something about the Leave It to Beaver episode, "Wally's Election"

In the Leave It to Beaver episode, "Wally's Election," a reluctant Wally Cleaver is nominated to run for sophomore class president against the oafish school bully, Lumpy Rutherford. Wally's and Lumpy's fathers, Ward and Fred, respectively, push their sons to campaign aggressively. The fathers are motivated, it turns out, by their own selfish ambitions. The episode's moral comes during Ward's confession to his sons in the final act.

Ward Cleaver: Oh, I guess its just all part of being a father, Beaver. Your boy makes the football team and you visualize him scoring touchdowns all over the place. He gets an A in mathematics, and you see him as an atomic scientist landing on the moon. Maybe you even picture him marrying the banker's daughter.

Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver: Gee, dad. I thought only kids had goofy dreams like that.

Ward: No, Beaver. Nope. Parents have their share, too. You see, as you grow older, you come to realize that some of the ambitions and dreams you had are just not going to come true. So, you begin to dream through your children.

Wally Cleaver: You mean Mr. Rutherford dreams through Lumpy?

Ward: Of course he does. I don't guess there's a father around anywhere who doesn't want things to be a little better for his children than they were for him.

When actor Hugh Beaumont, as Ward, says, "you come to realize that some of the ambitions and dreams you had are just not going to come true," Beaumont's delivery includes a slight, magnificent quiver. It is an efficient but effective line read—not a surprise from the ultimate and classic TV dad-actor.


Note: "Wally's Election" was the 19th episode of season 3 of the famous American TV series, Leave It to Beaver. It aired 6 February 1960.

something about "Excellent Sheep" by William Deresiewicz

Critics of academia often mock liberal arts studies of obscure and apparently unprofitable subjects like basket weaving (does such a degree even exist?). Critics also diagnose academia with a fatal case of aloof pretentiousness. But William Deresiewicz is a fierce proponent of the value of a classical liberal arts education.
 
Deresiewicz has criticisms of his own. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life starts on the offensive, putting a harsh light on modern trends in higher education—especially at elite institutions. But then Deresiewicz quickly pivots to an impassioned defense of the university. Excellent Sheep argues for the personal and social benefits of higher education.

I used to read William Deresiewicz's weekly columns in "The Chronicle of Higher Education." A few columns stuck with me: "Get Real," published in 2012, is my favorite. My fondness for those columns steered me toward Excellent Sheep, which was published in 2015 and grew out of Deresiewicz's experience as a professor at Yale.

something about "Believer: My Forty Years in Politics" by David Axelrod

David Axelrod emerged on the national political scene as Barack Obama's invaluable strategist during the 2008 campaign. After the campaign, Axelrod stayed on as Obama's senior advisor for half of the first term. He returned to the campaign trail for Obama in 2012. While these events, covered in Axelrod's memoir, Believer, are momentous, I enjoyed the beginning of Axelrod's story most of all.

When he was a child, the future strategist, born in New York City, witnessed a John F. Kennedy campaign speech. Axelrod cites that moment as a formative experience. He had caught and internalized the political optimism of the day. He recalls the experience with undiminished sincerity.

I also enjoyed his brief recount of Chicago's modern political history. This memoir also offers a little of the guilty pleasure of gossipy criticism, such as when Axelrod criticizes Elizabeth Edwards for micromanaging the 2004 presidential campaign of her husband, John.

Axelrod went to college in Chicago, then started as a journalist investigating Chicago politics and corruption. He had his own column in a city paper by age 18. Axelrod was friends with Obama long before they campaigned together, both having built careers out of Chicago politics.
 
Axelrod keeps the narrative moving. He could have written a whole book on just the first week in the White House, with the whole country groaning under the weight of the the financial crisis. But Axelrod gives those monumental days only the standard highlight reel. His writing is crisp, clever, and often funny. His forty-year career goes by too fast at times. He is an underrated and undervalued figure in our national politics. His enduring belief in the promise of America is precious.

something about "The Death of Ivan Ilych" by Leo Tolstoy

This remarkable novella drags a well-heeled federal judge through the ultimate crisis.

Tolstoy does not flatter our protagonist in The Death of Ivan Ilych. In an efficient account of Ilych's professional and social advancement, we learn that the man is shallow, conceited, and vain; he is a social climber and, having climbed, immediately became condescending (though not unkind) in his privilege.

One of the remarkable things about this novella is that these traits do not make Ivan Ilyich a villain; instead, they make him average.

In the story, Ilyich's health declines and he suffers exquisite pain in his illness. Incapacitated, the pointlessness of his life imposes on him. And the degree of suffering mystifies him because he has only ever done what he thought he was supposed to do: develop a career, get married, have kids, get established. But doing what was expected could not spare him an agonizing, slow death. In the end, the inauthenticity of his life leaves him lifeless.

My favorite parts--all of these include a comment on averageness and unoriginality:

On Ivan Ilych's parentage:

He was the son of an official who had worked his way through various ministries and departments in Petersburg, carving out the kind of career that brings people to a position from which, despite their obvious incapacity for doing anything remotely useful, they cannot be sacked because of their status and long years of service, so they end up being given wholly fictitious jobs, anything from six to ten thousand a year, and this enables them to live on to a ripe old age.

On Ivan Ilych decorating his fine new house:

But these were essentially the accoutrements that appeal to all people who are not actually rich but who want to look rich, though all they manage to do is look like each other: damasks, ebony, plants, rugs and bronzes, anything dark and gleaming--everything that all people of a certain class affect so as to be like all other people of a certain class.

