First Day Of December

    Tomorrow comes December first, and once again the lights of Christmas begin to decorate neighborhood homes.  Along the roads, the odd car carries atop its roof a Christmas tree.  Tonight, at Rockefeller Center the Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony will once again take place when someone flips a switch and electrifies 50,000  multicolored lights strung around an eighty-two foot tall Norway spruce. 

    Perhaps we're sentimental, but each year the lighting of the tree stirs in us a renewed belief that human beings can be kind, generous and peaceful.  But 4775 mile east of New York,  day and night Russian missiles pummel Ukraine, indiscriminately killing men, women and children.  Day and night Russian missiles blast the Ukrainian power grid.  Putin has an obvious objective: to terrorize and freeze the Ukrainians into submission and surrender.  

    While living under this barrage, the Ukrainians have fought bravely and in several instances have repelled the Russian invaders.  Their determination and courage and their fighting spirit radiates through the darkness spreading west from Moscow.  As we enjoy and celebrate this December, let's think of those inspiring Ukrainians and let's continue to pressure Washington to provide them with all they require to defeat the purely evil and rapacious villain who rules Russia.

This poem by Claude McKay expresses the Ukrainian resistance:

        If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs

Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,

Making their mock at our accursèd lot.

If we must die, O let us nobly die,

So that our precious blood may not be shed

In vain; then even the monsters we defy

Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

The Flaw of the Current English Major Today

    In his Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, (1998), Harold Bloom wrote "no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages."  Ten years later (2008), Maggi Trapp expressed a similar observation: 

    "Shakespeare’s plays and poems still matter to us because his plots still resonate, his characters still leave their mark, his language still moves and startles,” says Trapp. "His characters are ones we identify with. We understand Hamlet’s despondency; we recognize Othello’s envy; we feel Lear’s decline. These characters are, at once, types and revelations. Shakespeare’s characters are familiar, and at the same time they surprise us out of our complacency—and in this way they are endlessly fascinating."

    

    Yet Shakespeare, the "quintessence" of English literature, isn't required for English majors at most colleges and universities.  According to one statistic, only 8% of the country's top universities require their English majors to enroll in a Shakespeare class.

    Over the past thirty years, those who have worked to eliminate the traditional Shakespeare requirement have offered consistent reasons for dropping him:

• the plays of literature are antiquated and politically irrelevant;
• the plays of literature are racist and misogynistic;
• the plays privilege the hierarchal white/male power structure.

    The first reason is obviously the most absurd.  Everything from the past is old, but not automatically "antiquated."  If that were the case, then reading history, watching old films, listening to classical music, and visiting museums to see Old Masters or Impressionists paintings would be a waste of time.  

    Arguing that Shakespeare's plays are racist and misogynistic condemns those works for accurately depicting the world as Shakespeare knew it: a world that had not yet evolved to recognize the equality of all human beings (and frankly, something we still are struggling to achieve.).  

    Shakespeare's plays do not in fact perpetuate sexist or racist ideas.  They neither affirm nor deny any beliefs, doctrines, or attitudes.  To take offense at his depiction of  women, or other minority groups, is to narrowly read his works through an anachronistic lens.  What they do is explore and reveal as wide a variety of human nature as possible in the most verbally expansive language poets and authors of English have ever produced.  That variety, for example, does include characters who are racist, misogynistic, and malevolent; but also characters who are compassionate, loving, loyal, benevolent, heroic, tragic, and profound.  

    All English majors should read at least the five great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar.  To not read these plays is to deprive oneself of experiencing characters whose linguistic and psychological depth and range exceed anyone we will encounter in this life.  For example, read what Hamlet has to say about life:

   

    "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

(This quotation needs no explanation.)

    "What a piece of work is a man!  How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable!  in action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!  And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" Hamlet

(How modern this speech is.  How often have we felt the grandeur of our species, only to have the actions of others erode our belief in the good of humanity.)

Or Macbeth, who after his crime, suffers the effects of a guilty conscience on sleep:

"Methought I heard a voice cry "Sleep no more!/Macbeth does murder sleep," the innocent sleep,/Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,"

Or the villain Iago, on Jealousy as he manipulates Othello:

"Beware, my lord, of jealousy;? It is the green-eye'd monster which doth mock/The meat it feeds on,"

Or King Lear on the consequences of foolish actions and the ravages of age:

"I am a very foolish fond old man,/Fourscore and upward, not an hour more or less,/And, to deal plainly,/I fear I am not in my perfect mind."

And of course, there is Julius Caesar.  The political lessons from the play resonate even today.  Like Trump, Caesar wished to be a dictator and loved to be flattered: 

"But when I tell him he hates flatterers,/He says he does, being then most flattered." 

