Announcing Willett's Magazine

My distinguished pals:
I've been working on creating a magazine that would combine my wit - or witlessness - as I peacock it on this blog with the writings and musings, hopefully, of other peeps who I will pay in cash money - don't get excited, not a lot of cash money, this is me we are talking about - for their contributions. Of course, to pay in cash money I am going to have to beg for donations, which I'm going to do by going to one of those dumb crowdbegging sites and jumping through hoops and, presumably, bothering everybody who ever had the misfortune to link to me with my cup and doffed cap.

The name of the mag is Willetts. It is here.  Please think of sending me, at the paypal on this site, a donation. And those of you with ideas, from memoiring to reviews, or who would like me to commission a review, please drop me a line at rogergathmann@gmail.com

Today's article at Willard's is about the Abe Fortas Case: a lesson for Democrats.

Mother Jones, a magazine that has taken up the mantra of tut-tutting neoliberalism and run with it, has published an article that claims that it is a “liberal fantasy” to think of impeaching Brett Kavanaugh. The writer of the piece is their correspondent for covering the court, Stephanie Mencimer, so presumably she knows what she is talking about. This is her “wake up to the coffee” graf:

It’s never going to happen. If the Democrats can’t stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation in the Senate, there’s no way they’re going to be able to boot him from the bench after he’s secured his lifetime appointment. No Supreme Court justice has ever been successfully impeached and removed by Congress. The last time Congress even tried was in 1804. 

This, for Mencimer, disposes of the issue. Then she goes on to troll a bit how we don’t appreciate an “independent judiciary” anymore, like the elite slaveholders who founded the U.S. did.

Well, I have many bones to pick with the last part, but it is the first part I would like to direct my vitriol to.

Liberals would do well, at this point, to look to the Republican-directed pressure that was put on justices from the Warren court. One case stands out: Abe Fortas

When Abe Fortas died in 1982, his obituary was featured on the front page of the NYT. Since that time, his story has slipped into the national amnesia, save for that part of the national brain that consists of the Federalist society and its groupies. You could date the rightward shift, and the organization of one of the most powerful but underrated forces in the U.S., conservative legal activism, from the nomination of Abe Fortas by Lyndon Johnson to the post of Chief Justice, after Earl Warren stepped down.

Here’s the obituary thumbnail:

“Mr. Fortas resigned from the Court amid an uproar over disclosures that he had accepted a $20,000 fee from a foundation controlled by Louis E. Wolfson, a friend and former client who at the time of the payment was under Federal investigation for violating securities laws. His resignation ended a stormy three-and-a-half-year tenure on the Court, which included an abortive effort by President Johnson to name him Chief Justice, and made Mr. Fortas the only Justice in the history of the Supreme Court to resign under the pressure of public criticism.”

This happened in 1969, giving Richard Nixon his opportunity to put his impress on the Court.

So how did this happen?

In 1965, when LBJ nominated Abe Fortas, the editors of the New Republic commented:

“When the President nominated his friend Abe Fortas for the Supreme Court, he was rewarding Mr. Fortas' long-held, passionate faith in the statesmanship and liberalism of Lyndon B. Johnson - a faith not widely held or easily maintained in liberal and intellectual circles ten or even five years ago. But the President was able to reward a friend while at the same time appointing one of the ablest lawyers of his generation, and a lawyer who takes an exalted view of the court he is about to join. Little more than a year before his nomination and subsequent confirmation by the Senate, Mr. Fortas wrote of the court while paying tribute, in the Yale Law Journal, to another old friend. Justice William O. Douglas. "A man may live a long and active life - even in the aquarium of public office - without revealing and, indeed, without discovering his essential convictions. There are many hiding places; there are many factors which invite avoidance of this painful confrontation: the pressures of too little time; the exigencies of the moment; the rationalization engineered by the overwhelming virtue of self-preservation; the primacy of the need to accommodate one's views to those of others; the driving need for immediate results.”

Fortas here was worshipping at the idol of the lifetime appointment – the foundation of the “independent judiciary” so beloved by the Mother Jones correspondent. These words seem a little strange to us now: they speak more of a Straussian belief in the white lie, as the rulers nudge us into what they want us to do, then a faith in democratic forces and the wisdom of the crowd.

