THIRTEEN MORE VERY SHORT ESSAYS

Jerry Harkins

SAY, WHAT?

Why do so many car manufacturers and auto insurance companies run ads featuring idiots driving insanely through urban traffic, on backwoods roads, in blizzard conditions or in demolition derbies?

ROBO CHATTER

There is a class of problems that have no technical solution.  Stopping robo calls is not one of them.  Still, we keep electing clueless politicians who are not up to the task.

INCREDIBLE

Have you noticed that Trump’s second most favorite word is “incredible.” He thinks it means very good or very bad.  It really means not believable.  If I lied as much as he does, I’d be more careful about calling attention to my lack of veracity.  

SORRY, BUT “THEY IS” IS JUST NOT ENGLISH.

In an effort to devise a third person singular pronoun that does not denote gender, many young people are proposing they which would work if only a couple of billion people didn’t know it as a plural.  What we need is an entirely new word like Ms was fifty years ago.  Maybe se or sese from the Latin reflexive meaning himself, herself and itself.  While we’re at it, let’s shorten the inch by ¼ so that I turn out to be a six foot five inch chick magnet.

IRONY

Donald J. Trump makes me miss George W. Bush.  Actually, he makes me miss Vlad the Impaler.

I WASN’T AT THE MEETING

…where the agency creative team convinced Verizon to run a spot claiming its Fios service will encourage your guests to ignore you and each other in favor of overdosing on their digital devices.  It’s called truth in advertising. 

WHEN YOU’RE UP TO YOUR ASS IN ALLIGATORS

Desperate to find a new product that might save its endangered ass, The New York Times Executive Committee came up with “virtual reality” without wondering whether people might think that’s pretty much the same thing as fake news.

SPEAKING OF WHICH

Virtual reality relies heavily on something called “artificial intelligence” which also enables  all sorts of annoying modern conveniences such as hapless help lines.  Not surprising in that artificial means unnatural.

WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE MAY NOT BE 

COMFORTABLE FOR THE GANDER

Facebook, the world’s social arbiter, offers subscribers 58 choices to describe their gender.  These include “Other” but not male or female.

POP QUIZ:  POLITICAL SCIENCE 1*

Match the politicians in Column A with the adjectives in Column B.

WALL OF SHAME

Jerry Harkins

“Walls work!”

                              –Donald Trump, 1/8/19 et al.

Actually, they don’t.  The storied Walls of Jericho did not crumble because of Joshua’s trumpets.  Assuming Joshua was a real person, they may have fallen to his army as they did to many other armies later.  By the time the Topless Towers of Ilium welcomed the Trojan Horse, their walls had  been breached at least thirteen times during the bronze age.  Shortly before that, the Trojans burned the Greek fleet by first burning the wall of beached ships that was supposed to protect the rest of them.  In the real world, none of the versions of the Great Wall of China could keep out the Mongol invaders.  Hadrian’s Wall worked only as long as the Roman troops stationed along it were able to resist the bribes offered by the Scots and the Picts.  Rome itself was ringed with walls which were regularly breached by Goths, Vandals, Huns and any other heathans who encountered them.  The walled cities of medieval Europe were overcome by catapults and other siege tactics or simply by starving out their citizens.  The Berlin Wall became a symbol of Soviet stupidity.  The Great Wall of Montreal has become a joke or an embarrassment depending on your point of view.

But we never learn.  Even when our poets try to make it clear.  Robert Frost, for example, famously wrote:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down. [1]

Oh, yes.  The artist Richard Serra likes to build steel walls which wind up being despised by almost everyone who encounters them.  His most notorious work was “Tilted Arc” which, after an acrimonious jury trial, was dismantled and moved to a municipal garage in Brooklyn and then to a warehouse in Maryland.  It was accused of making a federal plaza in Manhattan even uglier and more dangerous than it already was.  Walls try to separate people, compartmentalize spaces, restrain movement and hinder communication.  Which is why they are prominent features of prisons.  In 1642, the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace wrote to Althea, “Stone walls do not a prison make.”  He was writing from his prison cell but he was right.  Prison walls are not effective against a determined escape artist.  As this is written, you can make a bet in Las Vegas on how long the so-called Super Max prison in Florence, Colorado will be able to hold the drug kingpin El Chapo.

In spite of millennia of human experience, the government of the United States has been trying for several years to build an impenetrable and insurmountable but beautiful wall along its border with Mexico.  It is an article of faith among Republicans that Latin American immigrants are mostly drug dealers, rapists and welfare cheats intent upon taking jobs from decent American workers.  Of course this is not true but truth is not a concern of the Republican faith at present and xenophobia is.  It’s the damndest thing.  Xenophobia in American life runs in cycles.  It began shortly after the Revolutionary War and manifested itself throughout the former colonies.  In 1790, Congress passed the Naturalization Law which provided a path to citizenship only for free white persons of good character.  In 1806, Northampton, Massachusetts hanged Dominic Daley and James Halligan before an audience of 15,000 citizens for the crime of being Irish immigrants.  (The trumped-up charges involved a murder of which they were officially exonerated 178 years later.)  In 1875, the Page Act denied entry to Chinese women.  Men were excluded in 1882.  Representative Page (Republican of California) said the objective was to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” 

In 1939, the United States refused entry to more than 900 Jewish escapees from Germany who had arrived in Miami on the good ship St. Louis.  The reason given was that the United States was not listed as a port on the ship’s manifest.  They were returned to Europe where a third of them were exterminated in the camps. When she learned of the rejection, Eleanor Roosevelt vowed that it would never happen again and the following year when more than 100 Jews on the Quanza were prohibited from entering the port of New York because the State Department said they were “undesirable,” she intervened and the decision was reversed.

