ALERT

I completed a post earlier this afternoon on Sotomayor and racism, but because I started composing it several days ago, the quirky blog program inserted it into my blog lower down. Please page down to the blog entitled GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER to read it.

TO SEE OURSELVES AS OTHERS SEE US

A little while ago, while I was working on a serious comment on Sotomayor and racism in America [which I hope to post later today], I received an email message from my Icelandic philosopher friend Pall Skulason, who was the subject of an early post in 2007. Susie and I saw Pall and his wife, Ardur, in Paris when we were there last May. Pall attached to his email two pictures he said he had taken at that time. When I opened the attachments, I saw two very similar shots of Pall standing next to an old Jewish man who was seated at a computer. Both of them were looking at the computer screen. I thought to myself, "That's odd. Why would Pall send me these two pictures, rather than pictures of Susie or me." [I am being serious here, so I will thank the peanut gallery to withhold its sniggers]. I took a second look at the pictures, and managed to identify the old Jewish man by the shirt he was wearing. It was I.

I have long since become resigned to the fact that I am not anything like as handsome as I think I am [a fact that is reconfirmed each time I glance at my reflection in a shop window], but I really did think that I had managed somehow not to look my age. Not even in my fantasy life do I look like the mature Paul Newman or Robert Redford, but I was sort of holding out for Spencer Tracy or Karl Malden. Alas, it is not to be.

I think I understand now why the character Woody Allen plays in his movies always ends up taking a gorgeous woman to bed. I used to think that was his way of commenting ironically on his utter weeniness, but maybe he just thinks he looks like Bernie Schwartz [which is to say, for those who have forgotten, Tony Curtis.]

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

One of the burdens inflicted by the old on the young is the lore they have acquired over the course of their lives, without which, they are quite sure, the young will be unable to survive. In the old days, when this wisdom took the form of tips on avoiding sabertoothed tigers and poisonous berries, the young had good reason to pay heed. But in a world in which the old are constantly asking the young how things work, or are pleading with eleven year old granddaughters to stop their VCRs from blinking "12:00 12:00," it is a bit harder to market the wisdom of the ages. Still, the impulse will not die, so here I am, turning to a blog to pass on a bit of grandfatherly insight.



Like all really useful tips, this one can be summed up in a slogan, in this case one taken from the Canadian lit professor and media theorist who enjoyed a good bit of fame in the 60's, Marshall McLuhan. Those of you who are classic film buffs will remember McLuhan from his surprise walk-on in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. McLuhan's slogan was The Medium is the Message. This was actually a pop version of something Aristotle pointed out in the Metaphysics, namely that the nature of a thing is determined by its form, not by its matter. But I digress.



Let me articulate the bit of wisdom I am going to pass on by telling two stories. The first is about me personally. The second concerns something I watched on television. Both date from the 6o's.


Me first. David Suskind was a producer and talk show host whose vehicle, The David Suskind Show, was very popular in the 60's and 70's. After the '68 student uprising at Columbia, Suskind decided to do a show on campus radicals, and since I had played a role in the Columbia affair, I was invited to join four or five other young radicals on the panel. We were very full of ourselves, and laid into him unmercifully for the entire hour. At one point, we berated him about the absence of any women on the panel and even up called from the audience a female comrade to join us. When the show ended, and the credits were rolling, we figured we had really given the Establishment a death blow, and sat there with barely concealed smiles of satisfaction on our faces, until Suskind turned to us, and with genuine gratitude, said "Great show!' All of sudden, the scales fell from my eyes. This was his show, We would be gone next week, but he would be back. He wasn't afraid that we would be outrageous, radical, even obscene or blasphemous. All he was worried about was that we would be dull, and since we had not been, he had won.

The other story concerns the queen of schlock novels, Jacqueline Susann. One day she appeared on the David Frost Show to discuss her oeuvre with four critics. The two I recall most vividly are Rex Reed, who was her very good friend, and John Simon, an imperious, fiercely intellectual literary critic who holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and is famous for not suffering schlock gladly. Frost had arranged things so that Susann sat on the stage with him, and the four critics sat below in the first row of the audience. As the discussion proceded, Simon expressed his disgust with Susann's writing in no uncertain terms, at one point, actually saying that he would rather watch dogs fornicate than read one of her novels. In a few pithy sentences, he told her why what she wrote was not literature. What he said -- you will have to take my word for it -- was completely true. But she was sitting alone on the stage, and he was sitting down in the audience with three other interlocuters, so that he had to look up at her as he spoke, and that structural fact about the arrangement of the mis en scene completely defeated him. The audience was with Susann all the way, and Simon was reduced to a furious silence that came off, in the circumstances, more as petulence than as scorn.

In both cases, form defeated content. We young radicals could not have won even had we set fire to Suskind's set. And no matter how trenchant Simon's critique, it was impossible for him to triumph as a champion of genuine literature against the onslaught of schlock.

