Letter To Camille Paglia On Abortion

4/7/16

My letter to the divine Ms P on her abortion piece in Salon, linked below: 

Dear Ms Paglia:

I love your journalism.

I read, enjoyed and am provoked by your recent Salon piece about the abortion mistakes of Trump and Clinton, then your brief tour through feminist thought on abortion and your contrast between the Catholic Church's invocations for life as against the rigid, somewhat lifeless reasoning  of pro abortion activist/fanatics.

Where I fall off the train is your proclamation of favouring unrestricted abortion on demand even as you recognize the the "higher moral ground" of the pro life position.

I'd start from the likely unusual case of an abortion in the last trimester where there is no danger to the life of the mother, where incest or rape aren't the facts, and there is no devastating physical problem with the fetus-- all wrenching exceptions. In that case, I cannot see the grounds of your argument--women being more than mere child bearers, women not being necessarily subservient to nature, women's bodily autonomy--prevailing over the fact that there's near to a completely formed life at stake, whereas in the first trimester, or up to the point of independent fetal viability, that weighing and balancing comes out 180 degrees differently. 

For me, those two examples form end points of a spectrum of moral reckoning. And what seems utterly grey to me, barring the usual wrenching exceptions to a pro life insistence, is the second trimester when at some point, difficult to be precise about, the aborning baby has too much of formed life about it to allow the case for abortion to prevail. 

So, all that said, I can't understand an absolute position of unrestricted abortion on demand for the reasons you give, if I'm understanding your position correctly. And I find that in your holding that position, your recognition of how compelling the pro life arguments are doesn't make your position more admirably hard fought, tougher, more nuanced or more capacious. Rather, I sense in that recognition a quality of trying to avoid the untenable hook that an absolute case for unrestricted abortion on demand lands you on. 

Respectfully,
Itzik Basman...
http://www.salon.com/2016/04/07/camille_paglia_feminists_have_abortion_wrong_trump_and_hillary_miscues_highlight_a_frozen_national_debate/

Nozick As Social Contractualist

Me:

....Nozick argues that independents are to be forcibly incorporated into society. Even if their rejection of it is their right, they pose a danger to what they reject (thus on a utilitarian basis decreasing the happiness of those accepting society by increasing their fear.) They can live in society obeying its laws or be dealt with by the monopolizer of force if their rejection leads to law breaking and worse. Since ought entails can, there is no moral duty to do the impossible. On this basis, the state does not lose legitimacy by that forcible incorporation: it is impossible to deal with the independents otherwise. In one way of understanding this, that incorporation comes down to the sheer power of the state compared to the relative powerlessness of the independents. 


Now, to take this one step further, what if a majority in the state want national health insurance. (Getting it increases their happiness.) What position can the minority take who oppose but are perforce required to help fund it through their taxes, or, even more pervasive, the welfare state? Does the state lose its legitimacy by forcing those opposed to support them by making them pay their taxes? Does the reasoning for the forcible incorporation of the independents without sacrificing legitimacy lose its force in relation to forcing dissenters from welfarism without, the argument is, by analogy, losing legitimacy? I'd think that those who oppose welfarism would continue to insist on their opposition but would do so conceding legitimacy. 


So if Nozick is:


as I understand he is, a social contract theorist;


and if he agrees that the basis of social contract theory is consent;


and if he rejects any proposition, as I understand he does, advanced by some that since unanimous consent in any state is impossible the state, any state premised on deep individual pluralism is therefore necessarily illegitimate;


then his notions of consent and legitimacy necessarily brook majorities that hold to policies that he stands fundamentally against.


If so, then what exactly is the core of his notion of  legitimacy, and what does that core do to the illegitimacy of the welfare project you argue against? Arguments pro and con specific policies on the basis of legitimacy run up against the concession of legitimacy to the state even as majority policies breach libertarians' central thesis of deep pluralism not to be trenched upon. And so, finally, arguments against say welfare policy can cite that central thesis, but can't with consistency, I don't think, assert the illegitimacy of that policy. Or can they?...

Don: 

....      I can recognize nothing of Nozik in what you write here. Right from the start you couch things in terms of 'independents" vs the State, and I cannot recognize this language  as Nozik's. I am admittedly not any kind of expert on Nozik, and I have absolutely no sympathy for Nozik's views. I do not find them in the least bit interesting, and he is no longer discussed in the intellectual circles with which I have contact. So you are forewarned that what I have to say here may be seriously distorted. 

