Or Else…what?

Posted on September 3, 2025 by hessd

It should not be too hard to grasp the idea that you can’t give ultimatums to people who have alternatives.  The classic formulation of this occurred in a memorable episode of the West Wing in which Leo McGarry, the President’s Chief of Staff cranks up the heat on the President.  It is clear to Leo that there is an action that only the President can take and that it is urgent that he take it immediately.  He leans over the President’s desk and says something to the effect of “You HAVE TO do this!.”  Finally, President Bartlett looks up and says, “Or else….what?” 

A foreign policy governed by ultimatum is a very tricky thing at best.  For one thing, it changes theOr Else….What?

It should not be too hard to grasp the idea that you can’t give ultimatums to people who have alternatives.  The classic formulation of this occurred in a memorable episode of the West Wing in which Leo McGarry, the President’s Chief of Staff cranks up the heat on the President.  It is clear to Leo that there is an action that only the President can take and that it is urgent that he take it immediately.  He leans over the President’s desk and says something to the effect of “You HAVE TO do this!.”  Finally, President Bartlett looks up and says, “Or else….what?” 

A foreign policy governed by ultimatum is a very tricky thing at best.  For one thing, it changes theOr Else….What?

It should not be too hard to grasp the idea that you can’t give ultimatums to people who have alternatives.  The classic formulation of this occurred in a memorable episode of the West Wing in which Leo McGarry, the President’s Chief of Staff cranks up the heat on the President.  It is clear to Leo that there is an action that only the President can take and that it is urgent that he take it immediately.  He leans over the President’s desk and says something to the effect of “You HAVE TO do this!.”  Finally, President Bartlett looks up and says, “Or else….what?” 

A foreign policy governed by ultimatum is a very tricky thing at best.  For one thing, it changes the traditional idea of U. S. foreign policy.  In the shadow cast by the present chaos, it is easy to idealize the recent—post 1945—conduct of American foreign policy, but this at least can be said.  The centerpiece of American foreign policy has been the construction and maintenance of alliances that will accomplish the goals of the members.  The policy of Containment—if the Soviet Union can be kept from expanding, it will eventually implode—may not be our finest hour, but the goals were clear, cooperation was widespread, and it was successful.

The U.S. served as the nation to formulate the idea, to specify what part other nations would need to play in this strategy, and to support them in those efforts.  So long as the threat was clear and imminent, holding the coalition together was manageable.  But under all circumstances, the policy choices involved the practices of the alliance.

One of the very early effects of President Trump bargaining practices is to fracture alliances into sets of two-party dealmaking.  Driving hard bargains with a trading partner—or even with a military partner—is a tricky proposition.  I want to consider in just a moment some of the things that make it tricky, but it is worth noting in passing that the alliance is gone when we do that.  The politics of managing an alliance to achieve common purposes is, of course, difficult, but it is simply incompatible with splitting the alliance up into bargaining units and dealing with each so as to maximize U. S. advantage.  So when we move from the one mode of foreign policy practices to the other—from an alliance-based to a deal-based mode—we lose all the advantages of the alliance.  We can hope—clearly President Trump DOES hope that the deals we will be able to make will be so good for America that the loss of the alliance partners will be compensated for.  The nations who were the alliance partners do not go away, of course.  France, Germany, and Britain are still where they were; but the common purpose that made them alliance partners has been lost in the rush to make one on one deals.

That’s the major problem, as I see it, in shifting to dealmaking among allies.  It is, briefly, that they are no longer allies.  But what happens to nations who were, until recently, being courted?

Everyone knows that depending on the question being asked, there are our guys, their guys, and those who have not make up their minds on the question being asked.  The U. S got in the habit, during the Cold War, of thinking about those groupings in very broad and stable categories.  We called “our guys” the First World, “their guys” the Second World, and those who were not playing the game or had not yet chosen sides, “the Third World.”  That seemed appropriate for issues as broad as “freedom under U. S leadership” v. domination under “Communism.”

But when we change to one on one bargaining, the categories lose their power and the question comes up of just how far you can push an antagonist in bargaining.  If he has no option but to comply—in another setting, we might quibble about whether that is really “bargaining” at all—then the U. S can push their demands quite far.  Always keeping an eye on that line that separates “continuing the conversation” from “opting out entirely.”

A good example of a nation in this dilemma is India, the most populous country in the world and an economic powerhouse.  The Trump administration has been bringing a good deal of pressure to bear on India, beginning with tariffs, as usual, to comply with U. S economic demands.  The level of pressure seems to presume that India has no alternative but to continue the conversation and try not to lose more than they can afford.

Briefly, the question we ask India by pushing them to the wall is, ‘Or what..”  

India has begun to answer that question by opening discussions with Russia, China, and North Korea.  We bargained with them—“tariffed at them”—as if they had no alternatives, but it might turn out that they do.

