Van Gogh on his life’s mission

The New Neo Posted on by

From one of Van Gogh’s letters to his beloved brother Theo:

What am I in the eyes of most people – a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person – somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low.

All right, then – even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.

That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout [in spite of everything], based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion.

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest comers. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

On Kasich: a lot of people have been asking…

The New Neo Posted on by

…why is Kasich still running?

The question isn’t all that interesting or mysterious to me, because I figure it’s ego, and/or he aims to help or hurt Trump or Cruz (take your pick), and/or he somehow sees this as leading to a vice-presidency for himself.

The question that interests me more is: why are so many people still voting for Kasich in the primaries? Do they like him so very very much (that’s hard for me to believe)? Do they merely see him as the only moderate left standing (that makes more sense to me)? Do they think he really has a chance of winning (highly unlikely)? Are they just not paying attention to the dynamics of the race at this point?

“That 2016 moment”: politics and culture

The New Neo Posted on by

Peggy Noonan writes:

Have you had your 2016 Moment? I think you probably have, or will.

The Moment is that sliver of time in which you fully realize something epochal is happening in politics, that there has never been a presidential year like 2016, and suddenly you are aware of it in a new, true and personal way. It tends to involve a poignant sense of dislocation, a knowledge that our politics have changed and won’t be going back.

I had my 2016 moment in November of 2012, right after the election. Actually, I had it a week before that, when after talking to a series of friends I realized in my gut that the election was almost certainly going to end with an Obama victory. But you get the idea.

However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t had further refinements on the moment this year. I most definitely have. Ever since last summer, I keep losing hope, and then getting hope revived—that somehow the forces of reason will pull this one out. But each time that hope has been short-lived. I’m with Noonan on this one:

We’ve had a lot to absorb””the breaking of a party, the rise of an outlandish outsider; a lurch to the left in the other party, the popular rise of a socialist. Alongside that, the enduring power of a candidate even her most ardent supporters accept as corrupt. Add the lowering of standards, the feeling of no options, the coarsening, and all the new estrangements.

The Moment is when it got to you, or when it fully came through.

But I don’t fully agree with this, at least not exactly:

As she stood watching a video of Reagan speaking, he thought of Reagan and FDR, of JFK and Martin Luther King. His daughter, he realized, would probably never see political leaders of such stature and grace, though she deserved to. Her first, indelible political memories were of lower, grubbier folk. “Leaders with Reaganesque potential no longer go into politics””and why would they, with all the posturing and plasticity that it requires?”

I still see some leaders with “Reaganesque potential” and “stature and grace” in politics. I even have seen people I might describe that way during this election cycle. For example, I saw those things in Carly Fiorina, particularly when I saw her in person. Cruz likewise, when he gives speeches and interacts with crowds. They are not the only ones. Are they Reagan, or up there with Reagan? No. But they have those qualities and that potential, and there is no reason other aspiring politicians of the future couldn’t sometimes exhibit those qualities and have that potential.

The real difference between Reagan’s times and now, as I see it? It’s the American people who have coarsened, who respond to posturing and plasticity positively rather than rejecting it, and who are less likely to elect politicians with those qualities of “stature and grace.” This is true not just in the political world, but in our cultural life across the spectrum. I don’t blame politics or politicians. The problem and the trend goes much much deeper.

Noonan also writes:

Lately conservative thinkers and journalists had taken to making clear their disdain for the white working class.

Well, maybe I don’t read those particular thinkers and journalists. Noonan doesn’t name them or quote them, so I’m not sure who she’s talking about, or what she considers evidence of this disdain—certainly it can’t just be criticism of Trump’s supporters, because criticism is not the same thing as disdain, and besides “Trump supporter” is not even remotely synonymous with “white working class,” because Trump supporters come from many different classes and educational levels (although most, like most Republicans, are white).

Earlier in this post when I wrote, “It’s the American people who have coarsened, who respond to posturing and plasticity positively rather than rejecting it. This is true not just in politics, but in our cultural life across the spectrum,” I was not referring to class at all. In fact, I don’t see the “white working class” as necessarily exhibiting more of these traits than anyone else. It’s not about money. It’s not about race or class. It’s more common across the board, part of public and private life, and it’s been worsening for decades.

I don’t even blame it on the left, although I believe the left has long encouraged and celebrated it. At this point it is bipartisan and pervasive.