       I can see no good reason for classifying Nozik as a social contract theorist, and I have never seen him discussed in those terms, and this despite the fact that he springs out of Locke, who was a social contract theorist. Nozik was perfectly aware that social contract theories are only analytic conceits sometimes providing us models for thinking about political/social issues;  Every social contract theory I am familiar with postulates an original state of nature and give different accounts of it, but in every account, individuals in a state of nature have absolutely no rights whatever. They have only interests and needs, Rights are always treated as social constructs arising out of the establishment of the social contract for purely utilitarian reasons. Rights enable people to perform utilitarian calculations that will maximize the individual and the social good, so that, e.g., society can tax people unequally if that policy will maximize the public good, even if it falls more heavily on some rather than others. 

     You will find none of that in Nozik, although he discusses social contract theory and utilitarianism at length, mostly, but not exclusively, in criticism of John Rawls. So what was Nozik up to? This is where things get messy. In the first place you have to understand who his targets are. Rawls is obviously a big one. But early in his career, Nozik was a socialist/social democrat, and after his quick abandonment of that, he embraced the cranky views of Murray Rothbard, the campus guru of young right-wing extremists, viz., individualistic anarchism. 

Nozik, sensibly enough, came to reject anarchism, and so undertook to construct a theory in which the State could be intrinsically legitimate, requiring no justification, utilitarian or otherwise. In this, I agree with him and with Aristotle from whom it originally derives. 

According to Aristotle, living in political societies is as natural for us as can be. Unlike other social animals, such as ants, bees, and various pack animals such as wolves etc who have no political organizations, we are endowed by nature with rationality in a high degree, and it is reason that makes it possible for us to transcend merely animal sociality. 

Noziks view is, that if there were a pre-political state of nature for us, we would in that state itself have certain absolute natural rights, the most important of which are the right to the life and security of the person, and the right to the ownership and transfer of private property. These rights do not derive from the State, in Nozik's view, and are not social constructs. In order to defend this view he needs a theory of property acquisition, and he has one, deriving straightforwardly from Locke. Property comes into existence (in a state of nature, if there is one) by mixing one's labour into resources found in nature - you chop down a tree, cut it into planks and build yourself a house, and it is by right of nature your property and yours alone, and nobody else is entitled to claim it. His view of rights is that they are all entitlements, not concessions others might make to you for utilitarian reasons. 

That is why Nozik is frequently referred to as an absolute Entitlement theorist, rather than a social contract theorist; property rights (and the others) are existentially prior to all possible contracts, and the State exists legitimately only to enforce acceptance and respect for property or other natural rights. No utilitarian calculations are involved, and Nozik rejects utilitarianism precisely because it can easily be used to justify modifications of absolute property rights. 

Nozik's State is Locke's "night watchman State", and is legitimate only insofar as it performs that role. In these ways, Nozik is able promote consistently both an absolutist libertarianism and a legitimate State using coercive enforcement of entitlements, i.e., force preventing some people from attempts to nullify or qualify our absolute entitlements. Applied to practical social/political life, Nozik's views forbid any kind of redistributivist programs whatsoever. 

The way wealth is acquired is what justifies it according to Nozik, so that even if a single honest individual working hard and using his natural talents etc. were able to acquire all of the wealth in the world, thereby reducing absolutely everybody else to dire poverty, he is entitled to his wealth, and any effort to use the powers of the State to relieve the suffering of the others would be unjust, rejecting as he does Rawls' (and our) intuition that 'Justice is Fairness' in favour of his own view that Justice is the protection and enforcement of entitlements. My own view is that Nozik's theories are their own Reductio ad Absurdum. 

    I do not wish to get into any discussions of Nozik's views. I am too old and I do not regard them as worth my efforts at this time of my life. There is no doubt that he was a very clever philosopher, but not a deep one, I think. Your best bet among modern thinkers is Rawls, I think....

Me:

....Don, again I thank you for the time and effort you took to set  out your views at my request. I'm not sure how to respond since you don't want discuss Nozick but I'll try.

