Morning Fog

(Epathetic) Dopey Donny

So, just a couple of days after delivering an address to a joint session of Congress - a speech that made Trump fans, at least, hopeful he might actually qualify at some point for his new title of "President" - there was Donald Trump again, issuing a blast of surreal, paranoid tweets in the middle of the night.  It wasn't unexpected; I'm surprised it took him so long!  But still, with every such outburst, a thinking person's opinion of "The Donald's" qualifications must sink lower. Ye gods, when will this man GROW UP and at least try to do the job he was elected for?

This episode, though, helped crystallize my thinking on one point:  We need a special kind of name for Trump: an epithet!

I recall from my high school days that an "epithet" in classical literature was a common way of attaching a positive attribute to an individual. I remember this particularly from Homer.  For example, Homer might choose to refer to Achilles as "strong-heeled Achilles."  And he would do so time after time. every time Achilles was mentioned.  (Incidentally, this did not make the reading of The Odyssey any more pleasant.)

After hearing DT attach a label to each of his opponents in the election campaign (Little Marco, Lyin' Ted, Crooked Hillary, etc.) I realized that he was emulating Homer (unconsciously, no doubt!), except these epithets were negative and hateful. I decided we really must have such a name for Donald. after all, what's sauce for the goose, you know... but I hadn't nailed it until these latest charges ("Obama wiretapped me!"). 

Given some of the characteristics I've seen, I considered "Delusional Donald" or a Homerian choice, like "Unbelievably Unqualified Don." But those are too long to grab people's attention, and have too many syllables to be grasped by the To-Be-Named himself. 

So the best I've come up with is "Dopey Donny."  This works on many levels. It sounds like something you'd hear on a fifth-grade school playground, as do most of Trump's outbursts. (The use of the diminutive "Donny" enhances this effect.) Further, "Dopey" is an old-fashioned word, as old-fashioned as Trump himself. It reflects the strange bewildered, where-am-I look that appears on Trump's face when he appears in public; yet it also aptly assesses many of Trump's policy statements. Finally, Dopey was one of the seven dwarfs, while our President seems to believe he's a giant. Dopey Donny it is. 

Perhaps you will ask, is it right to fashion such a moniker for a President? Isn't it disrespectful? Well, it used to be. But Trump himself changed the game.  He expects respect without earning it, yet had no problem using such mini-titles for serious and respectable people of all stripes.

Last, the title of this post is NOT accidentally misspelled.  I think "epathetic" nicely melds "epithet" with "pathetic."

New Typography - Where Does It Stop?

It hasn't been so often lately that I have had the chance to read a book, but in the past couple of weeks I tried specifically to devote some time to reading beyond the newspaper. 

That's how I wound up tackling an 1100-pager last week.  But reading isn't as easy as it used to be.  I don't mean my vision, which still seems fine.   The difficulty is that publishers/printers/writers don't use a double space after a full stop anymore. 

I have found this mildly annoying before, something I've noticed but put up with, yet I now realize that it will become very enervating over the longer haul of 1100 pages:

For a while I thought the single-spaced sentence ending was just a conceit (or an ignorance) of Bill Gates, analogous to the way he seems to think you would want your address book organized alphabetically by first name (!).  But many sources remind us that double spacing was abandoned in books and magazines long before Microsoft, as early as the 1950s or 1960s.  Perhaps I attributed it to computerization because early word processers tended to "autocorrect" two spaces to just one.  At least they no longer do that!  In any case, the standard explanation for the change, provided by authorities as disparate as Slate and Wikipedia, is that due to scalable type, the double spacing is "no longer necessary." 

Well, maybe not to publishers.  But for readers (for me, anyway), my latest experience with this current book is that spacing is essential to comfortable reading and quick cognition.  A period is a small thing, not easily noticed.  In smaller fonts, it's likely to be indistinguishable from a comma, and the upper-case letter beginning the next sentence also may be less noticeable, or mistaken for a proper noun.  The double space is (or was) the best and most noticeable signal of a full stop.

With the new typographic convention, I find myself constantly being fooled into reading run-on sentences Wait I think as I get halfway into the next sentence, "that doesn't make sense," or "how does that track?"  It's annoying, unnecessary, and delaying.

