IT ISN'T EVERYTHING, BUT IT IS SOMETHING

There is a lovely scene in The Sting when Robert Redford, a two-bit grifter, goes to see the legendary Paul Newman. who is hanging out in a whorehouse, to find out how to play the big con.  After sobering up, Newman tells Redford, "you won/t get everything, but you will have to be satisfied with what you get."

I have always considered that wise advice in politics as well as in grifting.

Guilty on all counts is something. It is not everything I want, but I will have to be satisfied with that. It is pretty good!

MY APOLOGIES

 I was dictating t my phone.  I meant Achim, of course.

THANK YOU, ADAM

 for that thoughtful and kind comment. I was much touched by.

A MEMORIAL DAY MEDITATION

Eric Erickson, in his finest book, Childhood and Society, writes wisely that “An individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of history.”  In my 91^st year, as I approach the end of my lifecycle, I often reflect on how much my view of the world has been shaped by the particular accidental coincidence of my lifecycle with one segment of history. My father’s father was born in 1879. He devoted his life to the Socialist party in New York City and died in 1944, just before the second world war ended. I was born late in 1933, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt began his first term as president. I was a senior in Harvard College before I saw a Republican elected to the White House. My early years were obsessed with the dangers of nuclear war and as I grew older, despite the terrible inequities of race and sex and class that beset my country, it was possible for me to believe that things were getting steadily better. The last half of my life has been spent in an increasingly frustrating struggle against the retreat from those early advances. Now, I await the outcome of an election that may effectively end whatever dream of democracy I had as a youth.

 

This past semester, I had the great pleasure of leading a study group at Harvard in a close examination of volume 1 of Capital, a book which I remain convinced is the greatest work of social and economic analysis ever written. In the last of my 12 two hour lectures, I spoke to those young people about the necessity of continuing the struggle without Marx’s confidence in the eventual victory of socialism to which he devoted his life’s work.

 

I am constitutionally unable to give up the struggle or retreat into a literary quietism, but I no longer believe alas that the arc of history bends toward justice.  Bound by my Parkinson’s to a desk chair or television set, I must take my pleasures where I find them and hope during this coming week to see Trump convicted in a court of law. I do not believe that will change the world, but it will certainly give me some pleasure, and that is perhaps the most I can ask of it

SIGH THEY NEVER LEARN.

56 years ago, I was a young associate professor in the Columbia philosophy department, on leave for the year to teach at Rutgers University, but still living half a block from the Columbia campus on 115^th St. between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive. My wife and I had just had our first child, Patrick, who was about two months old when things blew up on the campus. It is not an important part of the story, but it is worth noting just for the sake of keeping the history correct, that there were actually two student protests that spring. The first was carried out by a group of white students associated with SDS, who occupied the administration building to protest Columbia’s involvement in war work supporting the Vietnam war. The second was carried out by a group of black students who occupied Hamilton Hall to protest Columbia’s announced intention to build a new gymnasium and Morningside Park, which the residents of Harlem considered part of their world.  The new gymnasium, needless to say, would be open only to Columbia students, not to residents of Harlem. 

 

And here we are again. In 1968, the Columbia University administration, headed by Grayson Kirk, handled the whole matter very badly, with the result that David Truman, a distinguished political scientist who was widely thought to be the next president of Columbia, was forced to complete his career as the president of Mount Holyoke College instead.

 

How might the current president of Columbia have handled the matter better? The answer seems to me to be obvious, but for reasons which are equally obvious I am sure it never so much as occurred to her. As soon as the first evidence of student concern about the disaster in Gaza popped up, she should have called in the managers of the Columbia endowment and told them to sell all the shares in companies in any way involved with Israel’s attack on Gaza. I gather the Boeing Corporation makes bombs that the United States has been delivering to Israel and that Israel has been dropping on the Palestinians. I am sure there are other holdings in the endowment that are suspect in the same way. There are undoubtedly also ways in which the University is involved with Israel, and they should have been put on hold by the president. Then she should have asked for a meeting with all of the students, of any faith, and whatever their position on the current situation in the occupied territories. She should have told them that the official position of the University was that there should be an immediate cease-fire, a commitment by all parties to a two state solution, massive aid to the people of Gaza, and a demand that the US government withhold military aid to Israel so long as Netanyahu continues to insist that he is going to continue the war. She should have stated that if they wished to establish an encampment on the Columbia campus, they were welcome to do so and that so long as they did that she would join them there, conduct the business of the University from the encampment, and call on all faculty and students to join with her.

 

This would, of course, have had a dramatic effect on the political situation and it would have encouraged other private universities and colleges to do the same. (There is some question whether public universities could take this sort of political position but there is nothing to stop the presidents of those universities from announcing their personal support for a similar political stance.)

