I have a modest proposal.
I was talking to a friend of mine, a politically connected tradesman
and a marine retired from service. Everyone should be advised that there is no
such thing as an ex-marine. I doubt this is true in all cases, but marines,
when they grow old, tend to lose some conventional inhibitions. I suppose that’s
true of most of us. Conventions can be a smothering blanket, but in the winter
one wants warmth. Inhibitions gone, friends are the next to ditch us. Anyway, my
marine friend is full of salty expressions. Comradeship arouses in men,
especially when engaged in battle or sports, the scatological imperative.
People, he says, think politicians are helpful – compassion
and do-goodism is after all in their job specs -- and so people turn to them
when in distress, even when the distress is caused by the self-same politicians.
But, my friend says, politicians the world over are concerned chiefly with
acquiring power and utilizing it to their benefit. Politicians, however
virtuous the persona they present to the public, are made of the same frail
flesh as the rest of us. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, says this
friend of mine, quoting scripture.
My friend, a man of many masks, becomes cynical when a
philosophic mood clamps its crushing jaws around him, more often now that he is
older. The young wisely resist the lure of philosophy. Very soon we’ll all be
dust, he says, what’s the point in continuing to hedge and stammer? Politicians
-- some well-mannered, others not -- continue to trim the truth or avoid it
altogether even as they hobble towards the grave. Like drowning men, they grasp
frantically at straws. Anyway, this friend of mine says, politicians love to
stretch voters over the barrel -- bottoms up. Some are cleverer than others,
and the best of them are able so gently to penetrate the average voter that he
feels as if he has been touched by a feather. As I warned you, my friend is a
little salty in his expressions.
This friend of mine tends to look kindly, these days, on the
flaccid, failing flesh of older politicians. And, let’s face it, many of them
are ancient. Justice Ruth Bader Gingsberg, pushing 88, has survived
multiple operations yet continues to show up for work at the U.S. Supreme
Court. The two present contenders for the White House, President Donald Trump
and former Vice President in the Obama administration Joe Biden, are well past
middle age. The bloom has long been off their roses, and they are set in their
ways, for good or ill. The recently concluded Democrat primaries have swept younger
presidential aspirants into the dustbin of history. It would appear, my friend
says, that the elders of the party have successfully arranged matters so as to
secure their political futures for life. The only thing more deathless than the
insincerity of politicians is gerrymandered political districts. The notion of
term limits, he points out, is a flickering flame perpetually being doused by
gale force winds streaming from the mouths of incumbent politicians for whom
politics has become an unshakable bad habit – which is to say, all politicians currently plugged
into live power outlets. To be out of
office is to be unplugged and therefore powerless.
Anyhow, Biden, my friend points out, is now standing in the diminished
gale of the #MeToo movement, waiting for his own mini-tornado to subside. And
it really does seem the Tara Reade affair has blown over. Several prominent
#MeTooists have said in so many words: we suspect Biden had a horny moment that
ordinarily might have caused us to demand his head on a platter, but the
greater threat is a sitting president Democrats have been unable to pry from
office, though, God knows, they’ve tried numerous times.
So, Biden will more than likely get a pass. If delegates
matter at all, the alternative to Biden on the Democrat side may be recently self-neutered
Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders, always a bridge too far for moderate Democrats
who had tolerantly supported a left-leaning President Barack Obama for eight
long years. A return to normalcy is not within the grasp of what used to be
called “the vital” center of the Democrat Party. Indeed, the vital center, having
moved radically to the left, as indicated by the enthusiasm with which moderate
Democrats warmly embraced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s revolutionary Green New
Deal, has become far less vital and much more eccentric.
Despite expert opinion to the contrary, my friend says, eroticism
is not snuffed out by old age. Add power to age and you get an ungovernable
audacity. In the absence of term limits, #MeTooism, my friend thinks, might have
been used to cull the herd of politicians-for-life such as, here in
Connecticut, the redoubtable and as yet unblemished U.S. Representative in
Connecticut’s gerrymandered 1st District, John Larson. The equally
long-lived Rosa DeLauro in the state’s gerrymandered 3rd District is
not likely to be swept into a #MeToo maelstrom because – my friend hopes this
will not sound too condescending – she is an elderly woman unlikely to be set
upon by sex-driven men, young or old. Still, even elderly women are susceptible
to non-erotic sins of the flesh. Power is an aphrodisiac that stimulates all the
ungovernable appetites, foremost of which is, as Nietzsche tells us, the will
to power.
