a thoroughly modern presidential honeymoon

Once upon a time, newly married western couples would get to know each other during a period known as a honeymoon, a ‘sweet month’. For most, especially those in arranged marriages, the weeks following nuptials required adjusting to a shared life together, a series of mutual compromises and sometimes unwelcome discoveries. But the inevitable personal friction could be mostly smoothed over by the sheer novelty of the experience.

Modern honeymoons are usually quite different, because many modern couples live together for months or years before becoming formally married. Nevertheless, there remain new challenges, especially the legal, financial, and emotional consequences of being bound to another person for (one then expects) the rest of one’s life. Perhaps this is why we have invented such elaborate rituals around marriage, and why so many modern honeymoons take the form of lengthy vacations to exotic places. For couples who already share a life together, novelty must be generated artificially.

The metaphorical ‘honeymoon period’ enjoyed by a new public figure, especially a new president, seems to be now undergoing a similar shift. Normally, the goodwill and cooperation a president receives for the first few months (the ‘first hundred days’ usually) follow in part from the novelty of regarding this unfamiliar person - and retinue of officials and advisors – as the nation’s leadership. We, the public and the congress, grant our new administration the benefit of the doubt, and we try to meet awkward adjustments with good humor.

Barack Obama’s incipient administration, however, has begun to look like the live-in boyfriend with whom the marriage is just a formality. Obama appointed nearly his entire cabinet weeks in advance. He arrived in DC earlier than most new presidents do (so that his daughters could begin attending school). He has already begun negotiating with congress for a new economic stimulus package. Despite the ‘one president at a time’ rhetoric, Obama’s administration has already leaked the imminent closure of Guantanamo Bay, and other foreign policy signals are emerging. Surely it means something that, two weeks before inauguration, Bill Richardson accomplished the functional equivalent of a cabinet resignation.

None of this is a mistake on Obama's fault. It would be irresponsible to sit idle while the economy teeters. The Bush administration’s discredit is so complete that Obama was sucked into the policy-making vacuum even before officially winning election. But the transition has been so competent and so thorough that we’ve now been thinking of him as the president for weeks. Do we now even get a honeymoon with Barack? Just like any modern marriage, we’ll need some artificial novelty to spice things up. There will be an enormous display for the inauguration, and reminders for weeks afterward just how special this new president happens to be. Mark your calendar: Barack Obama is taking the country to a suite in the Bahamas for a week.

(photo from barackobamamain08.com)

metaphysics on board

Here is the start of an AP story:

There were 124 passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 59 when it left the Netherlands. There were 125 when it landed in Boston.

Phil Orlandella, a spokesman for Logan International Airport, says a woman went into labor and gave birth to an apparently healthy baby girl over the Atlantic Ocean on Wednesday during the eight-hour flight from Amsterdam.

The first paragraph (unwittingly?) takes a position on a rather contentious issue in politics, ethics, and metaphysics!

How many passengers were on the flight when it left the Netherlands? If you think that a fully-developed fetus is a person, then the answer is 125. If you think otherwise, then the answer is 124. The story appears to be taking sides.

I wonder if this occurred to the writer or editor at any point. Obviously the aim was to produce a punchy lede paragraph. But that’s not all that happened… You might say that this article was a human interest story when it took off, and a maneuver in the culture wars when it landed.

the honorable thing

Last week R. Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet, a French hedge fund manager working in New York, tabulated his losses: 1.6 billion dollars, his own money and that of his clients, poured down Bernard Madoff’s bottomless cavity. He called one important Parisian client and confessed his anguish; he had “betrayed” those who trusted his acumen. He tried but failed to recover the money. That night, he asked the cleaning staff to leave early, so that he might work late in peace. When morning came, according to the New York Times:

Security officers discovered the body of Mr. de la Villehuchet, a co-founder of Access International Advisors, in a chair, with one of his legs propped on his desk. His wrists and his left biceps were slashed, said Paul J. Browne, a New York police spokesman. A wastebasket had been placed under his bleeding biceps, Mr. Browne said.

It is possible to see de la Villehuchet’s suicide not as cowardice or comeuppance, but as an expression of deep moral courage. He had made a drastic mistake, an act of inexcusable negligence resulting in terrible consequences for a great many people whose vulnerability was a direct result of the trust they granted him. There was absolutely no way for him to repair the damage, and nothing in his power could possibly achieve suitable contrition. Facing an unthinkably large debt of guilt, he surrendered his only comparable asset – his entire universe.

In Victorian England, this was “doing the honorable thing”. Were you fully disgraced, your friends and colleagues would leave a bottle of whisky and a loaded revolver in your study, and you knew what was yours to do. Your end, achieved in privacy and dignity, would eventuate a sort of clearing of the moral air for everyone involved, most of all yourself. Under appropriate circumstances, this was understood to be obligatory on your part, although no one else would be justified in bringing about the desired end were you discovered uncouthly alive.

