THIS AND THAT

1.  I may have seen an indication this morning during my walk of a seismic shift in French culture.  When I passed the row of Batobuses anchored for the night on the shores of the Seine, I noticed that the Jean Gabin and the Yves Montand had been promoted from the rear to the front of the row.  If a Simone Signoret shows up, I will know that I am on to something.

2.  Magpie posts a long comment today [or last night], reacting to Chris Langton's critique of something I wrote two years ago.  Out of curiosity, I went back and read the original post, which was an essay I had actually written long ago called "A Critique of Keynesian Economics."  I found my essay quite interesting.  I also had absolutely no recollection of ever having written it.  There are times when I think I am losing it.

A SERIOUS POETIC INTERLUDE

Yesterday evening, we had dinner with our good friends Anne Berry and Philip Minns.  Philip brought along a collection of the poems of e. e. cummings, the poet whose works Susie and I would read to each other sixty-five years ago when we were courting.  The collection did  not contain my favorite cummings poem, but Google instantaneously supplied it.  Here it is, for your delectation.

"Gay" is the captivating cognomen of a Young Woman of cambridge,
mass.
to whom nobody seems to have mentioned ye olde freudian wish;
when i contemplate her uneyes safely ensconced in thick glass
you try if we are a gentleman not to think of(sh)

the world renowned investigator of paper sailors--argonauta argo
harmoniously being with his probably most brilliant pupil mated,
let us not deem it miraculous if their(so to speak)offspring has that largo
appearance of somebody who was hectocotyliferously propagated

when Miss G touched n.y. our skeleton stepped from his cupboard
gallantly offering to demonstrate the biggest best busiest city
and presently found himself rattling for that well known suburb
the bronx(enlivening an otherwise dead silence with harmless quips, out
of Briggs by Kitty)

arriving in an exhausted condition, i purchased two bags of lukewarm
peanuts
with the dime which her mama had generously provided(despite courte-
ous protestations)
and offering Miss Gay one(which she politely refused)set out gaily for
the hyenas
suppressing my frank qualms in deference to her not inobvious perturba-
tions

unhappily, the denizens of the zoo were that day inclined to be uncouthly
erotic
more particularly the primates--from which with dignity square feet
turned abruptly Miss Gay away:
"on the whole"(if you will permit a metaphor savouring slightly of the
demotic)
Miss Gay had nothing to say to the animals and the animals had nothing
to say to Miss Gay

during our return voyage, my pensive companion dimly remarlted some-
thing about "stuffed
fauna" being "very interesting" . . . we also discussed the possibility of
rain. . .
E distant proximity to a Y.W.c.a. she suddenly luffed
--thanking me; and(stating that she hoped we might "meet again
sometime")vanished, gunwale awash. I thereupon loosened my collar
and dove for the nearest l; surreptitiously cogitating
the dictum of a new england sculptor(well on in life)re the helen moller
dancers, whom he considered "elevating--that is, if dancing CAN be ele-
vating"

Miss(believe it or)Gay is a certain Young Woman unacquainted with the
libido
and pursuing a course of instruction at radcliffe college, cambridge, mass.
i try if you are a gentleman not to sense something un poco putrido
when we contemplate her uneyes safely ensconced in thick glass
  

GUILTY PLEASURES

Paul Krugman is not a Marxist.  I understand that I am therefore obligated to disdain him and look askance at those who profess to enjoy his blog.  So it is with a heavy heart and considerable embarrassment that I come before you to confess that I find Krugman funny, informative, and stick-it-to-'em abrasive in his exposure of the follies of his economist colleagues on the right.  To be sure, this just means that he is the wittiest and most amusing of the poor sods chained to the floor of the cave and forced to make educated guesses about the shadows playing on the walls.  Those of us who have struggled up into the light and can see capitalism for what it truly is must never associate in any serious way with the likes of Krugman.  But I enjoy a good snark as much as the next aging revolutionary, and although profundity is plentiful on the far left, wit is rather harder to find.

There, as the Roman Catholic Church discovered ages ago, confession is good for the soul.

