The Explanation Is There Isn't One

 

My early morning walks—when I rarely see another person or sometimes not even hear a passing car, and deliberately avoid podcasts or music—make me unusually aware of each moment and every subtle change along my familiar two-mile round trip route. Recently, a raccoon lurking in the shadows startled me. (I've encountered bobcats before, which is considerably more startling.) Those wildlife sightings have led me to adopt perhaps the least intimidating defense ever devised: carrying a golf ball in my pocket.

 

My strategy is simple. If confronted by an aggressive animal, I hope to throw a golf ball hard enough at it to at least startle it, clap my hands like a deranged scarecrow, and, if necessary, sing God Bless America as loudly and as off-key as possible. Surely even a determined bobcat would conclude there are easier breakfasts elsewhere. Fortunately, the plan has yet to be tested.

 

Our community also warns residents about alligators in the ponds. As I walk along the golf course, I'm always aware of where those bodies of water are and how far I might have to run should a gator decide to give chase. Since they are said to reach speeds approaching 35 miles per hour over short distances, I comfort myself by deciding that the odds are overwhelmingly in my favor as I will be nearby homes and boldly step outside each morning around six.

 

Only a month ago, during the summer solstice, dawn had already broken when I left the house. Day by day the light has quietly retreated, and now, only weeks later, it is nearly dark when I begin my walk. If the laughably named "Sunshine Protection Act" (who dreams up these titles—AI?) ever becomes law, Florida schoolchildren may find themselves standing at bus stops in darkness, vulnerable to drivers who can't see, well before sunrise. As for me, I suppose I'll become even more attractive to raccoons and alligators, creatures that also seem to appreciate the hours before dawn. Apparently that's a small price to pay if it means the President can squeeze in another few holes of golf before sunset.

 

Some "sunshine protection."

 

Meanwhile, smoke from wildfires periodically settles over parts of Florida. And no, Canada isn't to blame for failing to rake its leaves in our case. We have our own climate-induced problems. Recently, a stretch of the Florida Turnpike south of here had to close because of wildfires. I haven't yet heard that the other forty-nine states intend to impose a 50 percent tariff on Florida goods as punishment.

 

These are the sorts of thoughts that accompany my morning walks. They also accompany the writing of this blog. There is always something to think about, something to observe, and something to puzzle over. Whether any of it ultimately matters is another question entirely. I write for much the same reason I play the piano every day. At this stage of life, I find my inner life more satisfying than the traveling, boating, and busy social calendar that once seemed indispensable.

 

During those early "go-go years"of retirement, I somehow found time to write even more frequently than I do now. Perhaps that reflected greater energy, or perhaps simply a different rhythm of life. Now, in what retirement experts cheerfully call the "slow-go years," solitary pursuits seem increasingly appropriate and reading whenever my mind can still settle into a novel. Ann, fortunately, remains a voracious reader, perhaps because fiction offers a welcome refuge from today's world.  We are trying to dance as fast as we can as we gradually approach the "no-go years," although I hope they remain comfortably in the distance.

 

Artificial intelligence has added another layer to these reflections. I'm fascinated not only by what it can do for me but also by what it may be taking from me. After nearly twenty years of writing this blog, I've accumulated what amounts to a substantial archive. Much of it concerns family history and personal opinions that probably interest very few people but some of my theater and book reviews are widely read.

 

Out of curiosity, I asked one AI system about a subject I knew was covered exclusively in my blog. Sure enough, it produced an answer largely drawn from what I had written years ago. Older posts are actually more likely to appear because Google once indexed independent blogs far more generously than it does today.

 

I pointed out that I recognized the material because, in essence, I had written it. As obsequious as these systems can sometimes be, it immediately congratulated me on being the author of the "venerable Lacunae Musing." Taking the bait, I mentioned that over twenty years I had probably written close to a million words. The AI replied that I was "a human large language model." Mutual admiration can become exhausting, so we politely ended the conversation.

 

For complete disclosure, I should add that an AI agent has reviewed this very essay for logical development and copy editing. The observations, opinions, and tone, remain entirely my own.

