AND SO IT STARTS

In the NY TIMES today, Mark Penn and Andrew Stein have an Op Ed column calling for the Democrats to shun the left-wing socialistic extremism of Sanders and Warren and return to the winning ways of Bill Clinton.  I am not going to summarize it.  You can read it here, if you have the stomach for it.

I think it is entirely possible that Hilary Clinton will make another run in 2020 [billed, no doubt, as her re-election campaign.]  Let us not be fooled.  Right now, the Clinton forces are the best organized, best funded, and most deeply embedded faction of the Democratic Party.  If progressives do not field a host of good candidates in 2018 and win a ton of races, we will see a replay of 2016.

If that happens, I can kiss progressive politics goodbye for as long as I figure to live.

WORTH A READ

For what it is worth, here is an apparently more knowledgeable discussion of the subject about which I blogged a little while ago.  This does not sound very hopeful, even if America were to pledge not to attack North Korea, as Chomsky has, I gather, suggested.  This is a scary world.  It is no satisfaction at all that I, along with many others, anticipated these sorts of problems more than half a century ago.  Saying "I told you so" as the bombs drop is right up there with Slim Pickens riding a nuke down in Dr. Strangelove  waving his hat like a bronco buster.

MORE ON NORTH KOREA

First of all, let us be very clear.  I do not read, write, or speak Korean.  Although one of my books has been translated into Korean, I know absolutely nothing about the country save what little I have read in English.  Even though I have spent eighty-three years in the United States, I often find it difficult to figure out what the American government is going to do.  So take what follows for what it is worth.

Newspaper reports paint Kim Jong-un as unstable and irrational and brutal, but not at all as self-destructive or self-defeating.  I am guessing he knows that if he launched a missile attack that hit any part of American soil [Alaska, if that is all he can reach -- who knows?] the result would be a nuclear response that would obliterate his country and result in his death.  Mind you, I do not know this, not at all.  I am guessing.  If what I have read is true [remember, everything I think I know, whether I learned it from CNN or Noam Chomsky, is second-hand and could quite possibly be wrong], a non-nuclear "limited" war between North Korea and South Korean and American forces would result in huge numbers of Korean deaths on both sides and a great many American deaths.

I seriously doubt that Donald J. Trump could find North Korea on a map with country labels attached, I am reasonably certain that he would not care in the slightest who got killed in a war, so long as his real estate holdings and brands were untouched.  I am extremely fearful that his tiny ego would become deeply engaged by any perceived slight from North Korea to his manhood or his magnificence.

There are extremely deeply rooted institutional obstacles to independent actions by the American military countermanding what they perceive as irrational orders from the Commander-in-Chief, but in the present circumstances I could imagine that saner heads in the Joint Chiefs would find ways to slow-walk such orders and even subvert them.  There is precedent for that during the Nixon presidency, I believe.

All of which, put together, is unsettling, to put it as calmly as I can.

Meanwhile, I am quite certain that the Trump Administration is right now doing great harm to the most vulnerable among us here in America, and will continue to do that at least until 2018 and probably until 2020.

From all of the above, I draw the simplest and most banal conclusion imaginable, namely that we must struggle to win back the House and even, God willing, the Senate, and that we must try to wrest from the Republicans the 1000 seats in State legislatures that slipped away while Obama floated above the fray with inimitable grace.  In short, I conclude that our only hope of a better future lies in banal, unexciting ordinary politics.

More anon.

VERY SERIOUS

We are at a perilous moment vis-a-vis North Korea.  I am not interested in apportioning blame, of which there is a great deal to go around.  That can come later.  None of us at this point can do anything other than hope that there is not a war, in which huge numbers of people would die.