Between spasms of hatred, however, America welcomed immigrants in vast numbers.  This was memorialized in 1886 when the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor.  In 1903, a plaque bearing Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet was installed on Lady Liberty’s base.  You will recall the often-quoted sestet that concludes the poem:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

She was dead wrong about the “wretched refuse.”  Many were surely poor and homeless but they were also the bravest, most determined, most talented among Europe’s huddled masses.  They were the ones who set out to create a better life and more opportunity for themselves and their children.  And they succeeded.  They established the new order of the ages, the Novus Ordo Seculorum promised in the Great Seal printed on every dollar bill.  We were lucky to have them.  They lived heroic lives.  Their children prospered and their grandchildren entered the national pantheon.  The Irish who came after Daley and Halligan dug the Erie Canal and joined the freed slaves and the Chinese to build the railroads.  A couple of generations later, all three groups were winning Nobel Prizes.  The slaves, involuntary immigrants, had already contributed the cotton that fueled the Industrial Revolution and the music that remains America’s greatest contribution to world culture.  The Volga Germans settled in the Midwest, bringing with them the scientific agriculture and strains of wheat that made America the world’s breadbasket.  The Jews manned –– actually womaned –– the factories that turned the cotton into garments and blessed us with so many of the scientists, mathematicians and physicians who defined progress in the twentieth century.  And just when these groups were climbing the social ladder, along came the Russians and the Asians, the Japanese, a new wave of Chinese, Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese.  Still later we witnessed the arrival of Latin Americans, mainly our fellow citizens from Puerto Rico, Cubans and Mexicans, Jamaicans, Brazilians, Peruvians and Columbians.  And many, many more from every corner of the earth.  There is a high school in New York City that has students from homes where 104 languages are spoken.

But the success of the immigrants is only part of the story.  And the discrimination each group encountered is only another part.  The most interesting phenomenon is that the story of the immigrants is everywhere and always the same.  It is a process of learning to balance assimilation with ethnic pride.  The tools they employed were hard work and education.  And as poor as they were, there was always a nickel a week for burial insurance so as not to be a burden, and another nickel to send the children to the movies on Saturday so they would learn English.  They  started out in occupations their predecessors had abandoned, selling food and sundries from pushcarts, taking in wash, collecting rags and peddling newspapers.  The second generation entered the civil service, joining the police, fire and sanitation departments and becoming teachers, politicians, musicians, actors, writers, journalists and entrepreneurs.

Not all members of the first generation were restricted to typical careers.  Among thousands of them who broke through ceilings of one sort or another, a random dozen would include Irving Berlin, Sergey Brin, Levi Strauss, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, Yo Yo Ma, I.M. Pei, David Ho, Oscar de la Renta, Bob Hope, John Kenneth Galbraith and Henry Belafonte.  Among those born in the United States to immigrants were Colin Powell, Jonas Salk, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and Ray Kroc.

It is tempting to romanticize the saga of immigration but there was little romance in the lives they led.  Their living conditions were often an improvement but still they struggled against the concomitants of poverty and discrimination.  And they made and still make easy targets as scapegoats for the failures of others.  Republican ideology has recently degenerated to truly depraved levels where families of asylum seekers are separated.  Children are placed in locked cages and get lost for months in the bureaucratic system in defiance of court orders and common decency.  We are told that immigration is illegal unless the immigrant manages to navigate a witch’s brew of bureaucratic obstacles.  We are told that the law or merely the whim of a single addled politician is sacred writ that must be enforced even brutally when necessary.  We are also told that we haven’t got enough room for more immigrants or more jobs or enough medical resources.  Such claims are odious examples of the Big Lie technique.  It is true that the American economy has to evolve to accommodate new realities and that the evolution will not be painless.  It is also true that economies have always had to evolve and have always done so.

If there is one certainty in the immigration debate it is that immigrants are the best hope we have of restoring the American Dream and the commitment it represents to the future.  To deny that is a rejection of the Declaration of Independence.  It is un-American.  It is an ignorant denial of history and it is immoral because it is only one step shy of Auschwitz.

THE PRICE OF GOD’S LOVE

Jerry Harkins

It is Easter Sunday in the year of the coronavirus and I have received some fairly saccharine greetings from classmates and the heads of various schools I have been associated with.  These are people I respect and admire even if they are more conservative than I think Christians (or anyone else) should be.  Some include e-cards with links to medieval hymns in Latin.  Regina caeli lætare, alleluia!  I wish I could believe the Queen of Heaven would intervene on our behalf with the God who seems to be uninterested in our plight.

Then this morning came a New York Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat (Harvard, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 2002), one of the gray lady’s house conservatives and a convert to Roman Catholicism, pondering the meaning of death and suffering in a world “rife with misery,” a world created by “a good and loving God.”  His conclusion is there is no certain answer but we should still seek one.  Why?  Because, “…meaningless suffering is the goal of the devil, and bringing meaning out of suffering is the saving work of God.”  Say what?  God’s job is to save us by finding meaning in our suffering?  Save us from what?  Original sin?

Mr. Douthat is certainly right that there is no certain answer and, I would add, no logical one either.  His notion that squaring the circle –– bringing meaning out of suffering  –– is nonsensical and possibly heretical in that God’s salvation is said to be the result of Christ’s suffering on the cross.  Many theories about the role of suffering in God’s plan have been advanced over the millennia and Douthat alludes to some of them but not the one given in the Bible:  punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve.  As the loving God says later (Exodus 20:6, Deuteronomy 5:9), “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”  And he wasn’t kidding.  This is the God who thought to himself “I made a big mistake when I created human beings so I’m going to drown every single living thing on earth except for crazy Noah, his family and one pair of each species of the animal kingdom.  That way I can start the whole thing all over again.”  Of course, he didn’t defeat evil the second time any more than he had the first.  Christian doctrine has struggled with this failure since Saint Paul.  If you’re interested, you should investigate the gobbledygook that has been committed under the heading of free will.

You see where this is going.  Since there is no rational answer to the question of a good God creating or even tolerating evil and, assuming there is a God, there must be something wrong with the question.  Before we get there however we need to resolve a more basic question.  Is there anything an omnipotent God cannot do?  The “anything” in that question always reduces to a paradox which is logically fallacious.  For example, can an omnipotent God create a rock too heavy for him to lift?  The answer must be yes or no.  But either answer proves that God is not omnipotent.  The problem of evil falls into the same class which is why Douthat is right in saying it is unanswerable.

The very existence of evil, then, argues that either there is no God or there is a God but he or she cannot be described as all good.  (Actually, there is a third answer given by the Gnostic heretics which holds that there are two gods, one good and the other evil.  The evil demiurge created the material universe which is thoroughly evil and which has concealed the good God from all but a few of us.  At least it’s logical but the Holy Inquisition slaughtered the heretics at the direction of Pope Innocent III who mounted the Albigensian Crusade against them in 1208.). But let’s take a critical look at the two possibilities for a believing Christian.

