Joe Did What? Work as Punishment

Poster by Shephard Fairey, 2017.

 

One of the executive orders in that first extraordinary rush—is it three weeks ago now?—was to commission a review of the various Trump-era programs in various states for putting work requirements on Medicaid benefits, as if they thought not having a job in the cash economy was a kind of crime, and cutting off your access to a doctor was an appropriate punishment. Good thing! It was a terrible policy idea, not merely pointlessly cruel (these programs are meant to help out people who need help, not reward them for being virtuous) but also especially stupid, in that it's harmful to public health: one of the basic reasons for providing healthcare to those who can't afford it is to reduce the amount of disease to which everybody, rich and poor, is exposed.

The work requirements, a longstanding conservative goal, were a policy priority for Seema Verma, who ran the federal Medicaid program under President Trump. This was an about-face from the position of the Obama administration, which steadfastly opposed the idea of tethering public health benefits to work — something that had never happened in Medicaid’s nearly 60-year history. Obama administration officials repeatedly rejected states’ waiver requests, stating concerns that they “could undermine access” and that they did “not support the objectives of the Medicaid program.”

Literary Corner: Elegy For the War Dead

William Blake watercolor illustration for Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", 1777-78, via Wikipedia.

From an interview on ABC News with David Muir (in which the poet once again complained about the "broken tests" bequeathed him by the Obama administration, to no pushback from Muir; I'd say it's not surprising if they didn't work very well in diagnosing Covid-19, but very remarkable that they should have existed at all, since Obama left office more than three years before the virus was discovered, or is it possible that Trump is not telling the truth here? Just asking questions).

Muir observed that the pandemic has now taken upwards of 70,000 lives, more than the Vietnam War, and asked the president if he had a message for the bereaved families; rather than telling him that he was a bad reporter and calling the question "nasty", as he has done in the past, Trump offered an answer in the form of a lengthy elegy, in which his capacity for empathy was on unusually full display:

I wanna say I love you 

by Donald J. Trump

I wanna say that we're doing everything
we can I also wanna say that we're
trying to protect people over 60
years old we're trying so hard

I wanna just say to the people
that have lost family
and have lost loved ones
and the people that have just

suffered so badly and just
made it and just made it
that we love you we're with
you we're working with you

Could it be?

A nice column by Paul Waldman at WaPo ("How this crisis could help us get to health-care reform") asks a question I've been thinking about a little bit, whether the pandemic crisis might not stimulate us in in the US to do something about the inequities of our health care system. It's easy for rightwingers to say that socialized medicine in Italy and Spain is proving just as ill equipped to handle the logistic demands of the thing as our marketized approach is, but what can't be denied is that we're going to have a much harder time paying for it, as Waldman says:

untold numbers of people are going to get huge bills from being treated for covid-19. Insurance companies made a big deal about waiving cost-sharing for coronavirus tests, but if you get it and have to get treated, you could still face thousands of dollars in costs, especially if you have a high-deductible plan of the kind that has proliferated in recent years.

The number of people facing those costs will be enormous. As bad as the virus has gotten in some other countries, that’s one thing their citizens don’t have to worry about.

But it's better to be immoral than unconstrained

Wall Street Journal isn't complaining about Singapore dim sum in spite of the tipping policy.

I was going to skip yesterday's Brooks ("The Tipping System Is Immoral"), because it has so little relevance to the ongoing intellectual wildfires that threaten to kill us all—he's like a schoolkid who has to write an essay to be graded by some randomly selected teacher and whose main concern in choosing the topic is to make sure no matter who it is they won't be offended, and I didn't even think I disagreed with his ostensible conclusion on a first quick reading:

Tipping inflames a sexist dynamic. Some men use their tips as leverage to harass female servers. Young blond women are tipped more than older brunettes. Male Uber riders tip female drivers 12 percent more, but only if they are young.

Tipping inflames a racist dynamic. African-American and Latino servers get much smaller tips. In a 2005 study of more than 1,000 tips to taxi drivers in New Haven, black drivers were tipped about a third less than white drivers.

