Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

How close and how rational

If you have a limited amount of money and effort available for your presidential campaign, you don't want to spend more in a state than you have to. The rules of the electoral college give all a state's delegates to the candidate with the most votes. Once a candidate is confident that he will win 50.1% of the vote, therefore, it's in his interest to begin to taper off his spending. He should start to divert his money to some other state, where he's polling 49.9% or less.

Because of the fog of war, no candidate can knows for sure where he stands, and so no one would obey the 50.1%-rational-interest rule strictly. But as polling becomes more accurate and as ad purchasing becomes more sophisticated, one would expect the 50.1% rule to become more visible.

In other words, the hair's-breadth finish of Florida 2000 might not be an anomaly. It might be a presage of the future. Barring reform of the electoral college, we should, perhaps, expect more and more swing states to be as close as polling and strategic advertising can make them.

On the couch

My favorite moment in Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives is the following aside, which takes place during her interview with an analyst who seems at first to be forbidding:

The door of Eissler's consultation room suddenly opened and a large dog walked in. He came over and sniffed me in a friendly but unintrusive way, and then trotted over to the analytic couch, jumped up on it, pawed at the blanket that lay folded at the foot until it looked like an unmade bed, and lay down and went to sleep.

Some reverse engineering

Why is Bush doing so well when his record is so poor? Maybe it has something to do with psychology and storylines.

The Bush team promised in the spring that they would "define" Kerry early in the race. And they have. Their accusation that he flip-flops has been effective. Note that Bush hasn't personally called Kerry a liar. Only someone who is for all intents and purposes anonymous can make that charge about a public figure. When you call someone a liar in private life, you are announcing that you will have nothing more to do with him. When you call someone a liar in public life---well, really, the next thing you're supposed to do is make an appointment to meet at dawn in Weehawken. Since for the last century and half, such appointments have not been possible, a faint tinge of cowardice lingers over any major figure who accuses another of lying. Since you don't risk death, it isn't a gentlemanly thing to say.

To call someone a flip-flopper, on the other hand, does not besmirch his honor yet is directly relevant to his leadership ability. In other words, a succesful definition of the opponent has to sound mild.

The flip-flopping charge also stakes out an important binary. (Here we shall play at being Levi-Strauss and parse the myths into their elements accordingly.)

Kerry Bush
weak strong

As a subsidiary, it further establishes:

Kerry Bush
intellectual, intelligent straightforward, simple-minded

It chagrins intellectuals to think that Bush prospers by not being one, but it's the case. One of the most appealing things about him is what you might call his Prince Hal storyline. He never won a Rhodes scholarship, succeeded at business, or earned a Purple Heart. To a Painite or an egalitarian, this is an outrage. But it isn't to most people. It means that there is nothing about Bush to envy except what is beyond his control: his birth and his personality. You are free to identify with his victories without feeling any need to reproach yourself for not having worked as hard as he did or contributed as much as he did. He drank away his youth, and look where he is now. Born under the right constellation, anyone could be him.

There is something hollow about this storyline. It depends for sustenance on continual ascent. And as soon as he becomes king, Prince Hal invades another country on a slight pretext. He is nonetheless a hero. His story is stirring. To take it in the best light, it suggests that there is a potential greatness in everyone, no matter how poor the choices they have made in the past. The audience forgives Hal even the cruelty of his disavowal of his youthful drinking partners. They are willing to see the disavowal as a sign of maturity, even though it is hard to reconcile the harshness of it with the bantering charm that Hal showed earlier in the play.

It will not win Democrats any percentage points, therefore, to suggest that Bush is not intellectual and was born to privilege, or to prove that when young he indulged in debauchery and shirked his duties. All those things are true of Prince Hal, yet he remains beloved. The Prince Hal storyline will be dislodged not by criticism but by a stronger storyline.

Here are some more binaries that Kerry could still lay claim to:

Kerry Bush
prudent reckless
thorough impulsive
concerned insouciant
open to communication sealed off
flexible closed-minded
sincere hypocritical
dutiful opportunistic
respectful mocking

But it won't do to paint Kerry as nurturing and communicative, because these traits might easily be conflated with weakness. And to call Bush a hypocrite is too much like calling him a liar; worse, it has a little color of emotionality, which might seem less than virile. Looking over the list, however, it does seem that a style of manhood is what's at stake. Kerry has taken lately to calling Bush "wrong," but this reinforces the notion that Bush is secure in his decisions. What if the criticism were phrased more gently, less as a matter of personal virtue than of leadership qualities?

