INTO EACH LIFE A LITTLE RAIN MUST FALL

I have striven to keep this blog on an elevated plane, what with tutorials on the Critique of Pure Reason and Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  I mean, you can't get much more ethereal than that, right?  But every so often the pedestrian world interrupts my philosophical meditations, and this seems to be one of those moments.  So, for the next few paragraphs, I am going to complain.  This is, as I understand it, more or less standard for blogs in general.  Consider what follows evidence that I am human, all too human.

First of all, my right knee and leg hurt.  Six weeks ago, I made the bad mistake of trying a little running [or, more accurately, shambling] as part of my morning walk.  My ego had become involved in exactly how many minutes it was taking me to complete the course of slightly less than four miles, and I thought that if I did little bursts [so to speak] of trotting I could bring my time down to 57 or even 56 minutes.  Well, I did, but I also seem to have permanently irritated my aging joints, with the result that I now take many too many doses of Ibuprofen and Tylenol.  I finally gave in and made an appointment for this afternoon with a doctor.  We shall see.

At the same time, I have been dealing with a bizarre problem triggered by the efforts of the U. S. Post Office to upgrade itself.  Three weeks ago I sent out the annual fund-raising appeal for my scholarship organization, University Scholarships for South African Students.   A number of envelopes came back marked "undeliverable at this address."  Now, this is not at all unusual.  There are always a few folks who have moved or died or gone missing.  But when the envelope addressed to my sister in Washington, D.C. came back, I knew something was wrong.  It seems the P. O. now has a machine that reads the zip code electronically.  It reads from the bottom of the envelope up, and since I have a logo [a map of Africa] above the return address on my envelopes, my zip code is actually lower than the zip code of the addressee, so the machine was sending all the envelopes back.  The post office people said it would be fine if I just scratched out the return address and remailed them [no extra postage required], but then some of those envelopes also started coming back.  I had visions of my twenty-two year old organization crashing and burning because of this technodisaster, so I decided to have new envelopes printed up with the return address above the logo.  Now, I am engaged in sending out a duplicate mailing to all the folks who have not yet responded [some of the letters got through, apparently -- how?]

While this was happening, I received word from Paris that our "syndic" [the company that manages the copropriété ] has started work shoring up the building my apartment is in.  For some years Susie and I have noticed cracks in the wall in the interior courtyard that gives access to our apartment.  Well, we have renters who arrived on Saturday [old friends from my childhood, no less] to find that the interior courtyard is dug up ["to a depth of three meters," according to a neighbor who wrote me an email], and the entire area is a shambles.  I will refund their rent, needless to say, but my little Parisian getaway, the apple of my eye, is momentarily a disaster.

Confronted with all of this, I consider it really unfriendly of Obama to so completely louse up the first debate that I can no longer luxuriate in the discomfort of the Republicans.  Did the President not know that I was already struggling with a full complement of little crises?

Oh yes, did I mention that we just called in an exterminator to deal with an infestation of humongous cockroaches?  And that it has been raining for the past two days?

Would anyone like a quiet discussion of the subtleties of the Subjective Deduction in the First Edition Deduction of the Pure Concepts of  Understanding in the Analytic of Concepts of the Transcendental Analytic?

 

BIG BIRD

I couldn't watch the debate, and a good thing too, because everyone agrees Romney won.  But a strange thing has happened on the way to the winner's circle.  Never mind that Romney lied and shape-shifted.  At one point, apparently, he said he was going to eliminate all funding for Public Broadcasting, a long-time right-wing desideratum.  This has triggered a national outcry from lovers of Big Bird, which is to say, everyone not home schooled by religious nuts.  The next morning, Big Bird was invited to appear on all the morning cable news shows and the Internet is alive with paeans of praise to the big yellow goofball.

Sesame Street was launched in November, 1969, not long before the second birthday of my older son, Patrick.  I have countless fond memories of watching Sesame Street with him [and without him] on our old rabbit-eared black and white set [the same set on which, six years earlier, I watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald -- although, to be honest, there was such a crush in the courthouse that you couldn't actually see the shooting.]

I even once saw Big Bird, Ernie, Bert, and the other inhabitants of Sesame Street in person.   The daughter of my parents' next door neighbor got a job with PBS, and she wangled an invite for me to see a filming of the show.   The guy wearing the Big Bird suit, by the way, couldn't see a thing.  He had a little TV set inside the suit with which he oriented himself so that he could move the big cumbersome suit this way and that.  I think his eyes came about up to Big Bird's belly button.

