How Many Plots? the parlor game

It's fun to reduce the number of plot-lines that underlie most stories to as few as possible. There's the quest and homecoming theme of Odysseus and the Mosaic Jews, the temptation and moral growth theme of Gowain and Jesus, and the coming-of-age theme of the ugly duckling, Cinderella, and half a million novels. There is the contest theme of all battle stories from The Illiad onward and also the Tortoise and the Hare and the theme of innocence redeemed of Little Red Riding Hood. How many others? Love of course, revenge, mistaken identity, mistaken motives...... Here's a review of a new book and some links at the end.

From the Telegraph (UK):
World of books
By A N Wilson
(Filed: 08/11/2004)

The simple magic of storytelling

extracts

MY OLD English teacher, Timothy Tosswill, was the first person to open my eyes to the fact that there is a limited number of stories in the world. One term we read Chaucer's The Clerk's Tale together with Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale and noted many points of resemblance between these stories of tormented wives being put through unreasonable ordeals by tyrant husbands.

When we turned to King Lear the next term, Tosswill asked us if the story reminded us of another. There was the usual gormless silence, allowing the master to smile-sneer, "None of you, I take it, were read to when you were little boys a story about two ugly sisters and their patient, good little sister, Cinderella."

Christopher Booker has just published the magisterial treatment of this sort of theme – a book called The Seven Basic Plots, subtitled Why We Tell Stories. (Published by continuum, which annoyingly seems to have no capital C).

He thinks that there is one, monist explanation to the question why we tell stories. Ultimately, it is to bring us back to God, who is our home. But in psychological terms, it is to reconcile the conflicts within ourselves. The many stories which have the number three in them reflect the fact that three is the basic number – mother, father and child. But the child will be imprisoned in its ego if it remains only the child of its parents, so it looks for the eternal fourth. Hence the happy ending when comedies and quests end with a marriage, and another pairing.

There is a great pleasure, for me, in monist, catch-all theories of everything, whether they stem from Hegel or Jung or Aquinas or Booker. But one of the pleasures, having absorbed the theory, is to think of the many exceptions which can be found to the dogma.

On some future reading of Booker, I might be converted completely to his Jungian viewpoint. Meanwhile, I shall be buying his compendium as Christmas presents. It is a jolly useful reminder, for one thing, of far more than seven plots – he summarises what must be hundreds of films, novels, folk tales, plays from Sophocles to Chekhov (another hate of his), from Goldilocks to Godot. Some of his clumsier sideswipes against feminism and the like simply miss the mark. But I salute his hatred of soap operas, and the many sloppy films and TV shows and novels which have lost touch with the fascinating and emotionally satisfying business of story.

Basic plot-lines links:

The "Basic" Plots in Literature
What are the seven basic literary plots?
The 36 Basic Plots
The Magic of Making Stories, Basic Plots You Can Use

Some links to other reviews of the Booker book:

Times (of London)
Times Educational Supplement
Amazon UK
Review Index

Geraniums

We had our first frost Wednesday morning. The low temperature was 30 here at the house and a bit cooler in Rock Creek Park as I rode to work. The geraniums on our south-facing back porch took the weather in stride. Here's a photo of the flowers themselves and three showing them plus our volunteer back-porch guardian Max.

US economic policy

Earlier this week in the Financial Times there was an interesting opinion piece projecting the economic plan of the Bush administration. The author says Bush will pursue privitatization of social security, make permanent the tax cuts, and impose limits on malpractice claims and class-action suits. The goal will not be to strengthen the economy, but to provide benefits to key Republican supporters and to undermine Democrats. He says "the 'Bush II' agenda will not be constrained by bipartisanship, fiscal discipline or even economic reality, because the ultimate motivation is not economic but ideological - to shrink government and weaken Democratic opposition. The three big economic initiatives promised by Mr Bush should therefore be seen for the political thrusts they are." In conclusing, he sees a risk that the US economy suffer an extended decline, like the British economy in the 1960s and 1970s and Japan in the 1990s.

