Some Constitutional Amendment, Part III

Posted on February 26, 2019 by hessd

I think the most important challenge facing Americans today is constitutional amendment.

That sub-headline connects the three essays in this series.  The first established new, but perfectly plausible meanings for “constitution” (lower case c-) and for “amendment.”[1]  The second surveyed just why the soil that has produced our current political impasse requires amendment and just what sort of mending would help.  

Now we are down to actually doing—that means “writing about it” in my case— some amending.  There are three pieces to this puzzle that I want to highlight.  The first is the large value discrepancies in our society.  The second is the completely inadequate system of economic distribution.  The third is the “warring tribes” model by which the previous two inadequacies are translated into the governmental impasse I referred to above.

The structure of this problem is really simple. [2]  The angry and distrustful citizens are free to elect a presidential candidate who expresses their anger.  They are willing and able to do this.  That means that mending the current constitution of the U. S. would require making them less willing or less able.  I said it was simple.  I didn’t say it was easy.

Making them less able means doing away with democracy.  Throwing roadblocks in the way of voters who are likely to vote the wrong way is the strategy of conservatism, not liberalism.  So let’s work at making them less willing and let’s start with value discrepancies.

Value discrepancies

My thinking has been changed a little since I started this series.  Since then, I have read a very good book by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart:  Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism.  My approach to the social discrepancies has emphasized culture rather than values, but Norris and Inglehart make a good case for emphasizing the values themselves.  There has been, these authors demonstrate, a “silent revolution” in values.  Many of the old values were presupposed, rather than agreed upon, and as new settings lead to new values, the old values were “transcended,” in the view of the young or “abandoned” in the view of the old.

It’s really a generational thing, according to Norris and Inglehart.  Europe and the U. S.con sol 7 have been prosperous and secure for a long time now and the “values” that were required by “the greatest generation” [3] are no longer necessary.  Loyalty to one’s country, clear gender roles, heterosexuality, the cultural hegemony of white Christianity, and other commonplaces were once taken for granted.  But now that they are no longer “necessary,” we are free to look at what they cost us. [4] and when we see that the cost is high—not that those values are no longer “necessary”—we transcend them.  That is the silent revolution.

And if you take seriously the “back-“ in backlash, this is the answer.  This “revolution” is what the backlash is about.  In the view of the old [4], we have finally gone too far.  The things we care most about are overtly rejected and routinely ridiculed by “the elites.” [5].  It is time to stand up for America and for Christianity and for an economy that works for ordinary people.  That is the “back” of “backlash.”

We can’t change those values in the short run.  They will change on their own, under the conditions that produced the “silent revolution.”  When the working classes are secure and prosperous, they will not have a grievance that can be attached by political sleight of hand to the current ruling class.  If they don’t have a grievance, it can’t be used as fuel for a revolution of any kind.

So my “solution” to this problem is to leave the values alone except where they are put into statute as applicable to everyone.  In the view of this culture, for instance, refusing to require everyone to pray in public schools is “throwing God out of the schools.”  Those values, because they are demanded of everyone, need to be opposed.

Economic distribution

Because I focus on the cultural view—and here, I am in debt to the analysis of Joan C. Williams–it is not the inadequate compensation of the working class that constitutes the political problem, it is the prospect that things are going to continue to deteriorate for their children and grandchildren.  There is a braking effect on the feelings of class resentment if the parents always have to be prepared to see their children successful in terms of the current liberal agenda.  This “braking effect” used to keep class antagonisms from hardening up, but under current and foreseen economic circumstances, there will not be upward mobility for the children—the children will not become “them” in the class system—so there is no reason not to circle the wagons and begin to return fire.

I have argued that the flaw—the “menda”—in the economy is that work can now be done so cheaply that it doesn’t sustain workers anymore.  That means that there needs to be—as in the social democracies of Europe—a floor below which we will not allow our citizens to sink.  It means breaking the link, at the lower end of the wage economy, between work and compensation.

con sol 6There really isn’t any other way to do it if there is not enough work to go around.  We don’t need to go so far as Marx’s “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” but we need to move in that direction. [7]  The value argument is that all citizens deserve this support.  The wealthy deserve to live in a society where they are not assaulted by egregious poverty and need.  The poor need to have their basic needs for food, shelter, and medical care met so they will not experience egregious poverty and need.

So there you go.

This will require a good deal more taxation, of course, but we have the means to pay those taxes and when they are framed as what “we deserve as Americans,” those levels can be defended.

Warring tribes

The third element of the solution wouldn’t be necessary if the first two were the sole causes of the current “menda.”  If the abandonment of the old values and the perpetuation of the new poverty were the causes of the current political warfare, then when we deal with the first two, we have eliminated the need for the third.  Except that it doesn’t actually work that way.

So long as there is an elected government that can profit by stoking the latent grievances con sol 5of the citizenry, there will be appeals of that kind by the government to the people.  Politicians will say that their constituents STILL do not have the respect they are due and STILL do not have a fair deal economically, and that those citizens should be angry about it and use their anger to keep those particular politicians in office.

The previous two “solutions” mean that the citizens need not feel the way they do feel.  The value discrepancy problem has been solved in principle.  The economic equity problem has been solved in principle.  But if appeals are made to them, the fact that they need not does not mean that they will not.  We need also to make the warring tribes model of electioneering a thing of the past.

Currently, people organize themselves into collectivities in which “we” are righteous and unrecognized and “they” are imperious and immoral.  Or vice versa.  The order really doesn’t matter.  Appealing to your own tribe as a way of securing your election will still work so long as there are still tribes.  So my solution here is to get rid of tribes.

What I want is people who are willing and able to recognize that perfectly good people see things differently and, as a consequence, you really don’t need to cherish “enemies,” as is currently the practice.  You can have fellow citizens who are your allies on this issue and your opponents—not your enemies—on other issues.  This makes changes in the nature of the conversation also.  There is no value to treating with contempt, someone whose support and understanding you will need fifteen minutes later.  There is a kind of moderation that is born of these status discrepancies. [8]

So people who will not discuss politics (and economics and cultural values) civilly with their neighbors on the grounds that it is the right things to do, will still do so because it is the prudent thing to do.  You can have my support on zoning if I can have your support on homelessness.

I have argued that the tribal model is a two-way street.  Warring tribes of citizens elect warring politicians, who boast of having no friends in “the other party.”  And politicians who try to get re-elected by appealing to these discrepancies will seen only desperate and shrill, as if they have no real program to offer.

