v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Fed by Unreality

Fortunate enough to have taken a couple of years of literary courses on Borges given by Alicia Borinsky back in the 70's at Hopkins. She instilled in me a love for Borges' erudite fiction and understated humor. Reading recently an analysis of the famed “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” , a story on misinformation and conspiracy written 80 years ago, I googled for the massive book by Bioy Casares on Borges (2006), which appears not yet to be translated, and came up with this nice article on Borges and Bioy's love of crime fiction in Crime Reads:

As the authors cited by Borges suggest, the crime fiction he and Bioy Casares preferred were complex tales of detection. After kicking off the series with Nicholas Blake’s The Beast Must Die, they followed up with novels by John Dickson Carr, Michael Innes, and Anthony Gilbert. Borges and Bioy Casares had a predilection for British mystery writers, and from 1945 to 1955, when they ran The Seventh Circle, the majority of books they selected were from Britain. They did make exceptions—titles by James M. Cain, Vera Caspary, and Margaret Millar—but what the pair most wanted to display to Argentinian readers were confounding puzzles and whodunnits with clues, narratives where disorder hides behind the scrim of respectability and brutality squares off against the cerebral.

They had, under the name H. Bustos Domecq, collaborated on a detective story collection before creating The Seventh Circle. This book was Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (Seis problemas para don Isidro Parodi), published in 1942. Inspired by sedentary sleuths like Baroness Orczy’s The Old Man in the Corner and Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados, Parodi is an armchair detective taken to an absurd degree. He’s a man who has been imprisoned for a murder (wrongly), and who solves crimes from a jail cell. Famous in Buenos Aires for his mental abilities, he receives visitors in his cell, and while he smokes cigarettes, brusque and aloof in his manner, they present “the mystery that troubles them.” On their second visit, they hear the solution, “which astounds young and old alike.” Through a tongue in cheek forward written by a fictional critic about Domecq, Borges and Bioy Casares lay out their purpose and method. The critic states that “an Argentine hero has made his appearance in a purely Argentine setting. What an uncommon pleasure it is…to savor a detective story which does not obey the rigid rules of a foreign Anglo-Saxon market.”

In actuality, the six stories are exaggerated versions of Anglo-Saxon detective fiction, working as both parodies and genuine mysteries. The “Nights of Goliadkin” features a phony priest calling himself Father Brown and takes place on a sleeper train filled with ridiculous, secret-laden passengers. “The God of the Bulls” has an impossible crime taking place on an isolated estate, but this being Argentina, the estate is on the pampas and a prime suspect is a man obsessed with gauchos. “Tai An’s Long Search” is narrated by a Chinese man, whose extreme humbleness and amiability seem to mock a stereotype in part reinforced by the Charlie Chan novels. Borges and Bioy Casares wrote stories that entertain in Don Parodi, but at the same time, to a certain extent, they deconstruct a genre they love.

The stories also illuminate Argentina in the early 1940’s. The tail end of what became known as the “Infamous Decade,” this was a period, before the rise of Juan Perón, marked by fraudulent elections and corruption. Though not known as political writers, Borges and Bioy Casares do present a great deal of social commentary in the book, integrated into the convoluted plots. “A satire on the Argentine,” is how Borges, in his “Autobiographical Essay,” describes it, and what a barbed picture the book gives. Starting with the verbose fictional critic, Gervasio Montenegro, who writes the collection’s forward, pomposity and falsehood are everywhere. Class divisions cause problems, families implode because of rivalries and cruelty, there’s a large divide between rural people and urban, and everybody seems to be commenting on the foreign roots of other people, though Argentina is a nation of immigrants. Not a single person who comes to Don Parodi with a story uses language in a direct manner; voice after voice he listens to is florid and deceptive. His logic cuts through all the pretension, and when he speaks, he is concise and clear. In a world of the self-serving, of dupes and schemers, Parodi stands for intellectual honesty. That he is in prison, and for a crime he didn’t commit, emphasizes the topsy-turvy quality of the world he inhabits.

Four years later, Bioy Casares collaborated on a second mystery, this one a novel. Written with his wife, Silvina Ocampo, Where There’s Love, There’s Hate (Los que aman, Odian) came out in 1946 from Seventh Circle. It would be one of the few Spanish language works the imprint published.

