Obama Remaking America?

From another note I sent to Kay (we do talk, by the way - it’s just that I get the need to rant when I’m reading the internet; I’ve been fairly restrained in sending stuff to her for most of our marriage, but this election is worrying me). Again, not tons of time to research, but this is up for a sample of my thoughts:

Remember the claim I made that Obama would try to change America fundamentally? This quotation, though edited for length by someone else (and I’ve not checked the original source yet) seems to support what I’m saying. The poll numbers have been narrowing again (though possibly not enough), because Americans don’t like explicit re-distribution [and Obama has been more open about his tendencies in that direction]. What Obama sees as a “fundamental flaw” most of us see as its glory - we don’t have others who think they know better than us telling us what to do with the fruits of our labor. When the Church says, “give to the poor,” they don’t back it up with an army and force it upon us, but the government does. When the Church says, “give to the poor,” they don’t get more votes from those they’ve benefitted with someone else’s confiscated monies, but the politicians do. (That’s the benefit of the Church being a dictatorship of sorts.) The debate between socialists like Obama and the rest of us is not to do with greed vs. generosity, but liberty vs. freedom. When the Church says, “give to the poor,” they mean that I have to, [but] morally. When the government says, “give to the poor,” they mean that I have to, or else, and that, in addition, they’ll decide who the poor are and how, whether, and how much they deserve the largesse from my pocket. What else is a confiscation of my monies for another but a chance for the powerful to buy popularity at little cost to themselves?

Here’s the quote, indirect source below:

“But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. … And one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was — because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. … The Constitution reflected an enormous blind spot in this culture that carries on until this day. … The Framers had that same blind spot … the fundamental flaw of this country.”

http://www.creators.com/opinion/tony-blankley.html

I wasn’t going to originally post that, but it seemed to connect to a really effective post by John Hood, over at The Corner. I want to just post the whole thing, but I’ll simply summarize and post part of it. Then go and read it. Hood riffs on Obama’s line that McCain would call him a Communist if he were to share his toys in kindergarten, explaining that Obama’s gag shows he doesn’t even understand what Communism is. Hood’s points have been stated many times, but Hood states them clearly and with elegance, using Obama’s inadvertently-provided analogy to great effect. Here is Hood’s explanation of collectivism:

Collectivism in all its forms is about taking away your choice. Whether you wish to or not, the government compels you to surrender the toy, which it then redistributes to someone that government officials deem to be a more worthy owner. It won’t even be someone you could ever know, in most cases. That’s what makes the political philosophy unjust (by stripping you of control over yourself and the fruits of your labor) as well as counterproductive (by failing to give the recipient sufficient incentive to learn and work hard so he can earn his own toys in the future).

Government is not charity. It is not persuasion, or cooperation, or sharing. Government is a fist, a shove, a gun. Obama either doesn’t understand this, or doesn’t want voters to understand it.

Nicely said. Looks like my poor wife is going to get another e-mail.

Thoughts on Marlowe's Edward II

My goodness am I exhausted. Up till one last night, slept till four, got grades in only twenty-five minutes late. Slept only about an hour the night before. The wife wants to know how it is I’m still standing. So, naturally, what do we do? We go to see a play. Marlowe’s Edward II was playing tonight at the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, put on by the Hypocrites, a local group that I don’t think I’ve seen before.

The play itself is good, but it seems to me like I’ve seen it before. Richard II Redux, it seemed to be, to me. Could have called it Run, Richard, Run too. An effeminate young king enriches his favorites, ignores his wife, is deposed, and dies, horribly. The main difference is that Edward is far less sympathetic. He is grotesquely, and grossly, obsessed with his lover. The Hypocrites, to my distaste, played up the visuals of this relationship, and the whimpering effeteness of Edward’s character, but, unless they were putting words on Marlowe’s page, there is plenty of textual evidence to support the sexual nature of the relationship. Edward’s behavior to his wife is unkind and cruel: he evinces kindness only when she helps him restore his lover to him, and thus exchanges her literal for a resurrected metaphorical exile. And his attitude toward the kingship is childish and selfish. While the throne is a source of gifts for his toy, he revels in it, but when his funds are depleted and his toy taken – in part because Edward has deprived himself of the funds with which to pay to protect the pretty noble – he has no interest in the position, except as a tool with which to have his way again in the future.

The other main difference is the language. I can’t do a textual analysis here for you, and I’ve never read in-depth on the possibility of Marlowe being Shakespeare, but I know now that Marlowe didn’t write Shakespeare. He couldn’t have. The language of the play I heard tonight is not the language of many plays I have seen and read by Shakespeare. I’m too tired to be precise, but the lines just didn’t seem to have the … length of the lines of Shakespeare. To be undoubtedly more clichéd, they didn’t have the same majesty. I didn’t feel sorry for Edward, but I did for Richard II. That’s ’cause Richard could talk.