The loss of India as a partner in Asia would be a catastrophic loss, but it is a solid answer to the dangling question, “Or else…what?”traditional idea of U. S. foreign policy.  In the shadow cast by the present chaos, it is easy to idealize the recent—post 1945—conduct of American foreign policy, but this at least can be said.  The centerpiece of American foreign policy has been the construction and maintenance of alliances that will accomplish the goals of the members.  The policy of Containment—if the Soviet Union can be kept from expanding, it will eventually implode—may not be our finest hour, but the goals were clear, cooperation was widespread, and it was successful.

The U.S. served as the nation to formulate the idea, to specify what part other nations would need to play in this strategy, and to support them in those efforts.  So long as the threat was clear and imminent, holding the coalition together was manageable.  But under all circumstances, the policy choices involved the practices of the alliance.

One of the very early effects of President Trump bargaining practices is to fracture alliances into sets of two-party dealmaking.  Driving hard bargains with a trading partner—or even with a military partner—is a tricky proposition.  I want to consider in just a moment some of the things that make it tricky, but it is worth noting in passing that the alliance is gone when we do that.  The politics of managing an alliance to achieve common purposes is, of course, difficult, but it is simply incompatible with splitting the alliance up into bargaining units and dealing with each so as to maximize U. S. advantage.  So when we move from the one mode of foreign policy practices to the other—from an alliance-based to a deal-based mode—we lose all the advantages of the alliance.  We can hope—clearly President Trump DOES hope that the deals we will be able to make will be so good for America that the loss of the alliance partners will be compensated for.  The nations who were the alliance partners do not go away, of course.  France, Germany, and Britain are still where they were; but the common purpose that made them alliance partners has been lost in the rush to make one on one deals.

That’s the major problem, as I see it, in shifting to dealmaking among allies.  It is, briefly, that they are no longer allies.  But what happens to nations who were, until recently, being courted?

Everyone knows that depending on the question being asked, there are our guys, their guys, and those who have not make up their minds on the question being asked.  The U. S got in the habit, during the Cold War, of thinking about those groupings in very broad and stable categories.  We called “our guys” the First World, “their guys” the Second World, and those who were not playing the game or had not yet chosen sides, “the Third World.”  That seemed appropriate for issues as broad as “freedom under U. S leadership” v. domination under “Communism.”

But when we change to one on one bargaining, the categories lose their power and the question comes up of just how far you can push an antagonist in bargaining.  If he has no option but to comply—in another setting, we might quibble about whether that is really “bargaining” at all—then the U. S can push their demands quite far.  Always keeping an eye on that line that separates “continuing the conversation” from “opting out entirely.”

A good example of a nation in this dilemma is India, the most populous country in the world and an economic powerhouse.  The Trump administration has been bringing a good deal of pressure to bear on India, beginning with tariffs, as usual, to comply with U. S economic demands.  The level of pressure seems to presume that India has no alternative but to continue the conversation and try not to lose more than they can afford.

Briefly, the question we ask India by pushing them to the wall is, ‘Or what..”  

India has begun to answer that question by opening discussions with Russia, China, and North Korea.  We bargained with them—“tariffed at them”—as if they had no alternatives, but it might turn out that they do.

The loss of India as a partner in Asia would be a catastrophic loss, but it is a solid answer to the dangling question, “Or else…what?”

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The “Inmost” Self

Posted on August 26, 2025 by hessd

Sherry Turkle is one of the most articulate and knowledgeable critics of AI as a source of friendship and support.  Her book, Reclaiming Conversation is a wakeup call and a tightly reasoned argument. I agree with her concerns, but I am worried about the rationale.  I would really like a stronger one and I am not sure there is one.

She says that chatbots do not “have” empathy; they “perform” empathy.  That seems right to me, but is

it a criticism worth making?  Human society, as I experience it and as generations of sociologists have understood it, is a web of performances.  We greet each other with a courtesy we may not feel at the time, but we “perform it” because it is expected.  We ask after each other’s health, each other’s children, whether the vacation was all our friends had hoped.  We may sometimes experience the feelings from which these questions would naturally arise, but they will arise anyway because they are necessary.

They are performed interest, at the very least, and are done so as to suggest “empathy”. So what kind of criticism are we making when we say that the chatbots only “perform” empathy?  The only solid criticism I can think of is that than can not feel the feelings we feel—cannot by definition, “have” empathy.

That means that we can take for granted that the performance of an emotion by a chatbot is “insincere.”  It is “inauthentic.”  On the other hand, the performance is very good, and if that is what matters to us most, it may be something we will come to prefer.

Certainly we are saying that chatbots so not have the same feelings we have.  That would be empathy.  But are we saying that matters if the performance is good?  Turkle is worried that we may not continue to choose actual humans.  I am too, but I wonder what strong rationale there is for continuing to choose the variable performance of humans over the reliably competent vacuity of chatbots.

Here is Turkle’s reflection about a visit from psychologist Erik Erikson.

“I was a young faculty member at MIT in the late 1970s when the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson visited to talk about engineering education. After his presentation, he asked me what I was doing as a humanist at an engineering school. I told him I was studying how computers change people’s ideas about themselves, and he made this comment: ‘Engineers, they’re not convinced that people have an interior. It’s not necessary for their purposes.” 

And Turkle summarizes, “They see the complexity of inner life not as a feature but as a bug.”