    There is no denying that Shakespeare will continue to occupy the center of western culture.  Disagreeable as that may be to those who want to "decolonize" what is taught in colleges and K-12 schools, there is no escaping the fact that, as Majorie Garber noted, "Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare."  

    Those who eagerly dismiss Shakespeare's plays as irrelevant often failed to see the influence his works continue to have on our everyday thoughts and speech:

"A wild goose chase." Romeo and Juliet

"For goodness sake." Henry VIII

"One fell swoop." Macbeth

"Mums the word." Henry VI, part 2

"Knock knock! Who's there?" Macbeth 

"It's Greek to me." Julius Caesar

"Break the ice." Taming of the Shrew

"Such stuff as dreams are made of." The Tempest

"I will wear my heart upon my sleeve." Othello

"Truth will out." The Merchant of Venice

"Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." Hamlet

"Full circle" King Lear

"Neither rhyme nor reason." The Comedy of Errors

"Not slept one wink." Cymbeline

    It is perhaps ironic that these expressions, and many of the words Shakespeare himself coined, still flow naturally through our daily language (even the language of those who would eliminate him from secondary schools and colleges).  Reading his plays are considerably more difficult than reading the contemporary works that students find "more relevant,"  but with a moderate amount of mental exertion students will acquire a substantially richer command of English and a deeper intimacy with the complexities of the human mind.  

    Of course, English majors should go on taking classes in contemporary, and multicultural literature as they pursue their degrees.  If they do attend a college that does not require a Shakespeare course, then they should exercise intellectual independence, ignore those who anachronistically apply contemporary standards to pre-contemporary works of art, and take at least a course on his major tragedies.  They will never regret reading his plays and they won't say someday in the future that "the fault, dear [students] lies not within  the stars, but within ourselves" that we have missed what is most extraordinary and essential in all of literature.   

There's Got To Be A Morning After; and There Was.

    On election day, visions of a Republican "red wave" sweeping through Congress depressed me.  Like many, I believed that a Republican landslide would augur an inevitable return of Trump to the White House in 2024.  My mood might be best expressed by this Robert Frost poem:

                            Once By The Pacific

                    The shattered water made a misty din.

                    Great waves looked over others coming in,

                    And thought of doing something to the shore

                    That the water water never did to land before.

                    The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,

                    Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.

                    You could not tell, and yet it looked as if 

                    The shore was lucky in being baked by cliff,

                    The cliff in being backed by continent;

                    It looked as if an night of dark intent

                    Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

                    Someone had better be prepared  for rage.

                    There would be more than ocean-water broken

                    Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

   

The next morning I woke to surprising news.  The red wave turned out to be a ripple.  Best of all, many of Trump supported lying election deniers lost their races.  Perhaps lying isn't the best way to attract voters after all.  That's not a lesson Trump will ever learn.  When asked if he is responsible for the election results, Trump said he deserved credit if his supported candidates won, but not blame if they lost.  As for Mehmet Oz's defeat, he simply blamed his wife.

Eve of Mid-term Elections

     It's the eve of the mid-term election and I sit here believing the democrats are going to lose both house of congress.  Such a prospect ordinarily wouldn't bother me too much as I know from experience that the cycle of elections swaps out parties quite consistently.  But this election seems to forebode real troubles ahead.  Among the Republicans seeking office are loyal Trumpists who stoutly defend his lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him.  If elected, these men and women could undermine the integrity of the 2024 presidential election by refusing to certify the electoral vote count scheduled for November 5, 2025.  As Bill Maher and others have repeated, whether Trump wins or loses the 2024 presidential election, he will not concede and he will most certainly call on those election deniers he helped elect to reject electors from battleground states he needs to claim victory.  Who can say what will follow when/if the "nays" cascade through the halls of congress?  

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    In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

"On entering the House of Representatives of Washington one is struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly.  The eye frequently does not discover a man of celebrity with it walls.  Its members are almost all obscure individuals  whose names present no associations to the mind: they mostly village lawyers, men in trade, or even persons belonging to the lower classes of society.  In a country in which education is very general, it is said that the representatives of the people do not always know how to write correctly."  

How prescient Tocqueville was when one thinks of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert.  His view of the Senate was considerably more flattering:

"Scarcely an individual is to be perceived in it who does not recall the idea of an active and illustrious career: the Senate is composed of eloquent advocates, distinguished generals, wise magistrates, and statesmen of note, whose language would at all times do honor to the most remarkable parliamentary debated of Europe."