 

As I edge toward those "no-go years," I've begun thinking seriously about moving this blog to the Substack platform. I admire many of the writers there and already subscribe to several, but the technical aspects of migrating the content is yet another challenge to address.

 

One Substack author who particularly caught my attention is Tim Kreider, who amusingly describes himself as "a writer, cartoonist, and person in the world." Beginning as a political cartoonist seems almost ideal preparation for becoming a political essayist. Cartoonists have long understood that the quickest route to truth often runs through absurdity.

 

That brings me to Kreider's recent Substack essay, The Arbogast Fallacy: An Alternative Explanation for "Sanewashing."

I've argued before that Donald Trump's political mind is almost reptilian — reactive rather than reflective, impulse driven rather than deliberation. Kreider reaches much the same conclusion, but develops it with such clarity that I found myself nodding almost continuously as I read it.

 

The essence of "The Arbogast Fallacy" (its title drawn as a clever metaphor from the film Psycho) is that journalists and political commentators consistently overanalyze a man who requires very little analysis. Trained to search for elaborate strategies, ideological consistency, or hidden motives, they assume complexity where none exists. His behavior is more accurately explained by immediate impulses:  demanding attention, making as much money as possible in his position, and guaranteeing his self-preservation. As Kreider memorably observes, commentators keep "writing think pieces about a guy who doesn't." 

 

That simple observation explains far more than countless hours of televised political analysis. Every action and reaction seems ultimately directed toward those same goals, with self-preservation perhaps becoming the dominant one as the midterm elections approach.

 

Kreider persuaded me that perhaps the explanation isn't hidden at all. We keep assuming there must be some elaborate strategy because that's how we expect consequential leaders to behave. We search for depth because the consequences are so profound. But perhaps there are no hidden chambers to explore—only instinct, ego, and self-preservation played out on the largest political stage imaginable.

 

What remains unexplained isn't the man. It is us. How did a political culture, a Congress, and a Supreme Court entrusted with preserving constitutional government become so willing to normalize perpetual chaos?

 

Tomorrow morning I'll head out again with my golf ball in my pocket, keeping one eye on the raccoons and the other on the gathering darkness. Those are hazards I understand.

 

It's the human world that has become so difficult to explain.  Perhaps that is because the explanation is there isn't one.

Mike Luckovich Art of the Steal

How Calm Becomes a Political Act

 

I’ve written a lot about politics in this space — usually zoomed in close, responding to the outrage du jour rather than stepping back for the big picture. I’ve long argued that political cartoonists have a rare gift for distilling truth into a single, clarifying image, such as this one by Barry Blitt of The New Yorker that captures the feeling of Thanksgiving this year. It’s ironic, then, that the most incisive political analysis I’ve come across recently comes from a former cartoonist turned writer: Tim Kreider’s new Substack essay, Sang Froid: The Case for Keeping One's Cool.

What sets it apart is not simply the macro-argument, what Trumpism is—how we’ve arrived here, and how democracies slide into authoritarianism—but its structure. Kreider frames the entire piece around a real event from his girlfriend’s youth: a terrifying encounter with a man she later in life recognized as the serial killer Israel Keyes. At seventeen, alone on a mountain trail, she survived by doing the counterintuitive thing: she stayed calm, engaged him directly, made eye contact, and refused to accept the victim role he was trying to impose. Her composure didn’t guarantee her safety, but it allowed her to navigate a situation in which panic would likely have been fatal.

 

That story becomes Kreider’s central analogy for our lethal national moment — when the danger is obvious to anyone who isn’t in denial, yet the rituals of normalcy compel us to behave as if things are merely “unprecedented” or “norm-breaking” rather than openly authoritarian.

 

This, I think, is the problem with the newly conciliatory Bill Maher, who now preaches a sort of kumbaya politics that feels more like a policy for “getting along” than one of resistance. For me, January 6 and everything that followed makes that approach unworkable.

Kreider would likely argue that this is also the problem with much of the traditional media: the persistent fantasy that “the system will hold” if only both sides show enough respect and tolerance. Where Kreider and Maher might actually agree is in their fear that the moment we drop the pretense of dialogue altogether, things could tip from a cold civil conflict into a hot one.