Accordingly, the solution will require two parts.  The national parties will have to stop banning legislative contacts with the other party.  Any Democrat, for instance, would be encouraged to cultivate relationships with Republicans provided it did not damage the high priority Democratic bills.  The old wisdom used to be that we could accomplish more with bipartisan legislation, even if the credit neededcon sol 4 to be shared.  I want that back.

The second is that neighbors used to talk politics fairly peaceably before party membership became a ghetto.  Walking that back is going to be hard because it will require discussions with people who are now enemies on the grounds that they don’t need to be enemies.  “Opponents,” sure, but the friendship is not based on common membership; only on common interests and civility.

End of argument.  The problem as I and the cited authors have defined it, can be reasonably solved by the approaches I have outlined here..  That doesn’t make them any more likely, of course, but having worked my way all the way through from the beginning to the end, I feel better about it.

[1]I made a big point in the first essay that the Latin menda= a flaw or error and the process of a + mending is the removing of that flaw.

[2]  Leaving aside the mechanical problem that popular majorities (but not electoral majorities) continue to vote for liberal candidates, the problem is that the populist majority is willing and able to elect authoritarian leaders.  The solution would have to make them less willing or less able.

[3]  Tom Brokaw’s book has made that expression nearly indispensable.

[4]  Admittedly, just who “us” is shifts around a little in such a series.

[5]  Notice how “elite” shifts the complaint from either a value or a culture and places it at the feet of actual power holders, who can be rejected in one sweep as “them.”

[6] Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter.

[7]  The Apostle Paul thought that was perfectly appropriate as an operating practice within the church.  The Apostle Karl applied it to economies worldwide under conditions of communism.

[8]The hot book when I first began to become a political scientist was E. E. Schattschneider’sThe Semi-sovereign People, which argues that democracy is saved by what he called “cross-cutting cleavages.”That is exactly what I am hoping to restore by honoring status discrepancies.

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Some Constitutional Amendment, Part II

Posted on February 22, 2019 by hessd

I think the most important challenge facing Americans today is constitutional amendment.

The argument so far (Part 1) is not that we need a Constitutional amendment; it is that we need some constitutional amendment. Madison’s two solutions (allow factions to grow until they implode and put enlightened patriots in the Senate) have not held up all that well. No fault of his, of course. Mass-based political parties had not yet made their appearance on the American scene, so destructive partisan competition was the least of his worries.

Madison’s plan for enlightened patriots was dealt a significant structural blow by the 17th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of U. S. Senators. The Senate, in other words, is going to be filled by the same process that fills the House. So if the electorate at large is enlightened, thoughtful, and patriotic, then they will elect people like themselves to the Senate and all will be well.

con econ 3Of course, all is not well. Here is a history of partisan conflict in the U. S. in two paragraphs. Jefferson won in 1800 by inventing a “party” with broad popular support. It was ideologically inconsistent because it welded together northern liberals and southern conservatives (the later, but justly famous Austin-Boston axis) but it was successful. The only parties that were ideologically coherent were minor parties until the 1970s when the GOP’s “Southern Strategy” became the “white party” in the south and started winning elections. The Democrats responded by ejecting their southern (conservative) wing and became a coherent liberal party.

The dominant political tradition was that you elected the “best people,” the people you aspired to be, to office on your behalf. It is worth recalling that the elegant Senator Frank Church once represented Idaho. With the decline of trust generally [1], voters came to want “representatives like me.” These are not the people I aspire to any longer; they are the people with the same prejudices and resentments I have. “He” (usually) will “fight for us.”

And that is what happened to Madison’s strategy of permitting one angry and turbulent chamber if it could be paired with one cool and thoughtful chamber.  The predicted implosion of factions hasn’t turned out too well either. So long as distances were obstacles and time was costly, factions would be hard to sustain. Skipping over a lot of intermediate improvements, let’s go straight to social media. Social media allows [2] the concurrence of interests over impossible distances with no loss of time at all. According to the Washington Post, 49% of Republicans believed in the Hillary Clinton “Pizzagate” scandal. Time and distance are, alas, no longer an obstacle to the fractionalization of American politics. [3]

So Madison’s two solutions have not held up very well. The soil he invented for us is badly in need of amendment. Madison’s “soil” was the structure of government. It wasn’t that he had such faith in electorates. Take this assessment, for instance. [4]

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts

Madison’s hope was that he could counteract these tendencies by governmental structure and mechanics.

That hope has been dealt a severe blow by the direction of the post-World War II economy. Here’s the short version. For some decades after the war, wages increased as productivity increased. That’s a really good thing provided that the work is still done by human beings. But productivity has continued to increase and wages have stagnated. This is a long term trend and it means that people who do most of the work can look forward to making no progress in their lifetimes and for things to be even worse for their children. If you see the beginnings of a “faction” there, you have seen clearly.

Not only that, but automation generally, and the much more extensive use of robots even for what used to be “white collar jobs,” means that wages are just not going to do the job of sustaining the workforce. People who work with their hand or who do essentially “algorithmic” jobs [5] are being replaced by cheaper foreign workforces and by even cheaper robots. This is what the market requires; there is no governmental fix for it. Government’s job is going to have to be to intervene to support the losers these market forces create.

con econ 2This brings us back to needing “some amendment,” rather than “an amendment.” We have an economically stressed bloc of voters. They are socially stressed as well. The old standards—the way it used to be and the way it ought to be are nearly the same thing for these people—have been replaced by new ones. All the assumptions that supported a white, Christian, androcentric country have taken a hit. These voters are angry about what is being done to them. They no longer believe in electing to office people who can rise above their situation, but rather want people who are angry about the same things. “Drain the swamp” reflects the same emotional levels as “Bring the mother down.” Neither of those is going to happen.

If we have a society that is economically stressed and that has access to government—“a government as good as its people” we used to say, thinking that was a good thing—and that wants an angry and vindictive government. That is the social (and economic) soil that grows the kind of angry populism we not have.

A society like that will always produce a government like this. That process is not going to change unless there is an authoritarian coup. So we need a way to amend, to remove the “menda,” if you recall the etymology in Part I, so the society will choose better governments.

How in the world are we going to do that?

[1] Beginning all over the West in the 1970s according to Francis Fukuyama’s book Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Property.
[2] I despair of using “media” as a singular noun, but just try to read that sentence as “media allow.” It doesn’t work any more.
[3] I moved over from “faction” to “fraction” there because a fraction is not an integer, i.e. it has no “integrity.” As true in politics as in mathematics.
[4] And immediately following that, a passage that the young Karl Marx admired: “But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. “
[5] As opposed to “heuristic” jobs, which require context and judgment.

