Blind To Our Own Vulnerabilities

 

Growing up playing baseball, one of the most important things to learn was my own vulnerabilities:  Every pitcher looks for "the hole" in your swing. 

On Deck, Obadiah Youngblood

I could never hit inside pitches all that well--and curve balls, forget it. The first thing my good friend, (who was a pitcher) who really knew baseball, did for me was to introduce me to a hitting coach, who taught me how to hit the curve. Once I got that down, it was much harder for the opposition to get me out. (I continued to see a lot of inside pitches, but even that could be finessed.) Knowing that vulnerability and fixing it allowed me to win a lot more confrontations. 

Lovely Diversity

Now, the Democratic Party is failing because it does not see its own vulnerabilities, and if Trump is good at anything, it is to identify vulnerabilities, and to pitch to them. "Little Marco. Sleepy Jeb."

So Trump has picked on transgender politics and liberal DEI orthodoxy as the most obvious vulnerabilities. 

Transgender politics is the perfect example of taking a Democratic position, which affects a tiny percentage of people, and making it stand for all that is extreme and absurd in people who value consistency of thought and principle. 

Taking the small and making it the big. 

Exploiting reductio ad absurdum. 

If you believe in transgender rights, well,  then you would be willing to allow some transgender male to female to run over your daughter on the field hockey field, or to demolish her in swimming meets. That's how unhinged you are!

Mediocre Male Swimmer, Now Champion Female Swimmer

I've addressed what is wrong with the Democrats' approach to transgender politics ad nauseam in other posts and it boils down to "I am all for treating everyone with respect and kindness and sympathy, but that doesn't mean I can embrace transgender athletes."  Nobody objects to a former girl playing on a boy's team; what upsets people is a former boy playing on a girl's team. Rare as that may be, it makes you look like an unrepentant extremist if you refuse to see the problem there. You look like you are on the side of the bullies.

And don't get me started on pronouns. As if the entire English speaking world should switch from "she went to town to get a haircut and facial" to "they went to town..."

Not going to happen.

As Dave Chappelle has said, "I support anyone's right to  be who they want to be. My question is: To extent do I have to participate in your self image."

And then there is DEI.  It sounded so good, initially. Sure, I'm all for Starship Enterprise, a nation where everyone has a fair shot and the outcome of that, we all thought, would be school photos of classes with kids of every race and girls and boys all smiling happily in one big family. Like those United Colors of Benetton ads.  But that is not the way it worked out. 

United Colors of Benneton

What happened was the outcome of those happy, diverse groups we had hoped for did not happen automatically. Diversity is a virtue in a group, but it is not an individual virtue. An individual cannot be diverse; at most an individual can have a different perspective and contribute to diversity as that group meets and discusses things. But choosing a Black face does not mean the individual that face belongs to actually is much different from people with white faces.  

Preference was given individuals because of their color or gender and that preference overwhelmed the stated rules which had previously defined meritocracy (test scores, grades.) 

Resentment grew and in response to that, DEI proponents started setting up loyalty tests: New faculty in engineering and science were asked, "What will you do, if you get this job, to advance diversity, inclusion and equity in your classroom?"  In an engineering classroom? In a physics classroom? In a mathematics classroom? You had to declare your allegiance to the idea, to the gospel of DEI to get hired. I pledge allegiance to the banner of DEI. 

The fact is, diversity is a joy and a value we can embrace as a feature of a group, but if diversity comes down to assigning a virtue value to your non White face, that is a different story. Diversity is a value in a group; diversity is not a personal merit.  

As George Carlin said, you can be proud of something you have personally accomplished, but being proud of being Black or Irish or Hispanic is absurd. That is an accident of birth, not an accomplishment. And that is also true of diversity, being a face of color--this is not a merit and should not be assigned points in a meritocracy.

Now, of course, it is also true that there are many jobs and college freshmen classes which could be filled by a lottery without appreciably affecting the quality of those work crews and classes. 

Most of our "qualifications" are arbitrary and absurd. There's a wonderful ad on TV with a man interviewing a woman for a job, and he tells her she could clearly do the job well, but "the job requires a college degree, any college degree" for her to be hired. 

And she says, "I need a college degree for this job I've done for the past 10 years without one?" 

"Yes," he tells her. 

"And what was your college degree in?" she asks.

"Dance," he replies. 

"Dance?" she says.

And there you have it, meritocracy in practice.