We can see contemporary examples of this same truth weekly on the Sunday morning talk shows. A serious, thoughtful, penetrating critic of the received wisdom appears for fifteen minutes on George Staphanopoulos's sound stage, and then Cokie, George, and the other pundits emasculate the guest with their "objective" evaluation. No one can win in that situation. The control of the format allows Stephanopoulos and the others totally to control how the content is received.

Recently, my younger son, Tobias, was invited to appear on Fox News to be interviewed about Obama's policies concerning gay and lesbian Americans. [Tobias was the Co-Chair of the Advisory Committee on LGBT matters for the Obama campaign, and is a leading gay legal theorist and activist.] He declined. It was, for me, one more proof of his essential wisdom.

So, be warned. Form dominates content. The Medium is the Message. You cannot win the game, no matter how brilliant your play, when your opponent owns the playing field and is calling balls and strikes.

IRAN

I have not posted anything about Iran, even though I have been mesmerized by what is happening there, because I know absolutely nothing about the country. I have never been there, I cannot read, write, or speak any Farsi or Arabic, and I have never even read a book about the history of Iran. But once again, brave men and women are risking their careers, their freedom, and their lives to join together in a struggle for liberation from tyranny, and I feel that I must at least acknowledge and cheer their efforts, so long as I am committed to blogging. What is happening right now in Iran may in the end prove to be more important than almost anything now taking place around the globe. For those who want to stay as plugged in to the aituation as ignorami like me can be, I recommend Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish [Google it]. Sullivan is the one conservative I read regularly. He is a very interesting character, and of course, since he is gay, and writes repeatedly about the fight for LGBT rights, I am partial to him for personal reasons.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER: FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE SOTOMAYOR CONFIRMATION HEARINGS

Now that the Sotomayor confirmation hearings have limped to a close [about as exciting as watching toxic waste dry], it might be time to stand back and try to get some perspective on the sorry spectacle. Nothing happened, of course. Going in, Sotomayor was a lock to be confirmed, and coming out, she still is. So, what was all of that patently racist obsession with her innocuous remark about a wise Latina? And why have senators and rightwing commentators alike represented the prospect of Sotomayor's inevitable confirmation as the Untergang des Abendlandes?

As always, Frank Rich has nailed the subject [see today's SUNDAY NY TIMES Op Ed page], but there are a few thoughts I would like to add.

First things first. The replacement of Souter by Sotomayor will have no discernible effect on the ideological lineup of the court. [Full disclosure: Fifty years ago, David Souter was my philosophy tutee at Harvard. He wrote a very nice paper on C. I. Lewis' Mind and the World Order, and went on to win a Rhodes, with a letter from me, among others.] It has been suggested that the Republicans were laying down a marker, to dissuade Obama from next time appointing a liberal judge, should he get the chance, but that is nonsense. Nothing that Sessions and his scrimy crew did will have the slightest effect on Obama's next pick for the Supremes.

Neither Sessions, nor Hatch, nor Graham, nor Cornyn is a plausible contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, and hence in need of placating the hysterical base of the party. Nor does any of them face a potential primary challenge from a farther right wannebe [if indeed there is room to the right of any of them without falling off the edge of the earth].

The Commentariat believes, and I agree, that the performance of the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee cannot possibly help the party with the rapidly growing Hispanic voting population, and is almost certain to hurt.

So what on earth is going on? What has driven Pat Buchanan to come out from behind his faux-Irish bonhomie and announce with alarm that the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor is nothing less than an assault on the lives, the sacred honor of white males?

It will help to remind ourselves of a little history, and to reflect, as I so often like to do, on an old movie -- this one the 1967 classic starring the incomparable Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier, GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER.

So long as persons of African descent were legally consigned, by the institution of slavery, to a permanently inferior legal status in the United States, Whites were free to play with them, live cheek by jowl with them, offer their babies for suckling to them, forcibly procreate with them, and even, as did the esteemed Thomas Jefferson, enter into quasi-consensual long term sexual relationships with them. No Southern white slave owning family would think of traveling by train without at least one slave close at hand to bring them a cup of water, adjust a pillow, or provide a ready victim should they feel the need to beat someone. A novel legal theory ginned up in contradiction to long-established traditions of English Common Law [partus sequitur ventrem] guaranteed that the children born to slave women raped by their white owners would follow the legal status of their mothers, thus saving polite society from an onslaught of dark-hued offspring whose names began with "Fitz."

But with the end of slavery, it became obsessively important to whites not only to devise ways to retain the labor services of their former chattels, but also to maintain rigid social barriers mimicking the legal differentiations of the slave era. Suddenly, the mere touch of a Black man's hand came to be felt by anxious Whites as a stain that could only be removed by violence. Whites who had, not much earlier on, felt easy in joking relations with their slaves [convinced, often mistakenly, that they got the joke] now searched the faces, the dress, the body language of persons of color for the slightest hint of a lack of deference. Failure to step quickly enough out of the way of an approaching White person on a city street could threaten a Black man with lynching. Suddenly, White women who had grown up being dressed by slaves could not stomach the taint of being served by Black women in a dress shop. White men who had been bathed as children by Black women now found it unthinkable to drink from a water fountain that had been used by a person of color.

