Maggie's Farm

The complete archive of The Paris Review is online.

Also online,  The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

Lewis and Clark Weren't the Only Explorers to Map the American Frontier

In fact, the Spanish and French had lots of the "frontier" mapped out. The Indians did too. North America was not Mars.

Maybe they got bored with Shakespeare and decided to go into politics instead: Humanities, Pretty Much Dead, Are Mostly a Hunt for Racism and Sexism.

Or perhaps helping to preserve and illuminate culture and history for future generations just didn't feel important enough. Sad.

Mrs. Barrister and I update our address book whenever we feel forced to, but only get around to revising our Christmas Card subset of the address book every several years.

Doing Christmas cards is an important tradition, an annual rite of connection. Also, one more holiday hassle. At our house we tend to get around to sending Christmas cards biennially because of the challenge of getting good, full-family photos but we are giving up on that challenge this year. It just didn't happen. We wanted everybody on horses in Montana, but assembling family is herding cats. The purpose of the photo is to prove your continued existence, but all it reveals is your aging and the touch of grey.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that revising the Christmas list is mostly sad, not cheerful. You see how many have died, moved far away, divorced, or moved entirely out of your lives with no known address. The cheerful side is to stay in touch with those who have moved too far to see with any frequency or at all, and to acknowledge the new good friends you have made since your last revision.

We have been blessed with lasting friendships going back to grade school and prep school, and ones as new as this year. I will never move, as many do, to Florida for taxes or hot weather or, God forbid, California, as many friends seem to do. It pains me when people move away. Some people can not stay put, can live happily with shallower roots. Like restless pioneers, they move on and build rich new lives wherever they go. We do not have that ability or that restlessness; we do not want to rip the relationship fabric or the Yankee territorial fabric of our life however imperfect or highly-taxed it may be - and it is not meaningfully imperfect anyway - just expensive.

This post is my Christmas Card from Connecticut to all of our good readers, site visitors, fellow contributors and friendly bloggers. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Cheery Solstice, and God bless us, every one.

Can organizational professionalism be taught?

People who rise to the top of organizations generally have more important skills than pure IQ. Knowing how to manage people up, sideways, and down is an essential organizational skill. So is knowing how to keep emotion out of it all, how to maintain a professional distance from others without being cold or aloof, how to gain authority without being a jerk, calm social and organizational judgement, and so on.

People who start their own businesses or other organizations often learn such things slowly, by trial and error. In my career, I found Covey's classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to be quite useful.

Perhaps professionalism can be learned, but not taught.

Higher Ed today entails so many more things than it seemed to in the elite colleges that I was familiar with as a lad. They were mostly general education/acculturation/cultural transmission schools for gentlemen (separate schools for ladies) with majors which often had nothing to do with any planned vocation.

In my provincial New England bubble-world, there was no awareness of vocational higher-ed other than the Major of pre-med, and Engineering. I guess I had vaguely heard of Ag schools but never heard of a "business major". It might be my ignorance, but it seems to me that a proliferation of vocationally-oriented higher ed programs has altered the historical meaning and purpose of "higher-ed."  Perhaps I am a dinosaur.

To what extent does it make sense for higher ed to be vocationally-oriented? Much of it already is.  But can educational institutions even judge what sorts of training will be of value in the future? Educating the workplace.

When you have kids and enter middle age, you think about what you will leave behind you for the future, for future generations in your family line. Everybody does that, I think, in their own way. It's the way culture and subcultures are maintained.

Valued (or not) material items and photos are one sentimental part of that, but these things become diluted and dispersed over time, as does any money that is left behind.  A family's cultural traditions, habits, and pleasures are the best inheritance to leave behind with hopes that they will carry meaning and value as far into the future as you can throw them.  Messages from the graveyards - from your own future graveyard, and those of your ancestors.

The parental job is transmission of genes and culture, and the provision of food and shelter. That's about it, but it's not an easy job in today's world. If you were a serf on a lord's estate in England in 1300, it was an uncomplicated if tiresome job.

What's your opinion?

At first, Trump was just a clown. I thought so. Then he morphed into a dangerous crazy person. Now that he has been elected (I still have trouble believing it, but he has a misunderestimated Talent Stack), we sense that a new fear is emerging - a fear that he may be successful in some ways. Simon notes that Trump's optimism about America is driving gloomy leftoids crazy.

Even the always-cautious Walter Mead sees reason for optimism.

Best reason for optimism? We have Melania. From Dylan's political  I Shall Be Free:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It's President Kennedy callin' me up
He said, "My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow" ?
I said, "My friend, John, "Brigitte Bardot,
Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren"
Country'll grow.

