A RANT AT THE TV

All of us, I imagine, have at one time or another found ourselves yelling at the television.  I turned on MSNBC this afternoon just in time to hear a bright, cheerful young thing explaining to Ali Velshi why it makes no sense to require men to buy life insurance that insures them for, among other things, maternity expenses.  As she said with an enormous smile, “I am sorry to tell you this, Ali, but you are never going to get pregnant,” she was so manifestly pleased with her wit that she could scarcely contain herself.  Let us set to one side the notion, apparently anathema to a good many conservatives, that we should care about the well-being of others [even if they are no longer fetuses].  I feel the need to explain just exactly why it is in the self-interest of unmarried men to pay something to ensure the healthy delivery of babies.  If you know all of this a thousand times over, my apologies, but writing a blog post is a tad more satisfying than throwing fruit at a TV screen.

The life cycle is the central fact of human existence.  Assuming that we are fortunate, we are born, we grow to maturity, we live, we grow old, and we die.  These days in the United States that process takes, on average, a bit less than eight decades.

Now, to live, we need food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and – I am hesitant to acknowledge – cell phones.  It is also nice for us to have movies to watch, music to listen to, restaurants to go to, and airplanes to ride in.  Not absolutely essential, to be sure, but nice.  A great many people imagine that they can ensure their supply of food, clothing, shelter, and the latest upgrade in cell phones by prudently engaging in systematic saving, setting aside a bit of their income each year in a pension plan of some sort so that when their earning days are over, they can live on what they have saved.  But that is, I should like to point out, a very superficial and shortsighted view.

This is 2017.  Let us suppose that I am a thirty year old unmarried man gainfully employed here in Chapel Hill, NC.  My life plan has me retiring at 70 [I have one of those white collar jobs that does not wear the body down.]  That means that in 2057 I will stop earning and start spending my pension. 

Today, when I go to the grocery store for dinner, I will buy fresh fruits and vegetables [I am, let us suppose, a health nut.]  These fruits and vegetables are grown by farmers in California, harvested by low paid undocumented workers, trucked East by unionized truckers, and sold to me by the staff of the local Whole Foods outlet.  If I get sick, I will go to the Ambulatory Care Center [or ACC] at UNC Health Services and be looked after by a doctor and several attending nurses and medical students [it is a division of a teaching hospital.]

In 2057, who will grow, harvest, and truck East my fruits and vegetables?  Who will treat me when I am sick, as I imagine I will be from time to time at age seventy?  I will have the money to pay for them because I have for forty years prudently saved a little each year.  But although I am putting away money, I am not, as though I were a squirrel, storing bread and yoghurt and shoes!

The people who provide all of those things for me now will not still be providing them for me in forty years.  In forty years, those people will all pretty much be retired except for the medical students, who will be senior physicians.  No, I will be fed and clothed and housed and amused and treated by a raft of people who are now babies or children, if indeed they have even been born yet.

Think about that for a moment.  No matter how self-reliant I am, no matter how healthy a life I live, my survival in old age will depend completely on the labor of people who are being born now.  Is it in my self-interest that those people be born healthy, grow to maturity healthily, get educated, and live productive lives?  You are damned right it is.

Imagine I am rushed to the Emergency Room in 2057 with a heart attack, only to be told that the physician who was to attend me isn’t there because forty years ago her mother had inadequate pre-natal care and so she did not make it through the first year of life.  Of course, if maternity care had been part of a health insurance plan that unmarried men like me contributed to, thus making it affordable, that little girl would now be a physician capable of saving my life.

THAT, YOU TWIT, IS WHY EVEN ALI VELSHI SHOULD CONTRIBUTE TO A MEDICAL INSURANCE PROGRAM THAT INSURES MATERNITY CARE.

There.  That feels better.

A LACK OF IMAGINATION

The little back and forth about the title of Willem deVries’ book Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity got me thinking about the titles of my books, and I realized that no fewer than seven of my books have titles that are borrowed from other books, including one whose title is borrow from a book by me!

The first was the little book Barrington Moore, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, and I did in 1965, A Critique of Pure Tolerance [a joke title proposed by Herbert.]   This was followed by The Poverty of Liberalism in 1968.  This is actually a grandson title.  The original was Proudhon’s La Philosophie de la Misère, to which Marx responded with La Misère de la Philosophie [i.e. The Poverty of Philosophy] on which I then piggybacked.  The next year, I published The Ideal of the University, a steal from John Cardinal Newman/s classic work The Idea of the University [or homage as we say in the writing game].  The year after that I brought out In Defense of Anarchism, the title taken from a wonderful Mark Twain essay, “In Defense of Harriet Shelley.”  Then, in 1973, I edited a forgettable collection of essays by various authors called 1984 Revisited.  In ’85, having no better idea, I called my book on Marx’s economic theories Understanding Marx, an echo of my ’77 book Understanding Rawls.  Finally, in 2005, I published Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, a deliberate steal from and reference to the famous James Weldon Johnson novel Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.

As I was writing all this, I was blithely unaware of my habit of stealing titles.  I am sure it has some deep meaning, but I cannot for the life of me imagine what that is.

BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK

I have been shunning cable news since the House vote yesterday on the Republican health bill.  I simply could not stomach endless replays of the gloating and celebrating by Trump and the Republicans.  There is not the slightest chance of anything remotely like it passing the Senate, and there is good reason to hope that the vote will cost the Republicans some House seats in 2018, but the mere passage of the bill will apparently so roil the insurance markets that large numbers of people will lose coverage or experience unaffordable increase in their insurance costs.  In short, people will die as a consequence of the vote.