Towards the end of her column Noonan writes of her grief that “the great choice in a nation of 320 million may come down to Crazy Man versus Criminal” this year. Well, I feel grief, too, but have felt it for many years. And I find “Crazy Man versus Criminal”—cute, snappy, and memorable—inaccurate. Trump is not a crazy man, not at all. And although Hillary may be guilty of some crimes, “criminal” is not her most salient characteristic, nor her source of appeal. I realize that cute and snappy makes a column that people will quote and remember, but if I had to think of a way to put it I’d say (trying to be a bit cute and snappy myself) something like “Cunning Con Man versus Cunning Con Woman, the first from the world of business and the second from the world of politics.”

It does no good to disrespect working class people, and I don’t think I’ve ever done it (I don’t even like the term “working class,” although I can’t think of a better one to designate a certain group of people). I grew up in a mainly working class community, and although my father was a professional, my parents had a number of working class friends because the community in which they grew up and lived was a tight one where people had mostly known each other since childhood. I’ve lived ever since in mainly working class communities, and I see stupidity of mind and coarseness of thought and culture as equal opportunity qualities, cutting across classes and educational levels. Some of the dumbest people I know are well-educated professionals, some of the smartest are not, and vice versa.

I think something else is going on. I was in a Trader Joe’s the other day, pushing my cart and happily loading up on supplies (including this favorite), when I saw a youngish man in a T-shirt with the F-word on it. He was accompanied by his daughter of about six years old, and as they were talking I stared in realization that years ago—and not all that many years, either—such a thing would be highly unlikely, but now it’s just a matter of course. Years ago, it would be highly unusual for a father to wear such a T-shirt in public at all, much less in the presence of his young daughter, but these days it’s a sort of ho-hum experience for most people. That’s how coarsened our lives are, in small but meaningful ways.

As Andrew Breitbart (not the blog, the man) so memorably said, politics is downstream from culture. Politics can’t be some sort of highfalutin oasis, isolated from the culture and above it all—au contraire—and it never was. What we’re seeing today in politics is not primarily about politics, politics is just one of its manifestations, albeit an important and powerful one.

I’ve been writing about this phenomenon, both in politics and elsewhere, almost since the beginning of my blogging (see this for an early example, and this for a recent one). If Noonan’s “Reaganesque” politician of “stature and grace” came on the scene (particularly on the right), I submit that these days he or she would be considered a big boring yawn, and/or would be attacked by tabloid accusations that needn’t contain a particle of truth to be disseminated widely even by those who don’t write for tabloids. Such a politician would not be a winner—because way too many Americans neither demand nor appreciate such qualities in their leaders or their public figures, nor do they demonstrate them in their own public or private lives.

For Passover: celebrate freedom

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]

This evening is the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent years has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country, despite its long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it. I fear those days may be over.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have—the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).

Is freedom a “basic need, then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover!

US suicide rates continue to rise

The New Neo Posted on by

This is depressing news:

Suicide in the United States has surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years, a federal data analysis has found, with increases in every age group except older adults. The rise was particularly steep for women. It was also substantial among middle-aged Americans, sending a signal of deep anguish from a group whose suicide rates had been stable or falling since the 1950s.

The suicide rate for middle-aged women, ages 45 to 64, jumped by 63 percent over the period of the study, while it rose by 43 percent for men in that age range, the sharpest increase for males of any age. The overall suicide rate rose by 24 percent from 1999 to 2014, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the study on Friday

Rates increased sharply for girls 10-14 as well, and the ethnic group with the highest increase was American Indians, followed by white middle-aged women. Black men were the only ethnic group with a decrease.

Those statistics are all about increase vs. decrease rather than absolute numbers, however. A caveat is that 1999, the start year, was a low year for suicides. But the rates have been steadily increasing since then, so it seems to be a real effect. The other thing I need to point out is that even though the rates among women increased more than among men, men have a much higher suicide rate than women:

suiciderates

There are theories about why this general increase is happening, although no one knows for sure:

The data analysis provided fresh evidence of suffering among white Americans. Recent research has highlighted the plight of less educated whites, showing surges in deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, liver disease and alcohol poisoning, particularly among those with a high school education or less. The new report did not break down suicide rates by education, but researchers who reviewed the analysis said the patterns in age and race were consistent with that recent research and painted a picture of desperation for many in American society.