No doubt Tocqueville exaggerated  the qualities of the Senate.  What would he have thought of Senator Preston Brooks beating Senator Charles Sumner with his cane?  While the current Senate races have remained peaceful, though hardly polite, the assaults perpetrated against the English Language by Hershel Walker seem hardly less violent than his collisions with those NFL linebackers.  Like Tom Buchanan, Walker reached "an acute limited excellence" no where except on the football field.  It would be best for the country if he rested on those accomplishments 

Unfit For Just About Anything

On Fri, May 3, 2019 at 1:26 PM james skinner <yeatsskinner@gmail.com> wrote:

Stephen Moore thinks it’s an honor that Donald Trump is considering him for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.  But with that honor has come a cascade of reporting about Moore, which has demonstrated that he, like Trump, is as unqualified for the Federal Reserve as Trump is to be president.  Moore’s positions regarding monetary policy have been consistently wrong over the years. Krugman  

It surprises no one that Trump has put forward another candidate who lacks the ability for the job he would be responsible to undertake.  Nor is it surprising that this person exhibits similar sexist and racist attitudes that have been displayed in Trump’s words and behavior over the years.  Fortunately, for opponents of his appointment, Moore has provided enough evidence in his written work to convince any decent senator to reject his nomination to the Federal Reserve Board.  

Moore has repeatedly made offensive and disturbing comments about women.  Swirling through his remarks one detects a malevolent misogyny. In an essay responding to the news of sexual assaults on college campuses, Moore lamented the passing of the “good old days” when boys were encouraged to experience the new found freedom college frat life provided:

“They [women] seem hell bent on draining all the fun out of college life.  Colleges are places for rabble-rousing. For men to lose their boyhood innocence.  To do stupid things. To stay out way too late drinking. To chase skirts...It’s all a time-tested rite of passage into adulthood.  And the women seemed to survive just fine. If they were so oppressed and offended by drunken, lustful frat boys, why is it that on Friday nights they showed up in droves in tight skirts to keg parties?”

Washington Times, Sept. 2000

Besides espousing a puerile, bizarre and stupid point of view, there reverberates through Moore’s words a vicious contempt for women who have been victims of sexual assault.  Interestingly, Moore’s view of women parallels Trump’s. Access Hollywood Tape  The potential new Federal

Board Governor believes women are “commodities” for men to possess.  And although Moore will deny holding such a materialist’s attitude one could encounter as standard thinking a century ago, Moore has flown his sexist colors unabashedly.  

Writing for National Review Online, Moore postulates the ill effects of women earning greater pay than men:

“What are the implications of a society in which women earn more than men?  We don’t really know, but it could be disruptive to family stability. If men aren’t the breadwinners, will women regard them as economically expendable?  We saw what happened to family structure in low-income and black households when a welfare check took the place of a father’s paycheck. Divorce rates go up when men lose their jobs.” National Review

It’s difficult to unravel Moore’s scrambled thought process here.  Let’s see, when women earn more than men, divorce rates among the white, middle class rise in a pattern similar to divorce rates among those in poverty?  Of course, logical reasoning is the furthest thing from Moore’s mind. His true objective is to malign women and African Americans, to portray them as somehow responsible for any economic troubles.  His is the classic bate and switch: make the privileged victims and victims villains.

Moore’s ridiculous, twisted formula in no way camouflages his sexsim and racism; he fools no one.  And if Republican senators attempt to rationalize and defend Moore’s above words claiming that Moore is honestly observing what he sees in American society, democrats must counter with the other numerous displays of his sexism.  For example, Moore has made clear that he would deny equal pay for women if he could:

“The women tennis pros don’t really want equal pay for equal work.  They want equal pay for inferior work. There’s a very practical reason why Pete Sampras, for example, makes a lot more money than Martina Hingis does.  He’s much, much better than she is...If there is an injustice in tennis, it’s that women like Martina Hingis and Monica Seles make millions of dollars a year, even  though there are hundreds of men at the collegiate level...who could beat them handily.” National Review  

Moore has complained about the media coverage he has received.  He believes he is being unfairly attacked, the way Kavanagh was.  He has whined about how “all it’s been since then is one personal assault after another, a kind of character assassination.”   Poor Stephen Moore.  Well, at least, Trump has continued to support him.  Of course, That’s what one would expect from Trump. When Trump looks at Moore, he is peering into a mirror of himself.  And in that way, these men are made for each other. A perfect symmetry of incompetence, ignorance misogyny and bigotry.

Legal, But Not Legitimate

EDMUND

As to the legitimate: fine word,--legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper:
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

                                     KING LEAR
                                    Act I, Scene 2

     Legitimacy: a word that stalks Donald Trump.  He feels it right behind him and it's why he incessantly scurries to his favorite phrase "no collusion."  It has seeped into his skin and makes him rasp on and on about how "it was a clean campaign, I beat Hilary Clinton easily."  It deflates his ego so he bellows, "We ran a brilliant campaign, and that's why I'm president."

