FEAR AND LOATHING

I spent six months on active duty in the U.S. Army 63 years ago as part of my six-year National Guard obligation, and I even have an Honorable Discharge to prove it, but I have not in general been a strong supporter of America’s military adventures. Indeed, I think the last deployment of forces that I wholeheartedly approved of was World War II. Nevertheless, I have to confess that I was not only appalled and disgusted but also offended by Trump’s labeling of soldiers as suckers and fallen or captured soldiers as losers.  Will it make any difference? I don’t know, although it wouldn’t hurt for some of these unnamed sources to go public with their recollections.

What a pitiful, damaged, pathetic human being he is! As I am sure you know, I am not of a religious turn of mind, but I could be persuaded by an act of divine intervention, perhaps in the form of a terminal case of the coronavirus.

LABOR DAY SADNESS

For 58 years, my year began after Labor Day with the start of the college year. In the early years, Harvard did not begin until late September when the weather was getting cool and the jacket one had to wear to all meals seemed like an appropriate garb. Every September another school year would begin with the excitement of new courses to take and then to teach, with new students and new classes, new books to lecture on. From 1950 to 2008, with the exception of the year I spent wandering around Europe on a fellowship and the fall I spent in the Army, this was my routine. My little date books, courtesy of the Harvard Coop, actually began the year in September, not in January.

I still recall September, 2008 when, the summer over, I anticipated the start of the school year, only to discover that I was actually retired and had no classes to meet, no new students, no course syllabi to make up. I did what I could. For several years I taught in the adult education program at Duke University and that felt a little bit like meeting a class, although not really. One year I volunteered at Bennett College in Greensboro North Carolina and drove the one hour trip three or four times a week. I got a gig teaching a graduate seminar in the UNC department of public policy one year and that was great, but it was a one time thing, replacing the regular instructor who had a fellowship. In desperation, I bought myself a little camcorder and started recording lectures to be posted on YouTube. After the first series – devoted to Ideological Critique – I actually managed to give my YouTube lectures in a UNC classroom to a small group of students and faculty so that it felt almost like teaching a course.

In 2017, thanks to the intervention of my son, Tobias, and his friend at Columbia, I was elected to the Society of Senior Scholars and for two lovely years – 2018 and 2019 – I would get up early every Tuesday in the fall, fly to New York, take a bus to Columbia and co-teach a seminar with Todd Gitlin. I felt as though I had been reborn.

And then the virus struck. Last March I was teaching a course on Marx at UNC and was forced to do the last five class meetings by zoom. But both Columbia and UNC have been turned upside down by the virus and neither is in any position to continue using my services as an adjunct professor.

So here I sit on September 3, Labor Day just four days away, and once again I feel bereft. My only hope is that once the fall semester starts around the country in whatever form it takes, I will be invited to make guest appearances by zoom in courses here or there.

Mind you, I am not complaining. Susie and I are safe, well housed, well fed, well looked after and in this way vastly better off than several hundred million Americans at this moment. But oh, how I wish I were getting ready to fly up to New York yet again.

AFTER THE MUSICAL INTERLUDE

Now that we have refreshed our spirits with a musical interlude, let us return to the matter at hand: the election. Many commentators have noted that Democrats are prone to handwringing and I am certainly no exception. I obsessively check the polls as they are reported each day, anguishing over changes that are so far inside the margin of error that they have no significance whatsoever. Isolated as I am here in my safe retirement community, there is precious little I can actually do save to donate money to candidates or organizations, so, faute de mieux, I worry. Herewith a brief discussion of several of the more common sources of concern.

First is the shy Tory. This, as I am sure you know, is the theory that Trump supporters are embarrassed to tell a pollster of their intention to vote for so execrable a candidate, thereby systematically under representing the extent of his strength. There have in fact been several elections in the past in which a phenomenon of this sort was recorded, but there is no evidence that this is going to be one of them. Some polls are telephone polls in which a voter must tell an actual person at the other end of the line of his or her intention to vote for Trump. Others are online polls in which this source of embarrassment is not present. I do not believe there is any evidence of a systematic difference in the results of polls taken in these two different ways. So let us put that aside. It is upsetting enough that scores of millions of not noticeably mentally deficient Americans are enthusiastically planning to vote for Trump. That is bad enough without worrying about shy Tories.

