Don’t mess with Thomas Klingenstein

The New Neo Posted on by

As Barry Mills, president of Bowdoin College, learned:

One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein for a round of golf about an hour north of campus. College presidents spend many of their waking hours talking to potential donors. In this case, the two men spoke about college life””especially “diversity”””and the conversation made such an impression on President Mills that he cited it weeks later in his convocation address to Bowdoin’s freshman class. That’s where the dispute begins.

Read on for the full story of what each men said, and Klingenstein’s revenge, a commissioned study of academic life at Bowdoin. Suffice to say that nothing in the article or the report will surprise you, but both are fascinating in their depiction of what has happened to liberal arts universities in this country.

Kudos to Mr. Klingenstein.

Not wild about Wild

The New Neo Posted on by

I belong to a book group, as it seems about 99% of American women do these days. The books are more or less a pretext for getting together, talking, eating, and talking (did I say talking?).

Sometimes I read the books and sometimes I don’t, but this month I’ve finished about 100 pages so far of Wild by Cheryl Strayed, notice of which I’d somehow previously evaded despite it’s having been tops on the NY Times nonfiction bestseller list for about a gazillion weeks, and an Oprah pick (those two things are hardly unrelated, of course; the book had sold well but not spectacularly until Oprah anointed it).

Wild has a great “hook” at the beginning that drew me in and made me think it would be a good read: while hiking the Pacific Coast Trail solo, Strayed loses one of her boots (after taking them off temporarily) when it falls off a mountain and disappears into the woods below. But as I read on, I found myself more and more annoyed and mystified by Ms. Strayed, and disheartened by the fact that this book has been so popular.

The plot could be summarized (at least so far, and I have no reason to imagine it will substantially change) as: young woman loses mother to cancer, grieves, completely f***s up her life and marriage by wildly self-indulgent and self-destructive behavior (sex, drugs, very little rock and roll), and decides to solo hike along the California portion of the Pacific Coast trail with hardly even the most rudimentary preparation—and lives to tell about it. Along the way she seems to gain little insight or knowledge, and what she does gain can only be called “wisdom” or “knowledge” in comparison to her utter lack of either characteristic at the outset of the book.

And for a writer, and especially a memoir-writer, she’s remarkably lacking in introspection or understanding of either herself or others, and even more remarkably uninterested in either. It’s curious.

But I’m less interested in Strayed’s psyche than in that of her enthusiastic readers. I haven’t plowed through all nearly-1800 reviews on Amazon (that’s how popular this book has been), but I did note that there’s a significant number of readers (about 11% of the commenters there, by my quick calculations) who cannot stand the book and consider Ms. Strayed a self-centered twit. That’s heartening.

Oprah herself appears to have chosen the book because of Cheryl Strayed’s courage. Well, that the woman has. Courage and extreme foolhardiness, the bulk of the dangers faced in the book being of her own making and due to her own lack of thought and planning. But still, courage. And I suppose it takes courage to write about all one’s warts and foibles. But over 300 pages of this is almost as rough going as hiking the Pacific Coast Trail itself.

You may ask why I’m writing this post, and in the manner of Strayed I probably shouldn’t even try to explain. But I think it’s because so many popular books these days share some of the emotional offness of Wild, tell-alls that end up telling little of significance, full of sound and fury, and signifying—well, if not nothing, then next to nothing, except perhaps the fact that we have lost our way on the trail.

Obama: the legacy

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama actually offers up a proposal that at least gives the appearance of being a compromise (entitlement cuts for tax raises), and the left gets angry at him, naturally:

Progressive groups and lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), are blasting the Obama administration for cuts to Social Security and other programs expected to be unveiled in the president’s budget next week.

One progressive group, Democracy for America, is threatening primary challenges to those Democrats who support the cuts.

More details here.

Things haven’t really been going all that well for Obama of late. Of course, they don’t have to, because he already won re-election. But no doubt he wants to preserve his legacy. That would include Obamacare, which appears to be becoming more unpopular as time (or Time) goes by, rather than less.

Could it even be that, as Victor Davis Hanson writes, Obama will go down in history as a failed president?:

But the right shouldn’t rejoice about that. Even if Hanson is correct, I fear the damage is done–and there’s more damage to come, since we’ve only gotten through the first few months of Obama’s second term. There’s quite a bit more to go.

And the remedies may be too Draconian for people to accept:

We are institutionalizing, in European style, huge government, high unemployment, sluggish GDP growth, serial annual deficits, ballooning aggregate national debt and massive dependency, along with near-zero interest rates.

Hanson thinks that, after Obama, the two parties will come to agree on the remedies and the American people will not want us to “continue down the road to Italy or Spain.” I hope he’s correct but I believe he may indeed be wrong, and that instead we have reached some sort of tipping point in pro-welfare state public opinion, and that it would take something very major to change our reliance on big government.

Hanson agrees, though, that even if Obama fails as a president, he will never fail in the eyes of liberals:

Obama’s economic record will be dispassionately acknowledged to be similar to that of Jimmy Carter. But, unlike Carter, Obama will remain a mythical figure in liberal circles.