Sesame Street, of course, was the first show to feature a gay couple -- Ernie and Bert -- although no one said anything about it.  I think the first gay couple to be given a favorable presentation in the movies were Artoo Detoo and CP3O in Star Wars.

SONG OF MYSELF

I go to bed early, so I was pleased to learn that the big Obama-Romney debate would begin at seven this evening.  But it turns out that it actually begins at nine, which is -- believe it or not -- past my usual bedtime.  Having nothing better to do, and having just been asked by a commentor about my opinion of Freud, I decided to re-read the tutorial I wrote some while ago on The Thought of Sigmund Freud, a tutorial that ran to many parts, and was then deposited for posterity on box.net [accessible by following the link that the top of this blog.]  I have been re-reading it, and I say, with my characteristic modesty, that I think it is simply brilliant.  If you are seriously interested in spending several hours learning about Freud's theories, you really cannot do better, in my opinion, than read that Tutorial.

There, I said it.  I am now in full Mr Toad mode.  But if I don't say it, who on earth will?

WORDS

Every so often I come upon a word, a phrase, or a usage that particularly delights me.  I then make every effort to weave it into my quotidian discourse, as a sort of garnish.  A good example is "meretricious," which a long time ago I learned originally meant "falsely alluring, like a prostitute" [meretrix is apparently Latin for prostitute.]  Isn't that just perfect?  When someone you don't like offers an argument that you consider a crock, describing his argument as meretricious is a high-brow way of calling him a whore.

As I was playing a game of on-line Sudoku this morning before it got light enough for me to take my daily walk, I thought of one of my very favorite such terminological gems.  [I am simply going to assume that you folks all know how to play Sudoku.]  I have developed the following technique for solving Soduko puzzles:  I carry on, deducing entries for as long as I am able, using every trick I have developed, including some pretty nifty ones.  Then, if I get totally stuck, I find a binary opportunity -- a square that I know is either one number or another -- and I form the hypothesis that it is the first, tracing out all the implications of that hypothesis until I either solve the puzzle or come to a contradiction.  If I hit a contradiction, I know that the original square should have been filled with the second number, not the first, so I go all the way back and insert the second number.  Usually that is sufficient to enable me to complete the puzzle.  I call this "hypthecating a number." 

I encountered the word "hypthecate" in a wonderful book called Branches Without Roots:  Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1888, by the Yale economist Gerald Jaynes.  Here is the passage in which, I believe, it first appears, from page 148:

"The 1866 Alabama lien law allowed a 'lien on the crop equal to the advances made by any person(s) to any person of the state.'  There were two important implications of this law.  First, any person with a legal claim of possession to a crop would be able to receive credit by hypothecating that crop.  Second, the wording of the law allowed merchants and agents other than the employer to extend credit on the basis of a crop lien to anyone with a claim to a prospective crop."

This law, in effect, allowed share-cropping former slaves to go into debt for their food and other necessaries before the crop they were growing was actually harvested and they got their share of the proceeds.  In effect, it exchanged slavery for debt peonage.

Even if you are not as enchanted by the word as I, I strongly recommend Jaynes' book for profound historical insights into the period known as Reconstruction.

A BRUSH WITH FAME

The MacArthur Foundation has just announced its "genius" grants for this year.  One of the winners is Benoit Rolland, a Boston based archetier, or maker of bows for stringed instruments.  My viola bow is a Benoit Rolland bow!  When I bought my Marten Cornelisson viola some years ago, I tried out a number of bows, and the Benoit Rolland bow made me sound markedly better -- a deeper, richer tone.  In my world, that is as good as having a torn, dirty Michael Jordan shirt from his college days [the prized possession of one of my wife's sons.] 

I feel that I have been touched with greatness.

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO LIVES AFTER THEM

In 1969, I and my first wife were each in a full-scale psychoanalysis and I was doing everything I could to earn enough money to pay the medical bills.  [I was actually audited by the IRS one year because they could not believe that someone with an income that low had medical bills that high.]  A paperback publisher, New American Library, contacted me about doing a book to be called Ten Great Works of Philosophy.  The idea was that I would find ten works whose translations or [in the case of David Hume] originals were in the public domain -- hence no permissions fees -- and cut and paste them into a little book together with sketchy introductions.  The editor offered a thousand on signing and a thousand on submission, which in those days was three months of analysis for the two of us.  Needless to say, I jumped at the chance.  I completed work on the book so fast that before they could pay me the thousand for signing a contract I had submitted the finished manuscript and asked for the second thousand as well.  I know you will believe me when I say that this was not my finest scholarly effort.