Brooks on Harvard

Reading Room, Langdell Hall, Photo by John Phelan via Wikimedia Commons.

An interesting take from moral philosopher David F. Brooks ("Harvard's False Path to Wisdom") on the case of Kyle Kashuv, the gun nut Trump acolyte among the survivors of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school shooting, whose Harvard acceptance has been rescinded after the discovery of some extremely offensive text messages and other communications he wrote "years ago", in his words, or in some cases 18 months, as in the below example (via Steve M):

The racial slurs in an open Google doc have gotten more attention, but I suspect these texts from Kyle Kashuv may have weighed heavier in Harvard's decision. pic.twitter.com/hu7CYyE1M3

— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) June 17, 2019

Most conservative commentators focused on the unfairness of Harvard's decision, as Ben Shapiro, a mentor of Kashuv's, described it:  "Harvard's auto-da-fe sets up an insane, cruel standard no one can possibly meet", because who among us has not as a teenager typed things like this?

Homo make-me-a-sandwichensis

Margaret Leahy in Buster Keaton's Three Ages (1923). H/t Mary Ellen!

Two weeks ago David Brooks issued a column about "The Cruelty of Call-Out Culture" about an anecdote set in the "hard-core punk music scene in Richmond, Va." in which Emily, a performer, takes to Facebook to denounce a friend and fellow musician who has been caught sending some young lady a dick pic (I think, Brooks keeps it vague). The Facebook post ruins his life, he drops out of his own band and moves to another town, and nobody ever speaks to him again. Whereupon karma does her thing and Emily, who once bullied a girl victim of online abuse when they were in high school, is outed by a guy called Herbert and ostracized in turn, only it turns out that Herbert was abused sexually as a child, so it's all pretty sad, though it's not easy to see what anybody's supposed to do about it unless the solution is to just put up with abuse because you don't want anybody to really get hurt. In the society of niceness, you'll just suck it up.

Society enforces norms by murdering the bullies who break them. When systems are broken, vigilante justice may be rough justice, but it gets the job done. Prominent anthropologist Richard Wrangham says this is the only way civilization advances that he’s witnessed.

Really? Do we really think cycles of cruelty do more to advance civilization than cycles of wisdom and empathy? I’d say civilization moves forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it.

Though Emily explained pretty carefully that the rule of law didn't exist at the time, in regard to the time she was raped herself:

The Demoralization of the Market

Via DiasporaBR.

Brooks's headline last Friday ("The Remoralization of the Market") was so hilarious I found myself feeling the column couldn't possibly live up to it. With the appeal to some good old days from, I don't know, 1750 to 1970, when the Market was Moral, virtuous, kind, diligent, and generous, feeding the sick and clothing the hungry, and then came the Me Decade, and selfish individualistic investors suddenly deciding they were just in it for the money.

He really did kind of write it:

A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct. We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. We made the market its own priest and confessor.

And that's how the Market got Demoralized. I guess the "left" is to blame for constantly telling grasping shareholders, "Hey man, if greed is your thing, hey, whatever feels good, as long as you don't hurt anybody." We should have found some kind of leftist language for telling capitalists they were doing the wrong thing, I wonder what that would look like.

Indignation

Buster Keaton in Convict 13, 1920, via.

It's David Brooks, speculating, from his home on one of Saturn's most popular moons, what human beings on Earth might be like these days, now that Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, and Nelson Mandela have all died ("The Morality of Selfism"). He suspects some of them are probably self-absorbed:

You probably want to be a good person. But you may also be completely self-absorbed. So you may be thinking, “There is no way I can be good if I’m also a narcissist. Isn’t being good all about caring about other people?”

If David Brooks were completely self-absorbed, which he probably isn't, he'd probably worry about it. It could interfere with his project of being a good person by caring about other people, which is essentially what being good is all about, as in the well-studied cases of Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa,  and Nelson Mandela, probably. But according to his anonymous sources, there are all sorts of people on earth at the moment who don't react this way. It makes him so mad he can't stop himself from being a little sarcastic about it!

