A Most Unhappy Halloween

Halloween is particularly well placed in the calendar this year, shorn of its festive cloak due to what the Pontifex Maximus, for reasons unclear to me, referred to as "the lady" Covid.  Perhaps ladies are generally pestilent to the Catholic clergy--except, of course, for one Lady in particular.  Barely festive at all, in fact, for the children who benefit from the holiday in its largely secular form.

But what could be more appropriate at this very unfestive time?  Fear stalks the land in the form of someone as orange as a pumpkin, though not great in any good sense, along with the pandemic which seems to be growing.  Fear fostered by many for the most cynical reasons.  By politicians, that is to say, or at least those of them who are motivated primarily is not exclusively by the desire to retain power.  Fear also of uncertainty.  Fear of people wielding guns at polling places; fear of what might come of a Supreme Court whose latest member has minimal experience in law and seems to have been chosen for purely political reasons; fear of violence; fear of fraud in the election; fear that voting will be repressed.

Yes, Halloween will be scary this year if only due to the harrowing and hectoring political advertising to which we're exposed and the proximity to election day, which may or may not decide our fate, or which may or may not merely prolong the period in which we wait to know our fate depending on what options are available in the courts (I won't call them "legal" options for fear--what else?--of giving them more dignity than they merit).

Unfortunately, we can't take comfort in the wise, gentle and humorous traditions of this time of year, like the celebrations associated with the Day of the Dead.  There our deceased loved ones are thought of as still living and parts of our continuing families.  But imagine what our ancestors would feel if they could truly share our time with us.  They could only be angry of what we've become, or full of sorrow for us in our sorry state.  As for the saints of All Saints Day?  Well, perhaps they could at least intercede for us, assuming they would be heard.

Perhaps a mass exorcism is in order.  Priests brandishing the Rituale Romanum and reciting its text on exorcism should be walking among us, or perhaps driving among us in vehicles sporting loudspeakers, together with fundamentalist preachers casting out devils as some of them do on television.  Why not give it a try?  What do we have to lose?  Certainly not our dignity, which is long gone.

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, in one of his travels, encounters the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses, wise, reasonable, and benevolent who rule over deformed, ignorant creatures resembling humans called Yahoos.  Though taken in, he's eventually banned by the Houyhnhnms for being too much like a Yahoo, or even a Yahoo himself.  He despises Yahoos, though, and when he returns to England can't stand living among his fellow humans.  He becomes a recluse, and spends his time in the stables talking to the horses.

He also more famously encounters the Lilliputians, a tiny people who are concerned with trivial matters and are obsessed with displays of authority and power.

I'm not certain whether we're more Yahoos or Lilliputians, now.  A combination of the two, perhaps.  If we could celebrate Halloween traditionally, we should dress up as both.  Or it may be no costumes would be required.

 

The Allure of the '50s

An organization previously unknown to me called the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI)  issued a report in 2016 on the views of Americans regarding, roughly speaking, whether American Society has changed for the better, or for the worse, since the 1950s.  According to the report, most would say it's changed for the worse.  A majority of the majority were white, Christian and Republican.  Perhaps that goes without saying.

What is it about the '50s that makes most of us, apparently, think it better than what's been the case for the last 70 years?  An argument can be made that the '50s were white, Christian and Republican, at least on the surface and as the country was portrayed in the media.  It was also for many of us Baby Boomers the time we spent as children.  There are many Boomers, after all, and some of us look back on our childhood with nostalgia.

It was a time when televisions began, and continued to, appear in the homes of the middle and upper classes, and the America portrayed in the medium was beneficent indeed.  America fought evil then, successfully.  Whether in the Old West as shown in The Lone Ranger and Gunsmoke, fancifully as in Superman, through law enforcement as in The Untouchables, Dragnet and Highway Patrol, America and Americans promoted "Truth, Justice and the American Way" as stated in the introduction to Superman.

American families on TV were genial, sometimes comic, but always loving.  Their problems were reassuringly mundane, and resolved.  American women were sometimes ditzy, sometimes wise, but almost always motherly and beautiful when part of a family.  In other contexts they might be femme fatales who were beautiful but bad.  Even in that case, though, chances were excellent they had hearts of gold and had been led astray by bad men.  American men were generally brave, sometimes fatherly, sometimes rich, sometimes befuddled and comic, sometimes poor, always patriots and on the side of good unless crooks or spies in place to be bested.

Economically, times were generally good.  America had come out relatively well, economically, from the Second World War, in comparison with a great part of the world.  One can understand that many would feel content, even smug, in light of American prosperity.  Militarily, it seemed for a time at least that America was predominant.

But the Korean War didn't end nearly as well.  And the Soviet Union got the bomb, and put a satellite in space, and the communist scare began.  The '50s were the heyday of McCarthyism.  Not all was well, but the Red scare served to highlight the fact that America was good, communism bad.  So in a way the vision of goodness and the tendency towards self-righteousness were enhanced by America's problems in that time.