Publishers, authors, editors!  Let's show some respect for the reader, and reinstate the double space to its proper place in the pantheon of correct typography.  Word-processing programmers, how about at least a means of changing defaults, so that the double space could be automatically inserted?  Or maybe we should go back to the practice used in those old-fashioned telegrams, where the period didn't exist and we used the word "stop" instead STOP

Angelou. Trethewey. Say What?

Maya Angelou died yesterday.  An important and venerable American, to be sure, and worthy of the flood of tributes and remembrances that have since ensued.  You need only to read her moving poem "Still I Rise" to realize her greatness and relevance in a day when many people may fool themselves into believing racism was left behind us with the election of Barack Obama.  (It wasn't.)

Not having had much time to see/hear electronic news on Wednesday, I first learned of Angelou's death via an "appreciation" of her written by Natasha Trethewey, published in the Washington Post the next day.  For that, I am grateful to Trethewey.

But not for much else.  She came into the job two years ago, and as far as most Americans are aware, disappeared into the woodwork until today.   It's not her fault.  All poets laureate have tended to suffer the same fate.  And for good reason.  Poetry?  Oh, c'mon. 

I've written before about the concept of a "poet laureate."  It seems a waste, and very unAmerican, that we continue to indulge such frippery on the government budget.  Let's let our British colleagues continue that tradition, if they wish, but why hasn't the tea party tilted at this silly windmill?  Here's a small battle they could win. 

(And after that, it wouldn't hurt their credibility to kill off Daylight Saving Time, either.)

Hey Hey LBJ, How Much Culture Did You Fund Today?

I've always considered Lyndon Johnson was one of our greatest Presidents.  It was always possible to belittle his methods, or his personal style, or even the war in Vietnam (which, lest we forget, he inherited); yet his record of accomplishment, I felt, was huge, especially the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

But that was political achievement to the end of social legislation, based on his well-earned reputation as the wily politician, the shrewd vote-counter, the fellow who knew where the bodies were buried.

So it comes as something of a shock to have it brought home, as Philip Kennicott did in the Washington Post recently, that LBJ had other dimensions, and in particular, that historically he has turned out to be no small friend of culture and the arts.  Some of the key threads of this fabric were the Hirschorn Museum, the Kennedy Center, the National Endowments (for the Arts and for the Humanities), among others.  As Kennicott notes, he [LBJ] "put art, culture, and beauty on the same footing as roads, rights, commerce, and security." 

I suspect this is something few of us had ever much thought about.  Nor, come to think of it, is it something that many biographers would tend to focus on.  (Robert Caro, did you cover this angle? I don't remember it.)   And doesn't it leave us wondering what unexpected sorts of legislative surprises will emerge, fifty years from now, from the records of our recent Presidents?

Helicoptering Literature

A Virginia woman is taking up the cudgels against Toni Morrison's novel Beloved and more broadly, against literary works that might be deemed to damage her teen-ager's psyche.  She says she's not a book-burner, but on the other hand, I guess she's a book-banner [so I'll just call her BB], since she'd like to set up "policies" governing the assignment of books that might have "objectionable material" so that parents will have more input as to what books their kids read.  This all arose because BB's son, a senior in high school, reportedly found the book disturbing. 

BB is the one who spoke out, and in America, we credit her for doing so; but she isn't an isolated case; she is speaking for many, many parents.  The difficulty, of course, is that each parent may have different objections to different works, leaving entire generations of kids reading pablum.  And in this particular case, the novel is meant to be "disturbing."  Nevertheless, many communities' school systems do have provisions in place that allow parents to challenge books being read in classes, so this particular quest isn't all that unusual.

The added factor here, however, is that the reading in this case was assigned for an "Advanced Placement" class.   While parents might be allowed to make a judgment as to what their offspring be exposed to in high school, AP classes are by definition supposed to be college-level material.  This in my view should put them beyond the pale for parental interference.  If a parent believes her son or daughter - as a high school senior - isn't ready for exposure to the ills of the big wide world, they should keep them out of AP classes.

Naturally, parents don't want to do this.  College-credit classes were in their infancy when I took calculus as a high school senior way back in 1962; the class was taught by a professor from the local university, and its only benefit was to get a subject out of the way so that you wouldn't need to take it in college.   Now, many high school students graduate with a half-dozen or more "AP" classes on their transcript, and - for reasons endemic to our society - they're given higher grade point credits for taking them.  So for a young man or woman who wants to be competitive in the fight for college admissions (or whose parents wish him to be so), the AP designation is essential.   