The author is Adam Posen, senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington DC.

Here's a link to the article.
The economics of a second term
By Adam Posen
Published in FT.com: November 9 2004 02:00 | Last updated: November 9 2004 02:00

Roses

Could be the last roses of the year.

How big a divide?

There has been lots of talk about polarization, geographical as well as ideological. It's easy to forget that almost half the electorate voted for Kerry. What does't seem to be noticed is the extent to which divisions occured within counties, not just between them. The election didn't reveal a division among sections of the country (or at least not much of one) but the split was much more pervasive, within counties and not just between them. Take a look at the page of Maps and cartograms of 2004 US presidential election results by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman, University of Michigan. The cartograms, particularly the ones at the bottom of the page show graphically that there is a very large number of counties where the Bush/Kerry vote was pretty closely split (not 50/50, but showing sizable votes on both sides). I take this as support for the views expressed by Morris Fiorina on the Nightly Newshour post I did a few days ago. See the Newshour transcript here.

Falling dollar

The Financial Times is saying that China is selling dollars and has signaled that it will no longer keep its currency artificially low against the dollar. This is was the WaPo editorial said was desirable from the U.S. point of view since Americans need to stop buying and start saving. Americans buy cheap Asian goods in huge quantities, so an incraese in the cost of these goods can result in a decrease in the "savings deficit" as people buy less. The increase in the value of the renminbi (Chinese "People's Currency) will have this effect. The Financial Times, unlike the WaPo editors, does not see this as a good thing. They say there are signs that foreign government are becoming disinchanted with investments in the U.S. Although the WaPo editorial makes the optimistic assumption that Americans will take up the slack, there's no sign of this optimism in the FT account. The FT doesn't come right out and say it, but it seems to imply that what could happen is what the WaPo editorial was seeking to avoid: a crash. Here's the FT link: Dollar expected to fall amid China's rumoured selling, By Steve Johnson in London and Andrew Balls in Washington
Published: November 7 2004

Poet laureate? What poet laureate?

A good item from Arts Journal:

Plans To Replace Nevada Poet Laureate Surprise Poet Laureate Norman Kaye, 82, a "Las Vegas resident who's written tunes for crooner Perry Como, is not happy the state wants a new promoter of the iambic pentameter. Kaye was torqued to learn the Nevada Arts Council recently sent out a press release seeking nominations for the post of poet laureate. The announcement does not mention the state has an existing poet laureate in Kaye, a grievous slight in my book." Lohantan Valley News (Nevada) 11/08/04
Posted: 11/08/2004 9:19 am

From Lhontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard
What? You've never met Nevada's poet laureate?
Steve F. Lyon
I'm on deadline
November 8, 2004

Burke, Burke, and Bush

I'd like to hear comments, if anyone has them, on Tim Burke's reaction to the GWB revolution. On Nov 4, he posted a long essay called The Road To Victory Goes Through the End of the Democratic Coalition and on the 5th he did a shorter update, recapitulating much, And Another Thing...

To some extent, Burke views Republican voters as peasants who are conservative in the pure sense that they want to conserve, as Burke says, a "deliberate maintenance of sufficiency." In other words, they don't buy into the grasping materialism, floated on unreal levels of credit, that the editorial in yesterday's Wash Post refers to (see here for the editorial, while the link lasts, and below for my blog entry on it).

I don't agree and think Burke should look to his namesake, Edmund Burke, for inspiration on this subject. That Burke spoke for tradition (what we might call the constraints of social strictures) and reverence for established authority. He was a reactionary in that he reacted to, and put up defenses against, the threatened and actual revolutionary events of his time. He greatly feared anarchy, class warfare, and the uprising of the lower orders of society. In the French Revolution, he saw the potential for disintegration of civilization.

I see this as one key to the attractiveness of GWB to voters. He, Bush, tells them they are being threatened and must defend themselves. He says faith in the traditional order of things is the best defense. He says we must use our enormous strength to defend our liberty, He says we must cherish and strengthen our traditionally-held values. And he says, "we are freedom's home and defender."