This afternoon, in the day's mail, arrived my royalty payment for the book from Pearson, which at some point along the way acquired Penguin, which had earlier on acquired New American Library.  Not much -- $334 -- but when I entered the sales and payments in the Excel spreadsheet that serves as a record of my book sales, I noticed that I was closing in on 200,000 sales, all of which have brought me a bit more than $20,000.  I was thirty-five when I cranked out that little number, and like the Energizer bunny it just keeps on going.  I have the creepy feeling that long after I am dust, semi-annual checks will continue to arrive for my sons, and eventually for my grandchildren.

HIGHER EDUCATION, AND AN ADDENDUM TO THE MEDITATION

I return in today's post to a subject  on which I have commented in the past, and which continues to interest me, namely the distribution of educational credentials in the American population, and the implications of that distribution for American politics.  As always, I shall try to make connections between my own experience and larger social trends.

My father attended Boy's High School in Manhattan, achieving a grade average of 65 [a fact which, when I discovered it as an adult, gave me a good deal of retrospective satisfaction, inasmuch as my sister and I had been under considerable pressure to get high grades.]  In 1919, when he graduated from Boy's High [after being suspended for a bit for making inflammatory political speeches], roughly 12-15% of his age cohort earned a high school diploma.  In 1923, when he earned a Bachelor's Degree from City College, only a tiny fraction of his age group [perhaps 2-3%] rose to that level of educational attainment.

By the time I graduated from Forest Hills High School in 1950, well over half of my age mates were earning high school diplomas, but when I received my Bachelor's Degree three years later, even though a generation had passed since my father's days at CCNY, it was still the case that only about one in twelve Americans twenty-five or older held a first college degree.  Everyone I knew was going to college, so it simply never occurred to me that I and my fellow college students were, in American society, very rare birds indeed.

The G. I. Bill and the explosive post-war growth of public institutions of higher education are usually credited with dramatically changing the educational landscape in America, and so they did.  By 1970, the cohort of Americans 25 to 29 years of age holding a first college degree had tripled, and by the late 1970's the number of young Americans who had completed a college degree was five times what it had been at the end of the Second World War.

The impression soon became widespread that college was the new normal.  There was obsessive public attention to the growing difficulty of gaining admission to the elite colleges and universities, but it was more or less taken for granted that everyone who had the slightest interest in doing so could get some sort of college degree.  [Once again, my personal experience throws light on the changes taking place.  When I applied to Harvard College in 1950, somewhat more than 1900 young men made application.  Of those 1900, 1650 were admitted, and 1250 actually showed up in September to enroll.  Your chances nowadays of getting into UMass Amherst are very considerably worse.]

However, a look at the statistics for 2011, the most recent available, give us a very different picture.  Briefly, 87.58% of Americans 25 and older were, in 2011, high school graduates.  Roughly 57% of that same group had some post-secondary education.  But only a bit more than 30% held Bachelor's Degrees.  This is, of course, a dramatic change from the situation when I attended college -- a six-fold increase.  But it remains true today that seven in ten adult Americans do not hold college degrees.  Note, by the way, that the 57% of adults who have had some post-secondary education include those who have taken a single course at a local Community College.

You might think that this statistic is in a way misleading, because of the unusually high percentage of older Americans who do not have a college degree, but that is not the case.  The percentage of Americans 25 to 29 holding college degrees is only 32%, barely higher than the percentage for the adult population as a whole.

Simply inverting the statistics gives us an insight into the American population that is radically at odds with the common impression created by the discourse in the public media.  Almost seven in ten adult Americans do not have a college degree, and more than four in ten have never taken so much as a single course beyond high school.  Let me repeat what I wrote earlier, in order to emphasize what I consider to be an extremely important fact about American society.  A college degree is required in America for a wide range of jobs that no one in the media would consider elite, and indeed which the people who offer commentary on talk shows would not dream of taking themselves.

You need a college degree to be a high school teacher.  You need a college degree to be an elementary school teacher.  You need a college degree to be a management trainee, to be a staff psychologist in a corporation, to be a Walmart store manager, to be an FBI agent [indeed, you pretty well need a law degree for that job].  This means that seventy percent of Americans cannot even aspire to be grade school teachers!

Think about these simple facts in relation to the two-part Meditation that I have posted in the past few days.  If we on the left are serious about working to move American society in a progressive direction, then we need to start not on college campuses but in the workplaces and even, though I cringe to say it, in the churches of this country.  We need to devise organizing methods and policy proposals the aim at the seventy percent rather than at some sub-segment of the thirty percent.

I would welcome comments from readers about how we might go about doing this.