TESTS OF CHARACTER

No matter how firmly you vow never to say certain things to your children that your own mother or father said to you, sooner or later there comes a moment, after a long hard day, when, exhausted and exasperated, out of your mouth comes your father's voice, yelling "If you don't eat that oatmeal I am going to rub it in your hair!"  Stress reveals who we really are in a way that prepared presentations never can.

I think we may assume that after several weeks of excoriating criticism from the talking heads and opinion makers of the Republican Party, the inner circle of the Romney campaign is experiencing an uncommon level of stress.  So it is that recent outbursts like that of Ann Romney give us some insight into the true character of the candidate and his wife.  ["Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring.  This is hard and, you know, it's an important thing that we're doing right now and it's an important election and it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt's qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country."]

I suspect Romney and his wife really believe that America is lucky to have him, so that if the little folks ["You people," as she has addressed them on occasion] would just realize that, and understand how many millions of dollars Mitt is foregoing to offer himself selflessly to America, they would just shut up and vote Republican.

The pleasures of Schadenfreude are much underrated.

GOOGLE WINS AGAIN

One of the standard action film clichés that really bugs me is the scene in which the hero and the heroine are shown, in slow motion, running away from an explosion.  Every time I see that, I think, "That is nonsense.  An explosion expands much faster than anyone can run."  But of course I don't know that, so I just grumble a bit to myself and go on watching.  This morning, during my regular four mile walk, I started thinking about this, for some bizarre reason, so when I got home, I turned to Google.  As always, Google did not disappoint.  Here is a passage from a site I found, at  http://express.howstuffworks.com/explosion.htm.

"Can you really outrun an explosion, like Sydney does every other week on "Alias"?
Let's go to the starting blocks: Sydney vs. chunk of C-4 explosive.

(There is a picture here, but I cannot figure out how to upload it, so just imagine it.)

Let's say Sydney can sprint at about 15 miles per hour, or 22 feet per second. If we give her a 10-foot head start to get to top speed, she'll be 32 feet away from the center of the blast one second after the C-4 detonates. Not too shabby, but it's not nearly fast enough. A C-4 explosion will expand at a rate of 26,400 feet per second. In other words, the blast is so fast it's almost instantaneous. If she were in range of the explosion, she wouldn't have time to think about running - or anything else. "

Never mind Alias, which I have never watched [so I don't know whom Sydney is].  Isn't this cool?

THE SHADOW, ONCE AGAIN

A year ago, I posted a comment called "The Shadow."  It came to mind as I contemplated the disaster that the Romney campaign has become in the past several weeks.  I should like to re-post that old comment today, because I think it contains the secret to Obasma's current success in the polls, as well as a clue to how the first debate, on October 3rd, is likely to go.  Here is the old post:

"A meme has been replicating itself in cyberspace concerning President Obama. It is said that he has a mysterious ability to get his enemies to self-destruct. I have been thinking about this for a bit, and I believe I can throw some light on this strange power. But first, a trip down memory lane.

When I was a boy, I listened faithfully to a radio show called "The Shadow." The central character was a gentleman crime fighter named Lamont Cranston who, it was said, had acquired, during his travels in the Orient, the "strange power to cloud men's minds" and thereby render himself invisible. [Obi Wan Kenobe, in the original Star Wars movie, has a similar power, as he reveals when he and Luke go to town to hire a freighter to take them to Alderan. Am I recalling this correctly?] Each episode of The Shadow would begin with a sepulchral-voiced announcer intoning, "Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men? The Shadow knows." The always indispensable Wikipedia tells me that in the earliest years of the radio show, before I began to listen, Lamont Cranston was actually played by a young Orson Welles.

Now, to Obama. I begin with a crucial observation about the character of the political climate in the United States in the last twenty years or so. For a variety of reasons, some of which I have discussed here in the past, a sizable fragment of the American electorate has become viscerally convinced that no Democrat, regardless of the election results, is or could be a legitimate President of the United States. These are people who feel very deeply that the America they think they grew up in has been lost, and that they are being ruled, dominated, betrayed by foreigners, aliens, people who are "not American." They thought this about Bill Clinton, about John Kerry, about Hilary Clinton, about Joe Biden, and about anyone else who might put himself or herself forward as a candidate of the Democratic Party. The election to the Presidency of a Black man with a strange name who had spent part of his youth growing up in the Far East simply confirmed their worst fears, and has driven them clinically insane.

