Non Proximate Causes and Singular Events

It is said there is no use crying over spilled milk.  But what if via some mysterious technique, the milk can get put back into the bottle.  Then the crying would be the least we might do.  The reader should keep that thought in mind as the rest of this post progresses.

I have in mind large events that impacted our national politics and national ethos. Further, in each case there is a large gap in time between the initial act and the subsequent consequence.  Let me illustrate then with President Gerald Ford's pardon of former President Richard Nixon.  I wrote about that quite a while ago in a post called The "L" Word.

Gerald Ford was a Republican in the Eisenhower tradition.  Reagan tried to run for President in 1976.  But Ford was the sitting President and he won the nomination.  There is no way to know this, but I think it a likelihood that Ford would have won the election had it not been for the Pardon.  After Watergate, most everyone hated Nixon, certainly Democrats and then many Republicans too.  Ford explained that the Pardon was necessary for the country to heal.  Maybe so.  I’m not so sure.  The Pardon was a huge assist to the Carter candidacy.  Consider Ford as President from 1977- 1980, but imagine Ford facing the same Stagflation that Carter had to deal with and imagine the Shah falling and the hostage crisis in Iran happening anyway.  Now when Reagan runs in 1980 it’s no slam dunk and quite possibly a Democrat wins that election as a reaction to the previous regime.  But the Pardon set in motion the timing that we did observe.  It’s not in Krugman’s book at all.  It doesn’t help his case.  But it clearly did set in motion a chain of events that contributed to Reagan winning in 1980.

This next one I haven't written about before.  While there has been a huge focus on the events of 9/11, there has been much less reflection, in my view, on America's reaction to those events.  The second war in Iraq, in particular, should be noted as 9/11 seemed only a pretense for starting that war.  Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the events of 9/11.  But since the earlier war in Iraq left him in place, as regime change in Iraq was not part of the agenda at the time, there were some higher ups within the George W. Bush administration who viewed that as a mistake and wanted it rectified.  They held sway and eventually we did declare war on Iraq, again. 

We operated under a cloud of delusion.  Recall that is was said that the American liberators would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqis.  After that initial mirage we ended up losing our soul, most notably by the horrific events at Abu Ghraib.  In some sense, this utter disregard for humanity ended up being matched at home by the widespread speculation in real estate, ultimately leading to the burst of the housing bubble and the Great Recession, a kind of penance or so it seemed.

In neither of these first two examples can we get the milk back in the bottle.  I'm hoping that with the next one we still can.

Before getting to it, let me levy a criticism against the news which I don't see others making.  We seem to be so caught up in the immediate transgressions that we lose track of the prominent events of the recent past.  We can't keep all that information present in our thinking.  So, intentional or otherwise, the news serves us as a distraction from focusing on some of the particulars in our memory.  In that way, alas, it rewards the propagandists, who want to encourage such distraction.  The remedy is either to find a way to keep these prominent events newsworthy or to find some other outlet than the news in which these prominent events remain in view.

The event I want to focus on here is President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  This happened on March 16, 2016. The nomination was never put forward for the Senate to consider in its Advice and Consent process, a violation of their Constitutional responsibility.  At the time it was said that there shouldn't be Supreme Court nominations in the same year that there was a Presidential election.  Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, avowed that view.  Yet 4 years later he oversaw the nomination and subsequent confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.  Further, this nomination happened on September 20, 2020, more than 6 months further into the year than the Garland nomination.  It clearly put the lie to the earlier claim about no Supreme Court nominations during the year of a Presidential election.  

I believe that this event should remain front and center in our political view rather than being swept under the carpet like so much of the rest of our history. Indeed, I was so impassioned about this that in the late summer and fall of 2022 I wrote a novella (at the time I referred to it as a novelette) called The Adventures Of The Minute Women that was largely motivated by this event, though admittedly it was triggered by the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Chapter 3 of my book, entitled Merrick and Mitch, is devoted to reconsideration of President Obama's nomination.  

The events mentioned a couple of paragraphs above are not in dispute.  What might be argued is why McConnell and the Republicans didn't take up the nomination.  Most likely, in my view, they regarded Garland as too qualified not to be approved.  So they hoped that with an open seat on the Supreme Court a Republican President would be elected and a more Conservative nomination would then be put forward.  Alternatively, even if they felt they could block the confirmation of Garland in the normal Advice and Consent process, doing so might very well diminish the chances of the Republican Presidential candidate.  One of those must be the right explanation. This sort of reasoning should be evident to all voters, regardless of their political affiliation.

