For the Record: Mystery

Undated picture of the Aisne-Marne (spelled wrong by me below, with an extra -s), Belleau, France, via.

This is such a weird dance that's been going on since Bolton announced on October 23 that this meeting would take place. This was just after Trump's decision to abrogate the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty because, he said, the Russians were violating it. https://t.co/jL0b5WOTTQ

— Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought (@Yastreblyansky) November 11, 2018

Yet there they were planning a summit in Paris, on Veterans Day no less. Putin complained about the treaty getting broken, but he couldn't stop smiling and telling jokes. What, in the first place, was up with that? https://t.co/52fvxH8nLd

— Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought (@Yastreblyansky) November 11, 2018

Groomin'

Male chimps grooming (da da da da) on a Sunday afternoon, Via Cooler Insights.

David Brooks ("The Blindness of Social Wealth") begins with a story from Robert E. Hall's This Land of Strangers: The Relationship Crisis That Imperils Home, Work, Politics, and Faith (2012) illustrating how you can you take a concept of "social wealth", understood here as a kind of capital of human relationships, as literal wealth, money in the bank, that you may be able to draw on in a tight financial spot, a share in a company you thought went bankrupt long ago and that turns out to be thriving:

Bob Hall was a rancher. In 1936, in the midst of the Depression, he was suffering from a cancer that was eating the flesh on the side of his face. His ranch had dwindled to nearly nothing, and weeks after bankers took the last of his livestock, Hall died, leaving his family deeply in debt.

His sons pleaded with anybody they could find to make a loan and save the family ranch. No one would do it. Finally, in desperation, they went to their neighbor, Buzz Newton, who was known for his miserliness, and asked him to co-sign a loan. “I always thought so much of your dad; he was the most generous man I have known,” Newton answered. “Yes, I’ll co-sign the note.”

Bob Hall’s grandson, also named Robert Hall, drew out the lesson in his book “This Land of Strangers,” noting: “The truth is, relationships are the most valuable and value-creating resource of any society. They are our lifelines to survive, grow and thrive.”

Which seems like a dubious moral to me; old Bob Hall had saved the ranch for his children not by the strategic investment in relationships but by heedlessly befriending anybody at all—all the decent people he'd been friends with turned the kids down. It was the least likely friend who came through, like the little man in the forest in the old fairy tales who gives the simple-minded third brother woodcutter a treasure in exchange for a charitably offered sandwich. Old Bob Hall wasn't a capitalist of friendship, he was a nice guy.

Midlife Scouts

Photo from Matthew Johnson's Pinterest.

A funny thing happened on the way to today's David Brooks column, originally entitled something like "Giving Away Your Billion, Warren Buffett", judging from the url, but omitting Buffett's name from the final headline, perhaps because he couldn't decide how to punctuate it, or what it would mean:

Recently I’ve been reading the Giving Pledge letters. These are the letters that rich people write when they join Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge campaign. They take the pledge, promising to give away most of their wealth during their lifetime, and then they write letters describing their giving philosophy.

The funny thing was that he couldn't stand reading the letters enough to get more than six paragraphs out of them:

• Three for George B. Kaiser, an "oil and finance guy from Oklahoma" who realized with humility that he owed his eight billion dollars not to any special "personal character or initiative" but to the fact that he was "blessed to be born in an advanced society with caring parents", which certainly explains why so few of us have eight billion dollars—I should add that he's clearly nowhere near as stupid as Brooks's quotation technique makes him sound, indeed probably not stupid at all, though I expect I disagree with him about a lot of stuff.

There's more than one way of being ripples

Lost Hills, California. Photo by Chloe Sorvino/Forbes.

Another day, another dateline. Another little chunk of David Brooks's life. Stung by his failure to realize that Donald Trump was going to be the Republican presidential nominee this year, he's ripped himself yet again out of the bourgeois strata where he generally spends the the big chunks, and gone where he feels least comfortable, out into the pain, as his preferred approach to leaping across the chasms of segmentation, "One Neighborhood at a Time".  We all have some responsibility to do that.

Thus in early May he seems to have visited decaying Pittsburgh, where he chatted with school principals and factory owners, and the whitewater rafting country of West Virginia, where I could see no evidence he ever wandered as far from his room as the hotel's bar.

Today it's Lost Hills, California, where I'm afraid he's not going to find a lot of Trump voters; underemployment is no problem, because everybody has a job on the 70,000 acres of Paramount Farms, world's largest vertically integrated supplier of pistachios and almonds. Nor are there a lot of broken families:

A choice of embarrassments

Endless Wall Trail over New River Gorge near Lansing. Via LiveAndLetHike.

So David Brooks ("The Choice Explosion") seems to have started his project of atoning for his failure as a journalist and changing the way he does his job, venturing out into that vast dark forest where the Trump voters lurk to get "socially intermingled" with them, trying to find out, as Trump himself would put it, "just what in the hell is going on". At least his column today has a dateline, just like a Friedman column—"Lansing, W.Va."

But he hasn't actually started on any of that social intermingling yet, though it looks like a location well supplied with undereducated and underemployed white guys—not even with a taxi driver.