We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
There is now a grey pallor that seems to engulf this once thriving corridor. The houses that were built in the 1950s and 1960s and kept up by middle class families that took pride in their neighborhoods have been deteriorating for years. The homes are in disrepair. The bricks have grown dingy from years of pollution buildup and lack of power washing. Porches and awnings are sagging. The woodwork hasn’t seen a paint brush since the 1970s. Trash is strewn in the streets. Gardens are no longer tended to. Lawns are overgrown with weeds. The inhabitants of these neighborhoods either don’t care or don’t have the financial wherewithal to maintain their homes. On the current trajectory, these once proud neighborhoods will eventually resemble the 30 Blocks of Squalor.
It's not lack of wherewithal. If you can afford a car, an iPhone, and a big flat screen TV, you can afford a few gallons of paint, a scraper, and a paintbrush from Home Depot. It's just about old-fashioned degeneracy, ignorance, or sloth, which will always be with us in some proportion of the population. We have to accept that reality. For heaven's sake, we have prostitutes in Hartford getting Disability checks for anxiety disorders. It's their loss more than it is mine. If you wish to live a life without dignity, have at it; I won't let you starve, but don't expect any respect from me. A young gal with Down Syndrome works every day at my market. She is not on Disability.
I don't know whether Mr. Welton is right or wrong about government benefits enabling parastic or feral subcultures, but I do think he is correct that the middle class feels that all they can do about it via government is to give them some money and hope they will live, and stay, drunk or stoned or just unmotivated, far away from them. "NIMBY, s'il vous plait. I want a pleasant, peaceful life, and work hard to have one."
Funny, the middle class feels the same way about feral government, most of the time. Except when they are getting freebies. Never dare take freebies from the middle class.
Central to its doctrine of embattled and threatened virtue is the notion of what Lionel Trilling has called the avant-garde’s “adversary” relation to the larger (bourgeois) culture in which it functions. If the institutions that now serve as conduits of avant-garde claims are no longer shy about acknowledging this adversary role, it is because the role itself has acquired an unquestioned historical prestige.
We have all been brought up on the legend of avant-garde martyrdom, with its celebrated episodes of tardy vindication. Nothing is more familiar to us than the literature of cautionary tales recounting middle-class resistance to and stupidity about “advanced” artistic innovation. The history of modern art abounds in such tales, which are often chronicles of genuine suffering when they are not mere comedies of cultural manners. As a result, the tendency of modern critical thought, whether sympathetic to avant-garde objectives or openly hostile to them, has been to accept without question an essential, perhaps even a metaphysical, antagonism separating high culture from the middle class—an antagonism readily confirmed in our guilty feelings over the crowded roster of abused and misunderstood genius.
Kramer was wonderful. There is nothing new under the sun. Vanity of vanities: all is vanity. Call me bourgeois - I don't care -Trilling, Kramer, and Gombrich are my kind of bourgeois guys. Sticks and stones...
...if feckless men in Fishtown are not unmanly, what are they? Murray invites us to choose our own words; I suggest “remittance men.” In nineteenth-century Britain, sons, brothers, and uncles whose disreputable conduct made them an embarrassment to their families sometimes received an offer they couldn’t refuse: “Move to Capetown, Jamaica, or Tasmania, and—provided you never come back to England—we will send you a monthly remittance. It won’t be a lot, but you’ll be able to live without working.”
Do the residents of Belmont (median household income $95,000) and countless other communities like it have a similar understanding of Fishtown’s feckless men? The Belmonts of America help fund the various government payments that keep neighborhoods like Fishtown afloat. In return for remitting to the tax man, Belmont, Massachusetts (83.5 percent white, 11.1 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, and 1.8 percent black) gets a measure of isolation from the troubles and failures of urban neighborhoods.
Like totally cool. A country cabin on the roof of a six-storey building, corner of 13th and 3rd just a few blocks from Union Square. They even have a Wisteria arbor up there. Rus in urba indeed.
