The Other

Friends reading

In my previous post I discussed a piece by Javier Marías on the subject of friendships, in particular their ending. In the case of the Spanish writer, the end of earlier friendships came when people who were once like-minded went different ways politically. From what he says in the piece all these former friends, like himself, were on the Left side of the political spectrum, and the deviation from this side as they got older ("matured"?) has resulted in "disenchantment, quarrels, betrayal."

Those three nouns sum up the way I felt in two cases where friendships with others have ended, but the occasion was not because of our political differences. As I wrote in the previous post, one of the friends was a conservative, the other liberal. I have parted ways with them because they had truly betrayed me personally, in the process severing any good will I once felt for them. I do not despise them. Henceforth, they do not concern me at all. In contrast, I suspect in the case of Javier Marías that these former friends occupy him too much mentally, that their supposed betrayals rankle.

These thoughts as a preface to the subject of this post, also inspired by another piece by Javier Marías from the same collection. The title of the piece is "For Me Alone to Read." Superficially, it has nothing to do with politics or betrayals. It concerns the sense of being soiled that one has in discovering that someone we dislike expresses enthusiasm for a writer whom we feel is "ours" alone.

I like the way he describes the private possession we experience on reading certain books, as if the author's intention was to address us specifically. Or, me, as JM emphasizes. In an earlier post, I wrote about the effects of childhood reading in providing us with a "map of life," and as JM writes this appropriation of a writer is felt most intensely in youth. It happens that if the particular writer becomes a cult writer, has too many enthusiasts, grows successful beyond the realm in which he was our personal discovery, we may  move on. All very true.

JM's subject, however, is the discovery that people we dislike, persons who "strike us as errant fools" or worse, have a passion for our writer. Mentioning Don Quixote, he writes that it is hard "to see people we consider to be utter idiots suddenly discovering one of our favorite authors and starting to quote from and to comment on him." Although JM retreats to ethical judgments to characterize such usurpers ("someone for whom we have little respect"), the subject is not individuals about whom most of the population is repulsed (say, Hitler or Putin), but about fellow humans. To his credit, JM realizes that he is speaking of subjective feelings rather than objective judgments and that others may think the same about him when he expiates on his own reading enthusiasms, thus taking him down a peg or two.

He does not go into whether our assessments of others, when they are making aesthetic determinations, are valid, i.e., whether the other person is in reality as disagreeable or foolish as he appears to oneself. To do so would force him to recognize a common humanity, to acknowledge that the other has something in common with him.

Common humanity, after all, is the basis, according to Kant, of the universality of judgment. Insofar as we all respond to something outside of ourselves -- art or the behavior of others -- we expect others to feel the same way. When we enthuse to our friends about a book or movie that we love, we expect that they too will love it. We feel discord in ourselves when they have a different opinion, for the universality of judgment means that we believe our judgments to be universally true and valid. When our friends disagree with us about novels or movies, we may let the matter go. But when people who are not our friends, who are in fact people whom we despise, we are disturbed by their concurrence with us.

What I am getting at is that ethical judgments are always aesthetic. This is evident today in politics. Whatever one may think about our current president, there is no way to arrive at an objective assessment of his presidency, as the media (left and right) are biased. People who dislike him, indeed hate him, bring out the language of ethics to attack him, but they are simply responding "aesthetically." He displeases them on a very visceral personal level. If this were not the case, why would thousands turn out to protest him in England, but no one turns out to protest Putin? I experienced this myself many years ago when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to the U.S. and gave a speech at Columbia University. Students gathered on the campus, as if a concert were taking place, and attentively watched the screen on which appeared the former president of Iran. The few protesters were kept outside the campus by police.

What does this have to do with "the Other"? For some reason conservative political figures (and their voters) are the Other. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, identified the Other as one of the conceptual bases of intersubjectivity, of the relations among people. That is taken verbatim from a Wikipedia piece (by the way, it is time to make a donation to the site), which goes on: "The condition and quality of Otherness, the characteristics of the Other, is the state of being different from and alien to the social identity of a person and to the identity of the Self."

"Social identity" is the key term here, a very subjective state of affairs.

Enough for today.

Picture credit: PBS Parents

On the ending of friendships

I am reading a book of articles by the Spanish novelist Javier Marías. These are occasional pieces that were penned for a newspaper in Spain, translated now into English as Between Eternities and Other Writings. I have read several of his novels and am very impressed with his craftsmanship, if, at the same time, the stories leave me cold. From the articles, I get the feeling that he is person who doesn't like b.s. and  who sees through political correctness and the various vanities of our age. At the same time, he belongs to the species of European secular liberal who disdains religion and conservatism.

