APOLOGIES

A little while ago, I complained that folks were not paying attention to my profound and brilliant analyses of subtle arcane questions, hem hem.  Several folks responded by commenting on my profound and brilliant analyses of subtle arcane questions, and what did I do?  I ignored them.  Not so good.

Actually, I am going to respond, but things have heated up at Bennett, and what with this being the final days of the presidential campaign, I have been distracted.  My apologies.  I will attempt some responses in the next day or two.

Meanwhile, just a thought prompted by a TV ad.  Back when I was a youth, there were no credit cards, except for the expensive and rather rare American Express card with its hefty fees.  Folks paid cash.  Many stores featured what they called "layaway plans" that allowed consumers to put down a little each week or month on a big ticket item [washing machine, icebox, sofa] until they had paid enough to take the item home.  There were Christmas Clubs into which you could pay a little each week against the once-a-year expense of holiday presents for the kids.

Things began to change in the fifties and sixties, with the appearance of Mastercard and Visa.  [Indeed, for a long time, some establishments refused to accept the older American Express card because it charged higher fees to merchants.]  All of this pretty much passed over my head until one day in the late 60's when I was lying on the analyst's couch.  In those days, my first wife, Cynthia, and I lived in Morningside Heights half a block from Columbia, where I taught.  Cynthia was teaching at Manhattanville College in Westchester County, north of Manhattan.  We had an old blue VW bug which we parked on 115th street at night and which she drove to her job each day.  The bug was pretty reliable, but it developed its own bug, and I took it into the shop.  Since Cynthia had no other way to get to work, I had to rent a car, and the rental office required me to put down a $50 security deposit before they would release the rental to me [$50 in those days was the equivalent of about $300 today.]  I was complaining about this to my analyst, a strict Freudian who rarely said anything, when he broke his silence to ask, incredulously, whether I did not have a credit card.  I went right out and got one.

The prosperity of the next forty years was built on the easy availability of consumer credit, which had the economically beneficial effect of converting stocks into flows, if I may use the slightly technical jargon of the Economics profession.  Like cellphones, which in the lives of many have replaced landlines, credit cards and debit cards have replaced cash for ordinary Americans.

This morning, as I was watching the devastation of Sandy and its aftermath, I saw an ad for a bigbox store in which happy customers were embracing a new layaway plan as though it were a hi-tech innovation of the smoking twenty-teens.  I cannot think of a more poignant symbol of the destruction of working class and middle class financial security in the United States as the consequence of the financial crisis and predatory exploitative practices of the rich.

GOTV

Daniel Laurison, a Berkeley Sociology doctoral student doing a very interesting doctoral dissertation [judging from the write up on his department page]  calls on me to urge people to volunteer in these last few days, helping to get out the vote for the Democrats.  I could not agree more!  I have written on these pages about the fact that I would rather raise money and do other behind the scenes things than go door to door or call people cold on the phone, but in these last five days, actually persuading some people to pick themselves up and vote is the most useful thing any of us can do.  Obviously the need is greater in some states than others, but right now, the whole East Coast from Virginia north is struggling with the aftermath of the storm, and there will be literally millions of people with very good reasons not to bother to vote.  Anything any of us can do to encourage them to make the effort will pay off tenfold [leaving to one side the reward in heaven, which as an atheist I am barred from mentioning.]

We have Romney on the run.  Let's send him back to his car elevator.

AN OLD OBSERVATION ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGY

Johnathan suggested I check out election.princeton.edu, which I did, discovering that this technically sophisticated blogsite, run by a Princeton Biophysicist, Sam Wang, has even rosier projections for Obama than Nate Silver or Votamatic.  Now, I have already had my say about my shameless searching out of experts who confidently predict that what I want to happen will happen [which, as I pointed out, is almost the functional definition of a religion.]  But I took a few moments to read some of the scores of comments and comments on comments that had been posted on Sam Wang's site, and once again I was powerfully struck by the wealth of intelligent, knowledgeable people out there capable of speaking more thoughtfully, with more detail, and in a more balanced and reflective manner than any of the well-known paid opinion-mongers who clog the airwaves and the Op Ed pages of the major newspapers.  This seems to be true no matter what subject you choose to Google, regardless of whether it is an arcane specialty or a matter of common interest. 

When I was young, there were three networks:  NBC, CBS, ABC, and three evening news anchors who were, so far as anyone could tell, the only three knowledgeable, reliable, non-partisan wise men in the universe [there were, needless to say, no wise, knowledgeable, reliable, non-partisan women.]   What Walter Cronkhite said was as close as a Godless nation ever got to the Word of God.

With the advent of Cable, bloviators metastasized, rather like Tribbles, especially with the suspension of the requirements that Talking Heads be either wise or non-partisan.  At the same time, the national community fractured into echo chambers, with each of us [myself included, of course] seeking out the "TV personalities" whose views most narrowly matched our own.  So we have a public world populated by Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz, Sean Hannity, Bill Reilly, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Gail Collins, and the ever egregious Tom Friedman.

But America is better than that, if I may allow myself a patriotic moment.  On the evidence of the blogosphere, this country glories in hundreds, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of private citizens whose knowledge, wisdom, insight, and even literary style put to shame those who make their living by having opinions.

As young people like to say these days, who knew?

