WILLIAM SAFIRE, R.I.P

Some of you have probably noted the passing of the NY TIMES columnist and former Nixon speech writer, William Safire. Bill Safire, as he was apparently known by everyone, was one of the very few right-wing pundits whom I could stomach. He was, by all accounts, a decent man with a genuine commitment to individual liberties, despite his conservative bent. He also had a commendable passion for language, and a puckish wit.

Odd as it may seem, I once had an exchange of letters with him [in a manner of speaking]. Herewith my letter to the NY TIMES, and his hand-written response.

February 8, 1999

To the Editor:

I was astonished and dismayed to see William Safire, in today's Op-Ed column, refer to Vernon Jordan's phrase "Mother wit" as a "rich dialect phrase." Apparently, when Mr. Safire sees a Black man using a phrase that is not found on the tongues of Talk Show hosts or New York cabbies, he assumes it must be Ebonics.

For the phrase "mother wit," permit me to refer you to the Critique of Pure Reason of Immanuel Kant. The following appears in the opening pages of the Transcendental Analytic, at page 133 of the first edition: "It is the specific quality of so-called mother-wit [Mutterswitzes]." Mr. Safire might also have referred to the Oxford English Dictionary, which traces the phrase in English to 1440.

Sincerely, etc etc.

Safire sent the letter back with the following handwritten note: "Sir -- I've done a language column on this, that will appear in the NYT Magazine. Thanks for writing --- Bill Safire

Maybe I am just getting old, but I feel the need now and again to acknowledge the humanity of my enemies.

HEALTH CARE DOWN TO THE WIRE

A while back, I made a prediction, and promised to eat crow publicly [or as publicly as one can on this obscure bog] if I was wrong. The prediction was that a health care reform package would pass, that it would not be everything we on the left hoped for, and that it would not be the end of the story. As we come down to the wire on health care reform, it is time to make this prediction more precuise, and to assess where we are.

I think it is fair to equate a public option with "everything we on the left hoped for." To be sure, many of us would prefer a single-payer national health care system, but this was never a realistic possibility, given the constellation of forces in the United States. A single-payer system could more accurately be described as "everything we on the left dream of." I also dream of an egalitarian society in which everyone acknowledges the truth of evolution and is even willing to grant that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, but there are limits!

So, where are we, now that the Baucus committee has rejected the public option? First of all, it is clear that a bill will pass, and that it will be a major step in the direction of reform. No one anymore doubts that. Pause for a moment to consider what this means. Truman couldn't do it. Nixon couldn't do it. Clinton couldn't do it. But Obama will do it. That is a triumph by itself.

Secondly, the public option is not dead. The Baucus committee was always the most conservative of the five committees struggling with health care, and three of the others have already voted out bills that include a public option,. With the appointment of Paul Kirk, the Democrats are up to sixty, finally, and it remains genuinely uncertain whether they can block a filibuster, the statements of Nelson and others notwithstanding.

So I would say that my prediction is looking good, very good. What about the third part of the prediction? Is this all we are going to get, for at least another generation? That is truly harder to predict. So I will now venture another prediction, one that can be tested relatively soon. I predict that once a health care reform bill is signed into law, Obama will emerge from this struggle dramatically strengthened. He will have shown that against the most violent, concerted, massively funded opposition, he can prevail, and secure the fulfilment of a major campaign pledge. The decks will be cleared for other plans and proposals that have necessarily been put on hold while this health care battle is waged.

One more thing, more a prayerful hope than a prediction: Once health care is passed, Obama will be free to make a major reversal in Afghanistan policy without losing one or two crucial votes in the Senate. I think it is at least possible that we shall see that reversal shortly after health care passes.

Check back with me in a while to see whether my crystal ball is clear or cloudy.

AN ODD FACT

Have you ever noticed that no matter what the physical condition that afflicts you, as soon as you mention it, it turns out that everyone has had it? This morning, I took Susie to Duke Eye Center for cataract surgery -- happily, with lasers and such, not a terribly lengthy or distressing procedure. When we got home, the phone rang. It was the woman who runs Susie's MS Support Group calling for her. I was not sure Susie was up to talking on the phone, so I asked her, and then explained to the caller about the surgery. "Oh yes," she replied brightly, "I had that." It never fails.