In Reflections on the French Revolution, Edmund Burke uses great eloquence in opening up this theme of "freedom's home and defender." In opposition to terrorism and what he sees as attacks on freedom, he invokes as traditional values: morality, liberty, fear of God, and reverence for authority. Put otherwise, he invokes what he sees as the inarticulate feelings of the English people in opposition to the tyranny of reason in France: the attacks on tradition of the Philosophes of the French Enlightenment and the attacks on tradition of Machiavellian politicians.

This is very Bush-like. In viewing America as "freedom's home and defender," he too invokes inarticulate feelings and what he apparently believes are self-evident truisms. He says, "America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves—safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life."

Burke says the best response to emergencies, such as the terror of the French Revolution (and by extension the War on Terrorism) is an unthinking dependence on tradition, even prejudice. He says: such prejudice "engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature."

This prejudice probably parallels the way GWB sees his faith: He says, "My faith frees me. Frees me to put the problem of the moment in proper perspective. Frees me to make decisions that others might not like. Frees me to do the right thing, even though it may not poll well. Frees me to enjoy life and not worry about what comes next."

Burke has much to say about "duty:" the unrational feeling of what it is right to do and the faith needed to act upon this feeling.

Bush agrees. While Governor he said: "My dream is to usher in what I call the 'responsibility era'—an era in which each and every Texan understands that we're responsible for the decisions we make in life; that each of us is responsible for making sure our families come first; that we're responsible for loving our neighbors as we'd like to be loved ourselves; and that we're responsible for the communities in which we live."

That's it.

I don't maintain this explains all, but, as I say, it seems to me a more persuasive approach than Tim Burke's.

In closing, I can't resist quoting a bit more of Edmund Burke. He was so much a master of persuasive oratory and political writing. In the section of Reflections on the French Revolution from which I've quoted above he said:

We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery, through the whole course of our lives.

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

Your literary men, and your politicians, and so do the whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ in these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of confidence in their own. With them it is a sufficient motive to destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is no object to those who think little or nothing has been done before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery. They conceive, very systematically, that all things which give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at inexpiable war with all establishments. They think that government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little ill effect: that there needs no principle of attachment, except a sense of present conveniency, to any constitution of the state. They always speak as if they were of opinion that there is a singular species of compact between them and their magistrates, which binds the magistrate, but which has nothing reciprocal in it, but that the majesty of the people has a right to dissolve it without any reason, but its will. Their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it agrees with some of their fleeting projects; it begins and ends with that scheme of polity which falls in with their momentary opinion.

Source: Edmund Burke (1729–1797). Reflections on the French Revolution.
The Harvard Classics. 1909–14 (Paras. 125–149).

In another rhetorical flight, elsewhere in the Reflections, Burke describes what we used to call the silent majority:

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.

Note: Bush quotes come from the book review section of the Claremont Institute home page. The Claremont Institute aims to "restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life" (from the mission statement on the home page). Here's a link to the review article: A President, Not a Preacher, by Joseph M. Knippenberg, Posted September 2, 2004. A review of A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush by David Aikman, The Faith of George W. Bush by Stephen Mansfield, and George W. Bush on God and Country edited by Thomas M. Freiling.

An editorial on deficits

Today's Washington Post has a good editorial on the budget deficit and the value of the U.S. dollar. This relates, doesn't it, to the short blog entry on the national debt I did a few days ago? The editorial is pretty short so I'll reproduce the whole thing. As I understand it, the price of imports should be rising but it's not because the Chinese are keeping their currency artificially low. We need the price of imports to rise because our savings rate (as a nation) is too low. If Americans cannot afford imports, they're more likely to save rather than spend. If they save, they are more likely to invest in the U.S. budget deficit (directly via savings bonds, t-bills, etc. or indirectly via money market accounts that then invest in t-bills, etc). If Americans don't buy more U.S. government bonds, we'll be at the mercy of foreign investors and the cumulative effect of this dependence is likely to be higher interest rates (presumably this means that their confidence in the U.S. economy is declining). Note that tax cuts have not increased the savings rate in the U.S., but have caused it to drop (as the editorial says, the savings deficit has increased by a full third). Note also that we're relying on foreigners to put more than $500 billion dollars into the U.S. economy each year ($500,000,000,000).