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Constitutional amendment, Part I

Posted on February 21, 2019 by hessd

I think the most important challenge facing Americans today is constitutional amendment.

Think of that as sub-headline.  It’s misleading, sure, but it is supposed to get you into the body of the essay.  We’ll see.

Let’s work first on the misleading words I built into the title.  You may have noticed that although there is a capital C in the word “Constitution” in the title, there is a lower case c- in the word “constitution” in the subheadline.  That wasn’t a mistake.

The Constitution of the U. S. should always be capitalized. [1]  But anything can have a constitution.  If it has several elements that “stand together” it has a constitution [2].  A viable family has a constitution.  The United Kingdom has a constitution.  A senior center has a constitution.  And none of those are written documents.  They are the crucial infrastructure of ongoing social units.

But, of course, not everything that has a constitution has a good constitution.  The Federalists argued that the Articles of Confederation was not a good constitution.  The landscaper we consulted about our back yard (when we had a back yard) said that our soil’s constitution was poor.  And he suggested “amendments” to it.

con amd 1How you “amend” soil depends, of course, on what is wrong with it. [3]  This gets more complicated if you have something in particular you want to grow.  If you just want “good soil” and it is “too acid, you add a bunch of lime and you have “mended” the flaw in  your soil.  There are amendments for nearly anything and nearly any soil is good for growing something.  Some soils, much maligned, are good at growing moss, dandelions, and crabgrass.  Gardeners tend to call those “bad soils” which really isn’t fair, but gardeners are a constituency—they stand enduringly together—and they have a point of view.

But if you have a particular plant in mind, corn, for instance, and you want to grow it on a rocky island in the Aleutian Islands, you have other problems as well.  You have a kind of soil that can’t (a)mended and no one is suggesting that we mend the climate so that corn can be grown “too far north.”  That rocky, parched, frozen soil will (does) grow something, but it won’t grow what you want it to grow.

At that point, you have two choices.  You can go somewhere else, somewhere more hospitable to corn. [4]  Or you can decide to value what the soil and the climate will give you.

[Note to the reader.  This has gotten entirely out of hand.  I have just gone back to the title and renamed it “Part I.”  I am not going to be able to say what I want to say in one average size post, so let’s just serialize.]

James Madison had this kind of thing in mind when he wrote The Federalist #10, justly famous as a work of political theory, but written as a letter to the editor by a proponent of the new federal Constitution.  People told him that you really can’t have a popular government of a territory as large as the 13 states.  He said you could if you used the size as a feature, rather than lamenting it as a flaw.

The problem is “faction.”Madison defined a faction as follows:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Note that a faction is bad because the common impulse is bad.  It is “averse to the aggregate interests of the community.”.  He had two solutions.  The first was to make the electorate so large that small factions would not be a serious threat;  as they get large, they develop internal contradictions and implode. [5]

The second was to establish a two-chamber legislature where only one of the chamberscon amd 2 could be filled up with populist zealots.  The other chamber would have people “whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices .”  He had the Senate in mind when he chose those glowing words and he hoped that they would take care of the hotheads in the House of Representatives.  It requires only that they have enlightened views and virtuous sentiments. {6}

These are not “amendments” in the governmental sense because they were built into the Constitution along with a process by which further amending might be done.  But they are amendments in the sense that we can amend a soil that is flawed for the crop we have in mind, which, in this case, is representative democracy, known at the time as “republicanism.”  The natural limits to the coherence of factional groups and the presence of sober-minded patriotic citizens who are part of the legislative process and the amendments to the soil and they will allow us to grow a representative democracy.

If we are committed to representative democracy as the crop and the flaws we face can be mended, we should set about mending them.  If, on the other hand, they are—as in my Aleutian Island example—beyond the reach of amendment, we are going to have to go somewhere else (hardly practical for a modern nation-state) or change our “preferences” to a crop that our soil and climate will grow.

In Part II, I want to look at what our soil and climate are and to consider what it would take to amend the soil to make it compatible once more with democratic government.

[1]  It would be nice if it were also honored, but I am trying to restrict myself to language use at this point in the argument.

[2]Not to overdose on word origins, but once you get the hang of the stit- element of words, you see it a lot.  Following Eric Partridge’s account, I derive the Latin statuere, “to set: with is “a derivative” of stare, “to stand.”The prefix com- may mean “together,” as it often does (companion) or it may be an intensive.

[3]The Latin menda is “a fault or blemish.”That is why it needs to be “removed” in some way.  That sense is still available in the Latin ex- + menda, which became emendere, which became (after the French were done messing with it) amend.The a- still represents the “removal” part of the word and the “mend” the flaw to be removed.

[4]  Although it is hard not to notice that agricultural interests with a lot of money are buying up land “too far north” for what they are growing now.  You can be as skeptical as you like about the debates of climate scientists, but big time agricultural money in being spent on land where those crops have never ever (in this epoch) been grown.

[5]This is, for science fiction fans, the psychohistory solution in the Foundation Trilogy.  Maybe that’s where Madison got it.

[6]  Rep. Madison, allow me to introduce Sen. McConnell of Kentucky, a living breathing refutation of that half of your solution.

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Grief sherpa

Posted on February 19, 2019 by hessd

I’m a big fan of good analytical categories.  I value them in the way academics tend to, but on beyond that, I have been benefitted by them in some very personal ways.  Martin and Doka, for instance [1], distinguish between “intuitive” and “instrumental” styles of grieving.

On the other hand, the experience of grieving (the instrumental and intuitive styles are responses to the condition of grieving) is a fact.  Grief is true in your bones and in the pressure behind your eyes; it is true in the associations one word has with another; it is true in the way the numbers change on the clock.

My son, Doug, referred to me recently as “a grief sherpa.”  I think he invented the term sherpa 4on the spot, but I liked it right away.  Sherpas are not defined by their nationality.  There is no “Sherpistan.”  They are not defined by their locality although they do live in the Himalayas.  They defined by what they know and what they can do and mostly, that means what they have done before.  I think that is what Doug meant by calling me a grief sherpa—grief is something I have done before. [2]

The thing about me is, though, if I have experienced it frequently or deeply or both, I have probably written something about it.  Bette says I think with my fingers and although I’m not admitting anything, I do know what she means.  People say to me, “What was it like for you?” and very often, they wonder if, when it happened to me, I wrote anything about it.  Usually I have.

they say it much more often than they say, “How do you think I should handle this in my life?”