According to Turkle, we need to continue to choose interactions with humans not because empathy is guaranteed, but because it is possible.  With the bots, it is not possible by definition.  Some argue that the illusion of human feelings—compassion, anxiety, pleasure—is good enough.  Here is Turkle’s argument that it is not good enough

“I argued for this assertion of agency in 2015, and now I argue ever more fervently. There is more than a threat to empathy at stake; there is a threat to our sense of what it means to be human. The performance of pretend emotion does not make machines more human. But it challenges what we think makes people special. Our human identity is something we need to reclaim for ourselves.”

She uses powerful words to sketch in what is at stake.  She says that “what it means to be human” is at stake.  OK, what does it mean to be human?  We know what it has meant, but is that what it fundamentally means?  How would we know?

She says it challenges “what we think makes people special.”  Are we right in thinking that the exchange of authentic emotions is “what makes people special?”  In the superficial sense, of course, it does.  If the bots cannot, even in principle, experience empathy, they human beings are “special” by definition.  But surely Turkle means more than that.

Turkle never talks about souls.  And there is no reason why she should.  I don’t talk about them either and I suspect it is for the same reason. [1]. But I do think that is where her logic will lead her.  If the superficial features of humans and bots are similar, then humans and bots will have to be distinguished by the authenticity of the superficial expressions.  Do they, in other words, express genuine feelings.  I think she and I would both say that bots don’t have “genuine feelings” no matter how effectively they perform them.

But if we cannot reliably say, based on our own experiences, which expressions are authentic and which are not, then we will have to continue on into the interior to make our case.  And what else is there?  Will we have to argue that humans are “better” because we have souls and the bots to not?

That is where I see the argument heading.  If we want to continue to prefer humans to bots and if we can no longer—or not much longer—distinguish the performance of emotion from the expression of an inner feeling, then what is left?  Souls are the next entity; that is, they are even more elusive than “authenticity.”  We have built our societies on the performance of empathy, requiring authenticity only of our most intimate relationships.  Is the next step to grant “authenticity” to the bots and if it is, what is left that they cannot have but that we can?

I think it is souls.  I am not happy about that.

Turkle’s actual program is unobjectionable.  In fact, I think it is crucially important. She says that we need to pay attention to what we are doing.  We need to consistently prefer humans, even when the immediate experience is not as pleasant as the reliable “camaraderie” of socially competent bots.  I think she is right.  Nothing but daring to prefer what only humans friends can give us, will keep us from morphing slowly into the bots most reliable accessory.

[1] My reason is that I would not know what I was talking about if I claimed some particular virtue for a “soul.”

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The Price of They/Them

Posted on July 16, 2025 by hessd

I read in the last week the there was a distinct Democratic downturn that showed up when this political ad (in all its forms) began to be shown. When I looked it up online, they gave the full text as “Kamala’s for They/Them. President Trump’s for You.”

I missed it when it came out because I was mostly hiding from the campaign, so it all feels new to me.

The power in this superbly conceived ad is the meaning of “Them.” All the ad says on the surface is that Kamala is expressing her preference for one way of using personal pronouns over another way. Who would have thought that such a small grammatical preference would carry such a payload.

But, of course, there is more to the ad than the surface meaning. This is aimed at people who have said “him” or “her” to someone and who have been corrected when the person asked to be referred to as “they.” Those people—the people who have been corrected—are the “You” that shows up at the end of the ad.

And like the first part, which seems to be only about a choice of pronouns, this part, which seems also to be only about pronouns, is in fact a powerful statement of advocacy by the Trump campaign. Had the ad said only “President Trump is for You” it would have been feeble and pointless. But this ad points out the alternatives. Kamala is the candidate of the people who look down on you and correct your grammar. Trump thinks your grammar is just fine.

And, in fact, your grammar WAS just fine. Yesterday. But things keep changing and you are supposed to assent to the changes no matter how bizarre they are and to conform to them because you will be “corrected” if you don’t.

And once we change from the correction that is being demanded to the people who are doing the demanding, the range expands very quickly. The same people who find themselves simply unwilling to address another person as “they” are also called racist, sexist, ageist, and whatever other -ists are currently being deplored. And the power of this ad is that it shifts the emotional grievance from the usage to the critics.

Here is how it comes out. Whatever bizarre claims are being made for a new kind of society—different work norms, gender norms, relationship norms, language norms—Kamala is for them and for the people who want all those new things, no matter how ridiculous they might be. And those are the people who look down on you and call you names. So, briefly, they are the “them” of They/Them. Why would you vote for someone who supports Them?

President Trump is against “Them” and he is for “You.” Clearly, “them” is a grammatical usage, but ‘you” refers to real people; people you know. Trump is us. Kamala is them.

So that’s the politics as I see it. That is the stream of public controversy that this usage taps. Down below all that, down among people who are engaged in the gender wars personally and daily, the question is only, “What do I want to be called?” The “they/them” choosers not only reject him and her as inadequate; they also reject the high priority that has always been put on him or her. The people who have been causing them trouble are people for whom: a) him and her are the only two options and b) which one you are determines how you are to be treated.

