ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS

One last comment on the forthcoming election.   Lord, I will be happy when this is behind us.  Unless Obama loses, in which case I must decide whether to kill myself or buy a one way ticket to Paris.

The entire campaign has been really bizarre, and I have been trying very hard to make sense of it.  I have come up with an explanation, which may have some truth in it.  I offer it simply as a sop to those of you who, like me, are way beyond obsession and into hysteria, and hence need something to calm us down.

The focus of my puzzlement has been the sudden dramatic collapse of Obama's very large lead on the occasion of the first debate.  Since all the polling suggested that the country was dramatically polarized, with an unusually small number of respondents to the polls identifying themselves as "undecided," I simply could not make sense of the dramatic reversal of fortunes as a consequence of one listless debate performance.  Had there been a large number of undecided voters, the reversals might have been comprehensible, but how could Obama virtually overnight go, in Nate Silver's excellent statistical analysis, from an 87.1% chance of victory to a 61.1% chance?  [He is back up to a 74.4% chance, thank the Lord.]

There are, it seems to me, only two possible explanations.  The first, which I do not believe at all, is that the polls either before or after the debate were cooked or incompetently conducted.  That way lies paranoia and madness.  The second, which I have decided is the only explanation that makes sense, is this:  From the beginning, the race was going to be very close.  A bad Republican primary season and some unforced Romney errors influenced inattentive voters unduly before the post-Labor Day period, yielding unrealistic poll numbers that made it look as though Obama was going to run away with the election.  The arrival of the real election season coincided with Obama's poor showing in the first debate to jolt natural Romney supporters back to the position they were destined to occupy anyway.  They were never really persuadable by the Democrats.  So, after the second and third debates more or less equalized the situation, the polls began to show pretty much the sort of tight race that it was always going to be, with Obama in a small but solid lead.

This explanation has the great advantage, I think, of comporting with the expectations of the Obama campaign team, who are, in my experience, the smartest bunch of pros modern American politics has ever seen.  From the outset, they were sure they would be facing Romney, they were convinced that he was the strongest candidate the Republicans could put forward, and they thought they would have a turnout election in which their best chance of success was a superb ground game.

There are now no more turning points, no more startling revelations, just a grinding effort to get out the vote, early if possible but otherwise on election day.  My sunny optimism, which reached its peak in my happy blog post that Obama would win and Romney would lose, has given way to a sullen, determined, gut-wrenching slog from news cycle to news cycle as I await Election Day.  My pricey bottle of Chateau neuf du Pape will remain unopened until Obama takes Ohio, or at least New Hampshire. 

In the next ten days, I will strive to find something else to blog about.

A RESPONSE TO FORMERLY A WAGE SLAVE

 Oh dear, I am very, very sorry for having failed to offer a thoughtful or useful response to your comments.  I apologize.  In the nature of things, that is [polluted] water under the bridge, but I pledge to do a better job should you offer a comment in the future.  As for dismissing you as a failed academic, I hope I have made it clear in my occasional blog posts that I am quite aware of how much luck there was in my happy and successful career.  I just stumbled onto the academic scene at a time when there were plenty of jobs and plenty of publishing opportunities.  I anguish for those of my students who cannot launch successful careers, despite doing fine work and deserving so much more.

Well, I bellyached, and I got my comeuppance.  My apologies.

DYSPEPSIA

By and large, I try to project a cheerful upbeat persona.  Nobody likes a complainer.  But every so often, my inner Eeyore wells up inside me and seeks expression.  Today is one of those days.  My mild dyspepsia has been triggered by the experience of traveling on USAirways, which is, I do believe, the worst airline in America.  I shan't bore you with the details, save to say that I made it home from Williams College a day later than planned, and then was able to complete my little trip only by running through the Philadelphia airport to make a connection for which the airline had left way too little time.

The visit to Williams went just fine.  I gave a talk to thirty or so students and faculty Tuesday evening and led a three hour seminar with twenty Philosophy seniors the next afternoon.  The students had been told to read a chapter of Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia, as well as my "bourse" on Ideological Critique and my essay "Narrative Time," both of which are posted on box.net and  are accessible through this blog, and then to come to the seminar with questions prepared for me based on the reading.

