"I'm not concerned about the very poor."

Romney's suggestion that people who are very poor are doing just fine, that it's not the destitute but the the middle class that's struggling, disqualifies him for the presidency. Anyone who can make an argument so disconnected from simple logic and so devoid of empathy represents a danger to the republic.

Frankly, it's going to be a pleasure watching him self-destruct time and again over the coming months. A character flaw so glaring—and so intrinsic to his worldview—can't help but manifest itself more or less daily.

Equally telling is the indignation he exudes when someone challenges his incoherence. A profoundly unpleasant human being—

Obama's good fortune continues. Once again he'll face an opponent who cannot win.

(A personal note: I find it both sad and unsurprising that a Mormon—a man educated by the same faith that defined the first 25 years of my life—can even formulate these thoughts, let alone announce them to the world as his political platform. I couldn't care less if some pastor in Dallas claims that Mormons aren't Christian. But any Mormon who hears what is now the public face of Mormonism in the United States saying what Romney says might ask himself if that pastor in Dallas isn't onto something.)

A "Times" Pick

A couple of weeks ago my comment to a David Brooks column entitled "Where Are the Liberals?" was selected as an NYT Pick, which will both delight and perturb my parents. Risk the column at your discretion. Here's my comment, which strikes me now, a couple of weeks later, as oddly non sequitur:

     The best answer is most likely the simplest: we're getting older. And as people get older, they tend to become more conservative. Not because conservatism is correct about the world, but because change frightens us as we age: now past 40, I find myself increasingly resenting a world I no longer recognize, and yearning for the world of my youth.
     Yes, I'm keenly aware that contemporary American conservatism is a moral and philosophical catastrophe. But I feel the allure of conservatism's moralistic resentment, the comforts of its pervasive racism, the decisiveness of its flagged-up militarism. Getting older now, and feeling myself to be increasingly irrelevant, I wonder, for the first time in many years, if I don't want a Romney to lead me—an anachronistic, pseudo-religious greedmonger: a man like me, who will watch out for what little power I still retain.
     I can only imagine how the baby-boomers must feel. The world they knew is gone. Conservatism promises to bring it back. It's a tedious, destructive fantasy, grotesque with injustice. But who among us doesn't understand its appeal?

Someone Was Filming My Soul

(Apparently last Sunday my soul was unusually well dressed.)

Etta James, RIP

A single song by Etta James reminds us why it's quite possible that a thousand years from now, this country will be best remembered for re-inventing music between 1920 and 1970.

Huck Finn, C'est Moi!

Yesterday my father said: "Sometimes I feel like what I'm going through isn't even my problem—like it's a problem that doesn't actually belong to me. But suddenly it is my problem, and now I've got to deal with it. Even though I don't know where it really came from, or who caused it. But it's got to be fixed, and I guess I'm the one who has to fix it."

Immediately I ran with the idea—I've been running with it since—because it reflects how I often feel about my own life; also, because it reflects my experience as a reader and the connection between literary characters and the world. Huck Finn's problems don't interest us because they're his problems but because he embodies a moment in time—post-Civil War America—and through him we contemplate the process by which we, as a nation, kind of grew up. The problems he negotiates weren't his but ours. It fell to him to try to sort them out, in his life.

So narrating myself into existence I become aware that my problems aren't so much mine but the world's, right now. And, as with Huck, it falls to me to live them out, with everyone else.

Part of the appeal of this idea, I suppose, is that it permits me to transfer the responsibility for the difficulties of my life to the larger world. But that falls in line, for the most part, with my politics and with my understanding of the relationship between myself and society.

Because let's be real: I don't exist. The we is the real I.

Frightening? Not really. Far less frightening than the deluded narcissism and, inevitably, the crushing loneliness of individualism.

TFTD

I wish I knew where I was going. Doomed to be "carried of the spirit into the wilderness," I suppose. I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I cannot, and so there is no rest.

— John Muir, "Letter to Jeanne Carr," 30 August 1867

MItt Romney Cannot Win

Below I've embedded Newt Gingrich's infomercial attacking Mitt Romney, which is running right now in South Carolina.

If Romney's Republican opponents can construct this kind of devastating attack on Romney's career at Bain Capital, one can only imagine what the Obama campaign machine will come up with.

As I see it—I don't think this is just wishful thinking—Romney can't win the presidency, given these stories, his (all-too-familiar) tendency to behave like a sanctimonious prick, and the country's current political and economic climate, wonderfully modified by OWS.

I don't expect much street-dancing this time around, but it looks to me like four more years.

The End of Football

Football is an obscene sport, which is what makes it interesting. Like boxing, like NASCAR, like MMA, football is appealing because it's lethal. Within each of us dwells an assassin: football is that assassin's porn.

So, yes, I'll watch the NFL playoffs this weekend, as I have since adolescence. I'll delight in the violence; also, its violence will make me sad. I guess I enjoy watching football because I enjoy feeling myself at war with myself.

