THE ESSENTIAL NARCISSISM OF BLOGGING

For a long time I read Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish, pretty regularly.  It is one of those blogs that collect lots of stuff from the blogosphere and link to it, which is convenient.  He is also gay, and a determined gay activist, which inclines me in his favor.  But he has certain obsessions that get on my wick, and they have driven me away from the site.  The dominant one, of course, is religion in general and Catholicism in particular.  Sullivan is some sort of Catholic [it is hard to tell just what sort] and he cannot stop talking about every aspect of religiosity.  He is adamantly opposed to the "Christianism" of the Evangelical Right and, as you might expect, over the top delighted with the new Pope.  He is also obsessed with the new atheist movement, if one can call it that.  It is a great bore.  Along with that, Sullivan is fixated on beards.  He has one himself, and he is forever posting pictures of men with full beards.  I mean, really.

Then, this morning, I had a rather embarrassing moment of self-realization.  I had spent a nervous hour or so disassembling my viola [taking off the strings, the bridge, the chin rest, and the piece to which the strings attach at the bottom] so that I could polish it with W. E. Hill & Sons varnish polish, a product that originates in Coventry, England, after which I had reassembled it -- a great challenge -- and tuned it so that it was ready once more to be played.  I thought to post a description of the process on my blog, but it occurred to me that my obsession with the viola is really no better than Sullivan's obsession with beards, so I decided that I would not do that post.

Except that it would appear I have.

Oh well.

A QUESTION FOR MY READERS

Tom Perkins, one of America's seemingly endless supply of idiot billionaires, says people should get a number of votes equal to the number of dollars they pay in taxes.  I wanted to write a snark about that, referencing the old Texas billionaire [or maybe, back then, he was only a millionaire] who put forward a "serious" proposal that each person's vote should be weighted by his wealth [I don't recall he mentioned women.]  But I could not recall his name.  My brain says it is "Howard Hunt" but neither Google nor Wikipedia confirms that.  [I keep being referred to E. Howard Hunt of Watergate infamy.]

Does anyone recall?

PRIORITIES

During my five years of blogging, I have tried to combine extended and very serious discussion of a wide range of intellectually demanding subjects with pointed commentary on the passing political circus, all of it leavened by personal observations about age, viola playing, Paris, cooking, and other light subjects.  I have written lengthy disquisitions on the writings of Plato, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Karl Mannheim, Sigmund Freud, Erich Auerbach, William Golding, among others, as well as extended introductions to Afro-American Studies and The Study of Society.  I have written for this blog an eight hundred page Autobiography, and a book-length explication of The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy.  I have even offered a report on that little-known classic, Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation.  No one can accuse me of shirking my responsibilities as a blogger.

So perhaps I may be forgiven if I am, over the next few days, more or less Missing in Action.  Today the second season of House of Cards is available on Netflix, and I am not sure whether I can bear to move away from my computer until I have watched the entire run.  I am sure my readers will understand.  Indeed, they may take a break from reading my blog as well.

SPRING SHOOTS

I have just come in from a vigorous forty-five minutes clearing ice and snow off my Camry and my wife's Yaris.  So it is perhaps appropriate, in an odd way, that I, the eternal optimist, should see a few shoots of Spring peeping up after this long winter of our discontent.  Bill de Blasio is elected Mayor of New York on an unabashedly progressive platform.  An odd outlier of a poll reveals that among Americans under thirty, socialism is favored over capitalism.  [The pollsters tactfully refrained from inquiring whether the respondents had any idea at  all what socialism might be.]   A South African friend sends me e-mail congratulations on drawing a large crowd in California to a talk on Marx [he had me confused with my former UMass colleague Richard Wolff, a leading Marxist theoretician, but his heart was in the right place, which is to say with Marx.]