On Ivan Ilych's trip to the doctor early in his mysterious illness:

He was made to wait, the doctor was full of his own importance--an attitude he was familiar with because it was one that he himself assumed in court--then came all the tapping and listening, the questions with predetermined and obviously superfluous answers, the knowing look that seemed to say, "Just place yourself in our hands and we'll sort it out, we know what we're doing, there's no doubt about it, we can sort things out the same way as we would for anyone you care to name."

Note: The Death of Ivan Ilych was published in 1886. Tolstoy was supposedly suffering a personal crisis of meaning.

The New Girl sports her newness

This New York Magazine profile says a Zooey Deschanel is not an Apple product like we all thought. A Zooey Deschanel is actually a constant, expansive, and versatile market force carried out through a persona. And a Zooey Deschanel persona is a composite of associations--associations with sexuality, quirkiness (sometimes mistaken for "originality"), innocence, fun, and indie credibility with all its emphasis on authenticity and sincerity. People, especially those who fancy themselves hip and/or original, explore these conceptual areas for opportunities to escape consumer culture. But every attempt to step outside that culture just expands the Market's reach there (and beyond). A Zooey Deschanel is that reach manifest; her persona is singular in that it does not change whether on or off camera, thereby invoking a claim to authenticity and sincerity that empowers it to follow the hip and the original to new areas into which the market can flourish.


Notes:

The NYMagazine profile writer is aware and even seems vaguely complicit with the permanent marketing campaign of a Zooey Deschanel--until sticking this jab at the end using a Zooey Deschanel's own words:

Hearing the CD reminded me of how she had gotten very impassioned when I asked her if she and Gibbard bonded over music the first time they met. “I’m wary about this thing about being in the generation of social networking where people are like, ‘I am my musical taste,’” she said. “I am not just a collection of music. Or a collection of movies. I think that’s a thing that people romanticize: ‘Oh my God, she likes this band so she is a dream.’ I’ve definitely learned that you can easily get stars in your eyes. I’ll meet directors and they’ll be like, ‘I love Godard!’ And they love screwball comedies and they love all these things I love, and then it’s, like, ‘Wait a minute, that doesn’t mean they can make movies.’“ 

Just because somebody likes something doesn’t mean ... anything, really.”

Right there a Zooey Deschanel shoots down the sole reason she is appealing, and apes the very reaction that people have to her: A Zooey Deschanel is so cute because she likes Hello Kitty! A Zooey Deschanel is a composite of associations and likes that constantly advertises those likes, thereby associating a Zooey Deschanel with whatever associations the audience has with the objects being liked.

In a sense, none of this is unique to a Zooey Deschanel, but it is perhaps taken to a new level and with a new audience.

I first saw a Zooey Deschanel in an Apple product commercial, and I noticed the face design that says, "You are looking at me" (or, "I am a thing that is looked at").

Making sense of being more punk than you

Grant Hill penned a fascinating response to Jalen Rose's controversial comment heard in The Fab Five, a new ESPN documentary about the very talented and successful University of Michigan men's basketball team of the early 1990's. That team, which included Rose, were then and now noted for introducing the game to hip-hop's edge. They were all young, black men who could play, and who could look good and talk trash while doing it.

In the film, Rose charges that Duke recruited "Uncle Toms". Hill, having played for Duke against Michigan, justifiably feels his blackness challenged. In this reply, Hill infers that his middle-class (probably upper-middle) upbringing by two educated parents is the reason for the insult, and the reason Rose doesn't immediately include him in the society of "real" blacks.

In his defense, Hill briefly chronicles a trend of upward mobility in his family, sharing a generational rags to riches story. He notes that Henry, his middle name, is a family name; he shares one of his mother's sayings; he names a family heirloom; and he thanks an African American History professor he studied under. In other words, Blackness, to Hill, is found not only in struggle, but in the fruits of struggle. There is transference. Hill calls this "tradition".

I'll take great liberty here and assume and summarize Rose's argument. For Rose, his single-parent childhood in Detroit matters. Blackness in part comes from living the struggle. First hand experience matters. That experience is a uniquely Black experience (i.e., growing up poor and White with one parent in Detroit is not the same).

For Hill, Blacks rising out of poverty for their children's betterment is the tradition. For Rose, living in poverty--maybe even staying in poverty--is the tradition.

Hill also defends Duke, claiming their interest lies in finding and shaping excellence. He names other Black Duke players, enlisting them in his defense. Finally he stakes a claim on character. Up to this point, I found Hill's response brilliant, a rhetorical achievement. But, in discussing character, I can't help but wonder if he is implying that people often mistake "acting Black" for lacking character. He might as well call the Fab Five knappy-headed thugs.

The New York Times published Grant's response March 16, 2011:
http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/grant-hills-response-to-jalen-rose/

The Real Thing

Discussions about movies (The Matrix, Dark City), a story on the radio about philosophy classes, and advertisements depicting people out in the world being entertained by their hand-held devices: Simulated reality, the idea keeps surfacing.

To some, physical presence is a precondition of authentic experience; dreaming of a walk through the Louvre is not the same as flying to Paris and visiting the Louvre. But to others, being hooked up to a dream machine and spending life in a coma would be no less "real" than a life lived awake and in the world.

If my whole life was spent dreaming and I never knew it, then I would have no regrets, and I believe as a person thinking myself to be physically present here and now that a dreamed life is as real as this. But if I lived 60 years in a dream, on waking I would be confronted with deciding whether the previous 60 years were a waste or a perfectly well-lived life. In my case, I imagine I would be heartbroken that my body had not been present one moment. Why? I wonder if for people who privilege physical presence, long distance relationships are more difficult, TV and films less satisfying, death more tragic. Probably not, huh?