They/them is a protest against both of those. If I knew and liked someone who preferred to be referred to as “them,” I would make every effort to remember to use the term, despite a lifetime of understanding that it is wrong. But even for this person I liked, it would not take many times of being corrected for me to turn that favor I was doing for my friend into an unwilling obedience to their quirkiness. I would also be turned off by whoever among my friends thinks I ought to be more careful to use the preferred pronoun of the person I had just offended. And I would resent being turned off by people who think I should knuckle under to unreasonable demands.

And when that happens and I see a billboard that says I get to choose between someone who is for They/Them and someone who is for Me, the emotional force is all in one direction. It is Trumpish.

Finally, I, personally, despise Trump and everything Trumpish. I don’t like they/them either. It’s not a “personal preference” if everybody needs to use it. I am blessed with enough verbal fluency that I can manage to stay out of sentences that require me to use or to prominently avoid that pronoun. But I don’t like to have to be that careful all the time.

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“Don’t worry about it, ma’am.”

Posted on July 10, 2025 by hessd

I want to start this line of thought with a comment by Margaret Talev in Thomas Edsall’s New York Times column this week. She said, “Voters want to belong. If you want someone’s vote, you should ask for it. When it came to men, Trump did.”

It still seems odd to me to see an unqualified reference to “men,” but there is a meaning here that is clear enough that the reference is justified. She doesn’t mean “men” as a statistical category; she means “men” thinking of them in gendered terms. Men as males.

And Trump did ask for their vote, where Harris did not.

I was still thinking about Gov. Abbot when I ran across Heather Cox Richardson’s post. She cites an exchange that undoubtedly begins with a reporter asking who is to blame for the deaths caused by the flood in central Texas. Here’s what he said.

“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”


Abbot dismisses the question of responsibility as a “word choice.” It is only losers who wonder whose fault an unfavorable outcome was. Then he doubles back to make his argument impenetrable. The word that does it for Gov. Abbot is “ma’am.”

This is not a reference to the reporter who asked the question. This is the language of legend. It is the women who are told not to worry and they are told this by the men. By the “real men,” presumably, like Gov. Abbot.

The gulf between the question of who is responsible for Texas’s inexcusable unpreparedness, on the one hand, and a woman “worrying about it” is a huge gulf. And in the context of that news conference, I would think that trying to cross that gulf would be hazardous in the extreme. A reporter who tried to do that would have to fight the charge that he is or represents the perspective of losers; that he is not making a charge about public accountability; and that he is not a (mere) woman, indulging herself in “worrying.”

That is the size of the gulf. It is a situation of great hazard. For the reporter. On the other hand, to return to Margaret Talev’s remark about belonging, Gov. Abbot offers a place to belong. You can be one of the real men who take it on themselves to reassure the worrying women. Or if you are a woman, you can take seriously the reassurance by this man that you are only worrying and things and well in hand. The next election, for instance.

It is hard not to focus on the blatant culpability of the governments involved, but I think the more important question here is whether Gov. Abbot is offering voters a place to belong and whether they want that more than anything.

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Not a Slam Dunk

Posted on July 2, 2025 by hessd

I’d like to put two facts in opposition to each other. The first is that in Trump’s “budget” bill, which passed the Senate today, thanks to Vice President Vance’s vote, will have devastating effects on Trump’s core constituency.

Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at J. D. Vance’s alma mater [1] put it this way,“Districts represented by Republican members of Congress — as well as counties that supported Trump in the last election — are poorer, more rural, less dense, have fewer college graduates and are more likely to be in areas scarred by deindustrialization.”

It is hard to imagine that the Trump coalition will hold together through such a massive betrayal. Still, as Drew Altman, the president and chief executive of KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation) put it. “It looks like Republicans are handing Democrats their golden issue, but it’s not a slam dunk.
Why is it not a slam dunk? Against all the financial losses that will be suffered by the states most loyal to Trump, I put the sentiment in this picture.

You see that it is a Trump campaign poster. You can recognize him even in the blue tie. Think for a minute about who “They” is in this admonition. It isn’t just the Democrats. It is the nebulous evil organization he sometimes refers to as the “deep state.” It is the swamp he promised to drain. “They” are swamp demons.

And they are “after you.” There is an implacable resentment between “them” and you and this resentment is flavored with a casual dismissal of all the work you have done for them, In Kentucky’s District #5, Arlie Russell Hochschild ran into a sentiment that was expressed like this. [2]“They” are people who don’t honor the sacrifice that won World War II as the sign clearly says.


And I am “standing in the way”. I am going to take the vindictiveness of the people who disrespect you and turn it against them. I am the one you can turn to as a way to express your courage and your defiance.

That’s the way I read that sign. And that’s why it’s not a slam dunk. A lot depends, a Drew Altman puts it, on “whether Democrats succeed in holding the Republicans responsible.”


The case is there to be made. Altman, of KFF cited polling “showing that many voters are unaware of the effects of the Trump legislation. When they are told of the consequences, the already weak support drops precipitously.’ That is why the case is there to be made. Among these voters—the ones Altman is talking about—the support is weak and it goes into a nosedive when the practical consequences of the Trump budget are revealed.


