Some twenty years ago America was asked whether the kind of foul language that Donald Trump has used and the revolting behavior that he is accused of are acceptable in a public official.  The answer was: Yes.  It’s OK.  Bill Clinton was forgiven for the same or worse.  Instead, the Congress that impeached him was punished.  A two-term president usually suffers serious losses in both houses of Congress in his second off-year election.  Reagan lost the Senate in 1986.  George W. Bush lost both houses in 2006.  In 2014, Barack Obama lost 13 seats in the House (already in Republican hands) and saw the Senate switch to Republican control.  Yet, in 1998, the Democrats gained four seats in the House and lost no net Senate seats in the wake of the impeachment of President (Bill) Clinton.

The nation was persuaded that the sexual misbehavior of which Bill Clinton was credibly accused was separate and distinct from his ability to perform the functions of his high office.  Even the charge of rape, sufficiently credible to persuade NBC to hold the story until after the impeachment trial had ended, has never produced more than a yawn from the public.  How is it that the people who gave Bill Clinton a pass reach for the smelling salts when the less appealing Mr. Trump turns up covered with the same pitch?

I don’t see the adolescent conversation as particularly disqualifying for Donald Trump.  I agree that the alleged sexual harrassment would be disqualifying if the accusations proved to be true.  For the same reason, I think Bill Clinton should have been removed from office for his goings on in the White House.  In the case of Mr. Trump, he was already unqualified to serve as president, so the alleged behavior would make him even more fully disqualified than many sensible people thought he was in the first place.  But let’s remember that there is a whole boat load of public officials with similar resumes, some of whom served without any complaints from their constituents.  Teddy Kennedy died in office.  Larry Craig chose not to run for re-election but served out his term.  The list of reprobates is much longer, needless to say.

In my humble opinion, someone who cannot govern himself or herself has no business governing others.  Why on earth would you for a moment allow policy on taxation, or trade, national defense, public health, or anything else of importance to be decided by someone who governs his conduct by soliciting sex in a public bathroom (to mention a Republican senator) or receiving oral sex in the work place (to mention a Democratic president)?

Rational people would not turn over political power to such individuals.  I would put each one of them out of office if I could.

But that’s just me.  The American public came to a different conclusion.  Bill Clinton left office with a very high approval rating.  He lost some ground when the public judged that he sold pardons at the end of his time in office.  He founded the various Clinton charities to rebuild his reputation and at this point his financial and sexual transgressions in office seem to have been forgotten even as later ones of both varieties have been overlooked.

And let’s remember that the inability to govern oneself can be displayed in ways other than sexual misconduct.  Financial corruption, lying, contempt for legal standards and requirements, these too are symptoms of an un-self-governed personality, one that is unfit to govern others.  Polling at time of writing suggests that a plurality at least of the American voting public is not moved by such considerations.

The Trump incidents point out the staggering incompetence of his primary opponents.  The taped conversations that NBC released after a decade in the vault were between Trump and a fellow named Billy Bush.  We understand that he is a cousin of Jeb, or rather Jeb!  The two of them could have worked together to bring the tapes to our attention back when Jeb was still a candidate.  But perhaps Billy could see ahead to the trouble he would be in if the taped conversations were made public.  Also, Jeb! might have felt that gentlemen of his age, class, and station in life do not engage in gutter politics.

But such a constraint was not binding on Marco Rubio or Chris Christie or Scott Walker, to name but three of the mighty 16 that Trump ultimately defeated.  I understand that Trump was a frequent guest on Howard Stern’s program in the 1990s and 2000s, where he engaged in the kind of adolescent summer camp monologues that we have become so familiar with in recent weeks.  The material to do him in was readily available.  You didn’t need a cousin at NBC to manage the job.

Was there no one among the 16 non-Trump Republican candidates prepared to do whatever it took to be rid of him?  We now know that it would have been easy to do, once this material was exposed.  When Henry II became exasperated at the insubordination of Thomas à Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, he said (or is supposed to have said) “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?”  He said it in the presence of four of his loyal followers and days later Becket was dead, stabbed in his own cathedral, his blood flowing over the cold stone floor.

Could Christie, who some say can close great bridges through a wink to a subordinate, not find a way?  Marco Rubio’s forebears defied a Communist dictator and found a new home in a free country.  Surely the hot blood that fueled their determination is not completely diluted in his veins.  Scott Walker stood up to an organized takeover of his state capitol by angry demonstrators.  And yet not one of those three or any of the other competitors could turn to a trusted aide and say, “I want him out of the race.  Find a way.  Don’t tell me how you did it.”

Now, if one of them had taken Mr. Trump out of the race, it would not have been clear sailing for the eventual winner of the nomination.  Remember that Mitt Romney, who appears to have led a blameless life, was accused of having been part of a group in high school that might very well have forcibly cut the hair of a student who might possibly have been gay.  And of course, this kind of anti-gay bias is something that stays with a person forever.  Romney was also held responsible for the death of a former employee’s wife some years after the employee separated from service at a company that Romney’s firm acquired.  And Harry Reid charged Mitt with failure to pay federal taxes for a decade.  Reid made his accusation on the floor of the Senate, where he is immune from charges of libel and slander.

Bridgegate would have made Christie an easy target as the nominee.  Scott Walker could have been portrayed as a crazed anti-union fanatic, in the pocket of the Koch brothers.  In his autobiography, Marco Rubio fuddled the dates of his family’s move from Cuba, so that would have made him a target.  Incidentally, that kind of inaccuracy cannot be compared to Secretary Clinton’s reports of gunfire in Sarajevo or Senator Clinton’s eyewitness account of events on September 11, 2001 that didn’t actually take place – those are “brain freezes” and a cause for a warm chuckle among friends.  Who knows what corrupt deals Marco may have done as Speaker of the Florida state house of representatives?  And as a protégé of Jeb Bush, Rubio could have been charged with any number of Jeb’s missteps when he was Florida’s governor.

So, if someone had taken out Donald Trump in the primaries, the eventual Republican nominee would have run into some rough treatment.  It wouldn’t have been clear sailing.  But at least the Republican party would have avoided the embarrassment of losing to the Clintons over a sex scandal.

Edited 10/22/16 to correct a typo.

Some recent news stories got me musing about the following purely fictional series of events:

When he was at college, it was pleasant at first for Steve Carey to be thought a rich kid by his peers.  It was true that his family was better off than most.  He was labeled rich his second year because he had a car.  It wasn’t new and it wasn’t luxurious, but it marked him as someone who came from money.

As the source of his family’s wealth became more widely known, first among the students and later among the professors, he realized that there were different types of wealth, each with its own badge and rank.  His father owned a water bottling business, not the biggest in the country, not a household name outside of its home region, but big enough.  The problem wasn’t the size of the firm but the business it was in.  That his dad sold anything at retail put Steve toward the bottom of the wealth status rankings.  Add the fact that the firm sold a natural resource, essential to life itself, and Steve felt lucky not to be an outcast by the time he graduated.

After graduation, he worked for his dad at the Mineral Spring Vista Water Company for a few years while he decided what to do with his life.  Or, rather, he waited for a decision to come to him.  He had allowed five years for that sudden illumination to appear, but the decision was forced on him six months short of the scheduled date when one Friday afternoon his father keeled over from a massive heart attack.  They found him slumped over his desk with drafts of the recently ended quarter’s financial statements spread in front of him.  The numbers looked pretty good, so that wasn’t what killed him.

Steve had to make a decision and quickly.  Should he step into his father’s shoes, or sell the business?  His mother said she wanted him to do what he thought best, but hoped he would continue.  The minority shareholders, aging relatives and a few friends of his dad’s, did not favor a sale but were in no position to make a demand one way or the other.  His mom and dad, now his mom alone, had the controlling interest in the company.

He didn’t want to let her down and he did not like to disappoint his relatives and his dad’s friends.  He thought about the 700 or so employees of the firm.  What would happen to them if his mom sold out to one of the big national soft drink bottlers?  He decided to stay and run the business.

That had been three years ago and he realized that what he had inherited had been not a business but a never ending stream of problems.  There was not a moment in the day or a day of the week or a week in the year when there wasn’t a brace of crises that required solution.  Get too many wrong and you were out of business.  The tension and the pressure were unlike anything he had ever experienced.

There had been a strike at one of the bottling plants.  That went on for almost six months before the two sides settled, hurting sales every day it continued.  A few weeks later sales fell because of a Listeria scare.  A competitor’s product had gotten contaminated but bottled water sales from every company took a hit.  The national firms could absorb that kind of jolt better than the smaller guys like Mineral Spring Vista.  In fact, the national firms lobbied for an expensive new testing protocol to prevent future outbreaks.  You can’t argue against safety, but Steve did wonder at times if the bigger firms might favor costly testing as part of their competitive strategy.  Had someone in some nameless office at one of the big guys left a memo to that effect lying around?  He would have loved to get his hands on it.

Then there was that woman from India – he had forgotten her name and was not about to aggravate himself by looking it up and reminding himself – who had gone around the country lecturing about the evils of bottled water.  He had invested with a couple of other regional bottlers in a joint venture in India that had the goal of bringing fresh water to Indian villages.  The project actually penciled out financially and he was proud that he could help improve the lives of people who were desperately poor.  He had read that many Indian children, mostly girls, are kept out of school because their families need them to walk miles to the nearest source of fresh water.  They carry empty containers to the water source and then carry the filled containers home.  The kids, he read, had to do this several times a day to keep their families supplied.  Steve and his co-investors figured they could solve this problem and make a few bucks in the process.

The Indian woman – he could still see her, throwing the edge of her sari across her shoulder, a superior smirk on her face as she lectured – criticized the water business in general but his effort in particular because it undermined traditional Indian culture.  Folkways that had endured for centuries were being destroyed by an unscrupulous pursuit of profit!  And audiences across America had applauded her.  She had become quite a pet of certain segments of the academy.  The backlash from consumers was so strong, he and his partners ended up dropping the project.  He thought about those folkways – illiterate girls being kept out of school so they could spend their days hauling water in unsanitary containers – and it made him angry that such waste of human potential was being tolerated, even applauded, when an alternative was available.