Coronavirus, my friend says, hovers over Connecticut
politics like the lamb-horned “Beast of the Earth” in Revelations. The distinguishing
mark of the “Beast of the Sea” in Revelations is that the dominant sea-beast
rules by authority alone, and it is the province of the Beast of the Earth to
convince all to submit to such unauthorized supremacy. And no, my friend is not
a curbside Babbitt. In fact, he is a non-aggressive, live-and-let-live
agnostic, but he thinks Christian symbolism, still familiar to many, may be
deployed to illuminate our Christianity-purged secularized politics. He regards
the new, more aggressive, modernist de-Christianized dispensation as a
quasi-religious theatre in which politicians play the parts of prophets, preachers
and Christ-like political saviors. In the United States, even atheists are
Christian atheists.
Not to carry hyperbole too far, but Coronavirus has made Princips
of most governors, many of whom are now operating, in the absence of our two
traditional power-balancing branches of government – the legislative and
judicial – as pre- American Revolutionary monarchs. It is through
unconstitutional deference and the supine abnegation of the legislative and
judiciary branches of government that liberty is lost. In Connecticut, the General
Assembly has not sanctioned any of the extraordinary dicta daily issued by Governor
Ned Lamont through executive orders. And, of course, the judiciary
traditionally defers to chief executives on political matters unchallenged by
the legislature as being unconstitutional.
Our national Coronavirus plague, which some dour, “unscientific”
critics insist is no more deadly than the flu, has deposited in the hands of
governors here in the Northeast an administrative power that might well bring a
blush to the cheek of Gore Vidal’s Caligula. You will remember that, asked by a
reporter whether he objected to the seemingly endless senatorial reign of
Edward Kennedy in Massachusetts, Vidal quipped – no, not at all, because every
state should have in it at least one Caligula.
Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York is the most visible and
outspoken Vidalian Caligula in a compact of similarly endowed governors that
includes Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
A recent Stanford University antibody study
estimates that the world fatality rate among those infected with Coronavirus is
likely 0.1 to 0.2 percent, which presents a risk far lower than previous World
Health Organization (WHO) estimates that were 20 to 30 times higher. It was the
fanciful WHO estimates that spurred isolation and business shutdown policies. Nearly
one-third of all deaths in the United States have occurred in New York City,
the epicenter of the pandemic. In New York State, two-thirds of fatally
infected patients were over 70 years old; more than 95 percent were over 50 years
old; and about 90 percent of all fatal cases had an underlying illness. Of
COVID-19 deaths fully investigated for underlying conditions to date, 6,520,
or 99.2 percent, had
an underlying illness, according to the antibody study.
“If you do not already have an underlying chronic condition,”
The Hill notes, “your chances of
dying are small, regardless of age. And young adults and children in
normal health have almost no risk of any serious illness from COVID-19.”
When Coronavirus was raging like a brush fire through New
York’s nursing homes, Cuomo did not direct the bulk of his remediation efforts there.
The same is true in Connecticut. We knew right from the get-go that Coronavius
was especially deadly to people over 65 and those whose immune systems had been
compromised. Here in Connecticut, we were able very early on to identify Coronavirus
“hot spots,” such as Fairfield County (confirmed cases 13,236, deaths 1,034), New
Haven (confirmed cases 9,209, deaths 701), and Hartford (confirmed cases 7,263,
deaths 909). A proportional response that would have taken into account the
severity of Coronavirus in different sections of Connecticut was rejected from
the outset by governors such as Lamont and Cuomo – because they were governors
of states, not chief executives of municipalities. Similarly, Trump was the chief executive of
the nation, not the states. If the doctrine of subsidiarity, the first casualty
of unrepresentative, top-down governance, had held sway in Connecticut, schools
in low-impact municipalities such as Windham County (confirmed cases 270,
deaths 7) might have remained open, and a rational shutdown regimen would have
been far less devastating to business there and elsewhere in the state.
Fully 60 per percent, more than half, of Coronavirus deaths
in Connecticut occurred in nursing homes. The CEO of one Connecticut facility
especially hard hit, Kimberly Hall North in Windsor, we know from recent news
accounts, had begged relevant state agencies in Connecticut for rapid assistance.
