Cogito, Ergo Blogito
I HAD THE RIGHT OF WAY
NO MORE ROBOCALLS!
HE HAD LOTS OF REALLY COOL STUFF
ON THE OTHER HAND MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN VACCINATED
BELOVED HUSBAND, FATHER, BLAH DI BLAH
THEN WHAT WAS ALL THE KALE FOR
BUT I LOOK STUPID IN A HELMET
I SEEM TO BE ON MUTE
SO NOW MY FICA SCORE CAN GO F* ITSELF
SEE YA LATER
Note: Contrary to what you may have learned from media reports, we here in the Garden of Eaton don’t spend all of our time cavorting with Eve, munching on forbidden fruit, hobnobbing with disreputable serpents, and writing self-indulgent blog posts. I am delighted to report that today is the release date of the delightful crime novel A Conspiracy of Talkers (La congiura dei loquaci), by the Italian journalist, screenwriter and novelist Gaetano Savatteri, translated from the Italian by me, and published by Italica Press as part of its Italian Crime series, available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook versions.
Savatteri, though born in Milan, was raised in the small town of Racalmuto, Sicily. He grew up hearing about the murder of its mayor in November 1944, during the Allied occupation of the island. The justice system quickly apprehended and convicted a culprit, but few if anyone in the town believe that justice was actually served. A Conspiracy of Talkers is Savatteri’s novelistic re-creation of what might have happened, both in terms of the mayor’s assassination and the “investigation” that followed. Along the way, it’s a great read.
Here is an excerpt from the book. (Steve Eaton)
From A Conspiracy of Talkers (copyright © 2021 Italica Press, all rights reserved):
“I can’t even think about it, Signor Lieutenant. If we hadn’t been laki, veri laki, we’d be with the souls in purgatory right now.”
The jeep was lurching down the road. Its headlights revealed gaps in the pavement, avoided at the last second with a sudden skid. Lieutenant Adano’s knuckles were white from the effort of hanging onto the vehicle for hours. It was raining. The dust on the windshield had turned into a dark coating of mud.
“Are you sure you can see all right?” the lieutenant asked Semino in Italian.
“Donworri, Lieutenant. Eyes like a cat, Lieutenant.”
Once more Lieutenant Adano leafed through his mental phrasebooks — from the Italian dialect of his grandfather to the Sicilian-American of his aunt Cettina, whom he’d listened to as a child. He came back to Semino’s words, still not trusting in the road. Or the driver.
Sure, veri laki. Extremely laki along a hairpin curve on the mountain road near Vicari, where the jeep had careened sideways on two wheels helplessly skidding, unable to gain traction, spewing rocks and dust. From his side, Adano saw almond trees flying towards him. Semino’s face didn’t change — he had the same silent, focused expression since leaving Palermo. He managed to bring the jeep to a stop, the back half dangling in midair. With the help of some peasants, they’d managed to get back on the road and on their way. But from that moment — he hadn’t said a word before — Semino didn’t stop talking.
He told Lieutenant Adano about his grandfather Calogero Castrenze who emigrated to New York before the Great War, about his years in Brooklyn and then his move to Buffalo, about the fact that he’d been the best shoemaker in his hometown, but there was hunger, not even crustabred to eat, and that’s why he’d left with his wife and four children. Two had died but the girl, his mother, married someone from back home who lived in Buffalo and he, Salvatore, was born in America, but they’d always called him Sam though his mother used to call him Semino, bless her soul, which was surely in heaven, a sainted woman who’d made sacrifices so he and his brother could grow up healthy but she died when Semino was ten, tenny ears, so his father went back home to get married because a man with two kids can’t stay single and even in America there was the Depression so it might’ve been better if his grandfather had emigrated to Americazuela or Argentina cause there you just had to find some piece of open land, build a house on it and say this is mine, maicauntri, but instead his father went back to the old country and married a woman who, with all due respect, Signor Lieutenant, was no good for my father, who’d returned from America and maybe forgot how things worked back home, so she had a son seven months after the wedding, they said he was born premature but even my father knew he was the son of a whore, sonnovibich, he got depressed and didn’t want to go back to America with a son who, realli, wasn’t his son so he stayed in Sicily but Semino and his brother Charlie, his real brother, were always called Americans and then when the war ended and you guys arrived which was the save for la Sicilia, knowing the language, he worked for the Americans in Palermo, so good that once even General Poletti asked for his help on a sensitive matter, a serious thing which he did so well that General Poletti, a true gentleman, told Semino that he was a real american man, it is a great honor to America and to Sicily that we are like brothers, closer, even, duiuandersten, Lieutenant?”
Sure, of course. Adano understood less than half of the speech, that garble of Sicilianized English, of Sicilian in swing americano. But mostly what he understood was that he had misled Semino from the beginning, when he disclosed that he knew Italian. He’d studied at City College, painstakingly sounding out Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Nights of reading and rereading, savoring the sonorous language, musical and full, “the gentle hue of oriental sapphire,” so different and so distant from the Italian of his aunt Cettina, gloomy and muddled, mournful and drawling. Now that mournfulness, even more unhinged, was churning, churning in Semino’s words, in this November evening, in the driving rain, in the road that twisted and turned, turning away even from the feeble lights of distant towns and plunging again into the blackness of the countryside, and in the shadows of the men on mules who fled to the side of the road at the sight of headlights.
“How much longer, Semino?”
“Innotime, Signor Lieutenant. Past that rock.”