 

With that in mind, Kreider urges a different kind of resistance: to continue exhausting every legal and democratic tool available — courts, protests, boycotts, the defense of immigrants, insistence on due process, and protection of fair elections. The goal is not moral purity but tactical advantage: foul the authoritarian machinery from within the confines of legitimacy, buying time until circumstances shift. And when they do, the very Republicans who have bent the knee to Trump may ultimately turn on him the instant he becomes a liability.

 

In the end, what Kreider offers is a reminder that composure is a strategy that neither underestimates the danger nor romanticizes resistance. We only have to keep the machinery of democracy running long enough for the forces opposing it to exhaust themselves or turn on one another. And as his girlfriend’s story makes clear, survival sometimes depends less on bold, dramatic gestures than on the simple refusal to play the role the aggressor has written for you.

 

Full circle now, with Thanksgiving in mind. Fifteen years ago I marked the holiday with a photograph of my younger family and a warning about “increased polarization in this country.” That was during the Tea Party’s rise — a tremor we now recognize as the prelude to all that followed. So I’ll end as I did then, with something simple and still true:

 

To friends and family, near and far, Happy Thanksgiving — my favorite holiday, and a uniquely American one.

More Terminal Velocity

 

Tim Kreider’s, “Terminal Lucidity” taps into the relief many people first felt when Biden was elected but goes on to analyze the converging forces that could (probably?) result in the complete despoliation our democracy.  Trumpism acted as an accelerator, and since Kreider’s essay was written, let’s add increased tensions with China, Polio being added to the mix of Covid and Monkeypox, the FBI “Gestapo raid” on enchanted Mar-a-Lago, Liz Cheney being punished by WY, as well as the rise of “Foxy” deep-thinking media ladies Sarah Palin and Kari Lake.  Oh, let’s not forget recession or inflation (the Market cannot decide which), raging forest fires or floods or a water crisis here and in Europe, or to quote directly from Kreider: “It rained on the ice cap of Greenland for the first time in recorded history, and a chunk of Antarctica the size of Manhattan fell into the sea.  I’m probably forgetting something. Any one of these crises would take fortitude to contemplate; together, they amount to a demoralizing apocalyptic combo: impossible to ignore, impossible to face.”

 

Kreider notes that Democracy is the exception rather than the rule in human history, and its fragility must be guarded.  However, Trump’s influence on the American Zeitgeist did not end with his term as President. Conservative judges were appointed to the Supreme Court as well as at local levels, and state legislatures continue to Gerrymander and appoint obedient Electors to participate in the outmoded Electoral College. His toxicity will be felt long after he is gone.

 

We feel helpless in the face of the multiplicity of these crises.  As Kreider amusingly says: “writing your elected representative feels as effective as writing to Santa, and protest as potent a ritual as sacrificing a goat.”  And to think our threat comes from within, not from a foreign adversary, makes it more terrifying.

 

Liz Cheney’s defeat is highly symbolic as she stood for principle over Party.  Of course she was taken to the proverbial woodshed in a highly partisan State, but it shows the glaring weakness of our political system which the Trumpublicans (and let’s face it, there is no longer a Republican Party) are successfully exploiting.  To think that a State like WY which has a population not much more than Borough of Staten Island can have two senators and such disproportionate representation (along with many other States like ND, SD) is part of the weak link, not to mention the Electoral College and now the Supreme Court as well. (Perhaps States in which the buffalo roam should be demoted to territories?)

 

The Trumpublicans have already vowed swift retribution “when” they take control of both the House and Senate, punishing the opposition, having Hearings to look into the J6 Hearings, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary’s Emails, the FBI (which the Republicans used to love), and who knows, human trafficking out of Washington pizza parlors, UFO’s, etc.

 

Anecdotally, someone I know has a young adult granddaughter who does not seem to be concerned about what is happening.  (She feels that she will be taken care of like she has all her life.)  And perhaps that is my greatest concern: those who will inherit the earth complacently think the “bad guys” will be negated by “goodness” as in some nice neat morality play (the macro version of a “good guy with a gun” protecting us from an active shooter in a school or mall). Kreider prophetically concludes his essay with “Once all the grownups are gone, it forces you to realize that you’re the grownups now.  You’re the ones in charge. And what happens next is up to you.”

