Last Post of the Year

 From Shertz, Texas, visiting with the Texas Hudsons.  That Alistair is something.  Going forward to get use to an Apple watch. YAY!

 The turkey is in the straw. The Pied Piper is warming up. Sinatra is still singing Christmas songs. The fruitcake has all been eaten. The ice box is packed with leftovers. Joy to the world. The Lord has come. 2022 beckons. Wednesday I'm heading toward Jackson. I've been talking about Jackson for days now. Look out Jackson town. Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea. Joy to you and me.

 I may not have very many life skills, but I can sit in a quiet room alone and I can drive alone in my car for miles & miles without a radio.

I was surprised that I Iiked the new Spiderman movie. It's the first one I have seen so I did not have the benefit of understanding the character and the background of having seen the previous 34 or ever how many. I have heard of Toby McGuire but did not know that he was the original Spiderman. I had no idea what he looked like even. I am not an intrinsic visual person. I am a verbal person. Special effects and technology don't cut it for me by themselves. There has to be more. On those rare occasions when I watch a movie I like the visual but more prefer an interesting story, a movie that is thought-provoking, affects my emotions and has great acting. Special effects tend to wash over me like Powerpoint dulls my mind watching a one hour PP presentation. So this movie had a good story and appealing characters and the movie made me care about them. B+ The movie brought in the multiverse. Very interesting. I did not know that the concept of the multiverse was cultural mainstream. A Companions watching the move. A+

Gary Ginsberg - First Friends - Notes

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT PRESIDENTS AND THEIR BEST FRIENDS AND HOW THEIR FRIENDSHIP INFLUENCED AMERICAN HISTORY.      

***Keeping with current scholarship, the author says that Madison was Jefferson's equal so that Madison was not subservient to Jefferson.  Maybe so.  I wouldn't know.  He talks about the famous dinner with Hamilton in which it was decided that Madison and Jefferson would agree to Hamilton's plan to fund the war debt and that the former would back a Southern location for the new Capital.  What the author does not say is that Jefferson regretted that agreement for the rest of his life.  Neither does the author talk about how Madison went from being a nationalist to a states righter or how the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions lent ammunition to the secessionists cause come Civil War time.

                                                                             

•••FRANKLIN PIERCE AND NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.  I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT THE LONG FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN PIERCE AND HAWTHORNE.  IT STARTS EARLY AND CONTINUED TO THE END OF THEIR LIVES.  BOTH SUPPORTED SLAVERY IN THE INTEREST OF SAVING THE COUNTRY FROM CIVIL WAR.  HAWTHORNE WROTE PIERCE'S LOWING CAMPAIGN BIOGRAPHY.  THE AUTHOR ALL BUT BLAMES PIERCE FOR THE WAR.  HIS ACTIONS PRETTY MUCH GUARANTEED WAR ACCORDING TO THE AUTHOR.

***ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND JOSHUA SPEED. ON JANURY 1, 1841 LINCOLN BROKE OFF HIS ENGAGEMENT WITH MARY AND SPEED TOLD LINCOLN HE WAS MOVING BACK TO KENTURKCY. LINCOLN'S FRIENDS THOUGHT HE MIGHT BE SUICIDAL. SPEED GOT HIM THRU IT.

Speed helped Lincoln survive a crippling depression in 1861.  Later they worked together to save the Union as Speed helped Lincoln keep Kentucky from seceding. 

Lincoln and Speed drew apart after Speed moved back to Kentucky but they came back together in the 1850's when slavery politics wound up.

In 1854 when Lincoln and Speed began to correspond again Speed was a slave holding Unionist.  Lincoln made it clear to Speed that he abhorred slavery and it you were against the spread of slavery you should not hold human property in your own hands.

Writing to Speed in 1855, Lincoln says, "People say I am an abolitionist. . . . but I do no more than oppose the extension of slavery."

As the 1860 presidential election approached, Speed evidently remained a Democrat.  He did not vote for Lincoln.  I find this amazing.  Best friends yet opposed politically.

Kentucky was the linchpin of Lincoln's strategy to keep the four border states in the Union as it was the major staging place to launch military moves into the Confederacy.  The legislature was anti-slavery but the governor was pro-slavery.  Kentucky was the ballgame due to its strategic location and pro/anti slavery politics in the state.

Speed came to Washington as a back-stage operator for Lincoln to keep Kentucky in the Union after turning down a Cabinet offer.  Amazing stuff.

In issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln came around to the view that ending slavery was necessary to save the Union.  Speed disagreed, sticking to the view that that emancipation was strictly the work of the states, but gradually toward the end of his life, Speed to moved to more progressive views.

Speed died in 1882 at the age of 68 only a slightly reformed Southerner.