A second source of anxiety is the so-called Red Mirage. This is a slightly more complicated anxiety and needs a little explanation. If a significant majority of Americans vote for Biden but in very large numbers choose to vote by mail, on election night the initial results reported may show Trump leading in states with as many as 400 electoral votes. Although as the absentee ballots are counted Biden’s lead will manifest itself and he will clearly be the winner, there is a fear that Trump will declare victory on election night and then sow such confusion about the results that he will be able in some unspecified way to completely screw up the election and call its results into question, after which he will refuse to leave the White House and we will have a dictatorial crisis on our hands. I tend to think this anxiety is overstated but I understand it and there is one obvious way of avoiding it, namely voting early by mail. As I have reported, at least in North Carolina and perhaps in many other states as well, absentee ballots are opened and recorded as they arrive and then added to the election day votes on November 3. It is really only the absentee ballots mailed a few days before election day or even on election eve that cause the problem. So get out to vote just as soon as you can. I will predict (here I go again) that we are going to see a flood of early voting both in person and by mail. My sense is that Trump opponents are so eager to vote against him that they will crawl over broken glass to do so. Not so much to vote for Biden, but that is all right. A vote is a vote.

A more serious source of anxiety, and one that has afflicted me in recent days, is that continued demonstrations and unrest and occasional violence will spook those much discussed white suburban women whose shift toward the Democrats is a significant part of what now shows up in the polls as Biden’s lead. I worry a lot about that but I must say that so far the polls are not showing any evidence of such spooking. In response to the events in Kenosha and elsewhere, Biden has already started moving to the right on the issue, as surely we all expected. As someone whose only personal experience with electoral politics was running third in a three-person race for two open seats on the Northampton Massachusetts school committee, I don’t think my intuitions in this matter are particularly reliable, so we shall just have to see.

On the upside, Biden is taking in money hand over fist and much of it is coming from small donations so that is some concrete evidence of enthusiasm on the ground.

Sigh. It is more fun talking about music.

ENCORE

Six days ago, I wrote a post about some memorable musical experiences I have had in the course of my long life. Today I should like to add two more – one, the most all-around beautiful musical experience of my life; the other, far and away the most bizarre musical experience of my life. Beauty first.

Almost 30 years ago, Paris introduced a citywide festival that it called fete de la musique. On June 21, the first day of summer, when the days are so long that there is light until 10 PM, all of Paris comes out onto the streets to perform free concerts and listen to them. Bands get out their electronic equipment and set up in the corner of a place, sometimes two or three competing with one another from different corners of the open space. In the elegant place des Vosges, there may be a string quartet competing with a gay men’s chorus and a solitary violinist playing all by herself. Each year, the city invites world-class ensembles to give free concerts in some of the loveliest venues of Paris. Meanwhile, the toffs get all dressed up and board river cruises while the common folk stand on the bridges across the Seine and hoot at them as they sail by. It is a lovely event and Susie and I, in normal times when the virus is not upon us, try very hard to plan our trips to Paris so that we will be there on June 21st.

One summer not too many years ago, it was announced that the famous Baroque a cappella vocal group, the Tallis Scholars, would be performing a free concert during fete de la musique.  The concert would be held in the Musee d’Orsay, a beautiful museum created by transforming one of Paris’s great old train stations. Susie and I have long since visited such museums as we want to see but we go back again and again to the Musee d’Orsay, not simply to see the latest exhibition but to enjoy the space and, perhaps, have a lovely lunch in the restaurant on the top floor. Because the museum is a transformed train station, the central space is a vast open area with a ceiling that rises for four stories. That space now contains a sculpture exhibit – the paintings can be found in the rooms surrounding the space.

We got there very early in order to be sure of being admitted and when we entered, we found that there were already large numbers of people in the museum. We managed to get some space on a marble banquette and sat down to await the concert. The important people, who had received personal invitations, had folding chairs in front of the stage where the musicians would perform but that was so far away from where we were that we could see neither them nor the stage.