The strength of his feeling led him to write his thoughts out in a semi-organized fashion.  It was the only time in his life he had written an Op-Ed piece, this one for the local paper.  It produced a few comments on the paper’s website and for a couple of days there was a small tempest as the locals used the comments feature to trade uninformed opinions on the benefits and the evils of the water business.  Then he forgot about it and went back to his daily battles, fighting for shelf space in supermarkets, arguing about broker’s commissions, negotiating with plastic bottle vendors, and generally working himself to exhaustion.

It was the Op-Ed that brought him to the notice of Global Impact, the charitable foundation with such remarkable international outreach.  One of their recruitment officers, a Valerie Sutcliffe, thought Mineral Spring Vista Water Company might want to make a contribution to Global Impact to re-establish the company’s record of good works.  She called, made an appointment through Michele Small, Steve’s secretary, and was sitting in his office at 2:00 on a Thursday afternoon two weeks later.

She brought a glossy, highly produced book with her that demonstrated the range of Global Impact’s activities.  “You probably know us best for disaster relief.  When a natural disaster hits, an earthquake, hurricane, tsunami, if it’s big enough to make the evening news, we’ll be there.  Our members help us provide temporary shelter, food, medical treatment and supplies, and – something you would be particularly interested in – water.”

Steve immediately saw the benefit of becoming a preferred provider for an outfit like that.  They probably need to have a few hundred thousand bottles of water handy so they can respond to emergencies.  It would be a nice business to be able to supply some part of that.  If a contribution of a couple of thousand dollars would put him on their list, it could be a win for everyone.

He realized later that it might have been smart at this stage to say that he had no interest.  Instead, he asked if Valerie was looking for a contribution.  “We can always use the money, Steve, so I appreciate you asking.”

When he suggested that he thought his company’s budget could stand a contribution of $1,000 or so, Valerie gently pulled her presentation book back toward her and closed it.  “Steve, we deal in numbers bigger than that.  Frankly, for us to accept a contribution less than a million is an accommodation.  The paperwork, the administration, filing with the IRS, it’s all a headache.  If we’re not both thinking along those lines, I may be wasting my time.  But, let me leave you something to read” – she put the presentation book back in her case and took out an eight-page brochure that she left on the table – “and perhaps I can check up with you in a few months.”

——————–

The next Monday, Harriet Hangman was about to begin her week, as she always did, by sipping her first cup of coffee as she reviewed the list of new matters requiring investigation that Sharon Wills, her long-time administrative assistant, had prepared for her.  Harriet thought that being a United States Attorney was the best job she had ever had.  She had her pick of the most interesting cases and was privileged to work with some of the sharpest legal minds in the business.  She got to lock horns with defense counsel every once in a while, and that could be fun, too.

Harriet’s path to this great job had been unconventional.  She began as a criminal defense lawyer and switched to the prosecution side after a fifteen-year career marked by a string of high profile and highly lucrative white collar defenses.  Most criminal lawyers who make a switch go the other way.  She remembered someone saying that defending the guilty was a challenge but the real test for a defense lawyer was how he or she defended the innocent.  Harriet had found that defending the guilty was challenging enough, although she had been open to representing an innocent person if one ever walked through her door.

She became a prosecutor after reading Harvey Silverglate’s “Three Felonies a Day”.  The thesis of the book is that the law in the modern American regulatory state has become so complex that any citizen can be found to have committed at least three felonies every day, just in going about his or her daily business.  A prosecutor who decides to target a seemingly innocent individual can easily find that the citizen, now a defendant, had violated three statutes or regulations without even knowing it.

Harriet chuckled when she read that.  She was sure the true number was closer to eight and proceeded to prove it.  She soon found that the power she enjoyed as a prosecutor was even sweeter than the significant fees she had been raking in as a defense lawyer.  On the whole, she decided, the acquisition of power was preferable to the accumulation of wealth, especially for someone who had already done plenty of accumulating.

The only better job she could think of was Attorney General of the United States and she had very good reason to believe that she would be on the short list for that job if her party won the next presidential election, less than a year away.  One of her goals was to make that list shorter than it already was.

She opened the folder to start evaluating the new matters that had come in at the end of the previous week.  Her practice was to assign the routine matters to her staff but to retain for herself those of particular interest.  Sometimes these were cases of intriguing intellectual complexity but usually they were matters that promised to generate publicity for a tough and incorruptible U.S. Attorney.

Harriet’s instruction to Sharon was that the Monday list was not to exceed five items except for extraordinary circumstances.  At the beginning of their long relationship, Harriet had explained to Sharon in a private meeting, doors closed, no notes or memos, that the “extraordinary circumstances” label was reserved for items that had important political implications, especially those where someone in a position to help or hurt Harriet’s career had expressed an interest.

Therefore, when Harriet noticed that today’s list contained an item numbered 6, her eye went there first: “6.  Possible collusion over pricing and territorial division in the water bottling industry.”

———–

Three weeks later, two FBI agents were standing in front of Michele Small’s desk asking to see Steve.

“I’m sorry, gentlemen.  Do you have an appointment?”  She knew they didn’t.

One of them said, “No, Miss, we don’t have an appointment.  We can certainly make one if Mr. Carey prefers, but the appointment would be at our headquarters in Washington, D.C.  Up to him.”

Two minutes later they were in Steve’s office.  They declined coffee and water (specialty of the house), assured their host that they were most comfortable, showed him their credentials and handed him their business cards.

He read them: Peter Weston, agent in charge; and Michael Schmidt, special agent.  Steve thought, “Schmidt and Weston.  Someone at the FBI has a sense of humor.”  He was wrong about that.  The joke had never occurred to anyone at the FBI.  No attempt to explain it would have produced a smile.

“How can I help you gentlemen?”

Schmidt began.  “Mr. Carey, did you attend a meeting of the American Water Bottlers Association recently?”

“Yes.  I’m a member, naturally.  That is, the company is a member and I attended the annual convention in San Diego from April 5 through 9.”

“And did you meet with a Mr. Thomas Siemens while at the convention, Mr. Carey?”

“Yes. Tom Siemens is an old friend of my father’s.  He owns Siemens bottling.  They’re in a similar line of business to ours, so we have a certain amount in common even though he’s about twice my age.”

“Did you discuss pricing with Mr. Siemens at any time, Mr. Carey?”

“Pricing?  We talked about how tough it is to make a buck in this business.”

“And did you and Mr. Siemens meet together with a Mr. James Robbins?”

“No, I didn’t meet with those two together.”

“What date did you arrive in San Diego, Mr. Carey?”

Then he remembered.  He had been having a drink with Tom Siemens and was about to leave the bar when Jim Robbins arrived.  They were together for a few minutes.

“Wait, I just remembered something.  Tom and Jim, that is Mr. Siemens and Mr. Robbins and I were in the bar of the hotel together for a few minutes.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Carey.  Are you changing your answer?”

“Well, you asked me if I met with the two of them.  I was having a drink with Tom and was about to leave when Jim, Mr. Robbins, arrived and the three of us chatted for a few minutes, maybe five minutes.  Then I left.”

“And did you talk about selling water, where they sell, where you sell?”

“Well, in a general sort of way.  We’re all three in the water business, after all.  Look, what’s this about?  Do I need a lawyer?”

Now Weston took over.  “Of course, Mr. Carey, you always have a right to a lawyer.  If you think you need one, just tell us and we’ll stop asking these questions.  It’s something to think about because, well, you know that you don’t have to talk to us and anything you say to the FBI could be used against you in a court of law if for some reason we ended up in a court of law.  From the look of this place, I would guess that you already have lawyers on retainer, maybe not criminal defense lawyers, but lawyers.  But I want to make it clear that if you decide you need a lawyer and you don’t think you can afford one, we would be sure to get one for you.  You understand all of that, I hope, Mr. Carey.”

Steve swallowed hard.  He had seen it done differently on TV, but he was pretty sure that Weston had just read him his rights.

Weston turned to Schmidt.  “I think we’re done for now.  Mr. Carey, thanks for your time.  We’ll be in touch.”

After they left, Steve looked at his hands.  They were shaking slightly and his palms were wet with sweat.  And, he thought, I haven’t done anything illegal!  Imagine how I’d be feeling if I had actually broken the law!

———–

Two months went by.  Steve heard nothing from Schmidt and Weston.  He thought about hiring a lawyer just in case but decided that there was no reason to spend money on a service he wasn’t going to need unless the two agents came back and pursued whatever line of inquiry had brought them to his door in the first place.  Still, he thought about them every day and his worry drained away some of the energy and focus he needed to stay on top of his business.

Then Valerie returned.  She didn’t make an appointment this time; she just showed up.  How she knew he would be available, he never asked, but he agreed to see her when Michele buzzed to say Ms. Sutcliffe was at the front desk.

After the mandatory exchange of pleasantries, Valerie got to the point.  “Steve, have you changed your mind about making a substantial contribution to Global Impact?  Hurricane season is just around the corner.  We could use your help.  And you know, I think you’ll find that making a contribution can help with other problems.”

Steve knew that he was unsophisticated in the ways of politics, but he thought he knew a shakedown when he saw one.

“Valerie, are you talking about the visit that the FBI made here a couple of months ago?”

“You know, Steve, it’s funny you should say that.  Kristal Mason, our director of South American Outreach, made the point to me just yesterday that people sometimes jump to the conclusion that Global Impact has some deep connection to U.S. government agencies.  The two are completely separate.  Sometimes, it may look like there’s a connection because so many people in high positions at Global Impact used to work for the government.  Like Kristal.  Her last job was Assistant Attorney General for Consumer Protection.  And it goes the other way, too.  A lot of people in Justice, Commerce, State, the FTC, the NLRB, you name it, have experience working for Global Impact.  But the two are separate.  Completely separate.  We’re very careful to keep it that way.