The agency heads had ears but they heard not, eyes but they saw not. Why were
they deaf, blind and unprepared for the deadly assault on nursing homes, some
of which quickly became funeral homes? We still have not settled upon fi
statistics. Perhaps leading politicians in the state, intent on running Trump
into the ground, were distracted by the glittering possibility that their
declared presidential champion, Biden, must – simply MUST – do what Adam
Schiff, Nancy Pelosi and others had been unable to do, subvert the Trump
presidency, reclaim the White House and, God willing, capture both houses of
Congress.
Screwing in his scientific eye loop and pouring over recent data,
Cuomo discovered, to his
astonishment, that 66 percent of New Yorkers admitted to hospitals that had
contracted Coronavirus did so while sequestered at home.
The number suggests that sequestration may not be a
Coronavirus silver bullet. Even as the governors of New York, New Jersey and
Pennsylvania were requiring their citizens to wear face masks – but not in
churches they had closed – facemasks were becoming as difficult to procure as
toilet paper. Some of the home-fashioned masks and bandana’s my marine friend has seen while shopping at
Stop and Shop are useless, and there seems to be little agreement among
scientists whether these homemade masks are a help or a hindrance.
Early figures from scientists concerning the number of
people who had been infected by Coronavirus or those who died “from
complications arising from Coronavirus” were, to put it baldly, laughably
incorrect, as were calculations of the number of hospital beds needed in New
York City to wage the war on the plague. Historian Victor Davis Hanson
punctured the grosser predictions of credited scientists when he said that not
only did we not know the denominator in our Covid-19 calculations, we did not
know the numerator either. Ponder this: a woman crossing a street is hit and
killed by a hearse carrying the body of 91 year-old resident of a nursing home.
Later, it is discovered that the woman had been exposed to the Coronavirus. Did
the second corpse die “from complications arising from Coronavirus?”
This Coronavirus business is a messy affair, and some of the
mess had been intentionally generated. Politicians know that there is a level
of complexity at which the average citizen simply stops paying attention. That
is why political skullduggery lives, like a maggot infestation, in the
intercesses of complexity. The antidote to this bewildering complexity is modesty.
We should, my marine friend insists, be far more modest than we have been. He
quotes his Italian grandfather, deceased for many years, on the point -- never
say more than you know, and always know more than you say, a wise rule for both
politicians and journalists.
Lucian
***
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Lucian,
I agree with much of what you say here, especially the last
line of your letter, which refers to your grandfather’s bit of wisdom: Always
know more than you say, and never say more than you know. If journalists were
to abide by that advice, our papers would be less bulky but more truthful, and
what they lose in weight they would gain in lucidity.
We both agree that in the “post-modern” period – whatever
that means – a patient search for the truth is no longer a necessary part of
disputation since, if you cannot win an argument, you may always defame your
disputatious opponent, whoever he may be, not directly – for that would take
some courage – but indirectly through masked associates in the media. In our
time, it is no longer necessary to dispute or prove error. We have little time
for lengthy discussions that turn on nice points. For the perverse among us,
nothing is easier than turning truth into a burning bush of lies. The truth can
be buried under heaping mounds of twittering nonsense, so that the whisper in the whirlwind tucked in the mile-long twitter feeds need never be heard.
Just a couple of small bones I wish to pick with you. There
is no indication that Eros has carried off U.S. Representative John Larson. I
know you have not suggested such a thing. Larson is an old-time politician
operating in a political theatre in which old times no longer matter. And why do you not mention the U.S. Attorney
from Connecticut, John Durham, a man at the very center of the Trump whirlwind?
I hope you, your loved ones and your VERY few friends are
surviving happily in the age of Coronavirus.
Hester
***
Sunday, May 10
Hester,
Yes, John Durham is far less interesting than the views on
Durham held by anti-Trump/Barr/Durham Democrat partisans.
Durham is an ardent and honest prosecutor, a Thomas More man
who holds the More of “A Man For All Seasons” in the highest regard and said so
in a little referenced speech at Yale’s Tomistic Institute in 2018. We may pray none of his detractors discover he
is a non-lapsed Catholic, unlike post-modern Catholics; one thinks of the
“Catholic” members of Connecticut’s all-Democrat US Congressional Delegation
who, having abandoned the moral precepts of their church, have become little
more than practical atheists.
Durham takes his constitutional oath seriously, and for that
reason he is tethered to something firmer than the unstable estimation of unprincipled
journalists. Durham is no one’s man, somewhat like the More of the Bolt play.
Fidelity to an oath to defend and uphold Constitutional proscriptions against
all hazards will always be a more solid anchor than a flattering editorials in Connecticut's unitary media.
Blumenthal, of course, thinks he is the better prosecutor.