***The rise of Colonel House in Woodrow Wilson's life is amazing and the impact of this unelected unofficial man is unbelievable.  The control and access he had to President Wilson is hard to fathom.  He was not a real Colonel.  It was only a nickname he picked up in his native Texas.  He must have had enemies but the author doesn't say much about the people who did not like the Colonel.

So far Colonel House is the most fascinating person in this narrative.

The Wilson-House story is amazing.  They broke up over the Paris peace negotiations at the end of the war.  The part that Edith Wilson played in the breakup will never entirely be know except that she did not like House and tried to break them up from the beginning.  

It is truly amazing how this unelected man played such a big part in the Wilson Administration on the world stage mostly behind the scenes.

***Unassuming and overloaded in her lifetime, Daisy Suckley was in reality Franklin Roosevelt's most trusteed friend and confidant, the respite for a lonely and overworked president navigating the depression and World War II.

The most fascinating thing is in the mind of Franklin Roosevelt.  Why did he need a woman like Daisy?  Something about his psychological makeup no doubt would explain it.

The friendship between the two of them defies explanation.  Daisy lived until 1991.  Amazing story.

***Harry Truman met Eddie Jacobson while working as a clerk at the National Bank of Commerce in Kansas City at a young age,

The power of happenstance in their meeting at that bank in Kansas City.

The author says that Truman was man of contradictions.  He made racial slurs yet did much for civil rights.  He recognized the state of Israel helped by Jacobson.   Their friendship spanned over 50 years including military serve in WWI.

The youthful Truman yearned for praise and attention.  He was self-conscious about his thick glasses.  He seemed to have feminine side to his personality.  

Truman's first foray into politics was as a page at the 1900 Democratic National Convention held in Kansas City.

Truman knew about physical labor and knew how to use his hands.

Having by necessity to return home and manage the family farm, Truman forever called himself a farmer. He performed grueling farm work for eleven years.   Jacobson with family faced religious persecution after moving around the family settled in Kansas City,

Truman likely would have remained a farmer the rest of his life unless the US had not gotten involved in WWI.  Truman enlisted and did Eddie Jacobson and the two of them reunited in the same Missouri Second Field Artillery.

Jacobson was key in helping Truman recognize Israel in 1947.  He persuaded Truman to support a UN resolution that created Jewish and Arab spaces that led to the creation of Israel when at first Truman was totally opposed.  Truman had routine antisemitic feelings common for his time and place.  The creation of Israel was a complicated situation post-WWII.  George Marshall was opposed but did not oppose Truman's decision publicly.  

***JFK's good friend was David Ormsby-Gore, well-known highly visible Brit.

Ormsby-Gore was close to the Kennedy family.  He helped JFK stand up to Krushhev in the Cuban missile crisis yet show patience in allowing K to turn his ships around to avert war.  O-G was also instrumental in getting JFK to achieve a partial test ban treaty with the Soviet Union.

***After Bill Clinton lost his gubernatorial bid for reelection in Arkansas and he totally at lost for what to do as he considered leaving politics Vernon Jordan called Hillary and asked, "You got any grits down there?"  Hillary responded that she would get some.  Vernon visited and pep talked Bill into staying in politics.  He was elected governor again, and the rest is history.  This author seems to credit Jordan for saving Clinton's career from the outset after he lost reelection after being elected as the youngest governor in American history.

Jordan was a civil rights leader into his late 80's.  He knew everybody.  He could have had a cabinet position.  He was known in corporate America.  He was a high-priced corporate lawyer.  Yet he could relate to everybody and never forgot his Georgia roots.  He was known to have President Clinton's ear.  He had quite an accomplished life.

 