Kerry Bush
mature immature

To pull it off, you'd have to find a turn of phrase for Bush's immaturity that was as vernacular and as negative in connotation as "flip-flopping."

West's Democracy Matters

My review of Cornel West's Democracy Matters appears in the New York Times Book Review of 12 September 2004.

The Paradoxical Response

Somewhere in Gravity's Rainbow, in an attempt either to explain or to further mystify the correlation between the hero's erections and the firing of German rockets, Thomas Pynchon presents a lesser-known finding of Pavlov's called the paradoxical response (or maybe it's called the zero effect; I can't find the page).

Pavlov, as everyone knows, is the fellow who discovered the dogs will learn to salivate when they hear bells, if the bells are accompanied for a while by steaks. Pynchon consulted Pavlov's published results and discovered that his findings were actually somewhat stranger than the steak-bell link that everyone remembers. Apparently, once dogs have been taught to salivate to bells, their salivary response will increase if the dogs aren't rewarded by steaks consistently. Intrigued, Pavlov pushed his experiment further. He continued to ring bells in the absence of steaks. And he discovered something he called the paradoxical response (or zero effect): If dogs have been trained to associate bells with steaks, and then pass through a long period of hearing bells without steaks, their responsiveness will for a long time attenuate, as one would expect. But then it will suddenly, inexplicably spike upward, in defiance of the laws of operant conditioning.

Eons ago, when I was an bright-eyed undergraduate, I actually found this paper of Pavlov's in the college library, just to establish that Pynchon hadn't made it up. It's there. Whether or not it's a result that can be experimentally reproduced is beyond the scope of this blog. But it popped into my head this morning as I was trying to understand why I have become so anxious about the news.

Not long after the last "orange alert," the New York Times published a timeline, showing when Ashcroft had called for alerts in the last few years and when terrorists had actually struck. There was no correlation. And yet one doesn't cease to be anxious. In fact, you could say that the lack of correlation is the worst thing about it.

My anxiety about terrorist attacks is now fused with my anxiety that Bush will be reelected, because it is clear that he has squandered the political capital that could have been used for an effective response. I think I'm near to overload, and we don't even have a television. I can't say any more whether I want or don't want to read, say, "Bush's Lost Year," James Fallow's umpteen-thousand-word essay in The Atlantic about all the counterterrorism activities that Bush neglected by choosing to go to war in Iraq. It isn't up to me. It arrived in the mail yesterday, and it has sentences like these:

...among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. Except for those in government and in the opinion industries whose job it is to defend the Administration's record, they tend to see America's response to 9/11 as a catastrophe. I have sat through arguments among soldiers and scholars about whether the invasion of Iraq should be considered the worst strategic error in American history---or only the worst since Vietnam. . . .

"Are we better off in basic security than before we invaded Iraq?" asks Jeffrey Record, a professor of strategy at the Air War College and the author of the recent Dark Victory, a book about the Iraq War. "The answer is no. An unnecessary war has consumed American Army and other ground resources, to the point where we have nothing left in the cupboard for another contingency---for instance, should the North Koreans decide that with the Americans completely absorbed in Iraq, now is the time to do something."

So it had to be read, though it didn't exactly bring consolation.

Hard Cider Republicans

So the Republicans have dug up compassionate conservatism and injected it with the green reanimator fluid, and it lurches about, frightening children and confusing voters.

This, too, has a historical precedent. You will be reading along, minding your own literary business, in the oeuvre of a minor Transcendentalist---Orestes A. Brownson, say. And you will stumble across a passage like this:

The partizans of the Banks count on certain victory. The Banks discount freely to build "log cabins," to purchase "hard cider," and to defray the expense of manufacturing enthusiasm for a cause which is at war with the interests of the people. That they will succeed, we do not for one moment believe; but that they could maintain the struggle so long . . . proves but all too well the power of the Banks, and their fatal influence on the political action of the community.

Now you know that in 1840 Brownson was still a utopian radical and not yet a neoconservative Roman Catholic, and you know that the lefty party of the day, the Democrats, was tearing down the Bank of the United States under the leadership of Andrew Jackson's successor Martin Van Buren. And you know that, despite what latter-day Hamiltonophiles would have you believe, the Bank was not the equivalent of our Federal Reserve, which pace William Greider is relatively innocuous, but rather a much more formidable institution---as if the Federal Reserve, Halliburton, and Citibank were combined in a single corporation.