What follows isn't to get into the good or bad or much of the substance of Nozick's views but just to say why I think he's rightly called a social contract theorist. The big point I see emerging from your comments, if I'm understanding them, is the incompatibility of social contract account and a natural law account, the inclusion of any aspect of the latter vitiating the former.  That doesn't seem right to me.

In Nozick's theoretical account of state formation the independents are a rump group who refuse to join the state after all others have associated with others of like interest and have all agreed to submit themselves to a "night watchman" state of limited power over them save to provide security and the most essential services. The issue then becomes the justification for how the state deals with the independents in its midst given their innate, inalienable (natural law) liberty. The argument about the independents cuts against the notion of Nozick as theorist of absolute entitlement and leads to what I try to sketch as a deep contradiction in his system.

Nozick classifies himself as a social contract theorist and so do a couple of Yale and Harvard political and gov't theorists who've lectured on him. Since consent is at the heart of social contract theory, I can see on Nozick's account of state formation how he is one, though one where consent is sharply defined and limited. 

And in your terms, Nozick also posits an "analytical conceit" at the base of his theorizing. He also in his account delineates interests, rights and needs. But he also, as does Locke, hold to a natural law account of inalienable rights. That does not, as I read you to suggest, their social contractualism. Hobbes's account is closer to what you sketch in your third paragraph. But he's different from Locke in his emphasis and Nozick falls in the tradition of Locke. If he's not a social contractualist for the reasons you say, then Locke isn't one either. Both hold to rights pre-existing states. 

Rawls tries to provide a justification for the redistributionist state and Nozick stands foursquare against him. Both proceed from a notion of consent but have antithetical ideas of what comprises that consent when seen what each thinks man is, what comprises justice and what comprises legitimacy.

Whether what I point to is a good way of disassembling Nozick or not, and without wanting to appear presumptuous since I'm strictly an amateur in all this, I do agree, and for many of the reasons you say, that in what I understand of what he argues, it's finally incoherent. 

A Note To Adelle Waldman On The Love Affairs Of Nathaniel P.

March 28, 2016

Dear Ms Waldman:

So I'm *trying* to tie my thoughts together on just finishing your terrifically acute novel, The Love Affairs.... To do that, I'm trying to fit what I make of its ending into my sense of the whole book. 

Where I am is here: Nate rationalizes his sad-making intuition that he's lost something great in Hannah by trying to drown it in process, his life as moving along, with the busyness of later things making almost invisible what's troubling him at any particular time:

...In a few days, it would be as if this night never happened, the only evidence of it an unsent e-mail....

"As if" suggests what he hopes for won't be 100% successful. His "drafts folder" is sort of like his unconscious where as well everything is saved. So I see a relation between this rationalizing and his always obsessively living in his head, in which he can sort out most issues, say his treatment of women, to his moral or simply personal satisfaction by working them out till he's comfortably off the hook of his own concern:

...What he had with Greer was pretty fucking good...he liked his life...he was pleased with the progress on the new book; perhaps that was, for him, more important than  anything  else. He was, whether or not he deserved to be, happy...

The "perhaps" tells me that his preceding "then he knew" is not the the typical revelatory insight that in so many novels brings "truth and reconciliation." Rather, it and the doubt-nibbling of "whether he deserved it or not" say to me that Nate's "then he knew" is part of the constant flux of his mind and emotions, there for now, prey to change with further thoughts and feelings. 

The "Dear Hannah" is a momentary attempt at reconnection with something he intuits is deeply worthwhile. But he can't follow through, just as he couldn't answer her heart felt, totally-letting-her-guard-down long note to him. That inability and all the previous times he cruelly mistreats her but doesn't have the balls to be tactfully honest--he needn't be brutal in that honesty even as he rationalizes that sparing her brutality excuses his cowardice-- with her when she repeatedly pleads with him to be are unforgivable lapses of decency. His unfinished note to Hannah, now a saved draft, is his lapse in an attempt  at what might still be great and worthwhile in his life.

Nate shines in his work. He's admirable in his single minded devotion to it, brave in having suffered the precariousness of his free lance life, having lived on so little, having courted insecurity, but pushing ahead regardless. There's been exhilaration in that too, "the exact scent of the air from his bedroom window at dawn, after he'd been up all night working." But that's gone now too, it seems, in the compromised resolution he's found for now in Greer as part of his moving along, buffering "pain--or the pleasure" with a series of new moments and moods making "this sense of loss, of longing...fade, pass from him like any other mood." 