“No, Steve, what I meant was that many people tell us that the act of giving is itself beneficial.  It changes your heart, makes you a better person.  The other thing, that other business, not what I’m talking about.  As I said, we’re very careful to keep the two things separate.”

Steve got the point.  The two were connected.  “So, you were talking about a contribution of a million dollars.”

“Well, actually, Steve, I should have said something about that sooner.  We’ve had a change of policy.  I mentioned that there were a lot of complications with administration, record keeping, and so on.  We really can’t consider any contribution of less than two and a half million.”

Steve started to run numbers in his head.  The company made a small profit each year, enough to pay a two and a half percent dividend to the shareholders and a bonus to him as CEO.  Given the number of hours he put in, the bonus came to about forty dollars an hour for the year.  That’s good money per hour if you’re waiting tables, but he expected it was less per hour than Valerie was going to get for her efforts this year.  He could cut the dividend to one and half percent and reduce his bonus by fifty percent and find the rest of the money somewhere else.  Painful, but he did not want another visit from Schmidt and Weston.  It definitely would not make his day.

She saw him hesitate.  “You know, Steve, you could pass the cost on to your customers.”

It had always amazed him that people who knew nothing about business had that reason at the ready when they planned to impose a new cost on a business.  A higher tax, mandatory wage, required employee benefit, the cost of all of it could, in the minds of those imposing the cost, be “passed on”.  Nobody seemed to understand that people like him spent half their time busting a gut trying to sell as much of their product as they could for the best price they could get anyone to pay.  They spent the other half of their time cutting costs anywhere they could.  If you took in more than you paid out, you had “passed on” your costs and could stay in business to try again next year.  If you didn’t, you eventually went out of business.  Those costs didn’t get “passed on”.  If he could raise his price to cover costs, he would have raised them before the cost came along.  No one who bought his product cared what it cost him to make it.

The whole concept was based on a lack of understanding.  The only time a business could pass its costs on to a buyer was when it had a “cost plus” government contract.

At that moment, a bright light went off in his head.  He felt that he could see through the walls of his office, out to the horizon.  In that instant, he saw how Global Impact worked it.  It was brilliant in its simplicity.  He realized he should be flattered that they asked him to join the club, using the time-honored technique of making him an offer he couldn’t refuse.  He signed up right then.  As he was signing, he thought of those uneducated Indian girls and hoped that some of the money he was about to “contribute” would find its way to them.  Valerie agreed that he could make his contribution in monthly installments.  She told him that she expected to be back next year, assuming that things worked out this year to their mutual satisfaction.

—————–

Six weeks later, a Category 4 hurricane made a direct hit on one of those Caribbean islands that seem to generate a magnetic pull on tropical storms.  There was widespread devastation, thousands were homeless, and basic services were out of commission, possibly for months.

Mineral Spring Vista Water Company received a massive order for bottled water from a U.N. agency that Steve had never heard of.  The contract indicated that the agency was acting in coordination with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the disaster relief command of the United States Navy, although their names did not appear as parties to the contract.  The contract also stated that it was being administered by Global Impact, who would address all inquiries and communications and would handle all billing and payments.  A separate email contained the software needed to print the Global Impact label on all bottles and all containers supplied through the contract.  The supplier’s name was not to appear and the supplier was prohibited from making any public announcement about its involvement in disaster relief.

The contract was the most lucrative one that the company had that year.  The agency, whoever they were, paid more than double the going rate for bottled water and included a shipping allowance that was well in excess of actual cost.  The additional amount was labeled an “expediting fee”.

Steve wanted to celebrate, but didn’t want to start answering questions to friends and relations about how he had managed to land this remarkably profitable contract.  He went to a bar and sat alone, sipping an expensive single malt while he watched disaster relief being reported at the scene by one of the network news programs.  Steve wondered how the reporter, one of the finest looking females he had seen in weeks, found space in all that wreckage to have someone do such a spectacular job with her hair and makeup.

A few minutes later, a fellow solo customer took the stool next to him.  They watched as an aid worker emerged from a tent bearing the label “Global Impact” to speak to the reporter while an ambulance with the same logo on its sides and its back doors rumbled in the background, its roof tilting rhythmically from side to side as the driver negotiated the ruts in the mud-filled roadway.  Steve’s new companion tilted his glass toward the TV screen and said, “They do a lot of good, those people.”

 

I wondered whether Donald Trump, to show solidarity with Melania, might begin his acceptance speech with the words “Four score and seven years ago . . ..”  No such luck, but I was interested to learn not long ago that the final words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address were cribbed.  He ended the Address: “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century.  The preface to his Bible states: “This Bible is for the government of the people, for the people and by the people.”  The statement dates from 1384, twenty-three score and nineteen years before Lincoln spoke.  I don’t read the Bible very often, and I rarely venture into works written in Middle English, so it figured I was going to miss this connection.  Daniel Hannan pointed it out in his superb “Inventing Freedom”.

In his first address to Parliament after becoming prime minister, Winston Churchill said “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”  Theodore Roosevelt had made a very similar statement in 1897.  Decades before Churchill, Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom Oscar Wilde had a love affair, said that poetry “is forged slowly and painfully, link by link, with blood and sweat and tears.”  Even earlier, the poets Donne and Byron each turned phrases incorporating tears, sweat, and blood, not necessarily in that order.

The moving final paragraphs of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech, where he rings the changes on “Let Freedom Ring” are remarkably similar to an address to the Republican National Convention in 1952 by a gentleman named Archibald Carey, Sr.

Another class of borrowings arises when the original author is still living and has given permission for the use of his or her words, but which the current speaker or writer claims as his or her own.  In 2008, candidate Obama replied to candidate Clinton’s accusation that his ideas were “just words” by pointing out that the Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and other famous statements were also “just words”.  Mr. Obama’s friend Deval Patrick had earlier made the same point in virtually the same words, but Senator Obama had not given Governor Patrick credit for them.  Governor Patrick confirmed that his friend had used the words with permission (although some critics thought the permission might have come after the fact) and then-Senator Obama agreed that he should have given Governor Patrick credit.

The relationship between President Kennedy and Ted Sorensen is more complicated.  Kennedy received the Pulitzer Prize for his book “Profiles in Courage,” which was published under his name.  There is good reason to think that most of the book was written by Sorensen.  Sorensen is said to have written Kennedy’s inaugural address, although Kennedy acted as if he were the author.  When a reporter, Hugh Sidey, visited Kennedy on January 17, 1961, Kennedy was writing on a legal pad and indicated that he was in the act of composing his inaugural address.  It later turned out that he was copying Sorensen’s text into his own hand.  After the President was murdered, the story goes that Mrs. Kennedy insisted that Sorensen destroy the draft of the speech he had prepared.

There is no shame in a president getting help on an inaugural address.  We know that Lincoln asked for William Seward’s editorial assistance on his First Inaugural.  Neither man made any attempt to hide the fact, and scholars have been able to review Seward’s edits to give us a good idea of what the speech owes to Lincoln and what to Seward.  The Kennedy case is different only because the parties insisted on keeping Sorensen’s role hidden.  Sorensen revealed his version of the story late in his life.

A more extreme example is also more speculative.  The writer Jack Cashill is convinced that Bill Ayers wrote “Dreams from My Father,” a book whose cover declares that its author is Barack Obama.  I haven’t read Cashill’s book (“Deconstructing Obama”) but I understand the author uses sophisticated methods of textual analysis to attribute the authorship of “Dreams” to Ayers.  Perhaps historians of a later generation will sort the story out, if indeed there is anything to be sorted.

And let’s not even examine the extensive plagiarism that Joe Biden committed in 1988, when he made a few superficial changes to a speech given by Neil Kinnock, the leader at the time of Britain’s Labor Party, and presented it as his own.

So, Melania Trump or her speech writer might have figured that cribbing a few phrases from Michelle Obama was no big deal, given the extensive history of heavy borrowing by all the worthies who went before her.  But context is everything and what may be forgiven in an Obama, overlooked in a Martin Luther King, or ignored in a Kennedy, is not going to go unnoticed when a Slovenian supermodel tries it.  A better way would have been: “As was said most recently by our First Lady, a woman whose house I hope to occupy with the same grace and dignity she demonstrates, and whose vegetable garden I hope to tend with my son Barron when the next growing season comes to Washington, Donald and I were ‘raised with so many of the same values: that you work hard for what you want in life . . . . .’”

July 17, 2016 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.  DiMaggio came to the plate four times in the 57^th game, played in Cleveland.  He sent two shots down the third base line that could easily have been hits.  Twice, the Cleveland third baseman made dramatic back-handed stabs at the ball, followed each time by a heroic throw to first to record two outs instead of two doubles.

The streak began on May 15, 1941.  During the course of the 56 games, DiMaggio hit .408, with 15 home runs and 55 runs batted in.

The record for consecutive games with a base hit that DiMaggio broke was set in 1897 by William Keeler, known to baseball history by the micro-aggressive nickname “Wee” – he stood five foot four.  Wee Willie Keeler hit safely in the first 44 games of the 1897 season.  He had hit safely in the last game of the 1896 season.  Because organized baseball allows consecutive game records to carry over from one season to the next, Keeler can be said to have held two records:  44 consecutive games with a hit in one season and 45 consecutive games over two.

Whichever record you care to assign to Wee Willie, it had stood for 44 years when the 1941 season started.  A measure of the magnitude of DiMaggio’s achievement is the fact that in the intervening three-quarters of a century, no one has come close to his 56 game mark.  Wee Willie broke a record that had been set in 1894.  Two players threatened his record in the early decades of the twentieth century.  Ty Cobb had a streak of 40 games in 1911.  George Sisler hit safely in 41 consecutive games in 1922.  When Wee Willie died in 1923, he may have felt that his record was going to be safe for a good long while.  And 44 years is an impressive lifespan for a baseball record.