THE JOYS OF HOME OWNERSHIP IN OLD PARIS

As faithful readers of this blog are aware, Susie and I own a tiny ground floor studio apartment in the heart of old Paris, on rue Maitre Albert, half a block from the Seine, catty-corner from Notre Dame.  We stay there when we can, and rent it out when we are not there.  Our apartment opens onto an interior courtyard, and according to the rules of the coop [reglements du copropriete] of which our apartment is 2.7%, we have exclusive usage of one half of the interior courtyard.  The entire copropriete consists of three buildings, two of which [including ours] date back to the 17th century.

Recently, the company that manages the property [the "syndic"] has been doing some extensive work to shore up our building's foundations [cracks had started to appear not only in the interior wall of the courtyard but also in our apartment -- very alarming.]  The work began without my being aware of it, and I have returned the rent of two couples who have stayed in the apartment because of the inconvenience of having a ten foot deep hole ["three meters," my neighbor tells me] in the courtyard around which they had to tiptoe and climb.

Today, a letter arrived from the syndic informing me [if my inadequate French has deciphered it correctly] that an underground vaulted chamber [une cave voutee] has been discovered in the course of the work, necessitating a reconsideration of the project [this, after I had already paid almost a thousand Euros as my share of the costs.]  It seems that no one had the slightest idea that this chamber was down there.  Presumably, it dates back four or five hundred years!

If there is any treasure buried in it, I think my rights to the courtyard under which it sits gives me dibs on it.  On the other hand, if, as the rather unimaginative construction engineer supposes, it is an old septic tank, then I know nothing about it!

WHAT AM I READING?

Dr. J. P. Smit, a South African philosopher with whom I have had some correspondence, has very kindly sent me a fascinating book about the negotiations leading up the release of Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC:  ENDGAME - Secret Talks and the End of Apartheid, by Willie Esterhuyse.  I will report on it when I have finished it.

CHERRY-PICKING GURUS

I have always had a genial contempt for those who shop for their religion, comparing costs and benefits and opting for a faith that promises bliss without stress.  As an atheist, I take the stern view that one ought to cleave to one's ancestral faith even if it offers nothing more than predestination and eternal damnation.  But as this interminable election winds down toward its conclusion, now only a week away, I am embarrassed to find myself exhibiting a secular version of the behavior I have so long contemned.  A word of explanation. 

Some long while ago, I stumbled on Nate Silver's blog, fivethirtyeight.com, which had an extraordinary record of success in predicting the 2008 election, right down to the state level.  In that cycle, his only miss in fifty state predictions was Indiana, which he calculated would go for McCain but in fact was won by Obama by one percent.  Silver got his start as a sabermetrician [which is to say, someone who analyses baseball using objective data and statistics], and that quite naturally biases me in his favor.  It reveals a seriousness of purpose and a strength of character that most political commentators lack.

Silver has been predicting Obama's victory for quite some time now, with a percentage of confidence that swelled from the low sixties to the high eighties during the long Summer and early Fall of Romney's stumbling performance.  But after the disastrous first debate, the Obama line in his graph plummeted and the Romney line soared, striking into my heart and that of many others a terror that in prior ages was reserved for intimations of hellfire.

Just three days ago, I stumbled on a new guru -- Drew Linzer, an Assistant Professor at Emory University.  Linzer runs a blog called Votamatic, and his predictions for Obama are much rosier than Silver's [even though Silver's Obama line has now clawed its way back to roughly 75%.]  If Linzer is to be believed, Obama's chances are in the 90's, and his probable electoral vote count is north of 330.  Linzer is a quite respectable academic, for all his youth [he earned his doctorate only four years ago], with a fine list of publications on his cv. 

Now, I am a serious person.  I would not forsake the Baptist persuasion for Baha'i or Scientology.  But despite the minatory warnings of an ever-vigilant conscience, I find myself slipping away from Silver and migrating to Linzer.  I hope the election comes before I have consigned myself to what passes for Hell in rational atheist circles.

"THE NAME'S THE SAME"

An old and familiar conundrum to impress the uninitiate at parties is to ask, "In a room with twenty-three people in it, what are the odds that two of them have the same birthday?"  Everyone is always surprised that the answer is "better than fifty-fifty."   In a country of three hundred million people, what are the odds that someone has your name? The answer is obviously pretty near 100%.  My younger son, whose full name is Tobias Barrington Wolff [Barrington Moore, Jr. was his godfather], has an extremely uncommon name.  Unfortunately for him, the only other person in American, so far as we can tell, whose name is Tobias Wolff is of course a famous writer, which produced some contretemps until my Tobias became rather famous as well, although in a different line of work.  Tobias, who is a law professor, visited at Stanford Law School a while back, and who was running the Writing Program there?  Yup.  The other Tobias Wolff.  I mean, what are the odds?

I used to think that my full name, "Robert Paul Wolff," was unique in America until idly Googling myself one day [yes, I do Google myself -- make of it what you will], I came upon this entry:

"Robert Paul Wolff, of the 23000 block of Walton Avenue, Port Charlotte, was charged Wednesday with resisting an officer and driving with a suspended license."

I guess I had better steer clear of Port Charlotte.  [For those of you who, like me, have never heard of Port Charlotte, it is on the western side of lower Florida about twenty-five miles north of Fort Myers.]

Anyone doing a fullscale search of criminal records for the name "Robert Paul Wolff" would come up with an arrest for disorderly conduct in 1986 [anti-apartheid protest at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum] and "resisting an officer and driving with a suspended license" a quarter century later.  One could fabricate an interesting story from these data points about an aging leftie reduced in his golden years to petty crimes.