To borrow a line from a classic Western, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And so we will do just that.

Marriage: when?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the annals of embarrassing-mother moments, Susan Patton’s letter to the Princeton paper—exhorting girls (women?) at the school to look around at wonderful guys such as her son (a student there) and consider them a great pool of marriage material the likes of which they may not find again in one place at one time—ranks way up there, not the least because of the huge blogosphere brouhaha it engendered.

Susan Patton is an alum of Princeton, and her advice basically boils down to “strike while the iron is hot.” I could argue with her tone here and there, but her most basic message still rings true, and is pretty much the same one that rang in our ears when I went to college, the wisdom of which we acknowledged at the time and did our level best to actualize.

Let me just say that almost all of my friends met their husbands-to-be in yes, in college. Almost all were married young (actually, very young for some), almost all are still married to that very same person, and almost all have had children and careers and the sorts of lives that most of today’s women profess to want (some of these friends of mine are what you might even call “eminent”). I was a bit of an outlier, having met my husband-to-be the first week of grad school at twenty-one, and getting married at the ripe old age of twenty-six, which did feel oldish at the time but of course was not.

So it has taken me a while to understand that Bookworm, for example, may be correct when she describes some of today’s women as actually passing up a man they think is their “soulmate” merely because the timing isn’t right. And Megan McArdle, who is certainly closer to college age than I am, says that people do meet the right person and break up because it’s not “the right time.”

But I wonder how many people—women or men—are actually doing this.

And at least this group is for the most part still interested in getting married.

The following does not appear…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to be an April Fools joke, or an Onion article.

But I think I’ll take a raincheck on it anyway.

I kinda like the disparate elements, although I rarely let myself indulge in those particular vices. But the combo? Gag me with a spoon.

Although in the spirit of adventure…hmmm…if someone put one in front of me…[trails off, lost in thought]…

Mug me again!

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a story for you:

Last year when liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed, the New York Post editorial page used it to recall one of the late Ed Koch’s favorite anecdotes:

Back when he was first running for mayor, Ed Koch used to tell of the time he told some senior citizens about a judge he knew who’d been mugged.

The judge, said Koch, told a group that “this mugging will not influence any of my decisions from the bench” ”” whereupon a woman yelled, “Mug him again!”

While the Post was roundly criticized in some quarters for insensitivity, the lesson was apt. Those who can’t learn from their encounters with violent criminals lack credibility when they render judgment on dealing with related issues.

This anecdote came to mind when reading of the encounter of leftist Israeli filmmaker Yariv Horowitz”“who was in Aubagne, France to pick up an award at a film festival for his film Rock the Casbah”“had with a gang of Arab toughs. Though his movie is a cinematic attack on Israeli policies and a bouquet thrown in the direction of the Palestinians, the Arabs proved to be uninterested in his politics and instead subjected him to the same treatment they have accorded to many another Jew: he was badly beaten.

But like the judge in the Ed Koch story, Horowitz won’t let it influence him. When he regained consciousness, he refused to press charges against his attackers. Nor did he draw any conclusions about the intent of the mob that beat him up.

That immediately brought mind the story of Robert Fisk, whom you may fondly remember as the guy after whom the verb “to fisk” was named.

Here’s why (an article Fisk wrote about the time he was attacked by an Afghan mob):

They started by shaking hands. We said “Salaam aleikum” ”“ peace be upon you ”“ then the first pebbles flew past my face. A small boy tried to grab my bag. Then another. Then someone punched me in the back. Then young men broke my glasses, began smashing stones into my face and head. I couldn’t see for the blood pouring down my forehead and swamping my eyes. And even then, I understood. I couldn’t blame them for what they were doing. In fact, if I were the Afghan refugees of Kila Abdullah, close to the Afghan-Pakistan border, I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.

Some people are NOT mugged by reality. They are merely mugged, and then they pile on—themselves:

I love this story

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s another story about love coming late in life, which seems to be an emerging theme for today.

I also love the fact that this reunited couple both report having had happy marriages before they got back together (after becoming a widow and widower). Good for them; perhaps they’re just happy people in general. Also, they really are pretty recognizable from their early photos, which isn’t always the case (she in particular, I think, although his slightly crooked smile is instantly recognizable).

sweethearts

This reuniting with an old flame is a common occurrence—or at least fantasies about it are a common occurrence. I’ve known quite a few people who’ve acted on them. There’s just something about young love that has a tremendous force, something like imprinting.

I’d love (note that word again) to see some statistics on whether it usually works out. The people I know who did it ultimately separated again before they even got around to marrying. Sometimes fantasy is much better than reality.

Mark Sanford is engaged…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in campaigning for a vacant House seat in South Carolina as the official Republican nominee, having won the runoff election.

Yes, that Mark Sanford, the one who sort of lost his mind and ran off, not to the Appalachian trail as he originally said, but to an adulterous liaison in Argentina. Who said there are no second acts in American lives (F. Scott Fitzgerald, actually, but what did he know about politics)?