In the old days, Marxists were prone to say "It has to get worse before it can get better."  In 1972, I was momentarily beguiled by this Hegelian tag-line into deciding to vote for Nixon against Humphrey on the theory that he would make things enough worse to bring on The Revolution, but when I entered the voting booth on Amsterdam Avenue just north of the Columbia Campus my body rejected this interpretation of Das Kapital and my right arm refused to pull the lever marked "Republican."  Well, Nixon won without my vote and it did indeed get worse, and then it got worse again, and then it got even worse.  But maybe we have finally hit bottom.  There does seem to be a genuine groundswell of anger at the banana republic inequality to which America has sunk.  Can it be that despite the obsession with Chris Christie and the coronation rites for Hillary Clinton there is something resembling a genuine upswelling of leftwing populist sentiment, a readiness once again to speak the language of unashamed class warfare?

Sigh.  One can but hope. 

I CALLED IT

You will recall that when the Republicans caved on the debt ceiling raise last time, I said that their threat of default unless they "got something" was now a dead letter and would not happen again.  This evening, Boehner rolled over and brought a "clean" bill to the floor of the House, where it passed with all but two of the Democratic votes and a handful [28] of Republican votes.

It is a small victory for me, of course, but these days I will take anything I can get.  A rather bigger victory for the country, and of course a victory as well for Obama.

JACQUELINE JONES' A DREADFUL DECEIT

Back on January 25th, when I was confined to one finger on my IPhone, I promised to write about Jacqueline Jones' new book, A Dreadful Deceit, when I returned home and could type with both of my forefingers.  The time has come to fulfill that promise.

Jacqueline Jones is one of the most distinguished and accomplished scholars now writing American History.  Intellectual disciplines go through moments of extraordinary accomplishment separated by long deserts of mediocrity.  I have many times observed that Philosophy, far and away the oldest of the disciplines, has had stretches of five hundred years or more when nothing much seems to be happening, interrupted by eruptions of sheer brilliance.  Think of fifth and fourth century B. C. Athens, twelfth and thirteenth century Europe and North Africa, Seventeenth and Eighteenth century Great Britain and France and Prussia.  The same seems to be true for the younger disciplines.  Sociology, now mired in the tedium of opinion surveys and statistical manipulations, was, somewhat more than a century ago, the most exciting of the Social Sciences, with Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim and many others transforming our understanding of the social realm.  There have been moments [not now, I think] when Literary Criticism sparkled.  Economics has flourished, especially when Karl Marx was alive.  Even Political Science, which is not really a discipline at all, has had its moments.  This seems to be American History's time.  The depth, richness, complexity, and sophistication of the work now being done by the best American Historians, especially on the story of African-Americans, is worlds better than what is being written by  philosophers, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and literary critics these days.  And in this moment of its flourishing, Jackie Jones is one of the very best.  Two of her previous books, American Work and Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, are among the best things ever written about America.

The subtitle of A Dreadful Deceit is "The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America."  Jones presents her book as the detailed stories of six individuals, ranging in historical time and place from seventeenth century colonial Maryland to 1970s Detroit, but these stories are a device for organizing a sweeping survey of the entire history of race in America.  It is, contrary to superficial appearances, a book with a strong driving thesis that informs Jones' selection of the stories and of the vast amount of historical detail of time and place that she weaves around those stories.  The thesis is nicely summarized exactly halfway through the book:

"The notion of racial differences between blacks and whites would provide a guiding principle for postwar [i.e., post Civil War] political relations and create a social superstructure to replace the legal institution of slavery.  Southern yeoman farmers could ignore the material similarities between themselves and freedpeople and embrace a notion of whiteness that guaranteed them considerable privileges and legal rights, without altering their lowly class status.  Politicians could appeal to their impoverished white neighbors and exalt solidarity among white men, all the while exploiting the labor of tenants, sharecroppers, and field hands regardless of color.  Yet despite (or perhaps because of) the widespread acceptance of the notion of race, that notion did not necessarily lend itself to proof -- or to rational discussion for that matter" [p. 151]

The seventeenth century colonialists who sought to make their fortunes on land granted to them by the English King needed labor to transform the virgin forests into fields on which they could grow cash crops for the home market [tobacco, rice, later cotton.]  Their first solution was to bring the labor with them in the form of indentured English workers, but though they continued to use these workers for almost two centuries, they posed certain problems.  The indentured workers were English subjects and hence had legal protections that the courts set up in the New World were bound to observe. 