Therefore, I see a meant relation between the loss of the exhilaration of what his work has meant to him, a great thing in his life, and his "sense of loss, of longing" for Hannah, seemingly now gone from him. These losses and longings connect to what is of real underlying value. The "pretty fucking good" "happiness" Nate at novel's end thinks himself into feeling is less, I read the intimation to be, than what he's lost and would make him more whole, the emphatic "pretty fucking good" sounding like he's selling himself on something. 

Sincerely,

Itzik Basman






Sent from my iPad

Character Talk vs Theme Talk Round 6

3/25/16


Character Talk vs Theme Talk Round 6

R:

....The feuding isn't mindless, it just leads to, as we now say, collateral damage, or, as is said at the end, "these sad things,” “for never was a story of more woe/ Than this of Juliet and her Romeo."   I don't take the Arthur Miller view that tragedy is always protest, in this case against mindlessness.  It just gives us a way of grasping the gravity of each person's fate.  When Miriam Ulrych, your classmate tells me of a recent bad thing that happened to her I listen pretty much as I watch a play, with these differences.  She is eloquent but she doesn't mimic the speeches of the other people in ways that make them stand before my eyes, she has to digress and such to fill me in, whereas the poet expects me to know certain things and then focusses intensely on only what carries the story along, and I always have to wonder if I am getting the true story, whereas with fiction I am getting the fictional truth, the whole fictional truth and only the fictional truth so I can let my imagination go without worrying whether things are omitted or added or changed.  It is that being in total awareness that makes the experience so intense and thus what makes it matter.  

I think we care about fictions because they are like our lives might be or sometimes are.  Children are treated badly by the very people who are supposed to nurture, just as R and J are by the families who should nurture them.  
The way the meanings of a fictional work come about in my view is that a reader treats the words purely as cues to the state of the speaker's soul, or is told the state of the soul by  narrator. 
"As soon as we grasp the grammatical meaning of an expression in a mimetic poem, we begin drawing inferences which we scarcely recognize as inferences, because they are just such as we habitually make in life; inferences from the speech to the character, his situation, his thought, his passion, suddenly set the speaker before us and arouse our emotions in sympathy or antipathy."  Elder Olsen, a neo-aristotelian whose gang lost out to the New Critics and their belief that meanings, not the way we understand the  dramatis personae, were the culmination of critical scrutiny. We are sympathetic to R and J, antipathetic to the feuding families and so are moved by the terrible conclusion of the story.  

I think our disagreement is pretty clear.  

I don;t recall Ginger vividly, but my vague memory is of pure pathetic decline, incredibly sad as his lively spirit comes up against realities which it cannot overcome.  "Luck" is just plain irony.  But about this I may be all wrong, and if what I see as his decline is really prologue to his reaching some better state, I forget it.  But even that better state is just that, a better ending.  Just as the end of The Stranger is happy for Mersault, though I can still make the judgment that his meaningless is an illusion, since the very idea is his "luck" and thus meaningful.  


At the end of What Makes Sammy Run, Sammy, when asked how he feels now he has got all the marbles after battlng his way to the top, says, "I feel, I feel, . . . patriotic."  That strikes me as a brilliant way to dramatize his delighted  expression of his happy narcissism, for a patriot is in love with what he is.  Now, how did Schulberg do that?  Well,  by telling the story and then putting those words in that order.   I am happy, by the way, for you to tell me I have misunderstood Sammy's soul, that it is not narcissism but something else.  But you reached that conclusion on the basis of those words being put in that order at that point in the story, in which incidents were arranged in a certain order.  That is the basic technique, but we don't need to be aware of it as such, it just does its work on us....


Me:

.....We might cavil on "mindless" in relation to R&J. That's incidental to our issue, but so what. I respectfully suggest that you underestimate the theme, the meaning, the idea, of the play with "collateral damage." It's not apt. Why the feuding is mindless is because it's lost all sense of itself, just as it has in Huck Finn. Some originating incident lost, forgotten in the mists of time, passing down through generations, propelling itself as a matter of reflex, habit, perverse convention: how is that in that context not mindless;  how is it purposeful, mindful? 