CULTURE The Mournful Heart of It’s a Wonderful Life The holiday classic is now 75 years old, and a timely exploration of what happens when all that you’ve relied on fades away. By Megan Garber Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, depressed at a bar, in 'It's a Wonderful Life' RKO Pictures / Getty DECEMBER 24, 2021, 7 AM ET SHARE It’s a Wonderful Life is an odd candidate for the “heartwarming Christmas classic” category. The film’s plot pivots around its main character’s consideration of suicide. And the story of George Bailey, a family man beset by troubles both financial and existential, does not get notably Christmas-y until its final seconds. “I didn’t even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it,” the director, Frank Capra, would later say. “I just liked the idea.” The film’s current popularity is in some ways accidental: It met mixed reviews when it premiered in 1946 and flopped at the box office. It languished for decades until 1974, when what was likely a clerical oversight changed its fate: The film’s 28-year copyright period had come to an end because the studio that owned it failed to refile for a second term. It’s a Wonderful Life entered the public domain, and TV networks, availing themselves of its new royalty-free status, began airing it. Repeatedly. And eventually, as sometimes happens, the repetition led to love. Read: The most beloved Christmas specials are (mostly) terrible It’s a Wonderful Life is 75 years old this year, now beloved both because and in spite of the fact that it is about a man convinced by an affable angel that the world is better because he is in it. I’d remembered the film as a giddy blend of styles and characters: comedy, tragedy, magical realism, a celestial being whose angel-rank is Second Class and whose name is Clarence Odbody. I’d understood it through George’s descent from a would-be adventurer to a reluctant businessman, as a meditation on dashed dreams—an argument that growing up is, in part, adjusting the hopes you’ve had for the ones you might come to hold. Watching the movie this year, though, I found that it landed very differently. It read even more darkly. What struck me this time was the dreams’ manner of death: They were extinguished not in an instant, but by repeated dousings. George, played by James Stewart, is a hero whose journey is quite often stuck in the “being tested” phase of things. He tries, so hard, to have adventures away from his small hometown; circumstance, again and again, keeps him homebound. The recurrent nature of his trials seems especially acute right now. The pandemic that looked, earlier this year, like it might be under control has resurged with a new variant. The chance leaders had to do the bare minimum to forestall the planet’s furies has been squandered once again. American democracy, new and ever-fragile, is under threat once more. George Bailey was never just George Bailey; he has always doubled as a collection of decidedly American metaphors. This year, though, he looks more like an omen. The first thing audiences learn about George is that he is possessed of an intrinsic heroism. As a child, he saved his younger brother, Harry, from drowning after the ice of a pond they were skating on broke. George, without thinking, dived in; Harry lived; George came away with an infection that rendered him deaf in one ear. And then the cadence that defines much of the film—circumstances requiring his sacrifices—sets in. George dreams of traveling the world; he wants the scope of his universe to grow larger than life in Bedford Falls can afford. His initial plans for adventure get curtailed, at the very last minute, because his father has a stroke. He stays. Not long after, George is about to leave for college; minutes before he’s set to depart—the cab is idling outside—he learns that the family business, Bailey Bros. Building & Loan, will survive only if he takes over as its head. George has no interest in finance, but he does what must be done. He stays once again. Later, just as he’s leaving for his honeymoon—he and his wife, Mary, are in the cab this time—he sees a crowd in front of the Bailey Bros. office. There’s a run on the banks. Everyone wants their money back. George Bailey talks to a crowd of panicked townspeople at his family's building and loan company in "It's a Wonderful Life.' The film is a relic of an America that was earnestly animated by notions of sacrifice and the common good. (RKO Pictures / Getty) Again: George does what he has to do. He stays in Bedford Falls. He sacrifices once more. The circumstances are coincidental; for George, though, they amount for much of the film to a senseless resilience. He is tested and tested and tested, with a notable absence of relief or reward. The hero with a thousand faces is left, instead, with a thousand loan accounts. RECOMMENDED READING The FBI Considered 'It's a Wonderful Life' to Be Communist Propaganda ZACHARY M. SEWARD, QUARTZ AND QUARTZ George Bailey confronts Henry Potter in a scene in 'It's a Wonderful Life' The Morality of Banking in It’s a Wonderful Life BOURREE LAM AND GILLIAN B. WHITE A still from "A Charlie Brown Christmas," in which Charlie talks to another character in the snow The Most Beloved Christmas Specials Are (Almost) All Terrible TOM NICHOLS The end of It’s a Wonderful Life reliably makes me cry: the community coming together to save George, the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” in the Baileys’ living room, the moppet Zuzu Bailey reminding her father that “every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings”—it’s mushy and saccharine and I love it. This time around, though, a