The Chattering Class

 

My father did not fish, play ball, jog, play a musical instrument. (He did play opera on the radio, which was enough to drive me and my brother out of the house, but that was, mercifully, only on Sundays.)

Edward Steed, The New Yorker 1/19/26

He did go to the gym and pump iron.

When he was in his twenties he played handball.

But when I knew him, he mostly read. 

He read the Washington Post and on Sundays, The New York Times. And there were always books scattered around. Reading what others wrote seemed important to him. This was before there was way more written and easily accessible than you can possibly consume. 

The only political rally he ever attended, to my knowledge, was the famous  March on Washington, Wednesday, August 23, 1963. The rally was at the Lincoln Memorial, and people fanned out along the reflecting pool, and he had some time off from work that day, what with all the disruptions from people flooding into Washington, D.C., and his office was not far from the Mall so he wandered over. When he got home that night, he remarked that he had stood around and listened to some of the speakers and he particularly liked one of them. 

"Haven't heard rhetoric like that since Roosevelt," he said, admiringly. 

My brother turned on the TV with the news in the other room--it was about dinner time and the evening news, which then came on only at one hour of the day, was on and there was Martin Luther King in the midst of his "I have a Dream" speech and Pop pointed at the TV, "Yes! That's him. That's the guy!"

My brother and I watched it with him, and my mother wandered in and we all watched and listened. 

"Now, that's rhetoric," my father added after King finished.

My brother was home from college, it being August, and I was 16 and had worked at the swimming pool all day. My mother, a school teacher, was in the last week before she was going back to work. We were all home that evening. I don't recall my mother saying anything, but she was smiling as she listened. I don't recall us talking about it.

We all had our lives--my brother was headed back to his senior year in college, and after that, medical school. "Current events," i.e. politics were of interest but didn't affect us personally, in our home in suburbia, or at least it didn't until some years later, after my brother graduated medical school, and got sent to Vietnam. 

As the civil rights and anti-war movements picked up momentum, I would go to anti war marches during my summer breaks home from college. 

Four years later, I was working at the National Institutes of Health for my summer job, and I met Mickey Hitchens, a Black Howard University medical student, who worked in our lab. There was a ravishing blonde woman who worked in the lab, Sue Hayes, from New Jersey who went out with us to various bars Mickey knew, where they snatched your beer bottle as soon as you drained it because they didn't want those bottles used in bar fights. 

We went down to the Washington monument for some demonstration one evening and they sang "We Shall Overcome," and Sue sang along, but Mickey winked at me as we were walking back to our car and he said, "She sings it, but she doesn't feel it." 

I had no idea what he was talking about. Later, I understood, when I got to know her better. 

She looked a lot like a mix of Goldie Hawn and Julie Christie--same blue eyes and blonde hair, but Sue was prettier. I didn't care much about her political views, actually. I was 20. I had hormones. People nowadays talk about how kids don't care about big issues because they are too focused on their iPhones. We didn't care because of hormones. Probably the same thing works today.

All this is to say, people have their own lives and events and issues are not what drive most people.

So I read a Substack article about Heather Cox Richardson written by Nate Silver, who apparently is envious of HCR's huge Substack audience. She is the leader of one of the three factions of the Democratic party: 1.The Richardson Resistance Libs faction. 

The other two factions are: 

2.The Capital L left faction  

3. The Abudance Libs (led by Ezra Klein) 3. 

Personally, I have never understood all the attention given to the number of hits or the number of "viewers" thing which seems to obsess Silver, PBS News and even Paul Krugman. I sign up for lots of Substacks, the freebie option, and maybe read the first sentence.

I understand if you pay for your Substack subscription, the author gets money and Silver estimates HCR makes millions from her Substack which has millions of "subscribers."

But if most of her subscribers are like me, they've stopped actually reading her posts.

I never pay for stuff like that and I don't often read HCR's Substacks any more because it's like listening to myself think--no new insights. Yes, yes, yes. Yada. Yada. Maybe if she spent more time examining the opposing arguments, if she did the aude alteram partem thing--hear the other side--it might be more engaging. But she is really just one polemic after another. 

Krugman (who I also get for free) I do read, until the charts and Paul Offit's Substack I read all the way through every time. Offit starts with the latest inanity from RFKJR, playing a video of him croaking out his argument and then Offit takes it point by point and demolishes the whole thing, in particular, at length, thoroughly.

Krugman at least mentions the stupid things his prey have said, but then blows them up with graphs and charts and math I sort of follow.

Am I influenced by HCR? 

It's really all just stuff I already thought, but maybe I get a phrase or two I can use if I ever find myself debating a MAGAhead, but I almost never do debate MAGots now. 

Which, by the way, brings me to the topic of argument : I'm sorry to see Sig Sauer Savant bow out from commenting on this very small blog, with no where near a million viewers. He got sucked in commenting on "Anonymous," who I long ago realized is not actually a living breathing human being, but a robot and it seemed really weird to be going back and forth in heated debate with something which is no more sentient than a slot machine at a casino.

This bot comes very close to sounding like HAL (in the Stanley Kubrick movie "2001") which sounds very human or humanoid, but eventually, the human protagonist realizes HAL has gone rogue and has to be undone, and so wires get pulled and HAL winds down and ultimately winds up singing, in a very slow dirge, "Daisy, Daisy," which was one of the first songs this prototype for AI had been taught. And that's where, I'm afraid, BOT ANON is, winding down, spinning out the early stuff. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U0XpiqxXZ0

Sig Sauer Savant, is clearly a human being, with a back story, an evident military background, and I'm guessing some post deployment job in police or security but clearly a fondness for guns. And, this being a New Hampshire blog and Sig Sauer having its headquarters here...well, we can draw our own conclusions. 

But anyway, all I meant to say is there is reading, and listening and politics as a hobby, but in reality, most of us have our real lives we live until we are personally faced with some hooded goon on the street, but until we are mugged we don't think much about the police, or the government or what going from democracy to totalitarianism means for us individually.