Tragedy always being protest, which proposition I've never considered, seems too prescriptive, particularly if protest means what I take as "Millerian," dramatic fingers pointed at some near to allegorical wrong. I can maybe see some meaning in the idea of protest if it's taken to mean a literary declamation of a kind against the universe. But that's to stretch the anchoring meaning of protest too far. 

But it *is* in this latter sense we can see the R&J as a protest, using protest almost metaphorically, against the play's universe as comprised by mindless, self perpetuating, family feuding hatred and the inevitable toll it exacts. That's why "collateral damage" is inapt and why maybe you, with all due respect, may need to think through the play's foreshadowing, which I meant to offer as a plain and homely example of a meant literary technique forming meaning. 

Collateral damage, as we commonly use it, is a sidebar, an unfortunate incident of more central, usually purposeful action that calculates it as a necessary but accidental cost to achieve a greater good. But R&J's death isn't accidental even as contingencies and misapprehensions lead to it. The play's universe is deterministic in that sense: their deaths are predetermined by their families' hatreds. That's what the foreshadowing tells us as it forms that meaning. Their love is what can never be. And in the play we get a further working out of Shakespeare's great theme of the commingling of fate and contingent circumstance within fate in a complex world view that I to this day haven't fully worked out.

(Btw, and fwiiw, this very commingling structures Richler's first novel The Acrobats.)

When you describe your experience of a play as distinct from someone telling you discursively about a bad thing that happened, we have no argument as such. All the authorial things that, in principle, focus your attention on what the play is telling you and nothing else is the essence of the play, or any other artistic thing, as a work of art. But in your wanting to say this against what I've been trying to argue, you elide my distinction between the experience as such of the work art and the subsequent exercise, and I use exercise advisedly, of studying, analyzing--which is to say, taking apart to reconfigure--interpreting, which may be the reconfiguration, the work, if that's what wants to do. And doing that will, for instance, distinguish the critic from the reviewer.

(Btw, off topic, I say "in principle" as a meant qualifier. The kind of singular immersion you point to seems less than a full account of our experience of art. Not that this is full, but I think of it as a dialectic between our awareness of the world in active exchange with the substance of the work.) 

Of course we care about fiction, literature, because in its genres it variously illuminates aspects of our lives. Why would anything I argue discount that? But I suggest--and you'll know this better than I--that knowing this doesn't get you very far in studying it, criticizing it, and teaching it. In doing all that, a work's "fidelity to life"--ringing true, feeling right, apt, on or off, however it's phrased--within the contours of its own form and meaning is a necessary condition of our studied appreciation of it. But it's not sufficient. We need to bear down on the techniques we with good sense judge as meaningful, take them apart and then put them together somewhat in the way I mentioned.

What you quote from Elder Olsen sounds to me like part of what I much less ably have referred to as a dialectical process. But it points to, I'll argue, is the false binary running through what you keep saying. Why does there have to be an antimony between what he/you say and what I the new critics say? Why can't the New Critics be seen as filling in, as a matter of academic study, the means by which Olsen's inferences arise? Why do the New Critics have to be in effect relegated to bean counters of technique? Is this really what Cleanth Brooks's readings of poems and novels amount to? What in principle precludes these critics from addressing Olsen's inferences by way of how they're formed and by way of what they are and how they move us? 

The only answer to these questions I see from your comments is the flat denial of technique, of technique forming patterns, which are recurrences based on commonality, which then go to form meaning. Which, respectfully, seems an outlandish position. If literature has techniques that are unique to it, that mark it off categorically from inartful prose, then I think that that refutes that denial, if in fact I understand it. Nothing in what I say stops any critic seeing R&J in light of a perversion of parenting, of Ginger as pathetic, or understanding what his luck is, or if it's just Moore's irony, or how to see the ending of the Stranger, or to think, as I do, that it shows that Camus fails to sustain a coherent theme. 

And in relation to What Makes Sammy Run, what is "how did Schulberg do that" limited to? Does it exclude his imagery? Does it exclude certain language he uses over and over? Does it exclude certain symmetries and contrasts between the characters and the relations between them, the play and variations on running throughout the novel? 

Obama's Red Line: A Second Thought

3/24/16

I had fallen into thinking that once Assad had crossed the red line, O had to act militarily and his failure to was a failure.