The colonists tried to use the labor of the indigenous peoples, but this also posed problems.  These "Indians" were often members of powerful nations ["tribes"] with whom the colonists entered into political and military alliances, and to whom they could appeal for protection when their "masters" sought to exploit them.  One of the many fascinating elements in the early chapters of Jones' book is her detailed account of the political negotiations and shifting alliances between the colonists and the various indigenous nations.  These relationships were really no different in motivation from those into which European nations entered with one another in their endless jockeying for power and material advantage. 

The men and women captured, or sold into bondage, in West Africa and brought to Virginia and Maryland also belonged to nations, some them powerful, but those nations were too far away to offer protection, and so the Africans could be exploited and subdued to bondage more easily.

Race played virtually no role in all of this.  As Jones says early in her first chapter, "Local political economies and labor demands shaped by military imperatives -- not racial prejudices -- account for the origins of slavery in the colonies."  [p. 7]  So long as slavery was legal, the slave owners had no need to justify their treatment of their slaves, any more than they had a need of an elaborate ideological rationalization for their treatment of their livestock, their horses, or, for that matter, their tables and chairs.  But with the defeat of the South in the Civil War and the end of slavery, a situation emerged that was anomalous and required justification.  "[W]hites -- surrounded by a group of people toiling at ill-paid tasks, the men deprived of the right to vote and the women limited to domestic service -- devised a racial ideology from a harsh reality, an ideology that justified the immiseration of black men, women, and children, all in the name of racial difference. [p. 135]

The implications of this central insight, which Jones pursues through four centuries in the pages of her book, are profound, and of the very greatest importance for our understanding of contemporary politics.   The subordinated position of African-Americans, and now of Hispanic Americans, was inflicted upon them and exists today not because of the subjective, private, irrational prejudices of White Americans, but because it has served the economic interests of the rich while placating exploited Whites, whose disadvantaged status is made more or less palatable to them by the knowledge that their condition is at least superior to that of their black and brown neighbors.  So long as that subordinated economic position remains essentially untouched, not even the ascension to the White House of one of their own will address the roots of what today we call "racism."

It would be foolhardy of me to attempt to summarize Jones' book, for its real strength lies in the rich detail with which she fortifies and elaborates its central thesis.  This is not a quick read.  Indeed, it took me more than a month to read the entire book, even though it is only 301 pages long.  But it is a book of the very greatest importance, and I recommend it to you most strongly.

THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING

As many of my friends have noted, I am by nature an optimistic person.  I mean, I may be the last Old Marxist on the face of the earth to refer to our current disastrous economic system as "late capitalism," the implication being that it is on its last legs.  But I have just learned something that strikes terror in my heart, and it not even a certainty, just a possibility.

It seems that UMass is transitioning out of its own email system ["UMail"] to gmail.  When this happens for present and former faculty, some time this year, the techie on the other end of the line at the OIT Help Desk informs me that there will be no way for messages sent to the old address to be forwarded to the new address.  This means that everyone anywhere who tries to reach me by email will just get an error message -- "mail undeliverable."

This is a bleeping disaster!  I shall, of course, post my new address on my blog, but there is no way in UMail to send a message to everyone at the same time.  There is, in short, no Address Book of any use.  I can create a distribution list, I suppose, one name and address at a time, but that would take me longer, at eighty, than I may have left on this earth.

Meanwhile, UMass is spending a fortune to build a football stadium adequate to its ambition to have a Division I team.  You might think they could scratch one of the celebrity bathrooms in one of the SkyBoxes and devote the money to a bit of software that would forward the messages, but that, I fear, would require a total alteration in the priorities of the people who run UMass.

aaarrrggghhh!!!