagine, if we may, that an account has just been discovered of a fifth voyage, to a curious land called Blog.  Blog, Gulliver tells us, is a land composed entirely of mirrors, which endlessly reflect the doings of the inhabitants.   [Needless to say, I do not in my most self-referential fantasies compare myself to the incomparable Swift, although I did for a brief moment ascend to the heights of satire in my review of Allen Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, but bear with me.  I shall connect up, as the trial lawyers say.]

In Blog, the sole product of the endless labors of the inhabitants is opinions, on matters political, economic, religious, cultural, and even athletic.  For a long time, the Bloggians, or Bloggers as they are sometimes called, offer their products to one another in a pre-capitalist frenzy of gift exchange, rather in the manner of the South Sea Islanders described by Margaret Mead.  But then, an enterprising Blogger conceives the idea of charging for her opinions.  The other bloggers are taken by this innovation, and soon each blogger goes forth into the town square carrying a little change maker, rather like those that bus conductors once wore.  When someone wishes to hear an opinion on some matter, he must place a coin in the appropriate slot, whereupon the opinion is divulged.  Each opinionator keeps careful track of how many coins are deposited, and wears a sign on which the number is displayed.  The most popular opinion-producers receive thousands of coins, and enter into agreements with other leading opinion-makers to share their opinions on a reciprocal basis with inquiring minds.  Some of the most successful inhabitants of Blog do not even themselves formulate opinions, content to recycle the products of other opinionators.  At the outskirts of the town square are a few would-be opinionators who cannot find anyone to offer even one coin for their opinions.  These pathetic aspirants continue to offer their opinions freely, hoping against hope that their opinions will some day be sufficiently in demand to allow them to charge a few coins for them.  Because Blog is composed entirely of mirrors, it is difficult to tell which opinions are original and which are merely reflections of other opinions.  Eventually, the distinction itself evaporates, and originality gives way to repetition.

What has inspired in me this Swiftian fantasy?  The answer , in a name, is Andrew Sullivan.  As some of you may know, Andrew Sullivan is a Gay Catholic conservative English opinionator who used to be on the staff of The Atlantic Monthly.  His blog, The Daily Dish, was featured on the Atlanticwebsite for a while, until Sullivan left that site and signed up with The Daily Beast, an entirely web-based e-zine.   I have been reading The Daily Dish regularly for several years, principally because it is a convenient way of keeping track of conservative opinion on matters political.  Sullivan's religious anxieties and cultural predilections [he is, among other things, obsessed with beards] are, I find, rather a bore, but at certain important moments he has performed a genuinely valuable service, for example by reproducing verbatim the texting from the streets during the Iranian protests a year and more ago.  He is also deeply concerned with the campaign for the legitimation of same-sex marriage, which of course concerns me greatly, and has himself recently entered into marriage with his long-time partner.  The Daily Dish, like many of the major blogs, devotes most of its space to the recycling of things written elsewhere, which gives to it somewhat the air of a hall of mirrors [hence my fantasy].  It is extremely successful, claiming more than a million readers, and again like other major blogs, employs a staff, which in Sullivan's case numbers five or six.

Now Sullivan has decided to cut loose from The Daily Beast, not for yet another host site but rather to strike out on his own as an independent operation.  There are essentially three ways for such efforts to generate income:  ads, donations, and subscriptions.  Sullivan has opted for subscriptions.  Shortly, he will require those who wish to continue to read his blog to pay a subscription fee of $19.99 a year.  [The precise details are somewhat obscure to me, and involve keeping RSS feeds free, whatever they are, but satire has long played fast and loose with the complexities of reality, and I plead poetic license.]

I shall not pay, even if it means that I am denied access to The Daily Dish. 

Why on earth not?  In my comfortable upper middle class life, twenty dollars is a negligible fee.  It is, to choose just one example, the amount I tipped an airport employee on Christmas Eve who met Susie and me at the airplane door as we returned from Europe, pushed Susie in a wheel chair on the long walk to immigration, waited with us for our luggage, saw us through customs, and finally delivered Susie to a taxi rank where we caught a cab home to Chapel Hill.  Twenty dollars is a good deal less than I spend in one week for the lemon poppy seed muffin and coffee that I eat while doing the NY TIMEScrossword puzzle each morning.  It is not the money. 

My decision not to pay was immediate and unreflective, and it has taken me a bit of thought to figure out why I was offended by the demand that I pay to read Sullivan's blog.  I have been reading books for seventy years, and it has never seemed inappropriate that I be asked to pay for the books I read.  I regularly pay to attend concerts [although Susie and I make full use of the countless free concerts offered in out of the way churches in the higher numbered arrondissementsof Paris.]  I have even paid to hear lectures, and of course I have on countless occasions been paid to give them, even though they are, when all is said and done, nothing but compendia of my opinions.  After all, Sullivan must live.  So why this instinctive revulsion at the demand that I pay him for the right to read his opinions?

