Wednesday, November 30, 2011

a novel to hang onto

I read C.E. Morgan's All the Living with two classes of eleventh graders this term, and my high regard for this book was reconfirmed by their discussions and essays. Not that everyone loved it; but only deep imaginative engagement could have produced the essays that explored it.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Tribute to Mudslide

Tribute to Mudslide (for Charles Pratt) Mr. Loomis was already in Sag Harbor with his wife, the writer Hilary Mills, and their 8-year-old chocolate Lab, Mudslide. The New York Times Without pretense or vanity the name says that all three are unspeakably wonderful; it pushes back against the malevolent chances and grim certainties of the world. Does Mudslide hurtle drunkenly down the bank like an otter? If present at a disaster would he help find victims under the fallen hillsides? As a chosen name it proclaims: here is anarchic energy restrained, disciplined, domesticated. Mr. Loomis, newly retired, is 84, Ms. Mills' age not given. In naming they do not overlook love's daily melding of effort and gift, forgiveness and delight. As though knowing that mud is hard to wash off or vaccuum, Mudslide too must honor the customs of the house much of the time. May he do so gladly, and may it be so with his people, and with us.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

letter to editor in Exeter, Portsmouth papers 8/11

The logic of being an Independent
Aug. 12 — To the Editor:
Last week, I went down to the town clerk's office and changed my party affiliation of nearly 50 years. I am now an independent. In New Hampshire, all voters are entitled to vote in any party's primary. Changing your affiliation is mostly symbolic, but it can also represent a new perspective.

In the 2008 primary, there was some speculation about exactly who was voting for Hillary Clinton, who for Barack Obama, and why. The downside of the open primary is that it provides an opportunity, even a motive, for voting in bad faith. If you were planning to vote Republican in November 2008, and thought that Clinton would be harder to beat in November, perhaps you voted for Obama in the primary, even if you had zero intention of supporting him in the general election.

I think there is another reason, one that trumps partisan strategy, for voting for a Republican. It is a reason that applies even if you share my opinion that that party has disqualified itself for leadership both nationally and in New Hampshire. As things stand, the primaries are all but owned by activists and ideologues, by each party's presumed base. At the moment, this is especially true in the Republican Party.

But if 10,000 New Hampshire Democrats voted for a relatively centrist Republican, and if moderate Republicans turned out for the primary, those votes would undermine the dominance of the hard-liners. Perhaps in 2016 the same logic would point toward a similar protest vote in the Democratic primary.

As for races at the state level, the puzzle is more intricate. While New Hampshire has its share of Washington's paralysis and denial, its decades-long servitude to a toxic pledge — The Pledge — against all broad-based taxes (except the property tax) has poisoned our political culture. We now have a widespread presumption that the entire public sector is inherently wasteful, not a means of collective action for the common good. The state's overreliance on property taxes causes its own resistance even to fundamental actions like the compliance of our communities with the Clean Water Act. Another result is that we have a system in which the poor pay taxes at an effective rate four times that of the rich; the middle pays at twice the rate of the rich; and the rich have what is almost a tax sanctuary; accumulated wealth is not taxed, even at death; capital gains are not taxed; high incomes are not taxed; lavish consumption is not taxed. Meanwhile, in the absence of realistic revenues, this generally prosperous state cannot maintain its courts or its colleges and universities, cannot provide even minimal assistance to many citizens who suffer from disabilities, cannot effectively support its schools and teachers and other public servants, cannot keep faith with our hospitals, and cannot protect even those environmental resources that are fundamental to our economy. What is a voter to do?

When the national economy fell apart in 2008, the state's already inadequate revenue stream dwindled, and New Hampshire Republicans sold the resulting expanded deficit to the voters as a result of out-of-control spending in Concord. The Democrats are now hoping to return to power because the voters have seen how the new Republican majorities, especially in the House, relish the cutting of essential investments like higher education. So the voters have one major party celebrating the supposed discipline and responsibility of abandoning wise investments that would require more revenue. And the other major party simply promises to manage the state's inadequate resources in a less ideological and more rational way. Neither major party faces the issue that we are dependent on the wrong taxes.

Because the state's financial crisis is now visible at a new level, and because we have open primaries, we should be able to nominate candidates who dissent from the orthodoxies of both major parties. A voter does have to choose one party ballot or the other, however. So as an independent, for the foreseeable future, I am going to be looking in a non-partisan spirit for state House and Senate candidates who refuse to sign The Pledge. If there are none, I will abstain from voting for state-level candidates. Or perhaps it's time for some write-ins, like Jane or John No.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

The City Dark

This thoughtful and playful film by Ian Cheney adds to the admiration I have for him (and Curt Ellis) based on King Corn. It treats the direct observation of a cloudless and not too polluted night sky as a core experience of the natural world. It contemplates the ways in which most people alive today are impeded in any attempt they may happen to make at obtaining such an experience. The film includes images of night skies from Maine to Brooklyn and beyond and also has funny and impassioned interviews with Neal Tyson and other students and lovers of the stars. It's lovely work.

unfair and misleading reviews of a great book

Kenji Yoshino's A Thousand Times More Fair: What Shakespeare's Plays Teach Us About Justice is, for anyone who cares about Shakespeare's plays, a great read, a source of insight, and a shared celebration. People who have not yet seen the book but have read Garry Wills' perverse and misleading review in the NYTBR (4/17/2011)or have seen only Andrea Campana's dismissive and misleading letter (5/8/2011) will have no idea of Yoshino's strengths or of his purposes. Here then is a simple challenge: read either the Introduction to Yoshino's book or, say, his chapter on King Lear. Then either ignore Wills and Campana (and read the rest of A Thousand Times More Fair) or test what you have read of Yoshino against their complaints. In my opinion Wills--and the Times--should be embarrassed. It's one thing to disparage a book if you describe it accurately in doing so. It's another to build your thesis on a misrepresentation.