We can all see the absurdity of this idea of meritocracy in the ad, but are our cherished SAT and high school grades any less arbitrary or absurd? Can you tell me a single question from the last SAT exam?   How much do you know about the SAT exam? Last I saw, the SAT predicted the performance of students for the first semester in college but had no correlation to who made Phi Beta Kappa or went on to other scholastic honors in college. And yet, it's taken as an IQ test.  And it is very much a test which you can pay money to prep for and do better as a result.

And high school grades?  Look at who is doing the judging in high school. When you look at the high school teachers at Winnacunnet High, do you see folks you think should be choosing the freshman class at Harvard or Brown?

We could fill most positions by lottery, after a low hurdle is passed. The virtue of a lottery is at least we all know it is by definition, arbitrary. It's luck.

And now we have a meritocracy at colleges which looks to your embrace of the gospel of "Diversity" as a merit badge.

And the gospel does not affect just new hires. The president of Harvard, Larry Summers, a graduate of MIT, ruminated on the relative paucity of females at MIT and in Harvard's engineering and math and science classes and he, impolitically, thinking out loud, asked  if females might have less aptitude for math and science.  

He might have asked, "Does the Y chromosome give males some sort of advantage in these areas?" But he wasn't that smart, and the orthodox folks at Harvard, who accept as a matter of faith that women and men have equal capacities in all academic disciplines (which is likely true, but still) howled bloody murder,  and the liberal outrage deposed him and he was gone. 

Summers detractors on the Harvard faculty could have said, "Well, Larry, interesting question, but show us the numbers, the studies, which show that women have lower math/science aptitude than men. Surely, that is a testable hypothesis." 

That response was never even a consideration. He had uttered heresy and had to be removed as president. Can't have a president of the college questioning the basic dogma. 

This was intolerance of questioning; this was punishing anyone who had the temerity to challenge the gospel, intolerance of challenging orthodoxy, and it meant he would not be tolerated on campus.

After 50 years of affirmative action, there are now more women in medical schools and colleges than men.  And that was not mostly because of some special preference. It happened for a variety of reasons, but no special program or preference was needed. 

Somehow, however, once affirmative action preferences were removed for people of color, the percentages of Blacks and Hispanics at universities across the nation plunged.  Interestingly, the presence of Black males has been especially obvious. Black females continue to hold places in universities but Black males are becoming increasingly rare, for reasons I do not understand.

Liberal orthodoxy has meant that certain questions cannot be openly examined, that challenges to the way transgenders are treated are verboten. When Paul McHugh questioned whether the approach to transgenders might be wrong--given the 40% suicide rate at almost all transgender clinics nationwide--he was hounded out of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Now, Mr. Summers publishes an op ed  in the New York Times about the capitulation of universities to the inquisition from Trumpworld, which aims to dismantle elite universities, or at the very least, to replace the liberal orthodoxy with a reactionary orthodoxy:

"The Trump administration’s threats to withdraw billions of dollars in funding are little more than extortion. They must be resisted using all available legal means. Columbia University’s recent capitulation, in which it agreed to a raft of changes in an attempt to avoid losing hundreds of millions in funding, must not be emulated. Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.

As in most confrontations, the merits in this one are far from one sided. Critics of elite universities, including Harvard, where I am a professor, are right that they continue to tolerate antisemitism in their midst in a way that would be inconceivable with any other form of prejudice, that they have elevated identity over excellence in the selection of students and faculty, that they lack diversity of perspective and that they have repeatedly failed to impose discipline and maintain order.

And universities’ insistence that they be entirely left alone by their federal funders rings hollow in light of the enthusiasm they greet micromanagement when they approve the outcome, such as threats from Washington to withhold funds unless men’s and women’s athletic budgets were equalized."

--Larry Summers, NYT op ed

Ironically, one of the most famous examples of liberal intolerance to questioning orthodoxy, now calls for liberals to stand up and resist.

Until and unless liberals (and I am one) face the weakness in their own arguments, face the absurd places their own dogma has carried them, Trump, Vance and all those creepy crawlies who have emerged from under the rocks they had been hiding, will rule the planet.  

The magnificent dinosaurs could not survive the extinction events. 

Hopefully, Democrats will prove capable of fixing the holes in their swings.

Base Hit At Frederick, Obadiah Youngblood

Getting Noticed: Fifty Thousand Voices, All Talking At Once

45 years ago, Mad Dog exulted in the news that his first book was accepted for publication. 

Gustave Wiegand, Blue Lake

It was an improbable story, taken off the "slush pile," after having been rejected at 20 New York publishing houses, but one reader, an oddball gig worker named Brendan Boyd, who read manuscripts for a publisher with offices in Boston and New York, read it on his breaks at a Boston bookstore, where he worked, and told the publisher to publish it, and Mad Dog thought his ship had finally come in.