Some say this nosedive occurs when people experience the concrete consequences. That will be some time. Altman’s experience with polling is that the nosedive occurs when the people are told about what they can clearly see is likely. That is the job of the Democrats.


And they have one more job. They need to find a way to be the ones that offer a way forward. Showing how bad Trump is will not do the job. The Democrats need to offer a candidate people can believe in. They don’t need to do that to win back the House and the Senate, but they do to win back the presidency.

[1]. If law schools have alma maters.
[2] Her recent book on this issue is called Stolen Virtue—surely one of the best titled books in recent years.

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Plenty left on the rack

Posted on June 30, 2025 by hessd

Some years ago I taught with a sociologist friend who taught me a song he called “the mini mart Song.” And that’s what we called it when we asked him to sing it for us. He was a conservative man, all things being considered, and part of the fun of listening to him sing the old Jimmy Buffet lyrics was the contrast between what he seemed to be advocating and who he was.

For example.

There is a rationale embedded in the chorus. Here are the words: “We never took more than we could eat/There was plenty left on the rack”. And here is the rationale. Our theft was limited to our immediate needs. The fact that food was the need makes it seem somehow justified. Further, the theft was insignificant because there was so much—“plenty,” the song says—left on the rack. [1]

And not only that, there is at the end of the chorus a very respectable oath. “We all swore if we ever got rich/We would pay the mini mart back.” Of course, this “oath” is not quite so respectable if you sing it with a grin and a wink, which is the only way I have ever seen it performed and it is the way my friend always sang it.

I don’t want to go back to those days which seem–from the perspective of my present in Portland, Oregon–to be innocent and to dump on the song, much less on my friend who sang it many times at our request. On the other hand, a lot of retail stores in Portland are closing because they can’t control shoplifting. People go into these stores and take what they need or what they want or what they think they can sell. The stores can’t make up the loss and, at those levels of loss, can’t afford either the insurance or the extra enforcement (private security guards) that would be required.

So what happened? The people who are represented in the song are stealing the food in order to survive. That is what the lyrics say. But the the performance of the song is not a celebration of survival. It is a celebration of what amounts to a prank, with all the limitations the song places on the theft. You don’t take more than your immediate need requires; you leave a lot on the rack for legitimate sale to later customers; you have every intention of repaying the value of what you took. Those limitations.

But those “limitations” justify everything that is going on in Portland today. They don’t seem carefree anymore, looking at the wave of closures. The language, taken at face value, doesn’t justify any more today than it did back in 1973, when the song was popular. Is it that only a few people did it back then—starving artist types—and now it is very nearly a mainstream activity? Is that the difference?

Is it that back when the values that would have been inculcated by a family precluded all but the most desperate thefts, and now that such behavior has escaped the family and become part of the general urban culture, there are no more limits on it? Is that the difference?

No one imagines that back in the old days, you knew the guy who owned the mini mart and so limited your theft, but now they are all anonymous chains and so there is no reason to limit it. This was never a local grocery run by that nice couple who lived just down the street from your parents. So that’s not it.

Jimmy Buffet locates this kind of activity back in his “hard luck days.” Stealing for resale isn’t any part of anybody’s hard luck days. It’s a business model and it is predatory. I’d like to go on singing the song because I think it’s funny, but it isn’t as funny as it used to be.

[1]. More likely it was a shelf the food was left on, but we really need a word that is going to rhyme with “back.”

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Writing in my civilian name

Posted on June 16, 2025 by hessd

A few years ago, I jotted a quick note to my son, Doug, and in my haste, signed it Dale instead of Dad. I considered that an egregious breach—more on that later—and wrote him another note the next day, as soon as I discovered it. He wrote back in a tone of consolation. “That’s alright, Dad. I’ve always known your civilian name.”

I had not been all that worried about it and when I got his note, I shut down even the little worry I had been carrying. But I have kept it in my “Don’t Throw This Away” file because I had a feeling that something in it mattered. The way my mind works, there is a phenomenon that is hard to describe. I sometimes say it is like a very small light going on somewhere in my peripheral awareness and when this light goes on, it means “This means something.” [1]

I have learned to trust the significance of that little light and eventually I come up with a guess—never more than haphazard, but nearly always valuable—of what it meant. That is what happened this time.

In raising my three children, seen here celebrating my 80th birthday, I have gone through all the stages a father can go through, including Authority, Supporter, Critic, Listener, and finally, Friend. Of those, I value what unites the first three in combination with what unites the last two. The first three can be collected under “Dad,” the name I was so eager to use with Doug. The last two can be collected under the name Dale, which is, as Doug put it, “my civilian name.”

I may have done more thinking about relationships, very likely, than the average octogenarian because I was forced to dip my toe into the dating pool some time after my wife, Marilyn died in 2003. I was 68 at the time and had not given serious thought to “dating” since I was 18. I was dating trying any dating at all because my son, Dan, whose advice I am inclined to take seriously, called one day and said, “Dad, I know you won’t want to hear this, but you really need to date a lot of women.” That was followed by a rationale that was tailored specifically to me and that was psychologically acute. It was offered by someone who knew my civilian name.