The rock spur rose before them, white in the dark, wet night. “Chi passa dalla rocca e non è rubato, o il brigante dorme o è malato,” Semino chanted. If you get past the rock with no gun to your chest, then the bandit is sick or taking a rest.
“There were bandits around here?”
“There still are, Lieutenant, but donworri, they don’t do anything to the Americans. You’re American, right?”
Semino had asked this question, formulated one way or another, three times now. He just couldn’t believe that Lieutenant Adano was really the American officer whose arrival in Palermo from Naples he’d been informed of five days before, with orders to act as guide and interpreter. This guy here seemed to speak proper mainland Italian, even though he swore that his father and grandfather were Sicilian.
“Why don’t they do anything to the Americans, Semino?”
“Respect, Signor Lieutenant. They respect the Americans, like we all do.”
Beyond the rock, the dim lights of the town came into view — a few lit windows, a row of lights strung along the main road, bobbing in the wind.
Semino drove confidently — he knew the area. He’d been there the year before, when it was a zone of operations a few kilometers from the beaches of Licata and Gela and the confused and deadly landings that Adano had learned about later from accounts of veterans he’d met in Naples.
At the time, Adano was in the Pacific, relegated to a base without name or importance, shuffling papers and stamping documents. A Top Priority mission, they’d told him, just as his emergency transfer to Naples four months ago was Top Priority, pulling him out of the Marines and attaching him to the OSS. A promotion: now the papers he shuffled and the documents he stamped were marked “secret.” Top Priority, that’s also what Major Stafford said as he handed Adano the bundle of documents for his mission in Sicily. His orders were to find out what had happened to eight trucks, originally consigned to the 2nd Armored Division of Patton’s Seventh Army, then to AMGOT (the allied occupational government), and then disappearing, stolen or stripped for parts. Eight vanished trucks: Top Priority.
The jeep stopped in front of the Hotel Roma. Semino honked. The entrance behind the glass door lit up.
The man who came out of the pensione embraced Semino, kissing him on the cheeks. He was missing a hand — a stump stuck out of one sleeve. He stepped forward obsequiously. “Prego, Signor Lieutenant. I speak English.”
“Non si preoccupi, parlo italiano,” Adano replied, and continued in Italian. “Is City Hall nearby? First thing tomorrow morning, I have to see the mayor.”
The man’s eyes opened wide. Surprised and maybe disappointed, thought Adano, by my perfect Italian.
“The mayor?” He tried to catch Semino’s eyes. Then he turned back to Adano. “The mayor, you said?”
“The mayor, Signor Farrauto.” Adano reached for his leather portfolio. He’d read and reread the documents. He was sure. Baldassare Farrauto, appointed in August 1943, was mayor of this town.
The proprietor of the hotel gasped, glancing around at the deserted street. He approached Semino and whispered something incomprehensible, a gesture more than a word.
Semino remained expressionless, with the same blank face he wore while half of the jeep was dangling in midair off a turn on the mountain road near Vicari.
“The mayor had an accident. Two hours ago. They shot him, duiuandersten, Signor Lieutenant? He’s dead.”
(From A Conspiracy of Talkers by Gaetano Savatteri, translated from the Italian by Steve Eaton, 153 pages, Italica Press. Available from Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and, for our Austin friends who want to go local, bookpeople.com)
When we buy something expensive because we want it, and not because we need it, it makes us happy for a moment or two. But usually the material object of our affection does not age well. Its colors fade, its surfaces become brittle or warped. Perhaps it remains as a living, nagging reminder of a foolish waste of money that will never be recovered. It’s not as much fun as we thought. It didn’t transform our lives as we secretly hoped. Or learning to really use it well requires a new skill that we’re unable or too lazy to acquire. Or it’s superseded all too quickly by a newer version that is brighter, bigger (or smaller) and more capable.
But none of these things are what happened with me and my Beast.
The Beast was a brand new Kawasaki Ninja 650. I purchased it fifteen years ago. It has made me happy for most of the intervening years. It looked beautiful, sleek and sexy. Just the sight of it made me want to hop on and zip out to the winding, hilly roads west of Austin. It made going to work and coming back home fun (though it didn’t help much in the hours in between). And if I am to be honest, it bolstered my fantasy self image: of someone who wasn’t just a middle-aged office-bound technocrat, but actually a pretty cool, almost adventurous middle-aged office-bound technocrat.
Riding it was a delightful sensory experience. One’s body was smoothly integrated with the machine; you could hardly tell where one ended and the other began. Lean a little bit into the curve and the machine follows; twist the wrist a little to go soaring up a hill. It almost felt like the dream you sometimes have of being able to fly.
But a funny thing happened with the Beast and me. It wasn’t the Beast that got faded, frayed and frumpy. No, the Beast is still as beautiful, sleek and sexy–as young–as ever. (I mean…just look at it!) No, it’s the human who’s gotten old. (I never claimed to be beautiful or sleek or sexy. But I promise you that I was young, once.) And for a lot of reasons, riding the Beast just isn’t so important to my happiness any more. The Beast became a burden, taking up space in my garage, and money and time to maintain and insure. And that particular fantasy self-image started to seem hollow a while ago. I’m trying out different ones now.
So now the Beast goes to charity. I’m actually relieved. It no longer silently begs its owner to make use of it, like a reproachful piano sitting neglected in the living room (except a little more dangerous). But I’m sure I’ll have dreams about it once in a while…of gliding swiftly and smoothly through the thick cedar groves and over the clear green streams of western Travis County.
