TIME PASSES

Each of us, through the accident of when and where we are born, marks different moments as turning points in our political or spiritual lives. For some, it is the assassination of Julius Caesar, for others, Luther’s nailing of 95 theses to a church door. For my grandfather, it was the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks – he sided with the Mensheviks and so I grew up in a strongly socialist but anti-communist home. Some marked the Moscow show trials as their turning point, for others it was the Molotov – Ribbentrop pact. For the Sunnyside Progressive School, which I attended from the time I was two until the early summer of 1940, when my parents moved to a new house in Kew Gardens Hills, it was Stalin’s murder of Trotsky in Mexico on August 21, 1940 – just too late to force me to take sides.

 

My own personal turning point was April 18, 1961. I went to bed the night of the 17^th thinking of myself as a left liberal and woke up the next morning to discover that the newly elected liberal president, John F. Kennedy, had just launched a failed invasion of Cuba. I and the other young faculty and graduate students at Harvard who had formed a little group called The New Left Club of Cambridge realized that we could no longer identify ourselves as liberals. I began to call myself a Radical, but I had no idea what that meant save that I was not any longer a supporter of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. It took me another 15 years and more to decide that I was a Marxist and to know in some detail what that meant.

 

Those of us who are politically engagé place great store by these moments and imagine that they are somehow unique in history, but of course they are not. This Sunday it will be 61 years since that botched invasion. How much more hopeful I was then that I am now, despite everything

HE SAYS IT BETTER THAN I CAN

Take a look at this by Phil Green.  It is absolutely spot on. Well done, Phil.

ANOTHER INSULT, AND BY THE FEEL OF IT A LIGHT ONE (QUOTING POOH BAH IN THE MIKADO)

Longtime readers of this blog will call that eight years ago I wrote an extended review of Thomas Picketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first^t Century, the review eventually running some 9000 words. I considered the book important and I learned a great deal from it. Drawing on a vast amount of statistical data assembled by himself and his colleague Emmanuel Saez, Piketty advanced two important and troubling theses about the structure and development of capitalism. The first was that the dramatic decline in economic inequality in the three decades or so after the Second World War (the period referred to by the French as les trentes glorieuses) was not the new normal of mature capitalism but a temporary dip, caused by the depression and the war, an anomaly already being replaced by the onward march of inequality.  The second was that because of the relationship between the rate of growth and the profit rate in capitalism (i.e. r>g), hereditary wealth inequality – what Piketty called patrimonial capitalism – would only get worse as time went on.  Despite his pro forma dismissal of Karl Marx, Piketty’s analysis struck me as an important and valuable contribution to a Marxist critique of mature capitalism.

 

Well, maybe it is something in the drinking water, I don’t know, but Piketty seems to have gone all warm and fuzzy about capitalism, particularly American capitalism. In a two-part interview excerpted in the magazine section of yesterday’s New York Times, he more or less takes it all back, to the evident surprise of the interviewer.

 

The last question of the two page interview has the interviewer, David Marchese, asking “you know, I do find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that after 40 years of worsening inequality you – the inequality guy - Mr. r>g – are publishing a book saying we’re on the right track historically. It’s sort of cold comfort to know we’re more equal today than we were 100 or 200 years ago. Really give me a reason to feel as optimistic as you do.” I will not quote Piketty’s answer. It sounds like a Biden flack trying to persuade a Bernie supporter to stay on board until the next election.

 

Sigh. Where is Herbert Marcuse when you need him?

 

 

 

 

GETTING AROUND

While I rode my exercycle this morning, which is a reasonably stressful but otherwise quite boring half hour, I amused myself by trying to remember all the places I have visited in my life. I was able to come up with only 30 of the 50 states, although I may have missed a few. I do not count states that I am nominally in when I am changing planes in an airport. (Far and away my most memorable such airport moment occurred on October 5, 1988. I was on my way to Australia to watch my son Patrick play a chess game and I changed planes in Los Angeles. As I walked through the airport, I passed a bar that had a TV set on and stopped to watch a little bit of the Bentsen – Quayle vice presidential debate. I was just in time to see the famous moment when Bentsen said “I knew John F. Kennedy. John F. Kennedy was my friend. You are no John F. Kennedy, Senator.”) Thirty or thirty-five states strikes me as very low for someone of my age. I do not really know the United States first hand very well.

 

When it comes to foreign countries, the numbers are even more strikingly tilted. I have never been to any part of South America and the closest I have come to Central America was a birdwatching trip to Trinidad with Susie. I have been to Paris more than 40 times – maybe as many as 50 – but I have never been anywhere in Asia or to Russia or to India. My only visit to the near East or Middle East was three days spent in Israel and Susie and I made a detour on our way to Paris. I have been to Dubrovnik twice, to Vienna once, to Italy a number of times, and of course to England, Wales, and Scotland, but never to Ireland.

 

The place I most regret never having seen is China. There was a time when I might have managed to arrange a speaking tour of some sort but at my age such exertions are out of the question.

 

I imagine many readers of this blog have traveled much more widely. I am reminded of Henry David Thoreau’s famous remark, “I have traveled widely in Concord.” (Thoreau was of course a native of Concord!)

 

Which leaves sub-Saharan Africa, which I have travelled to more than 40 times, mostly but not exclusively to South Africa during the 23 years that I ran my scholarship organization there. It is odd how parochial I am in some respects.