So what happened when Fortas was nominated to be Chief Justice in 1968 and the aquarium of public office was hurled at his head?

Fortas’s downfall was engineered by two deeply racist Dixiecrats, James Eastland of Mississippi and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. We can follow the story in further New Republic editorials:

Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who after the GOP convention must be reckoned a power in the Republican Party and in the country, told his delegation at one point in Miami Beach that if it held firm for Nixon he (Thurmond) would be mightily encouraged in his battle against the Fortas nomination. Shouts and handclaps greeted his assurance to the Carolinians that "We hope to defeat Mr. Fortas' confirmation" and "If we can defeat this confirmation, in my judgment it will be a turning point in this nation."

Strom was right. The Fortas hearings were all about how buddy-buddy Fortas was with LBJ. This might not seem like a reason to deny him the seat, but it was the excuse for what Eastland and Thurmond really wanted – a thoroughgoing excoriation of the Warren court and all its deeds, the worst of which, for the two racists, was the legal crushing of the idea that blacks were second class citizens forever and ever. But this motive, as always in the South, was merged with the idea that it was all the fault of the communists. As Thurmond said on Meet the Press:

… his decisions have turned loose criminals on technicalities; they have allowed communists to teach in schools and colleges; they have allowed communists to work in defense plants and his decisions have reversed the local communities and the lower courts on the matter of obscenity." And: "We [of the Senate Committee] are not trying him for impeachment but we are trying him (sic) to determine his qualifications to be Chief Justice and we think his decisions on the Court, in the way I have related them, show that he is not qualified to be the Chief Justice. In fact, I don't think he is even qualified to be on the Court."

Evidently the Republicans of Thurmond’s day disagreed with the Collins doctrine that Senators should not look at the ideology of candidates. I think that is a rule that is only evoked for far right wing candidates, anyway.

Abe Fortas remained on the Court after the battle of 1968. His downfall was coming, though, especially when the Thurmondesque president,  Richard Nixon, was elected. I would recommend reading an excellent Washington Post piece dated May 16, 1969, the chronology of Fortas’s downfall was unfolded. It started when William Lambert, a Life Magazine reporter, received a tip from anonymous government official that he should look into the relationship between Fortas and a crooked businessman named Wolfson, recently imprisoned for stock manipulation (yes, Virginia, at one time they actually imprisoned crooked businessmen, instead of bailing them out with huge loans).

Word spread in D.C. The news must have made John Mitchell, the new Attorney General, smile a bit and puff a bit more on his pipe. Mitchell, somehow, didn’t have compunctions about the fantasy of getting rid of a sitting Supreme: he saw how he could catch a rat and went about it. An assistant Attorney General interviewed Lambert.  And the Life news story came out with information about the 20,000 dollars given Fortas by the “charitable” foundation set up by Wolfson.

The Republicans went on the attack in the House, while in the Senate Ted Kennedy said this was a very serious charge. It should be noted that Fortas’s friendship with LBJ would not make him a friend of the Kennedies.

On May 6, Nixon met with the Republican caucus and urged them (to repressed giggles, no doubt) not to make Fortas a partisan matter. One of the attendees asked if there was more on Fortas to be discovered. To which Mitchell gave the one word answer: yes.

On May 10, Mondale was the first Senator to suggest Fortas resign. The Republicans must have been happy about that. In the house, H.R. Gross of Iowa (GOP) called for empaneling a Federal jury to make a sweeping investigation of Fortas. But in the end, Fortas’s resignation brought him relief from the hounds.

This is a story about Democrats running water for the Republicans. There will not be a similar scene if the Dems take the house, and Representative Nadler really investigates Kavanaugh. But Democrats can take some hints from the Fortas affair. Leak to the press. Keep the pressure up. And use the power you have to call for a larger investigation of the Justice. If you don’t get him to resign, you can wound him to the extent that the Supreme Court will definitely start smelling of illegitimacy. Because… the Supreme Court is illegitimate. It is the result of sheer brute political strength, exerted by the GOP. As an arm of the Republican party, the respect one should, theoretically, have for an “independent judiciary” is simply a farcical exercise in swallowing the dictates of the D.C. elite and pretending it is some kind of civic duty. Our civic duty, at this point in time, is the exercise of countervailing power,  civil disobedience, and protest at the Court. Probably for a long, long time.  