The idea that there is no God is obviously a non-starter or at least it used to be.  However, beginning with the emergence of “non-creedal” Quakerism and other dissenting movements in the middle of the seventeenth century, many Christians began to hedge their bets.  Today, there is a growing number of denominations that are non-theistic but that look to the teachings of Jesus as a guide to the moral life.  Roman Catholicism seems occasionally to be drifting in the same direction.

In his first encyclical, the ultra-conservative Pope Benedict XVI can easily be read as reviving a radical thesis that was debated by the early fathers and doctors of the church.  It is a cautious treatment but one given some prominence in its title, Deus Caritas Est, God is love, which is rhetorically identical to the proposition that love is God.  The phrase is borrowed from the author(s) of the gospel and the three letters of John who may have believed literally that, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). But love is a nebulous idea which suggests that God is also an idea.  Maybe John meant it.  His gospel begins with the claim that, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and God was the word.  Logos in Greek means word in the sense of idea.  (In Christian Orthodoxy, Jesus is said to be the Word of God referring to his role as the explicator of God’s law.)

Maybe Benedict meant that the idea of love is what made the world possible.  Not an orthodox position of course but attractive nonetheless to Enlightenment thinkers including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith.  The problem with it is that love becomes the cause of suffering which is just as unsatisfying as the notion that a good God created suffering.  Perhaps there is a way to avoid this conundrum by extending the insight of Dame Julian of Norwich who reported the revelation that God created sin so that we might experience his forgiveness and thus know his abiding love for us.  In a similar fashion, God may have created suffering so that we might know joy.  It’s not so far from the church’s medieval teaching that doctors should not relieve pain because pain is a gift of God that reduces the time we must spend in Purgatory.  As the popular hymn has it, “Bear patiently the cross of grief and pain.”

Attractive as it is, the notion that God is love flies in the face of biblical mythology and human experience.  As Saint Paul tells us, “ Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.   It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5).  That is not the God of the Flood or of Job or  of the coronavirus.  Which brings us back to the unhappy but logical conclusion that there is no God, good or otherwise, that acts in history and is knowable to human beings. 

 Atheism has logical and scientific appeal as a resolution to what I will call the Douthat Dilemma but the idea of God has been comforting to most people throughout history precisely because it provides an answer to life’s mysteries.  Those reluctant to abandon that idea are left to confront the second possible resolution that God cannot be described as all good.  There is no reason God has to be good and a great deal of evidence that the God of Abraham and almost all other gods who have perpetrated vast amounts of pure evil as have their acolytes and their hierarchs.  My favorite example is the way our God treats his upright and blameless servant Job.  He slaughters his wife and children, destroys his wealth and denounces him often and loudly, all to win a whimsical bet with Satan.  Remember, he did not have to continue denouncing Job who never wavered in his submission to God’s will.  The same God goes on and on about Jesus as his “beloved son” and then requires him to suffer an agonizing death.  Why?  Because Adam and Eve ate an apple they had been told not to eat.  Their act was not evil because, before they ate the apple, they did not know good and evil.  On the cross Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  It’s a fair question to ask about a God who commands to his human subjects, “Thou shall not kill.”

Only in Wonderland can God be considered all good.  In any real world mediated, however imperfectly, by a sense of morality, Douthat’s God frequently appears as a sociopath.  This raises the question of whether that God can be simultaneously good and evil in the same way Schrödinger's cat was said to be simultaneously alive and dead in a quantum environment.  The answer to both is a definitive no.  At any given moment, God must be either good or evil.  Any other state would, like the quantum cat, be a paradox which, by its nature, is self-contradictory.

Of course, good people often do bad things.  Might God be successively good and evil like most of his creatures?  Again, no.  Theologians have long agreed that immutability is one of the defining attributes of God.  God cannot change.  As another well-known hymn says, “Change and decay in all around I see; / O Thou who changest not, abide with me.”  This, in turn, derives from James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”  Another overarching attribute of God is goodness.  Everything that God does is worthy of approval.  But Jesus told Peter, “Whatever thou shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven.”  Thus, whatever the church does is also worthy of approval, a proposition that is at a minimum ahistorical.

God does not exist and the question of his goodness is moot.  It is possible that there was a first cause that set off the Big Bang but, if so, it and anything else that may have existed, was obliterated in the explosion. The universe –– reality –– is what it seems to be.  It is indifferent to itself and to us.  We have evidence that it had a beginning and will have an end.  There is much we do not know but we are not ignorant.  We know the earth is round and that it orbits the star we call the sun.  We have visited our moon and several of our fellow planets and we know they are not made of green cheese.  We do not know whether this knowledge is unique to us.  It seems unlikely and we keep on looking for other self-reflecting creatures just as many continue to search for meaning in the form of a Supreme Being.  Both quests speak well of us even if one (or both) of them is truly hopeless.

Note

Because this is an essay, not a book, about the goodness of God (of which there are many), I have not felt it necessary to burden it with endnotes.  But there are two issues that merit mention.  First is my diagnosis of Noah.  If you have any doubt about his insanity, you may wish to re-read Genesis 9:20-27 about why he invented slavery to punish one of his sons.  Second is my assertion that Schrödinger's cat cannot be simultaneously alive and dead in a quantum environment.  The reason is that the cat cannot exist in a quantum environment in the first place.  Nor can a cat be simultaneously alive and dead.  Schrödinger and his colleagues knew all that of course but needed a concrete metaphor for what they were really talking about.

SO

Jerry Harkins

The longest entry in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary [1] is the 161 pages devoted to the word set which has 430 meanings in print (with another two hundred and some waiting for the Third Edition).  Run is second with 396 meanings.  Sadly, both words are quite pedestrian and their treatment in the OED is not light reading.  Happily, though, there are enough interesting words in English to make reading it addictive.  Consider, for example, what may be the most interesting word in English:  so.  The OED covers it in only a little more than five pages, attributing to it some 40 meanings. [2] I would argue that such (relatively) parsimonious attention is insufficiently respectful.