Blumenthal’s arrival in the US Senate, after more than 20 years plying his
trade as Connecticut’s Attorney General, changed forever the thrust of his senatorial
obligations. Far from being the seeming heroic prosecutor of his two-decade-long
political apprenticeship as a white-hatted consumer protection Attorney
General, Blumenthal has now become little more than a party hack – leading, of
course, the hackery parade. As Attorney General, he lavishly imposed
questionable restrictions on all kinds of Connecticut businesses. But as
Senator from the Constitution state, he has allowed one business – Big Abortion
Inc. – to escape untethered to reasonable restrictions.
Blumenthal carried into the Senate with him many of his
vices and few of his virtues. He is frigid, humorless and one of those people
about whom Thoreau says – those who go to their mail box frequently have not
heard from themselves in a long while. As Attorney General, Blumenthal warmly
embraced the notion that he would not allow the angels of his better nature to push
him around. What is the point of having absolute power, after all -- if you are
not willing to abuse it, eh?
And abuse it he did. When he left office, he deeded former
Democrat Party Chairman George Jepsen, his successor, more than 200 unresolved
cases. Jepson tossed them, which is to say – he cut the shackles from
Blumenthal’s victims, raised them up from a dank and dark cellar, and allowed
them, many of whom had been impoverished from years of litigation, a measure of
abridged freedom.
Over the years, Attorney General Blumenthal had fashioned a
process of prosecution – I had almost written “persecution” -- that forced many
of his victims to accede, after months and sometimes years of bullying, to his
demands. First, you find a victim by consulting the state’s Consumer Protection
Department. Next, you release to a friendly media a self-serving recitation of unproven
damning charges, some baseless, that will induce clients of the business under
attack to issue more complaints, at which point you then may persuade a judge
to allow you to seize the assets of your victim, driving him or her out of
business. Impoverished and brutalized by endless and expensive court hearings,
your victim will be rendered mutely compliant. And you will have sent an important
message, your calling card, to other businesses across the state -- don’t mess
with the man about whom it is said, “There is no more dangerous spot in
Connecticut than that between Blumenthal and a television camera.” Durham has a
sense of justice, Blumenthal a sense of theater. That is the main difference
between the two.
There is another important difference. In his Tomistic Institute
talk, Durham lays strong emphasis on that portion of the Bolt play in which son
Roper tells More he would cut down every law in England to cage the Devil. More
turns on him in righteous anger. England is paved solid with laws, More says –
the laws of men, not God, informed, one always hopes, by Christian charity. The
law without corresponding charity is an unjust tyranny. When the Devil turns on
Roper, More asks, where then will Roper turn for refuge and succor, all the
laws of the land having been flattened?
For people who have shaken their feet of God and “all that
antiquate religious rot,” there remains, after the great dethronement, only human
– “all too human,” Nietzsche says -- will and purpose. Blumenthal’s
frantic and aggressive behavior during the Senate hearings on Trump’s nominees
to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, strongly suggests he
graduated from this school with honors.
Most political commentators fully expect Blumenthal, the
Democrat’s Javier, to denounce Durham at some point. Blumenthal has become adroit
at pulling down men such as Kavanaugh, whose character he and other Democrats
gleefully destroyed in a congressional hearing that rivaled that of Associate
Justice Clarence Thomas.
You may recall Gore Vidal’s Senator Edward Kennedy bear-baiting Robert Bork, nominated
to the Supreme Court by President by President George W. Bush. Here is Kennedy
at full throttle: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be
forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch
counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids,
schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could
be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts
would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is
-- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the
heart of our democracy."
Intemperate opposition to Republican nominees to the high
court continued in the case of
Clarence Thomas, a black American. Thomas described his own hearing as
“a high tech lynching.” Responding to charges by Anita Hill that he had made unwanted
sexual advances towards her, the longest serving Justice on the Supreme Court
said at the time, “Do I have like stupid written on the back of my shirt? I
mean come on. We know what this is all about. People should just tell the
truth: 'This is the wrong black guy; he has to be destroyed.' Just say it. Then
now we're at least honest with each other." Thomas refused during his
hearing to play the part assigned him by his detractors.
Following such hearings, Kennedy continued to roar lion-like
in the Senate, 40 years after he had left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in Poncha
Pond.
Kennedy and Blumenthal both are political, not moral, lions.