  

  

Yeats and spelling

Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic?

The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations. A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.

I grow old, I grow old. I am too old for emoticons. And graffiti spelling does sometimes assault my sense of the order of things. Yet I am helped by the thought that Yeats was as apt to spell “there” “their” as not. I really am.

on the bezos bill

Senator Sanders so called Bezos bill has caused an interesting backlash. Some liberal economists, like Jared Bernstein, think that the bill will result in unemployment.

In brief, the bill proposes to charge those companies, like Amazon and Walmart, who make a habit of employing workers at such a low wage that they have to depend on foodstamps. Basically, Sanders bill calls this a social cost that the company should shoulder.

Bernstein’s worry is that the workers will be fired, since the company does not want to shoulder that cost. It is an interesting worry, because it depends on the assumption that there is enough slack in the logistical or clerical line that certain workers will be priced out. In other words, X company employs X amount of employees to get a certain task done – stock shelves, load packages onto trucks, etc. But they hire more than they need. Thus, they can fire some without endangering the process by which products are transported, shelved, checked out, etc. However, even if this is so – and in a near full employment situation, this is more plausible than in a less than full employment situation – they are still going to have to pay for the social costs or raise the pay for those employees doing these tasks. They can’t just not do them. So it is not at all clear to me that this argument works. Firstly, at the least slack in demand, these workers will go anyway. Secondly, the incentive to pay workers more, in order to avoid shouldering the government mandated costs, is good for the remaining workers.

Another argument, and frankly, a dumber one, has been presented by Dylan Matthews, at Vox. His argument is pretty much that we rely on big corporations to get the crummy social welfare that we already have. If we do this, who knows but that the corporations will turn against the whole idea of food stamps. As proof of this hitherto unseen altruism lurking in the corporate heart, Matthews adduces Walmart’s contribution to a think tank that leans towards increasing the social welfare net, and he tweets: “Walmart's strong support for food stamps (because it means more poor people can buy food at Walmart) is one of the few non-shit things about America's fucked up political economy, and something that ought to be encouraged rather than assailed.”

A funny thing about that strong support: according to a report in 2014 described on Huffington Post, “59 percent of the Walmart PAC’s contributions to House members who voted on the minimum wage increase went to candidates who opposed the increase, while 95 percent of the Waltons’ contributions went to candidates who opposed the increase.” Now, I know this is takin’ a big leap, but I’d guess, in America’s fucked up political economy, that you could draw a venn diagram of people who support food stamps and those who support restricting food stamps and freezing the level of them and the people who oppose increasing the minimum wage, and you would see a nearly total overlap. We could start with Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who is well known for wanting to squeeze out the number of people getting food stamps with various bureaucratic procedures weeding out those on disability.

So my idea is that no, Walmart’s eyes on the prize do not entail going to the mat about food stamps.

Now, to address what these liberals and neo-liberals don’t: the discouragement built into a system in which work gets you food stamps. The number of men who have opted out of employment over the past 20 years is a pretty significant factor in the Heartland. One of the reasons is that wages are low. You can make equal money by using the social welfare net. Charging corporations for using that social welfare net as a labor cost cutter might actually provide incentives for these men, as the wages rise to avoid the charges entailed by the surcharges created by corporate rentseeking.

This is one possibility, at least, and it is more likely than the possibility that Walmart, stung to its philanthropic core by the Bezos bill, will cease supporting food stamps.

There might well be a model or argument out there that makes a more plausible case for the Bezos bill having a downside. But these arguments surely aren’t it.

why grow up?

In etymological circles, there is a hot dispute about the etymology of the Latin word elementum. One theory holds that this is an outgrowth from the Etruscan, and the other theory holds that it is definitely, absolutely and completely not. Things get complex. The Oxford English Dictionary blog has a fascinating discussion (fascinating at least for some people) of where elementum comes from, and why it, rather than abecedarium, took up the space for letter or particle. From this discussion, I only want to point out one Harry Potterish thing, which is that elementary school, which is the name for grammar school in the U.S., could easily have been abecedarium school, with a few tweaks in our philological history.