In my quest to find a woman to marry, I formulated an idea of the kind of relationship I was looking for. I understood that it was the kind that would have to be built over years of relationship by a husband and wife who were committed to the model. I was just looking for a woman who, when I said what kind of relationship I wanted, said, “That sounds really good. I would like to be in a relationship like that.”

The relationship has a collegial face and an intimate face. Those are the names I eventually settled on, although the distinction itself came from C. S. Lewis’s book, The Four Loves. I wanted, that is to say, a task partner, someone who would value me, and I her, for what each of us contributed to our common project. And, on beyond collegiality, I wanted an intimate friend, a face to face friend, to whom I could say, “I know who you are and I love you.” And who could say the same to me.

I raise this now obscure part of my biography today because I am pretty sure those two ways of being in relationship track the Dad/Dale distinction that Doug named as a throwaway line. I sit here, on the morning of Father’s Day in a hallway just outside our apartment. When we moved in here [2], I saw immediately that it could serve us as an extra room. Having no sense at all about names and functions, I called it a “parlor,” meaning that it would be a good place to talk. Parlor vous? I was describing this to my daughter, Dawne, who does not have her father’s problem with names and functions and who, in addition, lives in New Jersey. “Pop, that’s not a parlor,” she said with some vehemence. “That’s a front porch.” They know, in her part of New Jersey, what front porches are for and as I sit here, writing this and saying hello to the neighbors who pass by, I know she was right. It is my front porch.

I think the Dad/Dale division functions in the same way the Colleague/Intimate distinction does. It marks, for my kids, a part of who we have been but we are not that any longer. The authority element is long gone, which is good for a father whose kids are all in their 60s, but it has not been replaced by the friendship element. It has been complemented by the friendship element.

I am a friend in a way I could never be had I not been an authority once. That part of the relationship has long been transcended, of course, but it still sits in our common background and provides a color and a contrast to our present. Not a one of the three thinks, even now, that I was a perfect father, but they have been for quite a while now, inclined to celebrate the whole package of who we were for each other—redeeming in their minds the bad parts and celebrating the good parts.

I take great pleasure in that. I like it that they do it on purpose. I know that the reason they do it is that they love me in a really complicated way. It would have to be, surely, to take such discrepant elements into account and make an integrated whole. They have done that and we, the four of us, have done that, as well.

And if that doesn’t make Father’s Day worth celebrating, I am going to sell off all my Hallmark stock shares.

[1]. Or as Roy Neary put it, referring immediately to the mound of mashed potatoes he had just scraped onto his place and ultimately to the site in Wyoming where we would first encounter sentient aliens, “This means something. This is important.”
[2]. Holladay Park Plaza, a senior center in Portland, Oregon. It’s what feels like home to Bette and me.

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Fun with Dick, Jane, and Ezra

Posted on June 10, 2025 by hessd

I had an experience this week that writers will recognize. I wrote a very small targeted fantasy as a way of unfolding some of the complexities of Israel’s post-Exilic history in the 6th Century BCE. It’s not as arcane as it sounds. Really. We had a really good discussion of this little fantasy in the group for whom I wrote it. One of the the members of the group expressed her appreciation for how really smart the authors were.

I agreed. Then, the rest of the day, I found myself confronted with really similar challenges which obligated me to be as smart as the authors I had invented and on several occasions, I actually did—I did the smart thing, just as my characters did.

That is the experience I am sure will be familiar to the writers among you.

The course I am working on studies the books of Jonah and Ruth and I have called them the “Yes, but…” stories. It is no secret to anyone that Ezra, the priest who played a leading part in putting Judah back together after the Exile in Babylon, ran a very tight ship. He took particular aim at the intermarriage of returning Judaeans and local Canaanites because he saw it as most likely to lead to idolatry. So Ezra, as I represent him in this story is a very narrow reformer.

The stories of Jonah and Ruth point in a different direction and were, according to quite a few scholars, composed during this very tense post-Exilic time. Because no one knows who wrote those stories and because I wanted to keep my fantasy on the light side, I named the authors Dick and Jane. It brings up a world of associations that is completely incompatible with Ezra, Jonah, and Ruth.

In this fantasy, Dick and Jane are alarmed by Ezra’s extreme social restrictions and meet with him to change his mind and moderate his behavior. (I told you at the beginning that this was a fantasy; you are going to have to give me a little room to imagine the scene I need.). They both know that telling Ezra that they think he is going too far is not going to help. So instead, they tell him a couple of stories. If there were a contemporary bumper sticker, “Tell Stories to Power,” Dick and Jane would be the reason for it. It is these stories that led one of the people in my group to celebrate how really smart Dick and Jane were. [1]

The stories present characters that cannot fit into the world Ezra is living in. They don’t appear to be making a point that matters to Ezra and in that sense they are simply a distraction. But they do make a point and the point they make cannot be made using the characters and the social dynamics that Ezra is most interested in. He will have to accept different characters, a different narrative arc, and a different outcome if he is to really tune in to the stories Dick and Jane are telling him.

