On a ‘national divorce’; a nation of smoke shops; the purpose of a college education; Latin lovers; and more
In 2020, David French came out with a book called “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” I thought it was maybe a little . . . premature? Alarmist? Then I read the book — darn good book. Really good. Probing, thoughtful, and deep. I wrote about it here.
David meant his book to be a warning — a warning of what could come to pass. He was also offering a prescription. How do you stave off dissolution? In short, by a rediscovery, a re-embracing, of pluralism.
Again, the title of David’s book is “Divided We Fall.” But his original title — his working title — was “The Great American Divorce.” I thought of a movie from the 1960s: Divorce American Style. It was popular, I recall. (The movie, I mean. But divorce, too.)
By now, you’ve probably heard the latest from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from Georgia, who is increasingly a force in her party and on the American right in general. She has forged an alliance with the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. He may be more dependent on her than she is on him.
In a recent tweet, Greene said,
We need a national divorce.
We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.
Everyone I talk to says this.
I think that’s possibly true — that everyone she talks to says that.
Will the idea pick up steam? This idea of a national divorce? I’m afraid it might. But there are complications to work out. Take the congresswoman’s home state of Georgia. It is a “red state,” everyone can agree. And yet — Biden won the state in 2020. Georgia’s two U.S. senators are Democratic.
What will happen to the Democrats in Georgia? Will there be population transfers?
If we are, in fact, to be two Americas, I hope I wind up in the America that has the U.S. Constitution, the Stars & Stripes (with however many stars), the national anthem (in the key of B flat), the Statue of Liberty — and lots of other good and American things.
In a column published last week, Kevin D. Williamson writes,
I do not blame Marjorie Taylor Greene for being what she is any more than I blame an oyster for not being Itzhak Perlman. The same is true for Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, George Santos, and the rest of the Republican clown show. I do blame the people who have benefited politically and financially from elevating these lunatics and grifters and for putting them in a position that obliges us to worry about their proposal to smash the country to bits in a tantrum.
I agree with Kevin entirely.
• Tocqueville, I am not, and I’m not even Charles Kuralt — but I get around a bit. Get around a bit in America. And everywhere I go now, I see smoke shops. Head shops. Weed shops. Whatever you want to call them. And I fear that the zombification of America proceeds apace.
Sell an addictive product, and the people will come. No wonder there’s a smoke shop on every block. I’m surprised there aren’t two (and there are two or more, depending on the block).
If our civilization collapses, archeologists may dig through the rubble and wonder at the smoke shops — surmising that these were drivers of our collapse.
• The other day, a man was begging at an intersection. My mother rolled down her window to hand him some nutrition bars. He said, “I don’t want that. I want weed.”
Honest.
• Every time I write about weed and other drugs, some people say, “What about alcohol, man!” Oh, baby, if you only knew whom you were talking to . . .
• There’s a college education — a traditional liberal-arts education. And there’s professional training. Both are very important. They even overlap. But they are different.
Harvey Mansfield emphasized this point to me in a podcast last fall. (He is the venerable professor of political philosophy at Harvard.)
“What’s a college education good for?” It’s good for knowing more than you did before college. For expanding your horizons. For acquiring a richer mental life. For getting acquainted with “the best that has been thought and said in the world” (Matthew Arnold).
“What kind of job will it lead to?” All sorts of jobs, probably — but that’s not the point of a college education, exactly. A college education is supposed to provide “knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”
Which may be a luxury, to be sure. Also, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
Did you see this story? “Marymount University’s Board of Trustees unanimously passed a plan on Friday morning that will eliminate nine majors, most of which are in the humanities field.” These majors include history, math, English, and philosophy. A university spokesman said that students are more interested in majors such as information technology, cybersecurity, and nursing.
Great. But . . .
Again, I quote Kevin Williamson, who writes, “A university in which there are no undergraduate studies in literature or history is not a university . . .”
True.
Everyone knows the words from Matthew Arnold that I have quoted above. But I have searched out the fuller context — and will paste a fuller quotation. Speaking of his book Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold wrote,
The whole scope . . . is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically . . .
Wonderful stuff.
• In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd had a wonderful column on John Leguizamo, the comedian and actor. I loved him on House of Buggin’, in the mid-’90s. Dowd sat down for a conversation with him.
Hispanic characters, Leguizamo thinks, ought to be played by Hispanic actors. Writes Dowd,
His complaints are encyclopedic, from Charlton Heston — “the whitest person on the planet” — playing a Mexican in Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil,” to Al Pacino playing a Cuban, Tony Montana, in “Scarface.” Pacino was an acting hero, “but he’s not Latin.”
So many things to say. The original “Latin lover,” Rudolph Valentino, was Italian. (So is Al Pacino, or an Italian American.)
Have I ever told you about my friend Pat Gigliotti? I feel sure I have. His parents gave him the name “Pasquale,” but an Irish nun had trouble pronouncing it and called him, instead, “Pat” — which stuck.
He grew up in Kansas City. There were mothers who wouldn’t allow their daughters to date him, on grounds that he wasn’t “white.” Italians weren’t “black,” exactly; but they weren’t “white” either. Later in life, Pat lived in L.A. — where he was considered an “Anglo.”
“I couldn’t tell whether that was a promotion or a demotion,” was Pat’s quip.
Other people — the non-“Anglos” — were “Latinos.” But, hang on, what about the Latin lover, Signor (not Señor) Valentino?
America is a funny country, never more so than on issues of race and ethnicity.
• You will want to know about a woman from Washington, D.C., whose neighbors know her as “Grandma.” She was driving to a chemotherapy appointment when a 15-year-old kid tried to carjack her. He told her, “Give me your keys, I got a gun.” Grandma answered, “Baby, you better shoot me, because you’re not taking my car.”
(Story here.)
• There is such a thing as literary journalism — pieces of writing that hover between journalism and literature. Let me recommend a piece in the New York Times by Dan Barry, about con-men on a South Jersey boardwalk. Marvelous. Ought to be anthologized.
Go here.
• In Impromptus, I write a lot about Left and Right, righties and lefties. Well, have you met Jurrangelo Cijntje? The young man at Mississippi State who pitches both righthanded and lefthanded? Holy smokes, what a thrower. A “switch-pitcher” — so rare.
Here.
• “James Abourezk, the First Arab American Senator, Dies at 92.” That is the headline over this obit. Allow me a memory.
When I was quite young, I was in love with politics. (Hard to believe, at this remove. I think politics was more innocent then, and I know I was.) When the secretary of the Senate called the roll, he would begin, “Mr. Abourezk.”
I can just hear the secretary’s voice: “Mr. Abourezk . . .”
The roll of the Senate is called in alphabetical order, mind you.
Soon, the first name on the list was “Abdnor.” “Mr. Abdnor . . .” Senator Abdnor, like Senator Abourezk, was a “James” from South Dakota.
What were the odds?
Anyway, a happy Tuesday to political geeks and non-geeks alike. See you later.
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