 

Looks Like a Good Book

Matthew Specktor writes in Paris Review from his new Book:

Frank Perry. The name came back to me as that of one of those fabled “New Hollywood” auteurs, albeit one whose career, like my mother’s, had never quite achieved its optimal shape. After a striking commercial success with 1970’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, adapted from Sue Kaufman’s bestseller, there was … not much, a series of lower-key flops and then 1981’s legendarily risible Mommie Dearest, whose most famously absurd line (“No wiiiire haanngerrrs!”) my own mother too had enjoyed mimicking when she was in her cups. My mom’s failure had been decidedly her own: to write her single produced Hollywood feature she’d crossed a picket line and her subsequent blackballing from the Writers Guild of America rendered her unemployable. Still, there is a sense in which ruptured movie careers are all alike.

One afternoon, I found myself at the Iliad Bookshop in the Valley where chance intervened. I was browsing the aisles, lost in the shop’s yellow blur of whirring fans, torpid cats, and parchment smells, when a book fell into my hand. I may have been reaching for something else, but the book I grabbed by mistake was Blue Pages, by one Eleanor Perry. It had a bone white cover, with a bubbled, seventies-style typeface. There were no blurbs, only a taut excerpt on the back that told me a story about divorce. It looked like one of those books that had lived on my parents’ shelves when I was a boy, like Judy Blume’s Wifey or John Irving’s The 158-Pound Marriage: one of those chronicles of mid-70’s conjugal torpor that seemed to bloom on every suburban shelf. I found this consoling. What better way to shake off one’s own postmarital despair than by reading about the incompetence of the previous generation? I tucked the book under my arm, then went to ring it up. It wasn’t until I got home that I noticed the bio on the dust flap: “Eleanor Perry is an acclaimed Hollywood screenwriter whose credits include … Diary of a Mad Housewife.” A bit of googling revealed what I immediately suspected: that Frank Perry had worked with a collaborator. The director may have stood out front, as Hollywood auteurs and Hollywood husbands were so often then wont to do, but every movie the director made in his young career’s prime—six films in all—was scripted by his wife. Or rather, from the looks of the novel I’d just brought home, his ex-wife.

Vincent and Lucia Wade are the names of the couple depicted in Blue Pages, a male director and a female screenwriter, the woman much older than the man, the man announcing in the book’s opening scene that he no longer loves the woman. It’s a familiar enough scenario: my father had once left my mother that same way, and my ex, me, likewise. But as Perry began to describe how the screenwriter, Lucia, fell in love with Vincent, I found myself charmed by her depiction of an animated, overweight man who looked like Balzac (“with his plumped-out cheeks and rolls of chin and shaggy hair and beard”), and by Lucia’s cool, gimlet intelligence.

Further googling confirmed some biographical correspondence between Lucia and her creator (as well as the fact Frank Perry, too, looked like Balzac). Like Eleanor herself, I discovered, the younger Lucia has been married once before, to a conventional-sounding man in Cleveland; like Eleanor herself, younger Lucia has a thriving life as a New York playwright just as young Vincent, like Frank, works as a theatrical producer’s assistant. Lucia has no real need for a love affair, for this puppyish importunate man, even as she rides alongside him in a taxi uptown, thinking of her childhood, her mother’s disappointing preparations of strawberries and cream: “She is almost a middle-aged woman, neither good nor bad, who doesn’t believe in God, her father and mother have long ago waged their wars and parted, and too many times these days the strawberries taste like damp cardboard.” Reading these lines, homely but intimate, concrete in a way that feels somehow specific to the writer’s own experience, I felt myself touch down in the person of Eleanor Perry. I found myself moved by their modesty, by their specificity and simplicity alike, and by the plainness with which they gaze at loss.

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Looted Materials

 

From the LARB, a review of the book Loot written by Barnaby Phillips:

Without diminishing the scale of research here, it is important to state outright that the graft and barbarism of the British Empire is not news to us Africans. Any novelty ascribed to Loot derives from a long history of dismissing African memory as ahistorical. The call for the return of African cultural objects is also not a recent development. Half a century ago, my uncle Nii Kwate Owoo made a film, You Hide Me, shot in the basement of the British Museum, revealing the travesty of so many looted objects from Africa just sitting in crates at European museums. He also described the industry of Western “experts” that formed around colonial theft — with historians, curators, ethnographers, art critics, and vendors all making careers as specialists in African plunder.