Nor did TV and other media uniformly portray our society as prosperous and benign.  There were stirrings of disappointment if not discontent.  The writers, musicians and poets of the Beat Generation were different from most of that time.  There were some shows, like The Twilight Zone, which raised questions about American society.  But that was late '50s, when things had begun to change, slowly.

Perhaps the Boomers who grew up watching Looney Toons, Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Howdy Doody became disillusioned in the 1960s and 1970s with the American Dream as it was dreamed by them in the '50s.  Perhaps they recognized that it was a dream.  Or, perhaps they felt that they had been betrayed somehow, by someone.  Not all was as clear as it was in the '50s, nor were they treated with the kindness and love they felt their due; they weren't entertained as they were in the past.   All the gunfights we saw on TV didn't make the Vietnam War less bloody or more understandable.  So the '50s at some point came to be mocked by the Boomers it created.  It was their parents' time; they weren't children any more.

But something happened as we grew old.  We want to be children again.  We look back beyond the '60s as we grow satisfied and content, but at the same time cautious and fearful.  Perhaps we even grow senile, in a way--culturally and politically.  Our second childhood reminds us of our first.  We find that our first was infinitely better.  Many of us find it more peculiarly American.  More particularly American in a particular way.

Whatever it was back then, those of us who were children at that time remember what we experienced as children, and for some and perhaps most of us what we experienced was what we saw on TV or as a result of efforts to mimic what we saw.  Suburbs, vacations, big cars, sports, highways, diners, drive-ins, rock and roll, country clubs, good food, money, good and evil easily distinguished and evil always vanquished.  Why can't it be like that again?

Ask those who think we've changed for the worst.  They'll tell you.  I think one of the things they'll tell you, unfortunately, is that what they see now isn't what they were shown on TV then.  More specifically, that the people they see now aren't the people they saw on TV then.

Goin' Courtin

There are nine Justices of the Supreme Court of our Glorious Union, not seven as there are brides and brothers in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a genial if odd musical which includes a song the title of which serves as the title to this post.  It's hard for me not to feel some fondness for a musical which includes a song and dance about "The Sobbin' Women" even if it serves as a reminder that rape is what's being portrayed as something charming for our entertainment.

But this post, alas, isn't a tribute to that strange product of the American imagination.  Instead it is not a tribute to what's taking place now, during a very strange election--the strange appointment of someone to the highest court of the land.

These shows (and they have been shows for quite some time now) are not entertainments, though they seem to entertain some.  They're more shows in the sense that show trials are trials.  All know the outcome, so what becomes of significance is the quality or lack of quality of the performances of those called upon to play the parts assigned.  Those opposing the appointment are limited to strenuously displaying their disapproval and the reasons for it.  Those supporting the appointment are required to justify their support, enthusiastically.

Certain things are expected of the nominee.  Answers to questions are to be vague, particularly when it comes to matters of importance, when answers are given.  Answers are to be avoided if possible.  The actual opinions of the nominee on certain issues are not to be sought.  One can't ask questions directed to religious beliefs, sexual preferences, or politics for example.  Nothing of importance is subject to inquiry, except perhaps professional qualifications, which it seems concern nobody.  One can note certain things about the nominee, and make inferences about them.  Rarely is there more involved in the process, unless there is a direct accusation of some misconduct, in which case the show becomes even more of a show as the performances take on a melodramatic character.

Where professional qualifications are concerned, it appears the current nominee is well suited to be what she has been for the most part--a professor.  She didn't practice law much at all.  She's been a federal appeals judge for three years.  I argued before the 7th Circuit in 2018, and for all I know she may have been on the panel hearing arguments that day.  I can't recall.  She clerked for judges.

My personal feeling is that a judge of an appellate court, and so a Supreme Court Justice, benefit immensely from having been a practicing lawyer, or a judge, for quite some time.  They should have some sense of what actually takes place in a courtroom, and what's involved in representing clients in civil or criminal practice.  They should have observed what the law and what courts do to actual people, what it's like to be a part of the legal system and to encounter it.

Ambrose Bierce described litigation as a machine which you enter as a pig and leave as a sausage.  It's something that should be experienced by those who sit in judgment of litigants and lower courts if they are to have any grasp of the law as it functions, not merely as an abstraction--in practice, not merely in theory.

There can be no question where her sympathies lie.  It would be naive not to expect her personal preferences on great issues to influence her decisions.  The only hope is that in her case and in others there is such a respect for the law that personal preferences will be restrained to the extent that what is the law won't be confused with what is believed should be the case.  The law is the law, not morality, not religion, not politics, not ideology.  If what I read of her religious preference (you know, like sexual preference) is accurate, and she identifies (I can't stop myself, it seems) as a charismatic, pentecostal Christian, it can be hoped that she'll seek inspiration when it comes to decisions of the court from the law rather than anything else.

The world we live in, though, doesn't encourage optimism in this respect.  It doesn't encourage optimism in general, in fact, as it encourages thoughtlessness and quick, emotional responses to any problem.