“This is part of the larger emerging pattern of evidence of the links between poverty, hopelessness and health,” said Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard…

This is sobering, as well:

Though suicide rates for older adults fell over the period of the study, men over 75 still have the highest suicide rate of any age group ”” 38.8 per 100,000 in 2014, compared with just four per 100,000 for their female counterparts.

When you look at the charts, you might notice something interesting about that:

womensuicide

mensuicide

You can easily see that spike for middle-aged women and for older men. But notice that both women and men over 75 had suicide rates even higher in 1999 than recently, the only category with that pattern. Has growing old become less depressing in the 21st Century for both sexes, while being middle-aged has become more so (especially for women)? Or are the differences generational?

RIP Prince

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t say I know much about Prince’s music except that he was mega-famous and a tremendous number of people loved his work. I know the song “Purple Rain” and very little else. However, the reports about his cause of death (the flu) made me wonder whether he wasn’t another victim of sepsis, an illness that recently killed a very good friend of mine.

I’ve also noticed that Prince and his first wife had a series of tragedies—the death of a baby born with a genetic illness, and then a later miscarriage. His ex-wife says the couple never really recovered from those events, and that such things either make a couple stronger or break them. That has the ring of truth to me.

RIP.

Politicians, deception, and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

From a commenter at Ace’s, saying he preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump for the following reason:

I prefer a wolf to a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

I’m not sure which I’d prefer—wolves are wolves, after all—but I understand the principle that the wolf you know a lot about might be easier to deal with than the wolf who masquerades as something else.

But don’t all politicians masquerade, and don’t they all lie?

Indeed, politicians often lie, or seem to have lied. Sometimes they lie about a single issue, sometimes more issues. But sometimes they just make promises they can’t keep, and their enemies call them liars. Barack Obama, however, was the first politician I can recall in my lifetime who was purposely deceptive about his basic political orientation when he was running for office.

I believe that Trump would be the second.

I wrote the above words last night as notes for a post to finish writing today. Between then and now I saw this story, which seems highly relevant:

Trump’s newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage.

“When he’s out on the stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” Manafort said in a private briefing.

“You’ll start to see more depth of the person, the real person. You’ll see a real different guy,” he said.

The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange.

“He gets it,” Manafort said of Trump’s need to moderate his personality. “The part that he’s been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting, but he wasn’t ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase. The negatives will come down. The image is going to change.”

I find this fascinating, and also fascinating are the responses to it. Many of Trump’s vocal supporters think it’s just great, as we’ve come to expect—a clever pivot showing his wonderful flexibility. His opponents think it’s remarkably duplicitous, beyond what is customary for a politician.

And of course, Trump is fond of touting his NON-politician status, and his supporters his “authenticity.” I guess he’s an authentic chameleon, not just about policy (we already know that) but in personality as well.

It’s not the least bit reassuring. Nor is this “politics as usual” (from the supposed non-politician, yet). Everyone has a public face (sometimes somewhat different in different public roles) and a private face (sometimes different with different people). But for people of integrity and character, there is a basic sameness and a basic thread that runs through all their encounters, both public and private. In other words, there’s a reason the description “two-faced” is ordinarily considered pejorative.

Manafort (see *NOTE below) assured the group that the Trump version 2.0 they are about to see is the “real” Trump. But having done a lot of research on Trump—seeing countless articles, profiles, and interviews; a biography, and videos—I have to say that if the “real” Trump is the one we haven’t seen yet, then Trump’s been acting a role for his entire public life, because the Trump persona we’ve seen in this campaign so far is highly consistent with the persona he’s been projecting towards the world for close to four decades—that is, most of his adult life, which has been spent in the spotlight.

What’s more, when a politician adopts a public persona, usually that presentation is of a person who is more sober, more serious and well-informed, than he or she might be in private. The private persona is usually the looser one. With Trump, according to Manafort, it’s the other way around. If Trump has been deceptive with the American public and what we’ve seen is not the real Trump, then he must think the American public consists of stupid, crass fools.

And of course, he may be right about a lot of people.