The play was put on in the same space as was the CST’s Rose Rage of a few years ago, and its … ugh. I can’t do any more. I’m too tired. Let me just list a few points, mostly made by the beautiful Kay:

This bloody and inventive staging of Edward II was
effective but owed much to Rose Rage, it seemed, at
least in its charnel-house motifs – perhaps they both
owe a lot to horror films, though that’s speculation of
the moment.

Like in their staging of The Three Penny Opera a few
weeks ago, the Hypocrites played this show as well at
an extremely high pitch that allowed for little in the
way of modulation. My point: The quiet moments
near the end were not nearly as successful as the
quiet moments of Richard II are – this seemed to be
due at least in part to the choices made by the
company.

Kay mentioned she was surprised that the Defiant
Theatre, a now defunct but once long-running
local group, never got their hands on Edward II, a
play of excesses.

The choice of the actor who played the king’s lover
to play the king’s executioner was more than apt; if
you don’t know why, research how Edward is
rumored to have died, and you’ll see.

My point: The extreme gayness of the main
character was distracting and came off as childish.
Edward spoke in that hyperbolically whiny vibrato
typical of television clothing designers, and
flounced or pouted at every available moment. We
wouldn’t put up with that behavior from
kindergartners, and it was effective in denuding this
king of even the faint hints of glory that might have
made us pity him.

Ok, I’m done. Pardon the mistakes. By the way, don’t pity me too much on the hours. They’re self-inflicted. Teaching is a lot of work, but I’m not getting things done all day long then having to work all night. When I slip on the ice, ’tis by my own weight that I fall.

From a Letter to Kay

This letter originally began with a list of taxation stats, reportedly from the IRS website (no, I haven’t checked – just vet my numbers yourselves – I’ve spent too much time writing this when grades are due next week). But I got them from a newsletter my dad forwards to me, and I’m not supposed to forward it to anyone else, so I’ll just leave the one number in that’s in the body of the paragraph, except to say that the bottom 50% pay around 3% of our taxes. Comparatively overtaxed they are not.

Anyway, here begins the letter, without indentation, both because Blogger’s indentation is ridiculously edit-intensive if one wants it to look other than plain stupid, and because the letter constitutes is the rest of the post. The letter, except for the now-missing list, was never sent to my wife (listening to U2 tunes on the computer two rooms over – probably watching the videos on YouTube, if I know her, and I do); I figured she can just read it here, if she wants to:

The demonization the rich have undergone in this country is mind-boggling. All you have to make, to be part of the so-called “super-rich,” the fabled 1%, is under $370,000 a year. Now granted, that’s awfully nice, but it’s not Gossip Girl country. When I grew up, my dad made in the $100k to $150k range, probably not that far different from the one-percenters at the bottom of that bracket today. Our life was very nice, but it wasn’t blowing people out of the water. We had three bedrooms in a safe, attractive suburb with good schools; we had one TV; we had one car; we did our own yard work; our most expensive pieces of art were chalk portraits of the kids and a few ivory pieces bought by my dad while on business in Singapore; we drove a series of station wagons (we did have a 1929 Model A parked in the garage, doing nothing; it sold for $10,000 in the mid- to late-nineties); we traveled by car and second-class plane, and our hotels ranged from Motel 6 to Holiday Inn.

The family business almost failed a few times in turbulent market conditions, and might have done so had it not been for the money my dad’s brother had made in the markets and plowed back into the company. Had his brother been soaked by the government because he owed it to the nation, because it was “patriotic” to give (cf. Joe Biden – who’s never shown any evidence of checking the voluntary giving box that appears on all our tax returns), he would not have been able to risk his savings on the business, the business might not have survived, and 10, 20, 50 people (not sure how many were employed at the time) would have lost their jobs, and a family-owned and -operated company that employed over 200 by the mid-2000’s would have ceased to exist. We maybe weren’t in the top 1%, but we were probably in the top 5%, or at the very least the top 10%, and my grandfather, father, and uncle were living productive lives, giving employment to people who needed and benefitted from the jobs run by honest, responsible men, and giving a service to investors and farmers who benefitted from working with honest, responsible men.

It has historically been, for fifty years, the contention of your [Kay’s] party [the Democrats], and increasingly seems to be the contention of mine, that the rich are to blame for the ills of this country, when in fact it is in the greatest proportions the rich, and the just-barely-rich, who grow up and raise their own children responsibly, who make the investments, who take the financial risks, who do hard work, and who pay the vast majority of this country’s way in the world, providing for infrastructure and defense and nation-building and the UN and vast quantities of charity at tsunami time. It’s nice that Obama wants to give money to the bottom 95%, but should the top 5% really be paying more than 60% of this nation’s vast yearly expenditure? Should the bottom 50% be given more money – in cash payments from the government – than they contribute in total? Isn’t it obvious how this is electoral pandering, a statement to the effect of, “I, the President of this United States and Commander in Chief of this nation’s Armed Forces, will use the police power of this state to transfer the money earned by a portion of the nation that does not have large numbers of voters to a portion of the nation that did not earn the money, but who will be so grateful for it that they will use their large number of voters to vote for me”? It’s bribery, pure and simple, and it’s not sustainable. Because when the government demands and demands and demands, the citizen does three things: he ceases working, he starts lying, and he moves away. At a certain point, those who get nothing in return for their work cease working, those who are not dealt with honestly will not be honest in return, and those who are not appreciated where they are go somewhere else.

