Origins of Wednesday lxviii: Only, our misplaced modifier

I spent a little bit of this
morning's coffee, trying to
rinse the grit from my eyes
of the latest Presidential
display of puerility, by im-
agining Dwight David Eisen-
hower, tidying the lapels
of Charles de Gaulle. Only
by admitting to myself, how
forgotten they are, was it
possible to regard that im-
age with any comprehension.

 The American President is a
 case study in the misplace-
 ment of an exclusive singular.
 Only because this is so cus-
 tomary, do we indulge his
 indiscipline as only routine.
 It'd be worse than bizarre,
 to see it as comprehensible.

Finding out things

[Freeman, holding forth as usual like
a professor]: "Scientists are still
trying to find out how pigeons can 
find their way home. We don't know
whether they can find their way by 
the stars." [George]: But I know that
camels find their way by the stars."
[Freeman]: "How do you know that?"
[George]: "Because when three wise men
were going to Bethlehem, the camels 
saw a star in the sky, and so they
knew where to go."

Esther is looking through an anthology

of children's poems: "That's funny, I 

wrote a poem called 'Daisy Song,' and 

now I see another author has written one 

too." [Freeman]: "Who is the other auth-

or?" [Esther}: "John Keats."

Freeman Dyson

La Jolla

April 19, 1959

Maker of Patterns

  An Autobiography

  through Letters

Liveright/Norton, 2018©

Suppose it were Friday cliii: And clear

The choice of an imagined future is always a matter of taste . .  I see human freedom as the goal and the creativity of small human societies as the means to achieve it. 

Freedom is the divine spark that causes human children to rebel against grand unified theories imposed by their parents.

At the age of 94, the theoretical physicist and mathematician, Freeman Dyson, has undertaken to present an unreasonably elegant review of a major new work of speculation in the social sciences. The extract, above, stands on its own, obviously, and suggests to me the spirit of the third figure in Dominique Isserman's image of the esplanade, more than Twombly's.

The choice of a vision of the present is always a matter of taste. With non-stop belligerent entertainment as the unified theory of the day, one turns with gratitude to the prospect of a weekend with the correspondences of a shimmering mentality. 

           A frequent contributor to The New York Review,

           Dyson laid out the stakes for the foregoing im-

           plication - that the mind most necessary to cri-

           tique is one's own - in a deeply well-informed

           review of the biography of Robert Oppenheimer,

           by Wittgenstein's leading biographer. (Kai Bird,

           author of the review cited here of Dyson's let-

           ters, wrote another one). Against the prodigious

           negative pressure of the day, to critique the un-

           ruly mentality of misrule in the nation, then and

           now, Dyson presented a devastating depiction of

           the cost the embattled path imposed on a stronger

           mind than most - and the rôle of companionship -

           [His wife} came to me with a cry for help. She

           implored me to collaborate with Robert in a piece

           of technical scientific work. She said Robert was

           desperate because he was no longer doing science,

           and he needed a collaborator to get him started ..

           His days as a scientist were over. It was too 

           late to cure his anguish with equations.

          

iv  Joe Collier

v   Oliver Houlby

Lower Broadway then and now

Every time one may be tempted to decry
a collapse in standards in an American
context, it is useful to remember that
there really never has been any such a
thing as a single context in this soci-
ety. There have been prevailing modes,
volatile but enduring visions, but the
only context of America is multilater-
al and fluid. This makes the biography
of the late Mrs. George Herbert Walker
Bush something of a study in tenacity.
This is Lower Broadway in her infancy.
It reeks of a single language, and we
are always reminded, language changes.

People are reflecting today on the il-
lusion that greed, the sine qua non of
Lower Broadway, even its raison d'être
as well, was so held in check by decor-
um and fastidiousness as to become civ-
ilized. All that was done was to limit
its reach by containing its popularity.
Those to whom greed was granted upheld
discretion and other concealment while
pursuing its ends, commissioning monu-
ments imparting aloofness more than os-
tentation. Mrs. Bush never failed this
style, even in the shadow of Reaganism.

She was as cognizant of the perils of
popularizing greed as her husband, who
denounced its euphoric propaganda for
the voodoo economics that it is, even
going on to betray it, having gulped
its toxins to serve his own ambitions.
The impression is awkward to struggle
against, that she conducted herself in
the constructs her context assigned to
her gender; but one is free to believe
that her trust in reticence would have
served the other well, holding power.

Charles Hellmuth

Lower Broadway

1920's

"I alone can do it"

      I suppose, trying to have one's

      way as President of the United

      States is a little like navigat-

      ing a vineyard on a skateboard.

It's just life's little accidents that people notice

   In yet another weekend where

   the debate rolled on, as to

   which of the American Presid-

   dent's incompetences poses a

   greater danger than any oth-

   er, it was unnerving to dis-

   cover that he couldn't keep

   his expulsions of Russian in-

   telligence agents to the min-

   imum he intended for the sake

   of flamboyant emptiness, al-

   lowing his staff to multiply

   everyone else's tiny purga-

   tions by the total number of

   expellers. What we all adore

   the most is how this allows

   his incompetence in command

   to claim the sovereign excuse

   of bureaucratic naughtiness.

   Pratfall, no. Scapegoats, yes.

   Meaning well is all his prop-

   agandists need; but betrayal,

   they can never have too much. 

   He'll never do what he means.

   

Demagogue of the Day, deposed

No, we couldn't believe it, either.
Joe DiMaggio batted safely in 56
straight games, one season, and
hearts sank, worldwide, when that
string was broken. Now, despite a
wonderfully full-throated roar of
self-praise (from the usual source)
for the most flamboyantly innocuous
act of righteous power since Gener-
al McClellan led the armies of the
American Union, a new claimant of
Demagogue of the Day recognition
has hit the ball out of the park.

A little context, for our innocent friends:
The United States is really a rather loose
association of 50 polities of scant mutual
interest, outside of resisting meddling by
the nation; and the education of children
is reserved to their sovereign negligence.

One such polity is called, Kentucky, a bas-
tion of poverty in every parameter except
the proof of its beverage and the hooves of
its thoroughbreds. The Governor, a Republic-
an of impeccable imbecility, has been at war
with educators and their ilk, and has drawn
repeated lines in the sand against learning
in public schools. Faced now with uprisings
among the teachers, he denounced their pro-
tests yesterday for causing the guaranteed 
molestation of children, indeed their fatal
poisoning, because the schools are closed.

Now, there's a real, adult male rôle model.

Aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter

    Ad hoc humanitarianism, amok.

    Menelaus, eat your heart out.

    From America, here we go again:

    neutering the Constitution and

    defying treaty accords we have

    authored, ourselves. This, to

    seduce our People into a self-

    abuse on behalf of a desperate

    incoherency of policy, to rat-

    ify the grotesque projections

    of a narcissist who's lost con-

    trol of a bad day's news cycle.

    From France and the United King-

    dom, verification that they are

    not documentarily restrained as

    America is, yet as incurably in-

    clined to claim the Levant as a

    sphere of disciplinary influence.