One of the consequences of this development, coupled with the new world of multi-media and cable television, has been a transformation of what passes for a public conversation in this country. The standard image of that public conversation now, replicated daily, is of angry talking heads in matching screens, shouting at one another, talking over one another, wrestling verbally for control of a few seconds of airtime. I respond to this in the way that many people do, I imagine, by feeling as though I am being assaulted. The talking heads all seem to be pushing air at me, as though by the sheer force of their voices they could reach out of the screen, grab me by the throat, and force me to accede to their point of view.

Now, good old Marshal McLuhan, the Canadian literary and cultural critic, had it basically right when he said "the medium is the message." [Or, as Aristotle would have put it, had he seen television, form dominates content.] It does not matter that in these shouting matches one person is saying reasonable, albeit debatable, things and the other is saying things that are just batshit crazy. The format defines the situation as one of rhetorical equality. As one of the speakers raises his or her voice, the other responds in an effort not to be drowned out, and no matter how hard we try when we are watching, it is impossible not to feel, at some level, that they are equivalent.

What happens when one side won't play? Call the two parties the shouter and the debater. What is the effect when the debater will not become a shouter, will not raise his or her voice, push air, make more and more un-nuanced assertions to balance the un-nuanced assertions from the shouter? Refuses to get angry? There is an interesting and complex effect. First of all, the partisans of the shouter see the shouter as winning the encounter, and so they cheer to the echo. The shouter, frustrated by the seemingly wimpy, flaccid unresponsiveness of the debater, and emboldened by the cheers of the fans, makes more and more outrageous statements, almost taunting the debater, seeing what he or she can get away with. The debater remains calm, quiet, reasonable, refusing to interrupt, to respond angrily, to become accusatory. The debater's supporters become frustrated at their champion's failure to give as good as he is getting, and they demand that he take the fight to the enemy, even, in their frustration, threatening to find another champion. The debater remains poised, unflappable, unmoved by these demands from his supporters. Meanwhile, as the shouter grows louder, more extreme, more uncompromising, the rather large group of lookers-on who are partisans of neither side become uncomfortable with the sheer assaultive noise of the shouter, and feel increasingly comfortable with the debater. It would be a mistake to suppose that the debater has won them over by the logic of his arguments. They aren't listening that carefully. They simply feel more comfortable with him.

This, I suggest is most -- but not yet all -- of what is going on right now in the public arena of American politics. But everything is complicated by the fact that Barack Obama is Black. Deeply rooted in the very being of White America is the image of the angry Black man, the menacing Black man, the mugger, the rebellious slave, the rapist, The Other. However much White America may congratulate itself on the extraordinary generosity and liberality of its open-mindedness in electing a Black man to the Presidency, that dark, frightening image remains. If the Republicans ever succeed in making Obama angry, they win. It won't matter what he is angry about, or how justified his anger. He will become The Angry Black Man, and they will win.

Does Obama understand this? Can Geico save you fifteen percent or more on your car insurance? [Local reference, for my overseas readers.] Of course he understands it. Every Black man in American understands this, whether he chooses to talk about it or not, and regardless of how he deals with it.

These ruminations are prompted by Rick Perry's veiled threat to lynch Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. It was an unconscionable statement, made by Perry deliberately for effect, and it triggered an eruption of outrage. Obama happened to be giving a one-on-one television interview, and was asked about it. His reply was pitch perfect. "He has only been running for president for a few days. I think we ought to cut him some slack." It reminded me of a televised moment, during the 2008 campaign. Obama was speaking to a large outdoor audience somewhere, and he brought up some of the attacks that had been directed at him. With a grace that would have done credit to Cary Grant, he lightly brushed an invisible speck of lint from the shoulder of his suit jacket. The crowd roared. It was the coolest thing I have ever seen a candidate do.

Now, none of this has anything to do with actual policies. But purely at the level of style, I think it is a profound mistake to criticize Obama for not throwing his base some rhetorical red meat. I repeat: if he gets angry, they win."