Editorial
The Other U.S. Deficit
Sunday, November 7, 2004; Page B06

WHEN PRESIDENT Bush batted away questions about the budget deficit during his news conference on Thursday, financial markets delivered a telling verdict. The stock market rallied, delighted by the prospect of continued low-tax policies, but the dollar fell to its lowest level in nine years. The next day's good news on job creation should have buoyed the dollar, but after a brief climb the currency headed down again. Economists have warned of a dollar collapse for several years now, and so far their alarmism has proved wrong. But some of them also warned of a stock market bubble in the 1990s, and after suffering some years of derision they were eventually proved right.

Even the possibility of a dollar crash should give Mr. Bush cause to rethink his tax policies -- if the prospect of burdening his children's generation with a massive national debt is not cause enough. Mr. Bush's budget deficit is so big that there aren't enough savings in the country to soak up the bonds he's issuing: The tax cuts are the prime reason for the expansion in the nation's overall savings deficit from 4 percent of gross domestic product in 2000 to almost 6 percent now. That gap has to be plugged by importing foreign capital, and if foreigners hesitate to provide it, the dollar falls until U.S. assets become cheap enough to lure them. This does not matter too much if the dollar's decline is gradual, as it has been so far. But the real worry is that investors may come to see a falling dollar as inevitable, precipitating a crash.

Mr. Bush may wish to ignore all this unpleasantness, but that may not be an option. Foreigners cannot be relied upon to inject upward of $500 billion into the economy annually forever; their reluctance may threaten not only a weaker dollar but scarcer capital, which will drive interest rates up.

This will be the markets' way of curing American profligacy: The weak dollar cuts American consumption and boosts production, leaving the nation with more savings to finance the budget deficit; high interest rates slow the economy and cut consumption further. The question is whether Mr. Bush allows these adjustments to occur at the whim of the markets, perhaps in a sudden and painful fashion, or whether he faces up to the nation's predicament and takes steps to smooth the transition.

The first step Mr. Bush should take is to present a serious plan to cut the budget deficit, not the phony five-year promise he touts now. Second, he should step up his quiet diplomacy to get China to revalue its currency against the dollar. Since the dollar peaked in February 2002, its orderly and welcome decline against the euro, the yen and other currencies has not cut the savings gap because China's currency has refused to budge, allowing Americans to carry on consuming cheap foreign imports. So long as China keeps its currency low, other Asian exporters that compete with the Chinese will follow that same policy. This inflexible Asian bloc accounts for fully half of America's trade deficit. Unless these countries allow their currencies to rise against the dollar along with the euro and others, the adjustment needed to head off a future economic gale is not going to happen.

WS

I like this depiction of Shakespeare. It's from the jacket of the new book, Will in the World, How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt.

I did a blog entry on the book early in October.

Here are links to reviews.
Washington Post Book World, The Observer, Guardian, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, The Times of London

Here's a synopsis from reviewsofbooks.com:

Much is unknown about the details of William Shakespeare's life. In Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt attempts to fill in many of the missing details. By exploring the events, lifestyles, and politics of the era, he re-creates the environment that would have provided the inspiration and background for Shakespeare's life and plays. Although much of it is conjecture based on circumstantial evidence, Greenblatt provides his estimation of the life lived by the bard. Will in the World has received mostly positive reviews with the Boston Globe saying, "Vividly written, richly detailed, and insightful from first chapter to last, Stephen Greenblatt's fascinating biography of Shakespeare is certain to secure a place among the essential studies of the greatest of all writers."