One of the articles, "Old Friends," has given me much to think about. He begins by mentioning how, over time, one loses touch with people with whom one was once evidently close, say, during one's youth. (In a related piece, he writes of "the ghosts" in his 30-year-old address book, for instance, names whose faces he cannot recall or who have since died.) He alludes to the reason for losing touch by mentioning that those earlier friendships were marked by the idealistic and combative stance of university students and that, in time, some of the same idealists now defend attitudes and people that they loathed thirty years earlier. The loss is thus the result of "disenchantment, quarrels, betrayals."

While he insists that he is not against people "changing and adapting and modifying and coming to see things differently," he finds that there are "limits that 'converts' fail to respect, a long path that needs to be traveled." "Sudden transformations are unacceptable," occurring as if by magic or overnight.

Since I came of age in the early 1970s, attending graduate school at the University of Texas with lots of idealistic and combative folks, I have had plenty of experience with people who, in my view, are stuck in the same combative and idealistic frame of mind as they were in the 1970s. They are people who would call me conservative, in fact have accused me of "becoming conservative." I would have to say, however, that my attitudes today are no different from what they were in the 1970s.

It just so happened that in 1975 I went to live in Japan for several years. On my return an enormous shift in cultural and social norms had taken place, and my friends from the pre-1970 days simply went along with this shift, accepting every hair-brained idea that has come down the turnpike, resulting in an ever widening extremity of social and cultural attitudes. Very few people in the early 1970s, for instance, talked about "dead white males." Very few even thought about "transgender rights." Or homosexual marriage. Since the 1970s there has been a continuous pushing back against limits, and anyone who objects is characterized as "bigoted." The idealists of my generation have simply marched in time and in tune, enlarging their identity. Had I not been away from the U.S. for several years, I might have become "progressive" myself. In contrast, my attitudes remain the same as they were back then. I have not "evolved."

Moreover, I don't have a problem maintaining friendships with people with different political views. Some former friends have dropped me, but I continue to like those with whom I am still in contact for personal qualities that have stood the test of time, not because we share the same political views. In fact, of two friends with whom I have broken in recent years -- because of what I consider betrayal on their part -- one is a conservative, the other a liberal. When that break occurs, it happens quickly and is not the result of simmering differences. I don't allow myself to be hurt or disappointed by the betrayal or to linger over it -- or even think badly of the person. Just move on. Remove them from your address book. Because of the peripatetic existence I have lived, I don't have a huge number of friends. Thus, I try to hang on to the few who remain and to cherish them, despite our differences.

Picture credit: New York magazine

Utopians ad infinitum

Argentinian Utopians

Recently seen, a title of a book under review in the New York Times Book Review:

GIVE PEOPLE MONEY: HOW A UNIVERSAL INCOME WOULD END POVERTY, REVOLUTIONIZE WORK, AND REMAKE THE WORLD

The author of this book is Anne Lowrey. Some people never learn from history. Lowrey was born in 1984: that says it all.

Picture credit: Brujula Communications

Michiko Kakutani is Ignorant

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

The New Yorker, The Atlantic, among others, fell all over themselves two years ago to heap praise on the New York Times book reviewer -- they actually referred to her as a "book critic" -- after her 38-year sojourn on the book page of the newspaper. To which I say: why didn't she leave earlier? Like practically every other regular writer for the Times, she was a predictable bore. Really, there should be term limits for these reviewers. Has any reader really profited from a review by Michiko Kakutani? I stopped reading her about twenty-five years ago (along with the Times itself). Well, today more evidence for her mediocrity.

A friend of mine subscribes to the New York Times and regularly gives me a pile of the Sunday book review (also a pathetic publication). So, today I went through the pile and found in the July 15 issue an interview with Kakutani, one of those front-of-the-publication features in which the first thing we learn is what books are currently on the interviewed's nightstand. When asked her opinion on "disappointing, overrated, just not good books," she replied: "I am hoping English department curriculums have changed since I was in college. I couldn't make it through Spenser's The Faerie Queene or Samuel Richardson's Clarissa."