 

I predict that Romney, egged on by his partisans and desperate to score a knock-out punch that will put him back in the race, will attack Obama in the first debate frontally, violently, perhaps even outrageously.  Progressive Democrats, hungry for blood, will hope against hope that Obama punches back, and they will be disappointed.  Obama will remain aloof, calm, balanced, unflappable.  And he will win the debate, simply by not getting angry.

 

I will say one more time what I said a year ago:  If he gets angry, they win.  He knows that, and he won't take the bait.

THE DELIGHTS OF AUTOMATION

Last Saturday, I sent out a large mailing for my scholarship organization, University Scholarships for South African Students, containing my annual appeal for funds.  Today, a batch came back, with a bar code printed on the bottom of the envelope and then crossed out, but no indication of wrong address, or address moved, or addressee deceased [I get a distressing number of those, as my funders age and pass on to their reward.]  One of the letters was sent to my sister.  Now I know that her address is correct and that she has neither moved nor died, so I hopped in the car and went to the post office to find out what is going on.

It seems that the post office now has a machine that automatically reads zip codes and sorts the mail accordingly.  It reads from the bottom of the envelope up.  As it happens, this time around, the addresses I had merge printed onto the envelopes were situated a bit high up and, since I have a logo consisting of an outline of the continent of Africa above the return address, the machine was reading the return zip code rather than the addressee's zip code, and was returning the envelopes to me!

The only solution is to throw out the hundred or so envelopes I have remaining and have the print shop do a new run of envelopes on which the logo is moved below the return address.  That will ensure that the addressee zip code is read first, and all will be well. 

I think I would like to return to the time when you handed a letter to a chap on a pony and he rode off into the sunset to deliver it.  All that remains of that storied era is the Wells Fargo bank branch across the street.

UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

There has been a good deal of speculation about the hour-long video that has surfaced of the now truly infamous supposedly private Mitt Romney speech to $50,000 a plate donors.  [I use the adjective "infamous" in its proper meaning, "detestable or shamefully malign," not in its current misusage as simply "widely known."]  Present in  the room were Romney, the fat cats, and servants scurrying about bringing the food and clearing the dirty plates.  The angle of the video makes it clear that it was not recorded by one of the guests, so we can only conclude that one of the wait staff managed to set up a camera and film the proceedings.

Upper classes always ignore the presence of their servants, a fact that gave rise to an entire genre of eighteenth century French comedy.  [Think "The Marriage of Figaro" without the immortal music.]  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they seem constitutionally incapable of remembering that the working class is populated by actual human beings with eyes and ears and fully functional intelligence.  This failure is ideological, not personal, in nature.  Were the rich and powerful of the world to acknowledge the full humanity of those they exploit, they would find it difficult to sustain the easy air of superiority that they consider their birthright.

I had a personal experience of this ancient truth more than twenty-five years ago in Johannesburg.  I had gone to South Africa for six weeks to lecture to the second year Philosophy majors at the University of the Witwatersrand on the thought of Karl Marx, a subject that had never until then been included in the undergraduate Philosophy curriculum.  The Chair of the Philosophy Department in those days was Jonathan Susman, nephew of the famous anti-apartheid activist and member of Parliament Helen Susman.  Jonathan invited me to join him for dinner at an old and very exclusive Johannesburg men's club.  I rented a tux [one of only four times in my life that I have worn a monkey suit] and joined him for a private dinner with, among others, the editor of one of the leading newspapers, an executive of a major bank, and the CEO of a mining company.

I was, to put it as gently as I can, a bit out of my element.  [The chap sitting next to me, in an effort to be friendly, turned to me at one point and asked, "Well, Bob, are you a club man?" meaning, I suppose, did I belong to an American counterpart of this men's club.  I allowed as how I was not.]  A good deal of the conversation concerned a bombing raid that the South African air force had launched against suspected anti-apartheid rebel forces in Zimbabwe.  [This was well before Nelson Mandela and his colleagues were released from Robben Island], about which the newspaper editor had some inside information.

As the men chatted, silent waiters moved about the room, serving us.  I sat there and wondered which of them was taking note of everything that was said and reporting it back to associates of the armed struggle inside South Africa.  My dinner hosts seemed blithely unaware that this could even be a possibility.