A RESPONSE TO TWO COMMENTS

On Sunday, I posted a brief essay in which I linked to a Nicholas Kristof column detailing some of the extraordinary gains that have been made in recent years in reducing starvation levels of poverty in the world, combating age-old scourges like leprosy, and making clean water available to those without it.  I suggested that these gains put into perspective the evils visited on us by the infantile narcissistic bully in the White House.  I was, I confess, somewhat surprised by the response of LFC, seconded by local details from S. Wallerstein.  “Before celebrating too much about the decline of extreme poverty, some things should be noted,” LFC wrote, citing, among other things, the fact that three-quarters of a billion [!] people remain in extreme poverty world-wide.  S. Wallerstein offered a few details about just how little “$1.90 a day” will actually buy in Santiago, Chile, where he lives.

As it happens, I agree with every single word both LFC and S. Wallerstein wrote, but I wondered, Why did they feel it necessary to write what they did?  To whom were their comments directed, and for what purpose?  I puzzled over this during my morning walk [to which I have returned after several days spent rehabilitating my aching and aging back] and here is what I have come up with.

There are two very different standpoints from which one can view the world: as passive, though interested, observer, and as engaged activist.  The observer and the activist have the same information available to them [although the activist may have a wealth of particular and intimate detail about one problem or region of the world that the observer lacks], but their orientation to that information is quite different.  Compare the point of view of an aid worker who spends years in the field working to reduce the extreme poverty of the men, women, and children in one village in Africa with the point of view of one of us reading Kristof’s column.  The aid worker, we may suppose, spends ten or twelve hours a day helping the people in the village to dig wells that yield clean water, teaching more productive ways of using their desperately meagre resources to increase crop yields, calling in assistance from a network of city lawyers to fight the exploitation of local landlords.  She does this not for a week, or even for a month but for years on end.  A new well is a victory, an expansion of the crop yields a triumph, one court victory against a rapacious landlord, after a series of disheartening defeats, a cause for celebration.  She is perpetually aware of how small her victories are when measured against the appalling misery and poverty in the midst of which she lives and works.  But she is a human being, not a balance sheet, and she must take heart from every advance, no matter how small, if she is to keep at her work and draw emotional sustenance from it.  For her, the Kristof column is a reassurance that she is not alone, that her work, along with that of so many others, is having a measurable impact on the world’s poorest and most powerless people.

The observer contemplates the world equanimously and with admirable balance, ever on the alert for false voices saying the crisis is over, the worst is behind us, we may relax our efforts and pursue our comfortable lives untroubled by the misery of others.  To the observer, who is, after all, not actually doing anything about poverty, or leprosy, or unsafe water, save perhaps casting a vote every two years and donating a bit of money now and again to Doctors Without Borders, the moral high ground is seized by those whose condemnation of evil is unrelenting and every positive report is rejected as a self-serving invitation to inaction.  Any celebration of progress is viewed as a form of moral back-sliding, of that worst of all political sins, moderation.  To the observer, the Kristof column sounds suspiciously like the self-satisfaction of a Clintonian.

Let me speak personally for a moment.  I have done precious little in my life save offer opinions, and thanks to certain oddities of the mid-Twentieth Century American Academy, the more extreme the opinions I expressed, the more my salary went up.  But I did after all actually do something besides offer opinions – for twenty-five years I raised bits of money to help poor Black young men and women to attend historically Black universities in South Africa.  The amounts were trivial -- $40,000 in a good year – but thanks to the exchange rate, it was enough to enable fifty or sixty young people each year to pay the portion of tuition due at registration, thereby making them eligible for government funded loans.  I was painfully aware that my bursary recipients were so few in number that my efforts did not even cause a blip in the South African university enrolment figures, but when I met the students on my annual visits, I drew encouragement and strength in my effort from their excitement, energy, and youthful enthusiasm.  I even received a cherished award after all those years in the form of an honorary degree from the University of the Western Cape, conferred on me by the titular Chancellor of the university, Archbishop Desmond Tutu himself!

Had someone sought to throw cold water on my excited reports of my trips to South Africa, pointing out to me that my efforts had failed to correct the deep-rooted educational inequities in South Africa, my response would have been that the comment entirely missed the point.  I needed any encouragement I could muster to keep at the effort for a quarter of a century, long after the novelty had worn off and the attention of lefties like myself had moved on to other inequities, other needs, other peoples.