As the era of legally enforced Jim Crow segregation ended, it came to be less and less socially and politically acceptable for Whites to express openly these obsessions, revulsions, and status anxieties. In their place, there appeared new modes of deference and social submission, disguised as standards of polite behavior. It was made clear to Black men and women that the price of their grudging acceptance by Whites was their willingness to adopt modes of behavior that signaled their promise not to challenge the superiority of Whites.

Enter my old movie. As those who have seen it will recall, the daughter of an impeccably liberal White couple [Tracy and Hepburn] announces that she is bringing to dinner her new fiance. Enter an impeccably dressed, manifestly superbly educated Sidney Poitier. At the end of an hour and a half, during which time Tracy struggles with his feelings, and finds common ground with Poitier's father, who is not at all persuaded that the proposed marriage is a good thing, the [presumed White] audience is permitted to congratulate itself on its open-mindedness

The movie is designed to allow White viewers to congratulate themselves on having rid themselves of the last vestiges of racism, but in fact it demonstrates their continuing presumption of racial superiority precisely by requiring of Poitier that he demonstrate his readiness to conform himself to whatever signals of deference Whites may demand.

This, after all, was the meaning of the Black is Beautiful movement, of the afros, of the slang use of "bad" to mean "good." [what Nietzsche, in another context, might have called the transvaluation of values.]

Which brings us back to Sonia Sotomayor. Now, the simple fact is that she has, throughout the course of her life, walked the Sidney Poitier path. But as barrier after barrier has fallen, as more and more Black and Hispanic men and women have simply foresworn the habit of signaling submission, a sizable population of White men have become hysterically frightened by the loss of their accustomed deference. It is, in a pathologically morbid way, fascinating that even White men who have ascended to the highest levels of power and status in American society can be terrified into incoherence by the mere presence of a woman of Hispanic ancestry who suggests that she might have something to contribute to the judicial process that they cannot.

As the hysteria builds, euphemisms fall by the wayside, and troglydytes like Buchanan say what even relatively unreconstructed throwbacks like Sessions have the sense not to mouth in polite company. I think we may allow ourselves a satisfied smirk or two at the discomfiture of the Grahams and Sessions. Call this one of the lesser benefits of the Obama victory.

ONE MORE THING

I swore that my last post would be my final word on the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, but then I watched a bit of Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn's questioning of Judge Sotomayor, and I could not believe my ears. Coburn was trying to get Sotomayor to say that Americans have a RIGHT to self-defense -- this a propos the whole business of carrying your own personal sub-machine gun and such. She tried to explain to him that the right of self-defense was written not into the Constitution but into the laws of the several states [you would have thought he would like to hear that, yes?], but Coburn, an Ob-Gyn, was having none of it. Americans want to know, he said, what you feel in your gut about this question.

Now, stop and think about this for a moment. Sessions, Hatch, Cornyn and that crowd have been hammering away at her for weeks because she once made a speech in which she suggested that a wise Latina might have some special wisdom to bring to the judicial process. NOT A BIT OF IT, they have been thundering. The law, nothing but the letter of the law, pure, unadulterated law, completely unaffected by life experience! And here is poor, simple Coburn suggesting that on one of the most hotly contested issues in constitutional law, Judge Sotomayor should be guided by her gut.

Why, I ask you, didn't Sessions and Hatch rise up and strangle Coburn in his own afterbirth?

ADVISE AND CONSENT: THE LAST LEGALLY PERMISSIBLE BLOOD SPORT

In an odd, twisted sort of way, it makes a certain amount of sense. If you are going to be elevated to the highest court in the land, there to sit for the rest of your life, empowered to issue legal rulings affecting generations of Americans yet unborn, you ought first to be required to wait quietly, a smile frozen on your face, while a brain-dead racist pipsqueak, a smarmy hypocritical Mormon wannabe, and a mean-spirited country-club Texan snarl at you and try their ineffectual best to besmirch your character. What better proof of judicial restraint? It is, I suppose, a salutary reminder to the candidate that though she is certain to be confirmed, and will, when she takes her seat next October, never again have to suffer the likes of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Orrin Hatch, and Jon Cornyn, still she will have to contend with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Everything intelligent and useful that can possibly be said about this sorry spectacle has already been said. The most important observation, now a part of the conventional wisdom in the neighborhoods I frequent, though not yet more than a whisper in the rest of America, is that white and male are distinguishing and limiting markers as much as are Latina and female. The ultimate expression of the power of white men is their ability, like the cheshire cat, to fade from view, leaving only the benign smile of unchallengeable privilege. I speak with objective judicial impartiality, because I am a white man, which is to say fully human. You must prove to me that you are capable of speaking with a like impartiality, because you are Hispanic and a woman.

I mean, Puleeeeze.