"Publishing is not a dream fulfilled," Brendan told Mad Dog. "It's a nightmare."

Gustave Wiegand, Springtime, New Hampshire

Mad Dog was too delirious to listen, but then he got sent down to the annual Booksellers Convention, this one in Washington, D.C., and he rode up on the escalator to the 2nd floor, where all the publishers had their displays, and stepping off the escalator, he looked around and saw Brendan's point. That year, 1981, there were 50,000 books published. Mad Dog looked around, and it was like trying to find one penguin among those throngs on the beach in "Planet Earth." 

Then it hit him: his one book, although published, printed, was a single peep among a huge expanse of birds.

In 2024, there were roughly 2.2 million books published.

How do you ever get heard, even if your idea, your voice, your story is the most magnificent of the year?

In fact, Mad Dog's book was nowhere close to the most magnificent of that year, and it was never heard of again. It was ignored, hardly reviewed, unnoticed, likely deservedly.

Actually, that's an over simplification, for purposes of clarity: The book did get one single, glowing review in the Washington Post Book World, front page, but what the reviewer liked about the book was its verisimilitude, its dark depiction of a hospital and the doctors, a sort of Nordic Noir, but Medical Noir, and the droves of people who streamed to local bookstores discovered the book had a bodice ripper cover which belonged on a romance novel, and so they left without the book, and if it ever had an audience, it never found it. So there is a case of a voice heard as a chirp, but then lost in the vicissitudes of marketing. So many things have to go right for a rocket to be launched. 

Gustave Wiegand

This Spring the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will do an exhibit of Van Gogh's paintings from his time at Arles, when he lived with the Roulin family, and he painted its members and he painted a number of scenes around their home.  When you get off the boat along the Seine, at Arles, you walk past a church and outside the church is a one foot square display of a Van Gogh painting of that church, and the town is dotted with other such displays in front of places he painted and you look at the things he painted, and you look at how he saw them, and you realize he was seeing things you could not see. 

Pink House, Obadiah Youngblood

Van Gogh was virtually unknown in his own time.

But, somehow, years later, we can all see his brilliance.

Andy Warhol gave away his paintings, strategically. Mad Dog was part of a group of friends from New York City who rented a summer house in East Hampton and one day, a woman named Nancy,  lying on her back in a bed in one of the rooms focused on what looked like a child's painting, which was unframed, but mounted on a board on the wall next to her bed. At the bottom of the painting was an inscription: "For Linda, From Andy."

Nancy pulled on her bikini and wandered out to the dining room table, where Mad Dog was mangling a  bagel, and she asked, "What was the name of that family on the lease for this place?"

Van Gogh and His Brother at Arles

As it happened, Mad Dog had signed the lease, and he somehow remembered: "Eastman," Mad Dog told her. "I remember because it's East Hampton and the name was Eastman. East, Eastman. Get it?"

Warhol

 

"Come with me," Nancy instructed, and Mad Dog followed her down to the bedroom, his hopes and curiosity rising in tandem--Nancy was a good looking woman. "Look at that," Nancy said. 

Mad Dog looked at the painting and said, "So?"

"So!" Nancy said. 

"Some kid painted..." Mad Dog said.

"To Linda," Nancy said, "Linda Eastman."

"Paul McCartney's Linda Eastman?" Mad Dog said.

"Yes, of course! Who would likely own a place in East Hampton she didn't use in the summer? And what Andy would give her a little sketch?"

"Andy Warhol?"

"Absolutely," said Nancy. "Who else?"

And that is one strategy for getting noticed. Give your stuff to famous people, rich famous people, and hope they hang it in their homes and then other people will want your stuff. 

If only Van Gogh had thought of that.

Three Hawks, Obadiah Youngblood

Somehow, some people with talent do get noticed.

Bob Dylan pursued Woody Guthrie, and he got Pete Seeger to put him on the stage at the Newport Folk Festival, and he played the Bitter End in Greenwich Village. 

Linda Ronstadt hung out with the Eagles, Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. 

Sometimes, groups of people can help each other get noticed.

But what if you want to start a political movement?

Hitler hung out at the beer hall in Munich.

Hamilton hung out with Aaron Burr and a bunch of friends in New York.

Locke 8, C&O Canal Obadiah Youngblood

But how many Van Goghs, Dylan's, Hamilton's never get noticed, never get heard? 

Gustave Wiegan, The Birches, Schroon Lake

In a Democracy, a government of, by and for the people means everyone has a voice, but if everyone is speaking and not enough people listening, what happens?