From the beginning of the economic crisis back in the pre-election fall, Barack Obama has been consistent about one thing: rhetoric that maximizes whatever panic and fear might be driving it.
And here he goes again. In naming Joe Biden to head a task force on the middle class and its economic woes, Obama uses his usual inflammatory rhetoric (emphasis mine):
This [recent shrinking of the economy] isn’t just an economic concept. This is a continuing disaster for America’s working families. As worrying as these numbers are, it’s what they mean to the American people that really matters.
There is no doubt we are in difficult economic times. But “disaster?” Obama’s words are certainly not “the only thing we have to fear.” But they cannot help but add to the fear that already exists and is probably helping to drive investment and consumer spending down; they neither reassure or inspire confidence.
Obama is not a dumb man, so I can only conclude that the consistent negativity of his pronouncements is deliberate, meant to provoke a fearful response that gives him carte blanche to do whatever he thinks best. In this he is also like the doctor who gives the patient a poor prognosis, knowing that if the person gets well sooner, it may well be interpreted as due to the doctor’s fabulous intervention.
The ipod is a wonderful invention, especially for those of us old enough to remember when the music collection of the typical adolescent consisted of just a few scratchy but beloved vinyl records.
If someone had told me back then that one day I’d be able to carry an entire record collection of many thousands of songs in a slim black gadget weighing just a few ounces, and could effortlessly dial up almost any tune I liked at any time I liked and listen to it through the privacy of earbuds, I’d have been flabbergasted and entranced in equal measure.
But sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Having total control of song selection, being able to hear whatever you choose in the order you wish, can be like having too many chocolates at once.
It used to be that on an album there was a certain ratio of boring ho-hum songs to the socko ones. Using a record player meant you usually had to wait through the bad ones to get to the good ones. This taught a certain amount of patience. Plus, it was often the case that if you listened to the less immediately likable songs enough times, you would come to appreciate qualities in them that were not immediately apparent on the first few listenings. This taught you patience as well, and to keep an open mind.
If you were like me, you sometimes circumvented the whole operation by standing poised at the record player at the end of the song, placing the needle on your favorite over and over till that particular band (or your hand) wore out. Maybe this taught patience, as well, although of a different sort.
With an ipod, every song we select to load is one we like. There are no bummers; every selection is a keeper, or we would not have selected it and kept it.
We can play our favorites over and over almost effortlessly with the mere press of a finger, until they are our favorites no more. We can play our tunes in alphabetical order. We can create playlist after personalized playlist that mix and match the tunes in the ways we deem most agreeable: some for the sad times, some for the happy; some for the contemplative moments, some for the active.
But after a while the steady diet of exactly what we like, exactly what we want, begins to pall. We get—impatient.
Too much richness and predictability can be boring. Human beings like to mix it up. But, wonder of wonders, the ipod folks have anticipated this problem and invented the shuffle, which adds some randomness to the proceedings.
We like to say, “surprise me.” And the ipod does, sometimes giving us old favorites we’d practically forgotten about and never would have chosen for ourselves. And then everything old is new again.
I first read John Updike’s Vietnam War essay “On Not Being a Dove” in 1989. That’s when his memoir Self-Consciousness, the book in which it was included, was first published.
At the time the essay seemed to me to be a curiosity, a slight work of little import. After all, so many years had passed since the turmoil of the 60s and early 70s, with their fevered and nearly endless arguments about the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War. Updike was a reluctant hawk—or, rather, a non-dove—back then, and he explained why in the essay. But it had no particular resonance for me then, so many years after the fact.
My, the times they have a-changed. On reading the essay now, newly republished in Commentary, I find sentence after sentence to be not only extraordinarily insightful about what was going on back then, but remarkably relevant to what this country has just been through regarding Iraq. Not only that, but Updike’s description of his discomfiture in attempting to explain his more conservative stance on Vietnam to his liberal literati friends contains echoes of my own experiences with political discussions in the last few years.