OP ED

Four years ago, I was invited to take part in the half century celebration of the establishment of Social Studies, an undergraduate interdisciplinary major at Harvard of which I was the first Head Tutor.  As long-time readers of this blog may recall, the affair was hi-jacked by a flap over some really ugly statements made by the always loathsome Marty Peretz, who was associated with Social Studies for some years and is remembered fondly by such faux progressives as E. J. Dionne.  I ended up having to revise my remarks at the lunch that day in order to express my dismay at Harvard’s readiness to accept donations to fund a scholarship honoring Peretz [without too much trouble I found an appropriate quotation from Das Kapital for the occasion], and it was those harsh comments that drew such attention as my talk garnered.  But my original intention had been to praise Social Studies for requiring its students to read some of the classic works of social theory – by Marx, Weber, Mannheim, and Durkheim – in which the central theme is the distinction between surface social appearance and underlying social reality.  That distinction, I noted, had all but disappeared from modern Political Sociology, which contents itself with opinion surveys that examine every detail of what people believe, without ever asking why they so often believe what is manifestly untrue.

All of this went through my mind as I read an an Op Ed essay in the NY TIMES by Thomas B. Edsall called The Coming Democratic Schism.  Edsall focuses on a number of opinion surveys of White voters who are reliable supporters of the Democratic Party.  The older White Democrats – forty-eight and up --strongly believe that you cannot get ahead in this country by hard work alone, that the economic disadvantage suffered by Blacks is a result of discrimination, that the government should do more to ameliorate economic inequality, and so forth.  They also strongly support the social agenda of the Democratic Party – Gay Rights, Women’s Rights, etc.  The younger White Democratic Party supporters – thirty-eight and under – share this support for the social agenda, but differ markedly on economic issues.  For example, “77 percent of the younger ‘next generation left’ believes that you can get ahead if you are willing to work hard,” as compared with “the older ‘solid liberal’ group, 67 percent [of whom] responded that hard work is no guarantee of success.”  And so forth.

The point of Edsall’s column is that the younger Democratic Party supporters have pretty much given up the belief of their elders in the systemic or structural causes of the inequalities that characterize American society.  But their solid support for the social agenda makes them virtually unreachable by a Republican Party that continues to make the social issues central to its message.

All of that is no doubt very striking, but Edsall simply never asks the really interesting question, which is, Why do the younger voters hold a set of beliefs that are so completely at odds with reality?  They are not stupid.  They are probably reasonably well-educated.  I would imagine they pay attention to public affairs, and yet their beliefs are completely at odds with the facts.  Surely that is what cries out for explanation.

First of all, a few elementary facts.  In the past forty years, the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, in constant dollars, has increased by roughly 225 percent – i.e., it has a good deal more than doubled.  Measured in 2013 dollars, the GDP was about seven and a half trillion dollars in 1973, and was close to seventeen trillion dollars in 2013.  Over the same forty years, median household income in constant dollars [i.e. the household income below which fall half of all the households in America] has increased by only five percent.  This is a truly astonishing datum.  It might be put this way:  After forty years of hard work, the efforts of the entire country are combining to produce an additional nine and a half trillion dollars of wealth per year, and virtually all of that nine and a half trillion dollars is going to the top half of American households – none of it is “trickling down” to the bottom half.  To put the same point another way, the top half of households are more than twice as well off as they were forty years ago; the bottom half are no better off than they were forty years ago.  What is more, intergenerational social mobility is lower in the United States than in France, Germany, or Great Britain, three countries thought by Americans to be more weighed down by tradition and inherited status than our open, free American society.

So the really interesting question not asked by Edsall is why younger white supporters of the Democratic Party so badly misperceive their own personal life chances and economic situation.