Sidewalk of our Times

 

Stoner Redux

I’m astonished that this book was published in 1965 and until now I was unaware of it.  Again, I have my friend Mary, who came back into my virtual world four decades after having worked for me in publishing, to thank.  She also led me to Wallace Stegner.

 

Recently Mary sent me a New Yorker article by Tim Kreider, The Greatest American Novel You've Never Heard Of  (published last October) as a wake-up call to read John Williams’ Stoner. 

The book had been rediscovered abroad, and brought back into print by the New York Review of Books.  One of my favorite UK novelists, Ian McEwan, has championed the book across the pond when interviewed for an article; Literature needs more Lazarus miracles like Stoner

It was republished with an insightful essay by John McGahern who, sadly, died at about the time of this paperback edition was published (2006).  The author of Stoner, John Williams, died in 1994, never to see his greatest work become critically acclaimed.

When Mary sent me the New Yorker link, I immediately ordered the book, although I was continuing to read William Trevor’s short stories, so many of them and so delightful, that it will be on my reading plate for some time to come.  So the intention was to put Stoner in my reading queue which is building, and building.  But when the novel arrived, the New Yorker article kept reverberating, and I was fascinated by the cover of the paperback (apparently you CAN tell a good book by its cover!) and I found myself putting it at the top of the queue and, ultimately, interrupting reading the Trevor collection.

One of the points made in the New Yorker article is somewhat inexplicable to me: Despite its pellucid prose, “Stoner” isn’t an easy book to read—not because it’s dense or abstruse but because it’s so painful. I had to stop reading it for a year or two, near the middle of the book….  Yes, it is painful at times, but much of Dickens and Hardy can be painful too but still compulsively readable.   How anyone could put this compelling novel aside is bewildering.  The author of Stoner articulated the very reasons I “fell in love” with the protagonist.  John Williams was once interviewed and said:

I think he's a real hero. A lot of people who have read the novel think that Stoner had such a sad and bad life. I think he had a very good life. He had a better life than most people do, certainly. He was doing what he wanted to do, he had some feeling for what he was doing, he had some sense of the importance of the job he was doing. He was a witness to values that are important ... The important thing in the novel to me is Stoner's sense of a job.  Teaching to him is a job-a job in the good and honorable sense of the word. His job gave him a particular kind of identity and made him what he was ... It's the love of the thing that's essential. And if you love something, you're going to understand it. And if you understand it, you're going to learn a lot. The lack of that love defines a bad teacher ... You never know all the results of what you do. I think it all boils down to what I was trying to get at in Stoner. You've got to keep the faith. The important thing is to keep the tradition going, because the tradition is civilization.

The essence of the story is about a man who grew up working with his parents on their farm.  The time is before the onset of WW I.  He knew nothing else but scratching out life from the fields, his worn hands those of a laborer.  It was hard work and there were diminishing returns from the land so when his father heard about the state college having a program to study Agriculture, so he sent his only son there, with the hope he would emerge with new techniques which would lessen their burdened lives. But William Stoner would never return to his former life, becoming instead a teacher of English. 

Here the exterior story and the inner story run parallel but at odds with one another.  His life is besieged by an unhappy marriage, isolation from his wife Edith and daughter Grace, and plagued by an enemy in his English Dept, its Chairman, Lomax (as evil a character towards Stoner as Claggart was to Melville’s Billy Budd), and by Lomax’s favorite student, Walker, who Stoner thinks unworthy of becoming a teacher.   He argues this with his one friend, the Dean, Gordon Finch, “it would be a disaster to let him [Walker] in a classroom…..if we do, we become like the world, just as unreal, just as….the only hope is to keep him out.”  But Finch is also now part of the real world and he has become increasingly removed from Stoner.  Then finally the real love of his life materializes, Katherine, a student, but ultimately it is to be a love denied.  Meanwhile his inner life is blossoming, finding in literature a certain kind of perfect harmony and tranquility. 