In looking back from the vantage point of 1989, Updike quotes a letter he wrote in 1966 in response to a NY Times book review:
Anyone not a rigorous pacifist must at least consider the argument that this war, evil as it is, is the lesser of available evils, intended to forestall worse wars. I am not sure that this is true, but I assume that this is the reasoning of those who prosecute it, rather than the maintenance of business prosperity or the President’s crazed stubbornness. I feel in the dove arguments as presented to me too much aesthetic distaste for the President”¦
Updike is writing about the dislike for Johnson. I cannot help but notice that the dislike for another, more recent, Texan president is also at least partly aesthetic in nature (in fact, I compared Bush and Johnson in this respect in an earlier post).
Here is Updike in 1989:
The protest, from my perspective, was in large part a snobbish dismissal of Johnson by the Eastern establishment; Cambridge professors and Manhattan lawyers and their guitar-strumming children thought they could run the country and the world better than this lugubrious bohunk from Texas. These privileged members of a privileged nation believed that their pleasant position could be maintained without anything visibly ugly happening in the world.
There is more; much more. Updike considered himself a liberal Democrat. But his basic intelligence and drive to be honest, both with himself and others, compelled him towards quite different conclusions than most of the people with whom he hobnobbed. And to speak up about it:
I would rather live under Diem (or Ky, or Thieu) than under Ho Chi Minh and his enforcers, and assumed that most South Vietnamese would. Those who would not, let them move North. But the foot traffic, one could not help noticing in these Communist/non-Communist partitions, was South, or West, away from Communism. Why was that? And so on.
I wanted to keep quiet, but could not. Something about it all made me very sore. I spoke up, blushing and hating my disruption of a post-liberal socioeconomic-cultural harmony I was pleased to be a part of.
Updike’s fame was gained primarily as a writer of fiction; he was neither a politician, historian, nor statesman. In his essay, he asserts that writers’ views on the subject of the Vietnam War have no special authority. That is true. But his depth of thought, and the clarity with which it is expressed, creates its own authority:
My thoughts ran as follows. Peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle”¦ It was all very well for civilized little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft evaders, but the United States had nobody to hide behind. Credibility must be maintained. Power is a dirty business, but who ever said it wasn’t?…
The Vietnam war””or any war””is “wrong,” but in the sense that existence itself is wrong. To be alive is to be a killer; and though the Jains try to hide this by wearing gauze masks to avoid inhaling insects, and the antiabortionists by picketing hospitals, and peace activists by lying down in front of ammunition trains, there is really no hiding what every meal we eat juicily demonstrates. Peace is not something we are entitled to but an illusory respite we earn. On both the personal and national level, islands of truce created by balances of terror and potential violence are the best we can hope for.
Updike loved this country and the comfortable and pleasant life he had carved out for himself within it. He never sought to become a pariah within the literary establishment; he wrote that “it pained and embarrassed me to be out of step with my magazine and literary colleagues.” But he could not embrace a position which he believed to be wrong—even if it was wildly unpopular—merely for the sake of convenience.
So, what did Updike think about the Iraq War? After all, he only died a few days ago; he was alive and kicking for most of it. After a quick Googling I was unable to find anything he wrote on the subject, but I think that this is very revealing. It’s a report by a blogger on a talk Updike gave back in 2006, in which he was asked his opinion of the war in Iraq. The questioner made a specific reference to Updike’s earlier views on Vietnam (the interviewer was Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker):
Goldberg points out that John Updike had been one of the few literary figures of the 1960’s to express support for the Vietnam War, and asks him to talk about George Bush and the war in Iraq. Updike accepts the comparison and acknowledges that, as in the 1960’s, his current feelings are mixed: the war is going badly, but the Bush administration faced hard choices and deserves some sympathy for the frustrating position it’s in.
Updike is clearly a principled moderate, and it’s brave of him to insist on ignoring the popular delineations between red-state and blue-state dogmatism”¦
Yes, indeed. Not that it got him much praise, then or now. Last night, for example, as I was watching a Charlie Rose tribute to John Updike that featured a panel composed of Updike’s editor Judith Jones, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and editor Sam Tanenhaus of The New York Times Book Review, the latter casually mentioned, amidst the praise and reminiscence, that “of course, Updike was on the wrong side about the Vietnam War.”
The California woman who gave birth to octuplets last Monday is now revealed to be the mother of six other children. What’s more, they are alleged to be living with her and her parents, and not a father in sight—except the grandfather of the (now fourteen) little ones.
Ah, but who are we to judge? Here are two quotes from doctors not directly involved with the case:
Doctors say they advise against higher-order births, but acknowledge the decision is not theirs to make.
“Who am I to say that six is the limit?” said Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, medical director of Fertility Institutes, which has clinics in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York City. “There are people who like to have big families.”
Dr. James Grifo, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the NYU School of Medicine, added: “I don’t think it’s our job to tell them how many babies they’re allowed to have. I am not a policeman for reproduction in the United States. My role is to educate patients.”
I agree with the doctors that they are not the reproductive police. Nor should they force parents who are carrying more than one fetus—even as many as eight, as this woman was—to selectively abort. And don’t get me wrong; I wish the mother, her babies, and in fact all her children (not to mention the grandparents, who probably have a bit of babysitting ahead of them) well.
But although not “police,” doctors make ethical and practical judgments about elective medical treatments all the time (in practice, they even make judgments about life-saving treatments, although they’re supposed to leave that to the patients). To my way of thinking, these two questions should have at least been asked by the doctors: (1) should fertility treatments be given to single parents?; and (2) should fertility treatments be given to people with six children? My answers would have been “yes, under certain circumstances” to question (1) (the circumstances would include age of parent, resources, and emotional health of parent); and “no” to question (2).
We already make similar decisions about whether such parents should be allowed to adopt. And although there are huge differences between the two situations (adoption is about someone else’s biological child, and fertility treatments are about one’s own, albeit with the help of extraordinary measures), the line should be drawn somewhere on both. I’m not a pure libertarian on this issue.
Of course, there is the knotty problem of what number of children a “too-large-for-further-fertility-treatments” family would consist of. Different doctors would draw the line at different points, no doubt. But a line should be drawn, or the doctor is being irresponsible.
It’s not that I don’t have lots of sympathy for people who have trouble conceiving. Hey, I even watch “Jon and Kate Plus 8” on occasion (shh, don’t tell anyone), although I balk at “17 Kids and Counting.” The former family, however, consists of a married couple who had fertility treatments when the only children they had at home were a set of female twins. The latter is another married couple who have had all their children, multiples and singletons, the good old-fashioned way.
The behavior of both of the couples, and their doctors, seem quite defensible. I would never argue that a couple with two children at home should not be helped with having another, or that a couple should be forced to limit the number of its own naturally-conceived biological children, although I could write another article about what I think about their decisions to air their whole families on reality TV.
I can’t help but think that the current octuplet mom has been watching too much TV on The Learning Channel, as have her doctors. How else to explain their decision to help this women have more children? Doctors can set a limit somewhere, as they are supposed to do with cosmetic surgery. There is no absolute right to have either, just because one can afford it.
Of course, the cosmetic surgeons who deal with this man and this woman seem to have the same difficulty just saying “no” to their patients’ requests.
[NOTE: The mother is keeping mum on certain relevant questions, such as whether she had fertility treatments. But since naturally-conceived octuplets are unknown, I think we can safely assume she did.]
The wacky winter weather we’ve been having lately has led to the phenomenon of ice storms and resultant power failures in places such as Arkansas and Texas that seldom see them. As readers of this blog are aware, I had a pretty nasty experience recently with a four-day power failure myself, and so I can relate and commiserate.
The power failures caused by ice storms are understandable: the usual mechanism is that heavy ice weighs down the trees, which fall on the wires and collapse them. The damage can be widespread if the storm covers a wide area. But essentially, it’s a local phenomenon.
The great power blackout of 1965 was a very different animal indeed. I recall it quite well; it involved most of the northeast United States, with twenty-five million losing power in a cascade of events stemming from a single failure in an isolated spot in Canada.
Such a thing wasn’t supposed to be able to happen. But it did:
The cause of the failure was human error that happened days before the blackout, when maintenance personnel incorrectly set a protective relay on one of the transmission lines between the Niagara generating station Sir Adam Beck Station No. 2 in Queenston, Ontario and Southern Ontario. Instead of the relay being set to trip and protect the line if the flow of power exceeded the line’s capacity, it was set for a much lower value.
As was common on a cold November evening, power for heating, lighting and cooking was pushing the electrical system to near its peak capacity, and the transmission lines heading into Southern Ontario were heavily loaded. At 5:16 p.m. Eastern Time a small surge of power coming from Lewiston, New York’s Robert Moses generating plant caused the misset relay to trip at far below the line’s rated capacity, disabling a main power line heading into Southern Ontario. Within seconds, the power that was flowing on the tripped line transferred to the other lines, causing them to become overloaded. Their protective relays, which are designed to protect the line if it became overloaded, tripped, isolating Adam Beck from all of Southern Ontario.
With no place else to go, the excess power from Beck then switched direction and headed east over the interconnected lines into New York State, overloading them as well and isolating the power generated in the Niagara region from the rest of the interconnected grid. The Beck and Moses generators, with no outlet for their power, were automatically shut down to prevent damage. Within five minutes the power distribution system in the northeast was in chaos as the effects of overloads and loss of generating capacity cascaded through the network, breaking it up into “islands”. Plant after plant experienced load imbalances and automatically shut down.
In that power failure and other subsequent ones, the problem was caused by a mechanism designed to protect the system: the interconnectedness of its parts. It may be stretching a metaphor almost to the breaking point, but the current financial crisis that began last fall reminds me a bit of those huge power failures.
How? The problems in the mortgage sector were bound up, bundled, derivatived (is that a word?), tranched, and seeded throughout the entire system. This was supposed to reduce the risk by spreading it around. But in the end it only guaranteed that the infection would affect even banks and institutions that were otherwise solvent. And the interconnectedness of the entire financial world guaranteed that the problem would not be kept to one country.
Starting with this comment in a previous thread about Madoff, a discussion ensued about whether the operation he ran that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme could be called a hedge fund.
Here are some definitions of “hedge fund.” It seems to me to be a fairly loose term, and that Madoff’s scheme (at least as presented to investors) would qualify.
Of course, in reality it seems to have been no sort of fund at all, but rather a pure Ponzi scheme—or, as this writer states, a virtual reality game—with some very nasty consequences in the real world.
In the last decade or two, his work had increasingly grappled with issues of aging and death, so perhaps his actual death should come as no surprise. But somehow it does—as it may have to him, if a passage from one of his early stories, “Pigeon Feathers, ” is any guide:
The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground. “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”
“Prolific” is a term often used to describe Updike. The man spewed forth words at an almost alarming clip, churning out approximately one book of fiction or short stories a year throughout his long literary life, not to mention a simultaneous outpouring of book reviews and other essays. It would be surprising if all of them were very good, and of course they’re not. But an astonishing number are.
Updike’s fictional oeuvre wasn’t really my cup of tea. The trials and adulterous liaisons of hard-drinking suburban men of the 1950s and 1960s, or the similar doings of former basketball stars in small-town Pennsylvania, aren’t my favored reading topics. But even though I’m not much of a novel-reader in general, I managed to voluntarily get through quite a sampler of Updike’s fictional output, mostly because of his amazing ability to write.
