A Grab-bag of Sunday Morning Ideas
This introduction is for the people who contributed to my GoFundMe account after reading Friday’s newsletter. You can skip down further if you’re not one of them (although you don’t have to, this section is free). You can also join them. They’re good folk. You know how I know? There’s a guy who kicked in five bucks because he “respects the paywall of honor.” That’s the guy you want with you in a firefight.
Anyway, my brother usually calls me from Nouakchott on Saturday morning. (He lives there with his family because his wife is a UN Peacekeeper.)
I hadn’t yet looked at my computer yet because I had so much housework I needed to do. I was resolved to do it. Then my phone rang.
“Mischa!”
“Hello!”
“Hello! There’s so much to be outraged about!”
Every week, we compare how outraged we are by all the outrageous outrages. We’re always whipsawed between the latest Trump outrage, the latest outrageous thing the Woke Left did, or the outrageous way the media covered it. We reserve our special outrage for Jia Tolentino of The New Yorker.
The Rorschach outrage
We entered a new, even weirder stage of national outrage last week, did you notice? Disembodied outage. Remember, first we learned only that there was an outrage. We had literally no idea what kind of outrage it might be. We only knew that a whistleblower had reported something of “urgent concern,” and this had turned into yet another standoff between the President and Congress.
At that stage—when no one knew what this could be about—I wrote:
I was not disappointed. People had their minds made up well in advance of any hint of knowledge. And I’ll bet you this: No matter what else is revealed, they won’t change it.
So, I’ll come back to this once I know what this story is about, but for now we’re remaining outraged on general principles.
“I love your newsletter!” my brother said.
“Really?”
“Yes! And I think it’s going to work! I think people will pay you for it!”
“You think?” I said doubtfully. “I just don’t know if anyone but you is reading it.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “Look at your GoFundMe page!”
“My GoFundMe page? You mean—someone donated?”
“Yes!” he said. My brother believes in me so profoundly that he checks my GoFundMe account more avidly than I do.
I minimized my brother and maximized GoFundMe.
“Oh, wow!” I said.
“See?”
“Wow!”
“See, it’s going to work!”
“Wow!”
Some of you sent really lovely messages, too, including the one that said, “Don’t often agree with Claire, but she makes me think. We need more civil discourse.”
I wrote back to tell him that not only did I very much appreciate the money—and I do, believe me—but I saw his note as a victory for liberal democracy itself. It’s victory for the marketplace of ideas. Literally, if you think about it.
“Wow, I’m so glad people are reading it and they like it,” I said to my brother.
“Yeah, it’s great. But—
“Yeah?”
“—have you considered making it shorter?”
Fossil fuels ate my homework
He and I compared our outrages. This week, I was outraged by this House Panel on Climate Change. What purpose could this hearing serve but to exploit these children? If they want advice about the climate, why not ask qualified climate scientists—adults —to sit in those chairs?
These kids don’t know anything about the climate, as they make abundantly clear. I was nauseated by the greasy smiles and patronizing faces on the politicians who contemplated this flowering of adolescent angst. Why are they making a spectacle out of profoundly mixed-up kids? Isn’t the US Congress supposed to be the place for rational debate?
Seriously. Those are adults, in a position of authority. They shouldn’t be wasting the time of the United States Congress taking advice on climate policy from teenagers. More obviously: How could they think it appropriate to participate in these kids’ Apocalyptic fantasies? Why aren’t they correcting them when they say things that no rational person familiar with “the science” believes?
Apart from the brown-nosing Tracy Flick guy on the right (in both senses), these are kids with serious problems. They explicitly tell us that they suffer, variously, with depression, anxiety, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. These conditions aren’t a joke. They’re serious psychiatric problems that cause boundless torment and misery, broken lives, interrupted education (already well in evidence), even suicide.
Nor were their afflictions caused by fossil fuels. Nor will they be helped by adults and authority figures who reinforce them in their most florid delusions and acclaim them for confronting the world with maximum hysteria and minimal resilience. Adults around them should not be telling them, “You’re right! We’re all about to die! How brave of you to warn us!”
What’s wrong with our moral culture that members of Congress think it’s appropriate to put unstable children on show, like circus animals, in lieu of having a stringent, rational debate among highly-informed adults about a complex matter of policy?
And what’s with the creepy group that’s organizing these strikes? I hadn’t realized how creepy they were until this gentleman brought it to my attention.
If you read their manifesto—and consider how many millions of people have been persuaded to associate themselves with it—it’s clear that we don’t just have on our hands a dangerous outbreak of right-wing populism. We’ve got a dangerous outbreak of left-wing authoritarianism, too. They’re reinforcing each other, each becoming more like the other’s caricatures.
