Michelle Goldberg Melts Down

Writing in the NYT Michelle Goldberg's "Pigs All the Way Down, Brett Kavanaugh and Our Rotten Ruling Class, " spins into a death spiral:


Regardless of what happens to Kavanaugh, however, this scandal has given us an X-ray view of the rotten foundations of elite male power. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.
--Michelle Goldberg


The problem with Goldberg's formulation is she apparently has little first hand experience with that "ruling class," or at least with the institutions which pretend to provide the "ruling class" for our nation.


Her screed is a sort of psychologist's textbook of a complex which suffers her to  resent  those she perceives as feeling superior to her.

Having drifted into the Ivy League, the Phantom would hardly describe any of the three different institutions he spent time in as being the incubator of a ruling class or even as being particularly "elite."


Hanah Arendt, observing the head Nazis at Nuremberg, was struck by "the banality of evil." None of these men appeared to be particularly remarkable.


I felt the same way in the halls of Ivy. To be sure, there were some very bright people skulking about, and the occasional person who seemed to be operating on a plane somewhere above the ordinary, but for the most part, the students and even many of the faculty seemed quite unremarkable, uninspiring and very ordinary.

Andrew Hacker, whose own credentials included Amherst, Princeton and Oxford taught at Cornell and Princeton and he tried to write a book tracking the fates of the members of the Princeton class of 1961, describing the students of that class, who he taught, as being the most dismal collection of mediocrities he had ever run across. Princeton refused to cooperate and he could never get the book off the ground. Hacker surmised a large number of the graduates never amounted to much and Princeton was determined to bury that sad truth. After all, Princeton was in the business of selling success, or selling the idea that a Princeton diploma was the punched ticket to wealth and success if not fame.

Many on Twitter and in the NY Times have expressed shock at the description of Yale students in Kavanaugh's class.
The Phantom saw nothing surprising in any of the accounts of his college days.
If anything, these stories sounded more eventful than what the Phantom saw in those humdrum corridors of pretend power and status.
In fact, it is notable Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did not hang around long at Harvard. To it's credit, Harvard selected these two future stars for admission. But once there, these two looked around and said, "I can do better."
There is a possibly apocryphal story about Tony Fauci, now the director the the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, one of those guys who helped bring HIV to heel.  When offered the glittering prize of admitting privileges and a faculty appointment at the Cornell New York Hospital Medical Center he declined, saying, "Someday I'm going to be very rich or very famous, but if I stay here, I'll be neither."
That summarized the Phantom's impression of the Ivy League. Well behaved youngsters (at least outside of their dormitories) who would never make waves.

Memory and Judge Kavanaugh

Much as Judge Kavanaugh fits the image of the privileged snotty white kid who starts out life on 3rd base, this whole last ditch effort to block his confirmation to the SCOTUS looks desperate, pathetic and more than a little ridiculous, at least to me.

First, there is the problem of memory: Some 20 years after graduating, I traveled back to my high school, driving along Whittier Boulevard, block by block hurtling back toward those discouraging times, the scenes of so much defeat and disappointment, toward the hideous prefabricated school buildings of that high school,  thinking about what a dark time high school was. 
I was visiting to interview two kids from my high school who had applied to my college.

But as soon as I stepped into the building, I saw 15 year old girls in the familiar black/white/royal blue colors, pleated cheerleader skirts and white sweaters, bouncing up and down, excitedly flirting with boys in front of their lockers and I was immediately thrust back into that time and I thought, "God! How I loved this place! It was so much fun, just thrilling."

So there is that. The mutability of memory.

Now, you will say, sure, some memories are like that. But the memory of getting sexually molested or raped stays fixed, seared into your memory.

But then again, memory is a slippery thing.

And then there is the problem of time passing.

Outraged liberals have opened themselves up to the jibe coming from a Republican Congressman: "Have you heard? Ruth Bader Ginsberg just claimed she was groped by Lincoln!"

It may not be all that funny, but it is effective and you know that will resonate with a lot of people.

And there is the problem of the joy of victimhood, the "Me Too" movement with its self righteous certainly of moral superiority, in which an entire movement is dedicated to the proposition accusation is equivalent to conviction.

As liberals, progressives, socialists, whatever you want to call us, we have been compromising constantly. We have been trying to work up enthusiasm for Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Corey Booker, Elizabeth Warren. But each, in his or her own way is simply uninspiring. 
We need a champion we can warm to, and we simply do not have one. 

We need a champion who can strike a blow for us from which we can feel a vicarious vibration.

Molesting the Past : Spielberg's Contaminated History

Watching the opening of Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" the Phantom was startled by just how dreadful it was. The Phantom had loved the movie when he saw it in the theater, but either he had arrived late and missed this miasma of a scene or he simply repressed it beyond memory.
Spielberg has made dozens of movies and some are free of the deadly sentimentality which has spews like brain rot at his viewers, but his historical films almost always have at least one defining "Spielberg moment."

In "Lincoln" it's right there in the second scene, the first with dialog, Lincoln talking with union soldiers after a battle, when the soldiers start reciting the Gettysburg Address, each in turn--you keep waiting for them to break into interpretive dance--the final paragraph delivered by a Black soldier walking off into the mists. 
Ye gads. Puke. Ugh.