If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he might have remarked, “nothing is certain in life except death and Facebook.” After all, as Leona Helmsley famously remarked, “only little people pay taxes.” Facebook, on the other hand, seems here to stay. And those two remaining certainties are intertwined.
As a child I enjoyed delving into the nooks and crannies of the daily newspaper. It appeared to be a highly codified window into the mysterious world of adulthood. The front section was more or less accessible to the novice, but the further one got into it, the more it seemed designed to be legible only to an exclusive society of grownups. The specialized jargon and tables of the sports page, and likewise the stultifyingly obscure business section. (MS Word doesn’t like ‘stultifyingly.’ Too bad.) What a relief to come upon the “arts” or “living” section with the truly important stuff: horoscopes and advice columns (both of which we sensed were for entertainment purposes only), movie schedules (highly critical in the pre-internet, pre-cable age), puzzles and above all the comics.
The obituary section was of minor interest, and like the business and sports pages, came with its specialized jargon and rituals. And as with the business and sports pages, our parents, who apparently had been to adult school, helped us to decipher it. “A long illness,” for example, was code for cancer. We got a vaguely prurient pleasure out of scanning the small black and white photos of an invariably smiling man in a business suit or uniform, or a smiling woman in a nice dress and carefully arranged hair. What was I looking for? A clue to the meaning of death (or life)? A feeling of satisfaction that they were gone while we were still here? I don’t know.
The text followed a prescribed formula: date of death, the “survived by” list, and a sort of resume of education, career, and charity work. Only the nice stuff made it into the story—everyone who died was a happy saint. In other words, all the really interesting stuff was left out. The ex-Mr. X went to Centerville High where he played right tackle, served in the Army, got a degree in accounting from State U., worked for Acme Insurance, got married, had kids, attended First Methodist, was prominent in the Lion’s Club, and passed on after a long illness. What? Is that all there is? The scariest part of the obituary section for a child was how boring and limited most lives seemed to be.
But one thing was clear and comforting: the death announcements, and their dead, were handled with seriousness and respect. That was the real point of the specialized jargon and ritualized format. How different from the announcements I see today on Facebook.
Whenever my time comes, I would prefer for the event not to be “posted.” The idea of being arbitrarily stuck on your “feed” between a photo of someone’s awesome Margarita and a heartfelt elegy for someone else’s recently passed Labrador, appended with plenty of crying-smiley-face icons, feels…very wrong on several levels. Nothing against Margaritas or Labradors. But I’d be happier with just a little black and white photo of my smiling younger self in the local paper (if there still is one), along with a highly condensed biography. Just the nice bits.
Your Remaining Minutes
What advantage lies in certainty of doom?
It didn’t make you love me more, or longer
To know that we were running out of room:
In fact it just made all the stronger
Your need to sample joy in other flavors.
We owe ourselves, each one, to discover
Those pieces of the world our being savors
Most, in work, and art, and place, and lover,
In the most efficient way. I get it now.
Too late I see that time is running late.
You’re looking at your phone: “Already? Wow!
There’s someone coming by for me at eight.”
I wish I could, but nothing’s harder than
Adding minutes to this Provider’s plan.
The Tourist
The campanile on the cemetery hill is ringing the Ave Maria.
Too bad you’re not Catholic, or Christian, or religious, or human.
The women in this town have put up with so much shit,
They aren’t impressed by sympathetic tourists
Like you. Try the famous local dish, sir, a sort of meatball made of fish,
Then go and tweet about it from home.
It could be worse
Our Year of Living Safely
It’s been a long, long year, here in the Garden of Eaton, located somewhere between Athens and Troy.* The walls of our earthly paradise have never seemed so constricting. On the plus side, Adam has learned new skills in the ongoing effort to live civilly with Eve in close quarters. Like Picking Up After Oneself. I’ve attained Level 1 on that and making big strides toward Level 2.
Our personal Year of Covid began on Saturday, March 14. We had embarked on a car trip to explore the Natchez Trace Parkway in Mississippi, as a consolation prize to ourselves for cancelling a planned vacation in Taiwan. At the time the red dots used by the New York Times to denote outbreak sites in the US appeared as sparse pimples in a still mostly clear map. Mississippi and Louisiana appeared blemish-free, or nearly. But as we reviewed the headlines on our iPad in a hotel room in Shreveport, the first stop on our journey, we decided it was foolish to go on. The casino buffet we had that night was our last grand meal out, to date. The smoked pork ribs were good. The desserts were brightly colored and inedible. The full, lively crowd appeared completely unconcerned.
After that, of course, the red dots multiplied and expanded feverishly, and we haven’t left The Garden since.
One of the discouraging aspects on this mess here in Texas is that, although there is no end of local heroes and heroines, no one at the state level seems to be in charge of keeping us safe and protected. In a sort of inversion of common sense, we have a governor and state attorney general who have dedicated themselves to protecting us from protecting ourselves—by reopening businesses even while the disease is in full swing, and prohibiting local authorities (like the city of Austin) from imposing safe practices like mask-wearing. And it grates even more to think that they’re using our money to do it.
To the governor’s credit, he boldly declared that if anyone still wants to wear a mask, that’s perfectly OK with him.
It’s enough to make one consider moving to a more enlightened province. Like Alabama. At least they have a governor with spine.
Not that we personally have a right to complain. We did not lose our jobs, we did not get sick (or die, so far as I can tell), and most thankfully by far, we have not lost anyone close to us. We don’t have jobs that require us to constantly expose ourselves to possible infection. The year even resulted in my first book-length literary translation. In short, we have been greatly blessed. Or more accurately, we have enjoyed the benefits of privilege. We’ve tried to acknowledge that privilege in a small way by giving money to our local food back.