Left-wing authoritarianism isn’t as dangerous, right now, because it isn’t in power. But it’s dangerous to the extent that when opposition parties allow themselves to be associated with, and co-opted by, these authoritarian left-wing movements, they make themselves absurd and more important, unelectable.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Boris Johnson is in power because the leader of the opposition is Jeremy Corbyn. No one in the UK thinks Boris Johnson should be Prime Minister, a very narrow segment of fanatics apart. But they will vote for him nonetheless if Corbyn is the only alternative. Johnson’s entire political strategy is based on this.
Claire Berlinski’s first rule for getting rid of authoritarian right-wing populists: Give voters a non-authoritarian alternative. Preferably one who doesn’t have, “I’LL TRASH THE ECONOMY AND GET IN BED WITH TERRORISTS’ tattooed on his forehead.
This couldn’t be a stronger warning to Democrats. Do not put voters in a position such that they feel they’ve been given a choice between a manifestly unfit but at least thoroughly incompetent right-wing populist President and a left-wing authoritarian who might be terrifyingly competent.
If Democrats associate with this culture, rather than firmly repudiating it, they are really risking a Trump re-election. Trump is too old to make himself President-for-life, but his second term will be all about making it impossible for any opposition party ever to win an election again.
I don’t have space in this newsletter to explain why I say that, but I’ll discuss it soon. There’s a right-wing populist playbook. If you pay attention to how they behave elsewhere, you’ll know what’s coming in the US. It’s like having a Magic 8-Ball.
Subscribe and I’ll tell you what the future holds.
The end of written culture
It is amazing that even though my brother lives in Nouakchott, I can reliably speak to him, as much as I want, for free, on a video phone call. Readers of my age will remember that when we were kids, this was the stuff of science fiction.
Anyone else remember when “international phone calls” were rare and expensive? If you’re too young: What this meant was that people with relatives in distant countries missed them terribly.
When I was about ten years old, my father took a job as a visiting professor in Paris. We lived in Seattle. We were later to join him, but he went first. I don’t remember how long he was gone, but I missed him so much.
Every now and again we got the treasured “international phone call.” I remember the crackling phone line and the wild excitement, then having about ten seconds to speak to my father. I’d be rushed off the phone almost as soon as I said, “Hi Daddy!” My mother would shriek, “It’s international!”—meaning it was so expensive I had to get off the phone, fast—and that was it.
Let’s pause to remember that we don’t want to go back. Free, instant communication is a blessing and a miracle.
On the down side, it’s also destroyed written culture, and probably liberal democracy. It may not be possible to fix this.
I have a collection of letters from my father and my grandparents. Real ones, handwritten on what’s now sold as “vintage” stationary. Now you buy these things on Etsy.
Long-distance phone calls being prohibitively expensive, the only way to stay meaningfully in touch with people far away from you was to write letters. So people, children included, applied themselves to reading and writing with vigor. There was an immediate and personal motivation to do it.
The key to what’s happening to us, politically, is that we’re in the midst of a massive transition from literary to oral culture.
John McWhorter wrote a column about this not long ago. Writing, as he notes, is a fairly recent human development:
Humans have existed for 150,000 years while writing only came along about 6,500 years ago. For a spell, as nations coalesced and humans increasingly expanded their horizons beyond the village, writing was the main way to say something beyond your doorstep. But with modern technology, you can just talk again—and because that is what has always come more naturally to people, increasingly, they do.
He focuses on Kim Kardashian’s tweets, rather than the President’s, to demonstrate the decline:
“One suspects,” McWhorter writes, that Kardashian “simply isn’t a reader.” One does suspect, yes. He notes that people who have had “rich exposure to the printed page, certainly during childhood and optimally beyond,” would not be inclined to use an exclamation point after the word “genocide.”
Consider, McWhorter suggests, that we should accept Ms. Kardashian’s prose style as normal, and what’s more, we must. There is no way to bring written culture back. It has been technologically superseded.
The letters modestly educated soldiers wrote home during the Civil War attest to the centrality of refined composition in the American culture of yesteryear.
Schools inculcated the skill, the society placed a cultural value on it, and more to the point, technology was such that public language was still much more print-based than it is today. Speaking, no one could be heard beyond the stage they spoke on, and there was no recording technology yet. Well into the 20th century, even with amplification and broadcasting, one had little personal control over such technologies. Writing—and reading it—was still more necessary than it is today, such that cities could commonly support several newspapers appearing in two editions daily.
It was much harder not to be immersed in formal writing lifelong, even if you weren’t a member of the intelligentsia. …
Those days are over for good.
He knows, he says, “a number of people whose social media prose is much like Kardashian’s tweet. They are quite diverse in educational level, temperament, class, and race. What unites them is that none read for pleasure.”
Those who have a feel for written culture will understand that he is not merely making a point about Ms. Kardashian or even his own social circle.
