The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote." —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Greetings from the far left coast where the new study project is John Aubrey (1626–1697) and his Brief Lives, a book that has occupied space in my bookcase for an indeterminate period that may well stretch into decades. I imagine I read a few of Aubrey's bio sketches when I first purchased the book before putting it aside with the intent of returning at some point. That point came last week.
The edition in my possession comes with a brief foreword by Edmund Wilson and a lengthy introductory essay on Aubrey's life and times by Oliver Lawson Dick with extensive quotation of Aubrey on a variety of subjects.
John Aubrey was an antiquary of some distinction and a charter member of the Royal Society ("for the promoting of Physico-Mathematicall-Experimental Learning") who "loved to compile gossip about famous men and to note their peculiarities, and in pursuit of this information he often went to considerable trouble" (Wilson). Among his subjects are Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Edmund Halley, Thomas Hobbes, Ben Jonson, John Milton, Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Spenser, to give you an idea.
Having decided to write a life, Aubrey selected a page in one of his notebooks and jotted down as quickly as possible everything that he could remember about the character concerned: his friends, his appearance, his actions, his books and his sayings. Any facts or dates that did not occur to him on the spur of the moment were left blank, and as Aubrey was so extremely sociable that he was usually suffering from a hangover when he came to put pen to paper, the number of these omissions was often very large. (Dick)
His "incurable sociability is made only too clear by the Diaries of the period, where Aubrey constantly appears, drinking in taverns, talking in coffee-houses or helping his friends in their work."
Entries in Brief Lives are sketches that run to only a few pages. Aubrey did not keep his records in order, "sometimes mixed anecdotes about different people, sometimes wrote the same story several times, and sometimes noted down under a subject's name only a few words or a mere list of dates and facts" (Wilson).
The bios are entertaining, amusing, and while not to be taken at face value for historical or biographical fact nonetheless shine light on a historical time and place where "learning was part of the joy of life, just as much as drinking or love-making, and it was just as often overdone" (Dick). Keen interest in science and experimentation were accompanied by widespread superstition, belief in the supernatural, and fanciful cures for what ails one, as with this remedy for toothache:
To Cure the Tooth-ach, Take a new Nail, and make the Gum bleed with it, and then drive it into an Oak. This did Cure William Neal, Sir William Neal's Son, a very stout Gentleman, when he was almost Mad with the Pain, and had a mind to have Pistoll'd himself.
Aubrey laments the accidental destruction of monastical manuscripts, which were used as covers for music, accounting, and other books and to wrap gloves. Worse was their destruction by the Puritans on purpose and principle in an era roiled by conflict, intolerance, repression, rebellion driven by argument over the form and role of government and religion. Zut alors, this has a familiar ring to it.
I read Aubrey not as an authoritative resource but rather a window onto interesting times and the often fascinating individuals who are his subjects.
Biden's student debt plan. Many Americans with moderate and low income face a crushing burden of student debt for a variety of reasons that include poor decisions, bad guidance, misleading claims by colleges, and because sometimes things just go sideways in life. We socialist, Marxist liberals believe that measured assistance is such circumstances is a proper function of government.
Some criticism of the plan strikes a chord. The program should be more carefully targeted to those most in need of relief, the ceiling is too high, and debt relief should be done in conjunction with a comprehensive plan to address the cost of higher education. A central component of the latter would be reining in low-quality, for-profit institutions with poor completion rates where a significant portion of student debt is racked up (Rampell, Want to fix the federal student loan system?).
The program will be administered by the Department of Education, which is already understaffed and underfunded, an invitation to boondoggles and undesired outcomes. Implementation by executive order is not exactly optimal. Yes, I understand that this is what we are reduced to by a Republican Party that with exception of the realm of defense and national security resists funding federal agencies and departments adequately, the aim being to undermine popular support for social programs by ensuring that they will not be able to operate efficiently. I remain wary of the process while acknowledging the reality in absence of a functioning federal government.