I happen to think that Trump is running a con. Now, politicians often have a lot of overlap with con artists, but it’s a matter of degree. But Trump’s overlap seems greater to me, the con bigger. Take a look at this description of con artists, for example [comments in brackets are mine]:

In order to be a con artist you have to take advantage of other people’s belief in you, and psychopaths don’t really have a conscience, so it’s much easier for them to take that step. Narcissism, you have to have an overinflated sense of self in order to rationalize conning other people, especially if you’re not a psychopath. If you’re someone who feels emotion normally, narcissism will protect you, because you say, “Well, I deserve it.” And finally, Machiavellianism is a textbook definition of a con artist, because it’s someone who is like Machiavelli’s “ideal prince,” someone who uses the tools of persuasion and deception and connivance to get what he wants. The ends justify the means…

Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People [a book that happens to have been an influential book during Trump’s formative years] is kind of the unofficial con artist’s bible, because a lot of those tactics [Carnegie] talks about, in terms of building relationships and being successful in business, are ideal for getting people to trust you. One of the really easy things is creating a feeling of familiarity. You’re more likely to trust someone who feels more familiar to you. It’s even enough to exploit something called the “mere exposure effect,” where, say, you just go to the same coffee shop as someone every single day, and they may not consciously note you, but all of a sudden you feel more familiar. [Americans have become very familiar with Donald Trump though his constant celebrity, and particularly through his popular show “The Apprentice,” which makes many of them think they know him and therefore can trust him.]

In summary, at this point I cannot imagine why anyone would trust anything Donald Trump says in any of his personae.

[*NOTE: Paul Manafort, the man who reassured the RNC that they’d see the “real” Trump soon, has an interesting history of presenting the public with candidates who’ve gotten a personality makeover. His most recent client in that regard prior to Trump was Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine, although Yanukovych was not favored by the US due to his alliance with Putin. This was Manafort’s role [emphasis mine]:

In 2010, under Manafort’s tutelage, the opposition leader [Yanukovych] put the Orange Revolution [that had previously overthrown him in 2004] on trial, campaigning against its leaders’ management of a weak economy. Returns from the presidential election gave Yanukovych a narrow win over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 demonstrations. Yanukovych owes his comeback in Ukraine’s presidential election to a drastic makeover of his political persona and, people in his party say, that makeover was engineered in part by his American consultant, Manafort.

Sound familiar?

It didn’t end well for Ukraine, as you can see by Yanukovych’s subsequent history.]

Okay, let’s play identity politics: a Ted Cruz friendship that should be publicized

The New Neo Posted on by

The hype on Ted Cruz is that nobody likes him, everybody hates him, he has no friends.

The hype on Republicans is that they’re racist bigots.

Here’s a story that could kill (or at least slightly injure) those two birds with one stone: the tale of Ted Cruz’s best friend in college, law school, and beyond, David Panton.

I first became aware of Panton on reading about this interview with Harvard Law’s Alan Dershowitz, which is fascinating in its own right:

Alan Dershowitz, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, confirmed for Megyn Kelly during an appearance on Tuesday’s Kelly File that Ted Cruz was one of the smartest students he ever had. Dershowitz said teachers love to be challenged. And Cruz disagreed with everything he said and made such brilliant arguments that Dershowitz never had to play the devil’s advocate.

Dershowitz also admitted he took a lot of criticism from his lefty friends for being truthful about Cruz. He also told Kelly that Cruz’s politics were the opposite of Dershowitz’, but they were clear, principled, unwavering, and very intelligently presented.

Dershowitz is to be commended for that sort of courage, which he’s shown many times before in taking positions that are unpopular with his fellow liberals.

Here’s how Dershowitz brought up the topic of Cruz’s friendship with Panton:

[Cruz] had been a champion debater at Princeton and he and his Princeton roommate sat next to each other, and he was an African-American, a black kid from Jamaica, two of the most brilliant guys at Harvard Law school. And they were inseparable. And they had a team tag match. One guy finished, the other guy would raise his hand.

Here’s a photo from way back when:

panton

This was not just a passing thing or a token friendship, either; it seems like the real deal. The two have remained friends to the present day:

David Panton and Ted Cruz have been friends for the last 25 years, they attended one of the most prestigious universities at young ages, 17 and 20, and have since maintained a bond. Ted was like a lightning rod for controversy and a stickler for process and was disliked by many of his classmates until his friendship with the popular and extremely likeable Jamaican.

They became debate partners and roommates for the rest of their time at Princeton and continued when they went to Harvard Law School, winning the North American Championship in 1992 and becoming the top two debaters in the country. They both participated in political studies. Resulting from their close friendship, they became business partners. Cruz has made numerous visits to the island. Panton became Cruz’s best man at his wedding, whilst Cruz became godfather to Panton’s son with Lisa Hanna.