So I should like to suggest that we allow ourselves to rejoice in Kristof’s statistics.  The magnitude of the improvement in human life summarized by those statistics is enormous.  Save the cavils and cautionary reminders for those who take Kristof’s column as an excuse for inaction.

GLEANINGS FROM THE MORNING NEWSPAPER

Two columns in the NY TIMES this morning, combined with my son Patrick’s account of a recent family trip to Tokyo, give me a striking and somewhat counterintuitive picture of the way of the world, a picture that does not bode well for America in the decades ahead.

The first column, by Nicholas Kristof, chronicles the dramatic improvement in the health and living conditions of the poorest hundreds of millions of men, women, and children in the world.  Since 1985, Kristof tells us, the incidence of leprosy, an age-old scourge of the poor and malnourished, has been reduced by 97%, and may be reduced effectively to zero by 2020.  Kristof writes, “There has been a stunning decline in extreme poverty, defined as less than about $2 per person per day, adjusted for inflation. For most of history, probably more than 90 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty, plunging to fewer than 10 percent today.  Every day, another 250,000 people graduate from extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. About 300,000 get electricity for the first time. Some 285,000 get their first access to clean drinking water…Family planning leads parents to have fewer babies and invest more in each. The number of global war deaths is far below what it was in the 1950s through the 1990s, let alone the murderous 1930s and ’40s.”

These figures are staggering.  If one believes, as I do, that each human life has the same worth, and that one person’s pain or suffering ought to count for as much in the universal felicific calculus as another’s, then the sheer magnitude of these improvements swamps those bad things currently being done to and by Americans that I and many others obsess over.  One does not have to be a Polyanna, not even a Tigger, to celebrate the fact that every day 285,000 people get access to clean drinking water for the first time.

The second column I read this morning is by the always interesting Frank Bruni, a lament to the increasing unlivability of his beloved New York City.  Bruni writes sadly, angrily, of the congestion in the subways, of the breakdown of the city’s infrastructure, of the eternal political antagonism between the mayor and the governor.  When I grew up in New York, seventy years ago, it was a manageable city, a human city, a city where a boy from a lower middle class family in Queens could ride the IND line to Manhattan and explore.  Later, in the 60’s, when I returned to teach at Columbia, things had become a good deal worse, especially for the shrinking working class population.  Bruni’s column suggests that the New York to which I shall be returning this Fall as a member of Columbia’s Society of Senior Scholars has become unmanageable for all but the very rich, who wall themselves off from the quotidian life of what was, and perhaps still is, America’s premier metropolis.

Patrick’s description of Tokyo –vast, modern, new, as active below street level as it is above – offered me an image of what New York might have been, had the necessary public expenditures been made over the decades to repair, replace, and expand the public spaces.  The only great city with which I am intimately familiar now is Paris, and though it is not a Tokyo, new, gleaming, utterly modern, yet it remains a thoroughly human city where one can enjoy the delights of an urban existence.

What lessons do I learn from these two columns and Patrick’s travelogue?  The first, as you might expect, is that Marx was right.  Capitalism is and remains the most revolutionary force ever unleashed on the human world, revolutionary both for ill and for good.  As Bruni writes, “For most of history, probably more than 90 percent of the world population lived in extreme poverty, plunging to fewer than 10 percent today.”  It is capitalism that accomplished this.  Marx was not a Luddite.  As he observed in a famous passage in the Manifesto,  “[T]he bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.”  [Compare this with the following remark by Sherlock Holmes:  “It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”] 

Socialism, when it comes at long last, will conquer the hideous inequality of capitalism, but the groundwork, as it were, will have been done by capitalism’s destruction of feudalism and slavery.  We may allow ourselves to dream, with Leon Trotsky, that under socialism, “[m]an will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”  [The great concluding lines of Literature and Revolution.]