I don’t know the answer to that question, but I have a suspicion, which I will share with you.  It is impossible to grasp the social reality in which one lives without some theoretical conceptual framework.  This is true even of supposedly simple societies – small, rural, economically primitive. [I have argued this at length in my tutorial, “How to Study Society,” available on box.net by following the link at the top of this blog.]   The theoretical insights into the deep structural inequality of capitalism of Marx and the other classical social theorists made their way into American public discourse, in part via the union movement, and for a long while in the first two thirds of the last century helped hundreds of millions of Americans to make sense of their immediate social and economic situation.  But that complex ideological demystification came under assault two generations ago, and has now all but disappeared from the collective consciousness of Americans.  As a consequence, those born and brought up since the Seventies really lack any organized conceptual framework within which to make sense of their world.

What they see most immediately is that their economic well-being is not protected either by the collective action of their fellow workers or by the government actions of Democratic congresses and presidential administrations.  Is their fate dependent on “hard work?”  Oh yes, indeed.  Their access to scarce and ill-paid jobs depends on competition against countless other aspirants.  What they cannot see without the appropriate conceptual framework is that their stagnant prospects are, taken as a whole, a consequence of the exploitative structure of capitalism, not a result of inadequate effort on their part.

It is not at all surprising that this Ayn Rand-esque understanding of the economy coexists in them with the most progressive commitment to social issues.  As I have many times argued on this blog, capitalism is quite comfortable with the elimination of legal discrimination against women or Latinos or African-Americans or gay and lesbian men and women.  It is only uncomfortable with anything that interrupts the steady, reliable exploitation of the working class, and the consequent accumulation of capital.

 

 

 

PARIS MY PARIS

Paris has not been génial, what with the awful weather and the endlessly frustrating engagement with FranceTelecom, but this morning the City of Light redeemed itself.  As I began my walk at 5:30 a.m., I looked up into a cloudless sky.  A large moon, all but full, hung over the Left Bank, and the streets were clean, quiet, and almost free of cars or people.  I crossed a completely empty parvis Nôtre Dame, emptied of the hundreds of chairs set up for the Bastille Day memorial mass, and turned left on the right bank to walk west along the Seine.  The traffic flows downstream on our side of the river [hence left bank] and upstream on the right bank, but at a bit after 5:30 in the morning there was scarcely anything moving.  Here and there several clusters of young people, ending the night as I was beginning the morning, called to one another or made a show of amorous dalliance.  [Embarrassing confession:  Some years ago I heard on NPR a bit of urban reporting about the Paris government office that dispatches couples around the city to act lovey-dovey in public as an amusement for the tourists.  City employees were alerted by cellphone when a tourist attraction lacked a couple kissing and hurried to fill the gap.  With a credulity that makes me cringe even now, I bought the satirical bit hook line and sinker.  Oh well.]

The Palais de Justice, which occupies much of the other end of the Ȋle de la Cité from Nôtre Dame was gleaming, its façade newly cleaned.  The river flowed quietly, rather more slowly than I walk [faithful readers will recall that once before I measured its rate of flow by pacing myself against a bit of flotsam drifting with the current.]   I walked past the pet shops, pont neuf [the oldest bridge across the Seine!] and the old Samaritaine building that is slowly being transformed into apartments and upscale boutiques by LVMH [Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessey for the fashion challenged.]  As I began the long walk from the east end to the west end of the Louvre, I looked across the river to the wonderful old buildings and the moon above them.  The view of the Left Bank from the quais of the Right Bank is stunning.  I passed the Académie Française, refuge of those desperate to resist the relentless encroachment of Englishisms and Americanisms on the pristine French language.  As I reached the end of the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay came into view with its pair of magnificent huge matching clocks on the north face at each end of what was once a railway station and is now perhaps the most beautiful museum building in France.

Walking along the outside of the Denon wing of the Louvre, which lies just across the street from the quais, you get some sense how huge the entire museum is.  It seems to take forever to make one’s way from Samaritaine at the eastern end to the beginning of the Tuileries Garden just past the western end of the museum.  Inside, there is so much to see that one scarcely notices the distance.  I recall wandering through the Denon wing the first time I visited the Louvre.  As I was passing from one hall to the next, I happened to glance to the right.  There on the wall was one of my favorite paintings, La Bohémienne by Franz Hals.  It was hanging without fanfare among many other paintings as though a harried curator had been able to find no better place for it.  This placement seemed a wanton expression of the bottomless resources of the museum.