Pete Rose is the only player to come within sight of the record.  He got to 44 in 1978.  Paul Molitor got to 39 in 1987.  Once a player gets into the 30s, every further game increases the notoriety and the pressure.  But Rose was two weeks away from reaching the record when even he, the all-time leader in career Major League hits (sorry, Ichiro), failed to get a hit in the 45^th game.

DiMaggio got a hit in what would have been the 58^th game had the streak continued.  That proved to be the first in a new 16 game streak.  So, the Yankee Clipper hit safely in 72 out of 73 games.

Baseball records and statistics are often front-loaded with qualifiers.  A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a few innings of Mariner baseball on the radio when Robinson Canó hit a home run.  The announcer told us that this was his 761^st career extra-base hit, which tied him for seventh place among Major League second basemen.  Prior to a World Series game a few years ago, I learned that one of the pitchers holds a record for World Series games in which a starting pitcher has gone at least eight innings and struck out ten or more batters without giving up a walk.  Sorry, I don’t remember who it was.

That’s part of the charm of DiMaggio’s record.  There are no qualifiers.  There is no wind-up.  He hit safely in 56 consecutive games, full stop.  No one else has come close.  It’s a record that will likely still be standing 75 years from today.

“We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party. . .. Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.”  (attributed to M. Stanton Evans, Samuel T. Francis and others)

The year 2016 is one in which both parties have run their pennants, one marked with a big S and the other with a huge E, to the top of their respective flagpoles.  When the wind is strong enough, you can hear the two flags snapping in the breeze.

Let’s take the Stupid Party first.

When I was a lad growing up in northern New Jersey, I joined the Boy Scouts.  Our troop ran the way a lot of things did in New Jersey.  The kids whose fathers were in charge of the troop got their merit badges through “pull”.  Their dads would fill out the necessary paperwork and the badges were issued in due course.  The rest of us had to actually undertake the tasks required to get the badge.

One of the badges had to do with community service.  A local charity was looking to the Boy Scouts to help drum up publicity for a fundraiser.  Our job was to get local businesses to put signs in their store-front windows advertising the event.  We were divided into pairs and sent off to improve our community through our good works.

My partner and I walked into a small dry-cleaning shop and politely asked if we could put a sign in the front window.  We didn’t know that we were the tenth pair of Scouts to make the identical request that day.  The dry cleaning guy groaned.  What he might have said, had he been in a better mood, was something like “Boys, thanks so much for trying to help your community.  Unfortunately, you are the tenth pair of scouts to make the same request today.  I am already committed, but maybe you could try one of the many other stores on the street, see if they can help you.”

What he actually said was, “Whaddaya bothering me for?  There’s enough people for everybody!”

When we got out of the store, I started laughing and I didn’t stop until I got home.  When I quoted the guy to my parents, they started laughing.  For years, if I wanted to get a laugh in our house I could say “There’s enough people for everybody”.  It never failed (with an admittedly easy audience).

What’s even funnier, as I look back on it, is that I knew exactly what he meant.  If you have lived for any time in the New York metropolitan area, you’ll know the kind of person I’m talking about.  There is a certain communication style common in that area, where the speaker leaps from point to point, leaving it to others to figure out the logic, or lack of it, that underlies his or her (but usually his) commentary.  There is a certain skill required to decode the words used by these excitable people and their logic is often called into question by others with the same communication style.  The resulting dialogues make heavy use of sarcasm, generalization, and reductio ad absurdum.

I think Donald Trump is a person of this type.  He has something complicated he wants to say, he has a very short time to engage his audience, and the details might not hold their attention.  They certainly don’t hold his.  When complaining about the judge overseeing his Trump University case, he could have talked about the specifics of the rulings the judge has made and suggested that the judge is biased against him.  The judge has been a member of an organization that provides legal aid to illegal immigrants.  Trump has said he is in favor of more rigorous enforcement of the laws prohibiting illegal immigration.  He could have emphasized the disagreement and suggested that the judge is giving vent to an ingrained bias.

He might have been wrong about those accusations, but he would have been arguing from known and agreed facts.  Instead, he said the judge was “Mexican” and “hates Donald Trump.”  Had he spelled his points out and skipped the ethnic identification of the judge, he might have avoided some of the charges of racism that have been aimed at him.  Some, not all.  There is a segment of the commentariat that is going to accuse him of racism in any case.

Some, not all, of his other outlandish statements yield to this treatment.  Take his proposed ban on entry by Moslems into the U.S.  He might have made his point (if it in fact was his point) this way: “Sharia law is incompatible with republican self-government.  Our government is based on the principle stated in the Declaration that the people have the right to manage their own government ‘organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness’.  A system of law that looks to divine revelation, one that treats as apostasy all human efforts to adopt laws inconsistent with or beyond the scope of that revelation, is not appropriate to a free people.  We have no objection if other nations wish to organize their laws under the principles of Sharia.  Saudi Arabia offers a fine example of what such a system would look like and we recommend it to those who believe that Sharia offers the best path toward a stable, prosperous, and happy society.  Iran is another.  If you find those models appealing, please feel free to relocate to a country that provides you with the opportunity to live under a government and a system of law of which you approve.  However, we do not wish to inject into our political discourse an element that is aimed at replacing our system of republican self-government with rules that are derived from an authority that we do not recognize.

“We know that many Moslems do not believe in, or do not favor, the application of Sharia law.  With them, we have no argument and we are happy to see them practice their religion under the same system of ordered liberty under which we practice ours, or for that matter decline to practice any religion.  We need to find some way, consistent with our tradition of religious liberty, to deny entry to those whose political, not religious, convictions commit them to work toward the imposition of Sharia law.  We reject them whether they are jihadi terrorists who seek to achieve their goals through violence or Islamists who will try to achieve their objective through stealth or other non-violent methods.  We will not be unfair to anyone on the basis of religious belief but we reserve the sovereign right to exclude anyone whose political views are at odds with the fundamental principles of self-government on which our society is built.”

That takes too long to think, let alone say.  A lot of the audience is going to get lost or bored.  (Not anyone reading this, needless to say, but we all know people.)  It’s easier to just shout out that we need to ban all Moslems “until our government figures out what in the hell is going on.”  Could be a long wait.

Similarly, Mr. Trump’s attitude toward a physical barrier between the United States and Mexico is not wildly irrational.  There is reason to think that the population that enters the country illegally is somewhat more prone to commit crimes than the typical legal resident.[1]  The research is complicated and the conclusions are tentative.  It’s easier to say that “Mexico is sending their criminals across the border.”  Saying that also ignores the fact that about half of the individuals who are in the U.S. illegally entered the country on a visa.  Building a wall might solve the one-half of the problem that walks across the southern border, but it still leaves the country vulnerable.

Again, it takes too long to say that.  The speaker and the audience don’t have the time, the patience, or the interest.

And a number of Mr. Trump’s shenanigans do not yield to the generous treatment that I have suggested for some of his positions.  It is unforgivable to mock a disabled person.  Decent people do not attack others because of their appearance.  It is not acceptable to attribute an aggressive debate question to the moderator’s bodily functions.

Add to that the candidate’s brazen ignorance of the benefits of trade between nations, his stated preference for extending the reach of libel laws notwithstanding the First Amendment (on which question he may, if elected, be able to find common ground in the United States Senate, where every Democratic Senator has voted to limit the scope of the amendment), his limited understanding of the issues of life vs. choice, and you have someone who has demonstrated that he does not have sufficient intellectual depth or emotional stability to qualify him for the high and distinguished office he seeks.

And yet, we have to consider his likely opponent in November.  Let’s take a look at the standard bearer of the evil party.

Say this for Donald Trump.  Despite his public presentation as a crude, loutish, inarticulate, and superficial candidate, there is a small but growing brace of intelligent, articulate, public intellectuals who vouch for him[2].  The private Trump, they tell us, is far more impressive than the public one.

On the other hand, if you suggest that Hillary Clinton is a dishonest person, totally lacking in personal integrity, I don’t think you will hear a firm contradiction from her supporters.  It would be a bold commentator who would offer a direct defense of her honesty.   Instead, the response from her public defenders is of the “There’s no smoking gun” variety.  They’ll say this even when there is a smoking gun, like the private server in the bathroom closet in Colorado.  In fact, there is an arc to the various defensive postures that her supporters will take over the course of any given scandal.  We start with “Let’s let the investigation play out and see where it leads before we rush to judgment.”  We continue with “The investigation is nothing but a fishing expedition, a partisan attempt to smear a political opponent.”  We may make a quick stop at “This is straight out of the Republican play book, part of the vast right-wing conspiracy that has been out to get her for the last 25 years.”  We conclude with “This is old news.  There is no smoking gun.  It’s time to move on.”  Until the next one.

The point is, you will not hear her defenders say that this honest woman, a model of integrity, the very mold of honor, is being besmirched, the way you will occasionally hear Donald Trump’s supporters say that, in private, he is personable, intelligent, and articulate.

Perhaps the difference is that it is possible to be intelligent in private but a lout in public.  We can always hope that the private person will emerge to replace the public one.  If a person’s public conduct is lacking in integrity, his or her good behavior in private doesn’t carry much weight.  That is one of the connotations of “integrity”.

Rather than wander through her more than 40 years of public conduct, let’s focus on only one incident.  On the night of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, after the attack on the Benghazi consulate, Mrs. Clinton sent an email to her daughter describing the incident as an “Al Qaeda style attack”.  The next night, September 12, she sent an email to the Egyptian Prime Minister, telling him that the incident was a planned attack and not a reaction to a video.

At some point in the next few days, the Obama administration decided that the offensive video was the explanation for the Benghazi attack.  Susan Rice went on five Sunday news programs on September 16 to repeat the administration position about the video.

In between the attack on the 11^th and the Sunday shows on the 16^th, the nation held a solemn memorial service when the remains of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and the three individuals who died trying to protect him and the others in the compound were returned to Joint Base Andrews on September 14.  At the service, Hillary spoke to each of the four families.  Members of three families (excluding that of the ambassador) report that Hillary told them “We will make sure the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”

She said this or something like it three times, once to each family.  Four different individuals have recalled these conversations.[3]  One of these individuals, a retired lawyer and administrative law judge, made a note of the Secretary’s comments in the memo book that (he tells us) he carries with him at all times.  The note is dated September 15.