But how wrong you are!

We live in a culture of selfism — a culture that puts tremendous emphasis on self, on self-care and self-display. And one of the things we’ve discovered is that you can be a very good person while thinking only about yourself!

Bogus Logjam

The four-mile log jam at Taylors Falls on the St. Croix River, "so spectacular that excursion trains traveled from Duluth to see it," 13 June 1886, via Minnesota Historical Society.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Quiet Death of Racial Progress", New York Times, 13 July 2018:

I was planning to write a column about all the tremendous progress that has been made in achieving racial equality in the United States since 1960, with black unemployment at historically low levels, but the more research I did the more I learned something totally unexpected, which is that the progress mostly stopped in around 1980 and nobody seems to have noticed. So I'll take twelve paragraphs to lay out these shocking facts, which will leave me four paragraphs to give my prescriptions. I'd say, if anybody asked me, that we should go with all the experts I know who feel that we have two basic problems, structural and cultural. Only unfortunately those people don't exist, we only have leftists who blame society in general for  the structural racism of society in general and rightists who blame black people for not adopting the bourgeois norms of serving in the military, getting married, and going to church, and therefore we are clearly in need of compromising on this because both sides are right because oops I'm out of space again.

Yes, it looks like David Brooks has been making a lot of progress himself in his understanding of the issues, and he's now ready after 30 years of denial to admit that systemic societal racism, including residential and educational segregation and the starkly different treatment of black people, especially men, by the criminal justice system from the beat cop to mass incarceration, holds black people, especially men, in a disadvantaged position relative to people of other races—but only if we'll admit that it's their fault because why won't they be more bourgeois?

Pissed off by Kristof

There was an old Timesman called Kristof
Who just got me royally pissed off
   By fudging his points
   With invidious joints
That I couldn't quite follow the gist of.

Discussing the "paradox" according to which "Blue States Practice the Family Values Red States Preach":

The liberal impulse may be to gloat: Those conservatives thunder about “family values” but don’t practice them. But there’s also perhaps a measure of hypocrisy in the blue states. As Cahn and Carbone [Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, 2010] put it: “Blue family values bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatization of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families.”

A Wank Supreme

Thanks for the shoutout, Professor Liberman!

The strongest Supreme.

Brooks ("Can People Change After Middle Age?") sounds as if he's wondering about himself again, or maybe Trump:

I sometimes read that people don’t change much after middle age.

He doesn't tell us where he reads it (is it always in the same place or does it pop up in different contexts?), so I'm not sure how seriously I want to take this. According to old William James, as I learn from the blog of Melissa Dahl, it was worse than that; personalities stop changing around 30, well before traditional middle age begins, according to his 1890 Principles of Psychology:

“In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

On the other hand, that picture has itself begun to soften in the nearly 130 years since it was formed. Many psychologists feel there's a genetic component to one's Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) that leaves you with a kind of fixed endowment that really won't change much beyond softening us around the edges, but a large study at UC Berkeley conducted by Sanjay Srivastava and published in 2003 found reasons to question that and, pleasantly enough, that we all tend to get better. We get more conscientious through our 20s, and more agreeable starting in the 30s; and although younger women are more neurotic and extraverted than younger men, that difference begins to erase itself with time. So isn't that nice! Was there anything else you wanted to know?

But everyday experience contradicts this on a weekly basis.

I mean of course everyday experience actually takes place seven times as much as weekly experience does. Are you suggesting that people change after middle age just 14% of the time? It's probably too stressful to do more of it.

Name that Decimation! II

You could even girdle your selfishness in plaid, if you had the moral capital to pay for it. Image from Vintage Dancer.

We dumped Brooks ("How to Repair Moral Capital") this morning just as he was throwing down the gauntlet personally to me, to get some names rectified:

It’s becoming ever clearer that the nation’s moral capital is being decimated, and the urgent challenge is to name that decimation and reverse it.