It’s been a great year for reading. I’ve discovered John Banville—a great writer. The Sea and Snow. I picked a few books off the NY Times list of best books of 2020. Homeland Elegies: great story; writing: meh. James McBride’s Deacon King Kong: strong story; writing: pretty good, especially the opening chapters—I would call it a One Hundred Years of Solitude meets Brooklyn housing project. How Much of These Hills is Gold: meh. Agent Sonya: fascinating non-fiction. Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad: brilliant alternative history story; writing, meh. Il talento della vittima (in Italian), a great original twist on the standard Italian detective story. Moi, les hommes, je les déteste—an extended essay by Pauline Harmange, in French but available in translation—pretty convincing. By the time I finished it, I detested men too (except for me—I’m different).
No, we haven’t suffered terribly. The worst aspects for us have been the inability to visit friends and relatives, and a grinding sameness in our daily lives. I miss having a beer with a friend after work. I miss riding my bicycle halfway across town and rewarding myself with a beer and a bratwurst before heading back. I miss sitting in on language and literature classes at the university. I miss seeing my family. I’m a little embarrassed at how much I enjoy sitting in a restaurant.
We hope the end is near. But to hijack a paradox, it seems as if we cover half of the remaining distance every day. The finish line keeps getting closer and closer, and never quite arrives. The state recently announced that our age group was eligible for vaccination starting March 15, but the city won’t let us sign up yet…claiming a shortage of vaccines.
So our year of living safely has been a big drag, and it’s not over. And don’t even get us started on the infinite offenses and indignities of the reign of Trump, the horror of January 6th, and the Great Texas Freeze Out, which is still causing some residents of this state to be without clean running water.
But we got our books, our iPads, our Netflix, our Zoom, our lives, and each other. It could be a lot worse.
*Athens, TX and Troy, TX, naturally.
It must seem to anglophones of every era that the English language of their generation is being horribly cheapened by the next. No doubt the English were appalled by the coarse Gallic smack-talk that began to invade their sturdy Anglo-Saxon dialect along with the Normans themselves in 1066.
Still I can’t help but feel that something truly degrading is happening now to the language of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and James Baldwin, abetted by an Internet culture that immediately rewards any abbreviation, minimization, and meme-ification of written expression. And perhaps the best (and worst) expression of the new unexpressiveness is the usage of “WTF”.
This linguistic atrocity first struck me in 2011, when Sarah Palin publicly responded to Barack Obama’s recent State-of-the-Union Address. (If you don’t remember Sarah Palin, think Marjorie Taylor-Greene without the civility.) She mocked a slogan Obama employed in that speech, “winning the future”, telling an ABC interviewer, “there were a lot of WTF moments through [sic] that speech.” By this she meant statements that were so incomprehensible or horrifying that it would cause a normal person to involuntarily interject…well, you know.
And what exactly were these incomprehensible, horrifying statements? Obama specifically tied “winning the future” to four policies: government investment in new technology; government investment in transportation and IT infrastructure; public education reform and investment; and cutting the budget deficit through a combination of spending cuts (including a freeze on total domestic spending) and tax increases.
WTF!
One could argue (and many did) against each of these ideas. But “WTF” is no argument—it is the end of argument. It is a smug declaration that one’s opponent is obviously too stupid or radical to deserve arguing with.
A friend of mine—whose political views I would call moderately conservative—recently criticized Texas Senator Ted Cruz for travelling to Cancun in the midst of a severe winter storm that caused millions of his fellow Texans to struggle without some or all of electricity, heat, or water, while still in the midst of a pandemic. “WTF?” was one response to this perfectly reasonable post.
Now, this “WTF” was not an appalled reaction to Cruz’s behavior. No, it was an expression of outrage against criticizing Ted Cruz for what he did. What’s wrong with going to Cancun (commented the commenter)? I would too, if I could! WTF?
So any opinion, any situation, however evidently reasonable or innocuous, would seem to be WTF-worthy. Just look at Yelp. This restaurant charges extra for chips and salsa? WTF?!
The strong language of yesterday is continually turning into the everyday usage of today. I read that the writers of the HBO Western series Deadwood liberally used explicit 21st century obscenities in dialogue because purely authentic speech would have sounded comically mild. What the tarnation!?
But I have to wonder how much room is left for the cheapification process to continue. Once a disagreement over the pettiest issue calls for a WTF, then what is left to describe something truly horrific? “Did you read about that slaughter of innocent villagers by a neighboring clan? WTF!” It already sounds meaningless.
So next time you’re tempted to respond with a WTF, ask yourself, “do I really need to? Wouldn’t it be better to explain why I disagree?”
Really now…WTF!
by George Kopf
Imagine that you owned a car that worked most of the time. Nine times out of ten, your vehicle would back down the driveway and take you where you wanted to go. But sometimes, on an average of one trip in ten, you’d back the car down the drive, into the street, check your mirrors, put the transmission into drive and suddenly the car would shoot backwards someplace you didn’t want to go such as your neighbor’s trash bin or mail box. What would you do with that car?
I expect your response would be something like “I’d get another car” or “I’d get the car fixed.” If you responded by saying “Oh, that’s the car for me. I wouldn’t change a thing!” you may have some problems that go deeper than a hypothetical car’s weird transmission. The point of this parable is that it exposes the Electoral College’s behavior and our attachment to it.