Oh, and Sanford is also engaged to be married; his latest press conference featured his fiancée Maria Belen Chapur at his side. Yes, they are intending to marry, four years after the debacle. I can’t imagine what they’ve been waiting for, but here they are (she looks a bit like Ali McGraw to me):

Sanford

One of the reasons Sanford was disgraced is that he didn’t go the usual route of successfully keeping the affair quiet (or at least continuing to do his job without interruption), divorcing his wife, and then marrying his lover. Instead, he went on walkabout and went AWOL from his job as governor for a few days. So this wasn’t just an ordinary peccadillo, this really seemed to affect his job directly rather than indirectly.

Shortly thereafter, I wrote a post about infidelity among politicians in which I observed:

The list of erring political husbands (yes, it’s usually husbands, although no doubt there are woman in public life who do the same) is long. But usually love’s got nothing to do with it. I wasn’t in their bedrooms to find out for sure, but I think we can safely say that for John Kennedy and Elliot Spitzer and John Edwards and John Ensign (what’s up this with all these “John’s”?) and Bill Clinton (whose bedroom/office we practically were in, thanks to Ken Starr’s report), the aim was to satisfy several lusts at once: conquest, power, excitement, and sex for fun and frolic.

…[But not] Governor Sanford, who seems to have been in a star-crossed-lovers situation. This makes him far more sympathetic, and far more rare. So why didn’t he just get divorced and marry his Argentine paramour? Perhaps she didn’t want to leave her country. Perhaps he felt too much guilt about his wife and especially his children (although not enough to stop him from having the affair in the first place). Perhaps he thought it would ruin his political career to divorce and remarry, although paradoxically, keeping the affair secret and acting so oddly and irresponsibly has probably sunk it far more in the end.

It remains to be seen whether that last statement is correct, because I’m not sure Sanford is sunk politically (although there’s no way to tell if he would have been better being more up-front about his infidelity in the first place, instead of inventing a cockamamie story that ended up fooling no one but worrying many.) But it does seem to have been a serious relationship rather than a fling, and although I wouldn’t put money on its lasting for the rest of their lives, perhaps it will.

Sanford is another example of a Republican candidate who won in a runoff or primary but seems weak, and leaves the seat vulnerable to a Democratic takeover in a district or state that Republicans should ordinarily be able to hold rather easily. We’ve had an awful lot of them lately, haven’t we? This article points out how he won: a combination of low voter interest and high name recognition, as well as his political skills and emphasis on forgiveness, and the fact that the district involved seems composed more of country-club Republicans than soc-cons (although soc-cons are often willing to vote for a sinner if he/she shows repentance).

I don’t know about ex-wife Jenny and his four sons; they’ll have to iron this out for themselves. Enough voters seem to have forgiven him to have made him the candidate. But have enough forgiven him to enable him to be elected?

You can always go downtown—again

The New Neo Posted on by

One of the things that draws me to YouTube is its ability to collapse time.

I’ve written other posts before that use this then/now format, but I don’t really tire of it. So here’s another.

Petula Clark, then:

And now (she’s 80):

As for Clark’s singing, you may be surprised to learn that the great and greatly eccentric classical pianist Glenn Gould was quite taken with her.

So that thought can be a bridge to the idea that Gould also lends himself to YouTube time-traveling. His debut recording was made in 1955 at the ripe old age of 22, and it was of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. His final one, made shortly before his death at the age of 50, was of the very same piece.

I say “the very same piece.” But Gould made sure it sounded very different.

Here’s a YouTube video comparing the two versions. First we hear the opening Aria movement played by the young, uptempo, “buoyant” Gould. It runs almost twice as fast as the second, more contemplative version that follows. Then there’s a short interview with Gould on the difference between his two interpretations, in which he says (among other things):

I find that I recognized at all points, really, the fingerprints of the party responsible [the young Gould himself, of course]—I mean from a tactical standpoint, from a purely mechanical standpoint. So I recognized the fingerprint. But (and it is a very big but) I could not recognize, or identify with, the spirit of the person who made that recording. It really seemed like some other spirit had been involved, and as a consequence I was just very glad to be doing it again.

Carved onto Gould’s tombstone in Toronto’s Mt. Pleasant Cemetery are the first few measures of the Goldberg Variations—that is, the aria you hear on the above video.

Confusion if DOMA’s overruled

The New Neo Posted on by

The fact that if SCOTUS overrules DOMA the result will be conflict of laws over who is married and who is not should come as absolutely no surprise. In fact, one of the reasons for the passage of the act in the first place was to avoid such confusion and make it clear how federal laws would work in the presence of the differences between the way states treat gay marriage.

To promoters of gay marriage who believe it should be universally accepted, this is probably a feature rather than a bug. Although I’m not conversant with all the finer legal points here, it seems to me the next step for them—if DOMA is declared unconstitutional by SCOTUS—would be to push for the idea that the resultant chaos should be resolved in favor of forcing all states to allow it. The argument would probably be that letting gay couples who are able to get married because they live in states that allow it receive tax and other federal benefits that are denied to other gay couples who would like to be married but who reside in states that do not allow it would be considered a denial of Fifth Amendment equal protection rights.