Maggie's is a big supporter of CSC: "Reimagining the classics." They manage to get stars who want to do classic stage. Bebe Neuwirth was Tatiana.
"But what is the story line?", I asked the wise Mrs. BD.
"What fools these mortals be" she replied.
I am fortunate in spouse and friends who dislodge me from my work, my gardens, and the internet. There was a wonderful street fair on Third Avenue. As a country boy, I sure do love visiting New York. I'd like to do a week of urban hiking there, with camera and beer stops and a nice hotel suite. Invite all of our readers to hike along too.
One of my kids attended a very demanding high school, a boarding school, actually. During senior or possibly junior year, this youth showed me his AP European History thesis. The master had written on top, in the usual red ink, "Best AP European History thesis I have read in ten years. Almost publishable. B+"
I believe he understood the compliment. The master believed that, however fine and well-researched the work was, he could have taken it even further.
“An A,” she said jubilantly, but with a strong undertone of derision. “And I didn’t even read the book!” As the paper thudded into the trash basket, her friends joined in the disdainful laughter.
That quote is about college, not the local high school. Another quote from the essay:
The person who is never challenged is also never refined, never learns to cope with the setbacks that come on the way to high endeavor. And it is not only in the academic realm, of course, that they may be hampered: a full life outside of university also requires the ability to confront one’s weaknesses and recover from defeat. Despite the admittedly important emphasis on character formation in our schools — on tolerance, anti-racism, refusal of bullying, and so on — it seems that we have failed to show students what real achievement looks like and what it will require of them.
Colleges have become high schools. As far as I have heard, only the elite boarding schools still maintain the highest expectations and standards, far higher than even the most elite colleges.
A shout-out to our friends at the Shelburne Museum, just a short drive south of Burlington.
An interesting and highly eclectic collection. I get a kick out of these small town museums which were started by eccentric rich folks who collected odd stuff. A good outing for a rainy day, or a day with nothing fun planned.
Roger Kimball is one of too few conservative writers who can lend deep erudition to connect the central tenets of Western civilization with today’s immediate events and concerns. Kimball’s influence is not only through his own writings but his featuring of that of others at his The New Criterion and its blog Arma Virumque (I’ve been overhonored to appear at the blog) and his publishing house Encounter Books.
Now, you have the chance to get in depth with Kimball’s learning and lessons in his new book The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. Order at this link.
Why does relativism, which begins with a beckoning promise of liberation from “oppressive” moral constraints, so often end in the embrace of immoral constraints that are politically obnoxious? Part of the answer lies in the hypertrophy or perversion of relativism’s conceptual enablers— terms like “pluralism,” “diversity,” “tolerance,” “openness,” and the like. They all name classic liberal virtues, but it turns out that their beneficence depends on their place in a constellation of fixed values. Absent that hierarchy, they rapidly degenerate into epithets in the armory of political suasion. They retain the aura, the emotional charge, of positive values. But in reality they act as moral solvents, as what Gairdner calls “value-dispersing terms that serve as an official warning to accept all behaviours of others without judgment and, most important, to keep all moral opinions private.” In this sense, the rise of relativism encourages an ideology of non-judgmentalism only as a prelude to ever more strident discriminations.
And…
[T]he fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It involves an attack on permanent things for the sake of the trendy and ephemeral. It means students who are graduated not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, or some other politically correct vice. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.
The world is full of people who cannot or will not negotiate life very well, or with any pride or honor. Every sort of culture has them; the people who cost you money or detract from your life in some unpleasant way. Often, they have either had misguided or negligent upbringings, terrible karma, or have significant character flaws resulting in poor judgement, poor functioning, or antisocial or dependent traits. Often their families expect them to rely on government for survival or help, as so many do with the frail elderly these days. (That's the Julia story.)
Not everybody is born to be a real, self-sufficient, family-centered American-type. It's not easy. However, we are all fully aware of the grieveous moral and spiritual effects of moral hazard in government benefits, and of the temptation of freebies.