The answer, I think, is this:  The blogosphere is, or purports to be, a global village.  Through its intermediation, each of us encounters and forms some sort of relationship with countless others passing through the village square.  Were I in a real village, could I imagine, save in a Swiftian satire, an encounter like this?  "Good morning, Bob, what do you think of the UNC football game last evening?"  "Well, Emily, put a quarter in my change purse and I will tell you."  "Fine, here is my quarter.  For fifty cents, I will tell you my reaction to the Fiscal Cliff negotiations."

Perhaps those of us not living on the pensions earned in a lifetime of work need to find a real job before we decide to blog.

MORE ON LINCOLN

By and large, even movies I like a great deal do not make me think.  The Hobbit,, for example, was great fun, but it did not set me to thinking [save to wonder how they manage to make Gandalf look twice as tall as Frodo -- or, for that matter, how they make Hagrid look so enormous in the Harry Potter movies.]  Even a truly lovely film like A Late Quartet, which I adored, and which made me burst into tears at its very end, was not in any deep way thought-provoking.

But I find myself turning Lincoln over in my mind and trying to extract from it lessons for our current situation -- which, judging from the fascinating interview with screenwriter Tony Kushner that Jim put me onto, is very much what the makers of the film intended.

Here, for what they are worth, are some reflections on the present day that were stimulated or reconfirmed by Lincoln.

First, truly great political accomplishments, among which I count the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, require enormous efforts, by countless men and women far from the political arena, to set the stage and create the circumstances that make those accomplishments possible.  In the case of Lincoln, it was the actions of several millions of slaves and former slaves that weakened the South's military campaign and made possible the North's impending victory.  Without their actions, it is not at all clear that the North could ever have won the war, nor is it clear, even if they had, that the victory would have ended slavery.  Once again, let me refer you to Black Reconstruction, in which Du Bois deploys the concept of the General Strike to explain the role of the slaves in the defeat of the South.  As I observed in my tutorial on Afro-American Studies, the truly remarkable thing about Du Bois' thesis is that he advanced it in 1935, two generations before the historiographical data required to confirm it would be made available by Ira Berlin and his co-authors [and legions of nameless graduate students] in Slaves No More.  Kushner, by the way, in the Bill Moyers interview that Jim put me on to, and which stimulated this post, gets this wrong, specifically denying that slaves or Free Blacks had anything directly to do with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

The lesson for us today, pretty clearly, is that it will take the efforts of millions, or tens of millions, of Americans far from Washington to create the conditions under which Obama and the Democrats can achieve dramatic change. 

The second lesson of the movie is that even heroic, epoch-making political action is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," to invoke Thomas Hobbes' classic description of the state of nature.  It is genuinely educational to see, in the movie, how corrupt and devious are the machinations by which something of transcendent moral importance gets accomplished in politics.  Anyone whose sensibilities are offended by the sight of Obama wheeling and dealing with Boehner or McConnell is just not serious about wanting the world to change.

The third lesson is that in the midst of a dirty, no holds barred political fight, it is very, very difficult to know just what precisely is the most that one can exact from one's opponents.  Knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em [to quote a Kenny Rogers classic] is a matter of art, not science, of intuition, not of calculation.  It is natural, but I think a mistake, to construe differences of judgment about such matters as evidences of moral failing. 

But, to recur to the first lesson, recognizing this character of political decision in no way alters the absolute necessity of mass action in support of goals that cannot, in their nature, be completely achieved.  Anyone who knows even a little bit about the promise and failure of Reconstruction, and about the century and more of struggle that was required to realize the dream of genuine liberation, will understand that only by overreaching, by demanding what will not entirely be achieved, can we create the pressure that will allow a Lincoln [or an Obama -- this is the real message of the film] to achieve what can be achieved in the present balance of political forces.  My favorite character in the movie is Thaddeus Stevens, not Abraham Lincoln, but if Abraham Lincoln had been a Thaddeus Stevens, the Thirteenth Amendment would not have passed, and if Thaddeus Stevens had been an Abraham Lincoln, it also would not have passed.

A PLEA FOR HELP

Something weird is happening.  Every time I access Google's Blogger, to post something on my blog or just to check comments, etc., an extremely irritating banner for PacMan pops up and obscures part of the screen.  I cannot figure out how to get rid of the damned thing, which I hate.  Does anyone know what is going on?