A couple of comments. Kakutani is so out of it that she doesn't know that practically no English department, probably not even at an ivy league institution like Yale, where she went to school (40 years ago), includes either of those novels in its course offerings. Indeed, it is possible to get a graduate degree in English literature today without reading them. But what a breathtaking show of ignorance for a supposed "book critic." To be  critic means to be familiar with the history of literature. And in support of my contention that she is an ignoramus, another summer issue of the book review featured a book of essays by William Giraldi, American Audacity: In Defense of Literary Daring. The reviewer (Nathaniel Rich) speaks of Giraldi as an enthusiast for high standards. He quotes Giraldi responding to Fifty Shades of Gray: "Do I really expect Americans to sit down with Adam Bede or Clarissa after all the professional and domestic hurly-burly of their day? Pardon me, but yes, I do."

Well, put me down as not insisting on such reading for those contending with full-time jobs and domestic life, but for the "book critic" of the New York Times one would expect a bit more. A "book critic" is familiar with the history of literature, knows (as Nathaniel Rich writes) that "for a book to outlast its first breath, it must contend with all that has come before." Kakutani always struck me as being trapped by the time in which she lives.

What really brought home Kakutani's irrelevance is her new book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. The Guardian, not impressed by the book, calls it "an account of the mental malaise that made Trump possible, [in which Kakutani] explains him as a postmodern phenomenon, a product of the deconstructionist assault on absolutes that raged through American universities in the 1980s." Excuse me, Ms. Kakukani, did you not know what was going on back in the universities in those days? Why did not the New York Times "book critic extraordinaire" use her pulpit to excoriate this phenomenon back when it might have counted for something? Like the New York Times, Kakutani is totally irrelevant.

My criticism of her is impartial. I have not published a book that she might have reviewed, though I am happy to add here a few nuggets from published writers (this from Slate) who also agree on her ignorance: The late Susan Sontag complained, "Her criticisms of my books are stupid and shallow and not to the point." Salman Rushdie referred to her as "a weird woman who seems to feel the need to alternately praise and spank."  Norman Mailer called Kakutani, who is of Japanese descent, a "one-woman kamikaze" and a "token" minority hire.

An honest liberal

Solid Nixon supporters

It's been ages. It's not that I don't have plenty that I want to say, plenty that I want to write about, but, for a change, I am trying to concentrate on one thing at a time. And the one thing that I must concentrate on is my novel. This novel concerns, among other things, the changes that have taken place in New York City in the decades in which I have lived here. I have experienced the transformation, but I was not here in the bad old days of the 1970s. And since one of the characters in my novel came to Manhattan in the late 1960s and experienced the 1970s, I have been reading writers from that time. One of them is Norman Mailer.

When I came to New York in the early 1980s, Mailer was still a vivid presence, but for all kinds of reasons I did not read much of his work. His themes at that time did not interest me, e.g., The Executioner's Song or Ancient Evenings. And then there was his defense of a criminal who then turned around and murdered someone. I recall, however, that I liked his take on feminism: The Prisoner of Sex. He seemed, however, a man who was wasting his talents on too many things, who was too happy to have his photo in the newspaper, to be quoted on the subject of the day. He seems an object lesson in how not to be a really great writer.

An example of how good Mailer could be, what a wonderful writer he was, can be found in Miami and the Siege of Chicago or, as per the subtitle, An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968, which I have been perusing as background on the mood of the so-called Sixties for my novel. It is an example of the expansive, personal journalism of the time. I suppose Tom Wolfe's books would fit in there as well. Mailer casts himself in the role of "the reporter," and the account is told from that third-person perspective. Thus, it is not an "objective" account of those two political conventions, for "the reporter" is also constantly revealing the effect of the happenings on him. Norman Mailer was of course a good liberal in the 1968 sense of that word, and "the reporter" succumbs to the thrill of possessing revolutionary sentiments. He feels the youthful fire in his loins. Yet, he cannot go the whole hog, especially after seeing the disturbances in Chicago wreaked by "youth." By 1968, of course, Mailer was forty-five years old, a man with "six children, a house on the water, a good apartment, good booze." And, as he concedes, he has even come to enjoy wine: "A revolutionary with a taste in wine has come already half the distance from Marx to Burke ..." Besides, he also doesn't want to get beat up by the police.

He is pretty disturbed by the radical goings-on that tore up Chicago, but what impressed me was his even-handedness concerning the Republicans. Mailer had come of age with disdain toward Richard Nixon, who would receive the Republican nomination in Miami, but having aged, acquired children, a taste in wine, and so on, he was able to regard Nixon as a more complex character than generally perceived, even to feel a certain admiration for him.

