IT ISN'T EVERYTHING, BUT IT IS SOMETHING

There is a lovely scene in The Sting when Robert Redford, a two-bit grifter, goes to see the legendary Paul Newman. who is hanging out in a whorehouse, to find out how to play the big con.  After sobering up, Newman tells Redford, "you won/t get everything, but you will have to be satisfied with what you get."

I have always considered that wise advice in politics as well as in grifting.

Guilty on all counts is something. It is not everything I want, but I will have to be satisfied with that. It is pretty good!

MY APOLOGIES

 I was dictating t my phone.  I meant Achim, of course.

THANK YOU, ADAM

 for that thoughtful and kind comment. I was much touched by.

A MEMORIAL DAY MEDITATION

Eric Erickson, in his finest book, Childhood and Society, writes wisely that “An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history.”  In my 91^st year, as I approach the end of my lifecycle, I often reflect on how much my view of the world has been shaped by the particular accidental coincidence of my lifecycle with one segment of history. My father’s father was born in 1879. He devoted his life to the Socialist party in New York City and died in 1944, just before the second world war ended. I was born late in 1933, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt began his first term as president. I was a senior in Harvard College before I saw a Republican elected to the White House. My early years were obsessed with the dangers of nuclear war and as I grew older, despite the terrible inequities of race and sex and class that beset my country, it was possible for me to believe that things were getting steadily better. The last half of my life has been spent in an increasingly frustrating struggle against the retreat from those early advances. Now, I await the outcome of an election that may effectively end whatever dream of democracy I had as a youth.

 

This past semester, I had the great pleasure of leading a study group at Harvard in a close examination of volume 1 of Capital, a book which I remain convinced is the greatest work of social and economic analysis ever written. In the last of my 12 two hour lectures, I spoke to those young people about the necessity of continuing the struggle without Marx’s confidence in the eventual victory of socialism to which he devoted his life’s work.

 

I am constitutionally unable to give up the struggle or retreat into a literary quietism, but I no longer believe alas that the arc of history bends toward justice.  Bound by my Parkinson’s to a desk chair or television set, I must take my pleasures where I find them and hope during this coming week to see Trump convicted in a court of law. I do not believe that will change the world, but it will certainly give me some pleasure, and that is perhaps the most I can ask of it

SIGH THEY NEVER LEARN.

56 years ago, I was a young associate professor in the Columbia philosophy department, on leave for the year to teach at Rutgers University, but still living half a block from the Columbia campus on 115^th St. between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. My wife and I had just had our first child, Patrick, who was about two months old when things blew up on the campus. It is not an important part of the story, but it is worth noting just for the sake of keeping the history correct, that there were actually two student protests that spring. The first was carried out by a group of white students associated with SDS, who occupied the administration building to protest Columbia’s involvement in war work supporting the Vietnam war. The second was carried out by a group of black students who occupied Hamilton Hall to protest Columbia’s announced intention to build a new gymnasium and Morningside Park, which the residents of Harlem considered part of their world.  The new gymnasium, needless to say, would be open only to Columbia students, not to residents of Harlem. 

 

And here we are again. In 1968, the Columbia University administration, headed by Grayson Kirk, handled the whole matter very badly, with the result that David Truman, a distinguished political scientist who was widely thought to be the next president of Columbia, was forced to complete his career as the president of Mount Holyoke College instead.

 

How might the current president of Columbia have handled the matter better? The answer seems to me to be obvious, but for reasons which are equally obvious I am sure it never so much as occurred to her. As soon as the first evidence of student concern about the disaster in Gaza popped up, she should have called in the managers of the Columbia endowment and told them to sell all the shares in companies in any way involved with Israel’s attack on Gaza. I gather the Boeing Corporation makes bombs that the United States has been delivering to Israel and that Israel has been dropping on the Palestinians. I am sure there are other holdings in the endowment that are suspect in the same way. There are undoubtedly also ways in which the University is involved with Israel, and they should have been put on hold by the president. Then she should have asked for a meeting with all of the students, of any faith, and whatever their position on the current situation in the occupied territories. She should have told them that the official position of the University was that there should be an immediate cease-fire, a commitment by all parties to a two state solution, massive aid to the people of Gaza, and a demand that the US government withhold military aid to Israel so long as Netanyahu continues to insist that he is going to continue the war. She should have stated that if they wished to establish an encampment on the Columbia campus, they were welcome to do so and that so long as they did that she would join them there, conduct the business of the University from the encampment, and call on all faculty and students to join with her.

 

This would, of course, have had a dramatic effect on the political situation and it would have encouraged other private universities and colleges to do the same. (There is some question whether public universities could take this sort of political position but there is nothing to stop the presidents of those universities from announcing their personal support for a similar political stance.)

 

It is I think obvious that there is not the slightest possibility that anything like this will ever happen. As I say, they never learn.