In this he reminds me of another (and less prolific) literary stylist of very different background and subject matter: Vladimir Nabokov. But where Updike celebrates the ordinary and accessible, Nabokov delves into the arcane and mysteriously complex. Where Updike is somewhat warm (although at times repellent), Nabokov is very cold (and at times repellent). But both are almost unsurpassed in their ability to string words together beautifully in what are often very long sentences that nevertheless retain their clarity of meaning.
These are virtuoso performances, meant to inspire awe. And they do. Updike also writes from a stance of awe (even religious awe; he was a very religious man) at the entire physical world and especially its amazing human denizens. And although he is often accused of being a misogynist because of the way he draws many of his female characters, I have always perceived a sort of grudging respect (and perhaps even awe) for women’s emotional depth and tenaciousness behind his portraits of a sex that always fascinated him.
My favorite works of Updike are his short stories and his personal essays. I happen to like the short story genre in general better than the novel, and in Updike’s case the shorter form focuses his mind and pen (or typewriter, or computer). Many of his short stories are far more openly autobiographical than his more wide-ranging novels; and this suits me, as well. I have always found truth stranger—and far more fascinating—than fiction, even if it is a shaped and slightly altered, more literary, truth.
You may laugh at the word “truth” in the context of fiction writing. But my sense of Updike is that in his writing he was almost ruthless with himself. The heroes fashioned in his image are often flawed men, bent on their own pleasure even at the expense of others, as they struggle with their competing desire to be decent and with their need to reconcile themselves with God. Nothing is simple; even Updike’s serially philandering husbands often experience a poignant and bitter regret when interacting with the divorced wives they left behind—and the regret is not only for the havoc they wreaked on the ex-spouse or the children, but that which they unwittingly inflicted on themselves.
One of my favorite Updike short stories is called “Guilt Gems.” It describes three incidents in the middle-aged male protagonist’s life that have left him with a terrible residue of guilt. These episodes are not what you might think; there is no sex involved, for instance. If I recall correctly (and forgive me if this in in error, because I am doing this from memory) they consist of the following: the narrator banishing the beloved family cat to the basement because he is allergic to it, and seeing the resultant stricken and angry look on his son’s face; the narrator allowing his elderly mother to drive home alone from the airport; and the narrator tagging out his daughter in a neighborhood baseball game.
The subject matter may sound trite, but in Updike’s hands it is not. Both in the descriptive and in the psychological sense, the writing is lusciously beautiful, as Updike’s writing nearly always is.
But perhaps my favorite Updike work is his “memoir,” entitled Self-Consciousness. Eschewing the conventional narrative trajectory of most autobiographies (as does Nabokov’s somewhat similar work, Speak, Memory), it deals with just a few aspects of Updike’s life.
Typically, two of them (his stuttering, his psoriasis) are previously hidden personal flaws that Updike chooses to expose and explore. If that sounds disgusting or vaguely Oprah-ish, Updike manages to avoid that trap. But best of all, the book contains the tour-de-force essay “On Being a Self Forever.” The subject is nothing less than individual human existence.
Now that Updike’s life is over, we will have no more yearly offerings from that singular voice. But the celebration of the ordinary by this extraordinary writer lives on.
[ADDENDUM: For other photos of Updike in varied stages of life, please see this.
The title of this post is a reference to the final book in Updike’s famous “Rabbit” series, entitled Rabbit at Rest, in which hero Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom dies.]
Bernie Madoff ran quite the little family business. Back in the happier, headier days of 2000, son Mark is quoted as saying:
All of his family members grew up with this being our lives. When it is a family operated business you don’t go home at night and shut everything off, so you take things home with you, which is how all of us grew up.
Madoff practiced nepotism to a degree I assume is somewhat unusual in the world of investment firms, employing not only sons Mark and Andrew, but a host of other relatives: brother Peter, niece Shana, nephews Charles and Roger (the role of wife Ruth in recent years remains unclear).
But Madoff insists that he, and he alone, knew of the fraudulent nature of his hedge fund operations. His sons, not surprisingly, agree.