In France, the terms are ecole primaire and ecole elementaire – I think the latter is gaining currency due to the occupation of France of an American version of English. And the first cycle begins with CP. That first cycle began two days ago, and swallowed Adam.

Sob.

Of course, children grow up. But this fact – like the fact that the sun will grow cold someday, that the universe will ultimately shrink to a dot of nothingness, that all men are mortal, that the sea is indifferent to the drowning man – is a fact for the head, not the heart. The heart’s fact is that inexplicably, it is the end of the vacation, and the end of pre-school, and here our boy is, lined up with the others, marching off to a classroom to learn all the things that one learns, growing up. The French system is all about parents on the outside. For the first day – the rentrée – parents were allowed, as a special treat, to penetrate the building with their kids. It was an oddly reassuring experience, because the principle of the school took the opportunity to scold us. It made me feel young. The message was: don’t bring your kid to school late! And it put such fear into us that it took us two days to have a bit of a crisis, looking up and seeing it is 8:27 and we had to get Adam there in three minutes. Luckily, the school is only one minute, or one block, away.
On the plus side, there is the reading the writing the rithmatic the sports the social life – on the down side is – where is our baby?

I imagine that this is a universal cry, shared by frogs and bower birds as well as human beings. Adam was primed, however, for his first day. He’s got his sac à dos, his pencils, his cahier (the means of communication between parent and teacher and school in general, an ingenious bureaucratic tool that goes against the Barbaric Yawp of the American anarchy, where the most we have our report cards and notes home from the teacher that we conveniently drop in the bushes on the way home). I’ve been thinking about what comes after Adam learns to read French – do I give him lessons in reading English? Will that be hard? Too hard?

I cannot remember my first day in a real school. I do remember that I liked school, and found that I had a rapport with teachers. I felt like they liked me. On the other hand, I never had that experience that I think is common for people like me, the ones seemingly designed for the classroom: the feeling of having a model in one teacher or another. I never felt like I wanted to be like my teachers. I never felt like I wanted to be a teacher. I think I wanted to be an explorer. Or the president, or a baseball player. And as time moved on, I wanted to be an unhappy, alienated artist living in an expressionistic city landscape, frequenting taverns. But teacher – no. Now, when it is way to late in life’s sweet bitter mystery, I think maybe I shoulda been a teacher. At an abecedarium.
Too late. Too late.

THE AGE OF HYPERLITERACY

NOBODY READS ANYMORE

I was truly psyched, this morning, that the angry internet mob forced David Remnick to disinvite Steve Fascist from the New Yorker's ideas party.

And I'm going to use this as a plug for my essay on the Books and Film Globe site, since it is relevant.
What I was trying to argue didn't have a snappy label. Now I've come up with one: hyperliteracy.

The thing one reads, over and over, is that "nobody reads anymore." N+1, a supposedly lefty site, just featured an editorial that went over the ground with a special hauteur, like the Marquis complaining about the gardner:

"Gone are the happy days when we dialed up to submit a comment to Salon.com, only to be abused by Glenn Greenwald or destroyed — respectfully — by the academics at Crooked Timber. Back then, we could not have imagined feeling nostalgic for the blogosphere… Even those who stridently disagreed shared some basic premises and context… Today’s internet, by contrast, is arbitrary and charmless. On social media, criticism once confined to the comments now comes as free-range abuse directed at other readers. Readers can address all parties instantaneously — writers, editors, publishers, and the world. And so writers who publish online peer into the fishbowl of readerly reception. Drop in some flakes and watch the fish swarm.”"

The idea that nobody reads is contiguous with, and overlaps, the idea that everybody is out there in a meanspirited twitter mob, shaming and destroying freedom of speech left and right.

Myself, I'm for the mob. But even if I wasn't for the mob, I would do a little more thinking about this idea of the writer on one side and the readerly swarm on the other side. Like, where does that idea come from?

Here I'm gonna quote my piece:

"The N+1 article is balanced on a division between the writer and the reader – as if we were still in a space where this division was socially absolute. But that has long been swept away. Rather than fishes swarming, readerly reception is now transformed, almost instantly, into writerly reception. It is as if the dull kids in the back of the classroom, the ones who passed around notes, are now in the front of the classroom, writing on twitter. Which is just another form of classroom note. And the authors are not amused. Like teachers, they suspect that the amusement those notes are causing is distracting from the very important lessons being drawn on the blackboard.