More review links (from reviewsofbooks.com)

Houston Chronicle review by Earl L. Dachslager,
New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani,
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review by Bob Hoover,
New York Times review by Colm Toibin,
Boston Globe review by William E. Cain,
Chicago Sun-Times review by Mark Athitakis,
Salon.com review by Laura Miller,
New Yorker review by Adam Gopnik,
San Francisco Chronicle review by Robert Hurwitt,
BookPage review by James Neal Webb,
New York Observer review by Robert Cornfield

The Yellow Rogue of Texas?

How the election results look to one British tabloid:

GOD HELP AMERICA
Nov 5 2004
THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN..

seen on Cliopatria

"Let us go then....."

People are looking for something light-hearted to take ther mind off .... what was it? Anyway, one poster pointed to The Modern Humorist Holy Tango of Poetry: If Poets Wrote Poems Whose Titles Were Anagrams of their Names. Here are a couple:

Toilets
by T.S. Eliot

Let us go then, to the john,
Where the toilet seat waits to be sat upon
Like a lover's lap perched upon ceramic;
Let us go, through doors that do not always lock,
Which means you ought to knock
Lest opening one reveal a soul within
Who'll shout, "Stay out! Did you not see my shin,
Framed within the gap twixt floor and stall?"
No, I did not see that at all.
That is not what I saw, at all.

To the stall the people come to go,
Reading an obscene graffito.

We have lingered in the chamber labeled "Men"
Till attendants proffer aftershave and mints
As we lather up our hands with soap, and rinse.

Skinny Domicile
by Emily Dickinson

I have a skinny Domicile—
Its Door is very narrow.
'Twill keep—I hope—the Reaper out—
His Scythe—and Bones—and Marrow.

Since Death is not a portly Chap,
The Entrance must be thin—
So—when my Final Moment comes—
He cannot wriggle in.

That's why I don't go out that much—
I can't fit through that Portal.
How dumb—to waste my Social Life
On Plans to be—immortal—

Here are the contents of the site, so far:

01.10.01
Holy Tango of Drama
“Dammit, Dave”

12.05.00
Volume 4
Basho, Angelou

09.14.00
Volume 3
Shakespeare, Thomas, H.D.

06.13.00
Volume 2
Blake, Nash, cummings

05.04.00
Volume 1
Eliot, Dickinson, Williams

One big reason the Democrats lost

B got me to watch a segment of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer last Wednesday, the day after the election. A lot of my thoughts in this post stem from her thoughts on the program. The topic was "divided we stand" how can the country re-unite after a hotly contested election? The focus was on values, meaning religious beliefs. The format: moderator and panel of specialists. It was very good. I give excerpts and a link to the full transcript below.

The country's religious divisions are intensely interesting and much debated. See for example the following posting in Crooked Timber. It highlights a main theme of the Newshour discussion: Religious beliefs as personal ethics vs. religious commitment to social justice, put in other words "the individual versus the communitarian".

Religion and Social Justice
Posted by Kieran

Mark Schmitt asks a good question:

The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change. I need some reading suggestions here.

Well, here are four from the Sociology department. Bob Wuthnow’s After Heaven: Spirituality in American Since the 1950s might be a good place to get a sense of the shift from what Wuthnow calls “place-based” to “practice-based” spirituality in America. His recent Saving America? Faith-Based Services and the Future of Civil Society looks at the social-service role of religions. Mark Chaves’ Congregations in America is built around the first nationally representative survey of U.S. congregations and emphasizes how small a role politics and social services play in the lives of churches. And The Quiet Hand of God: Faith-Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism, edited by Wuthnow¹ and John Evans, offers a survey of recent trends in the political involvement of the Mainline. (Full disclosure: Bob was one of my advisors, Mark is head of my department, and John is a friend of mine from grad school.) But I’m not a sociologist of religion, so there’s probably a lot of other relevant stuff out there I don’t know about.

¹ Bob can write books faster than most people can read them.