much earlier scene brought the tears. George, having taken over the building and loan, is meeting Harry, who had gone to college in his older brother’s stead, at the train station. After four years away, Harry was going to move back to Bedford Falls and take over the business: the brothers swapping timelines, but both fulfilling their dreams. And then, at the station, Harry disembarks with his new wife, Ruth. George learns that Harry will be taking another job, with her father’s company, outside of Bedford Falls. The camera zooms in on George’s face as he takes in the news, his expression ranging from horror to panic to resignation to despair. For a moment, the quintessential Capra film summons Hitchcock. And then George readjusts his expression into a smile. He understands what the world expects of him: compliance, sacrifice, resilience. Again, he does his duty. It was at that point, specifically, that I found myself tearing up. Today, one might interpret George’s forced smile as evidence of emotional labor. One might see, in his transactions with the world, something vaguely feminine. It’s a Wonderful Life, to be clear, is doing precisely nothing radical in terms of its exploration of gender identity. But it is examining, quite overtly, power as a social force—who wields it, who wilts under it. Other men in this world, among them Harry and the callous capitalist Henry Potter, want things, and their desires guide their actions. They act with stereotypical masculinity. They go out and realize their own versions of George’s great dream: They lasso the moon. George, meanwhile, typically has life happen to him. The world acts; he reacts. But he has no other option, the film suggests: His noble passivity nurtures the common good. That’s part of what makes It’s a Wonderful Life so complicated, not just as a holiday classic, but as a story in its own right. The film is charged with a sense of ambient despair. It channels George’s awareness of his own powerlessness. It turns vulnerability into an environmental condition. Early on, when the Bailey boys are sledding with their friends—a basic and wholesome winter pastime—what happens? The pond’s ice breaks. George and Mary are dancing at the graduation party, joyfully, breathlessly … until some guys pulling a prank remove the floor beneath their feet. The movie is full of scenes like that: stability fracturing, the ground gaping. Everyone—save for, perhaps, Mr. Potter—is vulnerable. At one moment, Mary is wearing her borrowed bathrobe, merrily flirting with George; the next, the robe having slipped off, she’s naked and hiding in a bush. At one moment, George’s mother is giggling with his father; hours later, Mr. Bailey has his stroke. It’s a Wonderful Life, its title notwithstanding, might train you to treat merriment itself as suspect: Joy, in this world, is so often interrupted by tragedy. Violence sometimes breaks into the film’s story, too—as evidence of wayward grief. Early on, Mr. Gower, the town pharmacist, hits a young George so badly that his ear bleeds: The older man has just received news that his son has died of influenza. Later, an adult George visits Mary after she’s returned from college. He is resistant: He knows both that he loves her and that loving her will mean an end to his dreams of world travel. He winds up on a phone call with Mary and another of her suitors, their mutual friend, and the scene that results—their faces close, their fates hanging in the balance—is a piece of cinematic lore. George finally gives in, wordlessly admitting that he cares about Mary. But before he does, he shakes her, so hard that it makes her cry. “I want to do what I want to do!” he says, angrily, pointlessly, before he kisses her. George reconciles himself. He gives up one dream for the one he had never thought to want: a wife who reliably sees the bright side of their misfortunes, children who are devoted to him, a community full of people whose lives have been made better because of him. Does that amount to a happy ending? Maybe. Seventy-five years later, It’s a Wonderful Life can be understood as an exploration of some of America’s fondest myths: that individual sacrifices will be rewarded; that capitalism can be controlled by people of goodwill; that communities will come together by the time the credits roll. It can also be seen as putting forth the great-man theory of history, realized by an everyman: George’s existence, Clarence makes clear, changed everything—for his family, and for his town, and for his country. George’s sacrifices prevented Potter from taking over Bedford Falls. The continued existence of the building and loan allowed community residents to buy their own homes, rather than living as Potter’s tenants. Harry fights in World War II, saving lives in the process—there to help others because George, all those years ago, had been there to help him. The film is a relic of an America, post-Depression and postwar, that was earnestly animated by notions of sacrifice and the common good. Its continued urgency, though, comes from its sense of how vulnerable everyone—even the heroic George Bailey—can be to twists of history. One moment, George is at a party, his adventures ahead of him and his dreams waiting to be claimed … and the next, the ground has retracted beneath him. The only thing he can do, the film suggests—the only thing that will keep him safe from despair—is find a way, despite it all, to keep dancing.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. James Joyce "The Dead" Each Christmas Eve I reread a Christmas story. This year James Joyce's classic "The Dead." The chills this story brings is palpable. My soul swoons.