What's the answer? Or is it just the price of civilization that some people just don't or won't get it, and must be paid regardless of moral hazard? In other words, just write them off and absorb the losses. Let them rip you off or live off your labor, even though they are not your relatives.
That's my theory. Ignore moral hazard and people working the system, write them off as losses, give them some money and let them go away. Nothing anybody can do about it. With half of the country on the dole in one way or another, parasitism is becoming acceptable anyway.
When most people farmed, it was not thus. Even today, I think anybody can make themselves useful, and lead a positive existence, if they want to.
...if Socrates is right, and true wisdom is accepting one's own ignorance ... what does that say about "progress?" As individuals, of course, we recognize our personal idiocy. But the arrogance of progress is that no matter how stupid individuals are, progressives have confidence that society (as a whole) is on a one-way trajectory toward comprehensive wisdom. Progressives trust that society is growing collectively smarter and wiser.
I refer to Arthur Miller's 1949 Death of a Salesman. I saw it performed once in New Haven, read it once or twice.
It's a dreary play about unhappy people, and I would have no interest in seeing it again. For a reason I cannot understand, it's been viewed as some sort of critique of modern life and capitalist society. I suppose being a regular person seems humdrum to a wealthy, celebrated writer who married Marilyn Monroe. The Lee Siegel comment on the current Broadway production is in that vein: Death of a Salesman’s Dreams.
Lee Siegel's comment is wrong on more counts than I have time to review.
For what it's worth, in my view it's the story, not about middle class dreams, but about life's disappointments. I suppose the endurance of the play has to do with the fact that we all have disappointed dreams. Biff's sanity is his aspiration to be "ordinary."
The play is also, I suppose, a play about clinical depression and a play about kids' perceptions of their fathers. But is that worth paying big bucks to see?
I happened to have a chat with a salesman recently. He sells services for IBM. Loves his job. Somebody told me recently that, in one way or another, "everybody is in sales."
In the early 1900s, nearly 80 percent of Americans over the age of 65 had a job. Dora Costa, an economic historian at UCLA, says people stopped working only if they were no longer physically able to. They expected to work as long as they lived.
Is that really such a terrible idea?
Social Security was partly designed to prevent the frail elderly, those presumably abandoned by their families, from starving in the gutters. A secondary purpose was to nudge older folks out of the job market during the Depression. Of course, the Ponzi scheme vote-buying motive was there too.
Thus was the utopian concept of "retirement" sold to the American people. Today, for most people, Social Security is just one factor in their retirement equation, and everybody is expected to have a "retirement plan," as if work and productivity were something to escape.
I happen to be one of those fortunate people who likes to work. I like any sort of work. Retirement has zero appeal to me, although more vacation time does appeal to me. My goal is 4 weeks off per year.
Our resident blog critic says it's a dumb article. Here's the article: Against Chairs. A quote:
I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad. Not only are chairs a health hazard, they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obsessed individualism. Worse still, we’ve become dependent on them and it’s not clear that we’ll ever be free.
It sounds absurd to claim that chairs are dangerous.
Who would give up the Iliad for the “real” historical record? Of course the writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth. But we demand that of all creative artists, of whatever medium. Besides which a reader of fiction who finds, in a novel, a familiar public figure saying and doing things not reported elsewhere knows he is reading fiction. He knows the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel. The novel is not read as a newspaper is read; it is read as it is written, in the spirit of freedom.
Picasso expressed the same idea summarily: “Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth.”
The story of Newark, New Jersey is a classic of the Northeast's Blue City woes with corrupt, plunder-oriented politicians, corrupt and greedy unions, the Mafia, unskilled blacks from the South coming for industrial opportunities which disappeared, drugs and drug gangs, welfare, white flight - all of it.
You can see the same sad story in Bridgeport, CT, Camden, NJ, or Hartford, CT. Newark Mayor Cory Booker has sought the chance to turn things around.
Is Booker a Don Quixote or a Rudy Giuliani? Time will tell.