The students are wonderful -- bright, lively, serious, engaged -- and I think they liked me [if I may echo Sally Field].  But they did not ask a single question based on what they were supposed to have read.  Instead, they all seemed troubled by my statement in my Tuesday evening talk that you must choose "which side you are on"  in politics and life, who your comrades are and who your enemies.  They clearly wanted everything to be "nice," with sensible discussion rather than bitter disagreement.  I suggested that that attitude was an expression of the comfort and security of their protected upper-middle class life.

But that is not what bugged me,  Rather it was something quite different, something that troubles me as well about the responses to this blog.  In the materials they were asked to read, both those by me and the chapter by Mannheim, there are some subtle, original, difficult ideas.  They seemed not to have even noticed those ideas, and they certainly were not sufficiently engaged with them to want to discuss them.

Now, over the years, I have written and posted here an enormous amount of conceptually complex material, much of it in one way or another original.  The simple truth is that the ideas in that material mean more to me than the political opinions I express from time to time.  Indeed, they are, I believe, my raison d'etre.  But although there have been almost 5000 comments posted here, including my own [an astonishing number -- which Google faithfully keeps track of], scarcely any of them have referenced the ideas I have articulated.  There are a good many seriously interested readers, as evidenced by their steady return to this site and by their comments, but almost no one has actually engaged with my ideas -- not with my opinions.  That is something quite different.

Returning to Williams, one of the more subtle ideas in "Narrative Time" is that the social world is inherently and uneliminably perspectival in its structure, mimicking in that characteristic the Judeo-Christian conception of the natural world.  No one mentioned that idea.  One of the central ideas of the Mannheim chapter is his claim that ideological disputes are at bottom a form of all-out war in which the aim is not merely to refute one's opponent but to humiliate and destroy him or her.  In light of the manifest eagerness of these students that everyone be "nice," one might have thought they would seize on that idea and quiz me about it, connecting it with what I had said about the necessity for choosing sides.  Not a peep.

It makes me very sad.  I could understand it if the readers of this blog [or of my written work] simply did not find anything there worth discussing.  But I am smart enough, self-confident enough, indeed arrogant enough, to be certain that that is not the case.

Meanwhile, in the presidential race ...

GOING NORTH

On Tuesday, I will fly north to make an appearance at Williams College, which for those of you who do not know is in the very northwest most corner of Massachusetts.  I have been invited to appear as a "Public Intellectual," which I guess I am now that I have a blog.  I shall give a talk Tuesday evening and appear at a class on Wednesday.  The title of my talk is "How to continue to be political when you are as old as I am."  I figure the one thing I really know about that the Williams students do not know about is being old.

I am beyond terminally anxious about the election, so even a two day distraction is welcome.  By the time I return to Chapel Hill, the election will be less than two weeks away.  I can stand anything for two weeks, right? 

THE MYTH OF THE SELF-MADE MAN

My son, Tobias, alerted me to this interesting article about the life of Romney's oldest son, Taggert:

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/108815/tagg-romney-myth-self-reliance?page=0,0
There are a good many things to be said about it [including a bit of snarking at the creepy image of Mitt and Ann as they went up to bed each evening], but what is important in it is the account of the perpetuation by the Romney clan of the myth of the self-made man -- be it father George, or son Mitt, or grandson Tagg. 

It cannot be repeated too often that no one, absolutely no one, is self-made in any plausible sense of that expression.  For the past million years or more, pre-hominids, hominids, and humans have been coming into a world they did not make and relying for life itself on the accumulated knowledge and material culture produced by their predecessors.  No one, not a cobbler, not a farmer, not a hunter-gatherer, and certainly not a business tycoon, makes himself or herself [although this does seem to be a peculiarly male fantasy.]

As the article wisely and astutely concludes by observing, the self-indulgent myth of self-creation is transmuted in the political realm into the brutal stripping away of all the collective social protections that generations of struggle have put in place to help those who need the assistance of their fellow citizens.

The thirty-five year project to destroy those protections is well under way, and should Romney be elected, they will be further destroyed.   The benighted and bigoted working class and middle class voters who cast their votes for Romney will suffer from this destruction, and they are simply too stupid to realize that simple fact.  I realize that sophisticated social theorists like myself are supposed to offer profound and subtle explanations for systematic acts of self-destruction, but sometimes, when I grow weary of the game, I cannot resists calling it stupidity when I see it.

Sixteen days.