Priceless. These insults are from an era “before” the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words. 1. "He had delusions of adequacy ” Walter Kerr 2. "He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”- Winston Churchill 3. "I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. - Clarence Darrow 4. "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway) 5. "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner) 6. "Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.” - Moses Hadas 7. "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.” - Mark Twain 8. "He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” - Oscar Wilde 9. "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one.” -George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill 10. "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one.” - Winston Churchill, in response 11. "I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here” - Stephen Bishop 12. "He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” - John Bright 13. "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial.” - Irvin S. Cobb 14. "He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others.” - Samuel Johnson 15. "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating 16. "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.” - Forrest Tucker 17. "Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?” - Mark Twain 18. "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.” - Mae West 19. "Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” - Oscar Wilde 20. "He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.” - Andrew Lang (1844-1912) 21. "He has Van Gogh's ear for music.” - Billy Wilder 22. "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I'm afraid this wasn't it.” - Groucho Marx 23. The exchange between Winston Churchill & Lady Astor: She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison." He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it." 24. "He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know." - Abraham Lincoln 25. "There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure." -- Jack E. Leonard 26. "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge." -- Thomas Brackett Reed 27. "He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them." -- James Reston (about Richard Nixon) stolen 3838 11 Comments Like Comment

Fascists Not Hypocrites

by Chauncey Devega healthy democracy, in America or anywhere else, must be based upon shared assumptions about empirical reality, facts and truth. Today's Republican Party and other "conservatives" reject such basic principles, norms and values. Fascism, which lies at the core of contemporary Republican politics, is the mind-killer: It is anti-intellectual, anti-rational and anti-human. Fascism also seeks to annihilate the world as it actually exists and replace it with a fantasy world created by the fascist movement and its leader. Too many liberals and progressives in this hour of darkness cling to the misguided belief that their core values about reason, democracy, human rights and civil rights are effectively universal, and so compelling that Republicans and others on the right must share them to a large degree. This collective narcissism may doom us all. Many members of the media class obsessively complain and protest — in a mixture of performative shock and sincere disbelief — that Republicans are "hypocrites" who have "double standards" and constantly tell lies. This is also a willful decision to avoid the truth. Advertisement: To cite a recent example, it is now publicly known that on Jan. 6, Fox News personalities, including Brian Kilmeade, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, texted White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, pleading with him to persuade Donald Trump to stop his followers from attacking the Capitol. Yet within hours or days, these propagandists were telling their viewers that Trump's attack force actually comprised "leftist radicals" — members of antifa, "Black Lives Matter or similar groups. Or, alternatively, that the Capitol attackers were genuine patriots and heroes — or simply "tourists." On cue, Democrats and the mainstream commentariat lambasted Fox News for its supposed hypocrisy and for allegedly insulting its audience. And of course, once this news hit the headlines, the Fox hosts involved changed their stories, blatantly lying about what their texts to Meadows had said. Hannity, Ingraham and Kilmeade pledged their loyalty once again to Donald Trump — out of fear, shared by all members of his cult following, that he might order them purged for disloyalty. Advertisement: Background Image Rick Wilson on how Democrats can use Trump’s tax bill against himProgress Bar 00:00 / 01:32 Volume Bar Go To Video Page RELATED: Text-gate fallout: Hannity, Ingraham and Don Jr. unveiled as whiny MAGA wimps! This is all part of a much larger and very tedious pattern, in which many liberals and Democrats express amazement that Republican political leaders and propagandists say one thing in private and something opposite in public. There also continues to be considerable consternation and awe at the power of Trump's Big Lie and his followers' unwavering dedication to it. Even after decades, many people still seem stunned by the Republican Party and the broader right's unwavering hostility toward science and expertise, their cultlike behavior and rejection of reality, their willingness to embrace conspiracy theories and religious extremism, their deepening attraction to fascism and authoritarianism and a range of related antisocial behavior. These habitual complaints about Republican hypocrisy function as a script or narrative frame that dominates much mainstream American political commentary. The indictment has lost almost all its power, except among a small niche audience of those who have convinced themselves that "democratic norms" still apply to the Republicans. When the average American is told that the Republicans are hypocrites, the common (and largely understandable) response is: "So what?" To make that accusation against politicians is the equivalent of observing that water is in fact wet. Advertisement: But for those in the chattering class who wield such words it has the imagined power of a religious invocation: God's judgment is called down to punish the "hypocrite" who has transgressed against the democratic order and its supposed commitment to truth and facts. In the world of realpolitik — and a country under siege by a fascist movement — such holy words have lost their power. If there is a deity who cares about such things, that deity abandoned the American people a long time ago. But there is another more basic explanation for why Democrats and others committed to reason, truth and democracy continue to believe they can find common ground with Republicans. That explanation is rooted in fear. Today's Republican Party and conservative movement has shown itself to be sociopathic and sadistic. It evinces no belief in a moral code or set of values that could be leveraged to create feelings of shame or embarrassment. Winning and keeping political power is all that matters; domination and control are the sole raison d'être. RELATED: Dr. Justin Frank: Laughing at Trump is "unhealthy" and won't "protect us from reality" Most people who identify with the Democratic Party, and most Americans overall, are terrified of that fact and continue to deny it, believing — or pretending to believe — that Republicans will return to the realm of "normal" politics sooner or later. In a conversation with Salon earlier this year, Dr. Justin Frank, a physician and psychoanalyst who is the author of "Donald Trump on the Couch," explained the roots of such reasoning: Most people do not want to believe that a person could be as destructive and evil as Donald Trump. That fact changes their worldview and their fantasies about life having a happy ending. The fantasy is that we are all protected, we are all going to be safe, which is a very childlike way of thinking. This is why many people do not want to acknowledge what Trump really is: They do not want to face the fact that Donald Trump, in my opinion, has shown himself to be a psychopath. Advertisement: Similarly Dr. John Gartner, a former professor at the Johns Hopkins medical school and a contributor to the bestseller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President," offered this context in an interview earlier this year: In a way, we as a society have been so protected and privileged, and lived such a life of peace and sanity, that we don't believe that the dystopian science fiction that we are living today in America is actually happening. There's a certain default option of normality. Nobody wants to give up that default assumption that we are still living in a world of facts and sanity. White America does not have either the historic memory or contemporary experience that comes from living under that kind of power, or struggling against it. For many people, therefore, the default impulse is to deny or ignore the existential danger embodied by American fascism, or simply hide from it in terror. RELATED: Dr. John Gartner on America after Trump: "Dystopian science fiction is actually happening"

