SMALL VICTORIES

Several months ago for no discernible reason, I suddenly became afflicted with a series of extremely irritating pop-up ads that would appear with a loud musical chord announcing their arrival on the right hand of my computer screen. I could make them go away with a click but sometimes there were as many as six or seven backed up behind the first one. I had no idea why they appeared nor any idea how to make them stop appearing so I simply laboriously dismissed them as they arose.

Yesterday, as I was idly viewing my computer screen ("idly viewing" is my default condition in the seemingly endless months of virus isolation) I happened to notice a tiny little symbol at the very lower right of my screen over which was printed the number 21. Having nothing better to do, I clicked on it. Instantly, a very large panel appeared covering the entire right hand edge of the screen from top to bottom. The information on it seemed to have something to do with these irritating ads and as I looked more closely I discovered a place where I could click to dismiss them. I did so and the ads have not reappeared. I feel liberated!

Now, I am well aware that every sentient 12-year-old on the planet would have discovered this within minutes after the first ad appeared but I take my victories where I find them. As my son, Tobias, advised me many years ago when I was remarking on the fact that the other people in the exercise room seemed to be walking much faster on the treadmill than I was, "Dad, you must only concentrate on your own personal best." I took that advice to heart and so I am here today to brag unashamedly that after only two months I have made the ads go away.

Sufficient unto the day...

THOROUGHLY IDLE MUSING

Unable to find anything printable to say about Jonathan Swann's remarkable and appalling interview with Pres. Trump, I allowed my mind to wander and into it popped one of my favorite lines from the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. It is the great moment in act two when Pooh Bah and his confederates, having given the Mikado an elaborate and entirely false account of their execution of a 2nd trombone player in a traveling band, discover that the person they have claimed to execute is the son of the Mikado, for which act they face hideous death. The others reproach Pooh Bah for his over the top description of the imaginary execution and Pooh Bah replies, in an effort to justify himself, that it was " merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." I don't know why I love this line so much. Perhaps it is because it strikes me as a fairly accurate description of a good deal of the contemporary philosophy I have read.


But since my mind is endlessly restless, it then recalled a truly appalling moment in a course I taught at UNC Chapel Hill six or seven years ago. The doctoral program in public policy requires all of its students to take a seminar on Moral Dimensions of Public Policy, a course that had for many years been taught by a senior member of the UNC philosophy department. But because this notable had a grant and was on leave, I was recruited to take his place. The experience was in general delightful. The students, unlike most philosophy department graduate students, had gone out into the world after graduating from college and held extremely interesting jobs in various aspects of public policy before returning to their doctorates, so they were not only bright, they also had a variety of interesting experiences on which they could draw in our classroom conversation. 

One day, as I was going on about something or other – I cannot now recall what – I made a reference by way of illustration of the point I was elaborating to one of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. From their facial reactions I could tell that my reference was falling flat so I took a moment to poll the young people sitting around the table and I discovered, to my horror, that not a single one of them had ever heard of Gilbert and Sullivan. I could have handled it if they confessed that they could not sing half a dozen of the songs or recount the plots of the plays. I mean, young people have their limitations. But not a single one of them had so much as heard of Gilbert and Sullivan.

I think it was at that moment that I first realized I had definitively passed my sell – by date. Sometimes it is hard growing old.

AS I AND EVERYONE ELSE PREDICTED

No sooner were the schools opened then cases of Covid popped up and were given a great deal of attention in the media. I confess I did not anticipate how much trouble baseball would have getting started. And now we will begin to hear the stories of evictions and foreclosures as the virus spreads across the country even into rural counties. This is simply terrible and it is going to get worse, much worse. Even if a usable vaccine is in fact developed by early in the new year, it will be six months or more after that before it is widely available and used. I continue my obsessive routine of cleansing everything that comes into our apartment, leaving the apartment each day only for my early morning walk, a check of the mail, and a trip to the end of the hall to put a bag of garbage in the garbage chute. My wife and I are among the lucky ones. We have more than enough money, live in a retirement community that labor is continuously to keep the virus out, and there are few if any trips that we must make outside our little world.

QVELLING

An unknown commentator just put up the following comment:
"Prof Wolff visited South Africa in the late 1980s and gave a number of spectacular lectures. He joined us in placard protests against apartheid. If I recall correctly, he joked at the time that he did not get arrested for protesting against the Vietnam War and was hoping that he could make up for it then. None of us got arrested, despite the protest being filmed by the police. What a privilege to have heard his lectures and engage him broadly on a range of topics. Hope he sees this and remembers the visit.

Thank you for making yourself available to so many aspiring or budding political theorists. You have no idea of the incredible impact you had on a generation of students at Wits University."