Since the U.S constitution was ratified there have been 58 presidential elections. The Electoral College has distorted the results of nearly all of them. On four occasions — twice in the nineteenth century (Hayes in 1876 and Harrison in 1888) and twice in the twenty-first century (Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016) — the Electoral College put the popular vote loser into the White hHouse. That’s a plus nine percent fail rate, but the Electoral College’s overall score is actually lower because it made a total hash of two early elections (1789 and 1800, more details later.) There were no good old days for the Electoral College. It has been a faulty institution since its inception. Not only does it distort our answer to one of the most important questions our country asks us — Who do we wish to be our president? — but it is based on ideas in which very few of us believe.
I harbored suspicions about the Electoral College for some time. To explore them, I built a spreadsheet contrasting the Electoral College’s recent record based on popular votes to check for distortion.
Here’s what our elections since World War II looked like after I applied the data:
| Year | Winner | Popular Win Margin | Popular Votes | Electoral Votes | Distortion |
| as % of vote | as % of total popular vote | as % of total electoral votes | |||
| 1940 | Roosevelt | 9.96% | 54.70% | 83.60% | 28.90% |
| 1944 | Roosevelt | 7.50% | 53.30% | 81.25% | 27.95% |
| 1948 | Truman | 4.48% | 49.40% | 57.10% | 7.70% |
| 1952 | Eisenhower | 10.85% | 54.90% | 83.20% | 28.30% |
| 1956 | Eisenhower | 15.40% | 57.40% | 86.20% | 28.80% |
| 1960 | Kennedy | 0.17% | 49.70% | 56.40% | 6.70% |
| 1964 | Johnson | 22.58% | 61.10% | 90.33% | 29.23% |
| 1968 | Nixon | 0.70% | 43.40% | 55.94% | 12.54% |
| 1972 | Nixon | 23.15% | 60.70% | 96.65% | 35.95% |
| 1976 | Carter | 2.06% | 50.00% | 55.20% | 5.20% |
| 1980 | Reagan | 9.74% | 50.40% | 90.89% | 40.49% |
| 1984 | Reagan | 18.21% | 58.80% | 97.58% | 38.78% |
| 1988 | Bush | 7.72% | 53.40% | 79.18% | 25.78% |
| 1992 | Clinton | 5.56% | 43.00% | 68.77% | 25.77% |
| 1996 | Clinton | 8.51% | 49.20% | 70.44% | 21.24% |
| 2000 | Bush | -0.51% | 48.35% | 50.37% | -2.02% |
| 2004 | Bush | 2.46% | 50.70% | 53.16% | 2.46% |
| 2008 | Obama | 7.27% | 52.90% | 67.84% | 14.94% |
| 2012 | Obama | 3.86% | 50.90% | 61.71% | 10.81% |
| 2016 | Trump | -2.09% | 48.89% | 56.50% | 7.61% |
| 2020 | Biden | 4.46% | 51.30% | 56.87% | 5.57% |
Glancing at the data, you don’t have to be a math major to see two things. When a presidential candidate wins by a comfortable margin, more than a few percentage points, the Electoral College rewards him with a huge win. But in a tight race, when the margin of victory narrows to one point, the system gets very volatile and is capable of transforming a loser into a winner.
Let’s look at some specific outcomes:
In 1948 Harry Truman had to fend off challenges not only from Thomas Dewey, but also Strom Thurmond who ran on a state’s rights platform and a progressive, Henry Wallace. This narrowed Truman’s popular victory to slightly under 50%. The Electoral College amplified this to 57%. That’s a big number, in the elections just before and after 1948, the Electoral College gave Roosevelt and Eisenhower much larger victory margins. John F. Kennedy’s experience in 1960 was almost exactly the same as Truman’s in 1948; JFK barely slipped by. In these cases the Electoral College reflected the popular vote.
The volatility that the Electoral College injects into the political system is very visible in the contrast between the 1976 and 1980 elections. In 1976 Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford by a tiny margin that registers as 50% of the popular vote. In 1980 Ronald Reagan beat Carter by similarly slim margin — 0.04 % of the popular vote– but look how differently the Electoral College reacted. Reagan’s 4/10 of one percent improvement over Carter’s 1976 performance generated an electoral landslide that buried Jimmy Carter under 91% of the electoral votes in 1980. Now that’s a lot of volatility!
Nevertheless, from the second world war to the close of the twentieth century, the Electoral College managed a minimally acceptable performance. In spite of weird numbers, winners won those elections and losers lost. The system worked o.k, until it didn’t.
In 2000 and 2016 democracy got burned. The Electoral College flipped the popular results — thus the negative numbers on my chart. If you are old enough to care about such things, you have already been exposed to a lot discussion about those elections so I’m not going to say anything more about them.
Instead, I want to ask you a question. Why do we put up with this? Why do we allow the Electoral College to add so much volatility into our political decisions?
At this point, essays by political scientists on this subject dive deep into the college’s constitutional origins, and particularly commentaries by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay collected in the Federalist Papers. I encourage you to read them. But my specialty area is writing briefing memos so I will bypass extended quotations in favor of commenting on the mechanics of what is happening and how we can get our electoral car fixed. First I need to come clean about one of my biases. I believe in one-person, one-vote elections. I do not think it is fair to favor or disfavor voters based on who they are or where they live. In other words I’m a small “d” democrat who believes in inclusive popular elections.