The notion of “sherpa-ness” took my mind right back to Leo McGarry’s description of how he could help Josh Lyman. [3]

LEO This guy’s walking down a street, when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep. He  can’t get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up “Hey you! Can you help me out?”  The doctor writes him a prescription, throws it down the hole and moves on. Then a priest  comes along and the guy shouts up “Father, I’m down in this hole, can you help me out?”  The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. [4]

Then a friend  walks by.  Hey Joe, it’s me, can you help me out?” And the friend jumps in the hole! Our guy says “Are you stupid? Now we’re both down here!” and the friend says, “Yeah, but I’ve been down here before, and I know the way out.”

This a great story for people who are grieving.  For one thing, it implicitly recognizes that there is a time called “afterward.”  When you are in the middle of it it feels like it is always going to be like this.  Somebody who was once in the hole you are in and who got out establishes that “afterward” is possible.

And for another thing, the friend has already jumped down into the hole.  He knows some important things (how to get out, for instance) and he has made himself available.  He is a friend.

sherpa 2This turns out to be relevant to what is going on in my life these days.  Some very difficult things have happened to friends recently.  These are friends who know enough of my life to know that I have been in the hole they are in right now.  Climbing out of that hole if really important to them; it is important, even at first, to know that it is possible and when you start to talk about climbing, you are talking about sherpas.  I called sherpas “people who know something and who know how to do something.

Here’s one that helped me.  Just a little earlier than the West Wing story I cited earlier, Josh was having a wrap-up conversation with Stanley Keyworth, his therapist.  Josh has just learned that his panic reaction had been brought on by the music he had heard.

JOSH So that’s gonna be my reaction every time I hear music? 

STANLEY No. 

JOSH Why not? 

STANLEY Because we get better.

We do.  We get better.  I knew that in an abstract sort of way, but hearing Dr. Keyworth say it, especially the way  he said it, made it seem like something I could afford to trust, maybe to risk a little, hoping that it might be true.

So my sherpa-ing amounts only to this.  I have done this before.  I know some things and I know how to do some things.  And I am willing to help.

[1]Their book is very misleadingly titled, Men Don’t Cry…Women Do, Kenneth Doka and Terry Martin, but it is a superb book

[2]  There is also an informal use he might have known about: “a civil servant or diplomat who undertakes preparatory work prior to a summit conference.”  That meaning was new to me, but if it has gotten that far, it has probably also become a verb in the same way that “caddy” became something your caddy did.

[3]  Season 2, The West Wing, “Noel”

[4]  This is Aaron Sorkin pushing as hard as he can against the narrative of The Good Samaritan.  That makes it much better when the role of the Samaritan is subverted.

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Let’s hear it for Iggy

Posted on February 18, 2019 by hessd

This is a celebration of Dr. Iggy Frome.  If you watch the NBC series, New Amsterdam, you already know Iggy.  He is “the psych department” at the hospital.  So far, that has mostly required him to be empathetic and cuddly, which he is.  You hear him say “Oh, I’m sorry” and “No, that’s OK” a lot.

Iggy 4That didn’t happen in the one subplot of the one episode “The Blues” (Season 1, Episode 13) that I am going to describe here.  Three lines, all directed at Dr. Lauren Bloom, opened up a new facet of Iggy’s work and changed my assessment of him entirely. 

The first zinger was, “I wouldn’t do that.” when Dr. Bloom was about to walk out on the counseling session.  The second, in answer to her speculation “So….I’ll get suspended,” was “No, you’ll get fired.”  And delivered just right.  Nothing cuddly at all there.  You’ll have to wait a little for the third zinger, but it will be worth the wait, I promise you.

The Addict

So here’s the deal.  Dr. Bloom (Janet Montgomery) has ADHD and is an emergency room physician.  She had taken Adderall for her condition for a long time, but now the stresses of her life and work have led to her abusing it.  Her colleague and friend, Dr. Sharpe (Freema Agyeman) reports her to the head of the hospital, Max Goodwin (Ryan Eggold) and Max sets Dr. Bloom up with psychiatrist, Iggy Frome (Tyler Labine).

This is a tough deal for Dr. Bloom.  She knows she is abusing Adderall, she knows she is Iggy 2making mistakes, but she tries to tough it out and denies all the indications that she is a danger to the hospital.  The “appointment” with Iggy is an ambush.  Dr. Bloom is called to Iggy’s office to “deal with a VIP.”  It turn out that the VIP is her.  Max leaves behind a very angry Dr. Bloom,;Iggy sits down behind his desk and starts asking innocuous questions.  She can’t leave without getting fired.  Iggy’s job is to get her to face the problem, which, after the process I am going to describe, she does.  Her last line, as she breaks down in tears is, “I need help.” (37:47)  Here is Dr. Bloom in better days.

The Treatment, Phase 1

If making the case against Dr. Bloom, were the job, Iggy could have started off by detailing the evidence against her.  He has a lot of evidence, it turns out, in the folder on his desk, but he doesn’t use it.  He just asks questions that seem chatty (and are supposed to) but when you have watched this episode several times as I have, you know why he asked them and where he is going to go.

He asks her why she, a New York City girl born and bred, went to Walla Walla, Washington to go to college.  She gives a snarky answer because she is angry about the ambush (“It’s insulting”) and doesn’t yet know that she is trapped. [1]

Iggy asks if she abused Adderall.  We all know she does.  She denies it.  Never take an extra dose?  Absolutely not.  Never put a patient in danger because of overuse.  Absolutely not.  “If I did that,” says Dr. Bloom, “I would turn in my license.”  Iggy has a folder full of evidence that she bas been doing exactly that.  “So…what are you waiting for?” he asks.

For me, watching this unfold, the desire to see Iggy play gotcha is overwhelming.  She is denying an offense he can prove her to be guilty of.  But Iggy isn’t trying to convict her.  He is trying to get her to understand that she needs help and that help is available.  He can’t do that by producing a lot of evidence.

The Treatment, Phase 2

Iggy 3Iggy asks about her childhood.  Her mother was a mess, her sister a victim, and her father a saint.  The “mess” her mother was turns out to be a mess that Dr. Bloom had to clean up, beginning at age 7.   She protected her sister as long as she could, but abandoned the sister at age 12 so she could go to college.  The father’s sainthood turned out to be his business successes and the fact that he always answered the phone when she called him.

That occasions the third of Iggy’s zingers.  “You just described him as an emotionally closed-off workaholic who was in complete denial that his personal life was on fire.  Who does that sound like?

