Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Just what the blogosphere needs, another 20 million of Rush Limbaugh’s Dittoheads… I worked this morning in Galax, VA. A great drive once past Winston-Salem, with the long approach to Pilot Mountain and the sweeping views near Fancy Gap. On the way home I heard Rush talking about a Hillary-bashing weblog post by Brad DeLong (Rush actually got the link from a David Frum column), and groping for an explanation of blogging. (Somehow Frum and Rush both missed this nearbv DeLong post on the unbelievable crappiness of the National Review’s economic analysis.)   Meanwhile, their fellow Hillaryphobe Andrew Sullivan complained that a Smith economist wasn’t given tenure, then celebrated that the decision was reversed. Sullivan assumes James Miller was persecuted because he was a conservative, and implies that he deserved rescue for that same reason. But maybe Miller is an ideological hack who supported the original Berman-Coble bill (in an article entitled “Let Hollywood Hack”) and opposes deep links. Not that I begrudge the man employment, but when I looked last fall I found myself “surprised at the flabbiness of his argument.” It’s frustrating when a brilliant guy like Sullivan devolves into a partisan hack himself.   Am I the only person who really doesn’t care much about Hillary Clinton’s book? 4:37:51 PM    comment []

When I was maybe twenty years old my father said to me about some mundane thing or another, “That depresses the hell out of me.” It was approximately the millionth time in my life that he had said that to me about something that most people wouldn’t even spend a minute thinking about, much less find depressing as hell.   “That depress the hell out of me,” he said. You sound like Holden Caulfield, I told him, you really do. “Where else did you think I got it?,” he replied.   That was an eye-opener. Not that I hadn’t known that my father was a reader and a thinker, but somehow hearing him riff from a book that I loved and took to be my own, and realizing that he had read the same book and internalized it way back before J.D. Salinger withdrew from the world, somehow that hit me in a nice way and made me feel a little closer to him, see him less as a kid sees a parent and more as an adult who recognizes a parent as a human being.   There was something of Holden Caulfield about my dad, who saw through phonies and posers and was always vulnerable in some way to them at the same time. He was sort of a quirky genius, kind and semi-neurotic and funny as hell. He believed in Shostakovich and Mahler and Joseph Heller, Detroit iron from the ‘50s, and the Protestant work ethic.   He died disappointed, my dad. That may be inevitable if you die at 54, but on his deathbed he told me that he felt he’d never really done much in his life. I argued with him. It felt important to dissuade him, to be his catcher in the rye. I recited his resume to him – an MD from Hopkins, a successful career in private practice…he was unimpressed. Of course he had done those things, he could, he had the resources (mental, financial) to do so, and in his practical worldview there was no other course he could have followed, and no particular credit was due for having done what he should have done.   I’m not sure what else he wanted to have done. I don’t know if he knew, either. I pointed out that he had been a loving husband and father at a time when families were falling apart all around us, and that doing that in combination with the other stuff was something worth relishing as he headed for the grave, but I don’t think he bought it.   I still believe it, though, sixteen years later. He would have been 70 today. 6:26:16 AM    comment []