My favorite dictionary for everyday use [3] invests only 631 words in so, 261 of them devoted to a mere sixteen definitions which barely scratch the surface of its usage.  Eight of these are adverbs, two are  adjectives, two conjunctions, two idioms and one each pronoun and interjection  The majority of the entry is given over to usage notes which, like the entire entry, are somewhat pedantic.  It, too, misses the richness, the mystery and the romance of the word, all of which are hinted at in the OED entry (as long as you are willing to spend a few days looking for the needles in a verbal haystack).

The etymology of so is simple even if nothing else about it is.  It derives from Old English, a blend of the languages spoken by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who settled in Britannia after the Roman legions left in 410 CE. [4] These Germanic people displaced the native Britons who spoke Latin and Brittonic, a Celtic language.  As time went on, swa which was the Old English word for so became swo and eventually swo became so.  As this evolution was occurring, its meaning was coalescing around a group of words signifying causation.  “It was raining so I took an umbrella.”  Thus. Therefore.  But so is not quite as resolute.  Therefore is definite.  B happened because and only because A had happened previously.  So leaves room for other factors.  It says A influenced B in this case, but B could be caused by contributing factors or even by factors in the absence of A.  The usual Latin word would be sic as in “Sic transit gloria mundi,” thus passes the glory of the world.  This is spoken during a papal coronation when flax is burned referring metaphorically to the ephemeral nature of worldly things.  If the smoke really caused the ephemerality, therefore (ergo) would have been used.

Many uses of so are similarly slightly vague or totally opaque.  Among the latter is the idiom So long which is a phrase meaning farewell with a hint of “I’ll see you soon.”  There is no shortage of theories for this you can find on the web but neither word signifies anything relevant.   Of course, goodbye is only slightly more meaningful.  Its supposed origin as a contraction of the phrase God be with ye seems like an academic conceit even though modern entomologists insist that good and god are unrelated.

Almost as devoid of meaning is so used, like ah or uh, as a kind of verbal tic or punctuation, a sound that can serve to introduce a new idea, direct attention to what follows or merely provide a brief pause for the speaker and listener to prepare for what follows.  It acts as a gateway and is often used when responding to a question.  A politician will answer a question by “So” followed by a full stop or pause and then an answer or, more likely, an evasion.  A transcript should indicate this with a period.  Closely related is a use which makes it less of a request and more of  a command or directive similar to the military injunction, “Now hear this.”  The more forceful the directive is, the more likely it should be followed by an exclamation point in a text or a rising inflection in the spoken word. 

The next gradation of so marks what follows as a matter of some wonder.  It is used like lo, behold or the repetitious phrase lo and behold.  Lo is a Middle English word for look and is used synonymously with behold.  [5]. A parent happens in on a teenage scene of which he or she does not approve and says “So!”  The degree of disapproval (or, occasionally, approval) depends entirely on the inflection.  However, the meaning of the inflection is never in doubt.

Doubt creeps in when we have lost the colloquial senses in which expressions were used.  The word cool, for example, has several contemporary connotations that have nothing to do with the temperature.  Among other things, it can mean laid back, popular, awesome, slow down or okay.  A future translator who knew these variations would have to choose one from the context while another who knew only the formal meaning would be puzzled by the idea of a cool cat.  We can turn to Seamus Heaney for a more literary example. [6]  The first line of Beowulf in Old English is:

Hwæt wê Gâr-Dena in gear-dagum

Given that we don’t have access to colloquial or idiomatic Old English, this means, "What we Spear-Danes, in [the] old days."   We are left to treat Hwæt as an adjective meaning what which makes no sense in context.  Clearly the Anglo-Saxons used it in a sense or senses that have been lost, leaving modern translators to imagine what what might also mean or imply.  Heaney renders it So followed by a period.  He gives the first and second lines as:

So.  The Spear-Danes in days gone by

and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s prose translation of the same lines [7] gives Hwæt as "Lo!":

Lo! the glory of the kings of the people of the Spear Danes in days of old we have heard tell, how those princes did deeds of valour. 

This would read better had Tolkien put a period after old and begun a new sentence with We.  But, like James Joyce, his usage is often eccentric so, as it is, the passage reads more like Tolkien than like the author of Beowulf.

Other translators have used "Listen" for Hwæt.  "Lo" is similar and perhaps more poetic.  It means something close to "behold" as in the gospel account of the first Christmas ("And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them…" Luke 2:9 from the Latin Et ecce).  I can't think of any justification for Heaney’s so.  I can imagine a bard saying "So" in the sense of "So let's begin the story by saying…"  But if he had and if he was writing in Old English he probably would have used Swa. In fact, swa appears often in the standard text and is translated as so by Heaney and others.

In the foreword to his translation, Heaney says, “But in Hiberno-English Scullion-speak, the particle ‘so’ came naturally to the rescue, because in that idiom ‘so’ operates as an expression that obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention.”  The same can be said of Tolkien's Lo.  But it still leaves the question of what the original may have been implying by Hwæt.  Perhaps the author was a Christian monk working in the Sixth Century and maybe the word Hwæt was taken from the first line of a local prayer beginning “What God has wrought.”  Might Hwæt then have evolved to become a poet’s shorthand invocation of Bragi, the Norse God of Poetry, for help in telling his story?  It seems far-fetched but remember that all three of the great classical epics – The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid –  begin with a prayer of invocation to Calliope, the Muse of epic poetry. [8] 

None of this is to dispute any of the decisions made by any of the translators whose work I have cited.  I can have my preferences but I cannot dispute Heaney's preference for So.  I can certainly appreciate the difficulties he faced and I have a strong impression that So is part of what gives his translation the feel of Old English in spite of its purported contemporary origin in "Hiberno-English Scullion-speak" which seems to refer to what my Irish grandparents would call "kitchen talk" implying the gossip of kitchen workers behind closed doors.  It sounds right to me even if Beowulf is hardly the kind of rhetoric one would expect of a medieval scullion. 