The founding fathers, including Hamilton, Madison and Jay, were not small “d“ democrats. They had their reasons. Images of mob rule made them nervous. They sought to insulate politics from quick decisions by popular majorities. They were for the most part small “r” republicans and small “f” federalists who wanted the states to decide the outcome of presidential elections. The states could decide how to feed information about the popular vote into their decisions. The states would send their result to Congress, and Congress would count the electoral votes and register the overall decision. That’s what the founders wanted; that’s how they set it up, and that’s how it works today. I encourage you to explore the bios, backgrounds, motivations and beliefs of the founders on your own time. They were great men who gave us a great and enduring system of government. But now I want to look under the hood.
When you vote, your vote is recorded and counted. Digitalization is making our elections increasingly secure and honest. The mind-numbing numbers of TV ads and internet messages in the runup to presidential elections encourage us to support candidates running in a nationwide contest, but we vote in 50 different elections administered by each state, on a state by state basis. In that sense, there is no national popular election. We speak and think as if there were one national election, and I built my spreadsheet on that basis. But on this point we are indulging ourselves with an illusion. What Congress counts in deciding the winner of the presidential and vice presidential elections is a compilation of state outcomes. And in 48 of the 50 states what the popular vote decides is who wins the state on an up or down, winner takes all of basis. Trump won Texas. All of it. Biden won Michigan. All of it. There are no fractional outcomes.
So what do the candidates win? They win a package of electoral votes equal to each state’s congressional delegation. Each state has two senators and at least one representative in the House of Representatives. State representation in the house is determined by the census every ten years. The number of senators is a constant – two per state. Since 1960, there have been a total of 538 electors in the Electoral College — 100 electors representing the senatorial delegations, 435 electors representing house delegations plus 3 electors representing the District of Columbia. Five hundred thirty eight divided by two equals 269; that’s the source of the magic number of 270 electoral votes to win that we hear so much about before presidential elections. So just to be clear, when Congress tallies the result of presidential elections, it counts the total of each state’s electoral votes for the president and vice president. The states do not split up their results according to the popular vote. The winner at the state level gets all of the electoral votes that a particular state has to offer.
The political result of this tidy, arithmetic system is a complete mess. We’ve already seen how the volatility factor distorts the voters’ will and can actually flip the results. This is driven by a secondary aspect of the system that is particularly unfair and unarguably inequitable. Because the 100 electors representing the states’ senatorial delegations is a mathematical constant, a fixed number that doesn’t change, states with small populations have a greater impact on outcomes than states with large populations. This is not a minor technicality. It’s a very big deal.
Wyoming has a population of 578,759. The District of Columbia’s population is 692,683. California has 39 million folks and Texas has 29 million. In terms of Electoral College representation you can be a gun totin’ Republican from Dallas or a chardonnay sippin’ Democrat from San Francisco, but your vote will be worth only 25% a vote from D.C. — a place that doesn’t even have senators but is represented in the Electoral College as if it did — or 20% of a vote from Wyoming. Your politics won’t make any difference. The current system supersizes voters from lightly populated states and makes pipsqueaks of voters from highly populated states. This “senatorial” aspect of the Electoral College distorts the results for all the states, north or south, red or blue.
In sum, what we have is a national double whammy. First, the Electoral College processes popular election results through a system that turns individual votes into up-or-down, state-by-state results. Secondarily, those decisions are distributed in favor of less populated states. That is a long way from a one-person, one-vote system.
Earlier, I commented that the Electoral College got off to a bad start by making a hash out of two early elections. Here’s what happened. In the original wording of the constitution, the founders forgot to specify that the states would need to report two sets of electoral college results to Congress, one for the President and one for the Vice President. So in 1796 John Adams became our second President and Thomas Jefferson, the runner up, became Adam’s vice president. The problem was that Jefferson had run for president as Adam’s opponent. They were rivals, very different people from different regions and different political parties who respected, but didn’t particularly like, one another. Fortunately, they were able to work together without provoking a constitutional crisis. But can you imagine such a thing in 2016 if Donald Trump were forced to work with Hillary Clinton? Talk about volatility!
By the way, did you know that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4, 1826 on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution?
Back on point, the 1796 election foreshadowed a constitutional crisis that occurred in 1800. In that election, Jefferson won the same number of electoral votes as his vice presidential running mate, Aaron Burr. Per the constitution, the matter went to the House where the House decided on Jefferson for the presidency, but only after a painfully protracted 36 ballots. The Twelfth Amendment (1803) patched things up just well enough for the Electoral College to go on inflicting screwy results on us for another 200 years.
Obviously, I’m not a big fan of the Twelfth Amendment, but it is notable that in 1803 the systemic response to an obvious problem was to amend the Constitution. In our era, we too frequently describe the constitution in quasi-religious terms like “God given.” “Originalists” , who sound like ultra-orthodox rabbis, insist we mustn’t tamper with a word of such a “sacred” document. This is not right. The Constitution is not the Bible. It is a wholly man-made political document. As such, its survival depends on its ability to change, to be amended.
Amending the Constitution is a complicated process because it’s an important process, but it can be done. A century ago, my grandparents and their friends were young people who idealistically thought society would be better without booze. After a decade under the Eighteenth Amendment (1919) they realized they were wrong, that the unintended consequences of prohibition outweighed its benefits so they amended the Constitution a second time (1933) to get rid of it. And between those two amendments, they also amended the Constitution twice again to give women the right to vote (1920) and to clear up questions about presidential and congressional terms of office (1933) . Clearly, our grandparents were members of a generation in a hurry and they got things done. They were also blessedly not overly introspective. I don’t remember any excessive hand wringing about whether they had done the right thing. What I do remember is that my maternal grandmother looked forward to enjoying a cocktail before dinner.
