Curmudgeon

Frontier schoolhouse

I do love a curmudgeon, especially one who writes well.

Here's an excerpt from an especially incisive essay in The New York Review of Books by Charles Simic.

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

...

If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high school curriculum and of families that don’t talk to their children about the past, there’s another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth, without comparable success. 


You can read the rest of  The Age of Ignorance here.


I'm not sure what to do with it all, though, other than shake my head and feel a certain smug satisfaction draped over growing dread that I'm in total agreement.

poetry instead of Rush

Even I'm getting tired of all this brouhaha over Rush and his vile comments. There are people in my neighborhood, minor television celebrities who are getting in trouble now for nasty Tweets. He was just trying to be funny, apologists will say about Rush. She's really a nice person; it's her politics that aren't, one of my friends said about the minor celebrity. Anywho. I grabbed the February 23rd issue of The New York Review of Books and felt a frisson (how's that for pretentious) when I opened it to The New World of William Carlos Williams, a review of three new books about the great modernist American poet with a great big photo of the dear man on the first page.

I just quoted from one of Williams' poems the other day on this blog because my dog-eared copy of one of his books of poetry is one of my favorites. What synchronicity! What serendipity! What does this have to do with Rush? Well, about halfway through this five million word article, when I was well on my way to a happy oblivion, I read that Williams was notoriously insecure and perhaps even insanely jealous of his more famous poetic colleagues -- the Ezra Pounds and H.D.s, especially the T.S. Eliots. When he left his home of Rutherford, New Jersey (where he worked as a general practitioner, serving a poor and immigrant population) for a visit to Paris with his wife in 1924, he evidently felt paranoid and certain he was being scorned by the likes of Pound and H.D. And still, what does this have to do with Rush? Well, really, not much except that when commenting about his fellow poet T.S. Eliot, Williams wrote Maybe I'm wrong but I distrust that bastard more than any writer I know in the world today. He then compared Eliot's work to moles on a pig's belly instead of tits. I laughed out loud when I read that. I never really got into Eliot's poetry like I did Williams, and I thought how nice it would be if someone out in the ether could say something that perfectly cutting about a person like Rush.

So, there you go. Poetry instead of Rush.

Listen to this:

To a Poor Old Woman

and this:

The Widow's Lament in Springtime

and read this:

I

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind.  Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.  All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens:  clarity, outline of leaf


But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them:  rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

-- from Spring and All


and think about this:

No ideas but in things --


William Carlos Williams, from Paterson

Hoity Toity Hoi Polloi

I have a friend who jokingly says that instead of reading real books, one could read about the books in the New York Review of Books and get by. After spending four hours at the lacrosse field today, bundled up against the early December California cold, I collapsed on my bed tonight and opened the December 8th issue of the Review and started flipping through. Generally I skip the reviews of history books, the discussions of Islam at the Met, the biographies of obscure World War II generals and convoluted economic theory and head straight for discussions of poets or great literary figures. I once sat, enraptured, reading about a perverse lion in Africa who copulated with dead lionesses and otherwise acted as no natural animal might. That article showed up months later in an anthology of the best American essays, a fact that I felt a bit proud of -- like I'd somehow discovered this weird and wild thing. I know you're probably shaking your head that I'd collapse into bed with such reading fare, and while I do consider myself a bit of a literary snob, I don't want you to feel intimidated, so I'll also confess to consuming huge quantities of romance as a teenager. I joined reading clubs like an addict (remember Book of the Month? Quality Paperback?) -- for at least two years I received a carton of eight "novels" from the Harlequin Romance Book Club every month, books that I read alongside the more rigorous Austen and Faulkner and Knowles and Bronte and Salinger.

Where am I going here? Oh. I'm collapsed on the bed, and this particular issue of the Review is sort of dry; I'm  flipping through it, really, secretly glad to be doing so as they tend to pile up, and this one doesn't look like it's going to have anything that's going to interest me, when I started reading a review of Michael Lewis' nonfiction book titled Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. The reason why it caught my eye is because the title of the review itself was written in large type at the top, How We Were All Misled, and underneath is a photo of the leaders of France, Greece and Germany. A small bankrupt town in California is also mentioned in the review, as is our former governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Lewis' book explores the collapse of the European economies, including Ireland, Greece and Iceland, but he draws on the American one as well, and it was all very interesting and very edifying and very terrifying, too (but not as interesting, edifying and terrifying as the Satanic lion).

Reader, I read the entire review (written by John Lancaster) and now feel as if I don't need to read the actual book (written by Michael Lewis). I'm thinking, too, that perhaps if you're reading this post, you don't have to read the review or the book! How neat is that?

Here's an excerpt that I found the most compelling, toward the end of the article:

I think, though, that the failure of responsibility was linked to a failure of agency -- the individual's ability to affect the course of events. An enormous number of people today feel as if they have very little  economic agency in their own lives; often, they are right to feel that. The decisions that affect their fates are taken far above their heads, and often aren't conscious decisions at all, so much as they are the operation of large economic forces over which they have no control -- impersonal forces whose effects are felt in directly personal ways.


It is difficult to feel responsible when you have no agency. many of the people who did stupid things -- who did things on that 0-10 scale -- did so because everyone around them was doing them too, and because loud voices were telling them to carry on. The Icelanders who bought cars with foreign currency loans were sold them by financiers who promised that it was a good idea; the Irish who bought now-unsellable houses on empty estates were told, by builders and bankers and the state, that this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity; the Greeks who are, at the time of writing, furiously rebelling against austerity measures were falsely told that the state could afford to look after them, and arranged their lives accordingly.


The collective momentum of a culture is, for more or less everybody more or less all of the time, overwhelming. This is especially true for anything to do with economics. The evidence is clear: it is easy to mislead people about money, and easy to lead members of the public astray both individually and en masse, because when it comes to money, most of us, most of the time, don't know what we're doing. The corollary is also clear: the whole Western world misled itself over debt, and the road back from where we are goes only uphill.


The whole notion of failure of agency is what fascinates me, and I'm going to think about it -- later. I don't know about you, but if not a bodice-ripper, I'm at least going back to my Michael Ondaatje.