Iggy means that she is running away, just like her father did, and he wants to know what she is running away from.  It turns out that she is running away from the guilt of abandoning her mother and her sister so she could go as far away as she could get.

We see the noose tightening around Dr. Bloom’s neck.  Iggy has the evidence and Bloom knows there is no denying it.  But she has not yet seen that this is one she can’t tough out.  She makes one more try and Iggy helps her—or seems to.

He asks if she thinks she can get her Adderall use under control.  She says she can.  He asks if she thinks practicing medicine is the best thing for recovery.  She says she knows it is.  “O.K.” he says, releasing her.  “Go show ‘em how it’s done.” [2]

The Treatment, Phase 3

She goes back to the emergency room. but she is disoriented.  The image we see of her is out of focus.  She sees things in slow motion.  She looks at five bays containing people in pain with no real comprehension.  Then, without thinking about it, she digs in her pocket for the Adderall.  Then she stops.

That is what takes her back to Iggy’s office.  She closes the door and leans against it in tears and says, “Ask me again.”  He says, “What were you running from?” and this time he gets in.  Bloom’s defenses collapse.  She has seen for herself that she can’t go on and says, finally, what Iggy needs for her to say, “I need help.”

He responds, “We can do that.”

The whole episode, “The Blues” is OK.  It’s fun, especially when you know the characters. [3]  But this particular subplot really engaged me.  It surprised me.  It moved me.  And I’ll never look at Iggy the same way again.

[1]  I had the same experience with an emergency room physician in Chicago when I demanded that she release me from the hospital.  I was pretty uppity about it.  She signed a paper saying I had left the hospital against medical advice.  I asked her what the airline would do when I presented the paper to them and she said they would not allow me to fly.  At that point I realized that she had me completely under her control and I got a great deal more compliant immediately.

[2]  They do come back to that moment at the end.  Bloom says through her tears, “Were you really clearing me to go back to work? and he replies, “And let a drug addict loose in the ED.  God, no.  Are you kidding me?”

[3]  It’s not a soap opera exactly.  It’s a scrub opera.

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Not being afraid

Posted on February 12, 2019 by hessd

There is nothing quite like fear to inspire an ardent interest in what works.

I am going to cite today two formulations that have helped me and that I have thought about. [1]  It seems odd to me, as I look at them, that both should help because they pull in opposite directions.  I really ought, I think, to find one or the other absurd and unhelpful, but in fact I have found help in both of them.

This one is called “The litany against fear” and it is familiar because it is featured in Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Dune.  This litany is taught to members of the Bene Gesserit order.  It goes like this.

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.[2]

This tee shirt version will help suggest how popular this litany has become, but I also chose this because it features the least helpful elements.  For me, at least.  I have two things in mind.  First, look at the verbs: I will face, I will permit, I will turn, I will remain.

Those virtually scream agency.  I am doing; I am acting.  And when you are seriouslyfear 1 afraid, agency is what you really need and besides it feels marvelous.

The second thing is the visualization.  The feared thing is coming at you and then you do something (permit it to pass) and then it goes away and you turn to see it go.  And then you stop and realize fully that it is gone and you are still here.

You can say those things all you want, but presupposing them is a good deal more powerful.  The things you might say, like “I am not afraid.”[2] don’t really work, but saying things that presuppose that you are not afraid, do work.

Everything in this litany presupposes that whatever is getting done, you are doing it.  It is your own courage that matters most because you are alone with the fear and have no recourse except to your own inner resources.

Minnie Haskins poem, at least the part of it quoted by King George VI in his famous address, is entirely different.  Here is that part.

I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year,

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied, “Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”

That poem reaches a completely different part of me.  I love it and I benefit from it.  I try not to be troubled that it is entirely opposed to the Litany, which I also find helpful.

Note first that I take no actions in this at all. [3]  I ask the advice of the man who stands at the gate of the year. [4]  And then I take his advice, which is to rely entirely on an understanding that is not my own. (See Proverbs 3:5)  What I do—and it might indeed be heroic—is to give up on what I understand and to rely entirely on what God understands.  Anyone who thinks that is easy has not tried it.

fear 8To the extent I do anything at all, in Minnie Haskins picture of reaction to fear, is that I do go out into the darkness. [5]  Then I put my hand into the hand of God.  That makes sense to me as a commitment, but for me the imagery is all wrong.  I think I would put my hand up and would feel God taking my hand.  You don’t “take” God’s hand when you can’t see it.  And, of course, the theology is all backwards, as this very sophisticated graphic demonstrates.

What is good about my situation, after I have accepted God’s firm grasp of my hand (my version of the transaction) is that my way in the darkness is better than any light would make it.  It is also safer than any way I might know.

I have an understandable and prudent [6] desire to know where I am going and also a desire to be safe.  Ordinarily, knowing what you are doing and how to make good choices fit together just fine.  But not at the Gate of the Year.  The future is God’s Territory, and following Him where he wants to take us is prudent and also safe.

Minnie Haskins view of dealing with danger is irreducibly relational.  It is in the relationship that understanding and trust and safety are found.  They are the presuppositions of her vision just as “my unconquerable soul” is the presupposition of the Bene Gesserit liturgy.  I ought, I am sure, to love one of those and hate the other, but the fact is that I love them both.

[1]  At first, the “helping me” part and the “thinking about” part have had no relationship to each other at all.  But over the years, the two actions have flowed together so that now, I think I find them more helpful because of the understanding of them I have developed.

[2]  “I do not fear those pale green pants with nobody inside ‘em.  I said and said and said those words.  I said ‘em, but I lied ‘em.”  Thank you Dr. Seuss.

[3]  In the part of the poem immediately after this, I do “put my hand into the hand of God” but in doing so, “I am led.”  Again, the passive.

[4] “ It is said that the image in her poem came to her at Warmley when she was standing at an upstairs balcony window, looking down the lit driveway to the gate.”So says a writer for the Daily Telegraph.

[5]  That is, in fact, the common biblical pattern.  God told the priests carrying the Ark of the Covenant to start into the raging Jordan River and then He would stop the waters and give them safe passage.  But first, you have to step into the water.

[6]The Latin prudentia is a contraction of providentia which is a combination of pro- before, and videre, to see.”It is seeing ahead, in this word, that allows us to “provide” for good choices, which is the “prudent” thing to do.

 

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The 12 days of Valentine Season

Posted on February 10, 2019 by hessd

It does sound odd, I am sure.  But Lent sounded odd to me at first and so did Passion Week and Advent.  I think “the 12 Days of Christmas” sounded less odd than those.  A gift a day to a loved one?  What’s so hard about that?