There’s a new journalism prize, The Walter Duranty Prize for Journalistic Mendacity. PJ Media and The New Criterion will award the Prize annually “for what our readers consider the most egregious example of dishonest reporting for the fiscal year.” The initial judges include Peter Collier, Roger Kimball, Cliff May, Ron Radosh, Glenn Reynolds, Claudia Rosett, and Roger L. Simon. Roger Simon writes, “Since this is a new prize the committee also solicits your suggestions on how we should carry on our work and any other suggestions regarding the Walter Duranty Prize.”
There’s certainly enough expertise on the panel to reach such a choice. I suggest the following criteria:
1.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be reporting on a foreign country. Walter Duranty’s infamous whitewashing of the starvation and death of millions of Ukrainians in 1932-3 will be hard to exceed, but there are enough terrible instances of widespread state brutality today that journalists who espouse the state line or distort the facts should be the priority.
2.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be to a bureau chief for a major news agency, newspaper, or other prominent media, as Walter Duranty was the longtime bureau chief in Moscow for the New York Times. This ties the responsibility directly to the owners of the venue.
3.In parallel to the reportage by Walter Duranty, the prize for dishonest reporting should be the recipient of an award for journalism, as Walter Duranty was of the Pulitzer Prize for his. This ties the responsibility to the journalism profession.
Susan Squire, the author of a forthcoming history of marriage called I Don’t, told me that marriage wasn’t made to handle all the sexual pressure we’re putting on it. For one thing, the average life span is far greater than it was 100 years ago; what is marriage to do with all that time? And in days gone by, marriage was a more formal institution whose purposes were breeding and family. Squire says that cultural standards of morality have changed dramatically. In ancient aristocracies, rich men had courtesans for pleasure and concubines for quick sex. In the Victorian age, prostitution was far more open than it is today. America is a special case. By the early-twentieth century, she says, the combined impact of egalitarian ideals and the movies had burdened American marriage with a new responsibility: providing romantic love forever. Squire says that the first couples therapy began cropping up in the thirties, when people found their marriages weren’t measuring up to cultural expectations.
With mashed potato minds fresh from the psychological Cuisinart of public schools, the next generation in line to inherit the most fantastically schizophrenic nation in history will be like candy for social engineers; utterly unequipped for the mission.
Our pal Sipp sent us the following missive, as a corrective to this morning's link on the topic:
The recipe for barn red is right here:
-Boiled Linseed oil. (Dullards like the writer don't know there's two kinds of linseed oil. Boiled linseed oil is what's used for paints. It's deadly poison. Regular linseed oil is what Amish type people use for this and that. I had a boss in the painting business way back when that heard of all the health benefits of a tablespoon of raw linseed oil, and used to eat Boiled linseed oil until I explained the difference. Raw linseed oil never dries, properly, so you can't use it for painting a structure) -Red lead powder. This goes back to the Roman Empire. It's really cheap, and a fantastic pigment. Has a tendency to make your children into dullards, though, even moreso than TV does. -Turpentine. Just old-fashioned paint thinner, distilled from pine sap. -Japan Drier. A dash of this metallic salt makes paint films dry much faster. It's poison, too. Counter-intuitively, if you add a lot, the paint never dries.
Old-fashioned barn stain used to be called OVT. Cabot still call some of their stuff OVT, but lord knows what it is. Oil, Varnish, Turpentine.
Sugar of white lead can be substituted for red lead. It's more expensive, so red got used more. People still called primer "red lead" when I was a kid, and it came in red even after the lead was removed from it. You can still find real red lead in use in shipyards, I bet. Muffy and Biff's yacht often had a coat of it on the bottom despite their Sierra Club protestations. Barns shifted from being painted red to being painted white when the idea of a farm became synonymous with "where the milk comes from." It's just a representation of cleanliness. And colonial era barns, as well as almost everything else, were pretty much never painted in any way. If you'd have seen Salem, Mass or some such place before 1800, the whole place, every stick of it, would have been weathered brown.
After I read this guest post at Zero Hedge, 
From 
From 
There’s a new journalism prize, 
Our pal