At Romney's rich donor dinner, it is a virtual certainty that the wait staff consisted of men [and perhaps women -- one cannot tell from the video] who make too little money to pay federal income taxes, and hence are among the 47% whom Romney says are dependent moochers who cannot take personal responsibility for their lives.  These people were obviously in full view of Romney as he stood at the podium and spoke for more than an hour.  The fact that it obviously never occurred to him that he was talking about people present in the room says more about Romney than any formal biography or hatchet job expose possibly can.

BUT I REPEAT MYSELF

Some truths are so important that they bear repeating.  One such truth is that for as long as the Republic has existed, the key to an understanding of American politics has been race.  This truth was once again borne in upon me by the extraordinary video that has surfaced of Mitt Romney's impromptu talk to a closed meeting of fat cat Republican donors.  [A second, subordinate, truth of contemporary American public life is that everything, without exception, has been captured on a handheld device by somebody or other and can be counted on to surface when least convenient.]

Romney's surreptitiously recorded speech is widely viewed, on the right as well as on the left, as having put paid to any lingering dreams the Republicans might have had of winning the election.  As Tallyrand is reputed to have said about Napoleon's murder of the duc d'Enghien, it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.  What can Romney have been thinking when he casually dismissed 47% of Americans as free-loading moochers incapable of caring for themselves and slavishly beholden to Democrats throwing them slops?  Never mind that Romney had his facts completely wrong.  I think we have become accustomed to that.  But in the midst of an election that he is currently losing, what can have possessed him to speak condescendingly and contemptuously of a tad less than half of the American electorate?

The answer, as always, is race.  Let me repeat what I have written here before.  Both before and after the Civil War, poor whites in the South and also in the North, bemired in a socially and economically disadvantaged position in American society, consoled themselves with the thought that however poor they were, however much they were disrespected by their wealthier and socially more prominent betters, at least they were not Black!  In both the North and the South, here was a permanent underclass toward whom they could show disdain, whom they could discriminate against, and on occasion whom they could lynch with impunity.  That structural fact of American life was written into the Black Codes -- laws that reinstituted de facto servitude  after the end of formal, legal slavery; it was written into Jim Crow, into the exclusionary racial covenants that kept Black families trapped in ghettoes, into the racial quotas at Northern colleges, and into the devil's compact between employers and White labor unions that kept former slaves from any chance of securing good industrial jobs.

The success of the Civil Rights Movement in ending Jim Crow, in breaking down the barriers to employment, and in winning the vote for Black citizens deprived poor Whites of their only consolation for their disadvantaged condition, and they reacted with anger, bitterness, and a deep sense of betrayal.  It is the bitter residue of this ressentiment that explains the tenacity with which poor and lower middle class Whites vote against their economic interest by supporting Republican candidates whose policies sink them ever deeper into economic despair.

Mitt Romney knew what he was saying when he described 47% of Americans as takers, moochers, free-loaders.  He was talking about Black and Brown Americans, and he was talking to White America.  The numbers do not matter, nor do the facts.  What mattered was a desperate attempt to tap into that deep well of bitterness and try to transform it into a winning coalition of White voters. 

Happily, he will fail.  But he is not a fool, and what he did was not in fact a blunder.  It was one last resurrection of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy.

EMBARRAS DE RICHESSES

There was a young man in my Harvard College class ['54] who really got on everyone's nerves.  His name was David Shapiro.  He was absolutely brilliant, and picture book handsome.  But what really got under our skins was the fact that he was really, really a nice guy.  It didn't seem fair, somehow.  Sort of like Angelina Jolie, who in addition to being the most gorgeous woman in the world is also a committed activist for humanitarian causes.  I mean, why couldn't she just marry famous men, like Marilyn Monroe?

The French have a lovely phrase for this phenomenon.  They call it an embarras de richesses.  That must be the way the Obama campaign feels this morning.  The video of Mitt Romney's despicable comments to a closed door meeting of rich donors, coming on top of his ill-considered comments about the violence in Libya and Egypt, which in turn followed Clint Eastwood's world-class comedy routine at the Republican Convention, must leave the Obama campaign ad planners at a loss to know which disaster to feature in their thirty second spots.  Truly, an embarras de richesses.

Shapiro, by the way, after marrying a lovely woman whom I dated briefly, went on to become a distinguished Harvard Law professor, a leading expert on Civil Procedure who has, on occasion, generously offered support and encouragement to my son, Tobias, whose field is also Civil Procedure.  For that, I can forgive him anything.