COMMENTARY Pride and prejudice: Forget critical race theory — let's talk about critical race facts Real history isn't designed to make white people feel good — and they can't hide from the truth forever By LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 20, 2021 8:00AM (EST) You want to know what the whole brouhaha about critical race theory is about? It's about people not wanting their children taught stuff they're not proud of. They're not proud of racism. It's nasty. It's not "who we are," to use a common political phraseology. Besides, it's behind us. We dealt with that part of our history. Let's move on! Sure, let's move on to studying the founding fathers, who we are proud of, but heaven forbid we should mention their messy aspects, like the fact that a bunch of them owned slaves. Let's move on to teaching about the wars we won, rather than those we lost. Let's move on to teaching about the Great Expansion West as our country grew from 13 colonies to encompass a continent, but let's leave out the genocide of the people who were already living here and the inconvenient truth that it was at least in part the debates over the expansion of slavery into the territories that ultimately led to the secession of the South, the collapse of American democracy and the Civil War. It's said that parents in hotspots like Sugar Land, Texas, and Loudoun County, Virginia don't want their children to be made to feel uncomfortable because they are white. Aside from the fact that discomfort is a rather odd criterion for what to teach or not teach children, I cannot recall a single instance during the 12 years I attended public schools of anyone being worried whether or not the Black kids I went to school with felt uncomfortable attending majority-white schools. But let's talk about pride for a moment. I'm proud to be a descendant of Thomas Jefferson. That doesn't mean I have to be proud of the fact that along with the Declaration of Independence, he laid out in his only book, "Notes on the State of Virginia," what you might call the founding ideology behind white supremacy: Blacks were inherently inferior to whites and were incapable of being educated, and thus it was proper that they remain chattel owned by whites. Nor am I proud of the fact that over his lifetime, Jefferson owned more than 600 human beings and upon his death freed only those with the last name Hemings, among whom were the children he had fathered with his slave, Sally. That's the thing about pride. It belongs to you, so you get to pick and choose what you're proud of. I remember when it was considered extraordinary that the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, would have a hit record with "Say it Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud." Released in 1968, that just wasn't something you heard Black people telling the world, and yet here was James Brown singing these lyrics: Now we demand a chance to do things for ourselves We're tired of beatin' our head against the wall And workin' for someone else We're people, we're just like the birds and the bees We'd rather die on our feet Than be livin' on our knees Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud! Same with the phrase, "Gay Pride." In the summer of 1969 when those words rang out from the crowd outside the Stonewall Inn after a police bust, it was extraordinary to hear it said out loud in a public place, much less during what amounted to a police riot against the people saying it. By a quirk of fate, I was there the night the Stonewall was busted. I wrote the Village Voice cover story on the two days of demonstrations that followed. The words "Gay Pride" and "Gay Power" were scrawled on the boarded-up windows of the Stonewall. Until that moment, being gay was hardly a source of pride. It would not be until 1987 that homosexuality was officially removed from the DSM, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders," and it took many more years for sex acts between adults of the same gender to be decriminalized. Proud of being a criminal and having a mental illness? It was instead the reason many gay and lesbian people chose to stay in the closet and hide their sexual identity. It's not just an irony but a crime that Black pride and gay pride are what lie behind much of the hysteria about "critical race theory," especially in the red states where the madness over transgender bathrooms and racial history really broken out. The attitude among so many of those who scream threats at school board meetings and demonstrate outside the homes of school principals and superintendents seems to be that gays and Blacks were OK — back when they weren't proud of who they are. Protesting parents seem to long for a time when "they" weren't in your face with ridiculous demands like teaching the subject of slavery in history classrooms and allowing LGBT students to form pride clubs and hold hands in the hallways. The arguments over critical race theory reflect a desire among certain parents for all that icky stuff to just go away. Let's get back to cheering at football games and decorating for prom, they seem to say. Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course. Here's just one problem with that. In places like Sugar Land, Texas, those football games are being played on land that was deeded to homesteaders in the 1820s and '30s by Stephen F. Austin from a land grant of more than 97,000 acres he received from Mexico as a deal for cotton and sugar plantations. If settlers brought one slave with them, they received 80 acres for a homestead. With two slaves they got 160 acres, and so on. For his role in helping to settle the territory of Texas and for leading the Texas revolution against Mexico, which opposed slavery, the state capital was named after him. Loudoun County, Virginia, one of the wealthiest and fastest-growing counties in the country, was similarly farmed by slave-owners. Ruth Basil, who worked for my grandparents on their Loudoun County farm in the early 1950s, is the great-granddaughter of slaves and was raised in a log cabin built by her great-grandparents, after they won their freedom in 1865, on land that was sold to them by the man who had owned them. Ruth was raised in that log cabin, from which she walked to school each day along the dirt roads that formed the boundaries of the farm where her great grandparents were slaves. She was frequently passed on her way to school by yellow school buses that carried white children to the all-white schools they attended. Ruth and her Black classmates studied from used schoolbooks that had been passed down to the segregated schools she attended. Loudoun County was part of Virginia's program of "massive resistance" against integration after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, and its schools would remain segregated, along with most the others in the state, until the mid-1960s. Massive resistance to school integration in Virginia has morphed into massive resistance against critical race theory and was a leading factor in the contest for the Virginia governorship, won by Republican Glenn Younkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe earlier this month. The state that used to hide its Black students in inadequately financed, poorly supplied and out of the way all-Black schools is now trying to hide the critical race facts of those years from its students. Here is a new "note on the state of Virginia": Opposition to critical race theory won't save you from the ugly truths about white supremacy. More from Salon on the "critical race theory" controversy: How Democrats can win the critical race theory war: Call out the Christian right behind the movement Meet Christopher Rufo — leader of the incoherent right-wing attack on "critical race theory" Right's cynical attack on "critical race theory": Old racist poison in a new bottle LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives on the East End of Long Island and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better. You can read his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ~Hannah Arendt (Book: The Origins of Totalitarianism https://amzn.to/3snB9ei)

