Political things

I receive unsolicited emails from an agency called “Conservative Direct.” The latest one announces an online course on “totalitarian” novels, taught by the president of Hillsdale College.

Texts: 1984, Brave New World, Darkness at Noon, That Hideous Strength.

Conservatives and liberals may inhabit different echo chambers, but at least they read some of the same books.

(Extracting different lessons from them, of course.)

What else is “common ground?” Johnny Cash, I’ve been told.

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I thought this sociological piece on Elon Musk was insightful.

Too often, I see people denouncing Musk as a numbskull. He’s not that. I see other people praising his management style to high heaven. That’s wrong, too.

He succeeds at cutting costs when (a) he understands the industry (especially, its technology) and (b) he owns the stakes and assumes the risks for certain key decisions. But that doesn’t make him a good person for deciding how to cut costs across something so multiform, with so many “stakeholders,” as the U.S. government.

(He may or may not be evil, but that’s not what the piece is about.)

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What does the government do? I look forward to reading these essays.

On reading scholarship

Juneteenth as a federal holiday, year two. I don’t have a job, but the holiday does bring me some respite. Karin got a day off and helped to mind the children.

Amazon delivered a package. No rest for those workers.

Our air conditioner has been repaired, and just in time: after a cool weekend, the temperature is rising again.

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After some months of staying put, philosophically speaking (Daniel’s birth threw off my routine), I am back upon that horse, reading articles and books, some of them rather old, about the ethics of nuclear warfare and deterrence; about the problem of dirty hands; about political realism, as opposed to political moralism; about the distinction between “private” and “public” morality; and about the epistemology of testimony. The topics are related, though not seamlessly. Their common elucidator is C.A.J. Coady. The longer I live, and the more I read, the more I prefer to read the same author on many topics than many authors on the same topic. Monologs rather than dialogs. Or, more precisely, I prefer dialogs to be recounted within monologs, in a clear, familiar, and singular voice. It’s one thing to give every point of view its due; it’s a different and considerably more tiresome thing to listen to every person who expresses a new point of view. It used to be, I would read topical anthologies because I thought it was good to listen to different people talking about the same topic. Now I read anthologies because, by and large, different ones feature the same authors. The better authors. I never took sociology in college, but I acquired a nice volume of first-year sociology readings. I used to think they were chosen for their topical importance. Now that I’ve read around for twenty years, and I know more names, I realize those topics were chosen because those authors had written about them. Which is well and good.

Another thing, it’s nicer to read people who don’t give a citation for every little point. Better for an author to do as Quine does and just call the other guys “McX” and “Wyman” and not refer explicitly to their writings. I realize you only can write like this once you’ve Arrived. Until then, you have to cite everybody under the sun, and you have to drone on in your acknowledgments about the many hours during your fellowship year when you were encouraged by Senior Figure So-and-So and criticized, over pints or during long walks, by Up-and-Comer Such-and-Such. Which is a bit groveling and, frankly, not much fun to read.

I’ve noticed that novelists write longer and longer acknowledgments now. These are annoying because they’re like, “I want to thank my agent and my tireless editor and all my friends and my dad and my mom … and my dog, ha, ha.” As if the general reader would care about that. When even the novelists have to display all their social and professional connections, we know there isn’t likely to be a place for a loner like me in the industry of the mind.

A week off

It’s my jobless week in between the spring semester and the first summer term. This afternoon, I’m in a lounge at Notre Dame, hoping that the strangeness of the locale will stimulate me to write.

I lunched with my dear cousin, Vickie, who’s just finished her bachelor’s work at Notre Dame. The poor thing has lost 20 lbs. during her last semester. I asked if it’s because she’s been eating phở in the cafeteria every day. No, she said, she hasn’t been doing that; she’s lost weight because of stress.

She has some jobs lined up for the next couple of years, but eventually she’ll have to decide whether to go to graduate school.

She said that in one of her sociology honors courses, the professor told the undergraduates that she expected all of them to go to grad school for sociology.

I think that’s the sort of expectation that ill serves humankind.

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The last two days, I got to watch two fantastic Champions League semifinal games.

On Tuesday, Liverpool defeated Barcelona at home by four goals to zero, gaining a decisive 4–3 lead in aggregate goals and canceling out Lionel Messi’s superb performance from the previous game.

And yesterday, the Potato Tots scored three second-half goals in Amsterdam to edge out Ajax on “away” goals. Lucas Moura, the goalscorer, prayed fervidly at the start of the half, and by the time he put in his second goal, it sure looked like he was receiving divine favor.

Still, I felt badly for Ajax: they’d outplayed the Potato Tots in three of the four halves. And I felt badly for Messi, whose teammates had failed to oblige when, in Barcelona’s home game, he’d set them up to score enough goals to put the series to bed.

The final (June 1) will be a ferocious contest. They’re two very gritty teams, Liverpool and the Potato Tots.