MOVIE REVIEW

Those of you who are familiar with my tastes in entertainment are aware that I prefer shoot 'em ups and spy movies to Merchant/Ivory films. My dear friend, Milton Cantor, has long since despaired of recommending to me "good" films, aware of the disdain I customarily show for any attempt at art in my amusements. Yesterday, my wife dragged me off to see Jane Campion's latest work, BRIGHT STAR, a film dealing in a leisurely low-key way with the love affair between the poet, Keats, and a young woman named Fanny Brawne, who was an accomplished seamstress. I am abashed to have to admit that the film is utterly beautiful, and mesmerizing.

Everyone describes the film as dealing with the last three years of the life of John K. But in watching the movie, if it were not for the fact that he is JOHN KEATS, immortal tragic romantic poet, one would pay him very little mind. The movie is really about Fanny -- her wit, her independence, and the slow growth in her of a passionate love for the consumptive young man with the permanent five o'clock shadow who has taken up residence next door with his companion, Mr. Brown.

There is one supremely erotic moment in this low-key, reserved film, and it consists of a single word uttered by Fanny. I leave it to you film buffs to find it.

Abbie Cornish, an actress I have not before encountered, is irresistible as Fanny. I for one spent the entire movie wishing I might get to meet her. [Fanny, that is. For all I know, Cornish is a supremely gifted dingbat.]

Well, if anyone in Amherst, MA is reading this, don't tell Milton. It would destroy his image of me, and leave me with a lot of explaining to do, next time I see him.

IT IS BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE THAN TO CURSE THE DARKNESS

On Friday, I posted a somewhat self-pitying message, tricked out in academic references to C. P. Snow, about my inability, during my long career, to find students who share my desire to unite the insights and methods of mathematics and logic with those of literary criticism, history, philosophy, and other "soft" disciplines. Yesterday, it occurred to me that self-pity is not a terribly attractive personality trait, even in a septuagenarian, so I decided to have another go.

I have always thought that the ideal teaching situation would be to gather a group of dedicated students who were seriously interested in learning, and then to conduct a seminar completely free of the extraneous irrelevances of university education: No entrance requirements, no tuition or other fees, no grades, no credits to earn and enter on a permanent record, no degrees awarded. Just me and the students, engaging with hard, exciting, deep ideas. Now that I am retired, there is no reason why I cannot do just that. All I need is students and a place to meet.

I think [it is not yet certain] that the UNC Philosophy Department will graciously allow me to use one of their seminar rooms, once a week, at a time when a regular seminar is not scheduled there. Now I must figure out how to put the word out in the Triangle community [Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, the Research Triangle, and associated towns and villages]. Then we shall see whether there are eight to fifteen people who want to study Marx's economic, historical, political, sociological, philosophical, anthropological, and psychological ideas with a depth and precision and integration that has not before, to my knowledge, been achieved.

Since the series of meetings -- probably twelve or so in all -- will cost nothing and confer no benefit on the participants save knowledge and understanding, I will feel free to make any demands I wish, however onerous. Anyone who does not want to work that hard will just drop out. I will ask them to read all of CAPITAL, Volume I, the MANIFESTO, portions of the ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 and THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, and my two books on Marx -- UNDERSTANDING MARX and MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, and other things in addition.

Well, twelve weeks may not do it.

I will expect them, at the very least, to feel comfortable with high school algebra -- I am not crazy, so I will not require Linear Algebra and Differential Calculus, even though those are both standard undergraduate subjects for students who pursue a science/mathematics track.

The course will be open to persons of any age, regardless of their educational credentials or lack of same. There will, needless to say, be not a whiff of ideological correctness. The students will not have to like Marx [that is actually rather hard to do] or agree with him -- or with me. All that is necessary is that they want to understand Marx, as richly and complexly as possible.

We shall see.

THE NEW CANDIDATE FOR DUMBEST SENATOR

The competition for the apparently much-coveted title of "Dumbest United States Senator," which for a long time was pretty well locked up by Jeff Sessions, has a new hopeful who will be hard to beat: Jon Kyle of Arizona. The following link comes to you courtesy of my son, Tobias, who apparently has enough time left in the day after his teaching duties at Harvard Law School to keep in touch with the ever more deeply plumbed depths of Republican stupidity. Just check out the follow: http://www.youtube.com/watch?3v=3Jj6pqajvB8& As Tobias observed to me, may we assume that Kyl has no female constituents?