The primary reason I loathe Trump, instinctively, is that he’s illiterate. I reckon this sentiment is shared across our elite class. Few can bring themselves to say it clearly, and perhaps few consciously realize it. But speaking as an emissary of the elite class, now, I can tell you this: His illiteracy, above all, is the quality that drives us berserk. This is the heart of the argument that he is “unfit.”
And it is good reason to loathe him and think him unfit. It is not a prejudice or an example of irrational elite snobbery. You cannot think clearly unless you can read and write. The words “illiteracy” are frequently to be found near the words “poverty, malnutrition, and disease,” and this isn’t an accident; it is why “eradicating illiteracy” is the treasured goal of every do-gooder who does good in developing societies.
Why is it so hard to say plainly that the president is unfit because he’s illiterate? I suspect it’s because the esteem for literacy and democracy have been so profoundly at tension in American history.
Using a literacy test seems a perfectly common-sense way to disambiguate between those who are fit to vote or hold office or vote, on the face of it. But we all know precisely what those tests were really designed to do.
Or perhaps I should not say, “designed.” It’s plausible to me that the enactment of literacy tests reflected genuine dismay at the prospect of the illiterate voting. But we view this now as a moral outrage, and for good reason. In the United States, the vast majority of men who could not pass a literacy test were unable to do so because they, or their parents, had been slaves. Switch here to the active voice: Because we enslaved them. Slaveholders, fearing the spread of abolitionist written material and slave insurrections, prevented slaves from learning to read and write; the slave states cracked down on literacy particularly after Nat Turner's Revolt. Virginians “immediately, as an act of retaliation or vengeance, abolished every colored school within their borders; and having dispersed the pupils, ordered the teachers to leave the State forthwith, and never more to return.” To then demand that freed slaves pass literacy tests to vote is akin to punching a woman in the face the night before your wedding and then refusing to marry her because you find her bruises unsightly.
This is the history that makes it impossible for Americans plainly to say that Trump is unfit for the presidency because he cannot read and write.
The memory of “literacy tests” causes us profound national shame. Even those unfamiliar with those tests pick up how to feel about them from our ambient culture. As so often with these phenomena, we don’t feel the shame fully and consciously—it is too painful—but instead act out in other domains of life. This is why we can’t say to ourselves, clearly and confidently, “The President of the United States, the most powerful man in the country and perhaps the world, must know how to read and write.” Psychotherapists speak of “processing” emotions—as if they were jams or texturized protein patties—but the concept is sound: emotions, repressed, returned. We have displaced our shame from circumstances where it is warranted to one where the very contrary impulse is warranted.
We know, we are certain that it is a terrible and terrifying idea to give a man who can’t read so much power over us, to allow him to make policy decisions that will affect us all, will affect our children, the entire word. The ability to read is now more essential to wise presidential behavior than it has ever been, because we live in an age of unusual complexity and rapid technical change. There is no “simple” or “standard” solution to our most urgent problems.
Many of these are problems humanity has never faced before. The president has never before been responsible for ensuring the climate of the earth remains fit for human habitation. Devising any kind of wise response to what many believe a climate emergency requires not just basic reading skills, but a solid science background. Before he could make sense of the claims before him, he’d need to be comfortable with statistics, and able to understand complex arguments about risk; he’d need three semesters, at least, of university-level chemistry and physics; he’d need to know enough about solid earth dynamics, geochronology, thermochronology, atmospheric chemistry, physical oceanography, chemical oceanography, and atmospheric science to read and make sense of cutting-edge papers in those fields—that’s the minimum he would need even to begin to disambiguate which claims about the climate are media hysteria and popular suspicion and which are solidly-founded and genuine cause for concern. He would need, too, to be up-to-date on schemes for producing clean energy. His comments about wind power suggest he knows nothing about where we are, technologically, and thus can’t know how this should inform his judgment.
Yes, of course, he could simply say to an advisor, “You take care of all of that and tell me what to think.” But if this really is, as Al Gore says, “our generation’s life-or-death challenge. It is Thermopylae, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Lexington and Concord, Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Bulge, Midway and Sept. 11,” then it would be, obviously, vastly better to have a President who is able to assess these claims personally, along with other claims, such as that made by his (now former) advisor, William Happer, to the effect that Al Gore was mistaken, and who compared warnings about fossil fuel usage to the “demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.” As George W. Bush described the job of the presidency, “I am the decider.” You cannot hope to be able to decide whose account is closer to the truth if you’re unable to read a scientific paper.