What Loot achieves with skill is to embed facts about the individual journeys of the Benin Bronzes in compelling narratives, tracing the lives of the British officers who looted the palace of the Oba. They kept choice objects for themselves while reserving a respectable haul for queen and country. Quirky revelations uncover the callous nature of British officials. African soldiers in their retinues were given a quarter ration of water on long treks. Lieutenant Vernon Haggard wrote a letter to his father, in which he gleefully states that one can whack the carriers “as much as you please.” And there is an occasion where journalist Raymond Blathwayt recounts the consul-general of the Niger Coast Protectorate Ralph Moor dining with friends while a man condemned to death was chained to a pillar beneath them. In the morning, the man is executed and his body thrown into the bush “to teach these people a lesson.”

The persistent disregard for Africans delegitimizes any humanitarian claims that the British later used to justify their invasion of Benin. The number of Edo people killed by the indiscriminate use of Maxim guns, explosives, and rocket missiles in the attack on Benin City alone probably accounted for more lost lives than any executions at the Oba’s command over decades. Even worse, after Benin City had fallen, the British carried on burning villages in their quest to capture the monarch, with no regard for the lives and livelihood of the Edo people.

Paradoxically, what is reaffirmed in Loot is the clear commercial end for which the British were prepared to kill in astounding numbers. As 1892 Consul-General Major Claude MacDonald explained, “minerals, gum Arabic, gum copal, palm oil, kernels, etc.” were available in large quantities in Benin’s territory, and, crucially, in preparing to invade Benin City, they had estimated that “sufficient Ivory may be found in the King’s house to pay the expenses in removing the King from his stool.”

The high valuation placed on this invasion might seem like a precursor to the prices that the Benin Bronzes command on the world art market, but I don’t believe so. Some resisted the African provenance of these masterpieces, with one British visitor speculating that “it is probably the Portuguese were the founders of [the] nation,” and the Manchester Courier newspaper asking “experienced travellers” to help “solve the problem of the origin and meaning of the Benin Bronzes.” Ascribing the origins of art for which the likes did not exist in Europe was the height of delusional, imperial arrogance, but it passed for wisdom in a chauvinistic quest.

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Taming of the New World

 

From The Guardian, a review of the most excellent and profound film Zama by Lucrecia Martel:

orror and despair hover just out of the frame, or below the surface, or behind the curtain, of Lucrecia Martel’s mysterious and dreamlike movie Zama. It’s a film that returns Martel to her themes of guilt, sex and shame – her first picture, in fact, since the enigmatic The Headless Woman 10 years ago. But Zama, with its eerie andante tempo and period setting, gives her ideas a new exalted platform, a new theatrical and formal grandeur.

It’s the story of Diego de Zama, an 18th-century administrator in the service of imperial Spain, whose courageous exploits in battle long ago won him a sinecure as a magistrate in the brutally remote outpost of what is now Asunción, on the Paraguay River. Now he waits endlessly, frantically, desperately for news of the more glamorous and prestigious posting he once assumed would quickly follow and that would reunite him with his wife and children, left behind years before in Buenos Aires.

Zama is played by Daniel Giménez Cacho with a perplexed hauteur, like a caged eagle. He is utterly alone, with a mediocre stipend, and nothing to do but cultivate a gloomy sexual fascination with the local women and capricious white aristocratic ladies of his own circle; his sexual brooding is a kind of anaesthetic for the panic that would otherwise overwhelm him. Zama must also participate – jadedly, diffidently – in the official duties of state violence and racism: enforcing the enslavement of the indigenous peoples. As an Americano – that is, someone born in the Americas and not Spain – Zama suspects that he himself is regarded as a second-rater in the service. Is this why he has been forgotten, left behind in this burning swamp? He doesn’t know, and has no way of finding out.