Both the New Yorker article and the Introduction to the NYRB edition quote the same nearly opening lines as I bracketed in pencil in the book.  It sets the tone and the themes like a piece of sculpture captures the essence of its subject.  It foreshadows the very end at the beginning, unusual for opening lines: An occasional student who comes across the name may wonder idly who William Stoner was, but he seldom pursues his curiosity beyond a casual question. Stoner’s colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now; to the older ones, his name is a reminder of the end that awaits them all, and to the younger ones it is merely a sound which evokes no sense of the past and no identity with which they can associate themselves or their careers.

His discovery of the love of learning and literature comes at the end of his college years (he thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived). And he comes to his profession almost by accident, his mentor, Professor Sloane saying “but don’t you know, Mr. Stoner?...Don’t you understand about yourself yet?  You’re going to be a teacher.” Suddenly Sloan seemed very distant, and the walls of the office receded.  Stoner felt himself suspended in the wide air, and he heard his voice ask, “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Sloane said softly.

“How can you tell? How can you be sure?”

“It’s love, Mr. Stoner,” Sloane said cheerfully. “You are in love.  It’s as simple as that.”

The joys of learning, teaching, moving forward in intellectual endeavors, counter balance worldly affairs.  The University is a refuge from life itself.  And then he finally discovers he is indeed a teacher: The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print - the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly…..He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.         

However, his personal life is not what he imagined it would be.  Edith, his wife, is reminiscent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Zelda (and as the New Yorker article astutely observes, you could almost describe [Stoner] as an anti-“Gatsby”).  Edith is unstable, almost child-like, and like Zelda ultimately tries to find some self identity in the arts.  They are totally estranged from each other, although living under the same roof. As one would imagine, their daughter, Grace, is impacted by this, ultimately getting pregnant to escape their home, moving to St. Louis, her husband (who she marries after she finds she’s pregnant) dying in WW II  (in fact, the novel bridges WW I and WW II).  She remains more or less in a trance, answering most questions Stoner asks with “it doesn’t matter,” over and over again, perhaps homage to Melville’s Bartelby similarly saying “I prefer not to.”  She becomes an alcoholic.

The absolutely exquisite, compact writing is what makes this novel great.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, where we come from and where we go during this brief encounter with life resonates in the pages.  Shadows, light, darkness, death, and nature figure prominently in the narrative, particularly the farmers’ fields Stoner comes from. Here he is burying his father:  They buried his father in a small plot on the outskirts of Booneville, and William returned to the farm with his mother.  That night he could not sleep. He dressed and walked into the field that his father had worked year after year, to the end that he now had found. He tried to remember his father, but the face that he had known in his youth would not come to him. He knelt in the field and took a dry clod of earth in his hand. He broke it and watched the grains, dark in the moonlight, crumble and flow through his fingers. He brushed his hand on his trouser leg and got up and went back to the house. He did not sleep; he lay on the bed and looked out the single window until the dawn came, until there were no shadows upon the land, until it stretched gray and barren and infinite before him.

After his mother dies, he lays her beside his father, and probably this is where the novel’s prose is bleakest, but rings so true. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.  Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives, and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them.  Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances.  And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.

But counterbalancing the dark aspects of life pushing Stoner along (sometimes the reader wondering whether he is a participant in his choices), is Stoner’s euphoric discovery that his choices are one of the mind, not in day to day living:  But choices is what excited him in his work, such as when he was planning his own book, an esoteric study of the English Renaissance.  He was in the stage of his planning his study, and it was that stage which gave him the most pleasure – the selection among alternative approaches, the rejection of certain strategies, the mysteries and uncertainties that lay in unexplored possibilities, the consequences of choice….The possibilities he could see so exhilarated him that he could not keep still.

And it is his love of his work, in spite of the slings and arrows dealt by his exterior life, which grows and grows in the novel.  He stands up for academic integrity, at a great cost to himself, but on his death bed has his doubts about the meaning of it all: He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance.  And what else? he thought. What else?

It is a remarkable novel, doubly remarkable that it went unnoticed for so long.  As the New Yorker article points out, so was Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.  The latter I discovered for myself (and reprinted when it was long out of print). 

 John Williams' Stoner can easily stand besides Yates’ work as one of the more important American novels of the 20^th century.