Peter Berger: Is The World Becoming Protestant?

(In proselytizing) Protestants stick out. By and large, Catholics, like mainline Protestants, have been less aggressive in efforts to convert people; Evangelicals have been the most aggressive, most spectacularly the Pentecostals among them, who have probably experienced the most explosive growth of any religion in human history. (Most Pentecostals can be described as Evangelicals with two important additions—speaking in tongues and miraculous healing). Modern Pentecostalism is usually dated from the so-called Azusa Street Revival in 1906, when an African-American preacher named William Seymour started to preach in an abandoned stable in Los Angeles, gathered around him a wildly enthusiastic (and incidentally inter-racial) congregation, who exhibited all the Pentecostal addenda and sent out missionaries throughout the United States and then abroad. In 2016 the prestigious Pew Research Center estimated the worldwide number of Pentecostals as 600 million people. For a number of reasons, I think that this is probably an underestimate. Still, a rather impressive trajectory from Azusa Street! (Seymour must have been a remarkable man.)

OSU Diversity Officer Urges Compassion for Somali Terrorist Who Attacked Student.

She can not bring herself to admit that the guy was filled with murderous hatred for me and for her. She is doing the reverse-victim narrative.

VDH:

What exactly is the Democratic criticism so far of Trumpism? That he is jawboning companies not to lay off thousands of workers and leave the country? That he is barring revolving-door lobbying for five years? That he raised and spent too little on his amateurish campaign, had too few bundlers, and did not hire enough professional handlers? That he met with the press too much and mouthed off on the record? That too many working-class people voted for him and not enough of their supposed Silicon Valley, Wall Street, beltway, and Hollywood betters did? That conservative pundits had their columns fact-checked and researched by the Trump campaign? That the Republican party sabotaged his primary competitors to give him the nomination? Or that he wants impoverished miners to work again and export coal?

In the good old days, people learned many of these things from their parents. What One Woman Wishes She Learned in High School Illustrates Everything Wrong With Public Education

"Budgeting" money, though - what's that?  Today we have credit cards so we can get whatever we want whenever we want. Budgeting and living within one's means is obsolete, same as with government.

Among other things, one thing this past election year or two seems to have shown is a rejection of family political dynasties. I haven't seen that discussed much.

Insofar as it may have played a subliminal role, it was a good thing. Clintons, Bushes, Bayhs - good bye. Time for fresh blood.

Thanksgiving Was a Triumph of Capitalism.

They had utopian Christian dreams which were rapidly shattered. A New Jerusalem. They really did feel that they were on a holy mission that had nothing to do with money (except insofar as they owed quite a bit to their sponsoring corporation - which they were never able to repay).

Meanwhile, at the same time and a short distance south, New Amsterdam was a prosperous and rapidly growing Dutch colony. They had a good port and a handy river, but also a spirit of freedom (and diversity!) which the Puritans lacked. I don't think the earlier Dutch settlers had a Thanksgiving in New York. They were too busy making money.

By Melanie Kirkpatrick, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience

Arrested Development Week in Higher Education

I received a bit of pushback yesterday from my post on wars but I am not changing my view yet.  Looking for fights is neither Conservative nor patriotic. Bellicosity is just foolish and weak.

I read these bits from Totten and it bothered me. Totten is a fine reporter, but does he like war?

Look at it this way: From Russia's standpoint, NATO (ie mainly the US) seems like a threat. a threat in their backyard.  I feel NATO is an obsolete remnant of the Cold War. Leave it. There is no Soviet Union. The Ukraine, historically part of Russia, is of no national interest for the US.  Major powers want their spheres of influence and power, and tend to be a little paranoid and bullying. Russia and China included. Yes, it all seems stupid in the modern world where economics rule. However, those are not America's issues. They do not wish to invade the US, for heaven's sake.

Except for Israel, the Middle East is a God-forsaken s-hole. Despite 9-11, I refuse to be intimidated by those backward lunatics. This is their extended Dark Ages, and nobody can pull them out of that. Bush's and Hillary's wars and interventions were wrong, in retrospect. In the ME, whatever you do is wrong. What could be more obvious? Nuke ISIS, but there will be another one popping up a week later. Evil perseveres.

Life sucks for many people on the planet, but we can't fix that. We are not God and we often make well-intentioned mistakes. We must count our blessings.

Contrary views welcome, as always. No Thought Police here but personal insults are not arguments and good manners are always appreciated.

Where do all of these spineless candy-ass university administrators come from? Are they as immature and babyish as the students,  or are they just afraid of the Stalinist Thought Police? This is refreshing:

UM students condemn Pres. Mark Schlissel for his anti-Trump statements, and for promoting conformity and exclusion