Great Books Make Us a Better Person

 

OPINION

JOHN MCWHORTER

Yes, the Great Books Make Us Better People

Dec. 17, 2021

Credit...Delcan and Co.

By John McWhorter

Opinion Writer

Roosevelt Montás came to the United States from the Dominican Republic as a child, got his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. from Columbia and ultimately came to run its Core Curriculum program. This is a slate of courses required of all Columbia undergraduates that includes a major component on what is commonly referred to as the Great Books.

Now, he’s written a combination memoir and call to arms.

In “Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation,” Montás explains why he fears, as many have, that universities have come to put more value on, and resources into teaching, the sciences and more readily marketable skills, as opposed to emphasizing the mind-expanding and personal development that students gain from a rigorous colloquy around certain hallowed texts. Specifically, he stipulates, “The animating argument of this book is for liberal education as the common education for all — not instead of a more practical education but as its prerequisite” and adds, “I want nurses, computer scientists, accountants, engineers, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and professionals of every kind, to be liberally educated.”

The New Yorker staff writer and Harvard English professor Louis Menand seems unimpressed, seeing Montás as well as Arnold Weinstein, a Brown comparative literature professor who has written a similar book just now, of overselling Great Books courses and undervaluing the aims and contributions of other academic curriculums, including in the sciences. In the coming New Yorker, Menand writes, “The conflict these professors are experiencing between their educational ideals and the priorities of their institutions is baked into the system” and is an extension of the “dispute over the purpose of college” and that the definition of a liberal education extends across academic disciplines, not just to the traditional canon.

Menand doesn’t dismiss the value of studying these texts, and notes that he teaches many of them. (I should note, at this point, that I am a fan of Menand — his book, “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War” is a feast. I’ll further note that Montás is a colleague and friend.)

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However, Menand wraps this all up by arguing something that caused me the same alarm that has called Montás to the academy’s battlements: that humanists such as Montás “need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos” and that “the idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.” Menand concludes:

The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a Great Books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was 17. But I don’t think I’m a better person.

Hmm. He doesn’t? For several years I taught the Core Curriculum course “Contemporary Civilization,” and I do think it made a better person out of me, as well as the dozens of students I ushered through it.

That course is a two-semester marathon requiring every sophomore to read dense texts week after week and come prepared to discuss and write about them. It starts with Plato’s “The Republic” and continues with (this is but a partial list) Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, St. Augustine, the New Testament, Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, Adam Smith, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Du Bois, Fanon and many others. And as much of a climb as this can be for students (and their teacher), it does make one a better person.

Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” for example, is initially a forbidding piece of work, seeming to meander through assorted definitions of vague- and perhaps quaint-sounding concepts such as happiness and virtue. However, to guide students through what Aristotle is getting across is to reveal invaluable insights about the human endeavor — one of my favorites of which is that what Aristotle means by virtue is excellence, as in excelling. His “Ethics” offers a light to shine through the difficulty in figuring out what the point of existence is — of finding something we do well and doing our best in it as a prime justification for existence. One day, it’s over for each of us, but you tried, and did, your best with what you were given.