I fear some on the left have allowed themselves to be buoyed by the inability of the Republicans to pass major pieces of legislation.  Even in that absence, Trump has managed to do an extraordinary amount of harm.  People have been bemused and misled by the scattering of unexpectedly liberal things that come from his mouth or from his Twitter fingers.  In fact, every single domestic appointment of this administration, without exception, has been appallingly, unimaginably bad.  Department after department has been put in the control of someone who is publicly, on record, opposed to its core purpose.  The only saving grace is the fact that Trump has filled virtually no positions below the top, thus depriving the departments of the ability to carry out the ugly policies of the man or woman in charge.

We must continue to organize from below, putting forward progressive candidates and supporting everyone who is an improvement over the existing office holder.  The truth is that America is, for many different reasons, a morally and politically ugly country, and I honestly do not know how much we can do to change that, but this is where I live, so I have to try.

Now, that is as much air time as I am willing to give to the little Eeyore struggling to push his way past my inner Tigger.

WHO KNEW?

Forty-seven boxes did it, so I turned my attention to stuff crammed into my office closet.  In a box otherwise filled with a lifetime of offprints,  I surfaced a book entitled Knoiwledge and Politics, edited in 1989 by Marcelo Dascal and Ora Gruengard of Tel Aviv University.  In it I found an essay I had rotally forgotten writing, called "Absolute Fruit and Abstract Labor:  Remarks on Marx's Use of the Concept of Inversion."  It was inspired by the early hilarious book by Marx and Engels called The Holy Family.  A quick glane suggests that it is a version of part of Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.  

PROGRESS REPORT

I spent all yesterday packing books.  At this moment, I am up to 43 boxes, and I think another 20 or 25 should do it.  When I finished packing the last of the books by and on Marx [4 boxes] I had a tiny bit of space left in the last one, so I used it to pack my copy of the King James Bible.  It seemed appropriate somehow, but I shall be sorry to be without the Good Book for two months.

CURIOUS

I have begun the long tedious task of packing to move.  The day before the movers come, the extended family will turn out to help the old folks, but with all this time [we move on June 28th] I decided to start on my books.  I bought a stack of very nice easy to assemble boxes from  Staples and set to work.  I am labeling the boxes, which will be broken down into five sets [maybe 60-70 boxes in all.]  There is the main alphabetical run, all the Marx books [including the complete English translation of the works of Marx and Engels -- the German is in Paris], all the economics books, all the Afro-American Studies book, and everything by me, including books, journals or collections in which I appear [offprints are already in a box in my closet], my doctoral dissertation, extra copies of translations, etc.

This morning, I had gotten as far as I-12, the twelfth box of the first group, which brought me to the letter H, and as I climbed on a little step stool to reach the top shelf, I came on the rather small Hegel collection.  There I saw a book I had clearly never opened, by  Willem A. deVries, entitled Hegel's Theory of Mental Activity, published by Cornell in 1988.  I checked and there is no reference to me in the Bibliography or Index.

Now, I mean, how likely  is it that deVreis hit on this title completely independently of my 1963 book, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity?

Weird.

SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER

Like many of you, I should think, I spend a certain amount of time listening to National Public Radio, in my case when I am in my car running errands.  Today, I took Susie to the dentist and sat outside in my car waiting for her.  I tuned in a show called “1A,” short for “First Amendment.”  It is the successor to the Diane Rehm Show which ran here in North Carolina for many years from 10 am to noon five days a week.   The show is hosted by someone named Joshua Johnson who sounds to me like a young man [although everyone sounds young to me.]  The topic was what to make of Trump’s recent rash of adoring statements and friendly overtures to a pretty fair sampling of the world’s dictators – Putin, Erdogan, Duterte, Kim Jong-un.  In the course of the conversation, I heard something I had never heard before on NPR.  What struck me most forcefully was the spontaneous eruption it triggered from Johnson.

I should explain to my overseas readers that talk shows on NPR are almost always polite, informed, restrained, apolitical or if not that then politically balanced, the ideal fare for urban upper middle class college educated types who can be counted on to vote, to support good causes, to recycle, and to express sympathy for the poor, for the homeless, for the oppressed and of course for Native Americans.  Listening to NPR makes me feel clean, the way I have always imagined Catholics feel after finally going to confession.  The one thing missing from the typical NPR talk show is truth, naked, raw, unqualified, unapologized for truth. 

In the discussion today, the guests were being asked to speculate on the reasons for certain of Trump’s recent statements and actions:  the congratulatory call to Erdogan, the invitation to Duterte, the rather unanticipated statement that he would be “honored” to meet with Kim Jong-un.  Why would Trump speak in this way about rulers who murdered their own countrymen, even their own relatives, rigged elections, oppressed opponents, threw reporters in jail?

One after another, guests speculated that Trump was trying to upend long-standing American foreign policy, or was speaking thoughtlessly, or had some hidden negotiating strategy in mind.  To each of these guests, Johnson responded courteously, respectfully, clearly signaling that these were just the sorts of sober, serious, thoughtful comments he wished to encourage.

Then it happened.  One of the guests, I do not know whom it was, said quietly, “I think it is envy.”  Johnson erupted almost before the words had been uttered.  In a loud, flustered voice, he burst out, “But you cannot mean that you think he would like to do those things!  But, but, but, surely you do not mean that.”  Johnson went on in this way, speaking over his guest, who was trying, so far as I could hear, to say “Yes, I think that is just what he wants to do.”

It was so manifestly, obviously, undeniably true, and at the same time so nakedly partisan, that it made Johnson’s head explode. 

It was, in its simplicity, the truest thing I had ever heard on NPR.  I do not imagine that guest will be invited back.