Zama is played by Daniel Giménez Cacho with a perplexed hauteur, like a caged eagle. He is utterly alone, with a mediocre stipend, and nothing to do but cultivate a gloomy sexual fascination with the local women and capricious white aristocratic ladies of his own circle; his sexual brooding is a kind of anaesthetic for the panic that would otherwise overwhelm him. Zama must also participate – jadedly, diffidently – in the official duties of state violence and racism: enforcing the enslavement of the indigenous peoples. As an Americano – that is, someone born in the Americas and not Spain – Zama suspects that he himself is regarded as a second-rater in the service. Is this why he has been forgotten, left behind in this burning swamp? He doesn’t know, and has no way of finding out.It’s a waking nightmare that is part existential paralysis, part erotic reverie. Martel has adapted the 1956 novel by the Argentinian author Antonio di Benedetto, who has been rediscovered in the English-speaking world since Esther Allen published her translation for the NYRB Classics edition in 2000, with a fascinating introduction wondering whether the book’s languorous evocation of official cruelty foreshadowed Di Benedetto’s own imprisonment and torture at the hands of the Argentinian junta 20 years later, in the 70s.

Reunions

From a letter by writer Lucia Berlin to  The Dorns:

How lovely it was that Race brought me home—that “Sandy” came home. We are having a vacation and a rest and a honeymoon. Walk down Main St. and through these crazy flowers and grass all over—look thru boxes in the attic—with books and photos and poems by Race and have dinner in dining room with flowers and candles and butter plates and Mark picked corn from a corn field and washed it and ate it. (He is out of his HEAD!) Went to see cousin Andy and his wife Esther and Dorns, these people are TOO much— they work so hard and so easily and mulch (I love that word) and sow and reap and can and prune and graft and darn and bake and plant all their food and everything is so cyclical and ORDERED and NICE—they are all nice—with this crazy wit and an INTEREST in things, everything, and a joy from the views they see every day. I am meeting everyone. They take me in. I don’t mean they approve or accept or like me, altho they do, I think, but they take me into their War and Peace scene, to their cradles in the attic, and Jeff sleeping in Grandma Proctor’s crib that was Bobby’s crib too and it’s so nice and terrifying. I’ve never known a family.

I keep thinking of the last family reunion my family had, the children of my grandfather in El Paso and of Mamie, his wife, with big tears in her eyes as she held his coffee cup by the sides while he sat down so he could quick grab it by the handle and drink it down boiling.

That reunion was on Christmas and aside from being a house full of about 30 people there were these things happening. Most of all everyone there was wishing for my aunt to die. She and my uncle had been so bloody happy and in love and fine, all their life, but then she got very sick—really in agony—pain all the time. It was like a reverse Dorian Grey how her body began to destroy her with self-pity and fear and how she began to destroy everyone else. That Christmas Dr. Holt was there, who somehow illegally kept my aunt on cocaine and himself in terrible remorse and horror. My uncle who loved her and watched her and cried at night. Her children who hated her for making my uncle’s life so horrible. Her mother, who prayed, was crazy, and who my aunt wouldn’t let out of her room not even to eat, only twice a day to go to the bathroom. I was there and it was 2 weeks before my divorce was final and my parents were leaving in 3 weeks. Rex Kipp was there and he is a rich rancher and he and my uncle are best friends. A few days before, he and my uncle had split in a plane and everybody thought they had just gone to get drunk but I found out later they had been preparing for a Santa Claus thing in Mexico where during the night they went to this poor village and put seed and beans and meal and toys and clothes at all the doors. Which is a pretty repulsive Texan thing to do but not really if you think of two drunk millionaires putting around in a plane trying like hell to think of something nice to do, anything nice to do, with their money on Christmas.

Anyway, on Christmas Eve it was cold and there were several things going on—two factions—the drunk ones giving each other deep freezers and TV sets and telling jokes and the religious ones singing the Lord’s Prayer and some people cooking hams and turkeys. Poker games and people riding up on new Palominos and everybody had some personal scene— awful violent Faulkner scene going—aside from Christmas Eve, but it was Christmas Eve and my aunt said, “You want me to die, OK, I will,” and climbed onto a roof with only a bathrobe on and lay down and it snowed, in El Paso.

There is a crazy thing about my family. If you’re going thru a room and meet anyone going thru or sitting, you stop and you touch them, or you contact them—you affirm something—even if often it’s some bitter angry thing.

So I can’t understand these truly positive people—honest people. Here is the negative portion of my letter and this is what I meant, Edw., when I said I was afraid. I am afraid because I can’t make this scene, this nice, so really GOOD HONEST POSITIVE SCENE—where nobody weeps or screams or curses or hugs or fucks up or despairs or desires or kids themselves or dreams. Like the Newtons, truly so kind and they love Sandy (Race), very much—but when they saw him they said, “Why, hello Sanford!” But no weeping. When cousin Andy came back from the war half-dead, after horrible time, his father shook his hand. “Hello, Andrew.” Nobody is CORNY here.

