NIGHT SWEATS

With the first meeting of my UNC course on Marx only thirteen days away, I can tell that the new semester is upon us because last night I had, yet again, a version of the nightmare that has troubled my sleep many times as semesters begin.  The details vary but the theme is always the same:  It is two weeks into a new semester, I have been meeting my two courses regularly, and suddenly I realize I am supposed to be teaching a third course as well that I have completely forgotten about.  Guilt stricken, I rush to the room, where [this is the part that shows it is a dream] the students have been waiting patiently for two weeks for me to show up.

Last night, since I intend sometime in February to begin a series of recorded lectures on David Hume in addition to the Marx course, the dream was that it was 9:15 a.m., my forgotten Hume lectures were scheduled to start at 9:30, and I was in the basement of a campus building trying to find the staircase out.  I had also, it seems, forgotten where I had parked my car [another recurring nightmare – this dream seems to have been a twofer.]

Oddly enough, something akin to this actually happened to me the first year I started teaching.  It was the Fall of 1955 and I was a twenty-one year old Harvard Teaching Fellow, just back from my European wanderjahr.  [A Teaching Fellow is Harvard’s notion of a TA.  Harvard also graded students A, B, C, D, and E.  It was not until I left Harvard and went to teach at Chicago that I discovered the rest of the world considered F the failing grade.]

I was assigned three discussions sections of Raphael Demos’ famous Philosophy 1 intro course.  One week that semester [not the first, thank God] I simply forgot to meet one of the sections!  I slunk around Harvard Square for a week, convinced the students were outraged.  In fact, of course, they probably waited three minutes past the mandatory seven and then split, delighted the section had been cancelled.  As I recall, the next week, nobody asked where I had been.

HO HO HO

Well, Thanksgiving has come and gone, Black Friday is just a memory, we celebrated Christmas in traditional Jewish fashion by going out for Chinese, my birthday is in the record books.  That leaves just New Year’s Day to survive and then the real world starts again.  Even the days are getting fractionally longer now.  God, how I hate the holidays.

By the time my Spring course has its first meeting on January 13^th, the Senate trial will have started, will have concluded, or else will be still on hold as Pelosi torments Trump.  Some things however are certain, or as Donald Rumsfeld used to say, are known knowns:  Susan Collins will be a fink, Joe Biden will be a dick, and Bernie will be doing better than the Mainstream Media commentators would like or are able to acknowledge.  For months now, I have been giving Bernie $9 automatically.  Today I received an email request from his campaign for $2.70 and responded with $250.  It is the season of giving.

Merry Christmas to all.

SOLSTICE MEDITATION

This time of year always makes me feel deracinated, which is to say uprooted.  There is a seemingly endless series of holidays, when there is no mail, stores are closed, and the TV is disrupted, all of it punctuated by my birthday.  The daylight dwindles to an annual minimum, even here in the south it is cold, and worst of all, school is out.  At the age of two my parents sent me to the Sunnyside Progressive School in Astoria, Queens [this was four years before Stalin had Trotsky murdered, a crime that tore the school apart], and for the next seventy-two years my inner calendar was governed by the tempos of academia.  Christmas and New Year’s Day were for me the middle of the year, not the end of the old and the beginning of the new.  My annual pocket datebooks, courtesy of the Harvard Coop, even began in June and ended in October, an arrangement that struck me as so natural that I was startled to discover that Susie’s datebooks start in January and end in December.

Twelve years ago, I retired, calling it quits after half a century.  When the next September rolled around, I could feel my juices stirring, only to realize in dismay that I had no classes to meet, no syllabi to draft, no students to welcome.  Ever since, I have been trying one way or another to get back into the classroom.  For the first several years, I taught in Duke University’s Learning in Retirement program, but that was not really the same thing.  I started and ran this blog, and I even spent a year as an unpaid volunteer at Bennett College in Greensboro, under the guidance of my old Afro-Am Chair Esther Terry, who was Bennett’s Acting President.  

Twice, I had the opportunity to teach a course at UNC Chapel Hill, once in the Public Policy doctoral program and once in the Philosophy Department.  Both were wonderful returns to the classroom, but that, it seemed, was that.  Desperate to continue teaching, I even recorded and posted on YouTube thirty lectures on several different subjects.

Then, three years ago, My son Tobias and his good friend Peter Pazziglini conspired to get me elected to Columbia University’s Society of Senior Scholars, and a year later, I began co-teaching a course at Columbia with my old student and friend Todd Gitlin, who had somehow transitioned from a youthful radical, the third president of SDS, into a distinguished much published senior professor and Director of the Pulitzer School of Journalism’s doctoral program.  I was back!