Here's the link to the Newshour transcript:

A NewsHour with Jim Lehrer Transcript
Online NewsHour
DIVIDED WE STAND
November 3, 2004

intro

Gwen Ifill leads a discussion about how the country can reunite after the hotly contested election.

GWEN IFILL: Both President Bush and Senator Kerry appealed across party lines today for unity in the wake of another election that left the nation split in shades of blue and red. But in a year when gay marriage bans passed in 11 states, to what degree is the debate over values contributing to that split?

For more on that, we turn to: Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, and author of the best-selling book, "The Purpose Driven Life"; author and essayist Barbara Ehrenreich-- her most recent book is "Nickel and Dimed: Surviving in Low-Wage America"; Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners, a Christian ministry that advocates for social justice; and Morris Fiorina, a political science professor at Stanford's Hoover Institute and the author of "Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America."

I was interested in the personal/social dicotemy because I've been reading Durkheim on religion and that was a main concern of his. All the same, the part of the panel discussion that most caught my attention were the statements by Morris Fiorina, who teaches at the Hoover Institute, which is a conservative bastion. He seems to be supporting what I've been thinking about the election: voters looked at the two candidates and saw, or thought they saw, that Kerry echoed Bush in most of his platform. See bottom of this post for his view of the matter.

The Democrats were so cautious in promoting the "stronger America" theme that the fight appeared to a whole lot of people to be one about religious beliefs and not politics, or the bungling of the government's response to terrorism, or the tragic mistake of war with Iraq, or even what life will be like in America for our children and their children. Shields and Brooks addressed this matter in the Political Wrap later in the same Newshour program. Mark Shields said that the focus on beliefs hurt the Democrats because they are seen as being a secular party:

I think the point I drew from Gwen's discussion, which was a terrific discussion were two, particularly Jim Wallis's point of the Sojourn. It's far more complex than the one-dimensional. It's the individual versus the communitarian.

If you say partisanism is essentially an individualistic religion, your relationship to God is individualistic and your moral acts really determine that relationship, whereas, communitarian and Catholicism have a far more communitarian concept, that your responsibility, your religious commitment is measured by your involvement in the community, your responsibility to those less fortunate and so forth, I think that's it.

I don't think there is any question that the Democratic Party has become a secular party. I think the Democratic Party to its disadvantage politically --

He also said that the Democrats could have won if they had nominated a man who would be able to differentiate himself from Bush on all the other issues:

The definition of the presidency changed on Sept. 11. Commander-in-chief became central to the job description of the president. John Kerry was the one Democrat in the eyes of Democratic primary voters who met that test and could be competitive, so I think the argument that John Edwards, who is a better campaigner, a more naturally gifted campaigner would have been a better candidate, Dick Gephardt, who I think would have been a better president than either one of them... would have been a better candidate.

Here's the quote from Fiorina:

GWEN IFILL: Morris Fiorina, is there polarization that exists? We looked at these numbers last night. We crunched through them. We saw that one in five people cited moral values as a major issue for their votes, and that eight out of ten of those people voted for President Bush, and then we look at that map with all those red states in the middle and the blue states on the end, does that mean that we're a hopelessly polarized nation?

MORRIS P. FIORINA: No. Not at all; I agree with Andy Kohut. There has been a lot of exaggeration here it is also true that people in the academy and the media are really missing the importance of religion and have for a long time in American politics.

But the point I want to make is it's not as if tens of millions of Americans woke up in the last two elections and decided economics doesn't matter anymore, it's all about values. Rather what's happened is the parties have become closer in economics.

They now argue about how big the tax cuts - how big the budget deficit, how big a prescription drug plan, and have gotten farther apart on values. The Republican Party has barely embraced the religious right. The Democratic Party has gotten quite secular.

But if you can imagine an alternative world in which John McCain was the Republican nominee and you recall he called various members of the religious right evil back in 2000 and a world in which Joe Lieberman was the Democratic nominee, a traditional values kind of guy, then I doubt we'd be having this discussion now. We have to pay attention to what elites are doing to make issues salient and to divide the population, not simply in what voters are doing.