McCarthyites in 1968

His characterization of the McCarthyites, however, the supporters of Eugene McCarthy, is a good foreshadowing of the current oppositional nature of American politics. He describes their gathering at Chicago's Midway Airport in anticipation of McCarthy's arrival in the city. The faces of the crowd, he writes, "gave glimpses of faces remarkably homogenous for a political rally":

One could pass from heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a 50-pound pack on their back to young adolescent poetesses, pale as Ophelia, prim as Florence Nightingale, from college boys in sweaters with hints of Hippy allegiance, to Madison Avenue types in sideburns, straw hats, and a species of pill-taking panache; through decent, mildly fanatic ranks of middle-class professionals -- suggestions of vitiated blood in their complexion -- to that part of theater and show biz which dependably would take up cause with the cleaner cadres of the Left.

He finds in this cadre a species of "parsimony," represented by their "thin nostrils." But the parsimony of the McCarthyites was not simply financial, as they had not been mean with funds to support the Senator:

No, like all crusaders, their stinginess could be found in a ferocious lack of tolerance or liaison to their left or right -- the search for Grail seems invariably to proceed in a straight line. It was no accident that an extraordinary number of McCarthyites seemed to drive Volkswagens (or was it that an extraordinary number of Volkswagens bore the white and blue psychedelic flower? -- if psychedelic it could truly be called, since the blue was too wan and the white too milky for the real sports of psychedlia land).

One gets a sense of where Maureen Dowd might have picked up her journalistic chops Although she is a big lib, she is also able to ridicule liberals where they deserve to be ridiculed. In another gem from Mailer concerning the McCarthyites, he remarks on the "disproportionate number of babies in mother's arms -- sly hint of middle-class Left mentality here at work!" And then he makes this astute observation:

The middle-class left would never learn that working men in greasy dungarees make a point of voting against the mother who carries the babe -- the righteous face of any such mother reminds them of schooteachers they used to hate!

Take that Hilary Clinton. And here is a question for you: Is there a connection between the righteous attitudes of the McCarthyites, the McCarthyism that liberals today find to be such a disturbing feature of the 1950s, and the current oppositional political currents?

 Picture credits: Florida Memories; U.S. Election Atlas

European anti-Americanism

Illustration by Barbara Kelley

After my visit to Germany last summer, I posted here a piece on German anti-Americanism. The Germans, however, are only indulging in a widespread European phenomenon, as evidenced by what I read in today's edition of "euro|topics," a daily digest I receive in my email box. I receive the German version, but the link here is to the English homepage. It is well worth subscribing to if one wants to get a feel for what agitates Europeans about the world. Every weekday there is a new topic on which the European opinion class opines Today's digest concerned "One Year Trump." To be fair, there was a variety of views. Trump remains mysterious at best to Europeans, and not all the commentators were uniformly negative, although it could be expected that Le Monde would assert that Trump represents the end of liberal democracy. I get Europeans to some extent, and the disruption of their pieties is not surprising.

One response from the Belgium newspaper De Standaard, however, was a really stand-out piece, exposing not simply hatred of the the U.S. president, but also every preconceived notion about the kind of country the U.S. represents. Here is the short version in English, oozing disdain and hatred, by Nick De Clippel:

“The problem is not Trump but that there were enough voters who lifted this rodeo clown into the saddle. If Trump falls from the horse, they're still there. ... The question is how could the US be allowed to go to rack and ruin like this, to gamble away all the moral authority it had, to fall behind on all levels (except the stock markets). ... Basically it was written in the stars that sooner or later a country with shopping mall schools, with Fox News as an analysis programme, with monsters like The Gong Show and The Jerry Springer Show as 'human interest' programmes would sooner or later have someone like Trump as president. A society driven by blind greed for profit and the resulting decay in education and media is responsible for this.”

That's pretty rich coming from a citizen of Belgium.

Excuse my arrogance, but Belgium is country that can't even keep track of the terrorists it harbors. That has two language populations that hate each other. That has a history of colonialism that is the worst in modern history. What has Belgium done for the world, aside from chocolate and beer?

De Clippel reproaches the U.S. for loss of "moral authority." What moral authority does "Europe" possess aside from its pieties and platitudes?

Airing one's dirty linen in public

North Carolina, 1950, Courtesy Arnika Dawkins Gallery

Today there was a discussion among friends about Paul Beatty's book The Sellout. We get together to talk about books, but for me this one was a slog to read. Partly that was due to the "rap" nature of the narration. Beatty's background, before his ventures into fiction, was as a rap poet, for which he has enjoyed considerable success. And while I concede the excellence of the conceit of the novel -- a black man in Los Angeles claims a bit of the city and reinstitutes slavery there for which he is arrested for offending the constitution -- I was uncomfortable with the novel. Of course, my friends and probably everyone else would say that discomfort was the author's intent: I, a white person, deserve to be made uncomfortable by racism experienced by blacks throughout the novel.