I promised that I wouldn’t quote the founding fathers at length, so in closing I will keep my promise by quoting only a fragment of a sentence by Alexander Hamilton on “The Mode of Electing a President” (Federalist Paper No. 69). Hamilton wrote that “that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.”
The Electoral College does not pass Hamilton’s test. Let’s fix it or get rid of it. We can replace the Electoral College with popular national elections for President and Vice President. Or, if we want to continue the tradition of Congress counting electoral votes, we can modify the Electoral College by amending the constitution to eliminate the 100 “senatorial” votes and distribute the remaining votes on the basis of the popular election results. Personally, I don’t think the Electoral College worth another conservation effort. But either way, in its present format, it’s got to go.
We recently had the pleasure of viewing two recent films about the American Dream: James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari (2019) and Regina King’s One Night in Miami (2020).
They’re both compelling, well crafted movies. They both do a good job of superficially re-creating the atmosphere of the early-mid 1960’s: the music, the clothes, the surface textures and colors of cars, buildings, appliances. They both have strong stories. They both have the added frisson of being about “real” people and events. They both have serious cinematic flaws.
One Night in Miami is based on a play, and it fully enjoys the main advantage of such adaptations: lots of sharp dialogue. But it also suffers the consequences: a film adapted from the stage feels stagy. The four lead characters are stuck in a rundown hotel room for two hours. Given their outsized personalities and the cramped quarters, both they and we start to feel hemmed in after a while.
Ford v Ferrari’s problems are more serious. We can’t feel the tension of the main plot line if we don’t understand some basics about race-cars, auto racing, the history of the Ford Motor Company, and the peculiarities of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. So there’s plenty of clearly contrived expository dialogue to bring us up to speed on all fronts. My God, man, you don’t want to race Le Mans…the turns aren’t cambered! More seriously, Matt Damon, who frequently can act, makes a half-hearted attempt to inhabit the rough-and-ready Texan Carroll Shelby (a role that, say, Matthew McConaughey would have nailed without even trying). Next to Christian Bale’s confrontational working-class British driver/mechanic Ken Miles, Damon practically vanishes.
But particularly after watching these two films in proximity, I find that the strangest peculiarity of Ford is that it portrays a world without Black people. Or more precisely, a world with only white people. (And, apart from Ken Miles’ wife, no women.) The checkered flag is the most integrated thing in the movie.
In Miami, by contrast, white folks are ever present, even though mostly off-camera. They have to be, because they are the reason for the story’s theme: the problem of how you survive, thrive, and maintain your dignity in a society in which the levers of power and wealth are held by people who hate anyone who looks like you.
But (I hear you ask) so what? Ford v Ferrari is about Grand Prix car racing in the mid-1960’s, which at the time was almost completely a white operation. (Regrettably, you are careful to add!) And (you continue, getting a little worked up over our political correctness) it’s a real story…about real people who just happened to be white! Can’t we just tell their story?
Fair enough. It’s just that for this viewer…after the #OscarsSoWhite movement, after the recent slate of films that really take an eviscerating look at the Black experience in this country (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), after Black Lives Matter, after George Floyd…a movie like Ford v. Ferrari seems empty, dull, unimportant. There’s so little at stake, really. It’s about a car race. If these guys lose, they might have to go back to more boring jobs than what they had before. Yes, racing is exciting, tricky, and dangerous. There are probably some really cool documentaries about it. (Like Senna.) But to make it dramatic in the theatrical sense, the film has to rig up a propagandistic contrast between good old fashioned American stick-to-itiveness and sneaky, sissified Italian elegance. (And no acknowledgement, in this paean to the American way, of the ongoing civil rights movement, of segregation, of the senselessly burgeoning war.)
So now it’s my turn to say, so what? Who cares who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966? One Night in Miami is a contrived drama, but its issues are anything but. Survival, artistic and professional fulfillment, dignity. And we don’t need any expository dialogue to tell us who Muhammed Ali, Malcom X, or Jim Brown are or why they were exceptional. (I admit, before the movie, Sam Cooke was only a name to me.) That’s because they weren’t just outstanding at their sport or their art. They risked their own financial security and physical safety, and stood up to the powers that be, in their own self-interest and on behalf of their entire oppressed community.
Hey, that would make a pretty good movie.
Editor’s Note: It has come to our attention that many of our Republican friends are experiencing shock and dismay at recent events, after having lost the Presidency, and the remaining legislative chamber they formerly controlled, in the last election. We wish to remind them of the Grand Old Party’s long and glorious history, by reprinting here some of the great stirring quotes of America’s Republican leaders of the past. And, in reassurance of the continued survival and even greatness of the “party of Lincoln,” we also include quotes from some of the party’s current elected leaders, who represent its no doubt bright future.