     But the legitimacy of his presidency is more in question now than ever after he groveled before Putin and said, "I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia that interfered in the 2016 election.  Politically and legally Trump is president.  But that fact carries little or no weight if the man in the Oval Office has forfeited his moral standing.  And Trump forfeited his when he supported Putin over the American intelligence agencies that have documented the Russian cyber attacks on our democracy.
   
     Fortunately, most Republican leaders in Congress have been honest enough to affirm publicly that they know the Russians under Putin's direction hacked the election.  Unfortunately, they have lacked the courage to admit the possibility that Russian interference might have affected the outcome.  Paul Ryan, for one, stated, "They did interfere in our election--it's really clear.  There should be no doubt about that."  But Ryan also claimed that the interference had no "effect" on the election. Clearly, Ryan wants to "legitimize" Trump's electoral victory.  Nevertheless, his is a conclusion without basis in fact.  With Trump's margin of victory so slim, it is impossible to ignore how many votes might have been delivered into his column with Russia's help.

     Another Republican, Trey Gowdy, remarked that "it is possible to conclude Russia interfered in our election in 2016 without delegitimizing his electoral success."  Even before the news conference with Putin, Trump's legitimacy as president has been corroded by the findings and indictments of the Mueller probe, the suspicious meeting at Trump tower between Don Jr., Paul Manafort and Russians, and the recent 12 indictments of Russians who hacked into the 2016 election.

    Among the information reported from Mueller's indictment is that Russian hackers stole data from the Democratic Party National Committee used to target potential voters for their candidates.  One Republican consultant has already admitted that he received some of this data and used it to help Republican Brian Mast during his 2016 campaign for congress.  One has to suspect that information from these hackers was passed on to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

     Perhaps we can balance the legitimacy of Trump's presidency on a single adverb--"not."  On Tuesday, Trump stiffened his back, folded his arms and tried erase what he said Monday about believing Putin over America's intelligence agencies.  He simply forgot to insert the word "not," in "I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia.  Of course, he spoke more about there not being any "collusion" between his campaign and the Russians.

     A child who insults a friend then claims that's "not" what he meant, might believe the lie he uses to squirm his way out of trouble.  I don't know if Trump believes his own lie (and lies); most of America does not.  The Republican party, if it is to salvage its own legitimacy, has to repudiate this "base" man who, though still has the legal authority to occupy the White House, has "not" any moral legitimacy to remain as president.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Trump

     In the film, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Control, who is head of MI 6, wants to uncover which of his four colleagues is actually a mole planted by the Russians at the top of British Intelligence.  He sends an agent, Jim Prideaux, to Hungary to meet with an Hungarian general who knows the name of the spy, but Control's plan is foiled by his Russian intelligence nemesis, Karla.  

     Watching the film's byzantine plot, which has driven some viewers to theatre exits well before the movie's conclusion, we learn that Bill Hayden, the number two official in British Intelligence, has long ago been "turned" by the Russians into a double agent working on their behalf.   And although it seems implausible that such a plot could unfold in real life, we have been observing an analogous, though contorted, storyline nevertheless produce a disturbing correlative.   To wit: the news conference in Finland where Trump defended Putin and Russia's hacking of the 2016 election.

     Unlike Bill Hayden, who was only an official in Britain's spy agency, the Russians have managed to insert their mole at the very top of the United States Government, President Trump.  Fantastic as this may sound, the evidence has been mounting for two years and today it rose to the level of a national-security emergency.  

     Anyone watching that conference couldn't help but be astonished by Trump's flagrant contradiction of U.S. intelligence reports documenting with overwhelming factual evidence Russia's interference in the 2016 election.  Yet, Trump stood at the podium and announced that "I will say this: I don't see any reason why it would be" Russia who hacked the election.  When pressed by reporters whether he believed Putin or America's intelligence agencies, Trump replied that there are "two thoughts" about the hacking, and then he shifted the topic to one of his favorite bogyman, Hilary Clinton's "missing" emails.    

     Trump's performance in Finland followed his attacking America's European allies the previous week.  He criticized Germany, claiming that country "is captive to Russia," faulted Theresa May on her handling of Brexit, and stated that the European Union is a foe of the United Sates.  All this while he remained silent on Russia's aggression against Ukraine, annexation of Crimea, the poisoning of British citizens and the cyber attacks on the United States' election.  

     Putin must be smiling broadly these days back at the Kremlin.  He's achieved more than the villain Karla in "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" could have dreamt of in his machinations against the West.  He's inserted his man at the pinnacle of the most powerful country on earth.  Now the rest of us will have to wait and see if the party Trump leads will have the honesty and courage to foil Putin's success and remove the Russia mole from the White House.