THE PASSAGE OF TIME

I have been blogging for somewhat more than nine years, during which time I have written a staggering number of words for The Philosopher’s Stone.  When I began, I was a youthful seventy-five, recently retired after half a century of teaching.  Now I am a mature eighty-four, launching a new career as a Peripatetic Philosopher and wondering whether I will make it to the century mark.  Recently, this blog seems to have reached beyond lift-off to a sustainable orbit.  The comments section is filled with essay-length contributions even when I am away.  I feel like Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein who, after pounding on the breast of the monster and shooting it with repeated electric shocks, finally cries out exultantly: It’s alive!”

I shall probably write fewer lengthy posts during the time that I am teaching at Columbia, not merely because of the need to prepare but also because the class gives me an opportunity for expression that has for the past decade been provided by this blog. 

Not to worry.  You cannot keep a garrulous old codger quiet.

Now, anybody have a clue who wrote the anonymous Op Ed?

A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE TWENTY-FIFTH AMENDMENT

Everyone who has been paying any attention to American politics is aware of the discussions that have sprung about concerning the feasibility of removing Trump from office by invoking the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution.  It is obviously never going to happen, but I would like to explain why I think it would be a very bad idea.  Trump is obviously not incapacitated.  He has not had a stroke or a major heart attack.  He is quite capable of playing a round of golf or giving a [rambling] ninety minute public speech.  He is not in a persistent vegetative state.  He is not in a more severe stage of dementia than Ronald Reagan was.  He is just an ignorant, impulsive narcissistic bully utterly incapable of performing the normal functions of an American president.

Why then am I opposed to invoking the 25^th Amendment?  Quite simply, because if the Vice President, the cabinet, and Congress were to reverse the express choice of the American voters in that fashion, I think it is absolutely certain that there would be an irresistible push to do the same thing to a genuinely radical President, were one ever by some miracle to gain the White House, regardless of his or her personality traits.  Indeed, the policies of such a President would be taken as evidence of his or her instability.

President Obama had it exactly right in his maiden political speech yesterday.  The most effective check on Trump’s craziness is the vote, not the 25^th Amendment.  Four years ago, as he noted, only 20% of eligible young people voted in the midterm elections – Twenty percent!  One in five!  [Actually, he was rounding up for emphasis.  The figure was 19%]

If some of those rolling their eyes and hashing their tags at Trump would just pause in their tweeting and snapchatting long enough to go to the polls and vote, we could start to turn this country around.

SPLIT PERSONALITY

I am living in two worlds, and it is disorienting.  My mind is entirely absorbed by preparations for my Columbia class.  On Tuesday I begin what will be three classes – six hours – devoted to explicating the first ten chapters of Capital.  On my morning walks, I deliver little interior lectures, organizing my thoughts in a coherent narrative that weaves together literary theory, economic theory, English history, and ideological critique in a seamless, comprehensible series of lectures.  As I work in my head, I am oblivious of the world around me, and despite the dramatic nature of the material I am explicating, I am at peace with myself.

At the same time, the world is exploding.  I am so furious about the confirmation of Kavanagh that I can scarcely contain myself.  I hang on the responses to the anonymous NY TIMES Op Ed.  I watch Kamal Harris and Corey Booker light into Kavanagh, positioning themselves for the 2020 presidential race.  And of course, I kvell as Serena Williams blasts her way to the finals of the U. S. Open.

The New York trip was a greater physical effort for me than I anticipated.  It is clear that I shall need a day or two to recover after each expedition.  I suppose at eighty-four I should have been prepared.  Todd, a youthful whippersnapper in his late seventies, is off to Mexico, having returned from Chile in time for our class.  Ah, youth.

BRIEF REPORT

Despite the best efforts of the Columbia bureaucracy, the first meeting of the course was a rave success.  This is going to be fun.  The only problem is that with both Todd and me there, the students are going to have to be ruthless to get a word in edgewise.  But the entire expedition was exhausting.  At eighty-four, the mean streets of Manhattan are no cakewalk for me.

A NEW ADVENTURE

Tomorrow, before dawn, I shall set out for RDU airport to start a new adventure in my long life.  On a day on which the temperature threatens to hit 95 in the Big Apple, I shall fly to LaGuardia, catch a cab to Morningside Heights, and after touching base in various offices and having lunch with Todd Gitlin in the Pulitzer building café, I will go upstairs with him to launch Sociology GU4600, “The Mystifications of Social Reality.”   I feel a little as I did in 1958 when I went to the first meeting of my section of Social Sciences 5 to begin surveying two millennia of European history for a class of Harvard preppies who had learned a good deal more Roman history at Choate, Groton, and Philips Academy than I had managed to swot up in the preceding several months.