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations—Abraham Lincoln (Republican), 16th President of the United States
I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything—Donald John Trump (Republican), 45th President of the United States
I appreciate the fact, and am proud of it, that the attentions I am receiving are intended more for our country than for me personally—Ulysses S. Grant (Republican), 18th President of the United States
Can you smell through that mask? Then you’re not stopping any sort of a virus. It’s part of the dehumanization of the children of God. You’re participating in it by wearing a mask—U.S. Representative Clay Higgins (Republican), Louisiana 3rd Congressional District
Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat—Theodore Roosevelt (Republican), 26th president
I just want to say to Nancy Pelosi, she’s a hypocrite, she’s an anti-American, and we’re gonna kick that bitch out of Congress—Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (Republican), Georgia 14th Congressional District
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed—Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president
Hey @MichaelCohen212 — Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot—U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz (Republican), Florida 1st Congressional District
Education is not the means of showing people how to get what they want. Education is an exercise by means of which enough men, it is hoped, will learn to want what is worth having—Ronald Reagan (Republican), 40th president
It appeared that [the terrorists] would have young women, who became pregnant, would get them into the United States to have a baby. And then they would turn back where they could be raised and coddled as future terrorists. Twenty, thirty years down the road, they can be sent in to help destroy our way of life—U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert (Republican), Texas 1st Congressional District
There…feel better now?
Can’t a blogger dream?
Ted Cruz praises Obamacare, Demands Investigation into Russian Hacking, Endorses Trump Impeachment “I realized, golly, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” says the senator. “This Texan doesn’t want to spend the Hereafter sharing an overheated dorm room with the Combover from Queens!”
Watching “Call My Agent” on Netflix While Eating Caramel Corn and Drinking Lager Beer Prevents COVID, Study Finds “We don’t know why it works, but it works,” states Dr. Fauci, who cautions, “but watching Disney+ makes it worse”
High Rate of Attempted Suicide Among Recent Presidential Medals of Freedom Medals awarded to Rush Limbaugh, Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan try to hang themselves by their own ribbons; express shame, embarrassment
Super Bowl Played With No Fans In Stadium Or watching on TV
Mysterious Illness Attacks COVID Deniers
California Approves Vaccine with Hemp Oil Additive Shot leaves patients immune to COVID and negativity
White Supremacists Face Financial Crisis Mom wants to know why Kyle is using her credit card to get stupid Army stuff
Trump Convicted in Senate by Vote of 2000-0 Every senator who ever served, dead or alive, makes effort to appear in person
‘Q’ to Followers: April Fool! Adds, ‘Wait, you didn’t actually believe that crap, did you?’
After Fixing Climate Change, Income Inequality, Virus, and Police Brutality, Biden to Address Secondary Issues Vows to make flying “coach” comfy again
Congress Outlaws Production, Sale, Ownership of Handguns They’re used to shoot people, study finds
There’s a certain kind of movie that I love, which I’ll try to describe here. It tells a simple but intriguing story, and tells it well, with an absence of sentimentality. It’s quiet: there’s little or no background music to tell us when to feel afraid, when to feel amused, when to feel pensive. Background music tends to appear only between scenes, as if to comment rather than explain. There is an absence of expository dialogue, so sometimes we’re confused on what is happening, a confusion which sometimes gets resolved, and sometimes never does. The director has the confidence to let the camera tell the story, or, more accurately, to skillfully contrive the illusion that the camera is telling the story. Or to put it yet another way (and why not—blog space is free) we have the illusion that the story is telling itself while we’re there, rather than having it shoved in our eyes and ears. Another aspect of these films is that they tend to be visually beautiful.
Some recent examples: Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning Roma (though I don’t buy the feminist-solidarity-conquers-class-inequality ending, and could do without the group hug on the beach, a made-for-TV moment). Martin Scorcese’s Silence. And now, Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
The story: A painter, a young woman, is taken on a frail rowboat to a rugged island off the coast of France (we’re not told where exactly, but it looks cold and Atlanticky, not warm and Mediterraneany). She has been hired by an impoverished aristocratic Italian widow to paint her daughter’s portrait. The daughter, who has been pulled out of a convent where she has been relatively happy, is to be married to a wealthy Milanese nobleman. The marriage will bring material comfort to mother and daughter, and fulfill the mother’s dream of returning to sunny Italy. But the man in Milan demands to see a portrait before he commits, and the young lady refuses to sit for one. The painter is to pretend that she’s simply the lady’s companion, taking every opportunity to gaze at her ward’s face, while working on the portrait from memory, at night.
That’s the setup, but it doesn’t begin to convey the spare, delicate way the story is told, or the depth of its characters, which is conveyed largely through looks and gestures. To give just one example, at the start of the film, we are with the young painter as she sits in the rowboat. Our perspective is gunwale-level, we are rocking violently, though the rowers don’t seem particularly anxious. We don’t yet know who the woman is or where she is going. As the boat lurches, the large wooden box the she is holding slips out of her hands into the water. The rowers keep rowing. The woman stands up and jumps into the sea to retrieve the box. That’s it: no hammering music, no shouts of, “Stop! I cannot part with my box!” We’re told just what we need to be told: this woman is fearless, and the crate contains something she cannot do without. Only later, when she is on shore and pries open the box, do we see that it contains pristine white canvasses, soaked in saltwater but still usable.
And the movie is visually gorgeous. You could freeze just about any frame of any scene at any moment, and you would have a marvelous painting. Which reminds me: another pleasure of this very painterly film is how we see the painting itself develop. And the more accurately the painter represents the beauty of her subject, the more she seals that subject’s doom in an arranged marriage.
The story is told, and the dilemmas are, if not exactly resolved, at least firmly dealt with, with no narrative cop-outs, no deus-ex-machina in the form of, say, an unexpected inheritance falling from the sky, or the scriptwriter’s pen, to make everything OK. But the attentive viewer will be rewarded with a couple of ingenious and (for me at least) satisfying clues on How Things Turn Out.
It’s simply a great experience to see a movie like this, a story well and confidently told, without the pawprints of a marketing-minded producer all over the finished product. I hope we get to see more like it.
The Garden of Eaton 