This president cannot do his job properly, even in principle, because he can’t read. He can’t read a history, for example, of US involvement in the Persian Gulf. He can’t read policy papers about Ukraine. He is unfit—not just morally, but lacking a crucial professional asset that is central to the job to holds: the ability to read and write. He cannot “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” because he cannot read a law, nor can he read a legal textbook, nor any of the volumes of complex written material that together are the foundation of our legal system. No one in his right mind would select a Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, who has not read a single book not, even one, about military history and strategy. I don’t believe that he is capable of reading anything beyond the sixth-grade level. If anyone has heard or seen evidence to the contrary, let me know.
You simply can’t do his job without the ability to read, to read quickly, to cover a great deal of material, much of it complex and technical, every day, and to do so drawing upon a life’s experience of reading and analyzing complex written material. No CEO of any major corporation could survive a day without these skills; nor could any judge, nor any successful member of the professional class.
The President superintends over massive federal bureaucracies. As Eric Cantor has complained of President Obama, the President may appoint “a virtual army of ‘czars’—each wholly unaccountable to Congress yet tasked with spearheading major policy efforts for the White House.” Cantor described this as an “end-run around the legislative branch of historic proportions.” It was of historic proportions until Trump realized that he could fill his his cabinet and principal offices without a word of “advice and consent” from the Senate just by firing the old ones and appointing “Acting” replacements.
So, without formal or external guidance, the President has chosen the heads of massive bureaucracies that affect in some way almost every American—the Defense Department, the Department of the Interior, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Management and Budget, the Small Business Administration, the Directorate on National Intelligence, the Department of Labor, the ambassador’s office at the United Nations, and many more—even though his reading skills are insufficient to give him any insight into their qualifications or habits of thought, and even though, lacking reading skills, he can’t possibly assess their performance in their jobs. He “hears” someone is “doing great things,” he “hears” people don’t like Bolton, but has he read the agencies’ internal performance estimates, and does he have any reason, beyond personal affection for the people he hires, to think that they are achieving the tasks the people of the United States would like them to achieve?
But wait, says, McWhorter! It ain’t necessarily so. We may be mistaken in conflating illiteracy with primitivism, poverty, malnutrition, and disease. The idea that an oral culture cannot be as intellectually rigorous as a literate one “would have surprised the ancient Greeks, whose pedagogical approach was primarily oral and stressed developing oratorical skills of rhetoric and persuasion.”
(That’s wrong, by the way. Has it ever occurred to you to ask why we know a quite a bit about what the Greeks thought, but have no idea what people thought or said in contemporaneous oral cultures? )
“Let’s stop pretending,” he concludes, “that the way Kim Kardashian tweets and the way so many people write is a problem that can be fixed.” He proposes that we train people to think rigorously “with a focus on speaking and on forms of writing that are highly speech-inflected.”
I’m open to the idea. He may be right. It’s theoretically possible. But it has not happened yet. This is a point Whorter himself makes, at book length, in a volume title Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care. Not only is are we in the middle of a rapid transformation from literary to oral culture, our oral culture is degraded. Making formal arguments of any kind is, as he writes, “simply not part of American culture.”
If you’d like to know more about what the life of a UN Peacekeeper’s husband might hypothetically be like, my brother wrote a work of fiction, just completely from his imagination, called Peacekeeping:
"Powerfully intelligent . . . A politically sophisticated novel that plants, like pushpins, a handful of memorable characters into Haiti’s arid soil . . . [Peacekeeping's] depths reside in Mr. Berlinski’s rich portrait of a society, and his cool, probing writing about topics like sex, politics, journalism, race, class, agriculture, language and fear . . . Berlinski has a knack for writing short, sharp, surreal scenes . . . There’s a good deal of magic in the way that Mr. Berlinski, in command of fact and emotion, pilots this big novel safely home." ―Dwight Garner,The New York Times
“A formidable piece of work . . . the book’s easy way with local stories and lore bespeaks the familiarity that comes with rich firsthand experience . . . [Berlinski is] a sharp collector of stories, and he has an enjoyable way of threading his narration with story: Berlinski knows how to keep leading us on.” ―James Wood, The New Yorker“Marvelous . . . Peacekeeping gallops ahead toward the horizon of tragedy, yet the novel is brightened by the author’s sense of the absurdities that saturate an enterprise like a U.N. mission and the weird, byzantine intimacies at the ground level of globalization . . . Peacekeeping, in that sense, is a welcome bearer of enlightenment and a raw reminder of the limits of empathy.” ―Bob Shacochis, The Washington Post
“Mischa Berlinski’s new novel stands out for doing far more than dramatizing news headlines about the beleaguered Caribbean nation . . . Berlinski immerses the reader in an environment so richly detailed that one almost hears the buzz of insects through the pages, but the novel’s plot transcends its tropical setting, resulting in a deeper exploration of what it means to be an observer.” ―Jennifer Kay, Associated Press
For those of you still unsure what to do with your your Sunday. it’s a great, old-fashioned novel—and it will take you far away from this, I promise.