So we celebrate Valentine’s Season around here.  I don’t do all twelve days, but I do start twelve days out.  

I do my part by giving Bette cards that say something true that is hard to say in so many words.  “I love you” would be the words, but if you have tried that, [1] you know that sometimes the message doesn’t land as solidly as you would like.  So, like me, you try other ways.  

Bette does her part by receiving the cards with pleasure (and not, thank you, Bette, with gratitude) and by trying sincerely to hear what I am trying to tell her.

My part is no more or less important than her part.  It does, in fact, take two to tango. [2]  If she didn’t do what she does, I couldn’t do what I do.

I want to show you my favorite card for this year.  It has a very unremarkable tandem bicycle on the front face of the card.  Then it has this, tucked almost discreetly into the bottom right corner.

Screen Shot 2019-02-09 at 9.02.59 AM.png

The inner tube is contorted by the artist to suggest a heart.  You could go off in the direction of just what is the inner tube of a relationship and how does it hold the pressure that allows the couple to go on down the road safely and efficiently?   I think that is kind of an intriguing question, but it isn’t the one that came first to my mind.  It isn’t the one that causes me to tear up as I was standing by the card rack and to choose to buy this card to give to Bette.

Here’s what moved me.  Every relationship I know of is porous.  If you want the right amount of air in the tire [3] you are going to have to keep putting air in it.  That’s what the handle and the pump and the hose are for.  And if it is a good relationship, you are both paying attention to whether the tire has enough air in it and you are both sharing the pumping task when it does not.

That’s what got to me.

But, of course, relationships—especially relationships of the heart—aren’t like bicycle tires.  Each of the partners has an ideal pressure and so does the relationship itself.  In maintaining the proper pressure in myself, I can do the checking and I can do the pumping most of the time.  But sometimes I don’t notice that the pressure is too low and Bette does notice.  At that point—I know this is ridiculously simple, but that’s why metaphors are so helpful—Bette can work the pump and restore the pressure.  And the same is true for the “pressure” in Bette’s “tires;”  I can check and I can help.

I understand that there are cyclists who adjust the tire pressure for the terrain they are going to cover, particularly if it is going to be irregular.  I don’t know anything about that.  I do know that Bette and I have occasions, like visiting each other’s families, for instance, where a little pressure might be needed.  That is especially true in situations where there might be a puncture and a patch would need to precede the pump.

So there’s a lot of variation.  But what there isn’t variation about is that the tires are going to lose air and we are going to want them to be kept at the right pressure and to do that, each of us is going to have to lend a hand with the air pump. [4]

And we do.  And this Valentine’s Season, I am especially grateful for that.

[1]  Bette doesn’t really hear words all that well.  It is actions from which meanings can be derived that really matter to her.  So I try to do things that will reliably imply the message I am trying to send.

[2]  So I hear.  I have never tried to tango either by myself or with a partner.

[3]  I have more often used the metaphor of burning high quality fuel in the engine (that drives the marriage, I guess) so it doesn’t fill up with gunk and start to malfunction.  Different metaphor; same point.

[4]  If the metaphor were to get entirely out of hand, each of us would have a tire pressure gauge and each would check from time to time on our bicycle.  I think that’s really too much for a Valentine’s Season card.

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Being friends with your adult children

Posted on February 9, 2019 by hessd

I want to begin with one of my favorite quotes from The West Wing.  Lisa Wolfe is a staffer in a Republican Senate, which controls the confirmation of federal judges.  Josh Lyman is a staffer in a Democratic White House, which controls the nomination of federal judges.  In the quotation below, Lisa is advising Josh to bring her the name of a moderate judge and not to waste his time bringing liberals.  She says:

 I tell you this as a person who would be your friend if I was a person who looked for different things in friends.

I just think it is cute that she the first subjunctive in as if she really wanted to be Josh’s friend and then a second subjunctive which establishes the simple truth that she does not want to be Josh’s friend.  When I think how easy it would have been to write that line so it wasn’t funny at all, I send a silent vote of thanks to Deborah Cahn who wrote this episode. [1]

children 6It does raise the question, however, of what you look for in friends and that is an especially piercing question when the people who might become your friends are your own children.

This isn’t like dating.  It isn’t like striking up a conversation with some new and interesting person at a party.  Your children are people you have known in another way.  The transition will have to have the form of “No longer this…but that.” 

In this essay, I am interested in three things.  What is it no longer?  What is it to become?  And what sort of transition is indicated by that little ellipsis between them?

What is it no longer?

It is not asymmetrical any longer.  Well…it is, kind of, because although you can become new persons for each other, it will always be true that you were, once the persons you were.  You were parent and child.  But you are in the process of leaving that asymmetry behind and the way to do that is to keep your eye on a new symmetry as the goal.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Your children used to be dependent on you, for instance.  That could have been the best part of the relationship for you or for the child or both, but it isn’t symmetrical and it can’t be made symmetrical.  As a practical matter, your choices are interdependence, in which each relies on the other, or independence, in which neither relies on the other.

Now that might not be the way you looked at it. [2] You may have focused much more children 7clearly on nurturance.  You nurtured the child and you did a terrific job of it, sometimes at considerable cost to yourself.  Apart from how good it was for the child to be nurtured, it was terrific to know how good you were at nurturing.  When the child becomes an adult, she doesn’t need to be nurtured, or, what is nearly the same thing, doesn’t want to be caught needing to be nurtured.  We’re all grown up now, right?

I’ve been talking about dependence and independence as if they were positions like ON and OFF.  They aren’t, of course, but I needed to simplify it so I could make the point about symmetry.  It works the same way if the virtue is wisdom. 

Wisdom is just another asymmetry.  I know things that you don’t and you need to know them so you ask.  I may look at how wonderful it is that he and I have such a close relationship (and it may be true) without noticing that it requires him not to know things.  There really ought to come a time when he needs to know things and he will know things and they may be different from the things you know.  They may be contradictory to the things you know to be true.

children 5It is at that point that you find out how tightly wedded you are to the Wise Man role.  If you need to play that role apart from whether your son needs the wisdom you are offering, then you will experience your son’s adulthood as a loss and you will grieve it. [3]  You may continue to offer “wisdom” because, after all, that is what you like to do and you have been really good at it; and find that there is no place to put all that wisdom.  There is no empty space in your son’s life which you can fill to the satisfaction of each party.

Here’s what to do.  Let’s start with the bad news first.

