Congressional progressive caucus; against the government shutdown. If a crazy person with a gun shoots me, I become an icon of the far left.

Maybe Bernie Sanders, only Senator in the caucus, will engage me in conversation.

“Any chance you’re a Vermonter?”

“No, but I’m an old friend of Peter Galbraith’s.”

“He’s not popular in the State Senate.”

“Tell me about it.”

The nutty right has royally fucked the country; I will stand with the nutty left against it. I will stand in the rain (it’s raining) and scream crazy shit with the crazy ass progressive caucus.

I don’t know what the p.c.’s platform is. I’m sure I’m opposed to most of it. But a student in my mo/pomo seminar told me about the rally, and I’ve been spouting off in class about postmodern political passivity (in my weaker moments I tell myself this blog, this daily attack on corrupt elements of the American university, constitutes…) and… I dunno. Sometimes there’s no unpacking motive. I’m on the train. I’m going.

Maybe they’ll cancel it due to inclement weather. Optimal outcome. I get points for going without having to listen to the crazy ass progressive caucus say dumb shit. Without having to worry about Our Polarized Nation.

UD‘s wearing her uniform (boots, jeans, black turtleneck, scarf). The other day she attended a meeting of GWU’s highest administrative team, and the contrast between their suits and her jeans was stark. Thready old hippie UD. Representing the humanities faculty whether they like it or not.

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Postlude. Wow, it’s wet out there. Chilled damp UD takes her place on the red line train back to Garrett Park. She carries a red sign with white letters that read

END THE SHUTDOWN!

Capitol trees, bushes, and grasses trembled beautifully around UD as she walked from Union Station to the rally. One tree in particular, planted in circular groves on the grounds of various buildings, had a complex birch-like peeling bark (maybe the tree was a river birch?) and a thick coat of reddening green leaves with black berries. Blue jays shrieked and crows called out from lamp tops. Panicled pampas grass was paired with humpy mums – not a good look.

Employees at various federal entities streamed in to a park at the foot of the Capitol. They banged pots and chanted WORK NOT HURT. One of them gave UD the sign. T-shirts were also available, but who was going to put one on over her poncho? The rain flooded down, and the air was cold.

One guy tromped through the crowd trying out various chants. “We’ve got a Norma Rae,” said one attendee to another, and they laughed.

Police and their dogs were everywhere. At one point a bunch of them converged on an oddball wearing sunglasses, but he was just an oddball.

“Are you on furlough?” a reporter asked UD.

“No.”

He walked away.

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Jesse Jackson spoke. He sounded drunk and old. He offered a halting potted American history. We won in 1862… and… uh… in 2012… Now it’s 2014 and we won’t forget… He didn’t even bother coming up with one of his famous rhyming couplets.

UD‘s been having rather trying summers lately.

True, she doesn’t teach during the summer, which means that her reading and writing time is her own. This fact alone makes her summers enviable from the point of view of most people, who have to go to workplaces.

On the other hand, last summer, as she prepared to go to her houselet in the hills of upstate NY, Righthaven came calling. No traditional birthday dinner for UD at Woodstock’s Bear Cafe. She had to stay home and deal with that.

This summer, which was going to involve a variation on the Bear Cafe birthday — an event at Peter Galbraith’s house in Vermont was planned — is also messed up, because she’s having surgery mid-August. Nothing scary, but she’ll need a few weeks recovery, etc.

Mr UD came up with the idea of their taking a little trip the week before the surgery, so today they drive to a bed and breakfast in Luray Virginia, where they will explore caves (this will impress you). UD will of course blog throughout the week.

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Longtime readers know that Les UDs – for reasons of Soltan family history – own a fifty-acre snail farm in Latgale, Latvia, not far from the town of Rezekne. (“It’s not a snail farm,” Mr UD just said, and indeed no snail farming goes on there; but someone imported snails to the property a long time ago, and they’re crawling all over the place, and someday maybe we’ll farm them, so I call it our Latvian snail farm.)

Time and priorities being what they are, UD has never spent a summer, or any other season, on the snail farm, but there’s a story in today’s news that reminds her she should visit the region.

Vilnius, Lithuania is a couple of hours away from the snails, and its mayor the other day took an armored vehicle and crushed a car illegally parked in a bicycles only lane.

… where she’ll celebrate the New Year and Peter Galbraith’s birthday.

Right now she’s off for last-minute shopping in Cambridge.

I’ll post when I can.

… with whom UD‘s old friend Peter Galbraith worked on the peace accord when Peter was ambassador to Croatia, has died.

Peter always described Holbrooke as so hard-nosed a character that UD wondered how the two of them – Peter and Holbrooke – could be in a room together without the room imploding.

… for the Vermont Senate for Windham County, with one of the candidates, our old friend, Peter Galbraith. Peter is happy. He’s doing very well.

… said UD as she returned to her rented beach chair yesterday afternoon. She’d been away from it for two hours, first cooling down in her building’s nearby pool, then having lunch with her sister, and she’d worried that someone might have snatched the chair.