The writerly revolution has still not been fully comprehended, I think. Literacy, until recently, has been thought of as largely passive. In the early modern period, learning to read did not necessarily entail learning to write: women, for instance, who formed even then the most ardent corps of readers, were often not instructed in writing. But both functions became one in the great literacy campaigns of the nineteenth century. Still, just as math beyond primitive algebra were taught to the masses and immediately forgotten by most of the masses, who had no practical use for them, the tools of writing were often used rarely after high school.

All of this has changed in a historical instance. The child who doesn’t know how to use the keyboard on the cell phone is now a rarity. Writing on the popular level has caught up with reading. Twitter is a fascinating place to watch the collision between an older form of literacy and a newer one. Far from being the “cesspit” that older media peeps – and the cranky formerly hip denizens of N+1 – like to despise, it is creating its own vocabulary, its audio-visual forms, its links, its infradig references. It is the old story of the modern: make it new."

We passed a threshhold we don't recognize. Barthes's death of the author entailed, necessarily, the death of the reader, because these were functions in a system of literacy that depended on a relatively small number of people having access to both sides of the literate paradigm. Now, everybody is on both of those sides. The readerly swarms are writerly swarms - they comment and gloss with no sense that they are violating some hierarchy. Far from being the end of reading, this is what hyperliteracy looks like, the crown on a state sponsored effort that has spanned two centuries. The tools of the old penmen have been given to us all. And we should fucking use them.

 

my distinguished pal

We sit down to the expanded energy footprint we have bought, and we unwrapped the hamburger and cheeseburger, free the toy from its plastic sack, open the box and take out the fries, open the plastic bottle and insert the plastic straw through the plastic top of the sprite cup, and go through the comestibles. Ah, two catchup packets. Adam tries to open one of them, but I lend a hand, finally. He’s getting the hang of the knife and fork business, and easily strips the paper from the straw, but opening those sacks that have been carefully pre-perforated for easy opening, with the arrows pointing to the appropriate place to grab, still evades his tool sense, his understanding of affordances. I am thinking, as I always think at Old McDonalds, how can all this stuff be so cheap? Adam takes a satisfied look at the table, turns to me, and says, “thanks, my distinguished pal.”

Adam is now five and 10 months, and he has been learning all about linguistic affordances, in both English and French. Of course, part of that is understanding words and grammar. But it also means getting your tongue around catch phrases. Which proliferate, the age of YouTube.

My distinguished pal. Did he pick this up from Bugs Bunny, or Scooby Doo, or Tom and Jerry, or the horror shows – tales of the cryptkeeper, the Haunting Hour, Goose Bumps – that we, his permissive parents, have allowed him to see? I don’t see the harm, although when he sat at the table at his grandparents’ house a few days ago and said that he wanted a motorcycle, a black helmet, sunglasses like a movie star, a black shirt with a skull on it, and to join a motorcycle gang, I had a few qualms. The gang reference came from Scooby Doo. Adam thought the whole point of the gang was to roll up your t shirt sleeves so that you showed your shoulder. He thought that would be a hilarious thing to do. I had to agree.

My distinguished pal. When I was young, it was of course an unrelenting stream of tv – old movies, rerun tv series, cartoons. And I still, in an age where I am definitely past my sell-by date, remember some of them. I remember, for instance, Newton, the Centaur, calling out for Herc Herc Hercules. I remember seeing a gangster move with James Cagney, at the end of which he died, clutching his stomach and moaning, is this the end of Rico? I must have died like Rico a hundred times, over chairs, on sofas, in the dining room, in the living room, in the back yard. Each time was as fun as the first time.

Every life is full of muses. We just don’t recognize them, or trace their obscure workings and wendings as they sink into our lives. My distinguished pal.

avital ronell

I'm going to be writing for bookandfilmglobe.com as a book editor. Anybody who has an idea for a review or an article should query me! rogergathmann@gmail.com

And this is my latest, about avital ronell, teachers' pets, the culture wars, the state of the humanities, and the impunity of John Searle.