It is impossible for me to say adequately how thrilled I am by this comment. That was the first of what would be more than 40 visits to South Africa over the next 30 years. I spent five weeks lecturing to the second year philosophy class at the University of the Witwatersrand, and I fell in love with the country. I have, of course, written at length about this in my autobiography. It was out of that trip and my subsequent involvement in the anti-apartheid movement at Harvard that I created University Scholarships for South African students, an organization that I ran all by myself for 25 years. Through that organization I was able to offer scholarships (or bursaries, as they were called) to 1600 or more young poor black men and women so that they could attend historically black universities and technikons in South Africa.

Many of you will recall the passage in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in which Grushenka tells the story of the bitter old woman who gives an onion from her garden to a passing beggar, and onion which her guardian angel later uses in an attempt to pull her out of hell. I have long thought that if there is a hell, and if I, as I suspect, that is where the good Lord sends me, my work in South Africa will be the onion that offers me a way out.

My thanks to "unknown" for the comment and for reminding me of that long and rewarding chapter in my life.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

Yesterday, searching as always for some way to pass the time, Susie and I stumbled on the lovely old 2009 movie Julie and Julia. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, the movie follows the early career of Julia Child while simultaneously following the year in which Julie Powell undertook to make all of the more than 500 recipes in Julia Child’s classic cookbook and write about it every day on her blog. The incomparable Meryl Streep plays Julia Child and a quite effective Amy Adams does the Powell role.

The movie took me back to my early days in Cambridge when public TV was in its infancy and everything was in black and white. Julia Child’s show, “the French Chef,” was of course the big hit on the Boston area public TV station but there was also an exercise show that drew a large audience hosted by Maggie Lettvin called “Maggie and the Beautiful Machine.”

Maggie Lettvin was the wife of a brilliant MIT scientist named Jerome Lettvin, or Jerry as he was widely known. Maggie was tall, slender, with a beautiful body which she put to good use in her public television show. Jerry was a large, fat, rumpled mess of a man who looked like a huge heap of clothes waiting to go in the washing machine. I was sitting in Tulla’s coffeehouse one evening having a heated philosophical discussion with a friend when Jerry, who was sitting at the next table, interrupted and joined the debate. He was that kind of man. At some point – I cannot remember when – I went to a party (a quite rare event for me) and in the middle of the evening Maggie and Jerry walked in looking like a Cambridge/MIT version of Beauty and the Beast.

In the movie, Julia’s husband Paul is played by the always excellent Stanley Tucci who of course appeared much later once again with Streep in The Devil wore Prada.

KAREN BASS, THE VP PICK, AND SCIENTOLOGY

When I was a boy, I was a great fan of science fiction. In those days (the 1940s) the two leading monthly science fiction magazines – both little pulp jobs – were Galaxy and Astounding Science Fiction. I was a fan of the latter – it was, in fact, the location of my first publication, a letter defending Aristotelian logic against the proponents of non-– A – and for a while I subscribed. One month, an issue showed up with an article in it by one of the leading science fiction writers, L. Ron Hubbard, about a subject to which he gave the name Dianetics. It was a kooky piece, a cross between quasi – Freudian psychology and the then quite new subject of computers, and I thought it was a spoof but next month part two appeared and I realized that Hubbard was serious. Dianetics was supposed to be a super modern version of psychoanalysis that had the great virtue of taking much less time and being much cheaper. Its principal claim was that it could activate the 90% or more of the brain that most of us waste by making each of us "clear."

Dianetics became all the rage, especially in California where everything new or nutty seemed to go to flourish and people who took the title of Dianetic Auditors made some big bucks for a bit. Then Dianetics got into trouble with the feds who said that Dianetic Auditors were practicing medicine without a license. Hubbard's first move was to retreat to a ship off the California coast beyond the 12 mile limit and therefore out of reach of federal agents but then he must have read the United States Constitution and noticed that there was protection for even such strange religions as Catholicism so Dianetics became transformed from psychotherapy into the religion of Scientology.

I don't know. As between a fan of Scientology and a corporate liberal, I think I might have to go with L. Ron Hubbard. Apparently it will be another two weeks before we find out who gets the nod.

AND SO IT STARTS

As I predicted, and as anyone with half a brain could see, August brings with it evictions, foreclosures, job losses, economic slowdown, and ever greater numbers of deaths from the virus. I find it extraordinary and really rather terrifying that even professional sports, with all the money in the world and every incentive to handle the virus successfully, cannot even put on baseball games in empty stadia without endangering the members of the teams. We are just now seeing the first attempts to open the schools and the consequences, predictably, will be disastrous.

I was not impressed by Trump's efforts to scare up a storm of commentary about the election, as they were transparently a response to the quite mind blowing drop in quarterly GDP. The news that his campaign has suspended television advertising for the time is genuinely astonishing and indicates a behind-the-scenes panic that even reporting from a leaky White House cannot fully capture.

The Republican national convention will be a shambles, and Trump's poll numbers will continue to slide. Will he use the excuse of a rigged election to withdraw? It is hard to imagine, but we live in what the Chinese curse calls "interesting times."

Since I seem to be in the business of making predictions about as risky as calling for the sun to rise in the east, I will predict that when Joe Biden announces his vice presidential choice we will all be massively disappointed.