But no longer since reading The Obama Doctrine by Jeffrey Goldberg. The mistake was pronouncing the red line. And I'm not saying military action wasn't in order. That can be argued both ways. But if Obama in good conscience and on analysis concluded that such action wasn't on balance a good thing, surely he was right not to act. Better to face the criticism and to understand the mistake of his less than circumspect pronouncement than take, to his mind, unwarranted and worsening-the-situation action.

The logic of that seems impeccable to me.

Goldberg talks about how Obama talks about how comfortable he is with his ultimate decision and how proud-not in a before the fall way--he is to have made it. He finally did what was contrary to the conventional thinking that had been carrying him along, contrary to his own inner conviction, until he liberated himself from convention and acted according to his deepest instincts and reasoning. 

And how common is it that we're on the brink of doing something that just doesn't feel right, and we force ourselves out of a kind of reflexive lethargy and do or not do what accords with our deepest sense of ourselves and with what we most deeply think and feel? It's an absolutely liberating experience when it happens.

Rave On Buddy Holly

3/23/16

Listen to Florence + The Machine's Not Fade Away, the fourth track on Rave On Buddy Holly. It's the most compelling track on this not-uniformly good but overall very good tribute record. 

Thinking about the record forces thinking about Buddy Holly himself, the nature of his genius, especially considering his death at 22. Isn't the essence of him the consummate marriage between romantic teenage innocence and the driving beat of rock and roll inflected by fast Texas country picking. The descriptor that comes through most about him given that marriage is "purity." He's a poet of young love, Romeo and Juliet, not Antony and Cleopatra, and decidedly not, heaven help us, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf love. So not for nothing his songs work off teenage idioms of his time and place: "Rave On," "Maybe Baby," "Oh Boy," "That'll Be The Day," "Everyday," "Well All Right," "It's So Easy" and maybe, just maybe, the more challenging "Not Fade Away." The themes of these songs are love wanted, love granted, love exisiting, love hurting and, generally, love that knows what it is, and, so, love simple.

If this is a fair assessment of the heart of Holly's art, surely an art bathed in romantic, uncomplicated teenage innocence, then it's a good standard by which to judge the tribute tracks for their fidelity to his art, for good variations on it, failure on either score, or, finally, as tunes in themselves.

So, Not Fade Away is an amazing track. The mainly unvarying backbeat drumming forming the spine of the tune suggests the enduring steadiness, the confident presence and the urgency of what won't fade away. Florence, who has a great voice, uses dynamics from quietly intoning the lyrics to a gospel like, loud, ecstatic insistence to give voice to this love's ebbs and flows within what won't fade away. In this she + the Machine depart from Buddy Holly's more plaintive:

....I'm a-gonna tell you how it's gonna be
You're gonna give your love to me...

to dramatic vocal enactment of love's ups and downs even as it's so real and so enduring. Simply a fantastic track. 

On the other hand, the worst track is Paul McCartney's "It's So Easy," an unaccountably ghoulish, lecherous, growling-sounding assurance of a sure thing. So, by my criteria, McCartney foolishly distorts and muddies Buddy Holly's purity and innocence for no artful gain; it sounds awful, a lot of meaningless growling and some raspy black-wanna- be speaking that give no reason for themselves; and, kind of saying the same thing twice, McCartney's cover itself is ugly and purposeless.

Fiona Apple and Jon Brion, duetting, do a nice version of "Everyday" in trying to remain pretty faithful to the original. The only thing is, by my last criterion, in the duetting Apple has a strong, supple, musical voice and Brion not evidently so much, at least going by this track. So while the singing is pleasant and infused with Holly's spirit, Brion brings her singing down some, providing a constant check against it being what it could be. Better it would've been to let Apple have some time to herself. 

Justin Townes Earle has a beautifully musical voice that lends itself well to his glorious version of Maybe Baby, giving it a lyricism, the poignancy of teenage hope, that does Holly one better. This is a variation on the original to great effect. Same comment more or less for True Love Ways by My Morning Jacket. 

Similarly, Kid Rock in his raspy essence-of-rock and roll way rocks on in Well All Right and gives it a driving exuberance not there in Buddy Holly's version. Here Kid Rock is doing perfectly what McCartney may have shot for but missed by a wide mile. (I'd argue that syrupy McCartney doesn't have it in him to sing the way Kid Rock does as his, Kid Rock's, second nature. But that's for another day.) 