The point is not that Joe the Plumber does not now make $250,000 (“The liar!” they gasp.); the point is that Joe is motivated to run a business making $250,000 – else why risk his savings and put in all that work? – but finds it not worth his trouble when the majority of that bounty goes to someone else who deems himself a better judge of where that money should go. Who knows whether Joe wants to build a beautiful church or gamble it all away? Does Joe even know yet? Does it matter politically? Is Obama’s opinion that the poor of Chicago need better public housing, for instance, inherently right? Does he know what those poor have been up to? Did they do their homework? Did they show up for the school play? Did they make it to every practice? Did they listen to their parents? Did they avoid drugs and alcohol and crime? Did they apply to college? Did they go to class in college? Did they show up for their first jobs on time and do good work? How can Obama, or any other of them, discern from their raptor’s perches in Washington how Joe’s money should be spent better than he can, other than on indisputable necessities like the national defense?

Since Marx, success has been deemed a mark of perfidy. And when Obama is called a socialist or worse, it’s because he exhibits that mindset. He bears the mark of socialism, of the idea that the center can better decide what to do with the output of my labor and your labor and our neighbor’s labor than you and I and our neighbor can.

Outside

Outside, all is grey. It is a strange fall day, too warm to be Autumn, but too grey for Summer. Green leaves are still on the trees. The wind is nonexistent. Our half-dead hanging plant sways, its pink flowers translucent in the morning light amidst the brown branches of its less hearty cousin in the same pot, but the trees are almost motionless. No squirrels or cats creep about; no birds cluck or chatter or sing. The neighbors are all abed or at work. Even the roar of the nearby trains seems to be silenced, and when it does come is muted, remote. Only just now is a pipe at work, somewhere in our building, briefly. The outside might as well be in. Walls seem built around the world, the doors locked, the owners away. Dust cloths cover the houses and the sunlight shines dull and grey through the dirty windows.

Thoughts on Chekov’s “The Fiancée”

I’m supposed to be grading wretched summer papers right now (yes, summer papers), but tomorrow I have off, and I will undoubtedly get scads, just scads, of work done then, so for now I play. I also have a short Tolkien essay I’m working on, but again, for now I put it off, primarily because I think it might end up being somewhat publishable, and would like to actually do a good job on it. So instead I will write on an author I hardly know, having read few of his stories, and none in their original language.

Nadya is the protagonist, and Anton Chekov’s “The Fiancée” begins with her engaged to be married. She is possessed of an ennui or misery that seems so typically literary to one of our day, but which was probably so shocking in Chekov’s, and the boil of her misery is prodded by her friend and distant cousin Sasha (short, in some mysteriously Russian way, for Alexander Timofeyevich). The story takes on Communism and the idle rich, spiritualism and the Orthodox Church, tubercular Romantics, self-satisfied young bourgeois, crotchety old women, and old romantic novels. None of these targets seem to escape unscathed, as is seen in this quotation, by the tubercular Sasha:

The only interesting people are the educated and
idealistic, they’re the ones we need. The more there are of
these people, the quicker God’s kingdom will come on
earth – agreed? Very gradually, not one stone of your
town will be left on another, everything will be turned
upside down, everything will change as if by magic. And
then there will be magnificent, huge houses, wonderful
gardens, splendid fountains, remarkable people. But
that’s not the most important part of it. The main thing
is, the mob, as we know it, as it exists now – that evil
will be no more, since every man will have something to
believe in, everyone will know what the purpose of his
life is and no one will seek support from the masses.
My dear, darling girl, get away from here! Show
everyone that you’re sick of this vegetating, dull,
shameless existence! At least show yourself! (23)

The fascinating thing about this passage is that it’s not spoken by a Marxist; it seems almost to be spoken by an evangelical, though one that places his faith in learning that is not exclusively religious. Sasha believes at the least that some approximation of heaven can be built upon earth, but disavows any worship of the mob as it is. Only when the mob is educated can this heaven be built. The line about living off the masses seems to have a doubled edge, aimed at both Nadya’s fiancé Andrey – a churchman’s son – and a demanding, grasping proletariat. The latter are dismissed in the line itself: the “evil” that is the mob will be no more, as all will have “something to believe in,” a “purpose,” and will cease to try to live off “the masses.” The former eagerly, almost comically, cops to Sasha’s criticism of his laziness, saying, “he’s absolutely right! I never do a thing, I just can’t!” (26).