The second lesson I learn from today’s proof texts and Patrick’s report is that in this century, it will not be America that leads the way to a better world.  America is very wealthy, if one aggregates rather than averages, and it is and will remain the one great military superpower, but for all that, the rest of the world may simply pass us by, so that we become an immensely rich, unimaginably powerful backwater.  The evidence suggests that our universities will continue to be the Mecca for graduate students in many disciplines, but those coming will prepare themselves for substandard living conditions, as American students traveling abroad did when I was young.  Large regions of our nation will wear virtual warning signs, “Proceed at your own risk!  The natives are poor, nasty, brutish, and short on human decency.”

Well, I seem to be in a dyspeptic mood today.  A Trump presidency will do that to you.

THE OLD PHILOSOPHER RETURNS, OR THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY APARTMENT.

When I was a boy, I lived in a tiny row house in the new development of Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, New York.  One day, my father and I rode by bus to the Jamaica Public Library where I checked out, on my father’s card, a fat, stubby book containing all four novels and fifty-six stories chronicling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.  I was enthralled, and the next Christmas, my parents gave me my very own copy, which I read and re-read until the cover frayed.  I even joined an association of Sherlock Holmes fans called The Baker Street Irregulars and every three months received their journal, filled with faux scholarly articles about disputed minutiae of the life of the great detective.  Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Holmes stories, aspired to a more distinguished career than scribbler of lowbrow detective fiction, but the popularity of the stories trapped him.  Finally, in 1893, he could stand it no longer and contrived to kill off his hero in the famous Reichenbach Falls finale of The Final Problem.  Conan Doyle was rewarded nine years later with the coveted knighthood, becoming for all time Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Like his musical contemporary, Arthur Sullivan, his aspiration to the higher reaches of art had been rewarded by a tap on the shoulder and elevation to the peerage.  But the Holmes fans, who were legion, would not leave poor Sir Arthur alone, and in 1903, with a contrivance that would make a modern soap opera writer blush, he brought Holmes back from the dead in The Adventure of the Empty House.

I have been absent from these pages for only two weeks, not ten years, my time completely occupied by moving, if not to an empty house, at least to an empty apartment.  But the worst of the move is now behind me, thanks to the efforts of my son, Tobias, and my wife’s grandsons, Noah and Ezra, who gathered here two days ago to unpack my books and put them on the shelves in alphabetical order.  Although there are still many pictures to be hung [including one large canvas of abstract blue splotches which my wife and I agree looks better horizontal than the intended vertical], I am sufficiently settled in to return to my daily animadversions against the contemporary scene. 

As I anticipated, the world took no notice of my absence.  The two most notable political developments in the interim were the regrettable loss of Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s 6^th Congressional District and the apparent inability of the Senate Republicans to complete the medical evisceration of the poor.  The second, which gives us reason to hope, is far more important than the first, for all the attention the by-election received.  With the soupçon of Tiggrish optimism I have managed to recapture during my absence from blogging, I allow myself to adopt the happy view that this and other by-elections portend big losses for the Republicans in the 2016 Congressional elections.  If we can produce the same magnitude of shift from Republicans to Democrats in three dozen CDs around the country, we will put paid to Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randesque adolescent fantasies.

Far more troubling is the increasing evidence of the profound mental instability of the President.  Rather than speculate on what the future holds, I will refer you to this recent analysis by my son, Tobias, who thinks more deeply and passionately about current political affairs than I can manage.

To be brutally honest, I am deeply fearful that Trump will act impulsively and dangerously on the international scene, moved in his infantile narcissistic way by an imagined slight.  We must ask seriously whether the senior military would collectively refuse to obey an irrationally self-destructive order coming from the Oval Office.

In His Last Bow, published on the eve of World War I, Holmes says to Watson, “There’s an east wind coming, Watson." Watson misinterprets the meaning of the words and says, "I think not, Holmes. It is very warm."

"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

That was a simpler age, and neither Conan Doyle nor his readers could anticipate the horrors of Dachau and Buchenwald, of Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki that lay not too far in the future.  Would that I could write with such sublime confidence of our own cold east wind.