The fact sheet released by the White House points out that nearly all Pell Grant recipients come from families with incomes of $60,000 or less. Eighty-seven percent of debt cancellation benefits will go to borrowers earning less than $75,000. These are points that the message should hammer on rather than flogging once again Bernie Sanders' nag about massive tax breaks for billionaires, which even I have begun to tune out. I am all for taxing the heck out of the über-wealthy, who would still be left absurdly wealthy, but that is a separate issue not addressed by forgiveness of student debt.
Much here may merit discussion and debate, fine-tuning, etc., but is not on its face unreasonable:
For undergraduate loans, cut in half the amount that borrowers have to pay each month from 10 percent to 5 percent of discretionary income.
Forgive loan balances after ten years of payments, instead of 20 years, for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less. The Department of Education estimates that this reform will allow nearly all community college borrowers to be debt-free within ten years.
Cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest, so that unlike other existing income-driven repayment plans, no borrower’s loan balance will grow as long as they make their monthly payments—even when that monthly payment is $0 because their income is low.
Economist Jason Furman, former Obama economic adviser, interviewed by Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic:
People hate college debt more than they hate other types of debt. It’s not 100 percent obvious to me why. We’re not talking about forgiving car debt or mortgage debt. I do think shifting to a world with more grants, or an Australian-type system—where they collect the [student-loan payment] on your tax return, and if your income is too low, they just don’t collect it—would be better. You barely have to think about it. That would be a really good system, and it would be great to do something like that.
FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Student Loan Relief for Borrowers Who Need It Most, The White House, August
Annie Lowrey, A Democratic Economist’s Case Against Biden’s Student-Loan Plan,The Atlantic, August 26, 2022
Amna Nawaz, Brooks and Marcus on the Mar-a-Lago affidavit and Biden’s student debt plan, PBS NewsHour, August 27, 2022
Amna Nawaz, Sen. Elizabeth Warren weighs in on Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan, PBS NewsHour, August 25, 2022
Catherine Rampell, Want to fix the federal student loan system? Kick out scammy schools, Washington Post, August 30, 2022
Ah, Biden. "What we’re seeing now is either the beginning or the death knell of extreme MAGA philosophy…It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the—I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism" (Christopher Cadelago, Olivia Olander, Biden calls Trump's philosophy 'semi-fascism,' Politico, August 25, 2022). Republicans wasted no time rising up on their hind legs in righteous umbrage to demand apology from the president for daring to associate some of their voters with fascism. Never mind that Republicans routinely malign Democrats in toto as socialists, Marxists, and the like.
Never mind, too, that Biden distinguished between the endangered species of mainstream, conservative Republicans and the MAGA faction that rejects election results that have been adjudicated in court, embraces political violence, and holds the unshakable conviction that the twice-impeached former president is above the law. Unfortunately, raising the specter of fascism presents Republicans opportunity to change the subject of debate from what the MAGA crowd is actually doing to wrangling over the applicability of a loaded label from which there is no appeal. Maybe that matters.
No argument is going to change MAGA hearts and minds anytime soon, as in, before hell freezes over, and what with global warming, that is really not anytime soon. Better to keep the focus on the clear and present danger MAGA ideology poses for constitutional governance and rule of law, pitching it to an audience that is not ready to march to the beat of the drummer from Mar-a-Lago but is also not nearly as progressive as some progressives appear to think—but nonetheless part of a mainstream a ways removed from the MAGA cult.
Sixty-seven million more Americans live in counties won by Joe Biden than by Trump in 2020—and the Biden counties produce 71 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.
…
The whole country might not be nearly as progressive as Provincetown or Martha’s Vineyard, but those blue havens are closer to an increasingly liberal mainstream than the MAGA redoubts where pickup trucks sport “Let’s Go, Brandon!” bumper stickers. (Max Boot, Blue-state residents are 'real' Americans, too, Washington Post, August 31, 2022)
Family Separation Policy. The September issue of The Atlantic features an exceptional article by Caitlin Dickerson documenting the previous administration's Zero Tolerance initiative that separated thousands of families.
Family separation was policy, not an incidental effect of enforcing the law.