To put it in terms of the Bolt play, they both are Cromwell, not More, proof of
the proposition that neither truth nor logic any longer plays a part in
disputation -- where denunciation has been given the run of the joint. And we
know what More thinks of Cromwell – a useful tool of the king, “a mere
plumber.”
Lucian
***
Sunday, May 24
Lucian,
I thought we might be able to put politics aside for a bit
and talk about something else – anything else. The news is full of Coronavirus
politics 24/7 and, it seems to some of us, that the more is said the less we
know. The sea of uncertainty, particularly with respect to our damaged economy,
appears to be deepening the more the talking heads chatter with “experts.” Most
of the data underlying expert analysis is either unreliable, in a state of rapid
change, or ambiguous, ambiguity being the real last refuge of scoundrels.
Lucian, the second century Roman satirist, we both know is
your namesake. Your father did have an impertinent sense of humor in choosing
your first name. In “The Sale Of Philosophers,” a skeptic, Coppernob, who is
named after Pyrrho, the founder of the Skeptic school, is auctioned off to a
shrewd BUYER, who asks PYRRHIAS “Tell me first, what do you know?”
PYRRHIAS: Nothing.
BUYER: How do you mean
nothing?
PYRRHIAS: I don’t think
there is anything at all.
BUYER: Aren’t we something?
PYRRHIAS: I’m not even
sure of that.
The seller charges one Attic mina for Pyrrhias, not a king’s
ransom.
BUYER: There you are.
Well now, you – I’ve bought you, eh?
PYRRHIAS: I’m not
sure.
BUYER: Nonsense! I have bought you, and I’ve paid my
money.
PYRRHIAS: I defer
judgment. I’m considering the matter.
Does this dialogue put you in mind of anyone or anything?
Hester
***
Sunday, May 17, 2010
Hester,
Lucian’s Pyrrhias puts me in mind of every college professor
whose classes I strove mightily to escape while a student. Skepticism, it
seemed to me at the time, was tolerable in a student barely graduated from high
school, but not in a professor whose duty it was to impart wisdom to his
students. It was not my father, no skeptic, who assigned me my first name, but
my mother. Neither was she a skeptic, just cautious of everyone and everything
that fell outside the magic and familiar circle of the family.
My grandfather on my father’s side may have kept his
skepticism a closely guarded secret; he did not wish to infect his children
with a paralyzing view of things. Just as all things were possible with God so,
to the Italian immigrant of his day, all things were possible in America, if
not for him then for his children. The northern Italy of my grandfather’s day
was a hangman’s noose. It was pure luck, or the grace of God, that led to my
mother and father’s mash up. Ask me about the spruce sprig and the dance
someday.
Lucian’s Pyrrhias has leaped from the frying pan,
skepticism, into the fire, nihilism.
Pyrrho thought certain knowledge should always be questioned, and in
this he does not differ substantially from, say, Abby Hoffman. But the modern
nihilist thinks certain knowledge is impossible, because everything that
appears before us is either in flux or a mirage such as thirsty men see in the
dessert. Knowledge itself is a nullity. The very presence of an observer casts doubt on objective knowledge. Everything but the sensory moment
is a painful or pleasant illusion. We stand on an ever shifting point in time
in which the past and future are what we make of them. Life is not so much
reincarnation, ceaseless repetition, as it is re-invention. Today we can be A
and tomorrow not-A. The life’s mission of men and women is to transcend fixed
principles of every kind, religious, political and sociological through the
abolition of time and space. Even gender is not a bar to willful change. If you
are dissatisfied with being male, castrate yourself, grow breasts.
We needn’t wonder what Lucian might have made of all this. If
Lucian were writing in our day, some compassionate censor would cart him off,
laughing and snickering, to a gulag, perhaps in Virginia, within hollering
distance of Washington DC. Some months ago, Jerry Seinfeld, a much respected
comic writer and performer, decided he would no longer appear on the college
circuit, because students and professors had fallen into the bad habit of
taking comedy seriously.
Modern scholars doubt whether Lucian was a cynic. They tend
to view him as a comic – he more or less invented the comic dialogue -- and
professional rhetorician who liberally swung his bat at everyone. We know Karl
Marx, another bat swinger, liked Lucian. Our quarrel should not be with updated
skepticism. We should be skeptical of modern day nihilism; that and the
perverse will of moderns, perfectly captured in some of Dostoyevsky’s novels
and short stories. The will to destruction, to perversely pull everything to
earth, to grind beauty’s face in the mud, to show truth the door -- this is
what we are contending against.
Lucian
Comments