Well, I got done SOME of what I had planned. Nothing read of the many comps for next week, nothing written in terms of rec letters or article reviews.
But I took the car to the mechanic--replaced a sensor and met another prof from my university. Both of us are stuck at the associate level, too overworked to focus on a book (maybe). Both of us are nervous in that resigned way of institutional veterans: more of the same. Both of us wonder if this time is worse? Because the governor hates us? Hates higher ed? Stacked the Board of Regents with his cronies?
And I got good news: a call from one of the seminaries I applied to, offering me a full tuition scholarship. Very nice, that personal touch.
I also figured out midterm grades, loaded them up, sent them out--and then immediately discovered an error in the grades for one class, recalculated, changed the grades, and sent out an explainer email.
And I dipped back into some News. Tariffs seem to be off again. Or delayed? Suspended? Who knows. Some random quote from some anonymous White House staffer basically praised it as a thrilling what-comes-next story line. We'll see how enjoyable markets find chaos.
Another death from measles, this time an adult. This is more deaths this year than we've had in the past twenty-two years.
I read two pieces today about The Awfulness--well, two blog posts and a video.
Writing in 3 Quarks Daily, Barry Goldman reflects on the conventional wisdom he has absorbed and transmitted about care and deliberation in the face of seeming emergencies. Goldman recalls a speech by a political science professor he heard once when he was young:
He said all revolutionary movements are essentially utopian. The central idea is that there is a madman at the wheel. If we could just knock out the madman and grab the wheel, we could steer to safety. He said, sadly, this is a juvenile fantasy. The bitter truth, he told us, is there is no madman. And there is no wheel.
The world is much more complicated than the slogans of the revolutionaries would have it. There are no simple solutions. There are not even any simple problems.
Worse, the idea that there are simple solutions leads inevitably to fanaticism. The notion that there is a simple truth, we know it, and that guy over there is preventing us from reaching it, leads us to excuse pushing that guy out of the way.
Goldman says he has long attested to the truth of this insight. But, quoting e.e. cummings, "There is some shit I will not eat":
There can be no respectful listening to the other side when the other side says children shouldn’t be vaccinated for polio, or January 6th was a day of love, or Ukraine “got in a war.” Ukraine did not get in a war. Ukraine was attacked by a murderous dictator. RFK Jr. is a dangerous crank. Elon Musk has no business mucking around in the Treasury Department computer system. There is no such thing as the Gulf of America.
So I have changed my mind. I do so with the greatest reluctance. It goes against everything I’ve been saying for nearly 50 years. But the facts have changed. And “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
The time for politics as usual has passed. We are in the midst of a coup. The Constitution is in danger. Democracy and the rule of law are at stake. There is a madman at the wheel.
THERE IS A MADMAN AT THE WHEEL!
(I'm reminded of John Mulaney's bit from the first T admin [I paraphrase]: It's like there's a horse loose in the hospital. The surgeries and procedures go on, but now and then you hear galloping, neighing, crashing--and you remember: There's a horse. In the hospital!)
Timothy Burke (the historian, not the more famous one) offers some advice for those of us convinced that there's a madman at the wheel/a horse in the hospital/a coup in the US:
If you want to do something about it, whatever that it might be, you have a bigger and harder job than just being right. You have to be part of a we. Being part of a we is not just organizing, it is allowing yourself to be organized by others. It means giving up some of your own vanities, you own insistences, your own certainties and urgencies.
Don’t start from the biggest “we” imaginable, and we don’t start with the “we” that is required to win out in a struggle, as if fighting for a better world is a Request For Proposal with an attached list of minimum specs. We start from where we are as individuals, with the people who are most likely to know us. But that is precisely where the lonely purist fails hardest when they mistake their vain righteousness for a truth everyone has to be bullied and cajoled into accepting. If you can’t convince the people most proximate to you, most likely to listen to you, about what you want to make a shared cause or common concern, then that’s what you have to leave behind. If you can’t leave it behind, then embrace being alone, accept that what matters to you is being right as opposed to being effective. Choose the perfect and scorn the merely good.
And finally, John Green (one of the vlog brothers) simply gives a sitrep on his own anxiety. His book about tuberculosis gets released in a few weeks, just as (as he notes) we seem as a country dead set on giving a huge boost to "diseases of injustice" like HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis. This boost to disease (by abruptly and cruelly withdrawing aid) will cost lives. He ends by admitting "I'm scared because it's scary." But, he reminds us, we live not at the end of history but in the middle of it. We don't know the ending, which gives us hope and lays out for us work to do.
The work, it seems, involves not merely raising the alarm about the present but also imagining a "we" who live today and tomorrow with us.
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