But what's all this about hard cider and log cabins?

Hard cider and log cabins were the cornerstone of the 1840 presidential campaign that elected William Henry Harrison. The Whigs were the party of the socioeconomic elite. They were the heirs of Hamilton's Federalist party, insofar as the Federalists had any heirs (in America, parties of the socioeconomic elite have a habit of going extinct). To win the presidency, the Whigs had chosen a general, Harrison, who didn't look like a man of the elite. On the contrary, so great was the disparity between his plain personal style and the social class whose interests he served, that the Democrats made a terrible mistake: They made fun of him.

"A Baltimore paper observed loftily that Harrison would be entirely happy on his backwoods farm if he had a pension, a log cabin and a barrel of hard cider," explains Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in The Age of Jackson (290). It was a gift to the Whig party. At rallies across the country, Whigs handed out hard cider and built replicas of log cabins. Harrison himself, born a Virginia grandee, was instructed to keep quiet, and he was sold to voters as a man who shared the masses' homely tastes.

America's intellectuals were stunned. Cheap newspapers had spread rapidly in the previous decade, and they had no doubt assumed that political acumen would spread with them. Instead the newspapers had made a new kind of mass deception possible. It had not occurred to the intellectuals that in an era of burgeoning journalism, a candidate could run on an image that almost perfectly misrepresented his political principles. It certainly never occurred to them that such a candidate could win. But he did. (Harrison died in office, however, and his vice president was, in fact, a moderate, so little damage was done.)

It's ironic, therefore, that They Might Be Giants have recorded a cover of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" for the CD packaged with The Future Dictionary of America, a book published by McSweeney's as a fundraiser "to benefit progressive causes in the 2004 elections." Fond as I am of TMBG, McSweeney's, and all things antebellum, I can't love the song. Tippecanoe was the site of Harrison's best-known military victory and it became his moniker, and the chorus's "Van, Van, the used-up man" is Martin Van Buren, who brought America's workers the right to a workday no more than ten hours long and would later become a leader of the Free Soil Party. For more than a decade the Whigs had smeared Van Buren, making him out to be a politician of Clintonian slipperiness, and 1840 was the climax of their slander. (Cultural historian Constance Rourke reports a representative joke at Van Buren's expense: One morning, President Andrew Jackson's bedroom window was found open, and

a discussion ensued among his friends, who decided that a thief had come and gone that way. To test the possibility a long ladder was placed against the wall, and several of the gentlemen mounted, but were unable to reach the top. Van Buren [then Jackson's vice president] almost reached it, then descended. 'He turned right round to the Gineral [i.e., Jackson] calm as moonshine, and says he, "Gineral, it wouldn't prove anything if I should get up to the window and I guess we may as well let it alone." ' " [American Humor, 23])

"Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" is a piece of populist propaganda, designed for conservative ends. It's an early instance of the same faux folksiness audible in Bush's boasts about his poor English, Texas swagger, and blunt speaking. On the bright side, if there is one, the disillusionment of 1840 was one of the forces that drove the Transcendentalists to retreat from politics in order to rethink the relation between ideals and the words that expressed them.

Against nicety in the popular cause

According to the front page of the New York Times, Republicans have said the word "Kerry" in the first three days of their convention more than twice as many times as Democrats said the word "Bush" in the first three days of theirs. In his speech accepting the nomination, Kerry called for restraint from ad hominem attack, but Cheney's speech last night crescendoed into and spent itself in Kerry-bashing.

It's asymmetric warfare, and it isn't new. William Hazlitt explained the nature of it in his 1820 essay, "On the Spirit of Partisanship."

Conservatives and liberals play the game of politics differently, Hazlitt wrote, because they have different motivations. Liberals are motivated by principles and tend to believe that personal honor can be spared in political combat. They may, in fact, become vain about their highmindedness. Hazlitt condemns the mildness as a mistake, both in moral reasoning and in political strategy. "They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse."

The conservatives, on the other hand, start with a personal interest in the conflict. Not wishing to lose their hold on power, they are fiercer. "We"---i.e., the liberals, or the "popular cause," in Hazlitt's terminology---"stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons.

They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will; they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters of mankind or to be hurled from high---

"To grinning scorn a sacrifice,
And endless infamy!"

They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all that makes for them; if they pause it is to gain time; if they offer terms it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand upon mere ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of inquiry, and douce humanit…. Their object is to destroy you, your object is to spare them---to treat them according to your own fancied dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition and a practical interest.