Later, however, thinking back on our discussion, I discern another reason for my discomfort. Thus, the title of this post. Let me explain.

I grew up in the 1950s, when divorce among ordinary folks was quite rare. In 1955, for instance, the rate stood at about 2.2 percent. Among that 2.2 percent was my father, who had been married for a short time many years before meeting my mother. Compounding this unusual state of affairs was that my father was Catholic. He and my mother, who was Protestant, were not married in the Church. As a Catholic child, this was an excruciating state of affairs, as my religious instruction made clear that divorce was a serious sin. It was indeed a shameful subject, one that was never talked about. I am sure I never mentioned it to any of my friends.

Fast forward. I go to college. In my first semester I take a course called Sociology 101. A friend of mine, a veteran of high school English instruction, has coined the term "the Rubicon theory of reading," according to which there is a sentence beyond which no student will pass. For me, the very first sentence in the textbook in the sociology course might have signaled the end of my university career: "Sociology is one of the social sciences." It was English, but what did it mean? I think you get where I was coming from. Still, with persistence, I came to terms, sentence by maddening sentence, in the thick textbook, with concepts like culture, socialization, role conflict, division of labor, altruistic suicide (!), secularism, gemeinschaft, gesellschaft, and ethnocentrism.

The subject around which American liberal and illiberal political opinion was centered in 1961 was that of racial integration, a charged issue to which I was introduced, of all places, in the sociology class. In my perusal of the table of contents in the textbook, I had noted that a chapter was devoted to race, but one morning this perplexing American social problem was addressed by my professor with considerable vehemence. I can't recall the specific content of his utterance, for the blood rushed to my head and made coherent thought impossible. To hear this white professor dwell so openly on instances of shameful treatment of blacks made me uncomfortable, which I suppose was his intention. My discomfort could be seen as an effect of the new environment into which I had plunged at seventeen, one that challenged one's dearest preconceptions. Indeed, the episode is the first I recall in which new social realities truly collided with my own convictions.

I speak not of civil rights, however, but, rather, of the professor's forthrightness. From my point of view, the professor was engaging in a flagrant breach of decorum: he was talking about inappropriate things, like sexual intercourse, in mixed company. My discomfort was principally because of the black students in the class. I would have been equally mortified had he held me up as an example of the suffering that a child feels because of a parent's divorce Although I could scarcely know what a black person had suffered –– no more than could the professor –– I knew that blacks suffered. But I also felt that suffering was an intensely personal matter and that the real blight was the deep inner wounds. The shame of discrimination was probably as deeply rooted as were my father's shame about his divorce and his conviction of living in sin. Being forbidden to use a water fountain was not something you wanted people to notice when they thought about you.

What had a strong effect on me was the professor's breach of decorum, particularly the lack of challenge or response to it. Although his comments, focused as they were on the less-than-human treatment of blacks, might be very wounding to blacks, openness was apparently part of being a smart, with-it person, especially if it concerned airing mortifying aspects of one's experience.

Now, to the point of this long preface. One thing Beatty's novel makes evident is the relentless focus on the shame blacks often feel about "being black," especially if "black" is the first thing with which one identifies oneself. In the last chapter of The Sellout, the narrator goes to open-mike night at a club patronized by blacks. The black comedian opens with this line: "Your mama been on welfare so long, her face is on the food stamp." Now, that is not something to joke about, IMHO. Whites should not find this funny. On one evening a white couple strolled into the club and took front-row seats and laughed and snickered knowingly at the comedian's jokes,"like they'd been black all their lives." The  comedian got irritated by their laughter, "howling the loudest. Slapping the table. Happy to be noticed. Happy to be accepted." He finally drove them from the club.

I was thinking about that when I watched the opening of Dave Chappelle's Netflix special. I had never heard of him until I read about The Sellout. What struck me about Chappelle's show was the number of white and Asian faces right up front laughing their heads off at his jokes. I didn't watch very long, so I don't know if he engaged in the "mama's picture on the food stamp" variety of one-liners, but every other word out of his mouth was a "foul" one.

So, when I think back about my life and that of my parents in the 1950s, it strikes me that, above all, even in our shame about certain things in our lives, we always kept our heads up and maintained our decorum. And I bet that was also the case for blacks, who lived in even more shameful circumstances: they kept their heads up and maintained appearances. Now that we have all become "liberals," we air our dirty linen in public and find it funny to do so.