Rousseau is perhaps best known for his concept of humans beginning as “noble savages.” These figures supposedly led largely solitary lives and lacked language and even capacities for discernment. We must, in a nod to Menand, acknowledge that anthropology and paleontology have put this to rest as any kind of scientific fact about the origin of humans — humans emerged as, and have always been, social, rational beings. And we must acknowledge the Eurocentricity in his characterizations.

The key thing is that Rousseau did not see this “noble savage,” a clueless brute, as noble at all. His notion of semi-paradise was small, basically egalitarian societies, with the idea that everything went to pieces when humans conglomerated into hierarchical civilizations. The problem as Rousseau saw it was masses of people condemned to wrest “iron and wheat” from the earth — while a fortunate few reaped the benefits thereof.

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The question, then, is whether what we think of as the normal state of things has been a worthy development. To examine that question seems, pretty clearly, to be a kind of self-improvement, even if you don’t land on conclusive answers, which you probably don’t.

And this understanding is a tool for grappling with today’s dilemmas: For example, anthropologists have also told me that depression and anomie are unknown among the early societies that they’ve studied, because it was so clear what one’s place and purpose were within the structure of these societies. Yet few of us would want humanity to return to these small bands being our universal condition.

But this leads to the question of whether hierarchy is inherently wrong. Is there a kind of large-scale hierarchical civilization that would be more just? Here is where a student may come to understand that Marxism, despite its built-in problems, despite its deserved bad rap in our market-based society, isn’t crazy. To simply know that the kinds of questions Rousseau stimulates are, indeed, questions makes you a better person in the sheer sense of understanding the complexity of the real world, something that escapes ideologues of all kinds.

I especially enjoyed teaching Immanuel Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.” One of his categorical imperatives proposes an ultimate ethical obligation, to “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” That is not, mind you, the old Golden Rule, because “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” could mean that you decide to be lazy and be OK with other people being lazy as well. This fails under the categorical imperative because it would be a poor universal law — a society of layabouts would be a hungry and threadbare one.

However, the categorical imperative leaks when you try to apply it to, say, suicide (Is it wrong because we wouldn’t want all people to do it?) and lying (Is a lie intended to avert catastrophe inherently wrong?). What we ultimately get from Kant is how elusive any truly universal principle is, especially if we consider that different peoples worldwide might have differing perspectives on such matters.

Menand, certainly, doesn’t think contemplating these questions has no value. But how can it be that becoming equipped to debate them didn’t improve his, or most people’s sense of preparation for this vale of tears called life? My mother taught at a university, and when I was around 10, I asked her what college was for, given that even at that age I sensed that students, at least outside of the sciences, were not being filled with quantities of basic knowledge in the same way they were in elementary, middle and high school. She said that after four years of college, students have, or should have, a sense of the world’s complexity, that everything did not easily reduce to common-sense observations of the kind you preface with “Well, all I know is …”

Mom had that right, I think, and Great Books lend precisely this perspective. Having a sense of how to decide what your life is for amid all the possible choices before you; understanding that the ethics of how civilizations and power operate is complex rather than reducible to facile binaries and snap judgments; tasting the elusiveness of the single, irrefutable answer and thus truly appreciating the wit of Douglas Adams’s famous proposal that the answer to everything is “42.” One is, surely, a better person with this perspective under one’s belt.

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Scholars of Montás’s perspective are empirically correct, not old-fashioned, in treating the books on the grand old “Five-Foot Shelf” as vehicles of self-improvement, of the kind to which the sciences generally lend only more obliquely. Books like “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” teach us much. Aristotle, Rousseau and Kant teach fundamental lessons.

Montás’s book is not a clap-back against the aims and practices of the modern university in general. He argues for the value of a Great Books education as the foundation for receiving the benefits of everything else a school has to offer. Especially urgent is his point that the Great Books curriculum, in its philosophical universality, is egalitarian. Despite those who claim that these are merely works by dead, possibly irrelevant white men, Montás argues that the Great Books approach has a fundamentally democratizing impulse.

“A Core education serves a leveling function” for students, he says, “sharpening their historical awareness of how the world has come to be what it is, giving them a shared vocabulary with which to describe and act upon it, and equipping them to communicate with others who bring different backgrounds and perspectives to the conversation.”

I’m sensing, once again, people coming out better.

Have feedback? Send a note to McWhorter-newsletter@nytimes.com.

John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He hosts the podcast “Lexicon Valley” and is the author, most recently, of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”