And so corniness ultimately unimportant and superficial— the dependability and strength of love is here. Ah. But once when I was very little I dug Frost and “Stopping by Woods” and then I read “The Death of the Hired Man” and there is a line there that says (more or less) “Home is where, if you haven’t anywhere else to go, they have to take you in.”

I wish I had my damn typewriter—I want to write—which is crazy. I suddenly have 100s of things to write—but anyway the second day we were in Little Falls, in that lovely place, THE WELL RAN DRY! No water! First time in 60 years.

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Advice from Poe

 

Great advice from Edgar Allan Poe on writing:

• Employ an unreliable narrator, preferably one who doesn't know he is insane and has no recollection of such events as digging into a grave to rip out the teeth of his recently departed lover.
• Include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin, preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment.
• Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A little Latin will also enhance the text.
• Do not shy away from such grotesqueries as inebriation, imprisonment, insanity, and men costumed as orangutans being burned to death.

Disfunctional Congress

 

From NYRB Michael Tomasky writes about KillSwitch, Adam Jentleson's book about the filabuster:

Adam Jentleson’s Kill Switch is the most exquisitely timed book I’ve encountered in years. Jentleson’s explanation of the filibuster’s ignominious roots, and of the mendacious arguments made today by its defenders, is careful and thorough and exacting. Every senator should be forced to read it and then reread it.

If they did, they would know that the notion of “unlimited debate”—the claim that the Senate is a special institution because it accommodates endless discussion of legislation—is a lie. They would know that the idea that the Senate was somehow designed to defend the rights of the minority is also a lie, and a particularly pernicious one, as the filibuster was invented by John C. Calhoun to uphold slavery and white supremacy. They would know how the Senate, sometimes by unhappy accident and sometimes by the malevolent design of those who exploited its rules, has become the graveyard of progressive legislation.

Jentleson, a former aide to Democratic senator Harry Reid, begins Kill Switch by emphasizing that the Founders were opponents of supermajorities, precisely because they gave a minority the power of a majority. In today’s Senate, the “cloture” procedure, which ends debate and calls for a final-passage vote, requires sixty votes, which in essence means that forty-one senators can block legislation. Jentleson demonstrates that, with very few exceptions, “whenever proposals for supermajority thresholds were raised at the [constitutional] convention they were summarily dismissed.” James Madison, the father of the Constitution and its leading theorist, was a firm opponent of minority rule from 1787 (the year of the convention) until his death. “To establish a positive and permanent rule giving such a power, to such a minority, over such a majority,” he wrote, “would overturn the first principle of free government, and in practice necessarily overturn the government itself.”

Originally, the Senate had a rule, called the “previous question” rule, that held that after sufficient debate, the president of the Senate could decide to force a vote. It was the precursor to today’s cloture vote—the crucial difference being that a simple majority could then call the question. By design, debate in the Senate was allowed to carry on, but with firm limits. Five of the original nineteen Senate rules placed limits on debate. And a certain decorum obtained such that senators—gentlemen all, in those days—agreed when it seemed about time to vote. So in 1806, in an effort to clear away some rules that were thought unnecessary, the Senate ended the previous question motion.

With this stroke, there was no way to cut off debate—but no one really exploited this change until Calhoun, representing South Carolina, did so in 1841. His opposition was to a bank bill, though the fight, as Jentleson notes, “was really about slavery” and the southern planters’ fear that a national bank would erode the power of the slave states. Calhoun organized the southern senators to speak and speak and speak, hoping to run out the clock until a scheduled summer adjournment. Henry Clay of Kentucky moved to restore the previous question rule, and Calhoun, in Jentleson’s words, “erupted. He invoked the loftiest of principles to cast Clay as a tyrant, and himself as the oppressed minority guarding Senate tradition.” The bank bill ultimately passed, but the filibuster, even though it had no name yet, was born. After an (also unsuccessful) 1848 filibuster against a bill banning slavery in the Oregon territory, Calhoun wrote a treatise making an unapologetic case for minority rule, all in the name of defending slavery and white supremacy.

