On Meeting An ‘Illiterate’

As my daughter approaches that miraculous stage in her cognitive and intellectual development when reading independently will start to become a possibility, opening up a portal to a world whose outlines she has, with some astonishment and delight, started  to sense, I am reminded of a childhood encounter which first made clear to me the singular importance of literacy.

During my childhood, an annual visit to my grandfather’s home was a much-anticipated event. One of the indulgences that awaited us there was the opportunity to eat food cooked by my grandfather’s faithful cook, Gopal, a long-serving and dedicated worker who had, over the years, perfected his craft to a point where it surpassed my grandmother’s cooking. Now, she supervised the kitchen from a distance, and left its daily operations to him. He awoke early in his quarters adjoining the main residence, fired up the coal braziers used for food preparation, laid out his cooking implements and got to work. Tea, breakfast, lunch, evening tea, dinner–these issued from his domain effortlessly, each consumed gratefully and appreciatively by our family. An almost literal icing on the cake were his dessert treats, made for us youngsters on special request. He was supremely indulgent in this regard, ever willing to rustle up some concoction or the other which would artfully deploy sugar or jaggery in manners previously unimagined. We–my cousins and I–saw him as an avuncular figure; there was a great deal of affection and respect in our interactions.

One aspect of this affectionate interaction was a desire on the part of my brother and I to share with him–as best as we could–our lives elsewhere: on air force bases, in New Delhi. To this end, one fine morning, I excitedly called Gopal over to look at a book–borrowed for a four-week loan–from a library in New Delhi. I pointed at an illustration and the caption, which I think, had amused me to no end. Gopal laughed along with me and then, abruptly, he said, “What does it say?” I replied, “Here, take a closer look.” Back came the answer, “No, you tell me; I can’t read it.” I said, “Right, sorry, you don’t know English.” He clarified, “No, I can’t read.”

I stared at him, stunned. Gopal was, at the time, over  fifty years of age. He had just informed me that in all that time, he had never learned to read; he had never read a book, a newspaper, or  even a recipe. He had never sat down to immerse himself in a printed page; he had never traversed those spaces made accessible by reading a book. I considered myself to be possessed of an active imagination but at that moment it failed me; I could not comprehend what such a life could be like. I say this–and thought it–without any condescension; I just did not know what it was like to not read, to be possessed of so much seeming incomprehension.

At that moment, something and someone I considered familiar had become utterly strange; I realized the extent of the gulf that separated my life from Gopal’s; and the extent of my fortunes all over again.   

An Amateurish And Embarrassing Oversight

Recently, much to my dismay, I noticed that on page 2 of my book Eye on Cricket: Reflections on the Great Game there are a couple of serious problems. There, the following passages appear:

Continue reading “An Amateurish And Embarrassing Oversight”

A Day In Gaol: Protesting Andrew Cuomo’s Attack On CUNY

Yesterday I, along with many other members of the City University of New York’s faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) participated in a civil disobedience action outside the New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s office. Across the street from us, other members held a rally; they waved signs, chanted slogans and marched. We were all protesting New York State (and City’s) slow starvation of CUNY–through persistent budget cuts. (See this earlier report too.) Moreover, faculty and staff have now been without a contract for six years. Given the cost of living increases in New York City, this  means that we have been receiving pay cuts for the past six years.

We marched out as a group in rows, arms linked, and then performed a ‘die-in’ in front of the entrance to the office building. We received three warnings from the NYPD to cease and desist; following our non-compliance, we were all arrested and taken to NYPD’s central office at One Police Plaza for booking and post-arrest processing. (Thankfully, the NYPD was not over-enthusiastic about tightening their plastic hand-cuffs.) The usual tedium ensued: first, we waited in the paddy-wagon before being driven off, then on arrival we waited before disembarking. Once that had happened, we moved slowly through several stages of processing. Identity cards were collected, searches conducted, property–including shoelaces–confiscated for holding, mugshots were taken (with a twist that each arrested person ‘posed’ with his arresting officer.) This done, we were sent to a holding cell. I had been assured by my arresting officer–a Pakistani gentleman with whom I struck up a rolling conversation in Hindi-Urdu-Hindustani-Punjabi–that a new streamlined procedure was being followed and that we would be out quickly, but even then, a wait of approximately four hours was still in store.

As was the case in my previous time spent in a NYPD holding cell, conversation with my cellmates was the saving grace of what would otherwise have been an exercise in boredom. I chatted with, among others: a staff member of CUNY’s Murphy Institute who hailed from a family with four generations of union organizers;  a political theorist who analyzes conservative critiques of capitalism; a doctoral student in sociology writing on race and class in social movements; a Brooklyn College sociology professor specializing in studies of policing and police brutality. (In the paddy-wagon too and while waiting in line for processing, there had been wonderful moments of bonding and camaraderie, including the obligatory rendition of ‘Solidarity Forever.’)

Finally, the moment came, as our arresting officer called us out to pick up our property and court appearance notices (we had been charged with ‘disorderly conduct.’) After doing so, we were escorted out to the precinct gates, where we were greeted by our union colleagues, who had kindly arranged for food and snacks and had held on to our backpacks. I was underdressed as I had not anticipated the sharp drop in temperatures, so I quickly ate a sandwich and headed for the downtown Q train to take me back home. I was in bed around midnight.

The ongoing, seemingly nation-wide, assault on public education is one of the most shameful features of modern American life. It is the true negation of the American dream, a central component of which was the promise to educate, and make possible, a better life for those who could not afford it otherwise. An attack on public education is a political act; it loudly and proudly proclaims an anti-intellectual stance; it says that education is a privilege reserved for those able to pay for it. That is not what CUNY is about, and the faculty and staff here will not let the city and state administration forget it.

Note: These articles by Village Voice writer Nick Pinto—here and here–provide more useful background on what is going down at CUNY. This article in the Gotham Gazette reports some of the latest developments in the funding crisis.

Paul Ryan’s ‘Mea Culpa’ Speech: Anatomy of Political Bad Faith

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a significant subset of the demographic consisting of American liberals and progressives and centrists are among the most gullible political subjects of all: throw them a bone or two–i.e., a substantive or purely rhetorical political concession–and they’ll immediately drop previously held convictions. The visible reaction to Paul Ryan‘s recent supposedly bold and courageous speech, where he offered a critique of the degraded level of current political discourse and apologized for using the term ‘takers’ to describe anyone that wasn’t a ‘maker’–the former are welfare mooches, the poor, benefits recipients, the latter are presumably CEOs and business executives–demonstrates the truth of this claim quite impressively. For no sooner were the words out of Ryan’s mouth that he was immediately anointed as the leader the Republican Party has been waiting for–many lonely eyes were turned his way apparently–, his political courage and principles were praised, and he immediately began to look presidential.

Excuse me while I don’t kiss this guy.

Ryan did not name names. He blamed all and sundry for the degraded level of political discourse–a kind of ‘everyone seems to have lost their mind’ line that is vacuous and dishonest. For the ones engaging in the kind of speech that Ryan seems to be referring to are members of his own party, and moreover, the level of discourse on display in Republican debates is not significantly lower than the kind of language his party has been using for a very long time. (The loudness and shrillness has been amped up just a bit but the sentiments on display have been public ones for a very long time) The guilty–the ones lowering the quality so beloved of Ryan–have just not been using it against other Republicans. Their targets have been the same demographics that Ryan targeted in his ‘takers’ comment: the politically and economically disenfranchised.

As for Ryan’s apology for using the ‘takers’ line: the most expedient political strategy for Republicans, following their noticing that many of those who have begun to carry the Trump banner would have been considered ‘takers’ in Ryan’s old formulation (even as they continue to reassure themselves that their whiteness ensures they will never be considered ‘takers’) would be to stop describing them as such and to enroll their support for a ‘mainstream’ candidate. This apology is Ryan’s triangulation, it is his lame attempt to sound a more populist note in a symphony consisting of endless variations on the economic self-sufficiency theme.

I had noted a little while ago that the Republican Party would absorb this year’s political turbulence and move on. Ryan’s speech is part of that attempt; it aims to acknowledge the crassness on display, thus reassuring the Republican faithful that their own more carefully phrased ugliness remains kosher; it tries to lamely assert ownership of a populist platform. So desperate is Republican Party’s political opposition for signs of political reasonableness that it will accept this transparent dishonesty.

Fool me once etc.

Karl Jaspers On The ‘Phantom’ Public

In Man In The Modern Age (Routledge, New York, 1959), Karl Jaspers writes:

The term ‘masses’ is ambiguous….If we use the word ‘masses’ as a synonym for the ‘public,’ this denotes a group of persons mentally interlinked by their common reception of certain opinions, but a group vague in its limits and its stratification, though at times a typical historical product….The ‘public’ is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as ‘public opinion,’ a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient: ”tis here, ’tis there, ’tis gone; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift and enjoy.

These are useful–and wise–words to remember during an election season in which voters will constantly be bombarded with invocations of ‘the American people’ and ‘some say.’ The former apparently have a clearly articulated consistent opinion on every single subject under the sun whereas the latter can be reliably expected to express some intuition useful for making a rhetorical point. Candidates will employ these terms to establish their case, while forgetting that it is the results of the election that will establish–with some measure of uncertainty–of what ‘the American people’ want and what ‘some’ will ‘say’ about its predilections. There are many American peoples; they have many opinions; composites of these views are hard to determine and articulate. Even the supposedly clearly articulated group this election season–‘Trump supporters,’ ‘Clintonistas,’ ‘Berners,’ ‘Republicans,’ ‘Democrats,’ take your pick–showcases diversity in many dimensions, making facile generalizations a particularly risky business. (It may also suggest some clues to why polling goes wrong–as it did during the Michigan Democratic primary, which had Bernie Sanders losing all the way up to the day of the actual voting.)

This diversity that is found in an entity all too often supposed to be monolithic perhaps serves as adequate warning against the kind of reckless invocations of the ‘public’ and the ‘masses’ that we will see this election season. So is there no such thing as a ‘public opinion’? What are polls–the ones that tell us that forty-five percent of those polled on topic X would like to see resolution Y–informing us of then? They do, with some measure of accuracy, register and report a visible and palpable uniformity of a kind–but we would do well to remember that to poke the surface of that apparent uniformity is all too likely to introduce turbulence in a previously quiescent state. Changing the manner of phrasing the question or the time of its asking, for instance, as referendums find out all the time, can radically change the results of the poll.

Somewhere out there is the ‘public,’ the masses. No shadow is harder to identify even as it is leaned on and invoked with reckless abandon.

 

Anticipating, And Interacting With, The ‘Bright Light’ Student

On several occasions this semester, while preparing for my classes–by doing the assigned readings, naturally–I find myself experiencing that most pleasurable of sensations for a teacher: the anticipation of an invigorating classroom interaction. With a wrinkle; I have very particular students in mind. Now, in general, I look forward to my classroom encounters with my entire student body–especially if they have done the readings–but as might be expected, on occasion, exceptional students stand out from that group. They do the readings more diligently; they say insightful things about the assigned material; they seem more widely and better read than their cohort; they challenge me to think on my feet even as they do the same. As such they start to command a distinctive attention from me.

For one thing, as I read, I pay closer attention to the text, on the lookout for material that will bring forth their inquiries and objections. I wonder how I will explain this difficult passage, this tricky move, this elision, this evasion. When I teach, I like to give the material I teach the best run for its money. That task can be made harder by a student who has already thought of good defenses for the material and found them wanting. Those students do not let me slack off; they do not let me become complacent.Conversely, I also find myself anticipating–in cases where the student’s inclinations have slowly become clearer to me as the semester has worn on–moments of intellectual convergence or agreement. At those times, I know that I will hear the student hold forth and offer their views on why they agree with a particular theoretical claim; these are very often, not just mere chimings in, but substantive elaborations instead. These embroideries can change my older understandings of the material I teach.

Students of such calibre are rare, I agree. But they are not non-existent. I encounter them every semester; they would fit into any high-quality academic program anywhere. They humble me; all too often, I catch myself envying their intellectual prowess and the stations–of the mind–it has already brought them to in their careers. When I look back on my undergraduate years, I am overcome with regret at: my indiscipline and indolence, the time I wasted, the books I didn’t read, the writing I did not do. I was ignorant then, and did little in those years to dispel my ignorance. These students, the ones who challenge me, who make me work harder on the material I teach, are well ahead of me; they certainly seem far more possessed and capable than I was at a comparable age. That might not mean much in some absolute reckoning but it serves them well in these classroom reckonings with me. I respect their abilities and their visible ethic of directed inquiry; I seek to do well by them, to respect the standard they seem to articulate for our encounters.  This standard, I hope, will become mine too.

No Happy Endings To This Election Season

Barack Obama was elected US president in 2008. With approximately fifty-three percent of the popular vote and a 365-173 electoral college margin over his rival, John McCain. His party, the Democrats, commanded a 235-278 majority in the US House of Representatives, and a 57-41 majority in the US Senate. Despite this electoral and popular mandate, an obstructionist opposition, the Republican Party, aided by the results of the 2010 elections, soon made it the case that sixty votes in the Senate–a majority immune to the filibuster–became the new standard for passing legislation. From that determined standard for throwing sand in the legislative wheels to the current declaration that no Senate vote will be forthcoming on Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is a long and sometimes winding, but consistently traveled on, road. (The many actual and threatened shutdowns of the Federal government were particularly well frequented destinations on this Republican-Tea Party activist route.) That journey conveys an ominous warning for what lies ahead, even if a Democratic president were to be elected in the fall of 2016.

First, even if Donald Trump is defeated–in the most optimistic of scenarios, by a landslide of overwhelming proportions–the forces he has unleashed, that particular febrile nativism and populism, which animated by a smoldering resentment over its systematic economic disenfranchisement, targets immigrants (or non-English speakers or Jews or blacks, take your pick), are not going away any time soon. That genie is out of the bottle; it has skipped smartly several steps down the road. The next president has to deal with it; as does the nation. The most charitable view of ‘Trump supporters’ is that they are a group looking for scapegoats, turned out to pasture by policies that have sent jobs overseas and by income inequality that has shrunk their wages.  Even under that presumption, whoever becomes president has to address the populist instincts that make Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump formidable opponents to Hilary Clinton. Failing that, that same discontent will continue to roil the American political landscape, to find the ugly–and increasingly violent–forums for expression that it has during the Trump presidential campaign.

Second, were Hilary Clinton to become president, the opposition she will face will be as fierce as any that Barack Obama had to face in his term. At least in one domain, and for all the wrong reasons–sexism and misogyny being prominent ones–Hilary Clinton is a unifier, not a divider. An electoral loss to Hilary will provoke unprecedented gnashing of teeth, much wailing and rending of garments. The same reaction to her that will animate Republican vitriol during the general election season–we have most certainly not seen the worst of it–will return during a Hilary Clinton administration. It will dog her steps too, just like another version of it did Obama’s–racism in that case, sexism in hers. Without an altered political environment (including a non-gerrymandered House of Representatives), there will be little prospect of substantive legislation during Clinton’s term(s).

This election season is going to have to answer for a great deal.

 

Kathryn Schulz’s Confused Take On The Steven Avery Case

In a rather confused take on the Steven Avery case–the subject of the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer, Kathryn Schultz of the New Yorker writes:

“Making a Murderer” raises serious and credible allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the trials of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. It also implies that that misconduct was malicious. That could be true; vindictive prosecutions have happened in our justice system before and they will happen again. But the vast majority of misconduct by law enforcement is motivated not by spite but by the belief that the end justifies the means—that it is fine to play fast and loose with the facts if doing so will put a dangerous criminal behind bars.

Pardon me, but the belief that the end justifies the means, which then prompts egregiously immoral actions–like the kind so clearly on display in Making a Murderer, is spiteful and malicious; it leads to actions that trample over all and any that get in the way of the particular end being realized. In the Steven Avery case, that belief–a rule for action–is spiteful because it disregards the moral and professional standards that are supposed to govern the conduct of law enforcement activity. I don’t mean to give Schulz a little lesson in moral philosophy but acting on the basis that the end justifies the means, which can mean treating a person as not a person–you know, one deserving to be treated as innocent until guilty–is a spectacular moral failure. It treats a person–like Brendan Dassey, abused in order to produce a coerced confession–as a means to an end, the kind of moral catastrophe Kant warned against.

Moreover, given Schultz’s apparent passion for the truth and for empirical assessments of the claims of investigative journalism, what does she base such a perception of law enforcement on? It cannot be the vast literature on prosecutorial misconduct or the racist system of mass incarceration which is this nation’s greatest current moral failure. Or is she simply taking law enforcement’s claims at face value? Still, it is nice to see a journalist sticking up for the side with the power to ruin innocent people’s lives. Those folks really don’t get enough positive press.

Ricciardi and Demos instead stack the deck to support their case for Avery, and, as a result, wind up mirroring the entity that they are trying to discredit.

Schultz imagines that journalism needs to be governed by the ‘both sides are equally culpable’ rule. But that is precisely not what journalism is supposed to be about. The best journalism is always partisan, a case often made quite eloquently by Glenn Greenwald (here is the most recent instance.) Moreover, most importantly, in the Avery case, plenty of supposed evidence against him was presented–he is in jail, after all. Perhaps someone should present Avery’s side of the story and concentrate on that so that the full dimensions of the tragedy at play can be brought out–rather than have it obfuscated once again by the considerations that led to his conviction in the first place.

Schulz is confused about both the issues that are supposedly the focus of her essay: the morality of ends-justifies-means behavior and the standards governing investigative journalism.

A Seinfeldian Encounter In My Barbershop

For the past few years, I’ve had my hair cut at a local barbershop, a few blocks down from where I live. It is an old-fashioned family establishment, owned and manned by a father and son pair (Italian), backed up by a Ukranian gentleman. (A classic Brooklyn institution, to be sure.) Initially, I would get my hair cut by any member of this trio, but then, eventually, I gravitated to the Ukranian barber, who seemed to have got my preferred style–a military-flavored crew cut, with a very close cut on the sides–just right. Nothing too complicated, but still. This establishment of a ‘favored’ barber brought with it, for the first time, a certain awkwardness to my visits to the barbershop.

For on occasion, when one of the father and son pair were done with their customers, they would turn to me and indicate they were unoccupied–at which point, I would say that I was going to wait for my friend to finish with his current engagement. After the first couple of times, they stopped asking me, moving on to the next waiting customer. My preference had been indicated, and matters soon found a new equilibrium. I would walk in, stake out a spot, wave on other customers while I waited for ‘my man.’ ‘P’ is a taciturn man, and my haircutting sessions with him only included a few conversational exchanges; a few pleasantries, and then, both he and I would lapse into silence while ‘P’ went about his work, competently and efficiently. (On my left, the barber’s son cut his customers’ hair in rather more conventional style: a free-wheeling conversation about sports, family, television, music–the whole nine yards.)

Then, a few weeks ago, awkwardness returned. I was due a for a haircut–badly. Unkempt and rough around the edges, I was dying to get cleaned up. My busy schedule meant that very few times in the week would allow me to visit the barbershop. One opportunity went by after another; finally, on a Friday morning, I resolved to reduce my hirsuteness before I went to work. Haircut or bust. I walked in only to find ‘P’ missing. On asking where he was, I was reassured–by the younger owner– he would be at work soon: “he shows up around this time; grab a seat.” I did so, and opened up a book to read. The minutes ticked by; my Friday could not wait for too long. As I read, I noticed that I was the only customer waiting in the shop. Once the haircut currently underway was completed, I would have the floor to myself. A previously unthinkable option had presented itself: betraying ‘P.’

And so it came to pass. As the customer ahead of me was cleaned up, I stood up and removed my jacket. I could not wait any longer. If I was lucky, my haircut would be complete before ‘P’ walked in and caught me cheating on him.

But as the white sheet went on, and as the clippers began their work, ‘P” walked in. We exchanged pleasantries; I cringed. My treachery was now a public matter. I could only hope that while my haircut proceeded another customer would engage him and distract him. But it was not to be. Bizarrely enough, for the next twenty minutes, while I received my haircut, the barbershop remained pristinely empty, even as ‘P,’ standing by his station next to me, stared moodily–and perhaps darkly and grimly–at the street outside.

That was one long haircut. It was made even more so by the fact that my barber kept up his usual stream of friendly chatter, to which I, with guilt racking every fibre of my being, reciprocated as best as I could (the Yankees, the Mets, local schools.)

Finally, the time came. I handed over my payment, included a tip, and then, as I headed out, bade everyone goodbye. Thankfully, ‘P’ squeezed out a smile–it looked like one–for me. So did the beaming young man who had just cut my hair.

I have no idea who is going to cut my hair the next time I walk through the doors of my barbershop. Stay tuned. I’m rough around the edges again.

GK Chesterton On Conservatism’s Necessary Changes

In Orthodoxy (Image Books, 1959) G. K. Chesterton writes:

Conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of changes. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must always be painting it again….Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. [pp. 15]

Wikipedia makes note in its entry on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, in the section on his most famous work, The Leopard that:

Perhaps the most memorable line in the book is spoken by Don Fabrizio’s nephew, Tancredi, urging unsuccessfully that Don Fabrizio abandon his allegiance to the disintegrating Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and ally himself with Giuseppe Garibaldi and the House of Savoy: “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

Indeed. And that conservative adage, as expressed above by Chesterton and Tancredi, has been quite vividly on display this election season. The ‘conservative’ party’s leading candidate for president is a decidedly unorthodox one who threatens to upend the hierarchy of the party’s leadership and is leading a revolt against the ‘establishment;’ riots are threatened if his march to the candidacy is interfered with by the party leadership; he is most definitely not reading from some prepared party script. That same conservative party has no interest in abiding by its constitutional responsibility to vote on the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice by the sitting president–a responsibility adequately established by historical, legal, political precedent. Should this be confusing to those thinking the Republican Party is a conservative party? Not really.

As I noted in my review of Lee Fang‘s The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right: 

The modern Republican Party supposedly suffers from ideological confusion. It is for the regulation of gay marriage and reproductive rights; it is against the regulation of industrial pollution, healthcare insurance, and workplace safety. It is for the reduced power of the executive branch, except when it comes to spying on Americans and declaring war. It is for the religious freedom of Christian evangelicals but not Muslim Americans. These seemingly disparate platforms actually display a coherent unity: the American Right is committed to preserving all hierarchy and imposed order: men over women, white over black, rich over poor, bosses over workers, Christian majorities over Muslim minorities. This love of hierarchy, of entrenched power, is manifest in the most visible face of opposition to the Obama Presidency: the Tea Party and the new crop of Republican representatives it has sent to Congress.

The Trump candidacy is a classic conservative candidacy: it seeks massive, sweeping changes precisely so that crucial hierarchies–like the ones made note of above–will be preserved. Populism to prop up hierarchy: that’s conservatism at its finest. (These thoughts have been expressed far more eloquently by Corey Robin in his The Reactionary Mind.)

Note: The GK Chesterton quote above is cited in Garry Wills‘ Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders pp. 143.