SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI

I have just read through the lengthy series of comments provoked by my report of a virtual family gathering and to be honest, I am depressed. Judging from the nature of the dispute that arose, Karl Marx might just as well never have lived and worked. Does anybody really think that the structure of modern capitalism can in any way be explained by reference to the talent  and hard work of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates? Seriously, people?

Oh well, my wife and I have just purchased a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of Paris to occupy ourselves while we dream of returning to the real thing. I will go back to putting together the part of the puzzle that represents Notre Dame, at least in its glory days before it burned.

THE WONDERS OF MODREN SCIENCE

Yesterday I attended a family gathering organized for my big sister's benefit by her daughter. I think there were 14 of us or so spanning three generations and ranging in age from 12 to 90. My sister is in Southern California as is her daughter and her son-in-law and also my son, Tobias. My sister's son was in northern Pennsylvania with his partner. My sister's grandchildren were in Chicago, Toronto, and Germany. My son Patrick and his wife and two children were in San Francisco and of course I was here in North Carolina. We spent a delightful hour together, only calling it a halt when my sister's son, who is recovering from a mild case of Covid, said that he was running down in energy as a result of the virus.

I imagine countless gatherings of this sort took place over the long Thanksgiving weekend. There is no way in the world that we could have assembled everyone physically in the same place for anything less than a wedding or funeral. I complain from time to time about being shut up here in comfortable isolation with Susie and our cat but the advent of zoom has really been a remarkable gift.

When I was a boy, my entire extended family on my father's side lived in New York City and we regularly got together for family gatherings at Christmas, Thanksgiving, and at other times during the year. It was the next generation – mine – that fanned out across the world, making such gatherings impossible.

One of the unexpected benefits of this kind of repeated family gathering over decades is that it gave me the opportunity to see what people are like as they get old. In my family, there seemed to be two sorts of aging: some of my uncles and aunts aged well, remaining interesting, lively, engaged people well into their 80s. Others grew as they aged into caricatures of themselves, as though they were crustaceans growing shells. It taught me a lot about the human condition.

Then I went to bed and spent a restless hour or two worrying about the Georgia runoffs. Regardless of how things turn out there, I am afraid I must get used to the fact that there will be no dramatic exciting groundbreaking changes in the Biden administration. There will be competence and honesty and a genuine concern for the unfortunate and that is certainly not nothing but I am afraid my fantasies that AOC was the wave of the future will not be fulfilled, at least in my lifetime.

Oh, by the way, you will recall that I asked for suggestions of books for my grandson Samuel's birthday presents and then took down my choices from the blog out of concern that he might see them there. Well, it turns out that Samuel reads my blog which is flattering but a trifle unnerving. So much for springing surprises on the kids. 

BLACK THOUGHTS ON BLACK FRIDAY

Nobody can be Tigger all the time, so I am going to give voice to my inner Eeyore. Herewith in no particular order are the things weighing on my mind.

.1.  Yesterday Trump said he would campaign in Georgia for the two runoff candidates. Maybe he will change his mind but I have been counting on him in a snit to refuse, thereby strengthening the call among his supporters to boycott the election.

2.   The reports about rates of infection, hospitalizations, and deaths in the virus are simply terrifying. The next three or four weeks are going to be horrendous and then we will have Christmas to deal with. Several hundred thousand more people are going to die from this thing before the vaccines even become available widely.

3.   I watched a YouTube video yesterday about the effects of global warming on river deltas and low areas all around the world and so far as I can make out, well after I am dead, more than a billion people are going to be displaced at a minimum. Rich countries will do better than poor countries and within each country the rich will do better than the poor. By the time my grandchildren are my age the world may very well be a god-awful place to live.

4.  Leaving aside what the future holds for us, right now something like one in four or one in five children in the United States is "food insecure" which is a polite way of saying they do not have enough to eat. Mitch McConnell is staking out a place for himself on the list of all-time mass murderers. Do not tell me about centrist Democrats. At least they are willing to pass $2 trillion bill to help those suffering.

5.  And as if that were not bad enough, this is the middle of a four day weekend at a time when the day is at its shortest. Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, does not begin to cover it.

All right, I got that out of my system and onto the page of my blog, just in case any of you thought I had not noticed that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Tomorrow I will be Tigger again, all chipper and cheerful, shoveling shit in the stable and looking for my pony.

DUE DILIGENCE

As many commentators have noted, Americans live in news bubbles that are almost impervious to one another. Quite obviously I do. My bubble consists of CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post online, DailyKos, TPM, and a variety of other sites on the progressive or left side. Yesterday, it occurred to me to spend a few minutes watching OAN (One American News), a far right network and online presence that has been pushing the conspiracy theories concerning the election.  What did I find? To put it as simply as I can, I found a professionally produced visually attractive online network whose news anchors are as believable and well turned out as those on the sites I usually frequent. There was nothing visually or otherwise in the presentation that would give me any doubt about its plausibility save for the fact that what was being said was nonsense.