GWEN IFILL: What do you mean when you say elites?

MORRIS P. FIORINA: By elites I mean the candidates, the activists, the parties basically, the corporate parties out there, and right now the Republicans in particular have found it politically advantageous to fight on values issues. This is one of the ways in which they undermine the old New Deal economic coalition for the Democrats.

Donald Justice

“Vague Memory from Childhood” by Donald Justice

It was the end of day—
Vast far clouds
In the zenith darkening
At the end of day.

The voices of my aunts
Sounded through an open window.
Bird-speech cantankerous in a high tree mingled
With the voices of my aunts.

I was playing alone,
Caught up in a sort of dream,
With sticks and twigs pretending,
Playing there alone

In the dust.
And a lamp came on indoors,
Printing a frail gold geometry
On the dust.

Shadows came engulfing
The great charmed sycamore.
It was the end of day.
Shadows came engulfing.

From a nice article called "The memory of Donald Justice" by David Yezzi (New Criterion)

The author also quotes Eurdora Welty and Justide himself:

The greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory—the individual human memory… . The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.
—Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings

Certain moments will never change nor stop being— My mother’s face all smiles, all wrinkles soon; The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen; Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune— All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.
—Donald Justice, “Thinking about the Past”

The other cross-dressed comedian

Nice article on Dame Edna in the Village Voice

It starts out:

With pride, I bear the mark of a Dame Edna Everage fan—recurring flower burn. Repeatedly, my eyes have almost been poked out by one of the wacky widow's flying gladiolus, but I was too busy laughing my guts out to be all that mortified, possums. By the time Edna has lovingly torpedoed the flora into the crowd for her finale, you've succumbed to her bracing mix of topical jokes, insult humor, saucy songs, and enforced audience participation. By melding all those titillating talents, Edna has carved out a unique niche, and not just on my face. The drag creation of Aussie actor Barry Humphries since 1956, she's fused music hall showmanship with self-help expertise, while deftly spoofing the aspirations and biases of the endearingly crass.

features

The dame from Oz gathers her gladiolus for her Broadway return
Flower Power
by Michael Musto
October 25th, 2004 4:55 PM

History and the end of the world

For Julia

This review article is partly about the difficulty of understanding, almost re-experiencing, past events through the objects that they produce: news accounts, reports, literature, artifacts.... And it's partly about the unimaginable magnitude of the Great War. Still, the impacts can be described. For example, the author refers to the slaughter of 30 million horses and donkeys as "the genocidal end of a once-benign, millennium-old friendship between men and horses."

From The Chronicle Review
From the issue dated November 5, 2004

Our First View of the End of the World

List: Books discussed in this essay

By TERRY CASTLE

excerpts

What does it mean to remember the First World War? Over the past few years I have been trying to get my students -- mostly 19- or 20-year-old Stanford English majors -- to learn about, think about, reckon with, remember the Great War. I have been spectacularly unsuccessful. My latest failure came just this spring, in an honors seminar on Virginia Woolf. We were reading Jacob's Room, the hero of which dies on the Western Front, and I suspected -- correctly -- that my students knew little about the war or its repercussions. (Make of it what you will, but all of the students except one were female.)

I set out to give them my usual nasty brutish overview, complete with some rough-'em-up Powerpoints to shock them into attention: Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife dead in their coffins; the idiot kaiser in his skull-helmet; pathetic mobs of Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Germans crowding into recruiting stations in 1914-15; Ypres and Verdun in ruins; trenches and craters and bombed-out churches; and of course lots of dead and dismembered bodies. Boneyards and muck on a sunny Palo Alto morning! This is why, I gravely informed the students, Woolf gave the doomed protagonist of Jacob's Room the last name of Flanders.