She now denies making these comments.  The family members stand by their statements.

Dear reader and friend, could you do what Hillary is accused of doing?  Could you look a grieving family in the eye and lie to them about the cause of their loved one’s death?

You could not.  It would not occur to you to do it.

Would you join an organization whose leadership behaved that way?  Would you want a person who had done something like that – someone who has done things like this repeatedly over the course of her public life — running your neighborhood community club, your PTA, or your kids’ soccer league?

We are none of us saints.  Any leader of any organization will be imperfect and will have said things or done things that he or she would wish to unsay or undo.  But even after we acknowledge that none of us is fit to cast stones, is it unreasonable to expect a modicum of integrity or decency in a political leader?

The Stupid Party and the Evil Party have really outdone themselves this time.

It is barely conceivable that one or both of these specimens will fail to win their party’s nomination.  On the Republican side, several commentators from the #NeverTrump school have made the point that delegates are not legally bound to vote for a particular candidate.  More precisely, the position is that state laws purporting to bind delegates to a national convention are unconstitutional.  One hears reports that some delegates are persuaded and are actively attempting to derail the Trump nomination.  My record as a predictor of political events is spotty – worse than that if you have to know the truth – so I hesitate to offer a prediction.  I don’t expect the Stupid Party delegates to the Republican convention later this month to revolt in sufficient numbers to change the outcome.

On the Democratic side, the reaction to the meeting between former president Clinton and Attorney General Lynch may have decreased the attorney general’s room for maneuver should the FBI recommend criminal charges against the former Secretary of State.  Some reports state that she has agreed to “rubber stamp” the recommendation of the FBI and DOJ professional staff.  Others state that that she “fully expects” to accept the recommendation of the investigative team after it has been reviewed by senior staff.  The indications are that the recommendation, whatever it turns out to be, will not arrive prior to the Democratic convention.  So, the overwhelming likelihood is that Mrs. Clinton will be her party’s nominee at the convention, even if later events are in doubt.

I accept that there is a chance, perhaps 5%, that one of these two will not be the next president.  If that longshot does not come in, then on January 20, 2017, one of the finest exemplars that the Stupid Party or the Evil Party could conjure will take the oath of office.

If that is to be the outcome, let us resign ourselves to it with as much grace as we can muster.  There will be another election in 2020.  Whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a socialist, conservative, or libertarian, pro-choice or pro-life, there is no reason to hand the Stupid Party to someone this stupid or the Evil Party to someone who presents this level of evil.  Let’s all resolve to provide a better person to bear our standard, whatever it may be, at our next opportunity.  The four years will go by before you know it.

[1] The question is not free from doubt.  See “Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue” at http://cis.org/ImmigrantCrime.  The authors are serious scholars and are not axe-grinders, which is not true of many researchers in this area.  Their tables 5, 6, and 7 provide a reasonable basis to believe that illegal immigrants are over-represented in prison populations and among those who have committed felonies.  It should also be emphasized that there is reason to believe that legal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the native population.

[2] I am thinking of Monica Crowley, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, and Conrad Black.  Larry Kudlow joined this group late and Steven Moore appears to be signing up.

[3] Some family members report no recollection that she made such a statement.

Headline, seattletimes.com, 5/31/2016 http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-may-slap-new-rules-on-airbnb-to-ease-rental-crunch/

Consider this sequence of hypothetical events.

1. Jim Dancer is a terrific home cook. He is married to Jane Dancer, who has made a hobby of exploring wine and matching the perfect wine to Jim’s culinary creations.  Every two weeks or so, they invite their friends Bill and Joe Beamer to join them.  Bill and Joe start to feel a little guilty about enjoying such great food without contributing anything.  After a few meals with Jim and Jane, they offer to bring the wine.
2. They try this arrangement for a couple of weeks, but it soon becomes evident that Bill and Joe do not have quite the taste in wine that Jim’s cooking requires. After an awkward conversation, the couples decide that it would be better if Bill and Joe contributed some cash and let Jane buy the wine.
3. Several months later, another couple in the neighborhood, Peter and Moira, hears about Jim’s cooking and Jane’s wines and asks to be included. Jim, Jane, Bill, and Joe decide that Pete and Moira can join them for dinner by contributing something toward the food and wine.
4. A month after that, Pete and Moira have some friends visiting from out of town and ask to include them in an upcoming dinner gathering. They provide some cash and the group grows to eight.
5. When the friends go back home to Salt Lake City, they tell their friends about the fabulous food and wine they had at Jim and Jane’s house. Those friends start sending emails to Jim and Jane asking if they can reserve seats at Jim and Jane’s table for an upcoming meal.
6. Jim gets tired of answering emails when he could be preparing menus, sourcing his ingredients, and prepping his meals. He sets up a webpage where guests can sign up for upcoming meals.  Reservations are on a first-come, first-served basis.  Demand spreads beyond Salt Lake City, if you can imagine it.  In fact, after a while there are so many requests that Jim and Jane are welcoming paying guests four or five days a week.
7. This has been going on for six months when Jim and Jane realize that the monetary contributions they are receiving cover the cost of food and wine but don’t really compensate them for their time and effort. They decide to increase their prices and before long they are making a profit on their operation.  They even hire some local neighborhood teenagers to help them with service and cleanup.
8. Word has gotten out about Jim and Jane’s hospitality arrangement. Scores of talented home cooks and wine lovers across the city start inviting paying guests in for a meal.

I have some questions, purely speculative.  At which point in this sequence do the following things happen?

The Seattle Association of Restaurants (name invented) contacts a favorite City Council member to demand that “Jim and Jane” operations be regulated as a restaurant.  Note, they don’t demand that they be released from the burden of regulation, only that others be subjected to it.

Local 729 of the International Amalgamated Brotherhood of Restaurant Workers (name invented) contacts a favorite City Council member (with several to choose from) to demand that “Jim and Jane” operations are stealing jobs from union members and have to be shut down or required to replace their scab teenage workers with certified union workers and to hire certified cooks and wine stewards.

A Seattle City Council member proposes an ordinance to require sensible regulation of “Jim and Jane” style operations.  Requirements would include liability insurance, a liquor license, spot visits by Health Department inspectors, food safety training for all personnel who work in the business, a business license, a posting in a prominent place of the business license and a schedule of all applicable charges that diners will incur, along with the phone number and email address of the health department and the consumer affairs department to facilitate the lodging of complaints.

The mayor announces publicly that the time has come to end the practice of unlicensed and unsafe food service facilities that exploit out of town visitors and steal jobs from honest hardworking Seattle residents who play by the rules.

I became a grandfather for the first time in the early hours of May 20.  I have transitioned to grandparenthood.  The little girl is the first grandchild on both sides of her family.  I was in that position myself many moons ago.  I think it was easier for my grandparents.  They did not transition in any way that I ever noticed.  They were grandparents for as long as I knew them and they stayed that way.

The old people that I knew when I was young don’t seem so old anymore.  The oldest of my grandparents, my father’s father, was born in 1885.  With a little luck, my granddaughter will be complaining about her lumbago as her grandchildren ring in the start of the twenty-second century.

Seeing a new generation begin is a reminder that we are all bridges from the past to the future.  Most of the traffic that passes over those bridges carries selective nostalgia in the form of detailed accounts of walking to school through the snow and a general head-shaking attitude toward the deterioration of modern life.  It is too easy to remember a past that is better than today, better than the past as it was.

Like most of their generation, people like my grandparents devoted their energy to solving the problems they faced and had little time for introspection, or any interest in it.  They were intelligent and engaged but their focus was outward not directed at themselves.  We are more likely than they were to see racism, injustice, and prejudice, although they experienced it more directly and more frequently than we do.  We worry about micro-aggressions.  Hitler and Stalin dismembering Poland, that was aggression, nothing micro about it.  The threat we face from Islamic fundamentalism has ideological pretensions on a par with national socialism and its international cousin, but nothing like their firepower.  If they weren’t blowing something up every six months, we’d forget they were there.

I was born in the year that Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color barrier in major league baseball.  My granddaughter is born in the eighth year of the presidency of a man whose father was born and lived most of his life in Kenya.  I remember people speculating in the 1950s and 1960s about the possibility of an African American president sometime in the future.  The consensus was always somewhere between “never” and “not in my lifetime”.  But it happened.  A nation that had permitted racial segregation within living memory elected an African American as its political leader.  The argument over the merits of the individual who filled that role is beside the point.

The past is not all it’s cracked up to be.  The overwhelming likelihood is that little Quinn and her cohort will lead lives of even greater personal fulfillment, ease, and enjoyment than have their ancestors.  All of us have been lucky to live in a prosperous commercial republic founded – and at times conducted — on the principle that the prime purpose of government is to protect the rights of its citizens.  The “prosperous commercial” part will mean that the already impressive advances in medicine, genetics, materials, information technology, systems management, and other practical arts will increase both in rate and in quantity for the generation now being born and for their descendants.  They will enjoy a better material existence and will have the opportunity for a richer intellectual and emotional existence than their ancestors, although we have had it pretty good, compared to our own predecessors.  It would take active stupidity to get in the way of that process, although there is an abundant supply on offer, its owners lining up for the chance to make policy for the rest of us.

I worry about the “protect the rights of its citizens” part.  We have gotten a taste in recent years of what it’s like when the organs of state power are put to work to advance ideological interests.  The political power of courts, prosecutors, presidents, and administrative agencies is growing in tandem with the increased reluctance by legislators and news organizations to act as a brake on the unwarranted exercise of executive, administrative, and judicial power.