It is not fair play, and Hazlitt thinks that liberals who decline to fight fire with fire are fools. "It might as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate and make reprisal on the common enemies of mankind in their own style and mode of execution."

Innocence vs. experience

Pedro the Lion's song "Penetration" begins

Have you ever seen an idealist with gray hairs on his head?

which reminds me of the passage in Emerson's lecture "The Transcendentalist" where he says

Talk with a seaman of the hazards to life in his profession, and he will ask you, "Where are the old sailors? do you not see that all are young men?" And we, on this sea of human thought, in like manner inquire, Where are the old idealists?

which reminds me, in turn, of late Melville. Yesterday, on the electronic discussion group ISHMAIL, the scholar Peter Norberg traced the origin of the motto that Melville is said to have kept pasted to his desk at the end of his life,

Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.

It comes from a discussion of Schiller's play Don Carlos in Madame de Stael's Germany. Stael reports a favor that one character asks of another, and then adds an observation of her own:

"Remind him," he says, "when he shall be of riper years,---remind him that he ought to have respect for the dreams of his youth." In fact, as we advance in life, prudence gains too much upon all our other virtues; it seems as if all warmth of soul were merely folly . . .

After work today, I walked down to the library at 42nd Street, digital camera in pocket, to watch the anarchists rally. On Fifth Avenue, I happened to fall in with them, and I eavesdropped. A young woman asked the young man with a crewcut carrying their furled banner to slow down, because someone in back couldn't keep up. "You're six foot one," she said, "and for every step you take, she has to take, like, four." He wanted to arrive on time; she accused him of insensitivity. "We're all adults here," he defended himself.

I went partly out of curiosity, partly out of remorse at having been out of town during the proper protest on Sunday. Even in my youth---especially in my youth---I wasn't much of an anarchist. (For the record, that's understatement.) And I am more or less constitutionally incapable of joining in chants.

Still, it was a spectacle, which I feel conflicted about having fed. Over at n+1, Marco Roth has written, perceptively, that "When you find democracy entertaining, you know you're a little off the right track---because it suggests you've become a spectator of yourself as a participant---similar to watching yourself have sex." And the photograph that I wanted to take, but which the stutteriness of digital technology more or less defeated, was of the cameras nearly outnumbering the anarchists, surrounding their little bubble of human messiness like the black, lunar probe-shaped viruses that circled a cell and then punctured its membrane in the diagram in my high school biology textbook.

A line of police kept the protesters from returning to the front steps of the library, and the protesters seemed unable to decide whether to turn their backs to the police or to address them. Where was the fourth wall? It didn't matter; the cameras were everywhere. The protesters shouted, "The whole world is watching," but the warning wasn't necessary. The police themselves were videotaping.

Will it hurt the Kerry campaign? The anarchists looked very much like middle America expects them to: tattoos, head scarves, sleeveless T-shirts. After the leader announced a march to Seventh Avenue, there was confusion, and I overheard a credential-wearing photojournalist mutter, "So fucking stupid." The professionals, in other words, were not impressed.

And there wasn't a lot of forethought on display. The protesters chose an extremely narrow gate for their exit. The police allowed them and the audience to file out. Then the police unrolled a ribbon of orange mesh and began to charge down the 42nd street sidewalk to clear it. If you haven't experienced this, it's sort of civil disobedience meets musical chairs. If the police finish "wrapping" a section of the sidewalk and you're on the inside of the wrapper when they're done, you're arrested. In the one round of the game that I stayed to watch, it was not that hard to escape; maybe it isn't meant to be. The police seemed mostly to catch photojournalists---players who were disadvantaged, no doubt, by not having looked up from their viewfinders.

I slipped forward along the walkway hidden by hedges that skirts the library's north side and debouches at the Bryant Street Cafe. There a middle-aged woman rose, drink in hand, to accost a parks employee. "I hear the anarchists have organized a protest on the internet, but how can they do that?" she asked. "If they're anarchists, how can they organize anything?" She seemed to feel she'd hit on a real stumper.

"They didn't," the parks employee answered.

That's about as much as I witnessed. I think I'm supposed to be more chagrined by the silliness than I am. I see the Times is already calling the incident at the library a "brawl." The word implies an evenhanded situation, as if the protesters resisted or fought back. They didn't, from what I observed. They were trying their best to look angry and nonconformist, and their enemies will be happy to see them that way. But it was difficult, in person, not to notice that they were also well-intentioned and hapless---young and imprudent. They seemed full of life.