Columbia these days turns out to be less efficiently run than a V. A. hospital, if that can be imagined.  Over the last sixty years, I have one way or another taught at close to two dozen colleges and universities, and Columbia is by several orders of magnitude less well run than any of them, private or public, big or small, rich or poor.  Thus it is that as students begin the first day of the new semester, they will find that our course [alone among all the others] is listed on line as meeting in a room TBD.  We shall see whether anyone shows up.

Every Tuesday this fall, save Election Day, I shall fly up to New York, sometimes returning that night, sometimes staying over.  This means that there will be a regular hiatus in my blog postings, but I will keep you informed as to how it all goes.

Wish me luck.

UPDATE

Alas, we were not approved to adopt the cat.  It seems we could not realistically offer the cat a twenty year guaranteed home.  Now, the agency facilitating the adoption knew that before it sent us on the wild goose chase [are wild geese especially hard to catch, or does “wild” modify “chase,” not “goose”?]  Susie was bitterly disappointed, and I wrote a stern email to the agency.  It would be easier to adopt a Russian baby, were it not for the Magnitsky Act.

Rats.

READING TEA LEAVES

Several commentators have raised once again questions about critiques of Piketty’s work, and I would like to address them, but that will take a while since the questions are complicated, and a little later this morning Susie and I will be going to meet a cat we are interested in adopting [the central question is whether the foster parents approve of us as adopters], so let me start this morning with the guilty plea of somebody named Sam Patten.  Why may it matter?

The central question of the Mueller investigation is whether the Trump campaign, and Trump himself, conspired with the Russian government to try to tilt the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.  This is not an investigation of whether the activities of the Russians affected the outcome.  No one can know the answer to that.  However, we do know that Clinton lost for two reasons:  She was the worst candidate imaginable, and she ran a godawful campaign.  So why do I care?  Because if Trump’s complicity can be proved, it will deal a death blow to him and also to the Republican Party.

Mueller has now established, I believe, that the Russians did two things to influence the campaign.  First, they hacked into the email accounts of Clinton, the DNC, and others, and leaked the hacked emails in ways designed to hurt her chances.  Second, they used social media to target swing voters with messages ostensibly from Americans.

Most attention has focused on the first of these actions, in part because of the public discussion of the Trump Tower meeting at which Russian agents offered the hacked emails to Trump campaign representatives.  So everyone wants to know whether it can be proven that Trump himself had advanced knowledge of the meeting and approved its purpose.

The second Russian effort was more complicated, for two reasons.  First, to pay for ads on social media platforms, one must provide an authenticatable identity, and the Russians wanted to keep their involvement secret.  Second, to be effective, such a social media campaign just have access to a huge database of voters, identifying them by location, gender, age, race, religion, ethnicity, income, past voting behavior, and party registration, a database of the sort that political parties in the United States now develop and maintain.  [In my own local efforts, I have encountered the Obama campaign program VoteBuilder, and it is extraordinary.]

In February, Mueller indicted a host of unreachable Russians for the social media actions, along with one American nonentity.  On February 20^th of this year, I wrote a post in which I quoted this bit from a news story:  “Separately, Mueller’s office announced that Richard Pinedo, of Santa Paula, California, had pleaded guilty to identity fraud. Pinedo, 28, admitted to running a website that offered stolen identities to help customers get around the security measures of major online payment sites. It was not made clear whether his service had been used by the Russian operatives.”

Poor Mr. Pinedo, just an enterprising young man stealing online identities, had gotten swept up in the biggest legal case of the century.  That answered the first question:  How did the Russians get the false identities?  That left the second question: Where did they get the fine-grained voter data for their efforts?  Enter Cambridge Analytica, whose records Mueller subpoenaed.  Cambridge Analytica did data work for the Trump campaign?  And who headed up the Trump campaign’s data efforts?  None other than golden boy Jared Kushner, husband of Trump’s Number One daughter and secret passion, Ivanka.

But that left one link missing in the chain from Trump to Putin.  Enter Sam Patten.  Sam Patten, in addition to working for the pro-Russian Ukraine faction, also had links to Cambridge Analytica.

Aha!  If Patten, who is now cooperating with Mueller, can connect Cambridge Analytica to Pinedo and to Kushner, then the chain is complete.

That is why it matters that on the last day before the magic September 1 deadline, Mueller’s grand jury handed up an indictment against obscure Sam Patten.

Stay tuned.