It is not foreordained that this process will continue.  It can be reversed.  But if it does continue, one generation is plenty of time to produce a nation populated by regimented minds living in a mental desert while surrounded by material prosperity.  To quote William S. Burroughs, “A functioning police state needs no police.”  The distance from Marilyn Mosby or Eric Schneiderman to Andrey Vyshinsky is not so great.  You start where we are today and push a little more every year.  There is no flashing red light to warn of danger ahead.  You arrive at your desert destination without noticing the subtle changes in the landscape along the way.

Advances in technology and progress in material well-being do not guarantee that the people enjoying their fruits will lead meaningful lives.  After all, the first satellite was put into orbit by the Soviets.  A slave society produced a major technological breakthrough (with a lot of help from captured German scientists).  Personal freedom is essential to our full development as humans, but it’s an impediment to the full development of governmental power.  Governments will try to increase their power the same way the Yankees will try to win another pennant.

It isn’t only governments that threaten liberty.  Real danger springs from the way so many minds are being closed, willingly, to challenging opinions and unwelcome information.  The modern trend to suppress dissenting opinions courts greater danger than would their unfettered expression.  If, for example, the “warmists” are correct, they can afford to allow the “deniers” the right to express dissent.  The correct view will be supported by sufficient evidence and logic to win the policy debate.  Of course, it may be that the reason to suppress dissent is to ensure victory in the policy debate, no matter how the evidence plays out.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Galileo ran into an opposition that was highly attuned to its own catalog of micro-agressions.

Little Quinn is born at a time of unlimited possibilities.  She and her cohort will have great scope to apply their talents and their gifts to the development of their potential and the improvement of the lives of others.  That’s a process that has been going on for a long time, but it increases with each generation as technological progress opens up vistas and uncovers niches that we could not see until they were presented to us.  Undoubtedly, earlier centuries produced their share of genius computer programmers and geneticists.  They arrived too early.  The fields in which they might have exercised those talents were invisible, enclosed behind a high wall.  The babies now being born will have fewer of those walls in their way than anyone in human history, other than the ones who come after them.  My hope is that Quinn and her cohort will achieve the great things ahead of them as free people.  That will be up to them, but it is also up to us who are preparing the way.

In the meantime, the important thing is to take the best possible care of this new child without overindulging her.  I can tell already that this will be a challenge for my wife, who has taken to being a grandmother with the energy and enthusiasm that she brings to everything she does.  I feel I should warn her to resist the urge to spoil the child.  The infant is so good-natured and so strikingly beautiful, I may find the urge hard to resist myself.

April 23, 2016 marks the 400^th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.  Professional critics will devote tons of ink and lightning bolts worth of electrons to the anniversary.  I hope a few words from an amateur will do no harm.

The date may also mark his 452^nd birthday.  No record confirms the date of birth because there was no birth registry in Stratford at that time.  April 23 has been the date favored by English traditionalists as his birthday because it is the name day of St. George, the patron saint of England.  We do know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564.  His death notice states that he was in his fifty-third year when he died on April 23^rd   He had to have been born on or before April 23, but not too much before in light of the baptism on the 26^th.  Samuel Schoenbaum tells us that the rule in the 1560s was to baptize an infant no later than the Sunday or other holy day following birth.  A child born on Sunday, April 23, 1564 would have been baptized on April 25, St. Mark’s Day.

The exact date of his birth will remain unknown.  April 23 lends symmetry to a notable life that it should have begun and ended on the same day on the calendar.  However, Professor Schoenbaum reminds us that “other considerations usually determine these events”.

How William Shakespeare ended up working on the London stage is the bigger puzzle.

John Shakespeare, William’s father, was a prominent citizen of Stratford during his son’s early childhood.  He was an alderman and served a one-year term as mayor[1].  He was a prosperous glover and dealer in hides and wool.  Stratford had a grammar school.  No attendance records survive; possibly they were not kept in the first place.  We can’t know whether William was a student, but it is likely that the son of a prominent citizen would have attended the local school.  Historians have dug up the standard curriculum of English grammar schools of that time, so we know what he would likely have learned had he in fact attended.  The standard course of study included Latin and English grammar.  Older students would read classical Roman plays in Latin.

We know that William married when he was 18.  There is a marriage license dated November 27, 1582.  The bride, Anne Hathaway, was seven or eight years older than the groom.  Scholars have had to deduce her age; there were no baptismal records kept in Stratford at the time of her birth.  Their first child, Susanna, was born in May 1583 (ahem) six months after the wedding.  In February 1585, less than two years later, the couple had twins (a boy and a girl).

So, here we have William Shakespeare, two months shy of his twenty-first birthday with a wife and three children to see to.  He is a resident of a small town some 100 miles northwest of London.  At some point in the 1580s he left Stratford, traveled to London, and started working in the theater.  By 1592 he was well enough established in London to have been attacked in a pamphlet by the writer and playwright Robert Greene as an “upstart crow”.  Greene was near death as he wrote.  According to the pamphlet’s title page, Greene’s dying request was that it be published.  So, by 1592 Shakespeare had earned a reputation, a bad one as far as Mr. Greene was concerned, as an actor and writer.

How far in advance of Mr. Greene’s death in 1592 would Shakespeare have begun working in London?  The first plays might have been written as early as 1589 or as late as 1591.  It’s hard to imagine that a theater company would hire him as a playwright off the street, so he must have started working in the theater some years before the first play was performed.  It would have taken time to gain the confidence of a theater company and to have awakened the ire of Robert Greene.

How did this happen?  In 1585, Shakespeare was a young townsman of Stratford with a wife and children.  Some five years later, he was writing plays that are performed, read, enjoyed, studied, and argued over more than four centuries later.  And he was writing sonnets and narrative poetry as well.

The short answer is that we don’t know and we aren’t going to know, ever.  The mystery is so complete, so profound, that it has given rise to the fascinating controversy that has been brewing for some 200 years over the identity of the true author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare[2].  The nearly blank pages of the poet’s early years have created opportunities for speculation.

Scott McCrae in The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Controversy[3] makes the point that the seeds of the dispute were sown shortly after Shakespeare’s death, although they did not germinate until later.  The early legend was that Shakespeare was a child of nature, that his writing displayed little learning or sophistication, and that the plays and poems are the expression of an untutored genius.  That view invited the devaluation of Shakespeare’s biography.

The problem is that later study showed that the author of the Shakespeare canon must have been far more learned than his early critics thought.  For example, scholars have measured the size of his vocabulary by counting each different word in the canon.  Shakespeare’s vocabulary was twice as large as that of his nearest contemporary.  It’s not just a matter of vocabulary, needless to say.  His command of English, his power of expression, are monumental.

It became increasingly difficult to reconcile the imagined country bumpkin with the sophisticated mind that produced the canon.  The author of the plays, sonnets, and other works could not have come from the modest background that legend had created for him.  So, he must have been a university graduate?  This is what I find so fascinating about the authorship controversy.  It discloses biases that might otherwise have remained unexamined.  Only those with university degrees know how to string together a powerful English sentence?  Let’s stop while we count all the owners of advanced degrees who have written great literature.

There is some spoken French here and there in the works.  Where could the fellow from Stratford have picked it up?  What about the knowledge of law displayed by the author?  There are many claims (mostly by lawyers) that he must have been trained in the law.

Or, think of all the Shakespeare plays that are set in Italy.  I’m not going to look at a list, but off the top I can think of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet.  If you wanted to throw in Julius Caesar, go ahead.  The author of the plays must have traveled in Italy to be able to write about the place, no?

We have no reason to think that William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, ever traveled outside of England.  Yet, the argument goes, the person who wrote these plays must have spent time in Italy.  Therefore, the man from Stratford could not have written the plays.  Q.E.D.

But how much does the author of the plays know about Italy?  McCrae suggests that Shakespeare’s Italy is not very Italian; it is more like England in the summertime.  He believes that most of the Italy plays do not demonstrate any particular sense of place.  For example, the two plays set in Venice don’t mention the canals.  His characters placed in Verona never mention the brick wall encircling the city that was constructed in the 1530s.

Here’s a telling example.  In Two Gentlemen of Verona there are several references to travel by sea.  The action begins in Verona.  In the early scenes, each of the two gentlemen makes a voyage to Milan, each with his servant.  It is clear that the trip will be made by water.  Characters are urged to hurry to catch their ship, and not just a ship but the “flood” (i.e., the tide).  This opens the door to a pun-fest using the words “tide” and “tied”.  But look at a map of northern Italy.  Verona is perhaps 60 miles inland and Milan is another 100 or so miles from the Adriatic.  The only sensible way to travel from Verona to Milan is over land.  In theory, you could take a river trip from Verona down the Adige River to its mouth, then coast southward to the mouth of the Po and fight the current for 150 miles or so to get close to Milan.  You could then use a system of canals, still in existence, to take you the rest of the way.

Some have argued that northern Italy had a more intricate system of canals in the sixteenth century.  On this view, the existing canals that connect Milan to the Po River are just a small part of a much larger system that connected Milan to Verona.  The author of the plays knew what he was talking about after all.  People of Shakespeare’s time would have traveled from Verona to Milan and back by water[4].

But, where are the canals?  The ones connecting Milan to the Po still have water in them.  Where is the magnificent system of canals connecting the two cities?  Some who believe William Shakespeare could not have written the plays and poems conclude that the old canals have been filled in and are no longer visible.  Also, that no record of them survives[5].

So, we start with the assumption that the author had to have known Italy.  We end with the conclusion that there must be a network of canals buried beneath the soil east of Milan, canals of which no historical or archeological record exists.  It’s a remarkable piece of reasoning, symptomatic of the belief that these great works could not have been produced by a small-town fellow with a 16^th century grammar school education.  Because that kind of thing doesn’t happen.

Which leads to the question: why is there an authorship controversy over the works of William Shakespeare but not over any of his contemporaries?  Is there an authorship controversy surrounding Cervantes (who died April 22, 1616 – it was a tough week for great writers)?  Everyone seems to be sure that John Donne wrote the poems attributed to him.  Donne is one of the great figures of English literature.  If you watch the Emma Thompson film “Wit” you learn that some Donne scholars think their man is a better poet than Will.  Could the reason be that Donne was held in low regard during most of the time between his death in 1631 and the early 20^th century?  As an underappreciated master, he was not worth the trouble of an authorship controversy.