What is unclear to me is what the story advocates. Is it worship of the self, or of the artist? Is it intellectualism? Sasha, we are told, was, at one point previous to the beginning of the story, a student at the Komissarov School, later went to the Fine Arts Institute, and stayed there for fifteen years, “just managing in the end to qualify in architecture” (18). Afterwards he works “for a firm of lithographers in Moscow” (18). Is he an artist or no? Architects straddle the line between useful and decorative, and lithographers … well, I’m not sure I remember what lithographers are (I’ve not fired up the Internet yet, as the wireless is finicky and the Internet distracting), but I’ve got an image of Sasha working for a company churning out magazine illustrations and Currier and Ives greeting cards. There’s nothing wrong with either, but neither really says artiste.

In the end, it seems that Sasha, at least, advocates solid middle-class usefulness, what with his inveighing against both the mob and the idle. But there are a few inconvenient details: his dilatory course of schooling was paid for by Nadya’s grandmother, a woman he criticizes for the conditions in which her servants live: “early this morning I popped into the kitchen and four of the servants were asleep on the bare floor. They don’t have beds; instead of bedding all they have is rags, stench, bugs, cockroaches” (18). He is apparently free to spend months on end away from his job, saying in June, while visiting Nadya’s home, “‘I may well stay until September’” (18). What’s more, Sasha’s lifestyle is positively bohemian. He wears “a buttoned-up frock coat and shabby canvas trousers that were ragged at the bottoms. His shirt had not been ironed and on the whole he looked somewhat grubby” (18). His living quarters in Moscow are worse. His room is described as:

full of the smell of stale tobacco, and with saliva stains.
On the table, next to a cold samovar, lay a broken plate
and a piece of dark paper. Both table and floor were
covered with dead flies. Everything showed what a
slipshod existence Sasha led – he was living any old
how, with a profound contempt for creature comforts (31).

Finally, he dies in the end of tuberculosis, the classic disease of the impractical Romantic – surely by 1903 this was settled symbolism? Sasha seems not to epitomize middle class respectability, bohemian revolution, nihilism, monasticism, or even, we shall see, intellectualism.

Nadya, only one of Sasha’s protégés, it seems, goes away to study. It never becomes clear what she studies, so it is hard to say whether one should regard her as an artist or something else. Her studies seem only to ironically confirm Sasha’s prediction: “Drastically alter your way of life and then everything else will change too. The most important thing is to make a completely fresh start, the rest doesn’t matter” (29-30). The primary change seems to be that Sasha is diminished in her eyes. As the tuberculosis weakens him, her experience in St. Petersburg diminishes him. “She wept,” we are told, “because Sasha did not seem as abreast of things, as intellectual, as interesting as last year” (32). This assessment of Sasha is unsurprising, given how emptily optimistic his advice to Nadya was.

Beyond this, Nadya seems as empty as Sasha. She comes back to a quiet home. No one has died, but the family, since Nadya’s repulse of Andrey, has lost their “position in society, reputation, the right to entertain guests” (33). The town is as meaningless to her as it had become before she left. “She saw,” we are told, “how her whole past had been torn away, had vanished as if burnt and the ashes scattered in the wind” (35). So she looks to the future, in words that, fifteen years after the story was published, would begin to take on an eerie, inexact prescience:

Oh, if only that bright new life would come quickly, then
one could face one’s destiny boldly, cheerful and free in
the knowledge that one was right! That life would come,
sooner or later. Surely the time would come when not a
trace would remain of Grandmother’s house, where four
servants were forced to live in one filthy basement room
– it would be forgotten, erased from the memory” (34).

Boy would it ever be. Is it possible that Nadya will, fifteen years after the story ends, find herself a professorial den mother to a pack of murdering Bolsheviks, that Sasha will turn out to have been some John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness of Moscow the advent of a salvific bureaucracy of intellectuals?

The back of the Penguin edition I own speaks of the story’s “high note of optimism.” I have no doubt that the back cover blurb writer either knows what he’s talking about or is getting directions from one who does, but even if we reject the notion that Chekov was some sort of ironical prophet in that passage, there is still the last paragraph of the story: “She went upstairs to pack and next morning said goodbye to her family. In a lively, cheerful mood she left that town – for ever, so she thought” (35).

“So she thought.” There seems to be some menace there. There is at the very least the possibility that she is wrong, that her “vague and mysterious” future will not turn out so “new, full and rich” in the end (35).

Works Cited

Chekov, Anton. “The Fiancée.” “The Fiance” and Other Stories. Trans.
          Ronald Wilks. New York: Viking Penguin, 1986.