ADDENDUM

One of the weird things about a population with a fertility rate below replacement – which is to say 2.1 – is that there is no natural point at which the decline in population stops. Although it will of course take a long time, a population with a fertility rate below 2.1 will eventually cease to exist. At the moment, the world fertility rate is estimated to be roughly 2.4 with all 10 of the countries with the highest fertility rate being in sub-Saharan Africa, but the fertility rate has halved in the past three quarters of a century and it continues to go down. At some point, several centuries in the future, the people of the world will be faced with the question whether they want the human race simply to go out of style. Even for the youngest reader of this blog, several centuries is very far in the future, but it is not long in historical time. 

HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS.

There are so many terrible things happening simultaneously that it is difficult to keep track of them all. Last night, as I lay in bed musing on the hideousness of it all, I hit on a generational device for sorting through the bad stuff. There are the things I will, with any luck, live long enough to see, the things that my sons will live long enough to see, and the things that my grandchildren will live long enough to see.

 

Let us suppose I make it for another six years to the age of 94, long enough to see the outcome of the 2008 presidential election (assuming presidential elections have not been canceled before then.) My sons, Patrick and Tobias, are now 54 and 52 so they will be 96 in the middle and late 2060s. My grandson Samuel is 16 and my granddaughter Athena is 13, so they will be 96 as the 22^nd century dawns. What is the bad stuff that I, my sons, and my grandchildren will likely be dealing with? Me first.

 

The immediate pressing question, which I may live long enough to see answered, is whether Republicans will succeed in killing representative democracy in the next six years. They are certainly going to try – indeed, they are doing everything they can right now to undermine such democracy as America has. They are desperate because they are fighting a losing demographic battle. Their core supporters are dying out and they can count on a shrinking portion of the electorate. In the past 22 years, including the 2000 election, the Republicans have won the popular vote in the presidential election only once – in 2004. They have, to be sure, won the presidency three times in the last seven tries, thanks to the bizarre rules governing American elections, but their base is shrinking and if they do not kill democracy soon, they are dead meat.

 

It is a near certainty that the Republicans will lose the popular vote by many millions in 2024. I think it is also very likely that they will lose the electoral vote that year, but whether they will succeed in stealing the election is an open question. This year’s midterm elections, which I have a good chance of living long enough to see, will be extraordinarily difficult for the Democrats but they have an ace in the hole: the Supreme Court. The High Court will very likely overturn Roe V Wade in the next two months. If they do so, it is entirely possible that this act of self-destructive cruelty will trigger a tsunami of women’s votes that will hold the Senate and conceivably even hold the House for the Democrats. I have expressed my hopes in this regard in this space before so there is no need to do so again. We shall see.

 

If the Republicans lose the 2004 presidential election and then attempt to steal it by having Republican-controlled state legislatures send lists of phony electors to the House, and if after everything plays out, Trump or some other Republican mini me is declared the President in manifest contradiction to the plain outcome of the vote, I think a number of large Democratic states may simply refuse to accept the theft and then we are in totally uncharted waters. I hope, as the Parkinson’s takes me down or I succumb mercifully to some other life ending event, that I do not go to my grave knowing that I have lived just long enough to see the death of American democracy. There is precious little I can do, of course, save to donate money and speak out but I will do what I can and hope.

 

Forty-two years from now, when Patrick is 96 and Tobias is 94, the effects of global warming will have long since started to transform the human world. Rising seas will permanently flood Florida’s luxury ocean front properties and drive scores of millions from Bangladesh, as well as compelling New York to build seawalls â la Hollandaise.  Weather patterns will have changed sufficiently to shift dramatically the portions of the globe that can serve as breadbaskets to the world, with consequences beyond my capacity to project. The richer nations will be better able to adjust to these changes, as will the rich even in the poorer nations, but the impact on hundreds of millions if not billions of people will be dramatic and mostly negative, I imagine.

 

By the time Samuel and Athena have reached their middle 90s, all of the problems of climate change will be exacerbated by the dramatic shrinkage of populations around the world. China, which currently has more than 1.4 billion citizens, will have shrunk to 700 million or fewer and a number of other countries, including those of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and many others will have seen dramatic declines in their populations, which will also be aging, thus reducing the proportion of the population capable of working to produce the goods and services required by the total population. The United States will experience less shrinkage than many other countries because it has welcomed so many immigrants to its shores, but inasmuch as the white sub-portion of the American population has already started to shrink in absolute numbers, according to the 2020 Census, the internal political upheavals caused by the shift in the composition of the population will be enormous and rather difficult to predict.

 

Well, that is about as far as I had gotten when I finally drifted off to sleep. All in all, it is a pity that I am not showing any signs of dementia.

D'OH

Every so often, something perfectly obvious that has never occurred to me before strikes me and I experience what I can only describe as a Homer Simpson moment. I can still recall lying on the analytic couch 56 years ago or so talking about I cannot recall what, when it suddenly occurred to me for the very first time in my life that New England was named after England, that New York was named after York, and of course that New Orleans was named after Orleans.

 

Last night, I was lying in bed awake at 2 AM explaining to some imaginary audience why the rank of Captain in the Navy is the equivalent of Colonel in the Army (you may well ask why I felt called upon to explain that at 2 AM. I have no idea.)  As part of my explanation, I rehearsed the organizational structure of the Army, something I learned 65 years ago when I went off to Fort Dix to do the active-duty portion of my National Guard service.

 

As I explained (to nobody at all) that several regiments could be put together to form a brigade, it suddenly struck me why the commander of a brigade is called a Brigadier General. But how to explain that the next ranks up are, in order, Major General, Lieutenant General, and General? And then I realized that the Lieutenant General is the assistant to the General and stands in for the General when the General is not available. The Lieutenant General takes the place of the General – he is a place holder, a lieu tenant. 

 

With that, I was able to go back to sleep. It only took me 65 years to figure this out. I thought I would tell you and save you some time.