Shakespeare was recognized as a fine poet and dramatist by his contemporaries, but it was only in the late eighteenth century that his status was elevated to “greatest writer of the English language.”  True “bardolatry,” as it was called, came into vogue.  And it was only after Shakespeare had been widely considered the greatest writer in the English language that questions about the provenance of his works began to emerge.

What is it about the works of Shakespeare that makes the doubters want to attribute them to someone else?  Why, in their minds, could the fellow from Stratford not manage it?

Let’s agree that it can’t be due to any special facility with plotting.  Entire subplots are introduced and then dropped without further mention in Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night.  In As You Like It, we are given as much story as is required to get the characters off to the Forest of Arden where they can frolic.  Are there characters in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, etc. that you are not fond of?  Just be patient, they will soon be dead.

It’s not the plot, it’s the poetry.  Part of his power lies in his ability to show rather than tell, to put images before our minds.  Consider an almost trivial example.  In the first scene of Henry IV, Part 1 the King is waiting in London for news from a battle in a place called Holmedon.  A messenger has arrived, one Sir Walter Blunt, and the author wants us to know that so conscientious and devoted is Sir Walter that he has ridden straight through to bring the news.

How to convey this information in the most compelling way?  “He rode without rest.”  That doesn’t say much.  “He rode hell for leather.”  Thanks, but there are enough clichés in Shakespeare’s work already[6].   “He left a trail of dust behind him for miles.”  Better, but that takes our attention away from the present scene and puts it out on the road somewhere.  “He is caked with mud from his ceaseless riding.”  Now we have the rider and some mud standing in front of us, so that’s an improvement.  Here is Shakespeare’s answer:

Here is a dear, a true industrious friend,

Sir Walter Blunt, new lighted from his horse,

Stain’d with the variation of each soil

Betwixt that Holmedon and this seat of ours; 

It’s an elegant solution.  We can picture the man and the horse covered in mud of different shades.  Why are they so covered?  Because they did not stop but rode straight through as the landscape and topography changed under them.  We aren’t told what the man and horse did.  Instead, an image is placed before our eyes, but our brains have to work to make sense of it.

And this is purely a throw-away line.  Nothing in the play turns on whether Sir Walter rode fast or far.  The lines are part of the web that draws us into the world that the poet has created for our entertainment or amusement or edification, depending on the particular play or scene within it.

The magic comes when a series of these images and metaphors are arranged together and cascade through our minds as we read or listen.  To take an almost random example (from Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1):

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife

Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;

Blood and destruction shall be so in use,

And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold

Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;

All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:

And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,

With Ate by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

Cry ‘Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war;

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial.

Now perhaps that’s an unfair example.  Once Mr. S gets going on the subjects of blood, death, war, and mayhem, he puts that little bit extra into his work that makes such a difference.  The example really was chosen nearly at random.  We have a 1936 first edition of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare[7]” that belonged to my mother-in-law.  It is some 1500 pages thick.  I opened to the middle and then went forward and back by twenty or so pages until I found something suitable on the fourth try.

It would be easy enough to find hundreds if not thousands of other examples.  There is John of Gaunt’s speech in Act 2, Scene 1 of Richard II (“This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle . . . .) or Leonato’s lines at the beginning of Act 5 of Much Ado About Nothing where he refuses to be calm and philosophical while he rages over what he believes, wrongly we know, to be the death of his daughter (“For there never yet was philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently,”) or the gentle post-courtroom scene in Merchant of Venice when, after the trial that condemned Shylock, the characters who are destined for happiness reflect on the beauty that surrounds them (“Look how the floor of heaven / Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold[8]”).

I’m not quoting these passages at length since they and countless others can be found in books or online.  Their power and beauty are augmented by the cascading effect of a series of potent metaphors.  We have barely absorbed one when the author starts to unfold the next one.  The effect can be dizzying, spellbinding.

It isn’t just the poetry, as potent as that is.  His people are so believable, even though we know that they are characters in a story.  And the range of personalities is staggering.  Think of the evil SOBs – Iago, Cassius, Richard III, or Lady Macbeth (a DOB) – each of them evil in his or her own special way.  The clowns, fools, and comics form their own regiment.  There are cadres of kings, legions of lovers, not to mention warriors, rustic innocents, raging drunkards, sympathetic priests, and the occasional self-important official.

A particularly congenial group are the women who spend time disguised as men (Viola, Rosalind, Portia, with apologies to those I overlooked).  This trope reaches a peak in Twelfth Night, where the young woman (Viola) masquerades as a young man (Cesario).  She falls in love with her employer, a Duke who is himself in love with a neighbor, Olivia.  Olivia falls in love with Cesario.  The tangle entertains us for five acts.  The resolution leaves the main characters as fully blinded by their emotions as they were at the beginning, but in new relationships.

Perhaps one characteristic common to many of Shakespeare’s characters is that they don’t explain themselves.  They act out who they are.  There is no exposition of their motives.  The purely evil SOBs, the innocent lambs, the furious fathers, the doting mothers, the masquerading women, none of them undergoes psychoanalysis – we see who they are.  How they got that way is rarely an issue[9].

So many of the jokes are still funny centuries later.  A lot of Shakespeare’s humor devolves from the plain meaning of words.

Viola:     [D]ost thou live by thy tabor[10]?

Clown: No, sir[11], I live by the church.

Viola:     Art thou a churchman?

Clown: No such matter, sir: I do live by the church; for I do live at my house, and my house doth stand by the church.    Twelfth Night, Act 3, Scene 1

Glendower:        I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur:               Why, so can I, or so can any man;

                                But will they come when you do call for them?  Henry IV, Part 1 Act 3, Scene 1

And a last, more complicated example, from Sir John Falstaff (again in Henry IV, Part 1), who saves his life in battle by pretending to be dead and then, when he is alone, rises to explain to himself and to us the wisdom of what he has done:

I am no counterfeit: to die, is to be a counterfeit; for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.

In Twelfth Night, there is a subplot in which Malvolio, Olivia’s self-important chief of staff, is ensnared by a set of characters that he considers his moral inferiors.  As he starts to fall victim to their plan, one of them, Fabian, says, “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”  The two times I’ve seen the play, he steps outside the action, comes to the edge of the stage, and addresses the audience directly.  The theater erupts with laughter.  The same thing must have happened when the line was spoken on the stage during the first known performance in 1602.  I’d bet a steak dinner that audiences have laughed out loud at that line every time it has been spoken.  There are forces at work that would outlaw laughter if they could.  Unless they achieve a complete victory, that line will be shaking the rafters a century from now, when our grandchildren and great-grandchildren commemorate the 500^th anniversary of the Bard’s death.

I know that I have barely touched what sets this work apart.  Whole libraries could be, have been, filled with books by scholars who have analyzed individual works or particular aspects of them.  I enjoy learning about the sources that Shakespeare was likely to have used for his plays, the place of the stage in the urban life of his time, the structure of his metaphors, the political implications of the plays.  It is sobering to think of the tens of thousands of scholars who have each devoted decades of study to better understand, and to help us better understand, the work of one individual.

And it is staggering to think that one individual could have a mind so profound and the ability to translate his thought into language of such depth and power that tens of thousands of scholars more will still be improving their understanding of his work and the understanding of our remote descendants centuries from now.

Does any of this establish that the mind in question could not have belonged to the man from Stratford?  Is there some known ingredient to genius operating at this level that we know Shakespeare lacked?  Can it be said honestly that, given a man with the mind of Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere or any of the other leading candidates, of course you would expect works of this quality?  It’s only when we stoop to a fellow like Will Shakespeare that we have trouble seeing how he could do it.  The fact is that it is difficult to understand how anyone, of whatever level of education, birth, or experience, wrote these works.

It’s a little like the assertion that life had to have been created because it’s impossible to imagine that it could have evolved through a natural process.  Without deciding that question, we have to acknowledge that the failure of our collective imaginations is not evidence of anything other than the bluntness of the instrument that is the human mind.  We can’t imagine how someone in his early twenties walked out of a mid-sized town and ended up a few years later writing the greatest works in the English language.  The mystery would not be resolved if we had reason to think that the author held a degree from a university, or had traveled widely, or held a hereditary title of nobility.  How would that explain anything?  No one else possessed of those characteristics has demonstrated that those are the keys that allow us to unlock the mystery.

To repeat myself, we don’t know how he decided to pursue his career or how he got his start, and we aren’t going to know.  But we do owe a debt to someone who has provided his audience with so much entertainment, inspiration, and stimulation.  We can’t repay him but I would like to make a small gesture toward acknowledging the debt by remembering the author on the four hundredth anniversary of his death.

[1] The official title was High Bailiff.

[2] To be clear, and for what it is worth, I believe there is no reason to doubt that William Shakespeare is the author of the plays and poems that are attributed to him.

[3] The title is optimistic.

[4] But even if there were such a system, all the jokes about floods, tides, and drowning would not fit a voyage via canal barge.

[5] There are German maps of the 1500s that view northern Italy as seen from the Alps. They show the area covered by rivers.  Those rivers don’t exist, never existed.  As McCrae points out, some remains of the supposed canals would have survived had they been in the ground.  Four hundred years is not enough time to have erased the archeological record.

[6] Joke.  Sorry.

[7] No longer complete.  It predates the discovery that The Two Noble Kinsman is at least partly the work of W.S.

[8] What an enchanting image, that we are looking up at the floor of heaven.  The original glass ceiling.

[9] Richard III is perhaps an exception.  Possibly his hyper-self-consciousness is a source of his evil power.  It would be natural to emphasize this characteristic in a play about the last Yorkist king written for an audience accustomed to cheer for the Lancastrians.

[10] I believe this would be a tambourine or similar instrument.

[11] Viola is disguised as a young man.