Dick tells the story of Jonah. It is a story with one Israelite, unless you count the great fish and the vine-eating worm as Israelites on the ground that, unlike Jonah, they do what God tells them to do. Everyone else is pagan and all the pagans are admirable.

At the risk of asking you to remember more of Jonah than you want to, Jonah gets a call from God to go north to Nineveh and give a message to the Ninevites. This ought to be very much a Mission Possible for Jonah because the message is a message of imminent destruction and Jonah hates the Ninevites. But Jonah tries to sneak away (west) instead. God sends a violent storm to prevent that voyage and the sailors on the ship—worshippers of other gods who have no reason to care at all about the tiff Jonah is having with his God—act heroically on his behalf.

Jonah arrives in Nineveh and begins to preach imminent destruction and the people immediately take him at his word and begin to repent. The king of Nineveh follows suite and God changes his mind and forgives all the Ninevites and cancels the scheduled destruction.

What is Ezra to do with a story like that. Nothing in it says that the Israelites are not God’s special people. Nothing in it allows for the slow descent into polytheism and idolatry which is Ezra’s greatest concern. The whole point of the story so far as Nineveh is concerned is that God opposes bad behavior—the Ninevite king refers to it once as “violence”—but is quick to forgive when remorse is shown. Nothing in that story helps Ezra in his purity crusade.

Then Jane follows with the story of Ruth. I am representing these events as if they really happened and I feel obliged to say now and again that I am making up the whole Dick, Jane, and Ezra confrontation. The only piece of that for which there is biblical support is Ezra’s behavior in post-Exilic Judaea. Dick and Jane are fictions, as are Jonah and Ruth.

And Ruth turns out to be no better than Jonah; no easier for Ezra, that is. Ruth is a Moabite, a member of a truly hated neighboring nation. The whole identity and essence of Ruth is bad. It is only her behavior that is good. She marries an Israelite boy from Bethlehem. Her new husband dies, as does his brother and his father. That leaves the widow, Naomi, Ruth’s mother-in-law. The only sensible response is to do what Naomi tells her, which is to go back to her parents’ house and find a nice Moabite boy, but Ruth does not do what is sensible. She pledges her loyalty to this foreign woman in words so direct and powerful that they are still used in weddings in the U. S.

Then she accompanies Naomi on the trip back to Bethlehem, where she goes immediately to work, gleaning grains of barley in the fields so they will have something to eat. As the situation develops, she does what Naomi tells her to do. Naomi is the veteran Israelite, after all. Then, on Naomi’s advice, she does what her benefactor—and future husband—Boaz tells her to do. And after all that, she becomes the grandmother of David the King. How Jewish can you get, really?

But there is nothing in Ruth for Ezra to use any more than there is in Jonah. Ruth is the obvious target of Ezra’s ethnic concerns and everything about her is admirable. As Ezra hears the story, he is forced to hear about the ideal villain—a Moabite woman—behaving like an ideal Judaean. Ruth’s love for Naomi and her hard work on Naomi’s behalf are flawless. There is nothing there for Ezra to use and, in fact, the categories aren’t even helpful in Ezra’s crusade, which requires the holy families to stay clear of the non-Israelites. Boaz, to pick an obvious hero, does not stay clear of non-Israelites.

When he buys the property that belongs to Naomi’s family, he also buys Ruth—most versions say “acquire”—and then he marries her, knowing that if their union produces a son, the son will inherit everything that would have come to Ruth’s former husband. None of it will go to the current husband. That is not a problem for Boaz, who is as generous and openhearted as the foreign woman he is marrying.

Another great story; another completely useless tale for Ezra. It uses people from the wrong categories and those people don’t behave in ways that seem iconic to Ezra, so he has, apparently, wasted a whole afternoon listening to engrossing and useless stories.

So as I read what I had written, I felt it press on me. I have my own crusades to conduct, of course. I am entirely pleased with the good characters in Jonah (the sailors, the people and the king) and the good characters in Ruth (Ruth and Boaz). I am not so well pleased with the behavior of Dick and Jane, who, faced with a political regime that was, as I have constructed it, out of control and going too far, simply told engaging stories. What I want to do, in the face of such a political regime is to oppose it in the most forceful prose I have at my disposal. That will do no good at all, of course.

What would actually do some good is to do what Dick and Jane did, which is to conjure up really good narratives that, as Emily Dickinson famously put it, “tells the truth, but tells it slant.” It is hard to do. It is hard even to want to do. And to do it as well as Dick and Jane did it,is truly amazing.

[1]. By contrast with the Wise Men in Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, who saw a star that represented a new king of Israel, so they rushed over to Jerusalem to share the good news with….um….the current king of Israel. Wise, but not Smart.

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No more money for you, Harvard!

Posted on June 6, 2025 by hessd

On April 11, three representatives of the Trump Administration wrote a letter to the president of Harvard, laying out the new requirements Harvard would be required to meet. If you treat the letter only on the level of the language it uses, it is hard to take seriously.