Note that “popular and extremely likeable” description of Panton. Interesting that he chose Cruz to be so close to. Here’s some more about Panton, who sounds like a pretty extraordinary person:

His brilliance as a Rhodes Scholar, which he received a doctorate in management studies from Oxford University, the youngest of his undergrad class, and among the youngest holders of a PhD from Oxford. He must be in the top 20 most brilliant Jamaican of all times, maybe not too far for the legendary Monsignor Wilson, who ranked sixth in the world in the 60s for brilliance. At Harvard Law School he became one of two black presidents in the history of Harvard Law Review, the other being President Obama.

There’s much more here. An excerpt:

The two were teenagers when they first met, assigned to live in the same freshman dorm at Princeton. They were an “unlikely couple,” Panton said last year to a radio station in Atlanta, where he now lives. Cruz was a deeply conservative Hispanic from a poor background while Panton, who is black, hailed from the upper crust of Jamaican society, where his father ran one of the island’s largest companies.

“Coming from a small school in a small town in Jamaica, I was young and felt both academically and culturally overwhelmed,” Panton told The Washington Post. “Ted was extremely pleasant and friendly and expressed genuine interest in my background.”

Cruz and Panton shared the love of a good argument and decided together to join Princeton’s competitive debate team, he said. Some classmates were baffled by the relationship between two people with seemingly opposite personalities. Panton, with his lilting Jamaican accent, exuded charm and made friends easily. Cruz was combative, developed few friendships and earned some lifelong enemies…

Panton said that over movies, video games and basketball, he saw another side of Cruz. “I am always surprised and perplexed by those who said they did not like Ted,” he said.

Panton’s Jamaican home played an important role in the relationship. Panton invited Cruz and Adam Erlich, a friend and fellow debater, to visit his family on the island…

When Panton was elected to become the president of the Harvard Law Review, the first person he called was—Ted Cruz.

Obama’s legacy

The New Neo Posted on by

I concur with this prediction:

There will be no liberation of Mosul in 2016. The Islamic State will outlive the U.S. administration whose lapses in Syria and Iraq helped to create it. It will be the ugliest piece of Barack Obama’s legacy.

Except perhaps for that last line.

I’m not sure it’s the “ugliest piece,” but only because there are so many ugly pieces.

How goes Indiana?

The New Neo Posted on by

The state of Indiana has a primary on May 3, and most analysts feel it will be pivotal in terms of the GOP nomination (and Ted Cruz knows it). But all that speculation about which way the state will go is based on almost no polling data at all.

So the pundits have no idea. And we have no idea, either. You may distrust polls; sometimes they are off, but they’re usually not very far off, and their information has been very useful in making general predictions about the basic trends in a state. Anyone here from Indiana who can shed some light on the situation there?

Naked lunch

The New Neo Posted on by

And dinner too.

For real.

[NOTE: If you don’t get the reference in the title of this post, see this, although I most definitely do not recommend the book, unless you want to wade through some incoherent but highly-praised depravity.]

Comparing throws in “Dances at a Gathering”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about the 1969 ballet “Dances At a Gathering” several times, and mentioned that I find today’s dancers, for all their fabulous technique, lacking the musicality and artistry of the past. A part of the ballet features certain lifts/throws that live on in my memory as some of the most thrilling things I’ve ever seen in all my long years of ballet-going.

Here’s a clip of a version done by the Paris Opera that seems flat and flawed to me. I’ve cued it up to the point right before one of these throws, followed by another even more spectacular one, a moment in the ballet that never fails to win enthusiastic applause. I’m not saying these movements are not competently performed in this video; these are certainly good dancers. Good, but that’s all—although if you didn’t see the original you might think I’m being a carping curmudgeon to complain. But to me these throws seem restrained and tight, with none of the wild abandon I recall:

I’m happy to report that the next video is more like it. It’s a performance by the New York City Ballet, the company on whom the ballet was first choreographed by Jerome Robbins, and whose original cast is the one I remember. This is not that cast, but it conjures up something much closer to the effect I remember:

When I saw it in person—in the depth of three dimensions rather than the two of a small computer screen—nearly fifty years ago (and I saw it at least five times), the audience used to gasp with a combination of fear, awe, and delight at the simultaneous riskiness and beauty of the move.