The Jardin des Tuilleries starts with a giant Carousel, which never actually seems to be turning, and ends at Place de la Concorde.  The Bastille Day military parade yesterday started at the Arc de Triomphe, made its way down the Champs Elysées, and ended at the reviewing stands in the Place, empty now as I turned to cross over again to the Left Bank.  Google says the affair is the oldest military parade in Europe, and certainly the endless overflights of France’s military aircraft and the rows upon rows of marching soldiers and helmeted motorcyclists must have been a grand sight, judging from the television coverage in our local café.  But the truth is that the Champs Elysées isn’t really good for much except a parade, and France’s days of imperial pretension are long past, the torch having been passed first to Great Britain and then to America.  Still, the French have been pretty depressed lately, so maybe a big parade was what they needed.

Back safely on the Left Bank, I turned again to walk upstream to Nôtre Dame and home.  The two little Batobuses, Jean Gabin and Yves Montand, were there behind the rows of big batobuses, and as it was now just past six, traffic was picking up and the joggers were out.  Since everyone passes me as though I were standing still, I must continually remind myself that I am eighty, so it is something that I am walking at all.

Past the Musée d’Orsay, this time up close on my right, past the Leopold Senghor foot bridge before the Left Bank entrance to which, like a sentinel, stands the unexpected statue of Thomas Jefferson, past pont neuf once again, and then, one block further on, the dark, elegant wooden exterior of Lapérouse, at one time half a century ago awarded the treasured three stars by Guide Michelin but now not even so much as accorded a mention.

The sun was coming up and the moon beginning to disappear in the sky as I approached Place St. Michel and the last leg of my walk.  It was too early for Keyser to be open so I went home to make a breakfast of yesterday’s baguette.  Paris had redeemed its eternal promise.

BRAGGING RIGHTS

One of the great pleasures of retirement in sitting back and watching your students flourish in the world of scholarship.  This is a special delight to me inasmuch as I am, as I have often noted, not really a scholar at all.  My latest intellectual grandchild [as it were] is a new book by Lindsey Swindall, one of the best doctoral students to come through the W. E. B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies during my long tenure as the inaugural Graduate Program Director.  Although I can take no credit at all for Lindsey's fine dissertation, she was my advisee for her first year in the program, and I figure that gives me some claim on everything she has ever done subsequent to that.

Lindsey's latest book, she tells me in an email, is The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955, now published by The University Press of Florida.  You can visit the press' web site here  I have not yet seen it, but if it is anything like her previous publications, it is well worth looking at.

BASTILLE DAY

July 14, 2014:  The two hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Great War that forever changed Europe, and the twelfth anniversary of the wedding of my son, Patrick, to Diana Schneider, a gifted, charming, dedicated contributor of effort and ideas to a variety of non-profit organizations and the mother of my grandchildren Samuel and Athena.  Susie and I celebrated the day by making one of our periodic outings to the Jardin des Plantes, I on foot and Susie on her Segway.  A trip to a botanical garden with Susie is a learning experience, since she started life as a botanist.  Senior moments, which all of us at this age suffer, for her take the form of forgetting the common names of plants even as she can produce the Latin names flawlessly.  She points to an unimpressive little flower and says "viola tricolor, now what is that called?"  "Pansy?"  I suggest tentatively.  "Yes, of course!"  At eight a.m. the Jardin was home to the usual joggers and a group of middle-aged oriental men and women doing some form of rather slow-moving meditative exercise.

The Cathedral of Notre Dame, our neighborhood church, set out several hundred folding chairs yesterday morning in the parvis in front of the church for the expected overflow crowd attending a commemorative mass in memory of those who lost their lives in 1914-1918.  We may wander over later and see whether we can freeload some of the blessings to be broadcast from inside.

Most of Paris has evaporated for the three day weekend, but the few restaurants still open will be jammed with tourists, so I shall make a simple dinner in this evening -- paupiettes pruneau, caramelized carrots, and rice, washed down with Sancerre blanc for Susie and Beaume de Venise rouge for me.