These cases are importantly different from suicide prompted by despondency or fear. People like de la Villehuchet might very well wish to go on living, apart from their moral guilt. Nor are these cases of martyrdom; nothing positive is accomplished. No – these are deaths for the sole purpose of salvaging honor. By these lights, an honorable suicide is merited once one has irrevocably destroyed one’s social status in life. Honor might be recaptured for one’s legacy (and perhaps for the sake of one’s heirs) with a suitably monumental display of regret. But anything else will forfeit honor eternally.

In 1912 the Emperor Meiji died of cancer. As his funeral procession passed through Tokyo, General Nogi Maresuke and his wife drank some sake, put on fresh linens, and then carefully disemboweled themselves. Nogi thereby completed the ancient (but by then illegal) samurai ritual of junshi, the following of a vassal upon his master’s death. In his suicide note, Nogi pleaded culpability for mistakes made while commanding in the Russo-Japanese war. Given these failings, it would have been dishonorable for the general to remain alive once the emperor had passed. (That Nogi’s wife should also die, despite bearing no recognizable personal blame, was a separate tenet of what was even then deeply archaic samurai lore.)

Nogi’s seppuku divided Japanese public attention. It was an act of supreme loyalty and, in a sense, beauty. Samurai death rituals possess intricate, highly symbolic structure, including the composition of delicate jisei (death poetry) and a tightly prescribed sequence of blade movements. The act plainly requires extraordinary discipline, especially when, like Nogi, one has no assistant to deliver swift decapitation and must instead die slowly from the stomach wound. At the same time, Nogi’s seppuku marked an abominable encroachment of primitive custom on the rapidly modernizing Japanese culture. It was embarrassingly crude for a people rushing toward industrialism and democracy. There emerged agreement that such things must cease – and so they did, until a brief upsurge in interest among the military caste in 1945.

I wonder if the Apocalypse Lite flavor of today’s economic climate encourages actions like de la Villehuchet’s suicide, just as the epoch-making death of Meiji Tenno did for Japanese a century ago. As the global order sputters and staggers, does it seem more appropriate to balance one’s own moral accounts in a suitably conclusive manner? Can this really be the honorable thing to do?

I have mixed views about honor. The concept seems deservedly obsolescent, suggesting a desperate grip on the fraying tail of Romanticism, and carrying the faded but unmistakable odor of feudal patriarchy. Suicide for honor looks like a perfect example of just so much self-important insanity. Really, honestly, exactly what is accomplished by this sort of death? The end of de la Villehuchet’s life undoes exactly none of his mistakes; it leaves absolutely no one better off. The only result is that a human life, an irreplaceable singularity, a still-glittering prospect of extraordinary redemption, is no more. That, for this archaic vagary, this half-digested pseudo-virtue, this ‘honor’?

And yet. There is something admirable in a person’s saying through conduct: ‘This is my mistake. I own it, absolutely and permanently. There will be no equivocation, no blame-ducking. I deserve the consequences that I can’t prevent from falling on others. And with this act, all discussion is closed.’ Silly and romantic it might be, but such an unreluctant embrace of personal responsibility seems, for lack of a better word, noble. If nothing else, while Bernie Madoff smirks his way home and Rod Blagojevich names his own senator, one can’t help but wonder if they might have learned a thing about honor from Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet.

The Master of the World
has passed away--
and after him,
eager to serve my lord,
go I.
Nogi Maresuke, death poem

surprises and expectations

Here, in its entirety, is a story from Reuters:

”What are you doing here?”: man asks wife in brothel

WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish man got the shock of his life when he visited a brothel and spotted his wife among the establishment's employees.

Polish tabloid Super Express said the woman had been making some extra money on the side while telling her husband she worked at a store in a nearby town.

"I was dumfounded. I thought I was dreaming," the husband told the newspaper on Wednesday.

The couple, married for 14 years, are now divorcing, the newspaper reported.

Here’s what I want to know: was the woman surprised to see her husband in the brothel? And why doesn’t the article address that question?

Advanced primates that we may be, we’re still wired to notice the unusual or unexpected. What seems to be unusual or unexpected here (both to the man and to us) is that someone’s wife happened to be working in a brothel. It is not unusual or unexpected that someone’s husband happened to be frequenting a brothel. The man’s behavior is (relatively) normal; the woman’s is not.

Can you imagine this article having been written from the other perspective: ‘brothel employee surprised to see husband as client’? I don’t think we’ll ever see such an article. It’s too hard for us (and for the reporter, our proxy) to identify with this abnormal creature, the brothel employee who is also a wife. But we recognize familiarity in the brothel customer who is also a husband. It’s not that we’re necessarily any more similar to him. It’s just that we’re used to him. And so the story gets told from his angle.

There’s an interesting reinforcing mechanism at work here. The story treats the wife’s presence at the brothel as the surprising factor, because it is the part of the story that surprises us. And it surprises us because of articles like this.

Madam Secretary

The appointment of Hillary Rodham Clinton as Obama's Secretary of State is interesting in all sorts of ways, but one seems especially durable. When Clinton takes office, it will be the case that three of the last four Secretaries of State are women.

This matters. Secretary of State is an immensely prestigious position. Thomas Jefferson was the nation's first; John Marshall and James Madison followed soon thereafter. The Secretary of State is fourth in the presidential order of succession, highest of all cabinet positions. Most cabinet secretaries are unknown to foreign leaders and the domestic population alike, but the Secretary of State is extraordinarily visible.