Recently disclosed internal emails from that time help explain…why the plan for reunifying families was faulty to the point of negligence. Inside DHS, officials were working to prevent reunifications from happening. Within days of the start of Zero Tolerance, Matt Albence, one of Tom Homan's deputies at ICE, expressed concern that if the parents' prosecutions happened too swiftly, their children would still be waiting to be picked up by HHS in Border Patrol stations, making reunification possible. When Albence received reports that reunifications had occurred in several Border Patrol sectors, he immediately sought to block the practice from continuing…"We can't have this," he wrote to colleagues, underscoring in a second note that reunification "obviously undermines the whole effort" behind reunification and would make DHS "look completely ridiculous."
More than a few career civil servants in agencies involved pushed back against the program. Some U.S. attorneys resisted prosecuting border crossers for misdemeanors. Their cases were reassigned. John Bash, Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in El Paso testified in federal court "that he was horrified to discover in June 2018 that in the few days it took his office to finish prosecuting parents, their children were already being shipped as far away as New York, with no system in place for reuniting them." Bash and other attorneys "were flabbergasted by the ineptitude of those who had created the policy. Bash remembered thinking, 'Why doesn't someone just have an Excel file?'"
Albence also suggested that Border Patrol deliver separated children to HHS "at an accelerated pace," instead of waiting for federal contractors to pick them up, to minimize the chance that they would be returned to their parents. "Confirm that the expectation is that we are NOT to reunite families and release" them, Albence wrote.
Dickerson's reporting is based on an eighteen-month investigation of the policy, with more than 150 interviews and review of thousands of pages of government documents, some obtained after a multiyear lawsuit. Weighing in at a little shy of 30,000 words, The secret history of the U.S. government’s family-separation policy is lengthy even by Atlantic standards. Scott Stossel, the magazine's national editor, broke it down into nine key points in a column on August 26 (Breaking Down an American Catastrophe).
Classroom censorship. A new PEN America report on educational gag orders analyzes state legislative efforts to restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, American history, and LGBTQ+ identities in K–12 and higher education as of August 2022 ((Jeremy C. Young, Jonathan Friedman, America's Censored Classrooms, PEN America, August 17, 2022). Among the findings:
Proposed educational gag orders have increased 250 percent compared to 2021. This year’s bills have been strikingly more punitive.
While most gag order bills have continued to target teaching about race, a growing number have targeted LGBTQ+ identities.
Bills introduced this year have targeted higher education more frequently than in 2021, part of a broader legislative attack on colleges and universities.
Republican legislators have overwhelmingly driven this year’s educational gag order bills.
Conservative groups and education officials are working to broaden the interpretation of existing gag order laws.
This is expected to continue in 2023.
The I get a kick out of this kind of thing department. NPR ran a piece about "skyrocketing" demand for low or no-alcohol wine. "In France, entire vineyards are dedicated to wine without alcohol, and winemakers have special tastings for their non-alcoholic offerings" (Rebecca Rosman, There's a new item on the menu at many French wine bars: non-alcoholic wine, NPR, August 23, 2022). Yes, even in France.
There are dissenters. "Le Baron Rouge [is] a wine bar in Paris' 11th arrondissement that's about as traditionalist as it can get. Opened in 1979, this tiny establishment is famous for serving wine from colossal wooden barrels." Sommelier Olivier Collin put it this way:
I don't understand why you want to drink wine without alcohol… But it's also true for the meat. You know, there is some vegan meat. It's crazy. And I don't understand why we need to eat something equal to the meat or to the wine or to the beer.
Collin pretty much sums up the editorial position here at Portable Bohemia.
An assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev: Cathy Young, Mikhail Gorbachev, 1931–2022, The Bulwark, August 31, 2022
New blog post: Investigating Trump and the Prospect for Civil Unrest. August 23, 2022. Justice Department officials are urged to tread cautiously in the investigation and possible prosecution of Donald Trump for a smorgasbord of offenses lest they agitate Trump partisans …read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: Yue Minjun Laughing Men Statues, Vancouver BC. Oct. 2009.