I think I'll name it "Howard", after Howard Kurtz. Or maybe "Radical Islamic Terrorism".

But seriously, folks, before I jump into naming stuff, can I ask what "moral capital" is? Because it puts me in mind of a society in which most people are allotted just the amount of moral value they need to stay alive, while a fortunate few are able to accumulate tons of surplus moral value, which they can invest into creating still more.

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:

Brooks's Imaginary Problem

Alfred Hitchock's The Lodger, 1927. Via somebody's Tumblr.

Shorter David Brooks, "Clinton's Imagination Problem", New York Times, April 6 2016:

Hillary Clinton seems very nice, but her ideas for revitalizing the lives of Appalachian coal miners whose livelihood has disappeared are just the same old stale Democratic nostrums, like trying to create new jobs to replace the lost ones. Instead, she needs to consider some fresh approaches such as that of David Cameron's Conservative Party in Britain, of reweaving the social fabric through relationship counseling and parenting classes. I mean who needs a job when you can get a social reweave?

So he's returned from his excellent adventure in West Virginia, though it remains unclear whether he ever did manage to get out of that hotel room; the only West Virginia experience he discusses is reading the local papers (Charleston Gazette-Mail) online.

From which he learned, of course, that things are pretty dire in West Virginia, as he probably might have suspected already. Indeed he might have been afraid to leave his hotel room, under the impression that the entire population consists of fiendish drug addicts, which would be an exaggeration. As he did earlier this week, he offers some evidence that he recently did go outdoors in Pennsylvania for some reason, and there, certainly, the drug addicts are pretty much wall-to-wall:

Proper Uses of Coercion

Charlie Chaplin in Shoulder Arms (1918), via ChaplinForTheAges.

David Brooks, "How Covenants Make Us":

When you think about it, there are four big forces coursing through modern societies.

When I think about what, exactly? How to apply facile analogies from physics to the description of social phenomena? What makes you think I think about it at all?

Global migration is leading to demographic diversity. 

Recent research pushes back the earliest date of sapiens-Neanderthaler interbreeding from 50,000 years ago to as much as 100,000 years. There has never been a time in the evolution of the species when humans have not been on the move. I've mentioned before how the period of Brooks's childhood—after his US-born parents remigrated from Canada to New York in the early sixties—was part of a truly exceptional time in American history, between about 1931 and 1980, when the amount of immigration, beginning with racial quotas and the Great Depression, was extremely low. He imagines, in his usual solipsism, that the state of the world has always been in general what it was in the homogenized-milk sameness of his own youth, and he is obviously wrong.

GÖPperdämmerung*

*Sure, others may give you the same old pun, such as the genial Doctor Cleveland, but will they throw in the essential umlauts? WILL THEY BOGROLL, as Smut would say.

Betty Amann in Gustav Fröhlich's Asphalt (1929). Via Fritzi.

What David Brooks meant to say ("The Post-Trump Era", New York Times, March 25 2016):

This is a thrilling moment to be a conservative!

For an entire generation, the Republican party has vegetated, stuck with the sclerotic ideology of Reaganism, which used to be conservative back in the day but is now liberal. Reaganism was based on the idea that voodoo economics, by creating more wealth for the wealthy than the wealthy could comfortably accommodate, would force them to let some of it out, and the resulting trickle would turn into a mighty tide upon which the dinghies of the lowly would float as high as the yachts of the great, but that's not true any more, though of course it was in the 1980s.

What happened? How did Morning in America turn into the Twilight of the GOP? When did the Lifting of the Boats become the Disintegration of the Drydock? How did these fresh and cheery metaphors turn anxious and bitter?

It's Awash

Three kabuki actors, by Toyohara Kunichika, 1868, via Wikimedia Commons.

David Brooks writes ("The Shame Culture", New York Times, March 15 2016) [PARODY ALERT]:

In 1987, the University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, which argued that American campuses were awash—awash, I tell you—with moral relativism, or the decadent new idea that one should not judge lest one be judged, closing their minds, as his title suggested, to the rich traditions of intolerance and self-righteousness, and dogmatically insisting that everybody ought to be morally open-minded.

