AND NOW, TO SLIDE THE SAUSAGE MEAT INTO THE CASING AND TIE IT OFF

These last few days and hours of the health care reform struggle are absolutely fascinating, and deserve close attention. Nancy Pelosi and the White House have now reached the stage of calculating exactly which endangered House Democrats they can permit to vote NO. Retiring members must vote yes, because they have no political price to pay. Close attention is being paid to the details of each district in which a Member is standing for re-election. Does an endangered Dem have a large African American constituency [presumed to be a safer constituency than some others?] Does a Member already have a Yes vote on the earlier bill on his or her record, and hence cannot be expected to suffer much more from a Yes vote this time around? And so forth. It is mesmerizing to see the American political system work exactly as it was set up to work, with everyone sniffing the wind, calculating the odds, balancing constituency pressure against party loyalty.

It is going to work, the bill is going to pass, and Obama will suddenly go from being a potentially failed President to being the first President since Teddy Roosevelt to pull off health care reform.

Let me repeat what I said many blog posts ago. If you are trying to get three hundred plus million people to act as one, and you don't want to use brute force or terror, this is what governing looks like. We who are pure of heart and forever excluded from the the inner circles of power may decry the messiness and imperfection of it all. But the alternatives are all around us in the history of the past one hundred years, and they do not inspire confidence. The best strategy for those of us on the left is to work endlessly for small leftward adjustments in the resolution of the parallelogram of political forces, at least until and unless we are favored with a revolutionary moment.

I remind you of Paul Newman's classic advice to Robert Redford in THE STING, when Redford asks Newman how to play The Big Con against Doyle Lonnegan [the late great Robert Shaw.] Even if we win, it will not be enough, but it is all we are going to get, so we have to just walk away.

MORE STRAWS IN THE WIND -- INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Most of you will recall, I imagine, that in the last French presidential elections, the Socialists got creamed, and Sarkozy took the office back for the right. France is now in the midst of regional elections [there are two rounds -- March 14 and March 21], and a coalition of left parties -- two socialist, one green -- is poised to win big. My own arrondisement here in Paris, the Fifth, had the largest turnout, and gave the left a pretty good victory in the first round. Paris itself has a gay socialist mayor, and the city is of course the most beautiful, most people friendly place in the world.

On a totally unrelated matter, I see that Dennis Kucinich has decided to vote for the health care reform package this time around. Apparently Dennis got the message that his groupies were not amused by his announced willingness to sink the bill. I think it is, at long last, going to pass, and when it does, the political climate in America will, overnight, change completely.

Yesterday evening, I essayed truite amandine for the first time in my cooking career. The two trout turned out perfectly, and combined with carmelized courgettes and eschallottes [zucchini and shallots], made a lovely simple meal. Tonight I shall go easy on myself and prepare some paupiettes provencale made by the local butcher. With a perfectly drinkable Beaume de Venise for me and a nice Sancerre blanc sec for Susie, it should do nicely.

A NON-RHETORICAL QUESTION

Am I missing something? I have been reading the reports of the latest Tea Party Washington protest against health care reform. The language, both from protesters and from their Republican Party Congressional enablers, is over the top. This flawed and incremental bill is described as fascism, as socialism, as unconstitutional, as the end of American liberty. The protesters call for Nancy Pelosi to be tried for treason.

Is more going on than I realize? Are these protesters right to see the passage of this bill as a stake driven into the heart of conservatism? Is this really a step so far beyond Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that armed rebellion is the only reasonable response by defenders of American capitalism? Are Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama closet radicals?

God, I hope so.

BRIAN LEITER - BLOG

Several days ago, my son, Tobias [the law professor] forwarded to me an essay on legal positivism by Brian Leiter, a philosopher and law professor at the University of Chicago. The essay is extraordinarily clear, precise, and well-written [and also true, as it happens], something that is rare in every field of intellectual endeavor. I found Leiter's email address on line, and had a very nice exchange of emails with him. It turns out that he has a quite elaborate blog, visited each day by maybe one hundred times as many people who check in here. You can find it at www.leiterreports.typepad.com Check it out.

J'ARRIVE, J'ARRIVE

We are here, in Paris, and as I expected, the gloom is dispelled, my spirits are lifted, and all is right with the world. Yesterday evening, we ate at La Rotisserie du Beaujolais. Susie had pigeon roti, I had ecrivisses gratinee and escargots a la tradition. I drank a large amount of a very modest red wine [Beaujolais villages]. It was wonderful. I feel happy just to be here.

This morning, we went to the market. I bought a dorade royale and two small truites for the next two dinners, along with courgettes, shallots, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce, tiny French beans, a lovely cheese [Comte], two bottles of wine, and all. We have arrived.

I am on the web, so I can monitor political developments in America, but already I feel less deeply involved, less oppressed by the frustrations of life on the margins. I have even done two loads of laundry in our French washer-dryer, which very quietly sloshes away for hours until the clothes are all washed and dried.

Now we are off to BHV [le Bazaar de l'Hotel de Ville - a large department store next to l'Hotel de Ville, or City Hall, that has everything.] The walk takes us past Notre Dame. Always nice to reacquaint ourselves with that grand old lady.

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS

Well, never mind closing up the wall with our English dead. [Henry V, for those who are wondering.] We are again going to set out for Paris. Let us hope US Airways does not do us in again.

Meanwhile, things are looking very good for health care reform, and suddenly the chattering classes are discovering that Obama is a rather skillful and determined politician after all.