Another of the most common uses of so is thus as in the expression “So be it” which derives from and is the meaning of the word amen in Hebrew.  The OED says that in this usage, so is a “predicate” which is probably not precisely correct.  Be that as it may, the sentence usually expresses the hope that what preceded it (usually a prayer in the case of amen) will come to pass.  On the other hand, the same phrase can indicate resignation to something unhappy.  Change the sentence just a bit and it becomes, “Is that so?”  Then there is the traditional assertion of integrity, “I do so declare,” which is written and signed at the end of a test.  It is not a hope but almost an oath that the writer has not cheated.  The so is the object of the predicate do declare and refers to a set of community rules well known to all members.

So what?  How much is so much?  How little is not so much?  How poor is so-so?  How bad is a so-and-so?  How so is quite so?  We have come full circle.  Each of these sos means nothing or almost nothing aside from the speaker's inflection, how it is said.  The answer to all these questions is to some unspecified degree greater than zero and less than infinity.  So we reach the point of this essay:  virtually all words in all languages have multiple meanings which range from strictly logical to incomprehensible.  Words stray far and fast from their root meanings, leaving a crazy quilt matrix of their journey.  An attentive reader can see what in Hwæt but only a poet can see the so.

Notes

1.  Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 20 volumes, Clarendon Press, 1989.

2.  ibid. Volume XV, pp. 886-892.

3.  The American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006, p. 1648.

4.  These and several other small Germanic tribes originally spoke different dialects of Frisian which linguists tell us were mutually unintelligible.  But in Brittan, they lived in close contact and had to communicate.

5.  The equivalent word in Latin is ecce as in Isaiah 7:14.   The Latin Vulgate says, “…ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium et vocabitis nomen eius Emmanuhel.”  The ecce is almost always translated as behold.  Thus the famous line from Isaiah, “…behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emanuel.”  Or that from Lamentations, “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.”  Again, we are confronted not with reality but with metaphor.  You cannot actually look at the virgin who will be conceiving or the sorrows of Jerusalem.

6.  Seamus Heaney, Beowulf:  A New Verse Translation, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.  Heaney gives us the poem in the Anglo-Saxon with his translation on the facing page.  In an earlier essay on the art of translation, I have expressed the opinion that Heaney was the greatest contemporary translator of classical poetry.  Part of this discussion of the first line of Beowulf is taken from that essay.

7  J.R.R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, Christopher Tolkien, editor, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.

8.  Some have argued that these invocations were directed not to Calliope but to her mother Mnemosyne, the Titan of memory, for assistance in recalling the events of the poem.  But the Titans were relatively less contemporary and therefore less important to the Greeks than the Muses.  Homer is explicitly addressing a Muse.  If not Calliope, a case could be made for Clio, another of Mnemosyne's daughters and the Muse of history.

THE KINGDOM, THE POWER AND THE GLORY OF DONALD TRUMP

Jerry Harkins

I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them,

it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they

                     let you do it. You can do anything.  Grab 'em by the pussy."

––Donald J. Trump

    2016

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody

                              and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?

                                                                                    ––Donald J, Trump

                                                                                        January 16, 2019

Article II allows me to do whatever I want.

––Donald J. Trump

    June 16, 2019

Whether you love Donald Trump or hate him, you can’t argue about certain aspects of his personality. First, he spends a lot more time and money on his hair than you do.  His “do” disproves Lady Clairol’s claim that only her hairdresser knows for sure.  In his case, everybody knows he is the world’s only 73-year old bottle blond (okay, bottle orange) of the male persuasion.  Second, he is not a paragon of truthfulness.  In his first three years as President, he has told more than 16,000 lies according to The Washington Post.  Third, he has a high opinion of himself.  He is not shy about his belief that he is a very stable genius and the greatest President we have ever had with the possible exception of George Washington.  (Washington, of course, never mastered the art of the big lie.)  Fourth, he wears his ties crotch-length, whether for protection or promotion.  Fifth, he displays a truly remarkable range of unflattering facial expressions.  He often puckers his lips so his face looks like that of a very angry pig.  Sixth, his next self-help book could be titled The Art of the Insult.  His memoirs might be called Revenge Is Mine Saith the Lord.  He is a master of hyperbole.  Everything he does is the greatest that has ever been done in the history of the world.  His enemies are invariably doing the work of the devil.  Seventh, he is attracted to autocrats, evangelical preachers and statuesque women.  He surrounds himself with toadies and incompetents and fires anyone with knowledge or talent.  Eighth, he doesn’t smoke or drink.  He does curse and swear a lot but he’s not really good at it.  His repertoire is pedestrian, limited to dirty words he learned in ninth grade.  Ninth, his alleged wealth derives primarily from a worshipful father, his mastery of the bankruptcy laws and his extensive experience as a deadbeat debtor.

With that sort of resume, you might think Trump would have trouble landing a job flipping burgers but you’d be wrong.  He shocked the world by losing the 2016 presidential election by only a little more than three million votes.  Even more shocking was the fact that he actually won in the electoral college by 77 votes, the undemocratic result of one of several undemocratic compromises made in1789 without which the Constitution would not have been adopted.  This same trade-off resulted in Al Gore’s defeat in 2000 and Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.  It also defeated three other Democrats  –– Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden and Grover Cleveland ––in 1824, 1876 and 1888 respectively.

For better or for worse, Donald Trump is not your normal politician or your normal business executive or your normal Christian.  In every respect, he is abnormal.  If your Uncle Joe acted the way he does, you would have serious reservations about his mental health and you would keep him away from BB guns never mind the nuclear football Presidents have always at hand.  If you had taken Psych 1 in college, you might readily conclude Uncle Don was a megalomaniac.

Actually, mental health professionals no longer use the term megalomania.  However, it still appears in the literature defined as “a highly inflated conception of one’s importance, power, or capabilities, as can be observed in many individuals with mania and paranoid schizophrenia. In the latter, megalomania is often accompanied or preceded by delusions of persecution.” [1]  Sound familiar?  Is this the root of all the Fake News and Deep State conspiracy theories?

In fairness, it should be noted that history is replete with leaders who might be described as having a highly inflated conception of their importance, power, or capabilities.  Some were decent people and/or brilliant leaders, others not. You can make your own list of which were which.  Here are a few to get you started:  Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Atilla the Hun, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Vlad the Impaler, Henry VIII, Suleiman the Magnificent, Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Idi Amin.  Go ahead, try it.  Make a chart and for each name and list why they might be considered good leaders and why not and the symptoms of any craziness they displayed.