In his otherwise wonderful "Empire of the Sun" a British boy imprisoned in a Japanese prison camp makes a connection, across the barbed wire, with a Japanese son of a Kamikaze pilot.  Spielberg makes movies about kids. That's okay. ET is gooey, but it's not a depiction of history. That's okay. But when he tries to turn history into ET, it makes your stomach turn and your skin crawl. He ruins that movie with another Spielberg attempt at tear jerker.

Even the otherwise excellent miniseries, "Band of Brothers" has one of those "here it comes" nauseating scenes, in which Richard Winters, on leave  in Paris, spots a boy in the subway who triggers a flashback to a German soldier, a mere boy, who Winters shot as he ran across a field attacking a company of SS soldiers in "Crossroads." The scene had some sliver of truth--Winters in fact had recounted that shooting in his report on the action--the soldier incongruously smiled at him before Winters shot him, but oh, what Spielberg does to contaminate that. Suddenly, Winters is deeply saddened by his own action of shooting a mere boy, who happened to be wearing an SS uniform and was kneeling in the field in front of his company, likely a sentry.

Winters remarked about that scene, "I never regretted shooting a single German my entire time in the field."

Spielberg had made Winters famous and revered in "Band of Brothers" but Winters could not abide that sullying of the truth, despite it all.

A later episode "Why We Fight" is much more effective and moving because Spielberg eschews the goo and gets at a complicated truth: Frank Perconte, a hard bitten soldier we have followed through Easy Company's slog across Europe chews out a new recruit who is looking to get into combat. 
"Last night I slept in a real bed with  sheets and this morning I wiped my ass with actual toilet paper for the first time in two years and here you are, like all the new guys, 'Where's the Germans at? When can I kill some Germans?' Well, it's been two years since I been home and this is the best I've had it."
A few scenes later, we see Perconte racing through woods, scrambling through a town, desperate to find Winters to bring him to a concentration camp he and his brothers in arms have stumbled upon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMlemhFqowU

The episode is called "Why We Fight" and of course, it seems misnamed because it implies Perconte was fighting to defeat the monstrous evil which created this concentration camp, but he's just got finished telling you that was not why he was fighting. He had no idea what he was fighting.  He had no idea of the magnitude of evil the Wehrmacht he was fighting supported. He was simply fighting to stay alive and to protect his fellow Easy company men.  But the discovery of that camp provided him with a new reality. So the episode name proves to be ironic and clever.

 Nancy Isenberg, author of "Fallen Founder" about Aaron Burr, noted that "history is not a bedtime story." 
Spielberg cannot seem to keep that in mind, always ready to drift off into glorifying, embellishing, seeking out the phony emotion, contaminating the real stinking experience with perfume.

Shakespeare never did that. Falstaff looks at a rotting corpse and says, "There's glory for you. It stinks."

If we could look at the past clear eyed, it might not own us in such a sinister way.
"The past is not dead," Faulkner told us, "It's not even past."

Diversity, Identity, Pride, Tolerance

Wandering the streets of Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, the past two weeks,  the Phantom was struck by the streams of nearly undiluted white faces, blue eyes, blonde hair. These countries all have immigrants who look different wandering among the locals, but the reason crowds of tourists arrive on boats and airplanes is to experience the difference, the uniqueness of Scandinavia.

There are occasional women in head scarves, and the Phantom saw one of the most beautiful human beings he has ever seen walking down the street in Copenhagen, in a scarf, clearly Muslim. 

The Phantom understands the power of the United States is its ability to mix different peoples and make them all Americans. 

But he also remembers what his colleague, Vikko Koivisto, told him at a department picnic--Vikko said he was leaving, taking his family back to Finland. 
"But Vikko, you have done so well here! You're a star."
It was true, Vikko had published more papers than the rest of us combined. His academic star was ascendant in our department.
"You see those kids?" Vikko asked me, pointing to the herd of children frolicking around the playground near the picnic tables. "Can you tell which are mine?"
I looked at the kids--they all wore the same sorts of T shirts, jeans, sneakers. No, I could not pick out Vikko's kids.
"That's the problem," Vikko said. "I want my kids to know they are Finnish."

Bill Clinton announced, with surprising equanimity, sometime in the midst of his Presidency that the country by the middle of the 21st century would no longer be white, but brown.

And looking at the offspring of intermarriage between races, people like Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Vanessa Williams, Beyonce, one can say mixed race folks can be among the most striking and beautiful of people.

But is something not potentially lost, when our differences meld into a melting pot? Is soup always better than salad?

The fact is, because of the power of "taste" the Phantom believes blue eyes, blonde hair, recessive genetic traits, will continue to be bred.  Fact is, a significant number of blue eyed blondes prefer other blue eyed blondes as sexual partners and have blue eye blonde children. Is this racism? Maybe, but more likely it's something else, something murkier, more complicated. 

So, the Phantom thinks there will still be people who look like the Danes we expect to see when we go to Denmark, by the end of the 21st century, no matter how many folks immigrate from Africa and the Middle East.

His tour guide in Estonia remarked that Estonia is a small cup and Africa a huge bucket. That's how she saw the problem of immigration. 

In some way, she is right--although, I suspect she would prefer to see no Africans at all live in Estonia--but immigration is, at root, a numbers problem--how many, how fast? The United States, should it throw its borders wide open would likely see enough immigrants from India and China and Central American alone, not to mention Africa, that English would become a minority language and whites surely would be a minority. If that happened, would that be a bad thing?

Whatever the answer to that question, it's pretty clear the United States would be a very different country, almost unrecognizable. 

For a country of 5 million, how much immigration would it take to erase any distinguishable characteristics?