The New Yorker in New Hampshire

 

In the mid 20th century, moving to New Hampshire from New York City or from Washington, DC or any other sophisticated urban environment might have been a leap into a backwater, something like the scene of Dr. Zhivago stepping off the train from Moscow, with his family, at the Varykino train station in the Urals: you were launched into another world, not alone, but surely disconnected from the people, values and ideas you had lived with before. 

Of course, with the internet, with podcasts, even with the old fashioned snail mail delivery to your rural mail box, you can read what they are saying, hear what they are thinking in Manhattan just as much as if you really lived there. After all, when I lived in Manhattan, did I ever have lunch with David Remnick or Jane Mayer? No. I heard what they were thinking the same way I do now: I read the New Yorker. I might as well have been in New Hampshire, for all the actual connection I had with the minds at the New Yorker.

But listening to the New Yorker's podcast about the January 6th committee and its recommendation to the Justice Department that Donald Trump be prosecuted for his crimes of January 6, I can only marvel at how marvelously disconnected these urban sophisticates are from the rest of the country, as opposed to the other way round.

Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer describes the actions of John Eastman, one of Trump's "lawyers" and she has to pause to gather her breath when she describes how he recommended Trump simply refuse to accept the results of the election, while admitting the case he would make to the Supreme Court would almost surely fail, and she says, almost choking at the enormity of the risk Eastman was taking: "He could be DISBARRED!"

Oh, the Horror!

Susan Glasser

Ms. Glasser added that Mr. Eastman had admitted he thought the Supreme Court would have rejected his argument as if that is the same thing as saying he did not believe in his argument or that he thought they would be correct in doing so.  And he had such stellar "credentials" having clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas! As if clerking for Thomas proves you have been molded in the most clarifying fires, and have a mind like tempered steel! He must have know what he was saying and advocating was wrong!

No, actually, Ms. Glasser, I don't think serving as a clerk for just any Supreme Court Justice makes you a legal scholar, or even a smart lawyer.

John Eastman on Jan 6

I tried to imagine Ms. Mayer, Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser having their conversation in a diner in the 14th Congressional district of Georgia, the one that sent Marjorie Taylor Greene back to Congress with a 65% mandate, after she informed her constituents that the wildfires in California were started by  space lasers devised by the Jewish bankers, the Rothschilds, and after she advocated for the execution of Nancy Pelosi.

Evan Osnos

"Sophisticate" means, at its essence, "knowing." It suggests a type of knowledge from worldly experience, which, when gained, allows one to operate in a setting where the stated rules of church and state are well known, but broken, and other rules which allow people to pursue their pleasures or their own ideas, really prevail.

So, in that sense, these New Yorkers are essentially unsophisticated because they know only their own world, their own rules.

What would Ms. Mayer have said to the woman who took my passport ID photos at the local Walgreen's, who told me the charge was $16.99, "Which ought to satisfy the government, which makes you do this but doesn't do anything for you."

"How's that?" I asked.

"Well, when has the government ever done anything for you? The government isn't good for anything."

"Oh, I think the government is good for a lot of things, like Social Security and Medicare," I replied. 

"Yeah, and they won't even pay for COVID tests any more," she retorted.

I hardly knew where to begin with that one, as it implied she thought it was the role of government to offer free COVID tests, and, in fact, I had just that day read the government was once again sending out free tests, so I said, "Well, the government got the COVID vaccines done in a year, which was amazing.

"Yeah, and I got three vaccines and still got COVID twice and my husband didn't get any vaccine and never got it. And COVID only had a 0.5% mortality rate."

"Closer to 1% with the first go round of the virus. And that would have meant 3 million dead," I rejoined.

"Yeah, well, have a nice day," she said.

So, what would Evan have had to say to her?

What these three lovely and intelligent people focused on was the 1000 witnesses, the slow, methodical accretion of evidence the committee had created and the obvious malfeasance of Trump.

What they seem oblivious to is what the Walgreen's clerk knows instinctively: The truth is, as Roy Cohn once told Trump, "Don't tell me about the law; tell me about the judge."

The law is just one long argument and as Mr. Trump knows well, the longer you extend the argument, the less likely you'll ever have to pay a price.

What counts, in the end, is how you are judged and that depends on who is doing the judging--the 14th Georgia or the New Yorker.

Meritocracy, Again

 Reading a book called "The Meritocracy Trap" by Yale Law School Professor, Daniel Markovits, and having watched Michael Sandel's series of lectures at Harvard, in which he finally crystalizes his major objection to the idea of "meritocracy" as the psychological and social damage done by the idea--that meritocracy means the losers are made to feel they deserve to be losers and are unworthy--I was struck by how very prosaic and fundamentally banal the product of thought from these two ultra-elite professors really is.

Professor Markovits had a stellar career at Yale in math, graduating summa cum laude and then off to Oxford and the London school of economics where he got degrees in "econometrics" and other stuff before returning to Yale, where he got his J.D. 

But when you read his book, you find yourself saying: This is what all those highfalutin degrees gets the writer and the reader? Somewhere in the muddle of his argument the professor finds that meritocracy is responsible for deaths of desperation, a decline in life expectancy among non college educated white men, and stagnation in central Michigan near Lake St. Clair. 

Not getting into Yale did all that to those dying Midwesterners in those stagnant communities in the Rust Belt. 

He employs  a case study--a bartender who found he could live better in a small, stagnant middle class town in Michigan than he could in Seattle, where he felt like a loser compared to the high tech rich guys working at Amazon, Microsoft and Boeing. Yes, professor, as so many of us knew already, you can live better on less money outside the glamour cities, where rents and mortgages are set by the upper 1%. 