You need to shift over from what you were doing to what your child now needs.  Notice that the trick is to “shift over,” not to stop one thing and start another.  If celebration is the mature form of nurture, then imagine that you are shifting from some kind of 80/20  mix down through 60/40 and on to 20/80.  More and more celebration and less and less nurture.  Or more and more receiving of wisdom from the child and less and less giving of wisdom to the child. 

I promised good new after the bad news, but we’re not there yet.

children 8The two hard things about that transformation are that you have to give up a role you were really good at and start practicing a role you are not likely to be as good at, at least at the beginning.  The nurture that emerged from your compassion and the counsel that emerged from your wisdom were beautiful and practiced and you and your child performed it like a dance.  The celebration of the daughter’s accomplishments is not going to be as good at first (also not as satisfying) so you really need to start now and the same goes for the celebration of your son’s wisdom.

Start now.  Use the asymmetrical relationship as a bank account you can draw from in beginning the new, well new-ish, relationship.[4]  You don’t have to withdraw the adult support faster than the child loses the need for it.  Just don’t be very much slower.  You are alert now for instances where your daughter does things using her own resources that would once have required a shoulder to cry on.  You see them coming, you prepare for them, you prepare to offer nurture should it be required and to lavish your pride on your daughter when she manages for herself.

It might not be easy, but it won’t continue to feel as bad as it feels now.  Here’s why.  When you first lose that wonderful old nurturance, it seems like a loss only.  You have lost something you had a right to.  But as you anticipate the chances to celebrate your daughter’s accomplishments, you can catch yourself feeling that way and you can disapprove of it.  The feelings won’t go away immediately, but when you refuse to approve of them, they will weaken and as you feed the new relationship—the adult to adult relationship—those new feelings will get stronger.

Now the good news I promised.

The new relationship is a relationship you can only have with a friend.  The relationship children 9of oversight and provision is gone now [5] and in its place is a friendship.  The friendship runs, as do all your other friendships, on the things you have in common now; on the complementarity of your current skills and emotions.  This is a small ironic riff on the expression “friends with benefits” only here, the benefit is the past you share and enjoy together.

Now, you get to receive nurture from your daughter and if you are willing to do that, you will get to offer nurture to her as well.  If you are willing to receive advice and counsel from your son, you will get to offer advice and counsel as well, just as you do with your other friends.  This is the symmetry you were looking for; the symmetry that was worth going through all that turbulence for.  It is a rich and caring interdependence.

It was a rough go, you think, looking back.  When she left, I felt only the loss of her leaving.  As I was learning to celebrate her achievements and not to hover, I didn’t always hit the balance right and frankly, she didn’t assert her new independence with unfailing grace either.  But we both learned to do better and then we got really good.  And then we came to rely on each other to play our new parts with confidence and generosity.  And now we are friends who know how to depend on each other, to actively affirm who we are and to relish what we were.

That’s not bad at all.  It brings us back to the little West Wing quip with which we began.  You are friends with you son or your daughter because you do, in fact, find in them the things you look for in a friend.

[1]It’s the 17th episode of Season 5 and it’s called “The Supremes.” Nearly all the episodes of The West Wing are available in full transcript form.

[2]  So I don’t have to keep talking about “the child” and to free this narrative up for a little more breadth, I have invented a mother/child relationship in which nurture is the key virtue and a father/son relationship in which wisdom is the key issue.  I know those are stereotypes, but it does open up some more specific examples without adding a batch of unnecessary words.

[3]  It is easy to imagine that you will not grieve it or at least that you will not show it.  That isn’t at all likely.  We respond to losses at that deep level in ways that are easy to see and easy to understand by everyone but ourselves.  We are literally the last to know

[4] There are lots of good forms of “not nurture anymore” of which celebration is only one, but it isn’t a bad one.

[5]  OK, it’s never entirely gone.  Minds don’t work that way.  But the emotions and the habits of mind that are associated with the parent/child relationship can become something the two of you laugh about together (because you are adults and friends) and secretly cherish because you both have wonderful memories of an earlier time.

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It’s “Groundhog Day.” Again.

Posted on February 2, 2019 by hessd

I will watch Groundhog Day again on Saturday. I watch it every year. I just don’t seem to be able to help myself. (Just kidding about that last part.)

In this well-known movie, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) discovers that his life doesn’t mean anything. Nothing he does has any consequence at all beyond the end of that day—whenever that is. [1]

Igroundhog 5t isn’t just that his existence is ephemeral, like a mayfly. It is not that it does not last beyond that day; it is that it has no meaning beyond that day. He starts off tomorrow, having learned a great deal from all the yesterdays that he (only) remembers. [2] He finds that terribly discouraging, eventually, but his first response is that it is a great opportunity.

He learns how to rob the bank truck every morning so he is rich for the rest of the day every day. He learns how to seduce a very desirable woman by building up the pretense of a long relationship because he remembers what he learned “yesterday” and she does not. He runs away from an aggressive insurance salesman because it takes him more than one day to figure out how to handle him more effectively. He kills himself in any number of imaginative ways, but nothing works. He still wakes up the next morning.

But at some point, he decides that when he has learned that “his life has no consequence,” he has learned too much. He has learned that life has no external consequence. It does, it turns out, have an internal consequence. He can feel good about himself that day because of all the good things he does that day. [3]

There are two kinds of things he chooses to do: the episodic and the cumulative. We seegroundhog 9 him on his “rounds.” He frightens the insurance salesman who always frightened him; he changes a flat tire for some old ladies; he catches a boy falling out of a tree; he performs the Heimlich maneuver for a man in a restaurant. Those are regular, but episodic.

He also does things that can’t be done in a day, even if they are done every day. He learns ice sculpture, for instance, and gets good at bar room piano.. And he learns to let go of his love for the only woman he loves because he realizes that to her, he will always be the jerk he was yesterday.

What happened?

Something happened to Phil Connors that broke the curse of inconsequentiality. [4] We don’t know what it was. It is tempting to think that the virtuous uses to which he put his endless February 2 were the breaking of the curse. It doesn’t change the “spell” but it is no longer a curse. Except he doesn’t feel that way after he learns the curse is broken. “Anything different is good” he tells Rita (Andie McDowell) the next morning.

groundhog 2So the curse wasn’t the arrogant person he was and all the action that inconsequentiality made possible. Had that been the case, the wonderful person he became when he saw the possibilities of inconsequentiality would have been the end of the curse. That’s not how he saw it. The inconsequentiality—the repeating of the same day with the same insipid radio host banter and the same songs and the same “chance” meetings on the street—was itself the curse.