But the ugly news is out of Texas, where the state textbook committee, dominated by right-wing fanatics, has passed a series of secondary school textbook guidelines that will dumb down the next ten years of young people. Because Texas chooses books state-wide, publishers supinely cave in to their insane demands, and that in turn blights the textbooks used in other states as well. This really is an appalling country, for the most part. As I have often noted in this blog, the Evangelicals and birthers and Tea Partiers think that people like me look down on them. Well, damn it, I do. Why should I give them a pass for their absurd views when they spend their time congratulating themselves that I will be damned to eternal hellfire for mine?

France, of course, has its own problems, which I am able to ignore because I do not really live there.

I am afraid the enforced lay-over has made me dyspeptic. As the taxi crosses the Seine and approaches our pied a terre on rue Maitre Albert, my spirits will lift, and my Paris posts will be models of sweetness and light.

en avant!

THOUGHTS IN LIMBO

Limbo is the region bordering Hell where reside the souls of such as unbaptized babies who, though innocent, cannot enter Heaven since their original sin has not been washed away in the blood of the Lamb. In the dumbed down amnesiac language of our modern age, limbo is any place where you are stuck, unable to continue on to whatever was to be your next stop -- like an airport departure lounge when your flight has been cancelled. Here I am, then, in limbo, innocent, unbaptized, waiting until Susie and I can tomorrow renew our trip to Paris.

Having taken out the garbage, done all the laundry, emptied the refrigerator, and even, this morning, Jiffy Lubed my car, I am left with idle thoughts. Happily, I have a blog, into which I can transfer them for the enlightenment of my small band of readers. Herewith, then, some idle thoughts.

The first is a poem, that came to my mind for some reason this morning. It is the haunting vilanelle by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, known by its great first line. I will only say, by way of commentary, that when my time comes [not, if my son, Tobias, is to be believed, for another twenty years or more], I hope that my sons will speak in this way to me:

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And now, for a total change of pace, a reaction to an Evan Thomas NEWSWEEK piece on American primary and secondary education that focuses on the supposedly baleful effects of teachers' unions and the institution of tenure. A vanishingly small number of teachers are discharged for cause each year, which leads Thomas to conclude that secondary education can only be improved by getting rid of "bad teachers."

As befits a philosopher in limbo, I shall begin at a very high level of theoretical abstraction and descend slowly to the real world. I remarked in a previous blog, devoted to Stephen Jay Gould's theories about hot hands and streaks in the sports world, that it is usually a mistake to ignore the folk wisdom of professionals in any field. Let me step back a bit and speak even more generally about how I think it is wise to proceed in analyzing a social institution.

In the early nineteenth century, there were, broadly speaking, three modes of analysis of the dramatic changes wrought first in England, and then on the Continent, by the new socio-economic form that we know as capitalism. Laisser-faire liberals tended to lay down axioms [rational agents, perfect knowledge, perfect markets, etc.] and then deduce consequences, the rigor of which was too often matched by a complete disconnect from the real world. Conservatives and Karl Marx [but not those whom Marx ridiculed as "utopian socialists"] in contrast, began from a consideration of institutions in medias res, recognizing that human affairs are a great deal more complex, mystified, and multi-layered than can be captured in neat systems of deductions from a priori premises.

As a Marxist with a deep appreciation for the insights of the best conservative social theorists [pace my penchant for quoting Hobbes], I try when I approach any question of social analysis to be alert to what the real world has to teach me. Let me turn that habit of mind to the subject before us, which is tenured teachers.

Let us begin by noting that there are, in addition to public secondary education, four institutions in American society that offer to their work force something very like tenure: University Education, the Catholic Church, the Federal Judiciary, and the Military. American university education is a rave success, the gold standard, universally recognized as the archetype for the countless ectypes worldwide. The Federal Judiciary, by and large, fully justifies the confidence that is placed in it by the practice of life tenure. People of my political persuasion may wish that former Vice President Cheney would take Justices Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas on a quail hunt, but the failings of the Federal Judiciary are, in the end, inadequacies of ideology, not evidences of incompetance. The American military, whatever you may think of the uses to which it has been put by its civilian masters, is an extraordinarily successful institution, a model of what a huge bureaucratic organization can be and accomplish. And even The Roman Catholic Church, the child abuse scandals notwithstanding, survives and flourishes across the milennia, despite the fact that it is more difficult to remove a priest from his holy orders than it is to fire a teacher, cashier an officer, or impeach a Supreme Court Justice.

Compare these four successful institutions with the corporate and political worlds, neither of which promsies tenure, for all that both offer to at least some of their supplicants great longevity. Does anyone seriously want to claim that politicians perform better than combat infantrymen, or that corporate CEOs are to be preferred to members of the Fourth Circuit?

Of all of these lifeworlds, I have extensive experience only of one: University Education. I am particularly struck by the fact that the practice of life tenure is more firmly entrenched in the elite reaches of that world even than in its lesser regions. Is the world right to esteem the Ivy League universities, the great institututions of public higher education, the very best of the small liberal arts colleges? Undoubtedly, in my judgment, for all that I have fought for half a lifetime with the benighted politics of my alma mater, Harvard. Tenure is not a source of mediocrity in higher education. It is the seedbed of originality, innovation, and free thinking. That is why the frenetic rightwing so often decries "tenured radicals."

The corporatization of higher education is well under way in America, just at the time when the inadequacies of the corporaste world are manifest. I confidently predict that as tenure erodes in universities, the quality of higher education will decline.

What then of primary and secondary education? Is the destruction of the teachers' unions really the necessary precondition for better performance? Well, reflect on the fact that the communities whose high schools have for generations been models of excellence [Newton, Brookline, and Belmont in Massachusetts, Shaker Heights in Ohio, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech in New York City, and so forth] all grant their teachers tenure.

It is not for me to say what can make poor schools better. I have not set foot in a high school classroom since I graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1950. But I am deeply sceptical of the notion that job insecurity is the way to improve teacher performance.

Now, off to Paris.