"If it feels good, do it," they proclaimed, unmooring people from their traditional ideas of right and wrong and thereby depriving them of those fascinatingly varied peaks and valleys of wickedness and virtue and making life flatter and emptier.

He was right, of course, but now he's wrong, because everything is totally different. Campuses today are still awash, but they're awash in judgmentalism.

The Deep Issues, and Shopping Too

From Segundo de Chomón, La Maison Ensorcelée (1908).

Shorter David Brooks, "A Question of Moral Radicalism", New York Times, February 5 2016:

Should we be moral radicals, giving our all to others and retaining nothing for ourselves, or should we be more moral moderates, giving and taking and having a beer once in a while and stuff like that, or is there some kind of compromise between these positions? Philosophers have been discussing this kind of issue since like 1982 and they still haven't gotten to the bottom of it, is that heavy or what?

Starting off with a Readers' Digest condensation of the Roddie Edmonds Righteous Among the Nations story (leading a group captured by Wehrmacht troops, he saved Jewish soldiers by telling the captors "We're all Jewish") as told by President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday, with link to the official text. Possibly Brooks trying to let us know he was invited again (went last year and gave the president high marks even in the face of disagreement from Andrea Mitchell, which goes to show what kind of courage and originality he himself possesses.)

That kind of moral heroism took place in extraordinary circumstances. But even today there are moral heroes making similar if less celebrated sacrifices than those soldiers were ready to make.

I'd like you to focus on the grammar of that sentence, with its totally unfair implication that the soldiers were only ready to make sacrifices if they were going to be fairly intensively celebrated.

Thin, relativistic, and ephemeral

18-foot fork in the road by Ken Marshall, Pasadena, Los Angeles Times, November 2009. Photo by Wakitu via Flickr. 

David Brooks writes, "The Big Decisions", New York Times, August 25, 2015:

Suppose you had a chance to become a vampire. Or suppose you had a chance to run for Senate. But I repeat myself.

No, seriously, the vampire question is one of those whimsical little devices used by professional philosophers to get a fix on how we should live our lives. And let's say it isn't a standard-issue evil Dracula type of vampire, for the sake of argument, but a stylish and benign vampire, what the philosopher L.A. Paul referred to before an editor got hold of the draft as a "vegetarian vampire", who only drinks free-range, organic, humanely slaughtered animal blood, bear with me here, and it turns out lots of your friends and relatives have done it already and are really happy with their decision, which gives them immortality, immense power, heightened sensory experience, companionship, and meaning. But once you do it there's no going back. I added the companionship and meaning part myself.

Pride goes before a pratfall too

Christian de Chalonge television version of Le Malade Imaginaire, 2008, via Le Figaro.

In a campaign speech before last January's parliamentary elections candidate Alexis Tsipras made a pretty audacious Greek literary reference, as The Guardian noted in a mysteriously Aristotle-bashing editorial:

The preceding five years had been ones of tragedy, he said. And after hubris, he warned, invoking Aristotle’s famous but flawed analysis of ancient drama, come nemesis and catharsis. The election, he added, was a battle between two approaches – on the one hand, the execution of austerity measures to the letter, whether or not those measures were working; on the other, a pragmatic notion – advanced by Mario Draghi, the head of the of European Central Bank – of “whatever it takes” to save the euro.

The latter view would prevail, said Mr Tsipras, and for an extra reason too: “Because Greece is the country of Sophocles, who taught us with his Antigone that there are moments in which the supreme law is justice.” Mr Tsipras was echoing the language of Antigone’s refusal to abide by her uncle the king’s edict that her dead brother be left unburied. In the drama she contrasts manmade laws, nomoi, with an ineffable, divine justice, Dike. Moral authority trumps mortal authority.

I'm not sure if he remembered that Antigone's view prevails in the end only after she herself is dead. King Creon's life is ruined too, with the suicides of his son and his wife, but that doesn't make it OK. It's a tragedy.