The second go-round of our course has now ended, and I await the very last paper before we submit the grades and close the books on Sociology GU6400.  In two weeks and a bit more, I shall start teaching Philosophy 471 [“Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism”] in the UNC Chapel Hill Philosophy Department.  This academic year, I actually have what the elite sector of American higher education considers a half-time teaching load.

How long can this continue?  On this, my very last day as an eighty-five year old, the only reasonable answer is, Who knows?  There is but one thing more to say, and Dylan Thomas said it best:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

A GOOD DEED FOR CHRISTMAS

In front of our retirement community runs a road called Mt. Carmel Church Road, which, as you might expect, runs past Mt. Carmel Baptist Church.  A quarter of a mile before Mt. Carmel Church Road heads sharply downhill and ends at Routes 15/501, there is an intersection.  Some long while ago, the county mysteriously decided that the intersection needed to be turned into a rotary, so for months now, traffic has been slowed, and on occasion reduced to one lane with men at either end holding STOP/SLOW signs with which they stop long lines of traffic and then let them crawl by.  Finally, last week, the work was done and the new rotary went into operation.  It is a quite unremarkable rotary in the center of which is a circular plot of grass.

Susie, ever the botanist, decided the plot needed some flowers.  Off we went to a plant store she used to patronize forty years ago when she lived in Chapel Hill before we got married.  We bought ten tulip bulbs and a bulb planter, and this morning, on Christmas Eve, we put some water in a bucket, drove to the rotary, parked, dodged traffic, walked to the circular grassy plot, and planted our bulbs.  Two old geezers in their eighties huffing and puffing as they planted.  Then we drove home and threw our pants, muddy from the dirt we had dug up, into the washing machine.  With luck, next spring there will be flowers to gladden the eye and lift the spirits of motorists as they enter or leave Mt. Carmel Church Road.

I hope God takes His eye off the sparrow for a moment and notices.  I think I need all the good will I can get.

SO, WHAT ELSE IS NEW?

In the good old days, before Twitter, before SnapChat, before Google, before YouTube, before FaceBook, before the Internet, before computers, before Cable News, before Xerox machines, almost before electric typewriters, when there were three networks, each with a half hour of news a night, it was possible to think that if you had an idea, and hadn’t heard it on the Huntley/Brinkley show or in the orotund tones of Walter Cronkhite, it was probably original and worthy of expression, even perhaps of the immortality of print.  But then, everybody on earth got a megaphone, and it turned out that America was chock full of people who had your idea, some of whom had been so impolite as to express it before you got a chance to.

I was going to write a blog post explaining that Pelosi’s decision to delay transmission of the impeachment vote to the Senate was yet another master stroke, designed not at all to put pressure on McConnell, but instead to drive Trump wild until he demanded a trial with witnesses so that he could get the acquittal he so desperately craves.  I was going to, that is, until I spent a little time this morning reading today’s spate of opinions, and discovered that my shrewd observation was already old news.

Well, if I may paraphrase Rick in Casablanca, I’ll always have the Subjective Deduction.

THE SCHOOL MA'RM SNAPS THE WHIP

Yesterday, I watched as much as I could stand of the House proceedings, muting the Republican speakers and from time to time switching to Turner Classic Movies.  Happily, I was in my seat glued to the screen for the actual votes on the two articles of impeachment, so I was able to watch in real time one of the most remarkable moments in Congressional history.  Nancy Pelosi was in the chair for the voting, and like the rest of political junkie America, I stared at the numbers on the screen as, one by one, they migrated from NV [Not Voting] to Yea or Nay [or, in the case of Tulsi Gabbard, Present.]

When the voting on the first article was finally done, Pelosi banged her gavel and announced that the first article had passed.  The Democratic members were gathered in a large scrum on the floor to Pelosi’s right.  With the announcement of the result, a few Democratic members began what was obviously going to be prolonged applause and cheering.  Pelosi turned her head ever so slightly in their direction and gave a barely perceptible admonitory wave of her hand, at which the applause abruptly stopped and there was silence.

It was a breathtaking exhibition of her absolute control over her caucus.  There has not been another Speaker in my lifetime who could have pulled that off, not even the legendary Tip O’Neill.

AS TIME PASSES

I met Noam Chomsky more than sixty years ago when he came to Harvard to take up a Junior Fellowship.  Although I think I have not seen him in person in almost half a century, I have seen pictures or videos or TV appearances, and lately I have watched some of his many YouTube appearances.  He was always the same man, older as the years went on, but otherwise unchanged.  Yesterday I came across this quite recent interview on YouTube, and was astonished to discover that he now has a full white rabbinical beard and something of a pot.  I suddenly felt quite old.