Or, far worse, someone might have lifted the big black hardback she’d set on its seat: Hitch-22, the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens.

But no, everything was here, including the book, its yellow spine blazing away in the sunlight as a high tide nipped its heels.

Having carried a headful of Hitchens to lunch, she’d burbled to her sister (who would have preferred to discuss Morrissey) about his virtues… “Dismal. Why don’t Americans much use that word? Hitchens uses it all the time, and it’s a great word… Recondite. An absurd word! I don’t use it because it sounds pretentious. But he uses it and it’s fine… Grog-blossom!

I once had a drink with an Express veteran, his face richly veined and seamed with grog-blossom…

Phrases too: One cannot be just a little bit heretical… And endless hilarious invective which always feels accurate — unlike Gore Vidal’s, which is also hilarious but feels vindictive…”

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I didn’t go into the deeper affinities I feel reading a man who adores Auden and Larkin (“I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets,” he said in an interview a couple of days ago, “the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”) and quotes Cesare Pavese…

Actually there’s a striking and immediate affinity there, because my first week on the beach I’d reread A. Alvarez’s book about suicide, The Savage God… Beach reading à la UD… and Hitchens not only begins his narrative talking about that book (his mother killed herself); he even pulls some of its quotations from Pavese (“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”). If you’ve read my latest Inside Higher Ed post about burqas, you know that I begin with a Pavese quotation pulled from last Saturday’s Alvarez reading. (“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”)

UD and Christopher Hitchens: Two literary-minded children of suicides.

*********************************

To be sure there are more obvious things to interest me in Hitch-22 — people we know in common, like Peter Galbraith, praised on page 300; a love of obscene limericks; a love of Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas; Jewishness; a slightly louche interest in the outer edges (“I think I wish I had not been introduced so early to the connection between obscure sexual excitement and the infliction – or the reception -of pain.”) — but what rivets UD is this odd life-and-literature affinity.

***********************************

Well, let’s bring it all together. It’s far from my favorite Larkin poem (I think the last line is weak), but anyway.

To the Sea

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first
Few families start the trek back to the cars.
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to the water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.

My old friend, Peter Galbraith, stands accused of it. An article about the matter appears on the front page of today’s New York Times.

Eide’s former deputy Peter Galbraith, who was fired last month, has challenged Eide’s credibility, complaining he turned a blind eye towards the extent of the fraud in the August vote.

Eide on Friday called Galbraith a “footnote in the electoral history of Afghanistan.”

… and broad sculpted staircases with immense stained-glass windows at the landings. I glance through a window and catch the ghosts of liberals past – Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith specifically – chatting on either side of the stone wall separating their big dreary Cambridge gardens.

A few yards behind these summoned luminaries looms the campus whose iconicity-to-actuality ratio UD has always found lopsided. The world dreams about Harvard, while Harvard itself stands in an almost-permanent bad weather snit, many of its major buildings brutalist and its central quads a dispiriting brickyard.

UD has always found these sorts of grandeur-to-ground-level gulfs bracing, refreshing, happy-making, as when she discovered that Phillip Larkin was a pissy old masturbator.

Hers is a common enough reaction. The most-praised portrayals of Winston Churchill show him as a shambling ass.

*********************

At the darkest, coldest time of the year, I am in an old house, beside an old campus, in a very old city. The operative words are dust and dusk. Weak sunlight gives out at around two o’clock by the brooding grandfather clock in the hall, and the already-drifting house settles into true REM sleep. Across from the clock, a fine empaneled library is a museum on its way to being a mausoleum. The bound words of the prolific JKG maintain, on its shelves, a stunned silence. What happened to the world?

Such is the delicacy of this preserved interior that whenever UD spills some tea or dislodges one of the ruglets on the stairs, she smiles and thinks I am UD, destroyer of worlds. But there is a praiseworthy piety – world historical, filial – that wants to keep things as they are. The servant-summoning technology still works: Press the Library or Third Hall button on the Clark and Mill Electric Co Cambridge and Boston panel, and out comes a chirp.

*********************

Ghosts, and catastrophes. You think less about the grandeur and more about the ground-level grief when you’re actually here: The young son whose death threw Galbraith into a tailspin. The gruesome public assassination of Benazir Bhutto, guest of honor at one of his celebrated garden parties. Galbraith’s son Peter spends his life pacing the aftermath of global atrocity.

You could say UD currently sits (she’s in the library at five AM) at the pinnacle of elitism; you could say she ain’t climbing any higher than atop this soft leather chair resting on one of the gargantuan rugs Galbraith or Galbraith junior brought back from India or Afghanistan. But it’s only the trappings. What’s been able to be held in amber. This place is the genuine Henry James (Harvard Law, 1872): The affluent society, expansive, sedate; and the cry of pain almost out of earshot.

UD‘s buddy Peter at a forum where the stands are tree stumps.

The first few minutes of this YouTube show you the restaurant down the street from UD‘s house. The rest of the clip features two distant acquaintances of UD‘s – her neighbor, Nancy Floreen, and Chris Van Hollen (UD last met up with him at one of Peter Galbraith’s birthday parties).