The Tallis Scholars had chosen to perform a work with which I was completely unfamiliar: Allegri’s Miserere.  As many of you will know, there come several points in the composition when a single soprano voice rises high above the chorus until it seems to be suspended in midair. It is a beautiful musical moment and in that space on that evening I felt as though I had been transported to a better world. Many of you, I imagine, are familiar with the composition and will appreciate what it would be like to hear it performed perfectly in such a venue. That evening lives in my memory as the most exquisite musical experience of my life.

The second experience I want to talk about was quite different although, musically speaking, it was very lovely. In 1986 or 1987, I was living in Watertown Massachusetts and teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst after my first marriage had broken up. As often as I could, I was flying down to Chapel Hill to see Susie, hoping and planning that we would marry when my divorce was final. One weekend, a famous musical group, the Beaux Arts Trio, arrived to play a concert at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. Sanders is an old concert and lecture hall that occupies one half of Memorial Hall, which was built to commemorate the Harvard graduates who died on both sides in the Civil War. I was very familiar with Sanders – it was there that I heard Bertrand Russell lecture my freshman year and also where I had sung in the pit chorus of a summer stock performance of the Beggar’s Opera starring Shirley Jones and her husband, Jack Cassidy.

(Weird aside: There is a central hallway that divides Sanders Theater from the rest of Memorial Hall and high on the walls there are inscribed in large letters the names of all the Harvard grads who died in the Civil War. One evening, when I was standing around in the crowd during the intermission of a concert, I idly started reading the names on the walls.  My eye fell on one that made me stop in astonishment. It was “Benjamin Franklin Pierce,” which many of you will recognize as the name of the lead character in the book, play, and TV series M*A*S*H played memorably on television by Alan Alda. It seems to me almost certain that that was the source of the name of Alda’s character, but a check on Wikipedia reveals that none of the authors involved in the creation of the book, the play, or the TV series was a Harvard grad.)

At all events, the concert began quite nicely with the Beaux-Arts Trio playing some classical work or other but at some point in the third movement, there was a stir in the audience and a loud voice called out “is there a doctor here?” Now, it is important to understand that this was primarily a Harvard audience, which meant that any medical students present would necessarily defer to interns, who in turn would defer to residents, who in turn would defer to chiefs of service at Mass General Hospital, who in turn would differ to full professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School. At any rate, someone stepped forward while everybody in the audience sat there quietly and waited and the trio paused in its concert. Pretty soon, the sound of an ambulance siren could be heard in the distance growing louder and closer. Eventually two EMTs came in with a rolling stretcher and while we all waited patiently took somebody away.

With that, the trio picked up where it had stopped and continued on with the third movement. Several minutes later, another voice called out from a different part of the audience “is there a doctor present?” We went through the same procedure again, after which the trio called it quits and left the stage for the intermission.

The next week, as it happens I flew down to Chapel Hill to see Susie and when I arrived she told me with great excitement that she had managed to acquire two tickets for performance that weekend of the Beaux-Arts Trio. A cold hand close around my heart at these words, but it all turned out well and the lovely concert went off without the assistance of an ambulance.

REQUEST FOR HELP

For I know not what reason, I lay awake in the middle of the night trying to remember what a bordered Hessian is. I know what a Hessian is – a square matrix the elements of which are the second partial derivatives of a function – but I could not recall what a bordered Hessian is, a term from my distant past. Anybody know?

MAKING PLANS

Here are my plans for voting. In North Carolina, absentee ballots will be sent out during the first two weeks of September, so I should get mine in the second or third week of this month. I just checked with the Chatham County elections board and once I have voted on my absentee ballot, I can drive down to Pittsboro, wearing both a facemask and my plastic face shield (courtesy of Amazon.com), and deliver it by hand, spending the shortest possible time inside in the presence of other people. Absentee ballots are scanned as they arrive and the totals will be added in on election day.

Okay, Donald J Trump, try screwing that up!

Josh Marshall on TPM has a column today explaining why Democrats are congenital worriers. Needless to say, I am sitting here having nothing else to do and worrying.

I have not yet made contingency plans in the eventuality that Trump wins reelection but I believe self – immolation is in there somewhere.

CRAP

I had the Best Buy Geek Squad do some work on my computer and now when I post a comment here it does not recognize me and says I am Anonymous.   Would someone tell me what I ought to do to fix it.