There was once a positive and affirming tradition in retailing.  After the customer paid, the seller would say “Thank you” and the customer would reply “Thank you”.  Those “thank-you”s were full of meaning.  The customer was saying, “Thank you for having the goods and services I wanted ready and available for me at a price I thought was reasonable.  No one compelled you to do it, and I genuinely appreciate it.”  The retailer was saying, “Thank you for choosing this store to meet your needs when you have so many alternatives.  It means a lot that you freely chose us.”

It’s a fitting moment to acknowledge that we are making a voluntary exchange that benefits us both.  They know that I don’t have to shop there and I know that they don’t have to make sure that my favorite brand of salsa is on the shelf.  We have both sought each other out for mutual aid.

I notice that in the South, where courtesy is much more a part of everyday life than it is in other parts of the United States, people will substitute “Y’all come back and see us, now.”  I believe this is just as good as “Thank you”.  It underscores the voluntary nature of the momentary association between buyer and seller.  It encompasses the notion that the customer is free to go somewhere else and therefore an effort should be made to welcome him or her to return.

This moment of mutual acknowledgment has gone missing in the corner of the world I live in.  Usually, what I hear at checkout is “Have a nice day.”  This reminds me of the joke about how many New Yorkers it takes to screw in a light bulb.  The answer: None of your damn business.  How many Californians does it take?  None of your damn business, but have a nice day.

When I hear, “Have a nice day” I am tempted to say “You should be saying thank you.”  What I say instead is “You too.”  The expression has no sense of momentary voluntary association, no sense of mutual benefit, only a robotic wish that nothing will happen that will disturb you, but only for the rest of the day.

I have learned from my dear wife how important it is to acknowledge other people when they do something positive or when they demonstrate a character trait that is noteworthy.  I had a positive experience in my local QFC grocery a couple of weeks ago when an employee unexpectedly re-introduced the “thank you” tradition.  I went out of my way to acknowledge the action.

Gabriel was bagging my groceries.  I doubt he is more than 20 years old.  His lightly accented English suggests to me that he immigrated from east Africa as a teenager, although that’s a guess.  The cashier, an assistant manager no less, finished ringing me up and said “Have a nice day.”  But Gabriel said, “Thank you for shopping with us.”  I made a point of telling Gabriel how much I appreciated that he had said that.  He smiled.  I smiled.

A week later, I was back at my neighborhood QFC.  I avoided the line of the slowest, most inaccurate checker in the store and glided into the line of what turned out to be the second slowest checker in the store.  But the compensation was that Gabriel was there, bagging groceries like mad.  I looked forward to our mutual recognition of the voluntary beneficial exchange in which we were participating.  As he finished he said to me, “Have a nice day.”  There is still work to do.

 

Well-deserved congratulations to those of us who watched every episode of Downton.  Those who missed a few episodes might consider a visit to the gift shop.  You could buy a brightly colored T-shirt with the legend:  My Friends Watched Downton Abbey and All I Got Was This Stupid Shirt.

I think it was a mistake for Mr. Fellowes to announce beforehand that this would be the last season.  Had he kept both audience and writers in the dark, both groups might have gotten more out of this final season.  As early as the first episode, I did not feel that we were getting the writers’ best work.  Who can blame them?  They had to keep an eye on monster.com and then go running off for interviews with the BBC and ITV.  These are not conditions likely to produce really gripping dramatic material week to week.  And we in the audience began to lower our expectations accordingly.  It became clear early on that the writers were just arranging pieces on the board in order to maneuver as many happy endings as time would allow.

And with a two-hour finale, there was time enough for happy endings out to the horizon.  When the lovely editor caught Edith’s bouquet just moments after Tom openly flirted with her, I felt I was approaching my limit for treacly sentimentality.  The only slight shadow is Mr. Carson’s infirmity[1], but even his happiness will be accommodated by a cottage on the estate, a pension, and the honor of being the advisor to family and staff on matters that come within his deep, although not very broad, knowledge and experience.

The whole episode reminded me of a movie I have mentioned before, The Secret Life of Bees.  That story is set in the Jim Crow South.  A pre-adolescent girl, white, ends up at a farm run by an African-American woman who keeps bees and lives in the eye of the segregationist storm that surrounds her.  In fact, in her capacity to dispense folk wisdom, she is very much like Mr. Mason except that he is male, white, and English where she is female, black, and American.  But other than that.  They are both deeply rooted to the soil – pigs, bees – which enables them to see into the future, counsel those around them, and maintain a cheerful outlook on life in all circumstances.

It wasn’t just that connection that put me in mind of the Bees movie.  It was the cheerful way everyone interacted with everyone else.  Atticus spies Tom and Henry talking about the changes they plan to make and says with a deep back-bending chuckle, “But I like you just the way you are!”  Ditto Robert and Cora, Violet and Spratt, Rose and the downstairs staff, and practically everyone else involved in this episode.

In the Bees movie, there is one moment when the Jim Crow system intrudes into the story.  The pre-teen adolescent white girl and a pre-teen adolescent black boy are sweet on each other.  They go to a movie theater to hold hands, but of course they have to go to the “Colored” area up in the balcony.  The kids don’t mind, but the evil killjoy segregationists spot them and break up their date.

We have a similar faux dark moment in this final episode when Robert, Cora, and Edith present themselves for inspection by Bertie’s redoubtable mother.  She has laid down the law that Bertie’s tenure is to be dedicated to a restoration of public morals, following the disgraceful trips to Tangiers by Bertie’s predecessor.  But it turns out that she is but a gingerbread moralist.  Edith discloses the Marigold story to her hoped for future mother-in-law, who adopts an attitude more typical of us Americans than of the British of the day.  Edith’s courage, honesty, and authenticity wipe away her fall from grace.  By confessing and (we assume, the scene was not shown to us) throwing herself on the mercy of Bertie’s mother (forgot her name), Edith has expunged the sin of “antenuptial fornication”.

But if Bertie’s mom is such a stern moralist, why does confession get Edith out of hot water?  (And if she is worried about appearances, little Marigold is going to have to be explained somehow.)  It appears that Bertie’s cousin, the Marques before him, didn’t try to hide his sexual orientation.  Why did his authenticity not earn him forgiveness?  Answer: We are going for happy endings here, thank you.

The choice of 1925 as the year in which to end the story is consistent with the general tone of happiness being ladled into overflowing cups.  The TV series that most closely resembles Downton is Upstairs, Downstairs, which ran in the 1970s.  According to Wikipedia, the series consisted of 68 episodes, starting in 1903 and ending with the stock market crash in 1929.  Downton must have had some 50 episodes (six seasons of eight or nine episodes each) and runs a shorter span, from the sinking of Titanic in 1912 to the last day of 1925.

The older series ended on a very dark note.  The heir of the family, James, has invested his own money heavily in the stock market.  One of the servants, Rose, trusted him to invest her savings as well.  He lost everything.  In the final scene, we hear a gunshot and see him lying face down on his bedroom floor.

Upstairs, Downstairs had far less action than Downton.  It was more like a stage play than a TV series.  Most of the action took place in the family’s drawing room or in the kitchen or servants’ quarters.  Even so, the glimpses we got of the family via the drawing room and the kitchen gave the viewer a better sense of the life of that time than did Downton.  Perhaps because the series touched on the lives of its characters more realistically than did Downton Abbey, the creators of Upstairs, Downstairs ended the series in the most dramatic way possible at a historic turning point for Britain.  The decade that began in 1930 was the beginning of a steep downhill slide for the British.

Possibly the same reasoning was at work in the Downton series for the opposite reason.  The more lighthearted orientation of Downton lent itself to a riot of happy endings brought to a close at a moment of peace and prosperity.  In 1925, the British Empire was in its Indian Summer, although that is apparent only with hindsight.  What happened in the following fifteen years shows how quickly a nation’s place in the world can change.  In the 1920s, Britain had the largest empire the world has ever known, if you add up the Commonwealth, the dominions, colonies, protectorates, etc., and it included about one in four people then living.  It was more than five times the size of the Roman Empire at its peak.  It was half again as large as the Soviet empire, including the eastern European Warsaw Pact countries on the Soviet side of the ledger.

Sitting comfortably at the hub of such a powerful enterprise, the residents of Downton Abbey and their fellow Britons might look back with pride on the accomplishments that they and their forebears in empire had achieved.  Britain abolished slavery voluntarily.  It abolished its own slave trade and took aggressive steps to suppress participation by other nations in that sickening commerce.  It advanced free trade and used the balance of power to maintain peace and calm, relatively speaking, in Europe for the century after Waterloo.  It has to be admitted that they did not always treat their colonies well and the Irish, the Indians, and the Africans can find much to complain of.  Even so, as Lord Merton might have put it, they had a good innings.  And in 1925, they had every reason to think that the progress and prosperity they had enjoyed would continue indefinitely.

So, as the story ends, Britain is just below the crest of the wave.  The horrors of the World War are fading into the past.  Everyone is as happy as his or her station in life permits as 1925 fades away.  Nearly everyone is paired up.  Those who aren’t – Violet, Denker, Spratt, Bertie’s Mom – are well satisfied with their situations.  Mr. Barrow is another exception but he at least has full time employment in his adopted home.  Robert can speak of the future as something to be faced with hope and the expectation of better things to come.  But how quickly things changed!  Only fifteen years after the story’s end, British cities would be in flames as bombs fell on them from German planes flying overhead.  Despite the peace and prosperity into which they were born, every child we have met in this story will come of age at a time when Britain’s continued existence as an independent nation will be in peril.

Well, we know what’s coming but there is no reason to spoil their pleasure.  Let them enjoy themselves while they can and as they can.  As Spanky said (and as Our Gang agreed) Sunday will never be the same.

[1] A loyal reader asked me to research Mr. Carson’s condition.  I entered his symptoms into WebMD.  They think he has “essential tremor”.  I understand that “essential” in this case means “not caused by an identified disease” such as Parkinson’s.  WebMD adds the helpful note that the condition can be treated through medication or brain surgery.  Consult your physician.