So far as I've got into his book, Dr. Markovits seems to blame the Ivy League and elite institutions for the ills of meritocracy, rather than the clueless titans of industry who make a B.A. degree a requirement for jobs which should not require a college education at all. 

As so many of us know, there are folks among our own friends and families who had the experience of being better at their jobs than those who were hired to manage them simply because those incompetent hires had  a college degree. 

General Electric wanted to make my friend a manager because, after 15 years on the line doing ultra high tech welding on airplane engines, he knew more than any of his managers, and all the managers kept going to him to find out how to organize the production line. When they called him in to promote him to management, they discovered he never did finish at the University of New Mexico and so, for want of that diploma, they couldn't promote him. He shrugged and said, "Fine, I like being a union worker."  He retired at age 54, after 35 years with the company, with a good pension, well before any of his siblings, all of whom had advanced degrees and professional careers.  He sits in front of his computer in his den watching the graphs and curves of his investment instruments, including several Vanguard accounts, and he travels with his wife all over the world.

His story reminds me of that classic Thomas Hardy poem, "The Ruined Maid" about the woman who laughed off the socially prescribed mores defining success and saw the truth by rejecting what society said was merit:

The Ruined Maid

BY THOMAS HARDY

"O 'Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!

Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?

And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?" —

"O didn't you know I'd been ruined?" said she.

— "You left us in tatters, without shoes or socks,

Tired of digging potatoes, and spudding up docks;

And now you've gay bracelets and bright feathers three!" —

"Yes: that's how we dress when we're ruined," said she.

— "At home in the barton you said thee' and thou,'

And thik oon,' and theäs oon,' and t'other'; but now

Your talking quite fits 'ee for high compa-ny!" —

"Some polish is gained with one's ruin," said she.

— "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak

But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,

And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" —

"We never do work when we're ruined," said she.

— "You used to call home-life a hag-ridden dream,

And you'd sigh, and you'd sock; but at present you seem

To know not of megrims or melancho-ly!" —

"True. One's pretty lively when ruined," said she.

— "I wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,

And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" —

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,

Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

And I think of my son's high school girlfriend, who was a star student, and the daughter of a mother who was a Yale graduate and who wanted her to go to Yale.  

She chose to transfer from an Ivy League school to join my son at a lesser institution, Vanderbilt, where he had spent a desultory first year, struggling to keep up his grade point average. When she arrived, she told him to stop studying more than he had to in any given subject. He would get fascinated by some topic and read beyond the assignment, leaving less time for other demands. "No," she told him, "You've done what you need to do for your 'A' in zoology,  now move on and do enough in the next subject for an 'A' there. this isn't about learning or fun or getting deep into things. This is about grades."

 From the time of her arrival, my son got nearly straight "A's" and he graduated magna cum laude and got into Columbia P&S, a very elite medical school. He did that by hardening into cynicism and he was a star there, as he reverted back to his tendency to get absorbed in subjects which fascinated him and he won the prize for best student in surgery and went on to become a vascular surgeon, a specialty which put to use some of his great strengths. We had despaired of his ever graduating college. 

The former girlfriend went on to get a PhD at Yale. But her ultimate career is instructive. After all those glittering academic prizes--she had as stellar a summa cum laude career as one could have--and then on to Yale, what did that mean for her ultimate financial and career fate? 

She went to work for the federal government, as had her mother before her.  The former girlfriend worked briefly at Ft. Dietrick, in a virus lab, but the went on to a more administrative job with the Department of Health and Human Services.

So how much does that elite education really determine the economic fate of American generations?  Markovits and Sandel think the meritocracy is pervasive and fate determining--like the university admissions process in Japan, where you either leap up into the stratosphere because you have got into the University of Tokyo, or you wind up stuck in the middle with the hoi polloi, working every day, living with your wife and her parents in an apartment at the outskirts of the city.

Of course, those graduates of the U. of Tokyo are also living with their wives and children with her parents in crowded apartments, but they are living in better neighborhoods.

Which makes me wonder what happens to all those wunderkind folks whose wedding announcements (advertisements) you read in the New York Times.  That woman who graduated from Princeton, went on to study at the Sorbonne for a degree in semiotics, and then Cambridge in philosophy and corporate anthropology and then a degree from Yale in public health and finally an MBA from Harvard. And she marries a guy who went to Princeton and then Yale Law and got a job with a fancy Washington, DC law firm, which is the actual source of their income, and none of those degrees earned by the wife mattered much to their status or income, because she now works for a non profit devoted to preserving architectural landmarks. 

So, yes, the academic pedigree might buy a job at Goldman Saks or some fancy law firm, but how long does that last? As so many of these high achievers discover the wash out rate at these places is high,  and they wind up working at less glamourous places, for less inspiring salaries.

Meanwhile, my HVAC guy visited my house this week, and the electrician is due any minute. And the plumber was in last week and all those guys live in New Hampshire in houses which are as roomy and comfortable as my own, but unlike me, they don't have diplomas from three different Ivy League institutions framed on their walls. I always ask them when they plan to retire and they tell me they could retire any time but they are having fun and they don't know what they'd do with their time that would be more satisfying.

I tell them about the Midwestern businessmen I meet on Viking tours and and they tell me they've been on Viking cruises and had fun, but they wouldn't want to live on a cruise boat.

And I have to agree with them. 

Harvard is just down the road and the folks wandering those lovely green yards are convinced they are masters of the universe and in the drivers' seats. But I'm not so sure.