THE TWO C ULTURES

Some of you may be familiar with the expression "the two cultures," made popular half a century ago by the Englishman C. P. Snow. Snow, who used the phrase first in a speech, then in an essay, and finally in a short book expanded from the essay, was referring to the intellectual and cultural chasm he observed between the science dons and the humanist dons at Oxford, a chasm that, by extension, divided educated people throughout the English-speaking world. Snow himself was both a science don and a novelist, and hence was well positioned to bridge the gulf between the two groups of intellectuals. No scientist, he observed, would willingly acknowledge not knowing who Shakespeare was, and could be expected at the least to have a few bits and snatches of information about him -- "the Bard of Avon," "Macbeth," "To be or not to be," that sort of thing. But supremely learned, sophisticated, and self-admiring humanists would openly confess, indeed sometimes even brazenly announce, that they had not the slightest idea what the Second Law of Thermodynamics might be, and felt no impulse to find out.

The starkness of the division was heightened in England by the practice [which may no longer be in effect -- I have not checked] of examining boys and girls in what we would consider roughly the beginning of high school, and then sending each one off either into a science/math stream or a literature/classics stream. This determination continued right on through university, with no "General Education" courses to give the scientists a taste for the humanities and the humanists a glimmer of the sciences.

As this brief description suggests, Snow, while claiming that each of the two cultures was ignorant of the other, really thought the split was, if I may combine a political metaphor with an American football metaphor, unbalanced to the right. The humanists were more deeply ignorant of the sciences than the scientists were of the humanities.

Throughout my long teaching career, which lasted fifty-three years and spanned six decades, I have brooded on this chasm between the two cultures, particularly because in my own intellectual work I strive not merely to work in a version of the two cultures but to fuse them seamlessly in order to achieve a deeper and more complex understanding than might otherwise be possible. I began my undergraduate education, in 1950, as a mathematics major, and though I quickly shifted to philosophy, I devoted a good deal of time and energy to the study of mathematical logic. Later on, when I became involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I taught myself Game Theory and studied the physics of radiation and fallout shelters, in order to debate against Herman Kahn and other defense intellectuals. My first teaching job, after getting my doctorate and spending six months on active duty in the Army National Guard, found me teaching European History at Harvard, while also teaching a graduate course on Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. I next taught undergraduates at the University of Chicago some of the classic texts of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, while also teaching a more advanced course on military strategy and foreign policy and a variety of graduate courses in philosophy. In the course of a long career, I taught Rational Choice Theory to graduate students, introductory microeconomics to undergraduates, and ended up running for twelve years a revolutionary doctoral program in Afro-American Studies.

This broad array of materials has always seemed to me to be seamlessly connected, demanding the same sorts of intelligence, intuition, rigor, and clarity. But to my very great sadness, I have virtually never found students able to draw, with my guidance, on a similar spectrum of disciplinary specialties. The consequence has been that I have never truly found students who can carry on the sort of work I do. If they can handle the math, the literary criticism and sociology and philosophy is a closed book to them. And if they are comfortable with the history or anthropology or literary analysis, they are almost certain to confess, only a trifle shame-facedly, that they were "never good at math."

When I started to study the thought of Karl Marx, I found in him a catholicity of intellect and breadth of learning that I admired, and I formulated the plan of writing a study and explication of his great work, DAS KAPITAL, that would bring into fruitful conjunction the modern mathematical interpretation of his economic theories with a literary, philosophical, sociological, and historical understanding of his devastating expose of the mystifications of capitalist market relations. I did not conceive this as some sort of scholarly analogue to the old parlor trick of rubbing one's stomach and patting one's head at the same time. Rather, I was persuaded [and still am] that only such an integrated approach could do justice to the depth and complexity of Marx's insights.

My friends made it urgently clear to me that there would no readership at all for a book that combined linear algebra equations with explications of Marx's literary metaphors, and I compromised by producing two books, the first of which [UNDERSTANDING MARX] analysed the economics [with the linear algebra consigned to an appendix] and the second of which [MONEYBAGS MUST HE SO LUCKY] dealt with the literary/philosophical dimensions of the first ten chapters of CAPITAL. The joke was on me, alas. The first book had a minor success in certain economic circles, while nobody at all read the second one.

Despite what has been, if one be honest, a career-long failure both to teach and to write in the way I think best, I remain wedded to the belief that an understanding of the complex capitalist world in which we live requires a fusion of the insights from as broad an array of disciplines as one can manage. Perhaps someone out there will pick up the torch.