Frederick who?

[Video accompanying the New York Times article “Trump’s Black History Talk: From Douglass to Media Bias and Crime.”]

Our president honors Black History Month: “They’re incredible people.” And: “You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago, when somebody said I took the statue out of my office.” And: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

Does Dunning K. Trump think Frederick Douglass is a living human being? Does he have any idea what Frederick Douglass is known for? And how would Trump have noticed that Douglass “is being recognized more and more”? What’s he even talking about? Like a student who hasn’t prepared for the test, our president is faking it — with no idea how obvious his fakery is. (That’s the Dunning K. part.)

Nothing about this presidency is normal. And nothing about this presidency is for getting used to.

*

February 2: Sean Spicer also appears not to know who Frederick Douglass was. Or if Spicer does know, he’s playing along with the boss. “Frederick Douglass” now has a Twitter account.

Resignation and courage (again)

Seeing visits today to a post from March 2016 makes me want to link to it again: useful words from Joseph Joubert about resignation and courage, words made for these times.

Related reading
All OCA Joseph Joubert posts (Pinboard)

Jon Stewart plays president

“Super-long tie, dead animal on head”: Jon Stewart visits The Late Show.

[As every tie-tier should know, “the tip of the tie should end in the middle of the belt buckle or waistband.”]

Credentialing

Jane Jacobs on credentialing, not educating, as “the primary business of North American universities”:

Teachers could not help despairing of classes whose members seemed less interested in learning than in doing the minimum work required to get by and get out. Enthusiastic students could not help despairing of institutions that seemed to think of them as raw material to process as efficiently as possible rather than as human beings with burning questions and confusions about the world and doubts about why they were sinking time and money into this prelude to their working lives.

Students who are passionate about learning, or could become so, do exist. Faculty members who love their subjects passionately and are eager to teach what they know and to plumb its depths further also exist. But institutions devoted to respecting and fulfilling these needs as their first purposes have become rare, under pressure of different necessities. . . . My impression is that university-educated parents and grandparents of students presently in university do not realize how much the experience has changed since their own student days, nor do the students themselves, since they have not experienced anything else. Only faculty who have lived through the loss realize what has been lost.

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004).

I realize what has been lost. I’d call it intellectual space: a less hurried atmosphere in which greater numbers of faculty and students availed themselves of ample opportunity for conversational exchange about ideas and questions — burning questions, idle questions, odd tangents.

You can read “Credentialing vs. Education,” Jane Jacobs’s chapter on education from Dark Age Ahead (or something very like it, perhaps with minor differences) at the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Two related posts
Michael Oakeshott on education : Review of Academically Adrift

“He will fail” (let’s hope)

Writing in The Atlantic, Eliot A. Cohen says that life under Trump will get worse, not better, “as power intoxicates Trump and those around him.” But, Cohen says, Trump will finally fail:

He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible — The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends. He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say “enough.” He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

I would disagree with Cohen (a vociferous advocate of war against Iraq and Iran) on nearly everything. But on this point I think he’s right. Let’s hope.

Wedding music?

The previous post prompts the question in this one. In the Gilmore Girls episode “I Can’t Get Started” (May 21, 2002), Sookie St. James walks down the aisle to a recording of Ella Fitzgerald singing “I Can’t Get Started” (music by Vernon Duke, words by Ira Gershwin). It’s a beautiful song (with a terrific bridge), but it’s a self-mocking lament, whose singer has triumphed in everything but romance: “The North Pole I have charted / But can’t get started with you.” It’s hardly a wedding song. Everyone in Stars Hollow says so. Except Sookie: “Oh, who listens to the lyrics?” Lorelai: “Anybody not hanging out with Annie Sullivan by the water pump.”

My question to you, reader: what wedding music have you heard (or heard of) that seems to you, well, less than appropriate to the occasion? I can name one song (heard of): Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” as an instrumental. Do its unheard words still matter? I’d say so.

Life imitates Gilmore Girls (and doesn’t)

Paris Geller is clearly considered to be the most qualified candidate for student-body president. The most competent too. Her minions Louise and Madeline have done the polling. But what else is there? Likability. And there, she falls short. And to a person, the students say that Paris’s lack of likability will influence their vote. And Paris doesn’t want to believe it. From the Gilmore Girls episode “I Can’t Get Started” (May 21, 2002):

“You mean people would rather vote for a moronic twink who they liked over someone who could actually do the job?”

The Internets figured out a Hillary Clinton–Paris Geller parallel a long time ago. I’m watching the Gilmore Girls for the first time and figured it out for myself. Spoiler: Paris is elected, with likable Rory Gilmore as her running mate. Too bad the United States isn’t the Chilton School.

Other Gilmore Girls posts
Escape to Stars Hollow : Shopping for supplies : “That bastard Donald Trump”

Orthodoxy

It’s Syme speaking. He’s a philologist, at work with many others on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary:


George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

See also Sean Spicer’s comment on dissenting State Department officials: “They should either get with the program or they can go.”

Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

“A Woman in the House” The actress Mary Webster, who appeared in one of the strangest (and best) episodes of Father Knows Best, has died.

Things to do

Contact your representative. Contact your senators. And for academics only: Sign this petition.