But this superb article explains why football must change or die.

It's one thing for grown men to collaborate in their own destruction. It's quite another for towns across America to cheer on the destruction of their adolescent boys.

Maybe one day—when America is healthier (and me with it)—we'll return to baseball and the elegance of sublimated warfare. Until then: fathers, don't let your babies grow up to be football players.

The English 48B Book Club, Winter 2012

English 48B = American Literature in the Gilded Age, 1865-1914. I intend to use the class to contemplate the birth of various philosophical and political ideas that shaped the country during the 20th century, including environmentalism, pragmatism, feminism, civil rights, and American militarism. We'll also travel with Frank Norris into the life of the American underclass—which looks increasingly like the American middle class.

In no particular order:

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, by Frank Norris.
My First Summer in the Sierra, by John Muir.
The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane.
Roughing It, by Mark Twain.
The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
Final Harvest: Poems, by Emily Dickinson.

The English 1A Book Club, Winter 2012

A return to Eros, lethal Eros, this time, in addition to Paz, by way of some contemporary female novelists.

The Double Flame, by Octavio Paz.
Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson.
The Lover, by Marguerite Duras.
Break It Down, by Lydia Davis.
Tokyo Fiancee, by Amélie Nothomb.
The Proof of the Honey, by Salwa Al-Neimi.

TFTD

If I exorcise my devils,

Well, my angels may leave too.

When they leave

 They're so hard to find.

— Tom Waits, "Please Call Me, Baby"

TFTD

What constitutes the freedom, the soul of an individual life, is its uniqueness. The reflection of the universe in someone’s consciousness is the foundation of his or her power, but life only becomes happiness, is only endowed with freedom and meaning, when someone exists as a whole world that has never been repeated in all eternity. Only then can they experience the joy of freedom and kindness, finding in others what they have already found in themselves.

— Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

The Joys of Student Writing: Exhibit E

"I just wanted to send this email informing you that i will not be in class tonight because i got scheduled for work and i tried calling to see if some one can take my shit, but no one can take it."

MVP

My sister, Mckenzie, has been named the 4A High School Volleyball MVP of the State of Utah.

I concede that her achievement represents an advance for the family over my own Most-Improved Award at the St. Mary's College Basketball Camp when I was in third grade.

"Shame on you! . . . You can go!"

Amen.



Update 11/20: I awoke this morning still reeling from this video—and its implications for the country.

On occasion certain images present themselves that clarify where the moral authority in a particular debate lies. With that idea in mind, I resolved to write a longer note, arguing that this video gives us that kind of imagery and adding some thoughts on how the police are dressed, their casually sadistic attitude (recognizable to anyone who's interacted with contemporary American police officers), and the students' spontaneous—and wholly successful—search for the language with which to respond to authoritarian cruelty.

But before doing my own writing I read this note from James Fallows at the Atlantic. Which makes all of my points.

This video makes it clear that our choice is simple: either we acknowledge where the moral authority self-evidently lies in this debate and proceed with the changes the occupiers demand, or we permit the United States to continue on its path toward a fascist plutocracy.

I find myself braced by the dignity and moral sophistication of these students. The Occupy Movement will triumph. It is our time's Civil Rights Movement. From what I see in this video, I'm now convinced that this country will not return to the moral desolation, the systemic injustice, the gleeful selfishness that has defined America during my generation. Change has come to America.

TFTD

I cause trouble, therefore I have a soul.

— Amélie Nothomb, Hygiene and the Assassin

Bloom Springs

In this week's Sunday Times, the inimitable Harold Bloom says in one article—"Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?"—what I've been trying to say with two years of blogging.

Disgrace, by the Seattle Police Department

Photo: JOSHUA TRUJILLO / SEATTLEPI.COM

Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace rushes – then meanders; finally, like its broken anti-hero, it anti-climaxes. The reader's task is to either resist or embrace its slow collapse. Resist it and you side with the world's optimistic innocents (secular liberals). Embrace it and you side with its despairing realists (everyone else). Regardless, the same fate—obsolescence, ugliness, disgrace—awaits.

Because for this South African novelist the modern State, which is good for little but moralizing and obfuscation, will see to it that you're denied life's fundamental pleasures. It will deny you beauty. It will deny you privacy. It will deny you the intellectual and physical capacity to construct for yourself an ethical life.

And History, which is the State's official narrative and is most succinctly embodied by your neighbors, is a rapist.

Decency—rare in Coetzee's world—manifests itself as brokenness. If you haven't been broken, you're a monster. If you have been broken, you devote your life to the welfare of animals.

In the protagonist's anti-climax we arrive at Coetzee's primary theme: disgrace, in the age of brutalism, is actually grace, and might be a road to redemption.

TFTD

Each of us is so ashamed of his own helplessness and ignorance that he considers it appropriate to communicate only what he thinks others will understand.

— Czeslaw Milosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay