Lance Mannion

Mrs M takes a vacation

Mined from the notebooks, Monday, August 12, 2019. Posted Friday morning, August 30.

Mrs M taking a mini-vacation in her head while waiting for her root beer float to arrive at the A&W in Lake George Village, Monday, August 12. 2019.

For the first three or four months after her major operations at the beginning of May, 2018, Mrs M experienced extended moments of what I learned are called confabulations when her brain would “get loose”--as she called it---and she would have what I likened to waking dreams. She would think things that were happening in her head---usually a mixing up of real memories with false ones that created in her mind an alternate reality that she reacted to and talked about as if it was the real moment we were living through. She saw the confabulated reality better than what was right before our eyes. 

The physiologic explanation is that her thoughts were trying to work their way around the neurons and synapses broken by the surgeries and had to pass through some unrelated stations where they picked up some oddball passengers who insisted on trying to take the train to their own destinations on the way to where she needed to go in her head to construct her reality for herself. That’s how all our brains work. 

We don’t take in the actual word in front of us all at once. We take in bits and pieces of sensory data out of which we assemble a reasonable and close facsimile to what’s really out there. We miss a lot while we’re at it. That’s why our “reality” can differ to a great degree from someone standing right beside us. That’s the basis of the joke about the blind philosophers and the elephant. It’s why scientists repeat and repeat experiments and test each other’s results. Mrs M’s problem is that her poor injured brain has to work with lots of false and irrelevant data. The fascinating thing was that her confabulations were often more vivid, more interesting, and more fun than what was actually happening before my eyes. This was especially acute when she was in the rehab hospital because her brain was in the early stages of knitting itself back together and there were more broken synapses to navigate around and because the rehab hospital didn’t give either of us much interesting to look at or think about. Her daily life there was necessarily routine and boring. So for her own sanity’s sake, she took every opportunity to...escape. For instance, one day we were sitting on the hospital’s back patio, quietly enjoying the view of the Hudson River and the mountains beyond. Or I was anyway. Mrs M had been elsewhere.

“Well, that was a nice walk,” she suddenly announced.

“You went for a walk?” I asked with seemingly normal and mild curiosity, trying not to smile too broadly. By this point I’d learned not to be surprised by anything surprising she said and also not to challenge it. Trying to snap someone in her condition back to “reality” only adds to their confusion and upsets them. And it embarrasses them.

By the way, this also applies to dementia patients.

“Where did you go?”

“Canada,” she said, matter of factly, as if Canada was just down the block and a regular destination for a casual stroll. Of course she hadn’t been for a walk anywhere, let alone Canada. She couldn’t even if she tried. She still had to use a wheelchair to get around. Which she hated, so it’s no wonder she was taking walks in her head.

“Did you have a good time?” I asked, doing a good job of not laughing.

“Yes. I had a very good time.”

“What did you like best?”

“Oh, the views.”

The confabulations continued after she came home, but they became less and less divorced from reality, grew fewer and farther apart, and lasted for less and less time. She came home in mid-July and by the end of October the confabulations were more or less gone. She still has moments, usually when she wakes up in the morning, when she’s elsewhere and elsewhen. Her mother’s is her favorite place to wake up in. But often it will happen on car rides. She’ll know where we’re going but not when we are. The drive will be taking place years in the past, when the Mannion guys were still teenagers and Old Father Blonde and Pop Mannion are still alive and waiting for us to visit. But with very little prompting, she’ll think---or remember---her way back to the present, apparently unconcerned and unsurprised by her brain’s having gotten loose again. “That’s right,” she’ll say if she had to be nudged back on track, and continue the conversation as if she’d only gotten a minor fact wrong, like the date, which, when you think about it, is all she’d done. She’d checked her mental calendar and seen the date marked with a video clip instead of a written note. She has a digital diary and sometimes simply turns to the wrong page. What is more likely to occur along the lines of a confabulation is that she will get lost in her thoughts for a few minutes and in those few minutes she will review a lifetime’s worth of memories. This happened today [Monday, August 12, 2019] after Uncle Jim’s funeral.

The mass was held at Uncle Jim and Aunt Norma’s church, Our Lady of the Annunciation, in Glens Falls, which is about fifteen minutes south of Lake George. So when the mass was done and the services at the cemetery finished, we decided to head on up to Lake George Village for root beer floats at the A&W, one of our favorite places when we used to be able to get up to the Village more often. While we were waiting for the one overworked but cheerful waitress to take our order, Mrs M said, “Well, this a nice vacation?”

“You consider this a vacation?” I asked casually, not forgetting my lessons.

“Of course! Don’t you?”

It was just Ken and me at the picnic table with her---Oliver was under the weather so he’d stayed home---and we looked at each other with bemusement. Neither of us were sure we should remind her we’d just been to a funeral.

“Too bad it’s so short,” was all I could think to say.

“Oh, it’s lasted long enough,” she said cheerfully, sounding as if she was having a nice time but was content for the vacation to be over. It turned out that she had been on vacation in her head. She’d been remembering and reliving all our past visits to Lake George going back to when were still dating and telling herself all the stories I’ve told her about the Mannion family trips to my grandparents’ camp on the lake when we Mannion kids were kids, and she’d conflated the memories and the stories into one long and happy vacation that was winding up with one last trip out for ice cream. Her pleasure was so infectious that by the time our floats came I was on vacation too.

Filed under Diary of Her Recovery.

The problem of remembering just enough of yourself

Mined from the notebooks Saturday, June 1, 2019. Posted Thursday morning, June 6.

Probably shouldn’t have read this one, considering how Pop Mannion died terrified he was descending into dementia at a rate that he soon wouldn’t be able to take care of Mom Mannion who was descending into a dementia of her own. I knew it would likely break my heart, as if isn’t already breaking every day, Mom is in an assisted living complex that’s geared toward Alzheimer’s patients. Mom isn’t one of them. Her form of dementia is Lewy Body Dementia. It’s progressive but not in the same way as Alzheimer’s and not as swift. This means she has to watch people around her dwindle mentally and physically away as she retains her health---as healthy as an 87 year old with heart problems can be---and enough of her faculties to be aware of what’s happening to them. She hates it. But the subject is objectively fascinating even as it’s personally heart-breaking and it's Oliver Sacks doing the writing---it’s his last book---so I’ll read it. Here’s a sample. It’s from an essay called “Telling”, which is about the doctor’s dilemma when he has to tell patients they have an illness that will eventually and inexorably cause them to become lost to themselves The objectively fascinating subject of this excerpt is a dementia patient who’s retained enough memory of himself that he knows what work he used to do for a living and still takes pride in it even though he can’t remember who he was or where he worked. Objectively fascinating for the medical observer. Personally heartbreaking for the doctor, the patient, his caregivers, and anyone with a heart reading. The Dr. M of the first sentence is a former teacher and mentor of Sacks’ who wound up a patient in the hospital where he used to be the medical director with his one-time student as his doctor. At one period, Dr M remembered himself on and off and enough of himself to be surprised by the news of what was happening to him and understand the medical implications. Which meant that he was regularly horrified and thrown into despair:

Mr. Q. was another patient, less demented than Dr. M., who resided in a nursing home, run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, where I often worked. He had been employed for many years as the janitor at a boarding school and now found himself in a somewhat similar place: an institutional building with institutional furniture and a great many people coming and going, especially in the daytime, some in authority, and dressed accordingly, others under their guidance; there was also a strict curriculum, with fixed mealtimes and fixed times for getting up and for going to bed. So perhaps it was not entirely unexpected that Mr. Q. should imagine that he was still a janitor, still at a school (albeit a school that had undergone some puzzling changes). And if the pupils were elderly or sometimes bedridden, and the staff wore the white habits of a religious order, these were mere details—he never bothered with administrative matters.

He had his job: checking the windows and doors to make sure they were securely locked at night, inspecting the laundry and boiler rooms to make sure all was functioning smoothly. He would check the kitchen to make sure all the gas rings were turned off and no perishable food had been left unrefrigerated. The sisters who ran the home, though perceiving his confusion and delusion, respected and even reinforced the identity of this somewhat demented resident, who, they felt, might fall apart if it were taken away. So they assisted him in his janitorial role, giving him keys to certain closets and encouraging him to lock up at night before he retired. He wore a bunch of keys jangling at his waist—the insignia of his office, his official identity. And, though he slowly became more and more demented over the years, he seemed to be organized and held together in a remarkable way by his role, the varied tasks of checking, cleaning, and maintenance that he performed throughout the day. When Mr. Q. died, of a sudden heart attack, he did so without perhaps ever realizing that he had been anything but a janitor with a lifetime of loyal work behind him.

Should we have told Mr. Q. that he was no longer a janitor but a declining and demented patient in a nursing home? Should we have taken away his accustomed and well-rehearsed identity and replaced it with a “reality” that, though real to us, would have been meaningless to him? It seemed not only pointless but cruel to do so—and might well have hastened his decline.

---from “Telling”, collected in “Everything in Its Place: First Loves and Last Tales” by Oliver Sacks. Reprinted in the New Yorker under the title “How Much A Dementia Patient Needs to Know”, February 25, 2019.

Too soon

Posted Sunday morning, October 28, 2018.

Last night after the game, which went a mercifully short regulation 9 innings---I want the Red Sox to win, by the way, but they’re doing it too fast---I went looking for something to read in the ten two-foot high stacks of books I’ve been building, in the mood for anything that wasn’t political. I chose something medical. “Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery” a collection of essays by Henry Marsh, a British neurosurgeon, now retired, who’s one of those great doctor-writers like Oliver Sacks. I got as far as this…

I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing. With a pair of diathermy forceps I…

That’s the first sentence and a half of the first essay in the book. I stopped right there.

It’s too soon.

I think the only reason I was able to keep calm and carry on and tamp down any rising panic, terror, hysteria, and despair during Mrs M’s ordeal in the surgical hospital was that I avoided imagining the anatomic details of her five operations. When I let myself think about it, I focused on the theoretical and abstract and told myself I was getting lessons in neurological SCIENCE! as if it was all psychology and physiology with none of the mess of biology involved.

Mrs M, on the other hand, was fascinated by the MRI images of her brain.

Maybe I’ll try Marsh’s book again tonight. But I’m probably right and it’s still too soon.

I have a feeling it’s always going to be too soon.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Recommended Mannion re-runs:

Paul Theroux on Oliver Sacks and other doctor-writers: “Even his footnotes fascinate”.

From my hospital journal, here’s me, avoiding thinking about the biology by focusing on the physiology: “Mrs M sends her regards and sometimes grants her attention”.

Filed in Brain Storms.

We'll always have Paris

Posted Friday morning, August 31, 2018.

While she heals, Mrs M's brain sometimes takes her on unexpected but interesting journeys. For instance, this morning we moved to France...

Our new neighborhood. The move arranged by Mrs M’s “loose brain”: Cafe and street scene in Paris’ Latin Quarter. Photo by Jacques Lebar, courtesy of the Paris Tourist Office via Paris Attitude.

Mrs M's brain is loose again this morning. “My brain is loose” is Mrs M's expression for when her memory's playing tricks on her and causing her to confabulate. She calls her little lapses of memory “brain hiccups.” Confabulating is when her thoughts go off on their own and take her to places and times that don’t exactly match the place and time she’s actually in and her “reality becomes a mix of the dreams, memories, and the here and now. More or less, she has waking dreams. From what her therapists tell me, this happens when her thoughts try to get around a part of her brain that’s still healing and don’t always find the next most direct route to where they need to go. Today she woke up convinced we're at her mother's house down near Philly. This has been a regular morning confabulation. She can't explain why her mom's house looks exactly like our house or why and how all our possessions have come to visit with us. Mrs M is often aware when she 's confabulating and she can be teased out of it, although sometimes what happens she gets teased into a new confabulation. Like this morning. I asked her why we're always at her mother's. Why can't we wake up somewhere else once in a while?

She asked me where I'd like to be instead.

Cape Cod, I suggested. Boston. Paris.

Ok, she said.

So now we're in France.

Of Pop Mannion, Mrs M, spinach pasta, and the persistence of memory

Posted Saturday, August 11, 2018.

Members of the Wedding: Pop Mannion, his new beloved daughter-in-law, the brand-new Mrs M, some guy in a rented tux, and Mom Mannion. May 28, 1988.

Mrs M has been home from the hospital three weeks now, and in those three weeks she’s made excellent progress in her recovery. Physically. She’s been regaining her strength. Walking more and farther and standing longer. Her coordination’s improving. She’s still wobbly on her pins. Her balance isn’t what it needs to be. Her left arm and left leg are still showing signs of neglect and are much weaker than her right. She has to be reminded to use her left hand and her left foot doesn’t always want to hold her up, so she’s in constant danger of falling and one of us needs to be nearby to spot her when she’s up and about. But with Ken acting as her personal trainer, she’s been diligent about doing her exercises. She surprises her physical and occupational therapists with her progress with each visit. And her doctors are thrilled. The trouble now is she’s getting cocky and thinks she can do more than she can. One of the things she thinks she can do is drive. This is a point she returns to again and again.

“You can’t drive,” I tell her, refusing gently but firmly to give her the keys.

“Who says?”

“Me, for one.”

“What do you know?”

“The doctors.”

“Oh, them.”

“Your therapists. New York State. Pretty much the whole world. Nobody wants you driving yet. You’d be a menace to traffic.”

“I would not.”

“You still have trouble navigating around the house. You turn right when you want to go left trying to get from the kitchen to the living room. I let you take the car to the grocery store and the next thing I know I'm getting a call from the Oregon state police telling me to come get you.”

“You worry too much. Where are the keys?”

Mrs M’s determination to get in the car and go is somewhat unnerving, mainly because she’s sneaky and quick. One day Oliver caught her on her way out the door and had to haul her back in the house. But as scary as it can be, it’s also heartening. I take it as a sign her old independence of spirit and need to keep herself busy are reasserting themselves. It shows she’s getting better, although, as is characteristic, she’s impatient and in too much of a hurry. What’s truly disconcerting is where she wants to drive to and when.

One example: Evenings after dinner she announces she has to go into the office for a bit to finish up some work.

The office she’s referring to is the newspaper office where she hasn’t worked in five years.

Physically her progress has been steady. Cognitively she’s been improving in fits and starts as her brain works to knit itself back together, a slow, complex, and unpredictable process. Mainly she’s been experiencing what are called confabulations, a mixing up of real memories with false memories with what’s actually taking place with what she’s imagining taking place. To listen to her confabulate is like listening to someone describe a dream while dreaming, with the dream being very real to the dreamer. Sometimes it’s as if Mrs M is living in two and even three realities at once, this one, an alternative and largely imagined one, and a remembered one. For instance, routinely in the mornings since she’s been home she’s waked up in her parents’ house and had her coffee in their kitchen while recognizing our bedroom and our kitchen and wondering how we managed to bring all our kitchenware down with us when we came to visit.

Her thoughts have to take detours and they don’t always get on the same train and travel along the same tracks. And some of those trains are hauling cars loaded with false memories and jumbled memories, and the passengers are looking out the windows at imagined landscapes and towns, and the trains are stopping at imagined stations to take on more confabulations.

The trains can be redirected and all the cars coupled on the same track, and her thoughts arrive at their scheduled destinations. It just makes for an interesting journey. And there’s a psychological aspect as well as a neurological one, although the two are part and parcel. Her confabulations usually seem to have roots in what is really going on or represent wishful thinking. Mrs M is itching to get back to work as a newswoman so her mixed up brain is telling her she already is.

Mrs M is aware this is part of her condition and sometimes it amuses her and even makes her laugh at herself. She calls her confabulations and memory confusions “brain hiccups” and tells people “my brain is loose.” I’m not sure she isn’t making a pun there, describing how some screws still need tightening and how her thinking occasionally escapes her control and goes wandering on its own. Her surgeons and her neurologist assure us that this will clear up, it’s just going to take several months.

Her other major cognitive issue is with her short-term memory. It’s not that she’s experiencing short-term memory loss. It’s more like short-term memory misplacement. New information takes a while to get stored where she can get at it easily when she needs to recall it. It’s as if on her way to put them on their proper shelves in  her mental attic she gets tired of climbing the stairs and puts the memories in a side closet to be carried up later, then when she needs them she forgets to look in that closet. Usually a gentle reminder is all it takes for her to go look. Sometimes she has to be told. When she finds them, she seems to recognize them. She actually remembers. But sometimes a memory comes back to her as news and she’s surprised by it as if this is the first she’s heard of it.

Which brings me to the other morning, Wednesday, two days after Pop Mannion’s funeral.

When I went to help her get up and get dressed, Mrs M noticed I wasn’t my usual ebullient I’ve-been-up-since-four-a.m.-and-I’m-still-full-of-vim-and vigor-and-rarin’-to-go self.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“It’s a sad morning,” I said.

“What are you sad about?”

“My dad.”

She reached out and stroked my cheek. “He’ll get better,” she said soothingly. Back in the beginning of May, when she went into the hospital, we thought that he would. I almost didn’t have the heart to tell her.

“Kid,” I began. We really do call each other kid. “Kid, we went to the funeral, Monday.”

She looked stricken. Her lips and chin quivered and her eyes filled with tears. It all came back to her in a rush.

A moment like this has happened just about every day since Pop died. Mrs M and Pop were very close. I’ve only had to lose my father once. She’s lost her beloved father-in-law five or six times and will likely lose him a few more until the memories finally make it to their proper place in the attic.

I debated with myself over what order to tell this, whether I should put the sad part or the funny part first. Yep. There’s a funny part. Obviously, that was the sad part. So here’s the funny part.

Pop loved all four of his daughters-in-law and both his sons-in-law, but he and Mrs M had a special affinity. They could talk to each other about politics and current events, the news business, books, and sports with an enthusiasm and directness and sense of fun that was a delight to listen in on. There was a time, when I was in my late teens and early twenties, when Pop and Mom Mannion nearly despaired of me. The thing that convinced them I wasn’t the complete screw-up and ne’er-do-well I appeared to be was my bringing this ebullient, gregarious, big-hearted, smart, talented, and ambitious curly-headed blonde home and then getting her somehow to agree to marry me. Not only did Pop enjoy talking with her, he enjoyed that she fed him well. On one of her early visits to the Old Mannion Homestead, Mrs M---the Blonde as was---made dinner for the whole clan. She was just learning to be the great cook she is, but she already had a delicious specialty, a spinach and cheese pasta dish that Uncle Merlin can attest is addictive. Pop devoured it. But it wasn’t until his third or fourth helping that he asked.

“What is this?”

“Spinach pasta,” he was told.

Pop looked taken aback.

“It can’t be,” he said.

“Why not?” Mrs M wondered.

“I don’t like spinach,” Pop said matter of factly.

So that’s the funny part. And whenever Mrs M gets sad about Pop, I just have to say “spinach” and she brightens right up. She remembers. Truly remembers. Not just that he’s gone but how happy we all were when he was here and how happy the two of them were whenever they got together, although...

She’s taught herself many more recipes over the years and I’m not sure she ever served him spinach again.

Hospital Journal. Day 58: A study of Mrs M's reading habits

Mined from the notebooks, Saturday evening, June 30, 2018. Posted Friday afternoon, July 6.

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” Photo of pages from the New York Times featuring an article about Kanye West Mrs M seemed to think it was imperative for me to read. The question is, did she read it herself?

Mrs M has been demonstrating heroic levels of patience, resilience, determination, and fortitude over the course of her rehab and recovery. If you know Mrs M, you know the resilience, determination, and fortitude are her being her. The patience might come as a surprise.

There’s a lot I won’t ever know about Mrs M’s personal experience of her ordeal unless she remembers it all when she’s fully recovered and wants to talk about it, which she may not. Mrs M isn’t one to dwell on the past. Solve a problem or come to terms with it and move on, that’s her thinking. But I’m pretty sure that one of the most frustrating things for her has been the slow recovery of her ability to read. For a while there she simply couldn’t, physically. Her vision needed to come back into focus. Her neurons and synapses needed to reconnect and start re-firing in the ways that made it possible for her to comprehend words as words, to even see letters as letters. And Mrs M loves to read. Anything and everything. On top of that, her professional pride is at stake. One of the qualities that made her such a good newspaper editor was her ability to read.

Read fast and read smart.

Faster and smarter than many another editor.

If she’s lost that ability she can’t go back to the work she loves and has loved since she was in high school.

So it’s a big step in her recovery that she’s reading again. Her vision’s back to normal, when she remembers to wear her glasses. Those neurons and synapses seem to be doing their proper jobs again. Books are still too much for her. That seems to be a problem of manual dexterity. She’s still having trouble holding things in both hands. Her left hand and arm are still very weak and she seems to be avoiding using them, which might be due to continuing neglect. Early on in her rehab she did try to “read” books. She’d open them flat on the bed and with her right hand flip slowly through the pages, sometimes all the way to the end, sometimes pausing to “study” a page, then flip back, methodically, as if searching for a particular passage or the place where she’d left off the last time she “read” this book. She’d then repeat the process again and again until I’d gently take the book to read and try to get her focused on something else.

And often she couldn’t tell me what she’d “read.” It was as if she remembered how to read, remembered she liked to read, but didn’t remember to read.

When she could tell me, it was often in the most general terms, describing what could have been almost any book on the subject suggested to her by the title or by my questions. Other times, she described what sounded like a real and specific book but not this particular book. What she was doing, I've since learned, was confabulating. That’s the substitution for real memories with other real memories but ones that aren’t appropriate to the moment---for instance, Mrs M remembering her best friend Mary Pat visiting her at Westchester Med at the beginning of the month but remembering the visit as if Mary Pat came to see her here today---or with an entirely false memory that sounds like storytelling and fantasy---for instance, Mrs M remembering Mary Pat taking her on a day trip to West Point in her bright red “speedster” to see President Obama in his office there.

There also might have been some semantic paraphasia at work caused by her problems with initiation. She knew what she’d read but she couldn’t physically force herself to describe it in the words she wanted so she substituted something that sounded close to it.

She gave up trying to read books as she recovered more of her old self-awareness and with it became able to do more things deliberately rather than by reflex or on impulse. She began to learn her limits, and reading books was beyond her limits just because they are, like I said, simply too heavy for her to hold.

But she has been reading, actually reading, magazines and newspapers for a while now---like I said, a major step in her recovery. When she first started "reading" them again she was mostly scanning pages and taking in the pictures and a few words here and there. Sometimes she “read” holding the page upside down. Reading, truly seeing the words as words and comprehending the sentences and paragraphs and then whole articles as wholes is something she apparently had to retrain herself to do. But that doesn’t always mean she remembers having read them.

And why would she? She doesn't need to. When you think about it, there's very little imperative reason to remember anything you read in print or online. That’s not a swipe at the current state of political journalism and commentary. It’s just a fact of the transient and often merely diverting nature of all journalism. Most of it is just written to fill space between ads and keep you entertained enough to move on to the next article filling the space around more ads. Consequently, not only is there little imperative reason to remember one article or story or column or post after you finish it and move onto the next, there’s often very little imperative reason to remember a newspaper or magazine article or a blog post while you are reading it. So Mrs M doesn't, usually.

She actually takes a lot of it in and files it away. She just forgets that she did. Sometimes, it seems, when she tries to remember, she has trouble finding and pulling open the right mental cabinet drawer. It's then easier and less frustrating to re-read than go searching. The result is she often rereads things several times and calls my attention to them each time.

“The Millennial Socialists are coming,” she informed me this afternoon, reading the headline on Michelle Goldberg’s column in the New York Times.

“Are they coming like the cavalry or like the White Walkers?” I asked.

“Like the cavalry, I think,” she said, then went back to her reading. A minute later she said, “The Millennial Socialists are coming.”

“Are we supposed to be worried?” I asked this time.

“Yes,” she said with mock seriousness---Mrs M has not lost her sense of humor. “Very worried.”

“Well, fortunately we have a Millennial Socialist for a son. Maybe he can put in a good word for us.”

“Who’s that?”

“Oliver.”

“Oh. That’s right.”

“He can intercede for us.”

“This is true,” she said but this time she seemed serious. She nodded thoughtfully, then went back to her reading. Something riveted her attention and she wanted me to know about it.

“The Millennial Socialists are coming,” she said.

“Like the Redcoats?”

“Yes,” she said but with a smile. “Like the Redcoats.”

I tried to redirect her thoughts. “‘Listen, my children, and you shall hear…’”

“Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” she said, finishing the line.

That seemed to work. She moved on to another section of the paper where she found an article she wanted to share with me.

"Do you want to read about Kanye?"

“Not really,” I said.

“Ok,” she went back to her reading. But a minute later…

“Do you want to read about Kanye?”

“No, thanks. You know how I feel about Kanye.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, but I wasn’t sure she did. So I said, “Same as President Obama.”

“How is that?”

“He called him a jackass.”

“Oh, that’s right. He did.” She went back to her reading once again, and, once again, after a minute she asked, “Do you want to read about Kanye?”

Now here’s the thing.

It dawned on me later that Mrs M might not have been asking me if I wanted to read about Kanye. She might have been asking me if I wanted her to tell me what she’d just read about Kanye.

Or…

She might have been being a wiseguy. Again. I told you she hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” she asked a few minutes later as we packed up her wheelchair for a trip downstairs to the cafeteria.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I have to push the wheelchair.”

“This is true.”

We started out, Mrs M perusing the paper as we made our way down the hall.

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” she asked again when we reached the elevators.

“Maybe when we get to the cafeteria.”

“Ok.”

Into the elevator and down we went, and when we were set up at a table by the window in the cafeteria…

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” she asked. I couldn’t resist a suspicious glare. She met my eyes.

She was grinning.

Impishly.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Do you want to read about Kanye? Then follow the link to Into the Wild With Kanye West at the New York Times.

Also, the Millennial Socialists really are coming!

Hospital Journal. Day 23. May 25, 2018: Mrs M sends her regards and sometimes her attention

Friday, May 25, 2018.

If nothing else I’m getting a refresher course in elementary neurology.

Dr W stopped in to see Mrs M today. Dr W and Dr B are good explainers. They give you the details without too much jargon with the intent of helping you understand what they’re doing and why instead of intending to impress you with their knowledge and expertise. I am impressed by their knowledge and expertise. It’s a question though whether I understand. But today Dr W explained the concepts of “regard and attention” and “neglect,” and I think I followed.

“Regard” is when I say hello and you focus on me and let me know by word, expression, or gesture that you are aware I’m there and recognize I said something although not necessarily what. “Attention” is just what it sounds like. You continue to focus and let me know not just that you’re hearing me but that you’re following what I’m saying or at least trying to. When Dr W came into Mrs M’s room and greeted her, he didn’t see any sign of attention or even regard.

But then he came around to the right side of the bed to examine her, she gave him more than regard and attention. She waved hello and answered his questions with thumbs ups. Dr W thinks that her lack of regard and attention when he approached her bedside from the left was due to “neglect.”

“Neglect” is the brain’s reaction to an injury on one side of the brain. Surgeons don’t like the word but surgery is injurious. As you know, the right side of your brain operates the left side of your body, and the left side of your brain is the in charge of the right. If you’re injured on the right side, the brain tends to focus on that side in order to concentrate on healing that side and forgets, that is, neglects, the left side, leaving it to fend for itself, which, without the brain giving it orders, it tends not to do. You can show someone whose brain is neglecting her left side her left hand, ask her, Whose hand is this? And she’ll say I don’t know. That’s Mrs M. Her last two surgeries were on the right side and the resulting edema is causing her to “neglect” left side. Dr W tried the Whose hand is this question and Mrs M looked at her hand with obvious indifference.

This is all fascinating. Well, as I’ve noted before. It would be fascinating, if it wasn’t my wife who was the subject of fascination.

I'm deluded all these ways

Posted Tuesday night, August 8, 2017.

We all are, sometimes. But it seems I’m experiencing these moments constantly lately. But maybe that’s a delusion.

But delusion can produce bad moments. And I don't just mean moments that, in retrospect, are obviously delusional, like horrible nightmares. I also mean moments that you might not think of as delusional, such as lying awake at night with anxiety. Or feeling hopeless...for days on end. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward people, bursts that may actually feel good for a moment but slowly corrode your character. Or feeling bursts of hatred toward yourself. Or feeling greedy, feeling a compulsion to buy things or eat things or drink things well beyond the point where your well-being is served.

---Robert Wright. Why Buddhism is True.

We know a lot of things we don't actually know

Mined from the notebooks, Thursday, May 11, 2017.

Another very short essay.

I know you know this. But your confreres online don’t seem to know, and it’s up to me to set them straight. So you can relax. I’m not talking to you. I’m talking to them. Telling them things they ought to know but don’t. Things you and I know as a matter of course. But consider this.

We all know things we don’t actually know. That is, when the moment calls for it, knowledge we called on just the other day, deserts us. It just doesn’t figure in our thinking. Our feelings crowd it out. We feel rather than know, and what we feel is the way we’d like the argument to go or need it to go. We feel our own right-ness and righteousness. We know we are right because we feel we are right. That’s what it comes down to. We know we are right even if the facts are against us. And when that happens, we treat that “knowledge” as fact and continue arguing from there.

Mandated: Chapter Two. Problem is we don't know what we think we know

Thursday, March 16, 2017.

“Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Doctor” by Norman Rockwell, 1943. Via WikiArt.

This is the second part of what I expect will be a three-part series. Follow the link to read Part One, The Sorrows of Young Lance Mannion and the Republican Health Care Act.

Start with the given.

Just about everything Republican politicians say is in service to the Rich Corporatists who own them. Much of what they say is to disguise the fact that they are serving the Rich Corporatists who own them, from their voters and from themselves---they say a lot of things that are meant to assure themselves they’re good people for doing the People no good. And almost all the rest they say is to reassure their racist voters that they---the voters and the politicians---aren’t racist but even if they are it’s ok because those people are nothing but lazy bums and thieves except for the ones who are drug addicts, drug dealers, murderers, and rapists.

Thus the Republican health care plan which is basically a giant tax cut for the rich, a boondoggle for the worst of the insurance industry, and a means of punishing those people for having the temerity to be poor and get sick and need government help to stay alive.

But all of what they say is said out of the very human tendency to form opinions and hold beliefs based on the assumption that they know everything they need to know to form those opinions, that they’ve learned the hard truths about life from experience, and that their experience is typical. In short, their thinking like everybody else’s is based on ignorance, vanity, and narrow self-interest, all of it frosted over by the self-flattering, complacent certainty that we’re thoughtful, decent, intelligent, and rational people who see the world for what it is and call it the way it the way we see it.

Once we think something’s the case, it’s very hard to get us to unthink it.

Don’t bother us with evidence to the contrary. We have all the evidence we need. If we don’t, we find it in a glance. Inside our own heads or right there, right then, in front of our own eyes, which amounts to the same thing, considering our tendency to see things as we expect to see them and as we need to see them as we want to see them, our vision directed by our biases and prejudices, wishes and desires, informed by memories we edit in the very act of remembering---that is, by what’s already inside our heads.

We are our own first, favorite, and most reliable source for news and information about how the world works and what it all means.

“Look. There it is. That one story on CNN, the experience of a friend of a friend of a friend, what just happened at the grocery store, what I remember doing to get my life back on track when I was twenty and had just flunked out of school confirms I’m right. So get out of my face with your ‘facts’ and your ‘science’ and your ‘fake news’! I know what I know and that’s all I need to know!”

But of course we don’t know...or don’t know enough. And we don’t even know we don’t know so we certainly don’t know what we don’t know.

Our memory is suspect, our store of personal knowledge insufficient, our experience limited, our level of expertise probably nowhere near what it needs to be, our capacity for self-deception boundless, our own thinking mysterious, and our self-awareness laughable.

“Here, clearly,” Michael Lewis writes in The Undoing Project, his new book about a pair of psychologists who in the 1960s and 70s studied the way people assessed risk and reached decisions and came to what were at the time some surprising conclusions, chief among them that people don’t think rationally, “was another source of error: not just that people don’t know what they don’t know, but that they don’t bother to factor their ignorance into their judgments.”But what else do we have to go on?

Day in and day out, as we go about the business of keeping our lives relatively together and moving forward on an even keel, this works out ok. We do what seems best and hope for the best, asking ourselves, What’s the worst that can happen? While trying not to think about the worst that could happen.

But it’s a problem. It causes us to get in the way of our own thinking when we need to think the most practically and clear-headedly and to not even know we’re doing it.

The water heater’s shot. Do I need to buy a new one or can I just get this one fixed? What’s wrong with it? How do I know? Should I call in a plumber or will a handyman be able to handle it? Which one should I call? I can ask a friend, ask a neighbor, check with the owner of our local hardware store, he’s pretty knowledgeable about these things. Maybe I can just go online, watch a few videos on YouTube? Or just say the heck with it and head over to Lowes and let the sales rep talk me into whatever. But what’s the best way to pay for it? Can I pay for it? Can the sales rep be trusted? Is the plumber or the handyman the owner of the hardware store recommend reliable? Will he show up? When? Whose advice should I take? Which of my own internal arguments should I listen to? What should I do?

I have to do what seems best and hope for the best. What’s the worst that could happen? I go a few more days without hot water? I’m out a couple hundred more bucks than I would have been if I’d made another, smarter decision, whatever that might have been?

But suppose the situation’s more urgent, suppose someone’s immediate health and well-being are at stake, suppose the decision’s far more complicated and the consequences of a wrong decision far more severe? Suppose, say, Mrs M wakes up one morning two days before Christmas with a tightness in her chest and feeling it’s hard to breathe? She’s had a cold for a few days running, maybe it’s just that her cold has gotten into her chest. Or maybe it’s pneumonia? Or maybe it’s her heart! The doctor’s office opens in an hour. Should we wait and drive up there? Or should we go straight to the hospital? Is there time? Maybe it’s best to call 911 and get the paramedics here right away, let them decide.

Which is what we did.

The doctor at the ER diagnosed the flu.

Mrs M would have been fine if we’d waited a half hour and gone to our doctor’s. We did go to the doctor’s that afternoon. She’d had an appointment for a checkup already scheduled. Our doctor agreed with the doctor at the emergency room.

Here’s the thing.

That decision was easier for us than deciding how to deal with the hot water heater, because we had a key question already answered for us: how were we going to pay for it?  We weren’t. Not all of it, at any rate. Not even near all of it. Our insurance covered it---the ambulance, the ER, the tests they did there, the doctor’s fees, whatever they charged us for whatever incidentals hospitals routinely tack onto your bill that you didn’t even know existed to be charged for. The co-pays were nothing to sneeze at. (Ha! A little medical humor there. Just keeping things light. You’re welcome.) But the fact is we were lucky in having the insurance we have. We didn’t have to worry about whether or not it would cover the trip to the hospital. We didn’t have to decide on the spot which hosptial.  We didn’t have to make our own medical diagnosis that would have been influenced by our having to make a financial decision at the same time, which is what Republicans want more of us to have to do in order to keep down everybody’s medical costs in order to keep down their taxes.

You might remember that back in December a Republican Congressman from Michigan named Bill Huizenga boasted---seriously. He was boasting. He thought he was being a great dad!---about how he had let his son’s broken arm go unlooked at overnight in order to save himself the cost of a possibly unnecessary trip to the emergency room. Huizenga did some on the spot doctoring. He diagnosed a sprain, splintered his son’s arm himself, and sent him to bed to sleep it off. His son didn’t. And in the morning they went to the doctor. Yep. Broken. Other parents having made that same judgment call and finding out how wrong they were would be overcome with guilt. Not Huizenga. He insisted he did the right thing. What’s more, he insisted that that’s the way every family should handle decisions about their health care.

From Talking Points Memo:

"When it [comes to] those type of things, do you keep your child home from school and take him the next morning to the doctor because of a cold or a flu, versus take him into the emergency room? If you don't have a cost difference, you'll make different decisions," he said.

He offered the example to explain his view that health care consumers should shoulder more of the financial responsibilities, instead of the current health system, which he said "continue[s] to squeeze providers."

"We have to be responsible, or have a part of the responsibility for what's going on," he said, while advocating for health savings accounts, a common GOP proposal.

"Way too often, people pull out their insurance card and they say 'I don't know the difference or cost between an X-ray or an MRI or CT Scan.' I might make a little different decision if I did know [what] some of those costs were and those costs came back to me," he said.

Thoughts like that didn’t even cross our minds. They didn’t have to, because we were able to do what Huizenga thinks we ought not have been able to do, pull out our insurance card. What’s more, if we had had to think that way we wouldn’t have known what to think. I’ve had three MRIs on my back in the past four years, all leading up to my surgery. I have no idea what their actual cost was because our insurance covered it. No copay! And I’m lucky I didn’t have to worry about that because I would not have been able to make an informed decision about whether or not I really needed them. I left that to my surgeon. I left it up to him to decide whether or not I should have the surgery. I’d have been a fool not to have. What did I know about stenois of the spine except that it was painful and debilitating and was getting worse? I could---and did---do some research, in order to make a reasonably informed decision to leave the decision up to the guy who went to med school, but if I was capable of truly understanding my condition I’d have become a doctor myself.

But this is a basis of the Republican health care plan, that everybody’s smart enough to play doctor.

This is stupid enough when you’re making decisions affecting your own health.

But we’re expected to make decisions affecting everybody else’s by way of who we vote for to send to Congress to make decisions and pass laws about health care policy.

It’s fundamental to democracy that the People are presumed to be intelligent, informed, and rational. It’s a basic quality of human nature that they generally aren’t.

When you think about it, it’s crazy, leaving the governance of a nation of 300 million people spread out across a vast continent and out into the far reaches of the Pacific Ocean and living and working in a global economy up to individuals who don’t know what they don’t know but think they know all they need to know, who form opinions and make judgments based on what’s going on inside their own heads without understanding how it got there or even what all is in there and how it's influencing their thinking.

For decades, the divide between Democrats and Republicans has been increasing along this line: what to do about the fact that the world is growing more and more complicated and complex and therefore more and more beyond individual understanding. Democrats believe the way to deal with it is more education plus a greater reliance on facts and figures gathered and analyzed and put to use by experts. Republicans have generally responded by denying that the world is complex or complicated. It is what you think it is, which is what it always was. Not only can folks understand it just by looking out their own windows, as it were, hardly need to bother---they know pretty much all they need to know already. Not only do they not need experts to tell them what’s what, there really aren’t any such things as experts. What there are are bunches of overeducated elitists working toward their own self-interested ends and in the process telling the rest of us what’s in our best interest, as if we’re a bunch of idiots incapable of figuring that out for ourselves. Experts, in short, are con artists who take us all for fools.

So…Jason Chaffetz.

You thought I was going to say Donald Trump, didn’t you?

Nope. I’ll get to him. Right now, Jason Chaffetz.

End of Chapter Two.

"And the Academy Award for Best Performance as President of the United States goes to...": Donald Trump at the Oscars. Scene 3

Friday, March 10, 2017.

“There is no mercy in a country that turns its back on those most in need of protection…”: Massachusetts Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy III taking House Speaker Paul Ryan to task at a hearing before the House Committee on Energy & Commerce on the Republicans’ bill to repeal and sort of replace the ACA. Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

This is the third of four parts. Part one is here. Part two here.

I think of Joe Kennedy III as my Congressman. It’s irrational. It’s nostalgia at work. There’s a part of me that still lives in Boston. It’s only a little saner than the parts of me that live in Dickens’ London and Hemingway’s Paris. But at least I did once live and vote in Boston. Tip O’Neill was my Congressman back then. That was a long time ago. Kennedy was born the first year I was in town. The districts have been redrawn since then. I can’t tell for sure from the map but I think at least one of the apartments I lived in is in his district. It at least includes the old neighborhood of the church where his grandfather and great-uncle Jack were baptized and, when I went to church, and I went to church back then, not regularly, but more often than you might think---I was dating a good Catholic girl at the time---that was my church. St Aidan’s. Bobby and Jack’s pictures hung on the wall behind the baptismal font. It’s gone now. Mostly. Swallowed up in a condominium complex. If you want an idea of how that came about, see the movie Spotlight. The Boston Archdiocese had some legal bills to pay. But it’s still standing there in my memory as the church it was. Mass is still being said. I’m still dating that girl. I still get to Fenway on Saturday afternoons in summer and pay $3.50 to sit in the right field bleachers and cheer on Dewey Evans and Wade Boggs and Jim Rice---I told you it was a long time ago. I still work in the bookstore downtown and walk across the Common every morning to get there with my coffee mug steaming. If home is where the heart is, Boston’s home. So, ridiculous as it is, I claim Joe Kennedy as my Congressman and the other night he made me and all his constituents, actual and imaginative, proud with his stirring rebuke of Paul Ryan for calling killing the ACA along with a lot of people who are going to lose their insurance a “mercy.”

"I was struck last night by a comment that I heard made by Speaker Ryan, where he called this repeal bill 'an act of mercy.' With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different Scripture…The one I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and to comfort the sick. It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful, but by how we care for the least among us. There is no mercy in a system that makes health care a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns their back on those most in need of protection: the elderly, the poor, the sick, and the suffering. There is no mercy in a cold shoulder to the mentally ill. This is not an act of mercy. It is an act of malice."

My heart leapt as I watched. There was no hope Ryan would feel the sting. A man with no heart can’t have a change of heart. But it was good to hear the words spoken. Particularly satisfying to hear that last word applied. But I knew as I was watching that I was as much moved by who was speaking as by what he was saying. The Kennedy name still lights a fire in me.

I mentioned in the second post of this series how the whole time I was growing up and for more than a decade into my adulthood Democrats around me were hoping for the second coming of JFK. I was one of them. At some level I still am. For a second the other day I thought I saw him.

The truth is I don’t know how proud I’d be to claim this Kennedy as my Congressman if he really was my Congressman. My sense is that he’s doing a good job and he’s a real up and comer. But I don’t read the Boston papers except to follow the Celtics and the Red Sox and I suspect my sense that he’s the real deal is more a matter of my hoping that he is.

The Kennedy name is no guarantee of political skill or success or even of being on the right side of an issue. Joe Kennedy III’s father Joseph Kennedy II was a pretty good Congressman during the twelve years he served in the House but I don’t recall he did anything to greatly distinguish himself. His uncle, Robert Kennedy Jr, is distinguishing himself as an anti-vaxxer kook these days. His aunt Kathleen Kennedy Townsend did all right by herself as lieutenant governor of Maryland, as far as I know, but that’s as far she went. His cousin Patrick, his uncle Ted’s son, had something of a mixed career; whatever potential he had he self-sabotaged thanks to his various addictions to alcohol and drugs. Ted’s other son, Ted Kennedy Jr, is just getting started as a member of the Connecticut State Senate but he’s something of a late bloomer at fifty-five. Given how many of them there are, there are probably plenty more members of the extended clan involved in politics in one way or another. But right now Joe III is the only one making a national reputation for himself and I can’t help hoping he’s the one and so, for a moment---one, brief shining moment---that’s who I saw him as.

Saw being the operative word.

I wasn’t just carried away by what I heard. It was also what I saw. His words were persuasive but his looks gave them force. The family resemblance is strong. Briefly I saw the three of them. His grandfather and his great-uncles. Robert, Ted, and Jack.

I caught myself.

I caught myself in the middle of telling myself a story about this Kennedy that was really about those Kennedys.

It was a story I wanted to hear. Needed to hear. And it wasn’t based on the facts of the moment but on memories and nostalgia, strongly Influenced by my having recently seen Jackie and the biography of Bobby I’m currently reading.

This is something we all do all the time. We make up stories based on what we already know or think we know and tell ourselves those stories while we are supposedly paying attention to what’s happening before our eyes.

The question then becomes what are we really paying attention to---what are we really seeing as opposed to what we think we’re seeing? The answer is a lot of things going on inside our own heads, much of which we’re not conscious of even as we’re “seeing” it. Unless we work hard not to, in most situations, what we’re paying closest attention to is ourselves.

It’s high near impossible to leave ourselves out of our thinking. It’s our fundamental bias. We tend to take our own word for things, usually without knowing that’s what we’re doing, which is why we don’t take it into account when forming impressions and making judgments. We tell ourselves stories and believe them completely to the point that the story is more real than reality and no contradicting stories will shake us out of our belief.

This explains why Trump’s voters are having such a hard time admitting they made a mistake in voting for the lunatic. They’re still telling themselves the same stories that allowed them to vote for him in the first place, the stories in which he appeared as “Donald Trump” the tough-minded, common-sensical boss America needs to make itself great again and not as Donald Trump the raving, racist egomaniac who doesn’t know how to do anything but hurt people and break things. And make money while he’s at it.

I think it also explains why so many members of the political media who should have known better---who did know better---didn’t see that raving, racist egomaniac doing his damnedest to pretend he wasn’t that racist, raving egomaniac in his address to Congress last week.

As I said in Scene 2, they saw what they wanted to see for the sake of the story they wanted to tell, Trump turning around his Presidency with one great “Presidential” speech. But they saw something else, and it was that something else that enabled them to see what they wanted to see for the sake of that story. They saw what they were used to seeing under the circumstances whenever a big commanding figure appears in the well of the House of Representatives before an assemblage of Senators and Congressmen and Congresswomen and other high government officials, flanked by the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House, against the backdrop of the American flag.

They saw the President of the United States.

Who they forgot for the moment was Donald Trump.

Fade out on Scene 3. Follow the link to Scene 4.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Here's my review of Jackie: Mrs Kennedy against Death.

This is the biography of RFK I'm reading, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye. It's available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon. Please help this blog keep chugging along. Buy books!

________________________________________________________________________________________

Try to see him and not them.

"And the Academy Award for Best Performance as President of the United States goes to...": Donald Trump at the Oscars. Scene 2.

Tuesday morning, March 7, 2017.

More on how what happened at the Oscars explains the media’s fawning over Trump’s address to Congress: People are looking for a hero-president, and that includes the political press corps

George Washington at the Constitutional Convention, 1787.

This is the second of three parts. Part one is here.

If you were paying attention to the glowing overnight reviews of Our Mr President Trump’s speech to Congress last week, you might have thought it amazing that a seventy-year old egomaniac who's never been anything but a liar, cheat, and conman since he left college and never shown he has the the character to change his ways or the least inclination to do so, had apparently turned into George Washington right before a skeptical media’s collective eyes!

I think it starts with Donald Trump firing Gary Busey.

Trump’s main advantage in the Republican primaries was his celebrity. That gave him more than name-recognition. It gave him a persona voters were familiar with and were predisposed to like. He was a known character. Literally. He was known for playing a character on TV named “Donald Trump”.

“Donald Trump” was as much a fictional character as Don Draper and Annalise Keating. The Apprentice and Celebrity Apprentice were as real as Mad Men and How to Get Away With Murder. But NBC did a great job of selling those shows as being as real as the news.Asking the real Donald Trump to run a business is like asking Jon Hamm to design your ad campaign or Viola Davis to solve a homicide, with the difference that Hamm and Davis would bring intelligence and competence to the job. Anyone who’d followed the business news and the gossip coming out of New York City in the 80s and 90s knew the real Donald Trump as an irresponsible, dishonest, and incompetent hustler who didn’t care how he made his money or who got hurt in the making of it. Fans of Howard Stern knew him as a shameless self-promoter and boaster with appalling views on women and sex and at least several screws loose. Anyone who knew about the Central Park Five knew him as a racist with an inclination to make himself the leader of a lynch mob and the ambition to get into politics as the leader of racist mobs. But that Donald Trump didn’t become a figure in the national popular imagination. Possibly because he didn’t have a good catch phrase.

The character he played on The Apprentice did. And people bought the character of “Donald Trump” as being the same as the real person named Donald Trump. They looked at “Donald Trump” and thought they were seeing Donald Trump and then assumed Donald Trump was what he appeared to be on TV: the tough, no nonsense, common-sensical boss, the man who knows how to get things done, and gets them done. They see a smart guy, smarter than all the so-called experts. They know he’s smart because he’s rich. The experts aren’t rich, not as rich as “Donald Trump”, at any rate, so they can’t be as smart. The ones who are rich? They got that way by cheating. The system’s rigged in their favor. “Donald Trump” knows how to handle that. He knows how to beat them at their own rigged game. Another sign of how smart he is and that he knows how to get things done.

And it was “Donald Trump” who ran for President or, at any rate, that’s the guy many people saw running for President.

Voters looked at him and saw that character and they said to themselves, “That’s my president!”

Never mind the White Working Class, whoever they are. The vast majority of people who voted for Trump were simply Republicans voting Republican. And they saw this guy “Donald Trump” as another Republican, someone who would cut their taxes, keep those people in line, and take a hard line against our enemies foreign and domestic while not seriously threatening that part of liberal government that serves them and their interests. They did not see---chose not to see---the racist bully. They did not see the white nationalist and the would-be dictator. They didn’t see him as a would-be dictator because they don’t see themselves as being undemocratic and un-American and only people who aren’t democratic and aren’t good Americans want dictators. They didn’t see him as racist because they don’t see their own racism as racism. It’s simply common sense. That’s the way the world is. Those people are dangerous. They look at themselves and do not expect to see a racist so they don’t expect to see themselves voting for a racist.

Oh sure, they want a president who’s tough. A president who’s strong. A president who’ll take action when action’s needed. The want a president who’ll be a hero. Republicans want to see a hero-president. So do Democrats. All during my childhood and on up to the election of Bill Clinton I heard Democrats wishing for the second coming of John Kennedy. They judged every politician by how close he or she came to being an avatar of the JFK of their imaginations . When Barack Obama became president, suddenly we were all looking for the second coming of FDR. And one of the reasons some Democrats couldn’t get excited about Hillary Clinton is that they wanted Barack Obama all over again. And don’t get me started about the basis of Bernie’s appeal in many of his voters’ eyes. But Republicans are more desperate for a hero-president because they see themselves in more desperate need of rescuing.

“Make America Great Again” means many things but all of them add up to “SAVE US, DONALD TRUMP! FOR GOD’S SAKE, SAVE US!”

To be sure, a good part of Trump’s base see the racist, see the white nationalist, see the would-be dictator and they like what they see. But most of them see what I said, “Donald Trump”, taking charge, being tough, brooking no nonsense, getting things done.

During the Republican primaries, a good many members of the political press corps saw that character too. It also happened that they didn’t see the other Republican candidates for what they were because for the past twenty years they haven’t been able to bring themselves to see the Republicans in general for what they are. They still think the GOP’s the party of politically moderate, economically sensible grown-ups. Howard Baker’s party if not Ike’s. The were trying to see all the Republican candidates as fitting into that long gone tradition---if it ever truly existed as a tradition and not the occasional cropping up of decent-minded contrarians and eccentrics. This caused them to see Donald Trump as the outsider, the challenger to that tradition, which weirdly caused them to see him as being more liberal than the rest of them at the same time they saw him as more Right Wing. Unable to reconcile the seeming contradiction---they used the word “Populist” but apparently didn’t know what it means---they decided to see him in the most simplistic way as the challenger of the Establishment, an upsetter of the status quo, the “bull in the china shop” Trump voters said the country needed. Looked at him this way, his bumptiousness mattered more than his racism, lying, fearmongering, and nihilism. They couldn’t see he was no different from the others except in being louder, hammier, and more brazen, shameless, and irresponsible. They just saw him as more fun to cover.

A good part of the political press corps is looking for a hero-president too. As a group, they have been since Jimmy Carter failed to be one in their doyens’ and sachems’ eyes and continues to fail in their generational memories. They expect that hero-president to be a Republican. Republicans are tough and manly. Democrats are soft and squishy, like they fear they are themselves.

So the last few months have been hard on many of them. They keep looking for “Donald Trump” and he keeps behaving like Donald Trump. They keep hoping to see a hero-president. He keeps acting like the villain he is. They keep telling themselves that any day now he’ll settle down, see the light, listen to reasonable Republicans like John McCain and Lindsay Graham, and “reset.” He’ll start his presidency over, this time with himself acting like a normal Republican president. And then he tweets.

They finally thought they saw that happening Tuesday night, Donald Trump turning into the Republican President older members of the press corps have been longing to see since Reagan and many of the younger members have been told to be on the lookout for by the wise old men and women they need to flatter and impress in order to promote their careers

Political journalists have a bad habit of telling themselves the story before they report it. It’s an occupational hazard. They’re on deadline. Saves time if half the story or more is already written in their heads before they sit down at their keyboards and face the cameras. They make it worse though by analyzing the story ahead of time, what-ifing their way through what are essentially advertisements for their later analyses. Then they’re committed to proving themselves to have been right, to have gotten the story before there was a story. Which commits them to seeing what they need to see to in order to think themselves savvy and smart.

And they want a good story.

“Trump says same old awful and appalling stuff but in a boring and stilted way” isn’t the kind of news that excites the masses.

They were looking for an excuse to write a positive story about Trump.

Didn’t matter his corrupt and incompetent and designedly destructive cabinet was falling into place. Didn’t matter Steve Bannon still had his job. Didn’t matter General Flynn no longer had his. Didn’t matter that it wasn’t even a week ago that Trump had made discriminating against trans people legal. Didn’t matter that his plans for the next day included ordering a rephrased version of his Muslim ban only you can’t call it a Muslim ban even if that’s what he’s called it. Didn’t matter that only the day before he’d given permission to industries to poison the water as much as they like. Didn’t matter the mass deportations had already begun.

It didn’t matter that only a few days before Trump had ranted and raved and riled up the mob at the Conservative Political Action Conference. It didn’t matter that reporters knew his handlers weren’t going to let him repeat that performance in front of a world-wide TV audience, that if they could they’d have a staffer up in the gallery with a dart gun at the ready in case he went off on another characteristic tirade or tangent or had him hypnotised like a smoker trying to quit with Mike Pence all set to lean over and whisper the trigger word---”Rosebud”---if he started in on his “historic” election victory or the millions of “illegals” who voted for Hillary. It didn’t matter, in other words, that they knew the speech was being carefully staged. The staging was the story. Would it do the trick? And the trick was would be making Trump popular?

And that was the story they were determined to report. All that terrible news coming out of the White House wasn’t adding up to the story of a destructive and incompetent president who’d lost what little control he’d ever had over his own staff and agenda and himself. It added up to a story about a President who was unpopular and needed to do something to reverse the decline in his approval ratings.

What mattered, it turned out, was his miserable poll numbers and not what was causing those miserable poll numbers. Would he turn it all around with his speech? Would he be able in one hour to make the American people forget the last four months and see him as having started his Presidency all over new?

You know, would he be able to do in this speech what he should have done in his Inaugural Address?

And, lo and behold, he did!

Or was judged to have.

And he did it by finally acting “Presidential”.

As if all that’s been the trouble since he was elected has been a matter of comportment. He hadn’t been acting like a President. A change of tie, a change of tone, an hour or two’s practice with a teleprompter and, voila! Instant Presidentialosity. It doesn’t matter what you do while presidenting or, it seemed, what you say, it’s how Presidentially you do it and say it.

That’s where they got themselves in trouble. They saw the speech. They didn’t hear it.

End of Scene Two. Follow the link to Scene 3.

"And the Academy Award for Best Performance as a President of the United States goes to...": Donald Trump at the Oscars. Scene 1.

Sunday morning, March 5, 2017.

How what happened at the Oscars explains the media’s fawning reaction to Trump’s address to Congress: People see what they expect to see.

La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz un-awards his movie the Best Picture Oscar to give it to the rightful winner, Moonlight, while a befuddled Warren Beatty, still holding the wrong envelope, tries to figure out what the hell happened.

Was easy enough to figure out what happened at the end of the Oscars last Sunday night. Somehow Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope. How that happened is for the folks at the Academy and Price-Waterhouse to figure out and deal with. But however it happened and whoever made the mistake, Beatty knew right away what he had in his hand wasn’t what he expected to have in his hand, the card with the name of the winner of Best Picture. What he didn’t seem to know is what to do about it.

The obvious thing would have been to call someone over from the wings and ask them to get him the right envelope or go over and get it himself. He didn’t do that. He turned to Faye Dunaway for help. Which makes sense. She was standing right there. That’s who any of us would turn to in a similar situation, the person right there next to us, and if you think about it, life is full of similar situations.

Forget that it happened at the Oscars and on national TV. Imagine that Beatty and Dunaway were a couple of junior high school teachers monitoring a spelling bee and Mr Beatty realized he had in hand as the next word to spell the word that had just been spelled. He’d turn immediately to Ms. D, wondering what to do next. Beatty turned to Dunaway reflexively and she reflexively thought...not that he had the wrong card because when has that ever happened? She did not think the unexpected had occurred. She thought that he wanted her to read the winner either because he was being gracious, which is routine at the Oscars, one presenter handing over the big moment to the other, or she thought he was having trouble reading the card. He’s about to turn eighty years old. Maybe his eyes aren’t so good and she knows that. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. Maybe she thought he was having a senior moment. Maybe she knows he has those. Or maybe she knows enough old people she expects people to have them. Maybe she’s had a few herself lately. She is seventy-six now. What she expected is a big part of what happened up there. The question is why didn’t she see it was the wrong card? Why didn’t she see Emma Stone’s name at the top? It was in larger print. And the reason is probably that Emma Stone’s name is not what she was expecting to see.

She was expecting to see the title of a movie.

That’s all she was looking for.

And there was one on the card and she saw it and she read it and that was that.

Happens to all of us all the time. We see what we’re expecting to see. And we don’t see what we don’t expect to see. More to the point, we ignore things we do see because they’re not what we expect to see.

Kevin Drum suggests there was something more to it. Dunaway wasn’t just expecting to see the title of a movie. She was expecting to see the title of a particular movie. La La Land was the betting favorite. Everybody expected it would win Best Picture. Lots of people were rooting for it.  Maybe Dunaway was one of them. Perhaps she saw only the words spelling out La La Land because those were the words she was not only expecting to see, they were the words she wanted to see.

Our expectations are shaped by more than the practical considerations of the moment. We see what we want to see, what we hope to see, what we need to see.

We see what we think we should see.

This is has a profound effect. We will un-see something because it isn’t what we’ve been told we should see. We will tell people we see what they’re seeing to save ourselves from the embarrassment of wrong in trusting the evidence of our own eyes. We will tell ourselves we saw something we didn’t see. We will think we made the mistake before we will think everybody else has.

Television, popular culture in general, what we’re taught in school, what our friends and family and co-workers tell us they’ve seen combine to tell us what we should see. And it usually turns out we’re good at seeing what we “should” see. We have better than 20-20 vision when it comes to that.

Our own memories will argue against us and tell us we should be seeing what we’re used to seeing or have seen. We’re naturally in the habit of comparing new experiences to past experiences in order to make sense of them and we tend to see the resemblances, even if they’re few and vague, and overlook the differences even when they’re significant and glaring.

We’re also pretty good at not seeing what we don’t want to see.

Which brings me to Donald Trump.

Of course it does.

What doesn’t these days?

The point here is what do people see when they look at Donald Trump?

By people I mean the people who voted for him and say they would vote for him again.

The easy answer is something I’ve been saying all along. They don’t see Donald Trump.

They see what they want to see. They see what they need to see. They see what they’re expecting to see based on what they’ve been seeing on television for the past ten years.

They see “Donald Trump.”

Fade out on Scene I. Fade in on Scene 2.

Can we just call the narcissistic bastard what he is?

Posted Friday morning, February 17, 2017.

Donald Trump’s trouble isn’t that he has a personality disorder. It’s that he’s a rotten human being.

Our Mr President Trump holding what John Cassidy of the New Yorker an “alternative reality press conference,” Thursday, February 16, 2017. Photo by Andrew Harnik, courtesy of AP, via the New Yorker.

Naturally, I'm an enthusiastic proponent of social media but I’m not an uncritical one. There are things I dislike about the online life and things I absolutely hate, and one of the is how it encourages bad writing.

Sloppy writing.

Sloppy writing and sloppy thinking.

Not just encourages. Teaches.

We tend to mimic the speech we spend our time with or, to put in another way, we talk like our friends. This is true for our offline lives as well as our online ones. It’s how a 17 year old uptalker complaining about how her teachers are, like? so unfair? becomes a 37 year old oncologist reassuring a patient and laying out plans for treatment.

In our twittering, facebooking, commenting, snapchatting calls gabfests, we infect each other’s vocabularies with stock phrases, catchphrases, slogans, fad words, cant words, cheap slang, pseudo-jargon, and instant cliches that we then use reflexively as if they're actual words with clearly defined and  universally shared meanings and connotations. What they are at best are sounds that match the users' feelings at the moment. Often they're signifiers of the users' political or cultural or social associations, a way of informing readers I'm one of the in crowd, verbal equivalents of lapel pins, club ties, and secret handshakes. Usually they mean only what the user wants them to mean. As many of you know, one of my least favorite of these types of words---that is I don't like it and I don't like anybody who does---is neoliberal.

As far as I've seen, it's just a highfalutin insult leftist idealogues use to assert their moral and intellectual superiority to any actual liberals (as opposed to the neo- kind) who disagree with them. Try to call them on this, and they have a canned definition at the ready. that sounds almost genuine, until you unpack it and realize it means “anybody who doesn’t agree with my political and economic views is no better than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher,” and given that they know how liberals feel about Reagan and Thatcher, it’s as good as saying, “You’re corrupt, evil, dumb, or all three. Take your pick.”

The only response to this is, “Same to you, fella”, at which point rational debate fails.

That’s one. Another is “pathological narcissist”.

What does that mean?

What are you saying when you call Our Mr President Donald Trump a pathological narcissist?
“I mean, Lance, he's a lying, cheating, thieving, racist, egomaniacal son of a bitch who’s in it for the money and cares only about himself.”
Oh, well, why didn't you say so?

Why do we need a special word or phrase to describe Donald Trump? We don’t need one to describe Richard Nixon. Nixon is a pejorative. His name connotes everything ugly, mean, despicable, and contemptible about him. The same’s increasingly true for Trump. His name is becoming the most succinct way to sum up his bad character and bad behavior. To say his name is to exhaust the thesaurus of synonyms for louse.

“Pathological narcissist” isn’t one of them. It’s a clinical term that shouldn’t be tossed around lightly by professionals let alone people whose understanding of what it means is based on a vaguely remembered article from Psychology Today. And as such it’s only halfway useful if you’re talking with someone who read the same article and shares your opinion that Trump somehow meets on the criteria for the diagnosis. Really, it’s just an expression of your mutual agreement that you don’t like Donald Trump and don’t like anybody who does. That aside, though, it’s not useful for purposes of debate or enlisting allies in opposing him and his policies because it doesn't describe him. It categorizes him. Worse, it abstracts him. It makes him an example of the condition and the condition and the condition becomes the subject of the discussion. Even worse, it's inaccurate.

Here’s a letter to the editor of the New York Times from Allen Frances, a professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College who was chairman of the task force that wrote the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (D.S.M.-IV). Frances knows from narcissistic personality disorders because he “wrote the criteria that define the disorder” and he doesn’t think Trump meets them.

According to Dr Frances, what’s wrong with Our Mr President Trump isn’t that he’s suffering from narcissistic personality disorder.

What’s wrong with him is he’s a rotten human being.

To the Editor:

Fevered media speculation about Donald Trump’s psychological motivations and psychiatric diagnosis has recently encouraged mental health professionals to disregard the usual ethical constraints against diagnosing public figures at a distance. They have sponsored several petitions and a Feb. 14 letter to The New York Times suggesting that Mr. Trump is incapable, on psychiatric grounds, of serving as president.

Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).

Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

ALLEN FRANCES

Coronado, Calif.

_________________________________________________________________________

From my own department of amateur armchair psychiatry:

I’ve been carelessly in the habit of referring to Our Mr President Trump as nuts, but after the lunacies of yesterday’s press conference, I’m beginning to wonder if he really his nuts!

Probably not, although he may be losing his grip. What I really think is that he’s not nuts, he’s simply a not really all that smart or capable old man, pathetically insecure at the same time he’s wildly impressed by himself---not mutually exclusive qualities. They feed each other.---who’s in way over his head and knows it and has begun to panic. What was on display yesterday wasn’t a madman in the grip of his delusions but a conman on the brink of hysteria. He’s in the process of being found out and the only thing he can think to do to save himself is to try what’s always worked in the past: lie wildly to his base of suckers and hope they’ll continue to fall for it and come to his rescue.

Then again, encroaching senility can’t be ruled out.

Listen: Lance Mannion has come unstuck in time

Monday. May 16, 2016.

Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks) unstuck in time on the planet Tralfamadore in a scene from the movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

Sometimes it seems I’ve spent my whole life chasing after Kurt Vonnegut.

I mean that metaphorically, as a comment on my so-called life as a writer. Vonnegut was one of the first grown-up influences on my ambitions, my sense of what writers do and how they go about it, the way I looked at life and people, and my prose style.

But I mean it as matter of geographic fact too. I chased him out to Iowa for grad school even though he wasn’t teaching there at the time. He was still the reason I went there. I figured if they’d had Vonnegut teaching there that had to be the place for me. But I’d chased him to Boston before that. That was kind of incidental. I didn’t go to Boston because he was there or had been there. He had been there, briefly. He taught at Harvard. In the prologue to his novel Jailbird, he called his stint at Harvard “undistinguished.” I went to Boston University more than ten years after he gave up the Harvard gig. But at BU, through Leslie Epstein, I met Samuel Shem, the doctor who wrote the wonderfully cynical novel about learning how to doctor, House of God, and Shem was a friend of Mark Vonnegut, Kurt's son the doctor and writer. It was a practically a flip of the coin that sent me to Iowa instead of staying at BU where I’d also been admitted. Leslie himself advised Iowa. I’ve never been sure if it was because he honestly thought the Iowa Writers Workshop was better than his own program or he just wanted to get rid of me. But if I had stayed at BU I might have gotten to know Shem better and through him might have met Doctor Vonnegut and through him...well, you know.

Before Boston, I could have caught up with him on Cape Cod, except at the time when Pop and Mom Mannion were taking us there for family vacations I hadn’t read any of his books. I probably didn’t even know who he was. My favorite living author at the time was Franklin W. Dixon. Sue me. I was a kid. I didn’t know.

By the time I got around to reading Slaughterhouse Five---that is, by the time I was old enough that Mom and Pop Mannion allowed me to read it. What were they going to say? I’d already read M*A*S*H and Catch 22---our family had stopped going to the Cape and so had he. He’d moved to New York City.

But the first place I chased him to, again unwittingly, and again arriving too late, was Schenectady. I say unwittingly because it wasn’t my choice to move to Schenectady. If anyone had listened to me we’d have stayed put in our house in Latham. But Mom and Pop didn’t listen and dragged me with them and the rest of the family to Schenectady in time for me to start first grade. My favorite living authors at that time were Robert McCloskey and Virginia Lee Burton.

Vonnegut worked in public relations at General Electric or, as he disguised it in his fiction, the General Forge and Foundry Company. He disguised Schenectady as Ilium, New York. He worked there at the same time as my grandfather...and tens of thousands of other people. Vonnegut left GE and hightailed it out of Schenectady, headed for Cape Cod, a few years before Pop Mannion started at GE. To insist even harder on that tenuous connection, Vonnegut’s older brother Bernard, the scientist, taught at the University at Albany at the same time as Pop (Pop left GE to start Albany’s computer science program when I was around ten) and they knew each other and chatted regularly. For a short time the computer science department and the department of atmospheric sciences had offices in the same building, which is where I met Bernard myself. Pop introduced us as they were passing the time of day in the hallway. We didn’t talk about his brother.

There’s more.

When Vonnegut worked for GE, he lived in a hamlet across the Mohawk River---disguised as the Iroquois in his novels---from Schenectady called Alplaus. Derived from the Dutch.  Aal Plaats. Place of Eels. My first girlfriend lived there and whenever I rode my bike out to visit her I would pause in front of the house I’d been told had been his and stare at it as if I expected a rift to open up in time and I would be able to look through it back thirty years to see him coming down the steps and down the front walk to greet me.

We’re up in Schenectady right now, visiting the old Mannion Homestead, and this morning, in what’s become a routine when we’re here, I took a drive across the river to Alplaus. I don’t drive straight there and my girlfriend’s house isn’t my destination, it’s simply the end point of my tour of the old neighborhood. The old neighborhood is defined by where my high school friends lived and the limits of my range on my bike. Her house was at the western boundary. Nowdays, when I meander my way out there, that’s where I turn around to head back to the Homestead, after pausing to think fondly about that girl and the good old days.

Nostalgia isn’t really the point of the drive, exactly. The city of Schenectady itself isn’t much to look at, but the area surrounding it, shaped topographically and historically by the river and the Erie Canal, is beautiful. Even a short drive will take you up and down hills, on country roads that wind through woods and wide open fields and meadows, past farms and orchards, and into shady neighborhoods of handsome older houses, one-hundred, two-hundred, and some close to three-hundred years old, and, of course, along the river. Alplaus is one of those neighborhoods and it was built along the river. My girlfriend’s house was (still is) a large, late Victorian farmhouse with white clapboards, black shutters, and a porch that wrapped around two sides. You couldn’t see the river from the porch, the houses and trees across the street were in the way, but you probably could get a good look at it from the attic window. I don’t remember ever having been up there though.

The main point of these morning drives is to clear my head and take in the scenery, but I can’t help the onslaught of memories. Just about everywhere I look, lurking in ambush, is a memory from my kidhood and adolescenthood. Not all of them are pleasant. I don’t mind that though. In fact I like it. I like to be reminded of what was and to see what what still is but I also like to see what isn’t and what’s there in its place. I’m not one of those old men who hate to see change because it reminds them of their own impending final change into dust and nothingness. Not yet, at any rate. Not all change is for the better, some of it is decidedly for the worse, but on the whole I tend to like to see things change because generally to see them say the same is really to see another form of change---decay. Change of the kind I like to see, no matter how much of what I used to know and love is left behind, is life continuing itself.

Still, another point of the drive is to trigger memories and revisit the past. Not for mere nostalgia’s sake but for the physical connection. Sight is a sense, seeing is touching. My drives are a way for me to not get in touch with the past but to touch it. The past becomes physically present, and I am physically present in it. That’s a way of saying I feel physically present in time and to myself. I’m connected to the whole of my life, and I feel like I’m still me. Like I am a me.

For instance, on my way out of town, shortly after I set out, I happened to look out the window and glance up a side street that climbed a hill to the middle school. Over the top of the rise I saw the building’s entablature, a sight I’d probably seen hundreds of times when I was growing up. I was jolted out of the present moment and set down in one or all of the moments when I’d looked that way before.

It wasn’t that it was 1966 again or 1976 or 2016. And it wasn’t all those years at once. It was one eternal year full of eternal moments. I think of this a Tralfamadorian way of looking at life and I learned it from Kurt Vonnegut the first time I read Slaughterhouse-Five  or, to be Tralfalmadorian about it, I’m learning it now as I am reading Slaughterhouse-Five for the first time again. I’ve always been reading it and I will always be reading it. Like Billy Pilgrim, I’m unstuck in time that way. My drives are deliberate attempts to unstick myself in time.

And that’s what I thought happened when later on the drive today I made my way across the river over to Alplaus. It was rush hour and for several miles I passed the long, slow-moving line of cars full of commuters headed the opposite direction. Once upon a time, just about everybody in one of those cars would have been on their way to work at General Electric, either at the main campus downtown or at the Research Lab and Atomic Power Lab in the suburbs. Some are still on their way to those places but most are aiming for offices and office parks in Albany and its surrounding suburbs. This morning, as I approached the river and saw the line of cars crawling across the bridge and down the hill on the other side I became unstuck in time, not at all to my surprise, but the eternal moment I was thrown back into wasn’t one when I was in a car but the one when I as at home reading Player Piano for the first time and getting a shock of recognition as I read Vonnegut’s description of the novel’s protagonist Dr Paul Proteus’s morning commute to the General Forge and Foundry company. I was remembering vividly how excited and amused I was to see a piece of my world turning up in Vonnegut’s fiction world and how I jumped up from the couch to go looking for Pop Mannion so I could show him that passage.

There was only one thing wrong with that memory.

What I was remembering never happened.

Not like that.

It couldn’t have.

That passage isn’t in the book.

This afternoon, at Barnes and Noble, I grabbed a copy of Player Piano from the shelf and sat down in the cafe to skim through it to find the passage to copy down for blogging purposes and...I couldn’t find it.

Instead I found this:

Ilium, New York is divided into three parts.

In the northwest are the managers and engineers and civil servants and a few professional people; in the northeast are the machines; and in the south, across the Iroquois River, is the area known locally as Homestead, where almost all the people live.

If the bridge across the Iroquois were dynamited, few daily routines would be disturbed. Not many people on either side would have reasons other than curiosity for crossing.

During the war, in hundreds of Iliums over America, managers and engineers learned to get along without their men and women, who went to fight. It was the miracle that won the war---production with almost no manpower. In the patois of the north side of the river, it was the know-how that won the war. Democracy owed its life to know-how.

There’s no description of the morning rush hour in Player Piano because there’s no morning rush hour in the dystopian future where the story’s set. That’s a main theme of the book! 

Player Piano is set in a time when most people don't have jobs to rush to in the morning. They've all been put out of work and so rendered without purpose to society and the economy and to themselves by machines.

Not something I needed to be reminded of. It’s not something I have to remember. It’s something I know! It’s something I talk about and routinely write about. It’s something I’m prepared to devote an entire class period to discussing if ever some English department does a foolish thing and let me teach my dream course on Vonnegut, Asimov, Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula Le Guin.

So how could I remember a passage in a novel that goes against what I know to be that novel’s plot and theme?

At first I thought the passage must be in there, that what I was remembering was a description of Proteus remembering what life used to be like in Ilium before the war. So I skimmed back through the book two more times.

Nope.

Then I thought maybe I was misremembering reading it in Player Piano. Maybe I read it in another book. A good part of Slaughterhouse-Five takes place in Ilium. Billy Pilgrim doesn’t work at the General Forge and Foundry Company. He’s an optometrist. But Vonnegut might have had him making that commute. I went to fetch a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Nope, again.

But Ilium and General Forge and Foundry show up again and again in Vonnegut’s fiction. The passage could have been from one of the other of his books I read in high school. I looked through those---Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Welcome to the Monkey House---and couldn’t find it in any of them.

It finally occurred to me that what I might have been remembering all these years---it’s a longstanding memory. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t remember it, which, of course, may be a trick of memory itself.---is an early act of mature literary analysis on my part. In reading the book I recognized that something can be made present by its skillfully arranged absence. The rush hour traffic that Paul Proteus didn’t have to put up with implied the rush hour traffic Vonnegut had had to and the rush hour traffic people were still putting up with when I read the book. Somehow I had unconsciously rewritten the actual memory of what Vonnegut had written---or, rather, hadn’t written---and turned it into what I had been inspired to imagine by his writing. I’d turned a real memory into a false one.

I think that’s what happened.

I’ll never know. I’ll never know what sort of memory it is or how it got in there and how come it’s still in there even though I know now it’s a false memory. But there it is. I’m still remembering it and in the same old detail. Yet more evidence that my memories of anything can’t be trusted.

How about that?

There’s only one place left for me to chase Vonnegut to, and since neither of us believe in it, I’m not going to catch up with him there.

I thought I would catch up with him at last when we moved here. He was still living in New York City and we’re not that far from there and get into town regularly. But the bastard died on me before I could track him down.

So it goes.

___________________________________________

Slaughterhouse-Five, Player Piano, and most of Vonnegut's other books are available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

The Politics of Memory: Bernie folk and Hillary folk misremember the 1990s together

 

“We’re all smart.” In one of my favorite scenes in Zero Dark Thirty, CIA Director Leon Panetta (James Gandolfini, right) gives an aide a terse lesson on the limits of being smart, a lesson a lot of us who debate politics online could benefit from learning.

I don’t know most of my students’ political leanings. My general sense is that the majority of them, maybe even all of them, aren’t thinking much about politics these days. They have other things on their minds and their time is taken up with all the work and studying they have to do. They’re honors students, carrying at least two majors and a minor and taking course overloads. I had a better idea of where the students stood in my Digital Commoners class last fall because our discussions were more openly political---Jamelle Bouie was one of our guest lecturers, after all.---and most of them were for Hillary. Well, they are honors students and that means they’re oddballs among their generation. But I think they identified with her because they saw her as a fellow honors student.

These are kids who value not just hard work, but extra-hard work. They got where they are by putting in the effort. They do the research. They prepare. They're organized. They're detail-oriented. They are driven, disciplined, responsible, and, maybe to too great a degree, dutiful---they believe that once you’ve agreed to play by the rules, you then play by the rules. What’s more, from their own experience, they know that the rules are what they are for reasons and that following them usually gets you where you need to go. In short, they are, like Hillary, pragmatic and realistic, words, by the way, many Bernie supporters can’t use without contempt.

But as I mentioned a couple weeks back, I try to steer clear of politics in the Wired Critics class. It’s not been easy to do and it wouldn’t be right to do it completely, considering that four of the movies we’ve watched in class were 42, In the Heat of the Night, Zero Dark Thirty, and The Searchers. (The other two films on the syllabus are Silver Linings Playbook, which we watched at the beginning of the semester, and Bringing Up Baby, which is coming up as the feature in our final class meeting. I don’t know what they’ll make of Bringing Up Baby, but one of my students astutely spotted the gender politics at work in Silver Linings.) The other day, though, I brought up politics myself and not in relation to any of the movies we’ve watched or books we’ve read. I talked about the presidential primaries.

I didn’t do it to give them my views or to find out theirs or to start any arguments. I did it in order to warn them about some of the intellectual pitfalls of life online. Since everything they write for the class is intended to be read online (and we have a class blog), in fact, since most everything they write in their academic and professional careers will find its way online, it’s important they know what they’re getting into.

There’s a lot of fallacious, specious, tendentious, meretricious, mendacious, illogical, wrong-headed, and just plain bullshit reasoning on display. Nowhere more so than in the political “discussions” taking place online, with the Clinton vs Sanders back and forth being as bad as any I’ve ever seen, maybe even the worst, because there are no arguments more vicious than those between smart people who basically agree on everything but the minor details.

Smart is key.

One of my favorite moments in Zero Dark Thirty is in the scene after the one in which CIA Director Leon Panetta (played by James Gandolfini) meets with a group of analysts to ask them one by one what’s the percentage that it’s Osama bin Laden hiding in that compound in Abbattobad. Maya (Jessica Chastain) is the only one in the room who thinks it’s 100 percent. Panetta is impressed but later when he’s getting on an elevator he asks the aide with him what he thinks of Maya.

“She’s very smart,” the aide says.

Panetta’s not impressed.

“We’re all smart,” he says.

The point being smart isn’t enough. A good lesson for honors students to take to heart, I think, because it’s not just that smart people have a habit of being too impressed by their own smarts and biased in their own favor to the point they don’t question themselves and take it for granted that they’re right as a matter of course and that other people should too---”Why aren’t you as impressed by me as you ought to be?” It’s that smart people are adept at outsmarting themselves.

They’re skilled at constructing arguments that sound smart, so smart they fool themselves: "An argument this well-constructed must be true!"

David Halberstam wrote a whole book about how that works.

But there was something else I wanted them to be aware of.

Much of the online debate between Hillary people and Bernie people has included revisiting the 1990s. This has been mainly driven by the Bernie people who have to attack Hillary’s past because, for one thing, that’s what she’s running on, her experience is her past. Bernie himself doesn’t have the experience to run on. He can't run on what he's done in the past, so he’s running on what he hopes to accomplish in the future. Since the future is vague and unpredictable and therefore a campaign based on promising it will be wonderful if only you vote for Bernie isn’t exactly convincing, they have to show that her past counts against her more than his lack of a past full of her sort of experience counts against him. Naturally, Hillary’s people have to show the opposite.

The trouble is that both sides are arguing from memory and, as my students were quick to point out when I asked them what the problem is with that, memory is unreliable. Memories are incomplete. They get fuzzy over time. Things get mixed up in the remembering. We all "remember" things that didn’t happen, at least not in the way we remember them, and forget plenty of things that did happen. And our memories aren’t digital recording devices with infinite storage space. Things are stowed away in bits and pieces in different corners and cabinets in our mental attics and they have to be reconstructed every time we call up a memory and they’re reconstructed according to the plan we used the last time we called up that memory. This means we’re not actually remembering something. We’re remembering the last time we remembered it.

And in the process of reconstructing a memory, we can correct it. We can add to it. Fix it. Improve it. That is we can make it tell a better story.

On top of all this, it’s suggestible. We can be talked into “remembering” things. If enough people around us remember something one way, there’s a good chance we’ll find ourselves “remembering” it that way too.

This means if you spend enough time with Bernie people, you’re likely to start "remembering" the 1990s one way, and if you spend enough time with Hillary people you’ll start "remembering" it another. The term for this is received memory. Since most liberal members of my students’ generation are rallying around Bernie, they’re receiving memories of the time when they were children---and not paying attention to politics so they don’t have any real memories of their own---that are biased in Bernie’s favor.

And that’s more to the point.

Memory is selective and it’s convenient. We often remember what we want to remember and remember it the way it’s useful to remember it.

It’s useful to Bernie’s cause that the 90s be remembered one way and useful to Hillary’s that they be remembered in another (or even not remembered at all).

This is where I stopped with my students and got back to matters at hand, which was the influence on The Searchers on George Lucas.

But if I had kept going I probably wouldn’t have been able to start making my own political case.

Bernie’s supporters have a stronger motive for having the 90s remembered their way. Hillary’s supporters can be and have been more willing to let history (as opposed to memory) speak for itself, even when it says things that aren’t to their liking. For one thing, they don’t believe what happened twenty and more years ago should be a major deciding factor in this year’s presidential election. For another, she wasn't the president then. But, beyond that, they believe history is biased in her favor, not just in that she has a history of doing well and doing right, but in that one of her claims on being the best qualified candidate is she has a history of learning and growing, personally and politically, as time goes on. If Bernie is what he was 50 years ago when he marched with Martin Luther King, Hillary is what she’s become after a lifetime of learning and growing and changing and adapting. She may not like admitting to her mistakes, especially when admitting them implies criticism of Bill, but she learns from them. So to bring up where she went wrong in the past is to bring up where she’s gone right since. As far as Hillary’s concerned, an honest discussion of her failures opens up an honest discussion of her successes. At least it ought to. But Bernie’s case depends on her past disqualifying her from the presidency. And it’s not sufficient that she’s shown to have demonstrated bad judgment. She has to be seen as having been a moral failure as well.

Fundamental to the “revolution” is that its leader is the Last Honest Man.

Everybody else, then, is dishonest and corrupt, particularly the Clintons, but the indictment extends to the whole “corrupt Democratic establishment.”

Bernie supporters can’t seem to keep it in mind that the Democratic establishment includes their supposed heroine, Elizabeth Warren. I say “supposed” because she’s not really a heroine to them. She’s merely cover. They invoke her name whenever they’re called on the sexism inherent in many of their preferred attack lines on Hillary.

“We’re not against the idea of a woman president. We’d gladly have voted for Warren if she’d run and we’ll gladly vote for her to succeed Bernie.” It always comes to a shock when I point out to my online Bernie guy pals that Warren’s 66 years old and that if Bernie serves the two terms they hope he will, she’ll be 74 in 2024 and 82 when she finishes her two terms. In other words, she’s not likely to ever run for president. But the fact that they haven’t considered this means they haven’t really considered her as anything other than a symbol of their own righteous cause.

At any rate, it is in Bernie’s interest that Hillary be “remembered” as not just having been wrong but bad. Bad as in a bad person. Evil, in fact.

For many of the Bernie supporters of my online acquaintance, it’s not enough for Clinton to be evil herself. She has to be Evil incarnate, the root of all evil and cause of all that’s wrong with the country and all that electing Bernie would fix. The way they go at it in their tweets and posts it’s as if she was at least co-president through Bill’s two terms, that George W. Bush was president for just long enough to lie us into the war in Iraq, at Hillary’s urging, after which she took over, guiding and prolonging the war from her seat in the Senate, where she did nothing else---Lilly Ledbetter? Never heard of her.---until Barack Obama became president, when once again she assumed the role of co-president, making all his foreign and military policy decisions until she left the State Department to prepare for her coronation as Queen-President in her own right.

But even among the more sensible, reasonable, and less doctrinaire, Bernie’s purity is generally proven by Hillary’s corruption and for that work history must be “remembered” accordingly.  And the ones taking the lead in the misremembering are middle-aged men---almost all the Bernie people I know online are Bernie guys and middle-aged Bernie guys at that---old enough to have been politically aware adults during the years of Bill’s presidency and Hillary’s time in the Senate but who apparently didn’t take notes and haven’t bothered to do the homework needed to make up for it.

But not only are they arguing from their own selective and convenient memory, they’re deliberately, consciously, and conscientiously working to plant false memories in the minds of the younger Bernie supporters. That is, they are knowingly rewriting history.

Ok, maybe they’re not doing it knowingly. Maybe they’re just being smart in that way I described above.

They’ve talked outsmarted themselves into “remembering” an incomplete, un-nuanced, and useful version of history and now they’re teaching it to the kids.

And in teaching that “history” to the kids they’re also giving them a very wrong and dangerous idea of how politics and government work. Not to mention a misguided and self-destructive conception of morality in which purity is of the essence and moral purity is synonymous with political purity and that such purity is desirable as an end itself. Getting things done, however good those things might be, doesn’t matter as much as maintaining one’s moral purity. Better, then, to fail completely than to allow yourself to become tainted by even incremental successes.This kind of thinking leads one of two ways: to withdrawal from society or to purifying it through witch hunts and purges.

Puritanical morality aside, the kids are being taught that politics is a matter of True Believership, that change---revolution---happens because enough people of good heart and good will come together and shout about it. All it’s going to take to make the world better and their futures brighter is to put the right man at the head of the march and let him do the most of the shouting.

Funny thing about populist movements. Even though they’re meant to express the common people’s collective interests, they all seem to require the people to rally behind a single loudmouthed demagogue.

None of this I said to my students. Like I said, I stopped where I said I did, with talking about the problem of arguing from memory. But I didn’t go right into talking about The Searchers and Star Wars. I got a little bit political. Even a bit partisan.

I told them that if they found themselves caught up in the arguments about what went on in the decade during which they were born and grew to pre-school and kindergarten age to keep in mind that the Clinton Administration wasn’t a New Democratic dictatorship. President Bill Clinton had to deal with a Congress that for the last six of the eight years he was in office was solidly in Republican control. Right Wing Republican control. Whatever he did or didn’t do, whatever he did right or did wrong, he did while having to deal with that fact. He also had to deal with...life. Things happen that presidents can’t predict or plan for. A great deal of presidenting is reactive and improvisational. There’s often not the time or the money to solve problems as they come up in the way they need to be solved. And then there’s the matter of voters.

People have to be taken into account. Not just their needs and interests but their wishes. They're reacting improvisationally to problems in life too and they have ideas about how those problems should be handled and when and in what order---usually NOW and FIRST!

All the issues of the past we’re arguing over---the crime bill, welfare reform, NAFTA, Iraq---have a history. That is, they came up within the courses of certain events and, whatever problems they’ve caused for us in the present, they were in their own time effects of causes arising within those times and from their pasts. NAFTA didn’t cause the decline of American manufacturing; it was an attempt to bring it back. Welfare reform happened because the welfare system needed to be reformed. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act wasn’t intended to lock up all young black men---It’s debatable that it contributed greatly to the mass incarceration crisis. Very few criminals wind up in federal penitentiaries since very few criminal commit federal crimes.---and it included things that need to be considered when arguing about it, particularly the Violence Against Women Act, the assault weapons ban, and federal laws on hate crimes and sex crimes.

It can be argued that those things were done with all the best intentions and did some real good and that whatever harm they caused were unintended consequences that couldn't have been foreseen. It can also be argued that those consequences not only should have been foreseen and could have been foreseen but were foreseen but even if they weren’t there were other, better plans for dealing with the problems. But neither argument should be made from memory.

You have to do your homework, I said to my students, as if they need to be told that.

There’s one more piece of history from the 1990s that hasn’t made its way into the debates much, except salaciously through the invoking of one name. Monica.

On December 19, 1998, against the wishes of the vast majority of the American people, the Republican controlled House voted to impeach the President of the United States. On February 12, 1999---the House managers acting as prosecutors thought they were being funny---all but a handful of Republican Senators voted to convict him.

Think about this, I said. We came this close to throwing a president out of office because he lied about cheating on his wife.

How crazy is that?

But here’s the craziest part. Those Republicans then are the Republicans now. They’re the generation the political press refers to as the GOP establishment, the ones who are supposed to be the sane and sensible adults desperately trying to prevent the nomination of Donald Trump. And what they did back in the 1990s was attempt a coup.

And that, probably more than anything she might have thought or said about the crime bill, welfare reform, or free trade, tells you what kind of president Hillary Clinton is likely to be when it comes to dealing with the Republicans she’s accused by fanatical Bernie supporters of being no different from.

I need to change my brain

Shwangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge in winter. Not exactly just down the road but close enough. If all goes well, I’ll be reporting on a walk around here in August. Photo courtesy of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

August 7th!

That’s not a date stamp on the post. That’s a date I’m looking forward to. Friday, August 7, 2015. That’s the day I’m going in for the procedure that’s supposed to fix up my back. Two shots of steroids straight to the spine. If it goes the way it’s supposed to, I’ll be up and walking normally by that afternoon. Then watch my smoke!

First thing I’m going to do is take a walk in the woods.

Or through the meadow.

Or along the river.

Or over the hills and far away.

Or just around the block.

Somewhere. Anywhere.

All my life I’ve been a walker. Not a hiker. Not a stroller. Though I’ve done a fair share of both. I’ve simply gone for walks.

At all times of day. For whatever length of time it takes me to get there and back, wherever there happens to be. Sometimes I walked with a purpose and a specific destination in mind. Sometimes I walked just to see where I’d end up. Often I walked just to walk, to be outside and in motion.

But at all times, wherever I walked, for whatever other purpose I walked to pursue, I walked to think.

It’s been frustrating not being able to get easily from here to there, even when here is the kitchen table and there is the living room. It drives me nuts that I can’t walk to the store for a loaf of bread or down to the library to return a book. It’s depressing and humiliating having to hobble with a cane into the bookstore or the movie theater or the supermarket, wincing every painful step of the way. I keep telling myself how many people have it so much worse. Doesn’t make me dread running an errand any less.

Running an errand! Good one, Lance.

And for over two years now I’ve been convinced that not being able to take walks has been making me stupid and crazy…because for two years I haven’t been able to think.

A lot of what’s called thinking isn’t having thoughts but arranging them, putting some together with others, pulling thoughts that had been together apart, sorting them, storing them, throwing some out. I used to do all that while walking.

I’ve tried to do it while sitting. I can’t. When I sit and try to think, I end up brooding or dreaming. Whichever I do, it’s a piling up of more thoughts that need arranging. The arranging doesn’t happen. Those thoughts remain unarranged. Disarranged. My mind’s a jumble.

It’s a wonder to me that I can teach. I’m told I’ve been doing a good job. I believe it’s my students who are doing the good job. They’re honors students. They think at the drop of a hat. All I have to do is sit there and smile encouragingly and they’re off to the races.

Sit there.

Back when I was young and truly a good teacher, I did all my teaching on my feet. Walking back and forth. You can call it pacing. But I walked at least a mile every class.

It’s even more of a wonder I have been able to write.

I don’t feel like I have been able. Not the way I used to. I know there’s been a significant fall off in the numbers of new posts to the blog. That may be a good thing. I suspect there’s also been a decline in quality, although no one’s been straight-forward enough to say so and many kind readers have assured me it’s not true. But tell you what I am sure of. There’s been an important loss in subject matter.

There haven’t been any reports from my walks which used to be a regular feature of the blog.

So the first post after August 7th is going to be a report from a walk. Might just be a walk around the block. But I’d like it to be here, the Shwangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge. Which is not too far from here, although a little too far to walk along busy roads or across private property with cows and horses and dogs guarding the paths. Believe it or not, I’ve never been there. I didn’t even know it was there until a couple of years ago when, driving one of Oliver’s friends home after some event at school, we drove past it.  A couple of years ago, you’ll note, is when my back gave out.

Anyway, that’s the plan, to go out there and take a walk as soon as I can after I’m up and walking. And if taking a walk works on my brain the way the shots are supposed to work on my back, I’ll get my thoughts arranged again. Maybe I’ll even feel somewhat sane again too.

Like I said. Not walking in the woods or in a meadow or along the river or over a hill has been driving me nuts. Which I didn’t need this New York Times article to tell me. Still, it’s always reassuring to have the New York Times tell you you’re right about something.

A walk in the park may soothe the mind and, in the process, change the workings of our brains in ways that improve our mental health, according to an interesting new study of the physical effects on the brain of visiting nature…

…Various studies have found that urban dwellers with little access to green spaces have a higher incidence of psychological problems than people living near parks and that city dwellers who visit natural environments have lower levels of stress hormones immediately afterward than people who have not recently been outside.

But just how a visit to a park or other green space might alter mood has been unclear. Does experiencing nature actually change our brains in some way that affects our emotional health?..

The article, by Gretchen Reynolds, goes on to report an attempt to answer that question. It also has some pertinent things to say about brooding. You can read the whole piece, How Walking in Nature Changes the Brain, at the New York Times.

Maybe it’s not such a good idea to defend your own good idea

Something to keep in mind when you’ve got something in mind you want to get people to change their minds about:

Inadvertently, he’d opened up a debate with his own investors, which he counted among his least favorite ideas. “I hated discussing ideas with investors,” he said, “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process.” Once you became an idea’s defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.”

That’s from The Big Short by Michael Lewis. The person talking is the genius hedge fund manager at the center of the book who foresaw the housing bubble bursting two years ahead---and prepared to make a killing off it, but never mind that. Point is that it’s a good idea to keep a distance between yourself and your own good ideas in case you need to be able to decide they’re no good.  Going to pass it along to my students. It relates to something I warn them about. People’s sense of self gets tied up in their opinions and ideas being right and giving them up and admitting those opinions and ideas are wrong feels like giving up a piece of themselves and admitting they are wrong in being themselves. I’m not sure they get that I’m warning to them to watch out for this in themselves and not just in people they’re arguing with.

Why We Need Fiction: George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and banning wearing yoga pants in public

A state legislator in Montana has introduced a bill that could ban wearing yoga pants in public. Guess which party he belongs to.

His name is David Moore. He wants voters to call him Doc. I haven’t found out where the nickname comes from. He’s not a doctor or a dentist. He doesn’t hold a Ph.D. He has a master’s in business administration from the University of Montana. Maybe he was a pitcher on his high school or college baseball teams and fans called him Doctor K because he struck a lot of guys out. That would have put him at least three years ahead of Doc Gooden in the nicknaming department. Maybe he played basketball and his idol was Julius Irving and Doctor D got shortened somewhere along the line. He’s worked as a teacher but his main job before he got into politics seems to have been auto technician. Maybe he was real good at diagnosing what was wrong with customers’ cars.  Doesn’t matter.

Doesn’t matter he’s a Republican either. It’s Montana. Democrats up there aren’t like Democrats in New York. Republicans up there probably aren’t like Republicans in South Carolina. For the record, though, he’s pro-choice, and he’s voted to put money into teachers’ retirement funds instead of taking it out and away. He’s parrots the standard Republican lies about the ACA to justify opposing expanding Medicaid. Conservation groups don’t like him. The NRA does. He doesn’t appear to support marriage equality but he is in favor of civil unions so maybe he’s “evolving.”  He’s fifty-three. He’s married. He has kids.  He’s a Lutheran. What this adds up to I’m not sure except that he can’t be dismissed as a typical Tea Party yahoo. Which makes me wonder all the more where this anti-yoga pants bill came from.

And it’s not just yoga pants with him.

Moore, who is upset that group of naked bicyclists pedaled through Missoula last year, decided that what his state really needs right now is tighter regulations on trousers. His proposed bill, HB 365, would outlaw not just nudity, but also "any device, costume, or covering that gives the appearance of or simulates the genitals, pubic hair, anus region, or pubic hair region."

He seems to want yoga pants banned on principle anyway, and Speedos, but I think he thinks that because yoga pants tend to be tight in the seat if you wear a pair that happens to be close in color to your skin tone, it might look at a glance as though your rear end is naked.

Think about this.

He was born in 1961 which means he hit puberty in time for his favorite advertising jingle to have been “Who Wears Short Shorts”. If he didn’t have a Farrah Fawcett poster on his bedroom wall, at least one of his friends probably did. By the time he was in college, nothing was coming between Brooke Shields and her Calvins. Girls he went to school with were more likely to wear carpenter pants than mini-skirts to class and up in Missoula the parkas probably came out even earlier and got put away later than they they did in Boston but spring came to Montana as surely as it did to Massachusetts and I would bet the campus lawns at UM turned into grassy versions of Miami Beach and the air was delicious with the smells of coconut-scented sunscreen and baby oil. He was still a young man when strategic rips began appearing below the back pockets of jeans, and he would have been only technically middle-aged when the golden age of cleavage in which we, blessedly, still live, arrived.

What I’m getting at is that he’s lived most of his life in a time when prevailing fashions have been a lot more revealing of female pulchritude than yoga pants, and I’m wondering what is his problem all of a sudden?

Here he is, deep into middle age, approaching grandfather age. He has a family to worry about. He’s holding a job that’s a definite step up from auto technician and substitute teacher in terms of having the ability to change people’s lives for the better, and this is how he wants to waste his time and taxpayers’ money?

What possessed him?

What possesses him?

Maybe he’s always been tormented by the sight of young women in figure flattering outfits. Maybe he’s spent the last forty years averting his eyes or not averting his eyes and hating himself for it.  Maybe it’s part of a midlife crisis. Maybe it’s the case with him as I suspect it is with many aging Republican men who’ve realized their time has past and no pretty young women are going to dress or undress for them anymore and resent and blame the young women for reminding them of this. And by the way this resentment might not be entirely sexual. What they might really be upset by is the reminder that they’re getting old and are going to die.

Maybe he’s simply offended by adults going about in public dressed like sloppy children or by overt displays of stupidity. Never mind what sort of adult freaks out over yoga pants. What sort of adult rides a bicycle naked?

Whatever’s bugging him, I’d like to know. And I can’t know. Who can tell me?  He can’t. I’m sure wouldn’t tell me if he could but odds are he doesn’t know himself. And when I say “he doesn’t know himself” I mean it two ways. He himself can’t explain it because he just doesn’t know. And he doesn’t know himself as in he’s not sufficiently self-aware. Few of us are, because few of his are in the habit of the intensive self-reflection, self-examination, and self-criticism that depth of self-knowledge demands. Generally, we don’t want to get to know ourselves that well. We’re afraid of the stranger we might meet.  Denial, deflection, projection, sublimation, these are tricks we play on ourselves to avoid admitting things about ourselves we’d rather not face up to.  Moore is probably as adept at this as the rest of us.

I’d also like to know who around him told him this was a good idea or if anyone warned him he was risking making a fool of himself and what was going through their heads, if they knew, and why did he listen to the one and not the other and what did he actually hear, because we have a way of hearing what we want to hear, and what did they actually say or mean to say?

And I can’t know the answers to any of these questions.

This is why we need fiction.

Serious fiction.

Literature.

Television and movies, comic books, and mystery novels and thrillers make use of characters like “Doc Moore” as villains, as victims, as background, as comic relief, but their writers aren’t interested in psychology. They only care about motivations. And because plot takes precedence over everything, the motivations need to help move the plot along, so they tend to be simple and direct matters of cause and effect. A character like Doc Moore would hate yoga pants because his wife left him for her yoga instructor or because he lusted after her yoga instructor. We’d know what drove him but we wouldn’t understand and we would have much real sympathy. Understanding and sympathy are what writers of serious fiction work to provide. That’s what makes it serious. Calling it serious signals intent. It’s descriptive of purpose not a claim of higher artistic merit. Pompous people use it to include the latter but that’s what makes them pompous. A writer of serious fiction is saying “I’m going to tell you a story that matters. I don’t want to just entertain you. I want you to understand something about life, about being human.” Many comedies are more serious in this way than most dramas.

Through stories we can imagine our way to knowing Doc Moore or, at any rate, someone like Doc Moore. If not like him in personality then like him in action and circumstance.  “What kind of politician would waste his time and taxpayer money trying to ban yoga pants?” says the writer. “Several kinds, probably, but I’m going to tell a story about this particular kind.”

We imagine what he’s like, we imagine what it’s like to be like him, we imagine what it’s like to be him. We get to know him, understand him, sympathize with him.  We don’t have to like a character to sympathize with him. We don’t need to approve of him and we certainly don’t need to root for him. We don’t need what jejune and lazy readers and audiences claim they want, a character they can identify with. Identifying with a character is a good way not to gain sympathy or understanding because it’s almost always solipsistic and narcissistic. It’s a roundabout path to identifying with a someone they already sympathize with and approve of, themselves. To understand and sympathize with a character we have to feel his pain, the pain of being who he is. We suffer that pain with him.

Chekhov was excellent at depicting unlikeable characters, characters difficult if not impossible to identify with in a way that leads to our own self-approval, and making them understandable and sympathetic. Dostoevsky was too, although the result was usually a character who was some type of hysteric. Dickens did it better than he used to be credited for when I was in school. It seems that within the last generation critics have cottoned on to his methods. Because he worked in caricature, fairy tale, and archetype, it can appear that he’s simplifying and letting us see his people only from the outside.  But the hidden truths are there to be discovered in his symbols and metaphors, parables and allegorical asides.  He was once supposed to be as reticent about sex as any good Victorian but in fact he was acutely aware of the erotic and perversely erotic forces at work in human beings, driving them forward, driving them crazy, driving them to distraction, driving them to murder. His great psychosexual portraits of people twisted and tortured by desires they don’t dare to acknowledge but which they can’t help acting upon or acting out include James Carker with his great, beautiful, flashing white teeth in Dombey and Son (a self-portrait, by the way), the proudly scarred masochist Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield, hating Steerforth because she loves him so much and can’t have him, both the violent and murderous Jonas Chuzzlewit and the lustful hypocrite Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit, and the lesbian seductress Miss Wade and her “victim,” the jealous and self-loathing Tattycoram in Little Dorrit. A case can be made that the diffident to the point of impotence hero of that book, Arthur Clennam, is a male Sleeping Beauty, a forty year old virgin metaphorically asleep his private castle where he waits to be deflowered by his much stronger and much more worldly although much younger rescuer Amy Dorrit. We can skip over Quilp and Uriah Heep who are too obvious. But Dickens was on his way to more overtly proto-Freudian portraits of sexual transgressives with the repressed schoolmaster Bradley Headstone in Our Mutual Friend and the divided personality, John Jaspers, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

But the writer I think handled characters like Doc Moore best is Anthony Trollope.

The reason I don’t rank Trollope quite up there with his contemporaries Dickens and George Eliot is that he wasn’t as lyrical a prose stylist as Dickens or as profound a thinker as Eliot and he wasn’t as interested in exploring the perversity of passion and desire in his characters as either. His most villainous characters are relatively mild-mannered.  His lovers are fairly normal in their erotic and romantic attitudes and activities. And he limited himself to exploring the safer and quieter and more comforting precincts of Victorian England. There’s no below stairs in Trollope’s novels. There is no underworld. There are no back alleys.  Metaphorically, psychologically, or in actuality.  Dickens, of course, was intimate with all those places, metaphorically, psychologically, and in actuality.  Eliot knew them at a remove, politically, sociologically, almost clinically.  But Trollope was far more prolific than both of them. He produced a wider and more various gallery of Humans of England.  Both Dickens and Eliot were politically aware and concerned. Dickens intended his writing to inspire political and economic change. I should say he hoped it would. He wasn’t optimistic. Eliot was, at least in comparison. Middlemarch is a political novel in that local politics plays an important role in one of the novel’s several subplots and their politics is a point of sympathy between Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw. It can be argued---and I know this because I argued it in a paper back in grad school---that Dr Lydgate’s downfall is due to his abandoning his political principles to advance his social standing.  But to a great degree Eliot presents politics as outside business, something people take up or take on in addition or on top of their other concerns.  It’s separate from other routines of their daily lives. Trollope sees politics as the very essence of daily life.

Trollope wrote extensively and knowledgeably about the business of politics and from practical experience. A great many of his characters are professional politicians or would-be politicians. His Palliser novels center on a nascent political dynasty. Creating politicians like Doc Moore was routine for him. But his characters didn’t have to hold an office or run for one or work in government to be politicians because in his world everybody is a politician as a matter of course.

Everything people do is political because everything we do is a matter of negotiating our place and function within a society. Politics is the word for how we get along with our neighbors and how we get ahead in our careers. In Trollope’s day, marriage was the career for middle class and upper class women, so in his novels marriages are political arrangements as much as romantic adventures or misadventures and figure importantly in the plots. His novels turn on the question of who will marry whom as much as George Eliot’s or, for that matter, Jane Austen’s with the difference that Eliot and Austen saw the answers as mainly affecting the lovers, would-be lovers, and their families and Trollope saw marriages as having consequences for the whole community.

Who marries whom is everybody’s business.

Trollope was excellent at depicting how individuals think: How they deny, deflect, project, rationalize, temporize, obfuscate, and otherwise self-deceive. How good people can think their way to behaving badly. How honest people can be dishonest with themselves in order to be dishonest with others. How selfish people can believe themselves generous. How generous-minded people can explain away selfish desires.  How all people can make themselves think they want one thing while they actively pursue another. How we’re all to some degree hypocrites and liars. How none of that means we’re necessarily stupid or evil or even not actually good.

None of this happens in isolation.

Alienation is practically an unknown affliction among Trollope’s characters.

It’s rare when one of his characters thinks purely for himself and acts on his own and rarer when he’s doing it because of a noble independence of mind and spirit and with high moral purpose. (When one does, it’s almost always not a he but she.) Usually it’s just pure selfishness. And he winds up properly corrected or punished by the community.

On the other hand, when a character does the “right thing” for the “right reasons” and acts unselfishly, sacrificing, her own interests and desires (again, it’s almost always a she), it often turns out to be a mistake caused by her assuming things about what others think and want and by her telling herself what she should think and want because of that.

When you get down to it, Eliot and Dickens were primarily moralists. They judged individuals as culpable for their crimes, sins, and bad behavior. Trollope was of a more tolerant and forgiving disposition. He tended to see people as not in control of who and what they are. We’re subject to too many outside influences, forces, and pressures. Our lives are too mixed up together and there’s no distinct point where our individual selves end and our neighbors’ begin.

Since this is how I tend to see it, I think the story of how Doc Moore---I should say someone like Doc Moore---isn’t a morality tale about an individual driven by his own demons and psychosexual hangups. It’s a political story about a politician reacting to pressures and influences brought to bear upon him by people reacting to pressures and influences brought to bear upon them by people reacting…you get the drift. 

The story doesn’t begin in a yoga studio or in the bedroom or inside the main character’s head.

It begins on the floor of the garage where he’s at work diagnosing a customer’s car’s balky engine with the customer’s conversation turning to the subject of yoga pants.

__________________________

Doc Moore is serious about strengthening the indecent exposure laws but he now says he was joking about banning yoga pants. He may have been kidding about the Speedos too. Going by the tone of the quote in the Mother Jones article, I’m inclined to believe him. It’s the kind of wiseguy remark I’d make, although I’m more of the opinion we need to ban the sporting of ugly beards by baseball players. So I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. He was making a joke.

But we all know what Freud said about jokes.

You should read Tim Murphy’s whole article at Mother Jones, Montana GOP Legislator Wants to Ban Yoga Pants, and this follow up report by Will Wadley of NBC’s Montana affiliate KECI, Lawmaker: Yoga pants comment 'a joke,' inspires beer. Yep, beer is involved or, at any rate, a local microbrewery. See? It’s all about the community.

The little I know about the real Doc Moore I learned at Vote Smart. and this Q and A he did with the editors of the Missoulian.

By the way, Moore’s bill has been tabled, probably to his relief.

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Useful in case there’s a quiz:

The Trollope Society’s website, Anthony Trollope.

David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page.

George Eliot at the Victorian Web.

The Captain and Kareem

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms. ---from Daniel Deronda by George Eliot.

Haven’t read any George Eliot lately but I have been re-reading Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice---as you probably guessed---gearing up to see the movie when it opens around here, if it does, and the other night I came across a passage that triggered what I’m half-sure is a false memory.

The protagonist, private eye and stoner, Doc Sportello is watching a basketball game, Lakers against the Milwaukee Bucks, and he expresses his admiration for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was playing for the Bucks at the time the novel’s set---the winter of 1971-72, I think, Pynchon doesn’t get specific---and Doc mentions how Abdul-Jabbar had recently changed his name from Lew Alcindor. When I read that the thought popped into my head that I had never known Abdul-Jabbar as Alcindor. That’s not quite right. What I thought was that the moment I learned there was a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar I learned he had changed his name from Lew Alcindor. And I learned this, I remembered, from Captain Kangaroo.

Probably right around the time Doc was watching that game.

Not only did I remember learning this from the Captain, I remembered the segment of the show. The Captain gave a short biography of Abdul-Jabbar (with clips) and explained the reason he’d changed his name. That meant the Captain had to explain Islam and its attraction for African Americans. The Captain being the Captain this would have been a sympathetic explanation meant to open up new ideas and different experiences to his young audience, which, the times being what they were, would have been presumed to be predominately children of the white middle class. But it would have also included an implicit awareness the Captain would have somehow communicated to kids like me that not every kid watching was like me.

This would have been how the Captain handled it, I thought. Captain Kangaroo was a product of its times and in those times the media was truly liberal. Captain Kangaroo would have been quietly and modestly teaching the kind of secularized Christianity that was for many people then the basis of liberalism: Love one another. Treat others as you’d like to be treated. Judge not. Don’t worry about the mote in your neighbor’s eye until you’ve removed the beam from your own. Cast your bread upon the waters. The kind of Christianity based on what Jesus taught and not on what Paul preached and the prophets imposed. The kind of Christianity in which important, exemplary figures included the Good Samaritan and the woman taken in adultery, an outsider and a sinner.

As I was remembering this, I started to think that maybe that segment included a guest appearance by Abdul-Jabbar himself. This would have been something that could have happened. The Captain did invite guests onto the show. And as I was thinking that it could have happened, I started remembering that it did happen.

I remembered the Captain and Kareem talking together in the Treasure House.

Mr Moose and Bunny Rabbit had been there, listening in, I remembered.

That’s when it dawned on me that I was possibly making this all up, fooling myself with an invented memory.

It might have happened as I remembered it, except that at the time I was a little old to be watching Captain Kangaroo and I was already a basketball fan. If that segment was real, I’d have probably been in school when it aired. And I wouldn’t have needed the Captain to tell me about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar either as a basketball star or a convert to Islam. I’d have read about it in the newspaper and heard about it while watching a game. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen too. It just raises the possibility that I’ve conflated and revised memories to the point that they are fictions.

This isn’t a big deal. I don’t need to know the truth. I suppose I could find out. I could make a visit to the Paley Center for Media and watch every episode of Captain Kangaroo that aired in 1971. (Note to my students: I did some Googling. Nothing turned up in searches pairing the Captain and Kareem, but I did find out that a couple of Adbul-Jabbar’s contemporaries from the NBA appeared on the show: Walt Frazier and Earl the Pearl Monroe.) But what’s interesting to me isn’t that I might have made up a memory. That happens all the time to everybody. What’s interesting is that this is the third time in the last two weeks that I’ve “remembered” learning lessons from an outside source that I might very likely have learned from myself.

That is, I gave credit to someone for teaching me something that I already knew or had come to think for myself and what that someone really did was reinforce what was already at work in my head or heart.

Take the Captain’s Christianity and liberalism.

Once upon a time, if you’d asked me what made me the bleeding heart I am, I’d have cited Captain Kangaroo as an early influence. And maybe he was. But at the time I was watching the show regularly I was also learning how to be a good little Catholic and, given my parents and teachers and the nuns and priests I knew, that was part and parcel with learning to be a good little Democrat too. The Kennedys were more important to the adults around me than Archbishop Sheen or, for that matter, Pope Paul VI. (They were all still mourning John XXIII.) So it’s likely that it didn’t matter if the Captain was a liberal as much as it did that I was predisposed to find in the lessons he taught similarities to the ones I was being taught by the grownups around me.

By the way, for what it’s worth, Bob Keeshan, who was the Captain in more than just being the actor who played him, was Catholic.

So: am I remembering what the Captain was like or am I remembering what I was like?

And earlier this week I wrote about how studying Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style taught me how to write. But I knew how to write before I got to college. It’s how I got into college. From the time I was able to distinguish a participle from a predicate, I had teachers praising me regularly for how well I wrote. But not only did I have a knack, along with teaching us real science at St H’s, the nuns taught us how to write. That was a distinguishing mark of us graduates of St H’s who went to the public high school. We could craft a sentence. And by the time I went off to college I was a regular reader of The New Yorker. E.B.White’s style was already in my head. So, the question this time is: Did I learn anything new from Strunk and White or were they just reassuring me that what I already thought was the right thing to think?

As for the nuns and lay teachers at St H’s teaching us science and to be little skeptics, there’s some truth in that. And, again, if you’d asked me, I’d have said the nuns were keener on all of us going on to do well in high school and then getting into college than helping us get into heaven or, at any rate, take up a vocation. I’d have said Sister Mary Catherine would rather have heard that a former student became a doctor than that she became a nun. Well, maybe a nurse. The Sisters of the Presentation were progressive, but I’m not sure they were feminists. But I was the son of a scientist and the roots of my skepticism might have been planted at home. I was already something of a doubter before landing in Mr Schick’s sixth grade religion class. I made it clear when I took Thomas as my Confirmation name in fourth grade that I was taking it from Thomas the Apostle and not Thomas Aquinas.

So, here it is one more time: did I actually learn something new or was I was a predisposed to take away from what I was being taught lessons I’d already learned? Am I remembering my teachers or am I remembering me?

No way to know for sure, I guess, and it doesn’t matter, except as a reminder.

So much of what we believe to be true is based upon what we know we know. We read it somewhere. We heard it from someone. It’s a fact. Right? Of course it’s right and of course that makes us right.

Unless we just made it all up.

 

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Speaking of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: He’s probably one of the smartest men to ever play the game and he has talents that always went beyond what he could do on the court.  Since his retirement he’s had a multi-faceted career that includes being a writer and a public intellectual.  Lately his writing has gotten him into the news in two very serious ways and one very fun way.

Here are the two serious ones, columns he wrote for TIME:

The Police Aren’t Under Attack. Institutionalized Racism Is.

These Terrorist Attacks Are Not About Religion.

Now for the fun. Abdul-Jabbar is a Sherlock Holmes’ fan and he’s co-authored a novel about Sherlock’s older and smarter brother Mycroft. It’s due out in the fall. I can’t wait.

Photos of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1974 and Captain Kangaroo and company circa 1961 via Wikipedia.