Poor Trump!  Maybe his greatest fear is waking up to the fact that he’s a phony, a failure, a laughingstock.  He wants to believe he’s a god, just as his parents told him he was but he lives in terror that he will be outed as just another dummkopf.   If that’s the case, he’s in good company.  A lot of very talented people have felt the same way.  Others, however, know a terrible truth:  I really am a putz. They can’t escape the fact that their best friends snicker behind their backs.  Even the mirror on the wall laughs out loud now when they ask, “Who’s the greatest genius of all time?”  In most cases, such feelings are not terribly harmful except maybe to those close to the sufferer but in extreme cases they can be devastating.  Unlike other psychological disturbances, patients present a wide range of manic behaviors only some of which are truly symptomatic and therefore useful in differential diagnosis.  It is worth quoting a standard psychiatric source at length in this regard:

Although psychotic features in patients with schizophrenia are typically bizarre and idiosyncratic, patients who are manic are much more likely to present with grandiose delusions that typically impair judgment and self-esteem. These patients may be difficult to manage because of their boundless energy and their grandiose misinterpretation of their situation. Staff may at first mistake mania for unusually high energy, talkativeness, and positive self-esteem; eventually they turn to the psychiatric consultant when the patient refuses to stop pacing or to stop talking to other patients late at night, or when he or she is belligerent or insists that he or she is free of any medical problems. Patients with irritable or dysphoric mania may present with persecutory delusions and can be superficially indistinguishable from a patient with paranoid schizophrenia. [2]

Again, sound familiar?  Bear in mind, this is not a diagnosis of Donald Trump’s mental health.  His doctors have assured us he is in full possession of his wits.  As you know, the Goldwater Rule says it is unethical for psychiatrists to offer a diagnosis about a patient they have not actually seen and this is excellent advice for writers who are untrained in mental health.  I don’t know whether or not Mr. Trump is a narcissist, a sociopath, a schizophrenic or a dysphoric maniac.  All I’m saying is it would be nice to know given that he has the power to destroy the world in his little finger. Then again, if it turned out he is crazy as a bedbug, it would be up to the Republicans to do something about it.  Which would mean they would have to abandon their distaste for evidence and their disregard for the judgement of history.  On December 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln sent Congress a message which included what became a famous admonition:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress

 and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. 

No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or an-

other of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, 

in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the 

Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to 

save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We ––

 even we here –– hold the power, and bear the responsibility. 

For the third time, sound familiar?  Persons of prominence should always worry about the first paragraph of their obituaries which will define for all time how they will be remembered.  No amount of academic revisionism will ever erase the memory of Cate O’Leary and her cow [3] or Lizzie Borden and her ax [4].  By all accounts, Roger B. Taney was a distinguished jurist and Chief Justice of the United States with the single exception of his abominable decision in the Dred Scott case which stained his obituary in 1864 and which forced both the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore to remove statues of him in 2017.

We live in perilous times.  Extremism is in the air all over the globe:  nationalism, xenophobia, terrorism, racism, sexism, human trafficking, civil war, religious wars, cyber wars, drug wars.  Truly, as William Butler Yeats told us, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” [5]  Of course, he was writing in the aftermath of the horror of World War I which should remind us that we have experienced horror before and have managed to survive.  Yeats foresaw the turn of history away from the Renaissance ideals of humanism, science, democracy and diversity.  But he could not have imagined the ability of social media and nuclear weapons to amplify the horror and the tragedy.  Like many intellectuals of his era, he looked to mysticism for hope.  There is evidence in his letters that he thought of hope as a strong force in human affairs and it may have been so in the distant past.  We, however, know it as a weak reed.  It may be that, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to the mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move;  and nothing will be impossible to you.”  But we have lost faith in such nostrums.

If we desire change, then we –– we the people –– must insist upon it.  We cannot afford to indulge our discontents however justified they may be, to exploit our petty differences, to invest our energy in peripheral disputes.  Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” [6] Americans need first to reverse the error of 2016 and, second, to agree that the reversal is only the first and perhaps easiest step toward renewal of the American Dream.  We cannot afford to be summer soldiers and sunshine patriots in the more important struggles ahead.

Notes

1.  Gary R. VandenBos, Ph.D. (Editor), APA Dictionary of Psychology, Second Edition, American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.,  2015.

2.  Oliver Freudenreich M.D., Donald C. Goff M.D., et al, Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of General Hospital Psychiatry,  Sixth Edition, Elsevier, 2010.

3.  This is the cow, at the Leary back gate, / Where she stood on the night of October the eight, / With her old crumpled horn and belligerent hoof, / Warning all "neighbor women" to keep well aloof. / Ah! this is the cow with the crumpled horn / That kicked over the lamp that set fire to the barn / That caused the Great Fire in Chicago! 

4.  Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.

5.  “The Second Coming,” first published in The Dial, New York, November, 1920.

6.  “The Crisis,” December 23, 1776.

THE MANY TRIALS OF BILL DE BLASIO

Jerry Harkins

New York is a tough town.  The folks who live here are smart, savvy and outspoken but they do occasionally make inscrutable decisions.  In 2013, they elected Bill de Blasio as their Mayor by a landslide.  They re-elected him in 2017 by another, albeit slightly smaller, landslide.  He did not have a great deal to recommend him on either occasion but he also did not have much in the way of credible competitors.   Fortunately for him, he did have a charismatic son Dante whose television ads were a hit.  He himself had no charisma and no significant executive experience.  Among Democrats, the obvious nominee had been Christine Quinn who was Speaker of the City Council, a smart, thoughtful politician.  But she had three strikes against her.  She was a woman, a married lesbian, and a protégé of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Bloomberg was a billionaire entrepreneur who had been a partner at Salomon Brothers.  He was also the best mayor New York had ever had, an empiricist, a pragmatist, and a management genius.  With Quinn’s help, he by-passed the city’s term limits law and served for twelve years.  But by the 2013 election, a lot of voters were tired of him and angry about some of the decisions he had made.  They took it out on Quinn.  Still, the inaugural speakers attacked Mr. Bloomberg viciously to his face, something de Blasio either knew in advance or should have known.  It was embarrassing etiquette and asinine politics.  It was also a portent of things to come.