I do not want to go all philosophically freaky about the social definition of reality and so forth but it is worth reporting that it is not at all difficult to understand how someone who gets his or her news from this and similar sites could believe quite confidently that the election had been stolen.

I do not for a moment believe that the solution to this problem is better education or reaching across the aisle or resurrecting superannuated middle-of-the-roaders to talk about the good old days when Tip O'Neill struck deals with Ronald Reagan. Nor do I think that revolution is the solution. As I have observed before, the other side has most of the guns.  Fortunately we are on the right side of demography and in the end that may be our very best bet.  Since demography is a long game, I probably will not live long enough to see the fourth quarter or the ninth inning or whatever is the appropriate metaphor but it is nice to think that time is on our side. Of course, that assumes we get climate change under control. But that is a nightmare for another post.

BY WAY OF EXPLANATION

As has happened before, I have, by writing too quickly, failed to explain myself adequately. The phrase “American exceptionalism” refers to a theory that was widely held for a long time by academic American historians and still plays a central role in the public mythology of this country. The theory is this: European countries – England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and so on – all have long legal, political, and economic traditions and institutions grounded in the feudal period, traditions of hereditary land ownership, ecclesiastical courts, special rights for the nobility, various forms of unfree labor such as serfdom, and so forth. The histories of these countries reach back to a time that is shrouded in myth and obscurity. These traditions, according to this view, have weighed heavily on these countries in their modern form, leaving structural and cultural marks that it is impossible to obliterate.

 

By contrast, so the theory of American exceptionalism goes, America was brought into existence in a virgin land without the burden of hereditary land ownership, traditional legal restrictions, ecclesiastical rights, and the like. For that reason, the theory goes on, American history has been an exception to the generalizations that historians have formulated on the basis of their cross national studies of the various nations of Europe. Hence American Exceptionalism. Indeed, this theory goes on, America is the only nation founded on an idea, the Idea of Freedom. Hence American history can correctly be viewed as the slow, painful, but inexorable fulfillment and realization of this founding Idea.

 

France has its Revolution, England has its Magna Carta, but the histories of France and England reach back beyond those defining moments and permanently shape and (or so it is obviously thought) corrupt their nature as nations. Only America is the pure embodiment of an idea toward the fulfillment ofwhich its history majestically moves.

 

In the second chapter of my book Autobiography of an Ex-White Man I showed at length the way in which this Myth of American Exceptionalism found its way into the leading college American history textbooks of the middle and later 20^th-century and then in the third chapter I told the real story of America as I had learned it from my colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts.

 

This is what I was alluding to in my all too brief remarks in my previous post. My apologies for not having been more clear.

BACK FROM PURGATORY

I spent yesterday in computer hell. At 6:30 AM I tried to check in on a live cam and other streaming sites that I enjoy and discover that I was getting nothing but the sound and a green screen. Somehow I found my way to a company promising to help me whose tech experts are apparently located in Manila. Four hours and too much money later the problem was solved. The techie who helped me kindly showed me how it was to be fixed. It turned out that it required four clicks and about 20 seconds to do the job. Now, along the way he cleaned up my computer, deleted lots of temporary files, and even got rid of a Trojan file that promised real trouble, but still – – –

 

Wrung through and beaten down, I went on Google Chrome to check several of my favorite sites. No problem. Then I switched to Microsoft Edge and the problem reappeared, but this time I was ready for it and with four clicks I fixed it! I am now prepared to rent out my new gained expertise at reasonable rates. :-)

 

As for the rest of the world, there is a silver lining in the electoral hell we are now going through. Seemingly forever, Americans have told themselves a fable about how exceptional a country we are. We annually put out lists of countries that have failed to live up to our standard of democratic politics, we recruit young people to go around the world showing the benighted peoples of Third World countries how to be democracies. It is no good for left-wing scholars, among whom I am one, to publish books showing that this fable of exceptionalism conceals an ugly truth (see chapters two and three of my book Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.) But a wannabe autocrat, a cooperative Republican Party, and a royally screwed up election have together done the job quite nicely. It will be a while before Americans have the chutzpah to claim that they are a city upon a hill, the only nation created on the idea of freedom, a beacon to the world, etc. etc. etc. Perhaps the Congress could establish an annual prize for the country whose politics most closely resemble our own – they could call it the Donald J Trump Prize. 

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY HAS BECOME A DEATH CULT

I assume by now everyone has seen or heard this extraordinary description by a nurse of her experiences with desperately ill patients who believe that COVID is a hoax and refuse to accept the proposition that that is what is killing them even as they lie in an emergency ward close to death. I do not think I have ever heard anything quite like this.