But the real point here is that the position of Secretary of State has traditionally been viewed as one possessing hard power. It requires competence with international realpolitik and a perceived willingness to make threats and compel obedience. Only two generations ago, it was common sense that no woman could occupy such a role. Now Clinton's appointment is remarkable solely because of her primary challenge to Obama; her gender is quite beside the point. The inclusion of women at almost the highest reaches of power has become normalized.

So Hillary Clinton did not get to be the first female president. But in a rather different way, she is part of the process that will eventually make it unremarkable for women to hold that position as well.

here kitty kitty

If you've ever been trapped in a car or at a dinner table with cat people for very long, you know that we like to engage in casually speculative feline psychology. "Cats do such weird things!" we observe tirelessly. "Why do they do such weird things?" Then we proceed to document for one another the special weird things that our particular cats do, offering evolutionary or developmental guessplanations for these profoundly enigmatic behaviors. "Princess Fluffy always dips her left paw into the toilet water, never her right paw! She must have fallen into the toilet on her right side when she was a kitten!"

I've come to appreciate the inverse corollary to this practice. I like to think that cats are similarly watching us, acquiring data to support shaky conjectures about causal origins of our own bizarre activities. My roommate's cats watch me constantly. Wendy the cat will sit motionless at the foot of my bed for thirty minutes straight, staring as I read a book. (This can be extraordinarily creepy at night, especially when she maintains exactly that pose after I've turned off the lights.)

Jake, Wendy's brother, loves to watch me get dressed, prepare food, put on makeup, comb my hair, or do any other bit of morning maintenance that has no precise analog in the feline world. (Jake's own morning ritual involves yowling until he's fed and then licking himself.) He is especially obsessed with precise motor behavior involving repetitious employment of a small instrument, such as the brushing of teeth or the application of mascara.

I imagine that when I'm at work Jake and Wendy sit around discussing my behavior, and arguing about its underlying import. "Isn't it weird that she puts on jeans one leg at a time, rather than just jumping into both at once? She must have had an accident as a child." "Why does she always react so readily when that alarm clock makes noise? Humans must have been prey to gigantic buzzing digital displays in their ancestral environment!"

This is perhaps a part of the attraction of cats. Something about them - their panopticon eyes, their ability to purr contentedly in your arms mere seconds before violently and inexplicably perforating several square inches of your epidermis - suggests an intelligence keen enough to engage in something like psychological theorizing and a sentiment alien enough to motivate perplexed curiosity as to the ways of hairless bipedal apes.

A cat's unbroken gaze invites you to see yourself from the outside, to wonder how your own behaviors might appear to someone suitably distanced from your own point of view. Dogs, as wonderful as they are, seem to accept our actions enthusiastically and uncritically. "If Human is doing X, then there must be some darn good reason to do X!" No one takes cats to go hunting in the woods; they wouldn't stand for it.

Cats are living mirrors whose observant presence reminds us that there are other ways of seeing, and other ways of being. Sometimes that is enough to put obstacles in front of a rampant ego. And sometimes it is enough to remind the abstractly rambling subject that it is also a curiously concrete object.

primary results

I heard someone (I think it was Jeff Zeleny of the NYT, speaking on PBS's 'Washington Week') make an interesting point about the election. Part of Obama's victory is due to his campaign's deliberate attempt to win across the country, even in states traditionally assumed to be Republican (such as Indiana and North Carolina). Part of that, we know, is a credit to Howard Dean's 50-state strategy for the DNC.

But part of it is also due (this is Zeleny or whoever's point) to the punishingly long Democratic primary season. Obama did so well in the general election because he put together campaign offices in states where Democrats don't normally bother, and he did this because the results in those states actually did matter during the primaries.

Consider: Obama won the Democratic primaries/caucuses in states like Montana, Virginia, Idaho, Colorado, and yes, North Carolina. The Clinton campaign notoriously failed to set up offices in several of these states, expecting the primary season to end on Super Tuesday, and lacking the logistical resources to adapt thereafter. Further, the Clinton strategy was based upon banking delegate in large states (like California and New York) that traditionally vote Democratic anyway, while the Obama strategy relied upon a slow accumulation of delegates from every state.

Arguably, it was the length of the primary season that induced Obama to be active - early and aggressively - across the country. Imagine that he had won all of the first several primary contests: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina. Suppose Hillary had dropped out before or immediately after Super Tuesday. Surely then Obama would have done much less to create a campaign apparatus in traditionally Republican states - why bother at that point? But as it happened, North Carolina and Indiana held their primaries on the same day, May 6, three months after Super Tuesday. Surely Obama's intense efforts to win those primaries (he got NC by 15% and lost Indiana by 1%) contributed heavily to his later general election results there.

So it is likely that Barack Obama owes his victory - at least in part - to the tenacity of Hillary Clinton's opposition early this year. That is something that the Party should keep in mind when it gets to work revising the crazy primary rules. Maybe those rules are just as they should be.