The guilty party in this case is the Republican Senate, not Donald Trump.  Then, those Supreme Court appointments that happened during Trump's first term - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett are all tainted as a consequence.  Evangelical Republicans are surely willing to live with that, as it produced many of the results they were after.  Yet other Republicans, viewing the country on a downhill slide during Trump's second term, might wish for reestablishing faith in the Constitution as primary.  Achieving that would require undoing these ill-gotten gains.  My book makes the argument that this can only happen via the electoral process, voting out those still in the Senate who won't renounce what happened to the Garland nomination in 2016, and voting in other candidates, regardless of party, who are willing to vote for impeachment of those Justices nominated by Trump, as a necessary step toward reuniting the country.  This would happen, of course, with the full cooperation of Democratic voters.  But, as should be evident, it can't happen with only Democratic voters.

This is on nobody's radar now and maybe it is too far-fetched to even be considered a possibility.  Yet I don't think that can be known until this event becomes prominent in the public eye once again.  I hold out the hope that is possible.  After that, who know knows what might happen?  

Debunking The MythMaker

It's an interesting matter how one chooses the next book to read.  For me, with my eyesight what it is, it will invariably be an ebook on my Kindle Fire, so I can provide ample line space and a large enough font that it's no strain that way.  I also have a mild preference for sans serif font, even though once in a while the letters seem to get jammed together and then the word is hard to discern.  As of late, my rule of thumb has been to intermix reading fiction after first watching the TV shows.  This includes Endeavour, a prequel to the books by Colin Dexter about Inspector Morse, Poldark, a show based on the series of books by Winston Graham, and more recently Outlander, and the books by Diana Gabaldon as well as the first season of Dept. Q and the first book in the series by Jussi Adler-Olsen.  With this I've also tried, on occasion, to choose books for my edification, so recently I've read a couple of novels by Toni Morrison and a few by Kurt Vonnegut. And not too long ago I've gotten through some books that I'm under the impression should be read if a person is to consider themselves educated, even if the reading itself I found less than enlightening because the books have significant segments that were over my head and opaque to me. This includes two books I've tried to get through multiple times in the past - James Joyce's Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.  I was able to get through them in this last go round, so I could check them off the list.  But otherwise, there was little if any personal growth from the experience.

In the past, when I was still able to read paper books comfortably, I would sometimes go on a jag where I'd read non-fiction, with that often tied to my interest in how people learn.  My favorites there, at least the ones that I remember now, are Abraham Maslow, both Toward a Psychology of Being and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, and Marion Milner's On Not Being Able to Paint.  Both authors write about creativity, among other things.  Milner's perspective may be more directly related to what I have to say below.  I wrote about some of what Milner says in this post called Interweaving.  (The part about Milner is in the middle of the post.) 

Now I want to get to the most recent book I've read, The Gilded Edge by Catherine Prendergast.  I probably wouldn't have read this book if I had come across it on my own.  I learned of it, instead, while having a coffee with Norma Scagnoli.  Norma and I were colleagues while we did ed tech in the College of Business and we had been friends before that.  We remain friends now and have a coffee now and then to catch up.  Norma more than mentioned Cathy's book.  (Maybe there is a deal with Netflix about the book, of that I'm not sure.)  And I knew Cathy from when I was doing campus ed tech.  We served together on the oversight committee for the Center of Writing Studies when Gail Hawisher ran the show.  We interacted a little either before, after, or during committee meetings; I no longer remember which.  And I checked my email archive recently.  Cathy and I have had a couple of exchanges in the past.  I have never read a book before where I knew the author first hand.  This made me eager to read The Gilded Edge.

The book is an archival analysis of the key players in the artist colony located in Carmel, California, from when that colony was formed around the turn of the 20th century.  The artist colony has a glamorous reputation today.  The debunking is to show that this reputation is mainly the work of George Sterling, the mythmaker, and his cronies.  Sterling had an odd combination of jobs.  He sold real estate.  He did other financial business as well.  Those two may not be so odd in combination.  But then he was a poet, the work he'd have rather done full time, if only the pecuniary rewards were sufficient from that.