When their papers came in, one of the more intelligent young women in the group (or so I had judged her) had produced some garbled late-night drivel about how traumatic it was for Woolf to see the peaceful English countryside devastated by trench warfare during the First World War. Now I know academic piety insists that one hold one's students dear, even when they exhibit the most shameful ignorance and inattention. But for several days afterward I felt only rage at the student and a fairly mind-boggling hatred for my job. Why did I have to deal with such obtuseness? How could a seemingly good student get it all so bollixed up? Why did these intelligent Stanford girls (their hip-huggers and pedicures and blonde ponytails notwithstanding) have to be so blatantly oblivious? What was the point (splutter) of trying to teach them anything?

Why do we want to forget the First World War? Why can't we keep our facts straight? Why

would we rather talk about "memory objects" than the memories themselves? (Or our inability to find them?) Given our flaunted "interest" -- and academics are the worst -- why do we seem so keen on not remembering?

We can't remember the Great War because we weren't there. Only if we had some magic syncretic access to the experiences of every human being alive between 1914 and 1918 might we have a chance of "remembering" -- or at least of not forgetting so completely. We'd have to have the experiences of every animal and plant alive then too, especially the millions of horses, mules, dogs, carrier pigeons, trees, rats, lice, and other nonhuman things that were also part of the carnage. Some 30 million horses and donkeys -- mainly pack animals -- died in the Great War. Yet when I once described the war (again to bright Stanford students) as a "hippocide," the genocidal end of a once-benign, millennium-old friendship between men and horses, they smirked as if I'd made some strange professorial joke.

Source: Arts & Letters Daily

Debt

This term, maybe the administration will not be able to escape responsibility for its fiscal irresponsibility.

Found on BeSpacific

From the Bureau of the Public Debt, the following data, as of November 3, 2004:

# Debt Held by the Public - $4,332,224,143,554.05

# Intragovernmental Holdings - 3,097,310,844,198.64

# Total - $7,429,534,987,752.69

Cycling in the rain

Rain. I don't usually set out in it and infrequently get caught it in. Still.... Gloomy, wet twilight at the end of my work day with light rainfall. Big problems with the subway -- result of a crash yesterday -- kept me from wishing to Metro home. A third of my way home bone-chilling rain, drenching me, pooling cold water in my mittens and shoes. Not my cup of tea. I kept myself going by thoughts of the warm bath I would give myself at home and also tried to keep in mind the professional cyclists from Belgium and Holland who specialized in triumphing in cold, wet races: men like Willy Planckaert and Joop Zoetemelk. These men gloried in the weather I was cursing.

Juggling

Might be a good time for some light humor. Our little corner of the world is only a few blocks in extent. Yet it's incorporated and has its own government, of sorts, and local traditions. One of the latter is the annual "Party-in-the-Park." The "Park" is a left-over piece of real estate, too small to support a house but big enough for social events. The park and the party started out 20 years ago, or so, and both were unprepossessing. Lately, both have become dramatically more substantial. The park has a new picket fence, a gazebo (with lights), a couple of benches, and pretty nice plantings. The party has become an extravaganza spead out on nearby streets, with lots of catered food, a big assortment of beverages, and an all-you-can eat opportunity from a Good Humor truck. We get to eat using tables and chairs and entertainment is plentiful. This year's event had a high-class juggler, Jeff Civilaco, one of the funniest I've seen. The photos below show me participating in part of the act. He assembled a tall unicycle on the tiny stage and used it and two volunteers -- me and another guy -- as props. He made a big deal about climbing up us to get on it, and nearly falling of course. In the end, he cycled a bit, and juggled above our heads.

The photos were scanned from prints given us by our neighbors across the street.

Operation Eagle Eye (or is that Evil Eye?)

A blog by a Village Voice columnist on Republican intimidation of voters.

Operation Eagle Eye by Rick Perlstein
Nowhere has Republican election chicanery been more blatant, systematic, and diabolic then in the Buckeye State. On this blog I'll be documenting the outrages, straight outta Cleveland. Send all tips, terrors, and tales of the tawdry to rperlstein@villagevoice.com.