De Blasio entered City Hall with some big ideas.  But his first priority, he announced, would be to eliminate the horse carriages in Manhattan because they constituted animal cruelty.  To the city’s animal activists, this was a big deal but to most people it was either a yawn or a laugh.  To the experts, it symbolized the invincible ignorance of city dwellers about animal husbandry. Whatever anyone thought, it was an arrogant, confrontational and elitist blunder.  It got worse when it turned out that he couldn’t get it done.  The animal lovers in his base were enraged, accusing him of caving into the big money interests.  Everyone else was astonished at his obliviousness or stupidity.  Whatever it was, there was a lot more of it to come.

He promised to solve the problem of the dwindling stock of affordable housing, an easy promise to keep because he would get to do the counting and write the report card.  His policies made things worse.  There were more homeless sleeping on the streets, working poor sleeping on the floors of the shelter bureaucracy, and rats attacking children in public housing.  His people were unable to implement a lead abatement program, keep the elevators running, install air conditioners in summer day camps during the hottest months on record, maintain heating systems during the coldest months or deal with escalating crime rates in the projects.  Meanwhile, the Zoning Department continued to issue dozens of permits for ridiculous, huge billionaires’ condos to developers noted for their political contributions.  With great fanfare, de Blasio announced Project Zero designed to cut down on traffic fatalities in the city streets.  After some early successes, the accident and death tolls started to increase again, a result he still hasn’t connected to his radical re-designing of the city’s traffic management priorities and initiatives.  It’s one thing to encourage bicycle riding which he did but quite another to make it safe which he didn’t.  The result has been more bicyclists and more bicycle accidents.  Duh!  Then, doubling down on his inability to ban horse carriages, he and the City Council passed a law forbidding the sale of foie gras.  Again, the motive was to prevent what the solons saw as animal cruelty.  Again, it only proved that New York politicians are blissfully ignorant.  Sales of the delicacy went through the roof and law suits were brought protesting Mother de Blasio’s overprotective rulemaking about what people can and cannot eat.  The new law has yet to go into effect but seems certain to share the fate of all efforts to legislate morality.  To his credit, he knew the charter school movement was wreaking havoc with the public school budget but he seemed cowed by the political clout of the charter entrepreneurs.  His instinct was to resist them but he usually wound up caving in to television ads attacking him as being anti-children.  He was not solely responsible for any of these problems or for the mismanagement that plagued attempted solutions.  He was, after all, dealing with a demoralized city bureaucracy and the New York State government, one of the most dysfunctional, corrupt regimes in the world.  But he was and is a terrible manager, a big thinking ideologue disengaged from the day-to-day business of getting things done.

Not everything was a failure.  Universal free pre-school was an important step toward breaking the cycle of poverty.  It wasn’t an original idea but he did get it done in spite of rampant corruption, obstruction and horse trading in Albany.  Free breakfast and lunch programs for all public school children was another vital step in leveling the playing field.  But tinkering with the admissions policy of elite high schools was monumentally wrong-headed.  He was right about virtually eliminating stop-and-frisk and broken-windows policing.  He handled the 2018 measles outbreak as well as could be expected and he did so at considerable risk to his standing in the Orthodox Jewish community.  He is right about closing down the infamous Rikers Island prison complex.  But he could afford to do so because he had inherited a much safer city from Mayor Bloomberg.  Similarly, he was right in decentralizing the garbage transfer facilities against the opposition of the affluent communities who didn’t want more garbage trucks in their backyards.

So it’s a mixed record.  But it should not have been.  When Mr. de Blasio entered office in 2014, the city was in good shape and was more politically unified and far more productive than it had been in a long time.  Most of its major problems – income inequality, affordable housing, congestion and the like – were the problems related to its successes in the post-9/11 or Bloomberg era.  Most of de Blasio’s failures were not substantive blunders but were the result of being rooted in ideology instead of analysis.  So, in 2019 when he entered the Democratic contest for the party’s presidential nomination –– which he had no chance of winning ––  the bloom was off the rose.  His quixotic campaign was met with outrage and derision.  In spite of some significant achievements, his constituents were now embarrassed.

Under the best of circumstances, de Blasio would be classified as a mediocre mayor if he didn’t have such a huge sense of entitlement.  Why would any politician with brains insist on travelling in an SUV with a police posse eleven miles to a gym in Brooklyn?  Why would he hire an expensive and embarrassing chief of staff for his wife?  Why would he continually pick silly fights with the Governor whose good will is essential to almost his entire agenda?  Why would he nurture a whining if not toxic distaste for the media?  Why, in, 2015 and 2016 would he be so clumsy in endorsing Hillary Clinton who had jump started his career?  Did it all start in kindergarten with a report card saying “Billy does not play well with other children?”

The answer to these questions must begin with the realization that being mayor of any large city is a very demanding job and one that often attracts unqualified candidates who see it as a gateway to bigger and better positions.  Then it is necessary to understand that America’s most successful mayors have rarely enjoyed the approval of the pundits and the good government lobbies (aka the goo-goos).  Consider, for example, the late Richard J. Daley who was Mayor of Chicago for 21 years (1955-1976).  Publishers, pundits and many academics were convinced he was corrupt, a racist, an authoritarian and a liar.  Some of the criticism may have been true to one degree or another but his constituents loved him.  He was elected six times usually getting more than 70% of the vote.  He transformed a decaying city of obsolete stockyards and nineteenth century railyards into a thriving financial and cultural capital that actually lived up to the claim of being “the city that works.”  He was, personally, scrupulously honest.  He was born and died in the working class Bridgeport neighborhood.  He was buried from the same church he had been baptized in.  There was corruption in Chicago and Daley was no saint even if he was a daily communicant.  He was surely a narrow minded autocrat.  It is probably true that he engineered the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 through the simple expedient of counting the votes of a huge majority of the residents of the city’s cemeteries.  He did not manage the 1968 Democratic convention or the police riots that responded to the radical protests.  But Saint Walter Cronkite’s bitter indictment of him on national television was ignorant and malicious.  Thirty-two years after his death, he is routinely ranked among the best mayors in U.S. history (as is his son, Richard M.).  He was the last of a breed that included some of the most accomplished politicians of the twentieth century.  For example:

·      John Francis (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald was twice elected Mayor of Boston.  He was the master of Fitzblarney. “Honey Fitz can talk you blind / on any subject you can find / Fish and fishing, motor boats / Railroads, streetcars, getting votes.”   He was forced to withdraw from the mayoral race in 1913 because of an indiscretion involving a lovely cigarette girl named Toodles, about whom the less said the better.  He was the maternal grandfather of another great Irish American politician John Fitzgerald Kennedy who, it seems, inherited his wandering eye.

·      James Michael Curley, ten-time candidate and four-time Mayor of Boston between 1914 and 1950, also known as Frank Skeffington, hero of Edwin O’Connor’s novel The Last Hurrah.  He served two Congressional Terms, one term as Governor of Massachusetts and several prison terms.  His first conviction was for taking a civil service test for an illiterate constituent who needed a job.  The second was for influence peddling.  He had nothing else to sell. The third time it was a federal rap for mail fraud. He simply continued to run the state from the federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.  Eventually Harry Truman pardoned him for the last two convictions.  The voters, too, forgave him and there are now two statues of him in the space between Faneuil Hall and the new City Hall.  His slogan was, “Curley Gets Things Done.”  Which was God’s honest truth.

·      James John (Beau James or Gentleman Jimmy) Walker, Jesuit educated lyricist (“Will You Love Me In December As You Do In May?”) and dapper Mayor of New York during the jazz age.  Denounced by Cardinal Farley for tolerating vice (His Eminence was the first social scientist to note that “girlie magazines” were the cause of the Great Depression) and by the Seabury Commission for corruption, he resigned in 1932 and retreated to Europe one step ahead of the law in the company of his mistress, the showgirl and actress Betty Compton.  He was played by Bob Hope in the movie Beau James.

·      Frank (“I am the law”) Hague, seven time Mayor of Jersey City and Boss of Hudson County.  He was expelled from school at age 14 and trained as a boxer.  Never made more than $8,500 a year but left an estate valued at more than $10 million.  That would be about $100 million in 2019.  Utterly corrupt, he was forced to resign in 1940 but able to appoint his son-in-law as his successor.  But Jersey City was a great place for a working man and his family. For one thing, Hague built the renowned Jersey City Medical Center which provided free medical care for all citizens for several decades.

·      Bill  O’Dwyer, Mayor of New York from 1946 to 1950 was born in a thatched cottage in Lismirrane, County Mayo and worked his way through Fordham Law School.  He gained notoriety as the Prosecutor of the Murder, Inc. gang and served as a Brigadier General during World War II.  He was an outstanding Mayor who also established the record for taking extended vacations but he ultimately ran afoul of the good government types who objected to his unsavory friends.  According to the Kefauver Committee, he hobnobbed with members of organized crime and there was speculation that he might be indicted.  He never was and after the committee was disbanded, Harry Truman appointed him Ambassador to Mexico.

There are no angels on that list.  These mayors were all Irish-Americans but not all successful mayors have been.  Just a few that come to mind are Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, John Hickenlooper of Denver, Kasim Reed of Atlanta and, of course, Willie Brown of San Francisco.  As Speaker of the California Assembly (14 years) and Mayor (2 terms), Brown set new standards of sartorial and rhetorical elegance and progressive politics.  But the FBI dogged him throughout his career, embarrassing itself with elaborate sting operations that went nowhere and leaking rumors and innuendos to the media.  It seems the G-men thought Mayor Brown, who was black, didn’t look honest.

It may be the case that, in an ideal world, mayors (and all those who make our laws) would be philosopher-kings à la Plato’s Republic.  However, the best of all possible worlds is far from ideal.  A mayor is a practitioner of retail politics at the most basic level and is charged with meeting the competing demands of dozens of constituencies.  His every waking moment is scrutinized by opponents, political donors, amateur moralists and media critics whose mission in life is to complain.  As Willie Brown is reputed to have said, “You're going to be accused of every high crime and low misdemeanor there is.”

De Blasio’s disappointments are not due to high crimes, stupidity or cupidity.  I’ve never met the man and am reluctant to engage in psychobabble but he strikes me as someone who is a lazy thinker.  He seems enamored with the easy answer and leans on ideology to spare him from the hard work of analysis.  It is a frail foundation for solving the complex problems that come to his desk.  It’s no way to run a railroad never mind a big city where maddeningly complex issues require a delicate balancing of competing interests.  Some tactics will advance a strategy, some will not but you can rarely predict which will turn out to be which.  Mistakes are inevitable and part of the management challenge is to identify and scrap them as soon as possible.  In governance as in science error is one of our best teachers.  No one is perfect at this but Bloomberg was very good.   De Blasio is not.  He is among the legion of politicians who believe and want you to believe that they do not make mistakes and never change their minds.  He also thinks he should be judged solely on his good intentions.  He is, in short, a cross between two Al Capp characters, the Schmoo and Joe Btfsplk.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”  Consider almost all recent politicians who have put themselves forward for the job of Mayor of New York.  A very few were talented but had little charisma.  Another few had charisma but little talent.  Some were good government types, others were scoundrels.  Bloomberg was the only one well qualified for the job and he had to switch parties twice to get elected.  The fault for this state of affairs rests exclusively with the electorate who allow the parties – every one of them – to emulate Caligula who plotted to appoint his horse as a Roman Senator.

It’s not just the mayors.  It’s every office holder above the rank of dog catcher.  New York State has had a surprising number of outstanding governors in recent decades but the state government is still the most venal and corrupt in the nation.  The prisons are full of bad actors who were elected to positions just below those governors.  Other states suffer similar records but New York is Number One.  Only Illinois comes close.  The system is not working because half of we the people are not paying attention and the other half is looking only through the prism of ideology.  When de Blasio was asked why he thought he could get the Presidential nomination, he told reporters, “Just watch.  I’ve never lost an election.”  To which I reply, in the immortal words of H. L. Mencken, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Subsequently

After an embarrassing showing in the early 2020 Democratic primary contests, de Blasio dropped out with his tail between his legs and threw his support to Bernie Sanders where his role seemed to be as an attack dog against the other candidates.  His principal target was Mike Bloomberg.  His principal weapon was twitter and his principal strategy was the Big Lie.  Maybe he's dumber than I thought he was.