But Sterling was also a lecher and a drunk and engaged in all his sordid activity while married to his wife Carrie.  He strung her along and that made her miserable, but it took seemingly forever before she divorced him.  George Sterling was well connected, for example, to Jack London and to Ambrose Bierce. Those connections afforded certain advantages and it seemed that Carried implicitly calculated that those advantages outweighed the misery her husband's despicable behavior was making for her, until they no longer did.  It probably wasn't as rationally thought out as that, as Carrie came from a poor background and had a great fear of living in poverty again.

The book is quite depressing to read as it describes multiple suicides, disjoint in time but by the same method, cyanide poisoning.  And these suicides seem to be linked to each other.  The first of these is by Nora May French, the poetess, as close to a heroine of the story as there is.  She was seemingly a free spirit, but suffered through multiple abortions and was with child when she killed herself.  At the time she had been living with George and Carrie Sterling and it may very well have been that George was the  father of the child.  It seems that George loved Nora and no longer loved Carrie.  Even if you're not a prude, reading about much of this is sickening, especially as Nora's spirit, embodied in her writing, remains present through the rest of the story, which goes on for a while.

I understand that Cathy had to invent some narrative when describing the female characters of the story, as the archival evidence about them is sparse, and even with the male characters there must have been some narrative invention as well.  Given that, I'm going to speculate a little on something I would have liked to see considered but didn't. 

In the literature on learning there is much discussion about intrinsic motivation - primarily curiosity in the subject matter - versus extrinsic motivation - coming mainly from trying to get a good grade on the coursework.  The former is purer and promotes learning far better than the latter.  Too much focus on the latter can block learning entirely.  In a parallel way, the writers who are the subject of the Gilded Edge must have had both intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation in producing their works, with the former simply the need for self-expression while the latter was from getting their piece placed in a well-regarded outlet and making good money from the publication.  The thirst for these extrinsic rewards, however, might then serve as a blockage for future creative endeavors.  The debauchery might then be escapism from this sort of writer's block.  I have no way of knowing whether there is any truth to this suggestion, but I'd like to have seen the idea examined.

Another idea was put forward.  These people lived on the razor's edge income-wise and that was an enormous source of stress.  I know from my own career as a campus administrator that one is apt to over-indulge in a situation of ongoing stress, simply as a kind of relief from it all.  Now, where I am 17 weeks into not drinking in an attempt to rehabilitate my liver fibrosis, I very much regret the over-indulgence in alcohol from 20 years ago, the overeating too.  I can be more disciplined now, but I've removed so much of the stress from my day-to-day existence.  George repeatedly promised Carrie that he'd give up drinking, then not live up to his promise.  He was either too immature or too irresponsible to find a more direct way to deal with the situation.  As such, he is the villain of the story, even as he does eventually commit suicide himself.

Let me wrap up with this bit from a post I wrote 20 years ago called Jen Dah.  It comes right at the end of the post.

I’d like to close with a point I’ve made before. It’s hard to be a nerd during childhood; there is a lot of social stigma attached to it. For boys, however, it is easier than for girls. My experience when I was a kid and at least for my older son he seems to have replicated that, it is possible to find a cohort of like minded kids and so one doesn’t have to bleach out all the idiosyncrasies. For girls who are inclined to be intellectual in a geeky way, however, I believe they are less likely to find a cohort that is unobtrusively nerdy. I’m of the mind that these kids will feel impelled to suppress a good part of their personas just to achieve some form of social acceptance. I’ve really not seen this issue discussed as much as I think it deserves.

While I may have been vaguely aware of nerdy girls in junior high, it became far more evident in high school.  I graduated from high school in 1972.  The Gilded Edge considers a time not quite 70 years earlier.  If anything, things must have been much harder for a nerdy girl then.  Yet for most of her life Nora May French did not suppress her personality.  It was only near the end of her life that she behaved differently, at which time she was living with George and Carrie Sterling.  Maybe sticking with our own personality can be a disaster socially, while still being a source of self-protection.  Alas, I'm clutching at straws here.  I really don't know.  It is said that hindsight is 20-20.  In this case, however, I'm not sure it is.