Throughout the nineteenth century, senators occasionally attempted reform. One fateful Friday in 1891, the powerful senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island left work thinking that he had the votes to restore the previous question rule. But his opponents—again, chiefly racist southerners—spent the weekend organizing, and Aldrich’s motion failed by one vote. Another pivotal moment came in 1917, when President Woodrow Wilson, in the waning days of the Sixty-Fourth Congress, sought a bill to arm American merchant ships. This time it was progressives who filibustered, led by Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette, running out the clock on the session. This inspired Wilson’s famous remark that “a little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.” It led the Senate to pass Rule 22, a formal procedure through which to end filibusters. However, whereas the old previous question motion could be invoked by a simple majority, the 1917 Senate decided that all debate could be ended by a two-thirds majority (reduced in 1975 to the three fifths of today). Ironically, a majority of the committee that wrote Rule 22 wanted the threshold to be a simple majority, but they compromised with the minority.

The more recent villain of the story is master of Senate rules Richard Russell of Georgia, like Calhoun an avowed white supremacist. In 1949 Russell fought an attempt by President Harry Truman’s administration to pass an anti–poll tax bill by expanding and strengthening Rule 22 and making it almost impossible to change. Russell, Jentleson writes, “had not just won a skirmish over an obscure rule, he had chosen the Senate’s future.”

The filibuster had chiefly been used to block civil rights legislation. But once the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, something odd and important happened. The filibuster lost much of its stigma as a tool of white supremacy. Jentleson quotes the CBS News reporter Roger Mudd, who passed away on March 9: “The filibuster began to lose its mystique, and without its mystique it slowly became just another run-of-the-mill legislative tactic of delay, no longer the exclusive weapon of the South.” As a result of other rule changes, senators no longer had to execute a real, “talking” filibuster. Now the mere threat is enough, and it can be made by Senate aides: “All you have to do,” writes Jentleson, “is call the cloakroom, tell them the senator you work for intends to place a hold on the bill, and the bill is filibustered.”

How Republicans Destroyed the Senate

From an Ezra Klein interview with Adam Jentleson who has recently written “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy,” :

Ezra: Senator Mitt Romney’s child allowance plan is the kind of proposal where you could really imagine Democrats and Republicans working together. But, to my knowledge, not one Republican senator has some out and supported it.

I think this is a way the 60-vote threshold impedes bipartisanship. It seems plausible to me that there are bills out there that could get, say, 43 Democrats and nine Republicans and pass with a simple majority. But you can’t pass a bill like that under a 60-vote threshold.

Adam: This is one of the biggest misconceptions about the filibuster: the idea that it promotes bipartisanship. In fact, it does the opposite because it gives the party that’s out of power the means, motive and opportunity to block the party that’s in power from getting anything done. And when the party that’s in power doesn’t get anything done — when voters see nothing but gridlock from Washington — they turn to the party that’s out of power and try to put them back in office.

Republicans are well poised to take back majorities in both the House and Senate — all they need is a handful of seats to do so. So they have every rational, political incentive to block Biden from achieving any victories. A program that would cut child poverty massively would be a huge victory for Biden. And the ability for Biden to pass it on a bipartisan basis would be a huge victory for his campaign promise to restore bipartisanship and unity.

Republicans collectively don’t want to see President Biden standing at a signing ceremony with Mitt Romney, signing a bill that is going to massively slash child poverty. That’s not good for their political interests and their desire to take back their majority in the 2022 midterms. So you have [Marco] Rubio and [Mike] Lee and all these others who supposedly care about this issue coming out and shooting it down right away.

The irony here is that the framers saw this coming and they identified this misperception about supermajority thresholds in 1789. The reason they saw it was that they had just finished having direct firsthand experience with the Articles of Confederation, which did require a supermajority threshold for most major categories of legislation.

In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton addresses this misperception head-on. He says, “What at first sight might seem a remedy,” referring to a supermajority threshold, “is in reality a poison.” You might think it would cause compromise, but really what it does is it provides an irresistible temptation for the party that’s out of power to make the party in power look bad.

So you think, oh, 60 votes. Well, there’s 50 Democrats; that means they have to get 10 Republicans, so that’s going to force bipartisanship. But really what it does is give Republicans the ability to make Democrats look bad at all times. And in a polarized environment, that’s the rational political choice.