Of course, Madoff is a liar. So why should we believe him on this one point? The answer is: we shouldn’t. But neither should we automatically assume that his sons absolutely had to be in the know.
I say this not through excess of naivete, although it may sound that way. No, I am fully aware that it is highly possible, not to mention likely, that the sons were cognizant of the Ponzi nature of the operations, and are part of the coverup.
But at the same time I think anyone who assumes Madoff himself could not have been clever enough, secretive enough, and criminal enough to defraud and fool even his own family is suffering from a different sort of naivete (see this).
So, if they weren’t part of the swindle, just what might the sons have been doing all day in their large but perhaps spartan offices (Madoff favored black, white, and gray as a color scheme, and reportedly was so obsessive-compulsive that he had no tolerance for a stray scrap of paper on the desks of employees)? Madoff carefully kept the brockerage arm of the firm—which the sons ran—separate from the fraudulent hedge fund operation. The former was apparently a bona fide business.
This, of course, does not mean the sons were not taken into his confidence. Perhaps the whole structure was carefully arranged merely to give the appearance of separation in order for the sons to exercise plausible deniability later on.
This past weekend’s Wall Street Journal has this to say of what is known so far about their role:
While neither son has been implicated by prosecutors, the sons interacted with some who worked in the Madoff investment operation. As executives at the firm, they met regularly with their father and other senior officials of the firm in closed-door discussions in the company’s offices, according to former employees. They both gave their father some of their own money to manage and occasionally chatted with a key lieutenant who now is a focus of probes into the alleged fraud, and they defended their father’s investment operation against critics.
These associations hardly constitute smoking guns, although they make it clear that opportunities abounded for the sons to learn about the scheme, if Madoff so desired, or if they smelled a rat. But did he, and/or did they?
Son Mark, who once had personal money invested in dad’s hedge fund, pulled it out for undisclosed reasons prior to a divorce in 2000—the strongest evidence, in my opinion, of his possible knowledge. But son Andrew remained heavily invested right up until the revelations of December.
So, what is the likelihood the sons knew? I can’t say; no one can except the parties themselves. But my gut tells me that Madoff senior is the sort of person who likes to feel superior to everybody around. Part of that supreme sort of narcissism and criminality is that it tends to take no one else into its confidence. I agree with those who believe that:
…good old Bernie Madoff might have stolen simply for the fun of it, exploiting every relationship in his life for decades while studiously manipulating financial regulators.
And note that “every relationship in his life,” if true, would include sons Andrew and Mark.
Madoff may have much preferred to walk alone. In fact, that may have been the whole point:
[NOTE: One fact that contradicts my “loner” theory is that someone must have been generating those imaginary reports of transactions for the hedge fund. Could it have been Madoff himself? I submit that, until other evidence surfaces, the answer is “yes.” The guy seems to have been obsessive-compulsive enough to have done so. Here’s how:
Madoff made his reputation on building complex financial systems, covering the full range of investment management””accounts, trades, taxes, clearinghouses, balances.
All he had to do was switch the input signal from real accounts to simulated accounts. And every programmer knows what happens then: GIGO””Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Call it the Madoff Virtual Reality Trading Simulation Game.]
Here’s more on that beautiful Grecian-inspired dress of Jackie Kennedy’s, the one I thought would have looked nice on Michelle at Obama’s inaugural ball.
A reader and friend kindly sent me the following photo of Jackie wearing the dress at a gala function:
And notice who was seated beside Jackie on that distant occasion: none other than poet Robert Frost! Thus it is that two of my posts on the Obama inauguration (see this) intersect.
I’m guessing that Frost must have enjoyed himself mightily that evening. And who was the regal-looking and lucky lady on JFK’s right? Pearl Buck, that’s who—the first woman Nobel laureate in literature, although recently she has fallen on harder times, critic-wise, than Frost (the Nobel eluded him to the end, despite four Pulitzers).
Here’s another view of the Kennedy dress on its original model, as well as Frost:
