Gov. Sanford's Affair

This letter appeared today in the Washington Post

Friday, June 26, 2009

I am a gay man. My partner lives 12 time zones away. We are in a monogamous relationship, and we do not cheat. We get to see each other only twice a year for less than three weeks. Although he is a professional in marketing, the United States will not let him immigrate because he was not picked in the lottery. The federal government would not recognize our relationship if I married him. The government will not allow us to be together.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford ["S.C. Gov. Sanford Admits to an Affair," front page, June 25] and Sen. John Ensign (and former House speaker Newt Gingrich and senator Larry Craig) oppose same-sex marriages even as they do their best to destroy the institution of marriage in the United States.

I pay my taxes. I served in the military. I was an Eagle Scout. In short, I am a good, but second-class, citizen. It's very hard not to be infuriated by the double standards.

WILLIAM McCOLL

Washington

I dreamed that Conan O'Brien died. Everyone was supposed to gather in a public square for a special announcement.

I'm a little hesitant to say so, but I think "Year One" is fricking hilarious. I realized I liked it because it recalled--very much--the "Carry On" movies I was crazy about as a kid. A totally non-hip movie, too. Everyone in it has found their inner borscht belt comic and does shtick (and how often these days do you see a movie where you have to be Jewish to get some of the jokes?), and Oliver Platt should get an Oscar for creating the kind of evil gay character you're supposed to be appalled by. Jack Black and Michael Cera have Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis chemistry; I hope they do a whole series of stupid comic romps through various historical periods. Then they should fuck all the Sex and the City women, make a comic version of Cloverfield, and retire after they finish their brilliant satire of The Wrestler with Michael Cera in the Marisa Tomei role.

From J. R. Coetzee's review of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, Volume 1: 1929-1940

A dictum he quotes from his favorite philosopher, the second-generation Cartesian Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669), suggests his overall stance toward the political: ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis, which may be glossed: Don't invest hope or longing in an arena where you have no power.

*

One of the more unexpected of his literary enthusiasms is for Samuel Johnson. Struck by the "mad terrified face" in the portrait by James Barry, he comes up in 1936 with the idea of turning the story of Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale into a stage play. It is not the great pontificator of Boswell's Life who engages him, as the letters make clear, but the man who struggled all his life against indolence and the black dog of depression.

I don't know why this should be unexpected--I can't think of a better match-up to an earlier writer for Beckett. There's something Beckett-y about Rasselas and maybe London, and of course there is a fascination with paring-away rather than adding to language in Johnson; he sabotages himself in his less successful work by getting carried away with his command of English.
Now I wonder if I hadn't come across Beckett's idea long before I got the notion of having Frank Barber narrate the story of Johnson and Hester Thrale.

* "I . . . seem never to have had the least faculty or disposition for the supernatural."

*

. . . one can venture to say that psychoanalysis of the kind that Beckett underwent with Bion--what one might call a proto-Kleinian analysis--was an important passage in his life, not so much because it relieved (or appears to have relieved) his crippling symptoms or because it helped (or appears to have helped) him to break with his mother, but because it confronted him in the person of an interlocutor or interrogator or antagonist in many ways his intellectual equal, with a new model of thinking and an unfamiliar mode of dialogue. Specifically, Bion challenged Beckett--whose devotion to the Cartesians shows how much he had invested in the notion of a private, inviolable, non-physical realm--to re-evaluate the priority he gave to pure thought. . . . In the psychic menagerie of Bion and Klein, Beckett may also have found hints for the protohuman organisms, the worms and bodiless heads in pots, that populate his various underworlds. Bion seems to have empathized with the need felt by creative personalities of Beckett's type to regress to prerational darkness and chaos as a preliminary to an act of creation.

This is something I'm going to want to return to a LOT. It seems like the Key to Everything--especially transcending the assumptions about character in realism in favor of something "protohuman." Oddly enough, this reminds me of Bert States' comments on dreams.

*

His guide here is Cezanne, who came to see the natural landscape as "unpproachably alien," an "unintelligible arrangement of atoms," and had the wisdom not to intrude himself into its alienness. . . . Cezanne has a sense of his own incommensurability not only with the landscape but--on the evidence of his self-portraits--with "the life . . .. operative in himself." Herewith the first authentic note of Beckett's mature, post-humanist phase is struck.

In case any of you boys are thinking of moving to another US city.

From Randall Jarrell's essays on Auden

Another of Auden's virtues is his great capacity for growth or change--he is as incapable as a chameleon of keeping the same surface for any great length of time. It is rather queer and pathetic to mention as a virtue this capacity for change, in the case of a man who changed away from his best poetry, got steadily worse, for many years, but he has begun to get better again, and is not laid away in that real graveyard of poets, My Own Style, going on like a repeating decimal until the day someone drives a stake through his heart.

Quoted by Charles Rosen in NYRB, Nov 20 08

Why "desire"? Why not "hunger"?

Everyone in the world needs to see this

Why the best stuff on TV never actually gets broadcast

The Destructive Center

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 8, 2009

What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished.

Even if the original Obama plan — around $800 billion in stimulus, with a substantial fraction of that total given over to ineffective tax cuts — had been enacted, it wouldn’t have been enough to fill the looming hole in the U.S. economy, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will amount to $2.9 trillion over the next three years.

Yet the centrists did their best to make the plan weaker and worse.

One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the “flip your house to your brother” provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering.

But how did this happen? I blame President Obama’s belief that he can transcend the partisan divide — a belief that warped his economic strategy.

After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

Mr. Obama’s postpartisan yearnings may also explain why he didn’t do something crucially important: speak forcefully about how government spending can help support the economy. Instead, he let conservatives define the debate, waiting until late last week before finally saying what needed to be said — that increasing spending is the whole point of the plan.

And Mr. Obama got nothing in return for his bipartisan outreach. Not one Republican voted for the House version of the stimulus plan, which was, by the way, better focused than the original administration proposal.

In the Senate, Republicans inveighed against “pork” — although the wasteful spending they claimed to have identified (much of it was fully justified) was a trivial share of the bill’s total. And they decried the bill’s cost — even as 36 out of 41 Republican senators voted to replace the Obama plan with $3 trillion, that’s right, $3 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.

So Mr. Obama was reduced to bargaining for the votes of those centrists. And the centrists, predictably, extracted a pound of flesh — not, as far as anyone can tell, based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo. They probably would have demanded that $100 billion or so be cut from anything Mr. Obama proposed; by coming in with such a low initial bid, the president guaranteed that the final deal would be much too small.

Such are the perils of negotiating with yourself.

Now, House and Senate negotiators have to reconcile their versions of the stimulus, and it’s possible that the final bill will undo the centrists’ worst. And Mr. Obama may be able to come back for a second round. But this was his best chance to get decisive action, and it fell short.

So has Mr. Obama learned from this experience? Early indications aren’t good.

For rather than acknowledge the failure of his political strategy and the damage to his economic strategy, the president tried to put a postpartisan happy face on the whole thing. “Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands,” he declared on Saturday, and “the scale and scope of this plan is right.”

No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t.