Ezra: I think this is a very important and very subtle point. When I came to Washington, the dominant view was bipartisanship is something the minority wants and the majority has to be incentivized to offer them. And in reality, it is the precise reverse. Bipartisanship is something the majority wants and the minority does not have an incentive to give them.

This is something, I think, that Mitch McConnell understood, frankly, better than any Senate leader before him. He understood that he could win the majority back by sabotaging the majority’s ability to govern. And that was an important strategic insight.

Adam: Yes. And he had the high-risk tolerance necessary to run the experiment. When Obama came into office, he was riding a 67 percent approval rating — the highest since J.F.K. Democrats had made massive gains in the House and Senate for two straight cycles, and the general wisdom was that if Republicans wanted to avoid extinction as a party they should cooperate with this massively popular president and his giant majorities.

So it took a real bold insight on McConnell’s part to defy all of the conventional wisdom and say no, we are going to oppose him at every turn. And what McConnell did was prove that blame for gridlock ends up being directed toward the party in power. I remember being there and trying to mount communications campaigns to lay the blame at Republicans’ feet. But people just don’t want to hear it. It sounds like excuses.

And then they have this massive success in the 2010 midterms, gaining upward of 50 seats in the House and seven seats in the Senate. So there’s just really no question that his experiment worked and proved that obstruction in our current polarized environment is a successful political strategy for the party that’s out of power.

Ezra: This is something I always want liberals to understand better about Mitch McConnell: He is not a unique evil genius. He is simply somebody who correctly understands the incentives of the system that we have set up

Imagine you work in an office and you don’t like your boss or what your boss is working on. And, importantly, for your boss to finish his project, he needs your help. If you don’t help him, he won’t finish his project and you may become the boss. And if you do help him, he will finish his project and you may lose your job. And even if you don’t lose your job, all your friends are going to be mad at you. So what do you do? I think the answer is pretty obvious: You wouldn’t help your boss.

But with Congress we expect minority players to overwhelm their own self-interest because of tradition or something.

Adam: I think that’s an extremely accurate way of looking at it. And then you add on to it that you have basically a massive cheering section cheering you on to oppose your boss and throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at you and providing you with unlimited resources to run ads against your boss and do everything you can to obstruct them.

You have structural factors encouraging you to do it. You have donors demanding that you do it. You have your base demanding that you do it. So it’s not taking the initiative to act this way. In many ways, it’s just going with the flow that is already carrying you in that direction of obstruction and legislative sabotage.

The Reality of Maintenace

 

A review of The Innovation Delusion at LARB, coming from this industry to a degree I hear what is being said:

Innovation-speak is not the same thing as innovation or creativity. Indeed, Vinsel and Russell, professors at Virginia Tech and SUNY Polytechnic respectively, have lots of respect for creativity, work, and ingenuity. But they argue that just as technology has the power to shape our lives, language has the power to shape our thoughts, and the Valley has used both with ruthless effect. Innovation-speak allows us to acquire the power of Imperial Rome while insisting on its fundamental innocence. It lets us declare with absolute certainty that disruption is inevitable, unavoidable, and for the long-run benefit of humankind (and, incidentally, our short-term gain). It makes us winningly bashful about all the attention we get, and the influence a few of us have over billions of others. And it helps us sustain a childlike wonder at the trillions of dollars that keep pouring onto our balance sheets, which almost (but not quite) distract us from our mission of Bringing The World Together, or whatever.

Yet all is not well. People keep complaining that we’re invading their privacy, leaking their data, giving their jobs to robots, addicting their children to screens, and letting their elections and democracies be subverted. (We also still haven’t delivered those jet packs and flying cars.) It’s starting to look like innovation-speak … doesn’t really work as a description of the future, and it’s losing its power as a distraction from the present.

Beware geeks bearing gifts, Vinsel and Russell warn. The pursuit of novelty for its own sake doesn’t just fuel income inequality or threaten the environment (though it does contribute to those): it takes resources and attention from what really matters, which is maintenance and repair. These more modest activities are undervalued in just about every way. Despite their invisibility, they are indispensable, and absolutely essential in a crisis. There’s nobility in “keeping daily life going, caring for the people and things that matter most to us, and ensuring that we preserve and sustain the inheritance of our collective pasts,” they write. “It’s the overlooked, undercompensated work that keeps our roads safe, our companies productive, and our lives happy and secure.”