 

It is I think obvious that there is not the slightest possibility that anything like this will ever happen. As I say, they never learn.

A TERMINOLOGICAL INTERVENTION

It has been just short of a month since I last posted on this blog. During that time, the average number of visits per day to the blog, as measured by Google, has roughly doubled – a rather humbling fact, I must say. My time has been spent preparing my weekly lectures on Marx and dealing with the depredations of Parkinson’s disease and the burdens of being the primary caregiver to my wife, who is struggling bravely with the problems of being 91 years old. Just in the past two days, I have learned of the deaths of two old and good friends – Charles Parsons, my college classmate, graduate apartment mate, colleague at Columbia, and lifelong friend, and William Strickland, my colleague and friend from the Afro-American studies department at the University of Massachusetts. Charles was 91 and Bill was 87. Since I am now 90, their passing is a cautionary tale for me.

 

I decided to return today to make what might be considered a terminological quibble, but one with some larger significance. A number of people have described the treatment of the Palestinians by Israel as a form of apartheid.  This is a mistake. Let me explain. “Apartheid” is an Afrikaner term to describe an elaborate and complex system of racially-based oppression developed in South Africa by the whites. The system, justified by some rather distressing phony philosophical arguments derived from a misunderstanding of European philosophical doctrines of the earlier 20^th century, involved classifying the population of South Africa into four major categories: Whites, Africans, Coulereds, and Asians.  The aim of the system was simultaneously to keep as much separation as was manageable of the four categories of people from one another (hence apartheid, which is to say apartness or separation) while also making it possible for the whites to exploit the labor of the nonwhites. The Africans, descendent of the original inhabitants of the area, were needed both for agricultural labor and for work in the mines. In addition, they were used as domestic workers of all sorts. To keep them separate from the white population, the Afrikaner government had several devices. The first was the creation of 10 “homelands,” territories ostensibly represented as independent states, one each for the 10 racial and linguistic groups that the Afrikaners imagined the Africans to be divided into. The second was the creation of single-sex hostels or residences where African mine workers lived for 11 months a year, being permitted to make brief trips home to their families and the homelands. The third was the townships, segregated communities outside major white cities where people whose labor was needed in the cities would be forced to return each evening. The best known of these, of course, was Soweto, a community whose name is an acronym formed from the words “Southwest Township” and which is located outside Johannesburg. In addition, there were so-called “informal settlements,” which is to say collections of shacks scattered along roads and elsewhere in the officially white parts of South Africa.

 

The goal of the system of apartheid was not to get rid of the nonwhite population – that would have been an economic disaster for the whites. Rather, the goal was to exploit their labor while keeping them officially out of sight, as it were.

 

I may be wrong, but it is not my impression that the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is based on a desire to exploit their labor. I think many Israelis would be quite happy if the Palestinians were simply to disappear. In that way, their attitude toward the Palestinians is much closer to the attitude of the European settlers toward Native Americans. By and large, the European settlers sought to exterminate the Native Americans, and when they could not quite accomplish that, to push them into reservations on land for which the settlers did not have much use. Needing large amounts of labor to develop the New World in ways that would make them money, the settlers first brought a good many indentured servants from England, and then brought Africans whom, over more than a century, they enslaved after revising the English Common Law to permit such a status to exist.

 

I am not sure this makes a great deal of difference to the struggle now going on, but I do think there is something to be gained from being more accurate in the terms we use to describe the horror as we observe. 

Carry on.

WHAT CAN BIDEN DO TODAY?

What can Biden do right now, today, to avoid even more deaths of innocent people in Gaza? I am not asking what he can do if he gets Congress to approve a bill in two weeks when they return from their break; I am not asking what the United Nations can do in a week; I am not asking what America’s negotiators can attempt to achieve in the next several days. I am asking what Biden can do today about the starvation now afflicting 2 million people in Gaza?

 

Here is what I think he can do. First, he can take all of the food on the aircraft carriers in the Middle East, put it on airplanes, and airlift it to an Egyptian airport, telling the Egyptians to get out of the way.  He can commandeer trucks, cars, whatever in Egypt and announced that the aid is being taken into Gaza, regardless of whether they have permission to do so. He can tell the Egyptians to get out of the way and my guess is that they will. At the same time, he can ship more food by air to the carriers to replace the food sent to Gaza. Meanwhile, he can underwrite the efforts of anybody, any organization, attempting to help the Gazans and announce to the world that American troops are going to take the food into Gaza. Meanwhile, he can cancel all military aid to Israel until they stop the creation of illegal settlements in the Palestine Authority.  He can tell Israel that if its troops fire on American troops bringing food to the Gazans, he will cancel all further military aid to Israel for as long as he is president.

 

Will he do any of these things? No. Could he do them? Yes.