Cold comfort

The New Neo Posted on by

I was away in New York for a few days and came back last night with a cold. So this morning I canceled a bunch of things I was supposed to do and just crawled back into bed, hunkering down. When I got up again, hours later, I felt a mite better.

A cold is a funny thing, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. If you’re not in poor health already, it’s a minor blip in your life. But still, for a few days or longer, you feel miserable. Sometimes I think that if you didn’t know it was a cold, if you didn’t know it was of no real import, you’d think you had some dreadful ailment and would be really worried.

On the other hand, colds vary. Some are a piece of cake, but some bring with them quite a bit of misery. The duration is unknown at the outset—is it going to lay you low just for a few days or will the cough and congested nose linger on…and on…and on?

Each person has a basic pattern, although there are variations on that theme. I tend to have long drawn-out colds, although zinc lozenges have helped modify that in recent years. But when I was younger a month of soreness and stuffiness and hacking away was not unusual for me. A friend of mine recently said that her colds last about two days. Two days! I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that short a duration.

Recently my son and his wife visited, and we were looking at a baby book of his that I’d kept when he was an infant and then a toddler, recording incidents funny and/or touching and/or frustrating. I came across something he’d said when he was about three years old: “It’s a little bit fun to be a little bit sick.” Hmmm. I think he might have been referring to the chicken soup, the hugs, and the unlimited TV.

Happy Mother’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of what has become my annual Mother’s Day post. It was written while my mother was still alive.]

Okay, who are these three dark beauties?

A hint: one of them is the very first picture you’ve ever seen on this blog of neo-neocon, sans apple. Not that you’d recognize me, of course. Even my own mother might not recognize me from this photo.

My own mother, you say? Of course she would. Ah, but she’s here too, looking a bit different than she does today—Mother’s Day—at ninety-eight years of age. Just a bit; maybe her own mother wouldn’t recognize her, either.

Her own mother? She’s the one who’s all dressed up, with longer hair than the rest of us.

The photo of my grandmother was taken in the 1880’s; the one of my mother in the teens of the twentieth century; and the one of me, of course, in the 1950s.

Heredity, ain’t it great? My mother and grandmother are both sitting for formal portraits at a professional photographer’s studio, but by the time I came around amateur snapshots were easy to take with a smallish Brownie camera. My mother is sitting on the knee of her own grandfather, my grandmother’s father, a dapper gentleman who was always very well-turned out. I’m next to my older brother, who’s reading a book to me but is cropped out of this photo. My grandmother sits alone in all her finery.

We all not only resemble each other greatly in our features and coloring, but in our solemnity. My mother’s and grandmother’s seriousness is probably explained by the strange and formal setting; mine is due to my concentration on the book, which was Peter Pan (my brother was only pretending to read it, since he couldn’t read yet, but I didn’t know that at the time). My mother’s resemblance to me is enhanced by our similar hairdos (or lack thereof), although hers was short because it hadn’t really grown in yet, and mine was short because she purposely kept it that way (easier to deal with).

My grandmother not only has the pretty ruffled dress and the long flowing locks, but if you look really closely you can see a tiny earring dangling from her earlobe. When I was young, she showed me her baby earrings; several miniature, delicate pairs. It astounded me that they’d actually pierced a baby’s ears (and that my grandmother had let the holes close up later on, and couldn’t wear pierced earrings any more), whereas I had to fight for the right to have mine done in my early teens.

I’m not sure what my mother’s wearing; some sort of baby smock. But I know what I have on: my brother’s hand-me-down pajamas, and I was none too happy about it, of that you can be sure.

So, a very happy Mother’s Day to you all! What would mothers be without babies…and mothers…and babies….and mothers….?

All that Fosse

The New Neo Posted on by

Another confession: I never much cared for Bob Fosse’s choreography, except for the very early stuff in “Kiss Me Kate” and “Damn Yankees.” And Gwen Verdon—that wonderful, wonderful dancer and impish spirit—was very much a part of my early admiration.

After Fosse really got famous and he became the dance king of Broadway, his later work not only didn’t interest me, it rather repelled me.

Static, full of posing, hyper-sexual without being sensual or romantic, it reached its tentacles further and further into show dance and popular dance and cancelled out the flow of it and what I consider the dance of it.

Here’s a review of two new books about Fosse that don’t paint a pretty picture. I’m a bit surprised, actually; I thought I was very much in the minority on this.

[NOTE: Go here for some wonderful early Fosse.]

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kanye West

The New Neo Posted on by

Ta-Nehisi Coates weighs in on the Kanye West Trumplove, as might be expected.

I’ve written about Coates before (see also this). In that first post I wrote:

The larger message [Coates received from his father’s treatment of him] was that he would always get beaten at someone’s hands, either parental hands or public official hands via the police, and that his father attributed his own violence towards his son as originating from and being intended to forestall that official violence. His father was claiming that the private violence the father doled out to son was administered to prevent the public violence, both at the hands of the police and by the son or daughter who might be wanting to act in a criminal manner out in the larger and very dangerous world.

I think that Coates is describing some sort of powerful emotional (and also physical) trap that he got caught in early on, as a child, and has never gotten out of. The way it goes is this: I am a small powerless boy, my father whips me, my father loves me, he says he whips me so the others won’t, therefore they are causing my father to hurt me, it is their fault not my father’s, the world is a dangerous and violent place, how can I ever be safe?

I often can’t wade through the thicket of Coates’ prose; his style of writing is highly admired by a lot of people but I’m not one of them. It’s self-consciously ornate and pretentiously over-written, at least to my way of thinking, and his content (in the pieces I’ve read, anyway) sounds a single note, the one I’ve described above.

Coates’ opinion of Kanye West is in line with that single note, although he introduces variations on the theme. He starts with Zinnish history and finishes with West as white.

Here’s the Zinn part:

…[W]hat happened to America in 2016 has long been happening in America, before there was an America, when the first Carib was bayoneted and the first African delivered up in chains. It is hard to express the depth of the emergency without bowing to the myth of past American unity, when in fact American unity has always been the unity of conquistadors and colonizers””unity premised on Indian killings, land grabs, noble internments, and the gallant General Lee…

Coates seems to have greatly admired West’s musical output, writing, “when I heard Kanye, I felt myself back in communion with something that I felt had been lost, a sense of ancestry in every sample, a sound that went back to the separated and unequal, that went back to the slave.”

Okay, I confess it now—I tried to read the rest of the Coates essay and I got bogged down before I finished. But the message of it is pretty much encapsulated here:

…West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom””a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next…

So Coates considers that West’s saying something laudatory about Trump (or not knowing every single relevant fact) makes West’s freedom of thought a suspect, “white” type of freedom, loaded with all the bad history Coates always seems to associate with whiteness.

As Andrew Sullivan says:

There was something about the reaction that just didn’t sit right with me, something too easy, too dismissive of an individual artist’s right to say whatever he wants, to be accountable to no one but himself. It had a smack of raw tribalism to it, of collective disciplining, of the group owning the individual, and exacting its revenge for difference. I find myself instinctually siding with the independent artist in these cases…

Or the individual anybody, I would add. Anybody—black or white or any other color, smart or dumb or eloquent or tongue-tied—has the right to think what he or she decides to think without anyone telling that person what color freedom is being demonstrated. What a deeply offensive thought, that freedom has a color.

Sullivan adds:

Coates reserves the worst adjective he can think of to describe West, the most othering and damning binary word he can muster: white. Just as a Puritan would suddenly exclaim that a heretic has been taken over by the Devil and must be expelled, so Coates denounces West for seeking something called “white freedom”…

Indeed.

Botanical cultural appropriation

The New Neo Posted on by

All hail the tree peony, as I did a few days ago in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s that time of year, and the Brooklyn garden has a huge display of these gorgeous plants, which feature enormous blossoms that look like velvet or crepe paper or silk.

Hmmm—velvet or crepe paper or silk, all of which seem to have originated in China. As does the tree peony.

The tree peony was originally a Chinese plant, cultivated there for beauty and medicinal purposes for about the last 1500 years. In the eighth century peonies traveled to Japan and became popular, then to England in 1787 and next the rest of Europe, arriving in the US in 1820. Is this isn’t cultural appropriation? Then so be it. It just points out how preposterous the concept is.

The tree peonies at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are not just lush and plentiful, but they also have a special history. They were sent from the Japanese town of Yatsuka-Cho in orde “to bring peace of mind to people in the United States” after the events of September 11, 2001. The first shipment ran into a longshoreman’s strike, and languished in containers on the docks at Long Beach, California for 6 weeks with predictable results: their demise. The next shipment made it, and those are the peonies growing in Brooklyn today.

Here are some of the photos I took:

The cop stop that wasn’t

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day while driving in a moderate-sized town, I glanced down to look at my cell phone GPS for a quick moment. Next thing I knew, I saw a police car in back of me turn on its blue light, and I pulled over to the right in response. The police car pulled over directly in back of me and very close to me.

I racked my brain to figure out what I had done wrong. Glancing down to look at a cell phone for a moment didn’t seem to be any kind of offense, and I wasn’t even sure the police officer could have seen me do it. My registration and stickers were all up to date, as well as my headlights and taillights.

So, trying to compose myself—I am always upset by any encounter with police and a possible ticket—I waited, license and registration at the ready.

And waited.

And waited.

The policeman stood just a few feet behind my car, talking to another officer. I knew better than to get out of my car to ask what was going on, but about fifteen minutes passed. Traffic kept going by, but we were the only two cars parked on the side of the road.

Then the policeman crossed the street (it wasn’t a wide boulevard either; just a regular old street) and went into a store. I was beginning to suspect that I was the McGuffin of this tale.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the policeman came out of the store. By this time 20 minutes had passed since I was pulled over—or thought I was pulled over. And at this point he got into his car and drove away, without ever having said a single word to me.

So here’s my question: what should I have done once I realized about halfway into the incident that I was probably not the target of the officer at all? I couldn’t figure out how to get away without risking his ire. I couldn’t even come up with a way to safely get his attention and ask a question about it.

And what should he have done? There didn’t seem to be any sort of big emergency happening. Shouldn’t he have figured out that I had pulled over because of him—it seemed rather obvious—and just waved me on?

More news on the blue wave front

The New Neo Posted on by

At least in the Senate, here’s more evidence it might be rough going for the Democrats:

Among more than 200 experts and veterans of Florida politics surveyed in the latest Tampa Bay Times Florida Insider Poll, nearly six in 10 this week said they expect Scott to unseat the three-term Democratic Senator. Just over two months ago, more than 57 percent of the Florida Insiders surveyed expected Nelson to win.

“I’m very worried about Sen. Nelson,” said a Democrat. “I think the Democrats need to reevaluate our candidate and Gwen Graham should jump to the Senate Race immediately.”

A Republican had a similar thought: “Bill Nelson’s best chance is a run for Governor. He should pivot now before Scott pastes his face to the floor. At least Nelson would win his party’s nomination. Better chance to win in the general than any other declared candidate in his party.”

“Rick Scott is focusing on Hispanics way before Nelson is…”

Then again, how can you believe the experts anyway, especially when they’ve reversed themselves that much in about two months?

The “Trump bump”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not referring to the possible effect of Trump’s presidency on the economy, which is the way the expression has sometimes been used. I’m using it more like a sort of speed bump in the narrative—that little obligatory hiccup in which the speaker on any given topic must pause to make a pejorative reference to Donald Trump before going on, in order to establish his or her bona fides as a good person.

Lawsuit: free speech in academia

The New Neo Posted on by

The University of Michigan has a comprehensive anti-free-speech policy.

Oh, the school doesn’t call it that. They say it’s:

…a disciplinary code that prohibits “harassment” and “bullying,” and increases the penalties if such actions are motivated by “bias.”…Michigan defines harassment as “unwanted negative attention perceived as intimidating, demeaning, or bothersome to an individual.”… Michigan has created a Bias Response Team that receives complaints of “bias” and “bias incidents” from offended students and is tasked with investigating and punishing those who commit offenses.

More than 150 reports of alleged “expressions of bias”””through posters, fliers, social media, whiteboards, verbal comments, classroom behavior, etc.””have been investigated by the university’s bias response team since April 2017. According to Michigan, “bias comes in many forms,” can be intentional or unintentional, and “can be a hurtful action based on who someone is as a person.” In the school’s words, “the most important indication of bias is your own feelings.” As a result, a student whose speech is seen by another student as hurtful to his or her feelings may receive a knock on the door from a team of school officials threatening to refer the student for discipline unless he or she submits to “restorative justice,” “individualized education,” or “unconscious bias training.”

Back when I was at school, if someone had told me this was the future for a place like the University of Michigan, I would have thought they were stark raving mad or describing the plot of some dystopian novel. But we here are.

Progress. Progressive progress.

The website I linked in this post is for a group called Speech First, which I just heard about for the first time today and which has filed a lawsuit challenging the University of Michigan’s speech code as a violation of the First Amendment, and asking “the court to declare that Michigan’s speech code is unconstitutional and to enjoin the bias response system.”

Good for them for fighting the pernicious effects of a policy that can’t help but have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, all in the name of protecting the feelings of students who profess to be grownups.

I went back to school in the early 1990s to get my graduate degree, and noticed these trends were already in place for faculty, although they had not yet taken root in codes that targeted the students themselves. I wrote this post about an experience I had back then that opened my eyes to the problem:

I discovered it when the young women in an undergraduate class I was required to take for my Master’s””a class which, being in the social sciences, consisted almost entirely of women””were virtually all in favor of a definition of actionable offensive speech that went something like this: “speech that offends any person in the subjective sense, rather than speech that is in fact objectively offensive.” In vain I stood up in front of the 100-or-so students, most of them around twenty years younger than I, to ask what the limits of this might be, to suggest that it was wrong to allow the most sensitive among us to dictate what was unacceptable, and to speak up for free speech in general. I was met with uncomprehending stares and impatient dismissal, a fossil in my own time.

I realized that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Not one person appeared to agree with me, or if they did they weren’t saying so publicly or privately.

I also remember saying something about the dangers of using a subjective measure of what was offensive speech. It all fell on deaf ears.

I wish the Speech First people well. Here is a description of the organization:

…[W]e’ve created a nationwide community to reassure students that they won’t fight these cases alone ”“ and that they’ll be supported every step of the way: on campus, in the media, and in court. We’re a membership association of students, parents, faculty, alumni, and concerned citizens from across the country who’ve had enough, and who want to fight back.

We believe that free and open discourse is an essential component of a comprehensive education. We are committed to restoring the freedom of speech on college campuses because we believe that by exposing students to different and challenging ideas, they will emerge stronger, smarter, and more resilient.

Speech First will protect students’ free speech rights on campus. Through advocacy, litigation, and other means, we will put colleges and universities on notice that shutting down unwanted speech will no longer be tolerated.

I’m glad to see a growing number of such organizations fighting the pernicious effect the left has had on freedom of speech on campus and elsewhere (see also this).

[NOTE: England is way ahead of us. And I don’t mean that in a good sense.]

I wouldn’t count my Senate chickens yet

The New Neo Posted on by

The GOP still might find a way to lose it all.

But it was always the case that the Democratic dreams of taking over the Senate in 2018 faced a possibly harsh reality, considering which seats were up for grabs.

Simply put, the map has never favored the Democrats in 2018. In the Senate, only a third of the seats are in contention in any one even-numbered year, unlike the House were everyone must be re-elected (or not) every two years. Big difference.

Foreign policy and naiveté

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m with Iowahawk, who said on Twitter (April 30), referring to some of Obama’s foreign policy aides such as Ben Rhodes, “I have a hard time believing a foreign policy brain trust made up of America’s top failed novelists and campaign van drivers could get things wrong.”

Anyone who read Ben Rhodes’ resume (as I did, in 2013) would not be the least bit surprised at how events have panned out for him and the policies he pushed.

But Rhodes would have been nothing without Obama, who not only chose him but shared his worldview. And as far I can see, the worldview of Obama hasn’t changed much since he was in college, a phenomenon I wrote about here. In it, I discussed an article he wrote for a student newspaper at Columbia—one of the few pieces of early writing we have from Obama, who kept a light paper trail—and how it combined ignorance, idealism, leftism, and arrogance. I’d say the same for Rhodes; Obama chose advisors who agreed with him (which of course is his prerogative).

Of course, one could say that Trump has no foreign policy experience either, and one would be right. This was one of the things that worried me so powerfully during the 2016 campaign. I still wonder about it. But he’s certainly chosen people to advise him who have plenty of experience in the arena, and what I’ve seen so far I mostly like.

What’s more, one thing you can say about Trump is that, although some of his behavior (and many of his Tweets) may seem and sound sophomoric and/or crass, his world-view on foreign policy is not. It’s cynical, hard-nosed, and it’s based on a ton of practical real-world experience in negotiating in a somewhat different but perhaps-related area, that of international business.

During the campaign and since, I’ve also been worried that Trump’s experience in the latter world would not transfer to the former world. But so far it appears that some of the negotiating skills are similar. And they’re a great deal more similar than writing novels and/or student articles are to negotiating foreign policy in the real world. A lot more similar.

I have no idea how the current approach towards Iran will work out. But I am firmly convinced that no one does. And the objections of Obama et al do not move me one iota. They have absolutely no credibility with me.