The More Things Change: Part Deux

I finished Schlesinger's The Crisis of the Old Order. I know he's the bete noire of the left, especially with books like The Vital Center, but the last two-thirds of this book were quite impressive. He vividly describes the growing desperation of the Great Depression, especialy given the teeth-grinding stupidity of the discredited financiers and their government lackeys, and he makes me understand just how fantastic Franklin Roosevelt was--at last someone who was willing to listen to ideas and act on them.

"But the scope of planning was less important in the baffled years of 1930 and 1931 than the liberating emphasis on the idea itself, with its implication that men through government could do something to extricate themselves from their misery. It was the prevalent economic fatalism which exasperated Roosevelt as much as anything. When an orthodox economist told him that the only hope was to let the system strike bottom, he said to the man, with a look of disgust of his face, 'People aren't cattle, you know'" (393).

Sheer stupidity: The next book I'm reading--Philip Hallie's Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There--recounts what happened in one, small village in France during World War II where they hid and saved several thousand Jewish refugees, just because it was the right thing to do. And somehow, even though the Nazis and the craven Vichy authorities were aware of what was occurring in this town, they managed to get through the war alive. In one memorable scene, the town's Protestant pastor and spiritual leader was arrested, although he's not sure of the charge. He tells some police officer it may be because he's tried to save some Jews, and the police officer responds scornfully:

"The captain's fury exploded. 'What? Jews? Oh--that's lovely. Now that doesn't surprise me. You're part of their conspiracy, eh? We all know that they're the ones who have brought France down into the abyss. Well, you're going to pay for this. You're going to pay for all the harm you've done to the marshall!'
This was a moment Trocme [the pastor] would never forget. In fact, his overnight stay in the police station in Limoges changed his view of mankind. He discovered people like the captain--patriotic, sincere, but above all, severely limited. These people were capable of repeating hate-ridden cliches without any concern for evidence or for the pain of others. Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil. From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over the world: stupidity. God, the Devil, and halfwits of mind and heart were all struggling with each other to take over the reins." (30)

Compare this to a passage from Schlesinger's text:

"And so, in the fourth winter of the depression, American business seemed to plead not only financial but also intellectual bankruptcy. Richberg, in his appearance before the Senate Finance Committee, delivered a savage judgment. 'I submit that every conspicuous leader of affairs who has appeared before this committee and who has attempted to justify the continuance of the present political economic system unchanged, with its present control unreformed, is either too ignorant of facts, too stupid in comprehension, or too viciously selfish in his short-sighted philosophy, to be worthy of any attention in this time of bitter need for honest, intelligent, and public-spirited planning for the rehabilitation of our crumbling civilization.'" (458-9)

The ongoing presence of stupidity--a constant in human societies.

Democracy Again

I'm reading Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Crisis of the Old Order, the first volume of his trilogy The Age of Roosevelt. It's OK--a bit of a reader's digest version of the great men of history. Still, it recounts the 1920s, another age dominated by business that careened into a catastrophe. Government run by business, he writes, "In time it would appear that even the leaders of business could not decipher the intricate financial structures they were erecting" (68), a sentence that could have been written today. Joseph Stiglitz, in a review in the London Review of Books, says that in the past thirty years there have been 100 economic crises--this after about 50 years of relative economic stability through a regulated economy. So we are incapable of learning from the past: or should I say the financial world is incapable of learning from the past and we, like sheep, believe whatever they say. Of course, there are those who profit from each financial catastrophe: something that tossed 10 percent of the population out of work becomes part of a business strategy.

Schlesinger later discusses H.L. Mencken, no lover of democracy he: "Mencken's typical congressman? 'A knavish and preposterous nonentity, half way between a kleagle of the Ku Kulx Klan and a grand worthy of the Knights of Zoroaster. It is such vermin that make the laws of the United States.' The civil service? 'A mere refuge for prehesile morons.' Public opinion? The immemorial fears of the mob, 'piped to central factories . . . flavoured and coloured and put into cans.' Democratic morality? 'When one has written off crutelty, envy and cowardice, one had accounted for nine-tenths of it.' Bryan, the 'Fundamentalist Pope'; T.R., the 'national Barbarossa'; Wilson, 'the self-bamboozled Presbyterian, the right-thinker, the great moral statesman, the perfect model of the Christian cad.' Democracy as a theory? 'All known facts lie flatly against it.'" (148-149). Update this 90 years and this, too, could have been written yesterday. The Bushes, Cheneys, Rumfelds and their hatchetmen are the reincarnated clowns of the recent past--the Hoovers, Mellons, and other stone deaf fools who, in the face of human suffering, can suggest that prosperity is just around the corner.

Can we say that the same bureaucratic fools now run our world--an endless supply of fool managers who operate even in the very institution I have the privilege of working at.

Affirmative Action

In the larger scheme of things, Affirmative Action doesn't matter: in the academic world, it mostly meant that black studies departments were set up. They weren't hiring blacks--or women, for that matter--in engineering departments or economics departments. Not in chemistry. But they did in English departments. For me, it meant that I couldn't get a job, because, for the most part, women were hired for jobs I applied to. Does it matter? Surely, given the massive pools of applicants for jobs, those women who got hired were more than capable--many undoubtedly as good, if not better, than I. Yet the idea of imposing a wrong to right a wrong is still troubling, for the real perpetrators of discrimination got off scott-free. In a true, just affirmative action process, older, white men should have lost their jobs to make way for women, minorites, anyone in classes of people who were denied places in, say, the academic world. Why did I have to be denied an opportunity to make up for the crime of my elders? With their white, male privilege, plenty of fools got jobs: they didn't accomplish all that much, except they got to pretend to be academics. Had comfortable lives. Read books. Viewed themselves as wise mentors. There's an ecology of livelihoods: jobs are handed out for silly reasons, unjustifiable reasons. Was it Balzac who said that behind every great fortune there's a crime? Well, behind every desirable tenured position, there's a crime. But we always believe that, if we achieve something, it's because we deserve it. Deserve it? If so, we also deserve every disease that comes our way. Every failure. It has the same reality as prayer--as if some entity cares.

The More Things Change

As part of my plan to read all of the works on the Texas Unrequired Reading List, I finished Richard Hofstatler's The American Political Tradition--clearly a depressing book in that we never seem to learn from experience. Odd characters like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both were confronted by large corporate powers and, while they had no interest in overturning capitalism, they did favor contolling these massive corporate entities, mostly through regulation. Hofstatler then turns to Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt--the former incapable of adjusting to the the economic catastrophe caused by unregulated business and making use of differing solutions to the problem of economic downturns, the latter becoming increasingly radical in his efforts to end the cycle of business collapses. Hofstatler suggests (in a book written in 1948) that we now understood the folly of unfettered capitalism, yet here we are, in 2010, right back to the ideologies of the 1920s--or worse, the 19th century. Another banking/financial sector catastrophe has occurred. We staved off, to some degree, an overwhelming economic catastrophe with government bailouts of predatory banks--and the idiot Republicans now oppose any meaningful effort at regulating the shadow banking world. And, naturally, there are any number of fools willing to vote for them. The Democrats can hardly pick up a finger to address financial regulation: apparently they are capable of passing only one major piece of legislation at a time. At least Franklin Roosevelt was willing to try virtually anything: unlike the contemporary timid and complacent party of the people.

I also read Martin Gardner's Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Lewis Thomas' Lives of the Cell, neither of which is so impressive (Gardner's book anthologizes his book reviews of work by scienific cranks and crackpots, Thomas's collection of short essays suggest that we're more like ants than we might imagine and that, yes, the Earth is a cell itself).

Tea Party?

My sense about the so-called tea-party activists is that they are reacting to the reality that at one time certain white people could be fairly successful, even if they weren't very smart or highly educated: but now, with the withering reality of corporate America hoovering up every last outstanding cent, there isn't the same possibility for what they believe is their right to a comfortable life. You can't make it just by being white--that privilege no longer is as readily available. Now you need a technical education--and some ruthlessness. The world economy doesn't pull along loser whites anymore, and they're feeling it. And they're not happy about it. So they're throwing a tantrum. They see Obama as that technically educated black man who is successful--and they don't like it. Some racism is part of it. Some nostalgia. Some resentment. Some ideological idiocy. Mostly it's incoherence--because they can't admit that they were privileged before (and thus didn't deserve it). The larger question, though, is why the mainstream newsmedia gives them so much attention, the kind of attention it would never give, say, countercultural lunatics.

The Emperor's Newest Clothes

It's sad and, in a bizarre sense, amusing to see someone unmasked, especially someone in a highly paid, administrative position. At my school, the president has offered ersatz faculty consultation, and then when the inevitable crisis hit--and all decisions are made by the administrtation without any meaningful input from the "employees"--he affects a hurt sensibility: why didn't you participate in these phony sessions where I would pretend to listen to you and then ignore everything you have to say? Of course, no one is expecting that they will simply do what we want, but after a while, even the most obtuse person will realize when the fix is in. They assume that meaningful faculty consultation equals some kind of anarchistic collective. We--with our degrees and experience--would like to be heard. But as administrators now mostly come from graduate programs in college administration, they no longer have any knowledge of teaching or scholarship--just managing the "crises." So colleges have drifted into a kind of unspoken agreement: you pretend to administer the school, we'll deal with the classroom. But sooner or later, they have to intervene into the classroom (layoffs, phony accredidation processes, pointless student surveys), although somehow administrative personnel almost never seem to disappear. So a lot of faculty showed up at a meeting--and the president threw a temper tantrum. This "meeting," like most of our meetings, was really an opportunity to hand out new rules for a specific program--no discussion, no questions, no give-and-take. That's how dictatorships are run. When the mask of affability comes off, then you see the reality. We pretend that somehow we don't live under dictatorships--but we do. The corporate rules rule.