… at the American Economic Association. Also on lack of disclosure, conflict of interest – the stuff Stanford University’s You CAN Have It All! medical staff is dealing with at the moment.

The New York Times recently noted the AEA’s amoral ways.

You can argue that things like ethics codes don’t make no nevermind one way or the other; but somehow their absence, when every other professional organization has something along these lines, feels like a statement in itself.

Asked about this, UD‘s acquaintance James Galbraith (economist; brother of Peter) says:

You can’t have an ethical code unless ethical people design it. No sign of that sensibility at the AEA. I think what should happen is the formation of small societies with codes joined by subscription. Then people could distinguish between economists who avoid or disclose conflicts, and those who do not.

She will usher in 2011 with this fellow, in Vermont.

Regular readers know that Les UDs have spent many December/Januaries in chilly Vermont farmhouses with Peter.

**********************

Update: Galbraith wins. Top vote-getter.

… under extremely strange circumstances.

****************

He was arrested in his house. The police said he was disorderly when they interviewed him about a (nearby?) break-in.

This is a rambling old luxurious house, just around the block from our house on Shady Hill Square, and inches from the house our friend Peter owns (his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, bought it).

I’m trying to open the police report and read it now. Hold on.

*****************

Well, okay, here’s the police report.

And here’s how things look — in a VERY preliminary way — to old UD.

There had been a previous break-in at the Gates house, and the front door wasn’t working right. A woman walking by saw two black men with backpacks pushing up against the door as if to break it in. She called the cops.

But it seems likely that they pushed the door in that way because that was the only way to open it since the break-in. Or I guess attempted break-in.

Okay. So a policeman responds to her call and begins to talk to Gates, who is most decidedly unpleasant to him. Did the policeman provoke the unpleasantness? Maybe, maybe not. Is Gates so angry being racially profiled in various ways that he took his rage out on the policeman? Maybe, maybe not.

In any case, it seems clear that Gates lost it and shouted and made a big scene.

It is not at all clear that the policeman should have arrested him. So Gates is screaming and out of control. So what. He’s still in his house. He’s not going anywhere. The thing to do at this point, it seems to UD, is leave. It seems to UD that this was not so much a racial as a class encounter between a high-handed Harvard professor (“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” said Gates, obnoxiously.) and a cop insulted by Harvard obnoxiousness.

But if you work the Harvard beat, you need to be able to take it. You need to be able to walk away when high-handed people who think they’re better than you are mouth off. I’m guessing the policeman lost his cool.

But this is WAY preliminary…

********************

Update, New York Times. Still a bit murky.

What can UD tell you about the friend she’s known for almost thirty years now that he’s a very big deal?

He was the best man at her wedding. He gave a glorious toast.

He and Mr UD go way back. Both sons of Harvard professors, the two lads lived only a couple of blocks away from one another in Cambridge, and they were among the first to attend Charles Merrill’s Commonwealth School in Boston. (Mr UD loves to tell the story of Merrill one afternoon awkwardly announcing that the kids were going to have a guest speaker that day, a poet… Uh… the headmaster’s brother… Guy named James Merrill…)

Both went to Harvard, where they remained close friends. Both moved to Washington, Peter to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Karol to work at the University of Maryland.

Over the years, Mr UD has accompanied Peter to Kurdistan, Baghdad, and East Timor to work with him on political issues.

Les UDs have spent many moody, meditative New Years in Vermont with Peter (he has long had a house there), his family, and other friends.

Peter is a loyal and loving friend.

He has an excellent sense of humor. UD once made him laugh so hard he almost lost it. Les UDs and Peter and Peter’s girlfriend were driving back from kayaking in Virginia somewhere. Peter was at the wheel. UD, notorious for being unable to tell even a simple joke correctly, was trying to tell the first of these two jokes. It all went terribly wrong, and became far more obscene than necessary, in her hands.

Somehow the total ineptitude of UD‘s telling, and the desperate obscenity of her version, sent Peter into such a spin that he almost lost control of the car.

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Peter has the driven, complex, difficult personality you’d expect with his high-powered background, his politically active and ambitious family, and the legacy of his world-historical father. In fact it looks as though the Number One diplomat in Afghanistan (Peter will be the second in command) didn’t want him appointed.

“Galbraith is a much stronger personality, he’s a bigger name, from a bigger country and he is going to carry more weight [than the Norwegian at the head of the UN team,” one diplomatic] official said.

Yeah, I guess he’s a strong personality. Sure. Very strong.

***********************

Update: UD doesn’t have any pictures of herself with Peter on this computer, so she’ll run this one instead. He’s standing somewhere nearby.

Les UDs visited Peter when he was the American ambassador to Croatia, and they spent a day yachting and eating excellent food on various islands with Croatia’s then-president, Franjo Tudjman. In this photo, La Kid, showing a good deal of sense (Tudjman was an unsavory character), is hiding her face rather than be photographed with him. UD has no such reservations, and smiles, as you see, broadly.