Another failed track is Lou Reed's cover of Peggy Sue. In Holly's singing, that song is pure teenage wanting, teenage romantic obsession that crowds in on itself and crowds all else out--"Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty Peggy Sue"--to the point of hiccuping excitement. Reed loses all that in his flattened out, too cool for school, hip version. By my criteria, he's lost the spirit of Holly's art, has varied it downwards and that variation is in its own right a pretty draggy monotone tune.

The maker of this tribute record has done something smart. He ends it with John Doe singing Peggy Sue Got Married and finally with a great version of Raining In My Heart by Graham Nash. Bob Dylan said that when he was a kid he saw Buddy Holly perform in Hibbing Minnesota. Dylan says he watched him perform and, mesmerized, just went "Wow!" So it's a nice symmetry that Peggy Sue Got Married has something of the "Dylanesque" in its more wistful, complex lyrics, and even in, forgive me, its bit of intertextuality as the song refers to previous songs mostly about a girl named Peggy Sue. And then the capper, the last track on the record, Graham Nash's Raining In My Heart, with more mature sadness by way of more complex lyrics than in any other song on the record, and sung with the most accomplished channeling of Buddy Holly. Graham Nash loved him. 

All to my ears anyway.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JlE1C8_DtSo

Y

A Short Trump Trialogue

3/16/16

A short Trump trialogue:

The note: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/03/cant-stop-lecturing.html

L: As far as it goes, I think it's spot on, except for this sentence: "But surely an awful lot of our establishments must be smart enough to have figured this out", where "this" refers to the idea that "all this tone-deaf sanctimonious lecturing will not actually help reduce interest in Trump, and may instead increase it" -- I don't think our establishments have the foggiest. Hanson identifies the reason for this blindness himself a bit further on: "people typically care more about making sure they are seen to take a particular moral stance than they care about the net effect of their lectures on behavior". 

Of course, this says something about the Trump supporters too, and it would certainly be easy -- and tempting for his detractors -- to blindly continue the sanctimony by labelling them all childish or emotional adolescents. But that just stays fixed within the limits of a role or posture. Better would be to think about what it is that makes people of any age react to such sanctimony, whether it comes from parents or teachers, or from holier-than-thou preachers, or from comfortable elites....

R: This trivializes the whole business.  His defiance of PC, which is well worth doing, is not the basic issue, but a mark of his willingness to violate other limits, as in torture in defense of America, which claim does little for defense but a lot to bolster the spirit of dispirited people...

L:  No, I'd say his defiance of "PC" is the basic issue, for his supporters and detractors alike. The problem, though, is that the term "PC" doesn't get at the nature and scope of the underlying issues driving both sides, and of course, those who defend one version or another of PC will always want to say that their particular issue is not it...

I (me):  I don't think Hanson adds much to our understanding of why and wherefore Trump. Nor do I think there's much to her/his idea that the critics of Trump, all manner of them, are more interested in moral posturing than anything else. It may be that PC, understood in a particular way, as a kind of proxy for virtually whatever is conventional, is an apt approximation of what underlies Trumpism. But that doesn't seem to me to say much. 

My own vague sense is that with rising globalization we're in the midst of massive creative destruction that overtakes policy solutions to it, if there are any, for that, so far, roughly 1/3 of the R primary electorate. In Trump, this group has a repository for its anger, which is at root economic frustration and with that the loss of an American way of life now in the midst of transformation, and enhanced by demographic change. These conditions have been well diagnosed by many going back the last couple of decades, including by Robert Putnam, Charles Murray and Deirdre McCloskey, and these three from different ideological angles. 

As for moral posturing, how to distinguish from agonized moral concern, especially when the case against Trump ought to be primarily a moral one? Moral preening, no doubt there's some, is that amount of preening typically present whenever a morally provocative issue confronts us. One can't reason from lack of solutions to Trump to preening. He's a pretty good marriage between ripe conditions and his charismatic, telegenic ability to channel them. I mean, as microcosm for him, he was a lunatic birther on O's citizenship. Solutions for him and the conditions he exploits are necessary but not sufficient for his political success are elusive to say the least....