I am sure that if the Trump administration is allowed to mobilize the financial, legal, and regulatory pressures they threaten, it will be easier to take the treat seriously. The language, not so much.

This post is made up of quotations from the letter, which I will put in italics, and some comments of my own.

The letter is signed by Josh Gruenbaum, of the General Services Administration; Sean R Keveny, Acting General Counsel Department of Health and Human Services: and Thomas E. Wheeler, Acting General Counsel, Department of Education. No one you have ever heard of is listed as a signatory.

Here are some of the highlights of the letter.

The United States has invested in Harvard University’s operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence.

Then, three sentences later:

Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.

Fortunately, there is a ready solution.

By August 2025, Harvard must make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter;

Let’s just pause to see what we have so far. The U. S. Government has discovered that Harvard is an exemplar of scholarly discovery and academic excellence and that is why the government has invested so much money in the university. Harvard has recently stumbled, however, both intellectually and in what the letter calls “civil rights conditions.”

The university.must therefore reform, changing its governance practices and promoting to leadership those professors who will be most committed to “the changes indicated in this letter.”

Let’s do admissions next.

By August 2025, the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.

And to ensure that Harvard is doing it right:

All admissions data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit by the federal government… including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests—during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

Finally, there is the matter of reforming schools or departments that have succumbed to ideological capture or, in fact, to any biases at all.

By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.including…the Divinity School.

The Trump administration knows it can count on opposition from the best established universities and it has chosen Harvard as it’s favorite bad example. Whenever the letter refers to “the federal government,” I think we should translate that into the values clearly espoused the Project 2025 or, more briefly, whatever institutions have recently riled Trump’s anger.

All it takes is a specification of just why “the United States” has been investing its money in Harvard. That is followed by an unsubstantiated charge that Harvard has lately been failing to meet those conditions. Then, finally, Harvard is to cease immediately using its judgment about what kind of education it wants to provide for the students it admits and turn that job over to the federal government for their quarterly review.

My favorite part of that is their singling out the Harvard Divinity School for special attention. Could it be that the Divinity School is not displaying the “viewpoint diversity” that could be required of them by an administration more committed to fairness? It’s hard to say.

Again, the threat may be real. The language makes it hard to take it seriously.

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An American Government of One Branch

Posted on June 1, 2025 by hessd

Let’s begin with just what to call this part of the Project 2025 Report (hereafter the Report) of the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank.  The Report calls it “The Executive Office of the President of the United States.”  Simon Pierce has written a critique of the Report, called Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership.  In his critique, he calls this section,  “Expansion of Presidential Powers.”  As you see, I have called it “American Government.”  My reasoning is very straightforward.  The Report sees the President as the American Government.

You might miss some reference to other familiar institutions such as the Congress and the Supreme Court.  The Report criticizes these institutions, but only as asides.  In this section, as I will show, the government is the President and the job of the President is to serve the People.  (Caps in both cases are deliberate.)

I will be taking quotations from Pierce.  He says that the Report says such and such on page 43 and I take him at his word.  The few times I went to the Report to check for myself, he was correct, so I stopped checking.

Here is what the Report says on page 43 in the section Pierce titles Expansion of Presidential Powers.”

“The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch.  Sadly, however, the President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.  The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.”  (I have put the last sentence in bold font because Pierce put it in bold font.)

The error in this section is so large and so grievous that it is hard not to be drawn away into what means might be employed to put it into practice.  The error is that there are two actors in American government.  There are the People (capital P) and the President.  The People may or may not have preferences.  The Report doesn’t say.  They are, rather, the recipients of the actions taken by the President “on their behalf.”

The preferences of the American people are famously diverse. Like every citizenry everywhere, they want lots of government services and low taxes.  Ordinarily, debates take place within the presumed framework of the Constitution and one set of policy preferences is traded off against another.  

That is not the problem as the Report sees it so we would expect that the solutions they propose will be in line with the way they see the problem.  The problems they identify are “a sprawling federal bureaucracy” which is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences or, possibly the policy plans and preferences of a radical, “woke” faction of the country.

There are two kinds of difficulties here.  The first is that the bureaucracy has its own plans, presumably plans that will benefit the patrons of whichever bureau proposed them.  The second is that even if the bureaucracy is being guided by the people, the people they are being guided by are the wrong people.  Those people are “a faction,” they are radical, and they are “woke.”  The bureaucracy should, therefore, not be guided by them.

At this point, the casual reader desperately misses any reference to the Congress, the body to which the Constitution gives the task of enacting those policy plans and preferences and, by the way, of funding them as well.  The President has the job of enforcing the laws the Congress passes and even if, as is often alleged, the Congress simply passes the legislation the “sprawling federal bureaucracy” asks them to pass, still, the point where changes need to be made is with the Congress, not with the bureaus.

But if American government is, as in the quote above, made up of the President, then Congress need not be consulted.  The President understands what will benefit the American people and is free to act on their behalf.  “On their behalf,” it goes without saying, as the President sees things.

What could possibly go wrong?

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