The answer is obvious:  dumb down AP classes, take out that "objectionable material," omit what might be thought-provoking, "challenge" what may be challenging.  Is this destroy-the-village-to-save-it approach really less objectionable than a student's having to read a novel?  Literature used to be about expanding horizons and challenging preconceived notions.

 

 

NASA's "Earth As Art"

If your local paper has not alerted you, as mine did me, to the book of photographs taken from space that's just been published by NASA, you owe it to yourself to have a look.  They are absolutely stunning.  The physical book itself will cost you $44 plus; but on the NASA website you can see the photos, or even download a free pdf of the entire book plus an iPad app for it.  Amazing!

 

 

Greatness Or Pettiness

In an opinion piece last Sunday that merits more attention, David Alpert asked, in considering plans to turn Washington DC's Union Station into a modern, effective transportation hub, "Do We Still Have What It Takes?" [to do great infrastructure projects]. 

It's a good question, one to which I had to answer "no"last year, when I looked at another recent project, in which frightened suburbanites and the Washington Post itself prevented the planned subway station at Dulles International Airport from being constructed conveniently underground IN the terminal, leaving it to be built inconveniently 600 feet AWAY from the airport, on the grounds that "we couldn't afford it." 

On these questions, I tend to ask, as Alpert does, can we afford not to do it?  Most often, the better solution, even if more costly, has long-term benefits in terms of cost-saving improvements, time-saving and step-saving efficiencies.  And often, we discover to our chagrin later, that the cheaper solution eventually has to be fixed, at a much higher cost than doing it correctly in the first place.   I also like the idea expressed here by Deputy Transportation Secretary Porcari that our generation has an obligation to create the big projects to pay things forward for the next generation -- to create and maintain infrastructure.

I often hear people suggesting that in the current lean economy, governments and even corporations and organizations should postpone or cancel capital projects that have been in the works for years because we "can't afford them."  Shortsighted, because to the extent those projects continue, they help pull us out of recession by creating jobs and putting money into the economy.  

Besides, I don't think it's just the economy, it's a reluctance to think in grand terms, or to take on the tremendous job of overcoming inertia.  Do we have leaders and visionaries who can do so?   We haven't seen them much in the U.S. of late.  The Union Station isn't all that immense, but it would be a start.

More Ike To Like

George Will has chosen today to address two different upcoming events related to former President Eisenhower.

First, he grouses about the memorial that's in the planning stages, with a design by renowned architect Frank Gehry.  In true conservative fashion, he dislikes it because the proposed design is not strictly representational à la Norman Rockwell.   I'm not too worried about the design of the memorial, so I find the main truth Will has to offer on this topic is a point he makes sarcastically: "cancel the memorial."

There are too many such memorials in Washington.  If our young country continues the me-too trend of a memorial for every President, we'll soon run out of places to put them.  We already have, in fact.  Besides, the current fever of memorialization has a strong political content, which began with Repubicans wanting to honor Reagan (with an airport and - rather ironically - with a huge federal government office building) as the guy who temporarily resuscitated their political fortunes.  (True, there was a similar fever for Kennedy; but Kennedy, I recall, was assassinated in office, so we went overboard although he was not one of our "great" Presidents.  Then we relaxed for a generation.)

On the other hand, I believe Will has a point in arguing that Eisenhower's accomplishments are not sufficiently appreciated.   That's why I have been hunting around on the internet lately, looking for a good one-volume biography covering Eisenhower's whole life.  I wasn't impressed by those that exist, so I'm hopeful that the new book being published this week, and touted by Will -- Eisenhower in War and Peace, by a prolific writer of biographies, Jean Edward Smith -- might fill the bill. I look forward to reading it.

("Eisenhower in War and Peace" can be ordered from amazon.com via the link in the right-hand margin, and Morning Fog will even get a little "cut" from it.)

Monumental Excess - About Ike, And What's Not To Like

Who knew anybody was planning a monument to Dwight David Eisenhower in Washington DC?  Apparently Congress knew, having set up a commission for the purpose back in 1999.   And now, finally, a possible design for the monument, by Frank Gehry, is getting its first exposure to the public.