How central is maintenance? As Vinsel and Russell note, “about 70 percent of engineers maintain and oversee existing systems,” and “60 and 80 percent of software budgets are spent on maintenance.” Indeed, according to one estimate, two-thirds of US workers are engaged in maintenance of infrastructures, places, or people. Yet they’re often underpaid (65 percent make less than $20 an hour), and maintenance itself is chronically underfunded. (Maintenance is also largely overlooked by Russell and Vinsel’s fellow historians of science and technology, who are as focused on innovation as any comms shop in Palo Alto.)

This comes at a cost. If, as social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling famously declared, “broken windows” signal a level of public disorder that invites more serious criminality, it is also true that neglected bridges and shabby public buildings impoverish civic life, slow economic growth and social mobility, and in the long run cost more to repair than to keep in good order.

Maintenance is also a deeply collective enterprise. It represents a willingness to invest in common goods, to choose the public benefit over private advantage; but public spaces also support social life in a way that private goods cannot. It takes a village to build a square; in turn, the square becomes the heart of village life.

A Despotic Act

 

 

From The NYRB, Fintan O'Toole  writes:

It is impossible not to think, in this in-between moment, of Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Something is dying, but we do not yet know what. Is it the basic idea of majority rule or is it the most coherent attempt to destroy that idea since the secession of the Confederacy? Something is trying to be born, but we cannot yet say what it is either. Is it an American version of the “managed democracy” or “electoral autocracy” that is the most rapidly expanding political form around the world? Or is it a radically renewed republic that can finally deal with the unfinished business of its history? The old is in a state of suspended animation; the new stands at a threshold it cannot yet cross.

In 1974 upon his inauguration as president, just half an hour after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford declared, “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” He implied that the lawlessness and derangement of Nixon’s presidency, laid bare in the Watergate scandal, had been more traumatic for the United States even than the violence of the Vietnam War, its wounds “more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars.” Yet he also suggested that Nixon’s departure had left the country in a good place: “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.” With its institutions intact, the US could quickly return to its natural condition of mutual benevolence: “Let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.” If you had an air to that speech you could sing it:

For the house fell on her head
And the coroner pronounced her dead
And thru the town the joyous news was spread
Ding-dong, the witch is dead!

Many Americans imagined themselves singing that national anthem on the morning of November 4. But long national nightmares do not end in real life as they do in Oz. Donald Trump himself crawled out of Nixon’s political grave, more lawless, more shameless, more openly unhinged. And he will not lie down. Joe Biden, like Ford before him, hoped to arrive in the Oval Office, not just as a healer, but as an exorcist, driving out the evil spirits of suspicion and hate. For many of those who voted for him, the end of the Trump regime, like the banishing of Nixon, would prove that, after all, “our Constitution works.” There could be a great sigh of relief: the system has corrected itself. That was not really true in 1974 and it is emphatically false now.

The established, uplifting alternative to the long national nightmare is the American Dream. Biden evoked it in his acceptance speech at the virtual Democratic convention in August when he insisted that the opportunity for every American “to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them” is one “we can never lose.” But this is a hazy kind of reverie, and it could not stand up to Trump’s Gothic horror version of the trope. In announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in June 2015, he both performed its funeral rites and dragged it out of the grave: “Sadly the American dream is dead, but if I get elected president, I will bring it back. Bigger, better and stronger than ever before.” While Biden was insisting that the dream was undying, Trump’s promise to resuscitate its cadaver was, for so many of those who have experienced the demise of industrial America, a much more potent image.

It has, moreover, its own nightmarish history. As Sarah Churchwell points out in her illuminating exploration of the term, in her book Behold, America (2018), the first widely disseminated use of “American dream,” in the sense that later became such a staple of political rhetoric, appeared in the New York Post in 1900. It was in fact a warning about the threat posed by super-rich tycoons to the very existence of the American system of government. “Discontented multimillionaires,” it warned, form the “greatest risk” to “every republic.” All previous republics, it noted, had been “overthrown by rich men” and this could happen too in America, where the tycoons were “deriding the constitution, unrebuked by the executive or by public opinion.” If they had their way “it would be the end of the American dream.” This—and not a woolly appeal to its benign power—is the sense in which the term should resonate now. The American republic has come close to being overthrown by a discontented multimillionaire. Biden failed to say with sufficient force that America needed not to go from nightmare to dream, but to wake up to the urgent meaning of that threat.