So what was it? Was it his love for Rita? That’s possible. The movie is a lighthearted comedy, although you couldn’t tell it from the way I have been writing about it, and “love conquers the curse” is well within the range of the movie. So maybe that’s the answer. [5]

Does Phil Connors live a life without consequence? Does nothing “follow” from the actions he takes? (That’s the sequor part of consequence: “it follows,” as we say). I’ve been saying that he could live such a life and he did and he hated it. But now I would like to say that he could not and did not and his belief that he did is a misunderstanding.

Consequentiality Reconsidered

Phil Connors’ life had no external consequences. But the life he chose (eventually) to live had internal consequences for sure. The actions we take send out little signals like the chirp of a bat and by them we tell where we are (and, for humans, who we are) by hearing them bounce off things and return to us. Every time Phil acts—either the bad Phil (I don’t even floss anymore) or the good Phil (Not today, see footnote 3)—he send out a signal of who he might be. What he learns from hearing the signal return to him is the internal consequence of his action. Bad Phil’s actions have the consequence of confirming just how bad he is and how unsatisfying all that badness is. That’s why he gives it up.

Good Phil’s consequences—we are considering only inner consequences now—affirmgroundhog 7 him as the kind of person he really wants to be. He tried seduction and slovenliness and irresponsible work and theft and unconcern and suicide and found them to have consequences for his own sense of himself that he did not like. Now he is trying honest courtship and hygiene and solid professional work and honesty and compassion and he likes that Phil. It doesn’t break the curse (see the argument above on what the curse really was) but it gives him the richest life a person in his situation can have and either he likes it or his heroism in the face of inconsequentiality knows no bounds at all.  Jean Paul Sartre would marvel at an existential hero like this Phil Conners.

Some commentators have said that what works the magic for Phil Connors is that he finally realizes that today is the only day he has. Then they follow up by observing that that is true of all of us. But, of course, it is not. We make promises we intend to keep, for instance. Phil could not marry Rita using any wedding service I have ever heard without promising to love and cherish her for longer than the day they were married.

So I deny that the curse of inconsequentiality would be really good for us all. It did bring to Phil Connors an intense focus on that day. I won’t deny it. And like everyone else, I liked the good Phil and hated the bad one.

I’m not talking about the groundhog.

[1] We learn that it is not midnight, as Rita mistakenly believes it must be.
[2] He says to Rita that he is “a god” and maybe God’s trick is not that He is omniscient, but just that he had been around a long time and remembers everything.
[3] He laments the death of an old man whose life he has been unable to save. The nurse explains to him, “Sometimes they just die.” His response is powerful for a many who has only today to live. He says, “Not today.”
[4] Honestly, I don’t think I have ever had a chance to use that word before and I mean by it exactly what I mean. Although he redeems the day to the extent he can, he can never be to others the person he is now rather than the person he used to be. That is why it is a curse and why he is exhilarated to see it end, even though he has learned to thrive in it.
[5] In Woman of the Dunes, the Japanese story on which this is based, Niki Junpei, who is trapped the way Bill Murray is trapped, decided to stay because he has learned something valuable that he can teach to future generations. If Junpei’s imprisonment could be thought of by analogy with Phil Connors’ curse, then we would say that, given the choice, he chose the curse.

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“Realistic” as a slur

Posted on January 30, 2019 by hessd

I’ve been having fun recently thinking about two sets of terms that are so close to each other, in a way, and yet so very far apart.

The first set is real/realistic. It comes from the most recent remake of Miracle on 34th Street. The interchange between the little girl on Santa’s lap and Santa goes like this.

Susan: But you’re a very good Santa Claus. Your beard is stuck on real tight. Usually the Santa’s whiskers are too loose. Yours are realistic.

Santa: That’s because they ARE real.

This is what Susan (Mara Wilson) looks like then the beard doesn’t come off when she pulls it.

Real. Realistic. “Realistic” specifies that they are not real and comments on how nearly they look—or smell or feel or sound—like the real thing. It would take a revolution in Susan’s world to enable her to ask whether they are real.

If the whiskers are real, it would only require that the person playing Santa Claus have an actual beard of his own. He brings his own beard to playing the role of Santa Claus. But, of course, there is another possible meaning as well, which is that the beard is real because Santa Claus is real and this is THE Santa Claus.

That question is addressed in this same scene, where the double-valued word is “employee.” Here’s how that goes. Susan introduces herself as the daughter of the woman who runs the Cole’s parade and, we know as viewers, the woman who hired Santa Claus to play the part of Santa Claus in the department store

Susan: I know how this all works. You are an employee of Cole’s.

Santa: THAT is true.

What Susan means, and what she thinks she said, is that the man on whose lap she is sitting is “the Cole’s department store Santa Claus AND NOT THE REAL THING.” What Santa says in reply is precisely correct. He is an employee of Cole’s. He does not touch on the question of whether he is also the real Santa Claus.[1]

So “real” and “realistic” operate on different levels entirely. The second set of words to be set side by side is “diverse” and “perverse.” The -verses are the same, of course,[2] but they appear, in a manner of speaking, in different chapters.

Things that are “diverse” are “turned different ways,” according the Latin root diversus. [3] The di- is the remnant of dis-, which suggests a variety of turns, just as convert uses con- to suggest turning back and traverse uses trans- to travel across. No judgment is implied in any of these. Going on and going back and going different ways are all fine in the right circumstances. [4]

“Perverse” isn’t like that. The prefix per- gives us “away” or “askew.” Those are not good. There is a norm, in other words, that supports “perverse” just as there is a norm that supports “real.” And the behavior in question does not, according to the speaker, conform to that norm. If there were no norm, “diverse” would work just fine; if there is a norm and the behavior in question violates it, “diverse” is just not enough.

So no amount of diversity gets you to perversity. It isn’t a superlative form. For anything to be perverse, some norm must be proposed so that “away from” can mean something. Someone with a greater attraction to making trouble than I have might ask, when some thing is called “perverse,” just what norm is being violated.

My guess is that it would be hard to say sometimes and, at other times, not so hard to say, but hard to admit.

[1] At the trial, the prosecutor asks him point blank if he is Santa Claus. “Yes, of course,” he replies.
[2] These two words share the root vertere = “to turn” but are differentiated by their prefixes.
[3] This one emerged in a conversation with my son, Doug, who, like his father, has a thing about words.

[4]  All the beautiful slim women represent “diversity” in some sense or other.  You have to look for it

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