As always, there are those who think the new design proposal is marvelous, and others who think it misses the mark.   I'm in between.  I like the novel aspects of the architecture itself; and I favor innovative designs over the mundane.   The mundane is well represented by the World War II memorial, which Stalin would have loved; and the new Martin Luther King Memorial, which Mao Tse-Dung would have loved.  

On the other hand, I agree with Roger Lewis that a memorial focusing on Eisenhower's boyhood does not make a lot of sense.  Also I can tell you that a theme of trees just doesn't fit -- I've been to Abilene and trees are not typical of the landscape.  Oh, and is that a grain silo I see in the design?  Interesting, but it may look a bit out of place in Washington.  Architecturally, I fear for Gehry's design because imaginative public art has a way of being ground into kitsch by Congress.  Witness, for example, the ridiculous addition of the very traditional statues of soldiers to the clean, modern line of the original design of the Vietnam War memorial, or consider the aforementioned WWII and MLK efforts. 

Time will tell how the design will turn out.  It may be a quite different one.

Meantime, the stealth commission having beavered away for more than ten years now, it's probably too late for me to ask my questions:   Do we really have to have a colossal monument to every President somewhere along the Mall, and where does it all stop?  How great is great enough to merit a monument?  Is there a Chester A. Arthur commission yet?

Somewhere, it's written that a person must have "lasting historical significance" to be honored by a major monument (think of the "major award" in A Christmas Story and you'll get the picture that pops into my head when I say that).  I wouldn't deny that Eisenhower may qualify; perhaps more than some others because he did a lot that was both historically significant and important to his country even before he became President.  I've been looking for a good, comprehensive biography or history of DDE and his times, but haven't found a satisfactory one yet.  And he grew up in Kansas, where both my parents were raised and where I spent and at times misspent a small segment of my youth. 

But if we are honest, using the "lasting historical signficance" measure, wouldn't any U.S. President probably qualify?  Especially when there are willing partisans of his party in Congress ready to push his cause?  Will existing "naming opportunities" -- like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (which has a sculpted head of the eponymous Pres), or the Ronald Reagan Building (how curious that a huge building to house the federal burreaucracy should be named after this particular President) -- suffice for their fans, or will we have to build city-block-sized monuments to them too?  We can already foresee that in 20 years or so, pressure will be building for a monument to Obama, if only as the first African-American President, and to George W. Bush, if only as the creator of the most colossal economic collapse since Hoover... (no, seriously, Bush will be nominated because the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks occurred on his watch). 

For me, it's enough already.  Let's wait a respectable period to decide about someone's historical significance before we throw up monuments to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who happens to get elected President.  A hundred years would be about right.  From that perspective, we know who's who, and save ourselves an awful lot of smelting.

What Zola Knew

Germinal is by some accounts still the most widely read of Émile Zola's novels, and at least two films have been made based on its story.   It is in part an exposé of the bleak world of late-19th-century French coal-mine workers and their strike, in part a story of a love triangle.   Oh, and by the way these days, to this American reader, it's also a bore.  Yet it's always possible to find interesting, even enlightening, tidbits in even the least likely of places.

When Étienne, the novel's protagonist and strike organizer, recites his arguments aimed at persuading the colliers to strike, the first step in realizing workers' rights is to destroy "the state."  And though this coalminer is channeling Marxist dogma here, I was struck by the paradoxical similarity between him and those contemporary rabble-rousers who want to "starve the beast" of government.  Of course in both cases the desire is only only replace it with one more to their liking.  

Today's extreme conservatives might be surprised to learn how much they share with Marxist theoreticians and activists of 150 years ago.  Yet, reading Zola's novel the day after my last posting ("The Shared Nuttiness of Right and Left") the comparison was stark.  In both cases, the solution to the excesses of capitalism is to blame government. 

In Germinal, the miners' strike doesn't end well.  And as we now know, communism was not the answer - whatever the question may have been.  "Communist" governments nearly everywhere have gone out of business, and those that survive have transformed themselves into capitalist societies hiding out in Maoist clothing.  The willful effort to force government into atrophy for temporary political gain is no less a dead-end path into the future. 

In Zola's time, the excesses of profit-seeking behemoths were easily hidden and needed to be brought to the attention of an ignorant public.  Today, the excesses are well known, recent, and highly publicized, so there is little excuse for ignoring them or (worse) putting them on a pedestal.  Like Zola, we should be focusing on identifying the real causes of our ills, rather than undermining the institutions that act as a counterweight to them.