MOVIE TIME

Yesterday evening [well, actually, late yesterday afternoon] Susie and I went to the movies to see Ben Affleck's new film, Argo, also featuring John Goodman and Alan Arkin in marvelous lesser roles.  I have liked Affleck ever since he and Matt Damon made their breakout film, Good Will Hunting. I can watch forever the delicious scene in which Damon, while mopping the floor in an MIT hall, stops long enough to solve a math problem that none of the MIT undergraduates or graduate students can crack.  That scene captures the essential difference between MIT and Harvard, which is that at MIT, all that matters is sheer brains.  Affleck has not had as successful a career as his buddy, Damon, but he has done some fine work, including a lovely minor role in Shakespeare in Love.

Argo tells the apparently true story of the "exfilation" from Teheran of six Americans from the embassy who hide out in the Canadian embassy after the Iranian revolution in 1979.  Never mind the plot.  For purposes of this blog post, what matters is the brief prelude to the narration of the story in which the shameful history is recounted of the coup by MI6 and the CIA deposing Mossadegh in 1953 and the subsequent installation of Pahlavi as Shah.  I almost wept, once again, as a sepulchral voice told the bare bones of the affair over news clips of Mossadegh and Pahlavi.  Had the United States embraced Mossadegh's secular democratic regime instead of overthrowing it because it was "socialist," Iran could have been, these past thirty-odd years, an ally and friend rather than a member of the Axis of Evil.  In just the same way, Cuba could have been the Socialist paradise Castro wanted to make it had the United States poured aid into the new democratic regime instead of sending that hapless collection of exiles into the Bay of Pigs on their doomed mission.  So too could America have stepped into the void left by France's departure from Southeast Asia to help create a flourishing Viet Nam, instead of nearly destroying that country and a generation of American men in the appalling carnage of the Viet Nam War.

There is nothing secret about these events.  All of us in my generation have lived through them and their inevitable consequences.  And yet, as things stand in this country today, it would be simply impossible to introduce what I have said about them into a serious discussion of American international affairs.  The "progressive" position among "serious" people is that Viet Nam was an unfortunate but unavoidable war, that it is time to attempt a tentative opening to Cuba now that Castro has aged sufficiently to step down, and that we ought to impose crippling sanctions on Iran rather than go to war with that country.

Affleck directed Argo, and it was his choice to open the film with that recitation of what is now ancient history.  I honor him for that.  It was a courageous and honorable choice.,

A COMMENT ON A COMMENT

Magpie [these webnames!] offered the following comment to my brief post about hitting the 500,000 mark in visits to this blog:

"To give you something exciting to read:

BBC's Paul Mason on Prof. Manuel Castells From networked protest to 'non-capitalism'http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-19932562 "

I followed the link and found a conversation about groups of people around the world who are not waiting for "the Revolution" but instead are opting out of capitalism, working in cooperatives, offering one another interest free loans, and so forth.  I always have mixed feelings about stories like this.  On the one hand, I am cheered by the evidence that sensible progressive people are taking matters into their own hands and are trying to build communities that are guided by something other than the dictates of The Market.  On the other hand, I know that such experiments, some of them quite elaborate, have been a constant accompaniment of the implacable advance of capitalism, in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and have not measurably softened the blows of capitalism nor altered its direction of evolution.  Marx spoke contemptuously of the theorists of such experiments as "Utopian Socialists," to which he contrasted his own "scientific socialism."  If I may invoke a botanical image, these small communities are like exotic flowers growing in the shade and underbrush of forests dominated by huge trees.  They are pleasant to look at, and do indeed sustain little communities of butterflies, but they are virtually invisible from the sky and make very little impact on the forests.  [This is just a feeble attempt at a metaphor -- don't go all E. O. Wilson on me and tell me about the central important of ants to the ecology of the forest!]

There have been two effective counterweapons to the depredations of capitalism in America -- labor unions and Federal legislation to enforce progressive tax rates, regulatory controls, and the like -- and not surprisingly, they have been the prime targets of right-wing reactionaries.  Neither union organizing nor legislation has stopped the evolution of international capitalism, nor can they, I believe, but both have made life for those living in capitalist America better, more humane, more adequately protected.  I have tried to write about this systematically in my essay, "The Future of Socialism," and as readers of that essay will testify, I am not optimistic.