Alan Jacobs

This piece by Don McNeil (which in a sane world would have appeared in the New York Times, but that’s another story) is a sobering reflection on just how chaotically incompetent the vaccine roll-out is here in America. People are getting vaccinated, to be sure — my wife being one of them, thanks be to God, because she has a medical condition that would make contracting covid-19 very dangerous indeed to her. But it’s happening in a way that seems almost random. As McNeil points out, being a frat boy appears to be a qualification for getting vaccinated; but I, teacher of frat boys, don’t have a snowball’s chance in a Texas summer of getting the jab. I’ve been teaching students in person for almost an entire academic year, and that doesn’t factor into anyone’s calculations. I fully expect to be the last person in America to be vaccinated against covid-19 — I mean, assuming that I don’t get the disease itself. 

UPDATE:

Not everything was killed in our Big Freeze (but I fear a lot was).

There’s a great story about the famous wit Sydney Smith. He was walking with a friend through one of the narrow “closes” of Edinburgh, and looked up to see two women, one leaning from a window on the left side of the close and one leaning from a window on the right side, screaming wrathfully at each other. “Those women will never agree,” Smith remarked to his friend. “They are arguing from different premises.” 

I have a new post up at the Hedgehog Review on the contours of some of our current disagreements and the places at which our premises converge, or might be seen to converge. The most famous advocates of free speech are rarely, if ever, absolutists; people who deny that “cancel culture“ exists often acknowledge that the rush to judgment and rage for punishment can get out of control. Twitter and that minor adjunct of Twitter that some people still call “journalism” like to portray all disagreement as stemming from radically “different premises”; but what if we occupy similar and contiguous premises and simply differ on the most prudent and useful way to negotiate them? Our condition then might not be as bad as I sometimes fear and as the more hateful among us often hope. There are useful conversations to be had if we want them. 

I don’t blame people for getting alarmed by stories like this one from Bari Weiss. But there’s one question that I think everyone reading such stories should ask: Will the students believe what they are taught? 

There’s plenty to be worried about in any case: the intellectual bankruptcy, the moral callousness, the preening self-righteousness of such schools’ leaders; their substitution of indoctrination for education. But much of the alarm, in some circles sheer panic, arises from the unconfronted assumption that such indoctrination works. Does it?

I don’t know, but I have my doubts. I suspect that such a system is less likely to produce True Woke Believers than to produce young people who are thoroughly cynical about education and about the dishonesty and hypocrisy of educators. And that might be a worse outcome. 

I read once that Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, an Argentinian and a Chilean, a conservative and a Communist, formed a bond over the one thing they agreed on: English is the best language in which to write poetry because it has so many one-syllable words. How those native Spanish speakers envied all the one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words! 

I wrote a post a while back about the power of the monosyllabic, and I have a new example: “Seemed the Better Way,” from Leonard Cohen’s final album. (Yeah, I quoted the title song recently — I’m obsessed with the record right now.) 

Here are the lyrics: 

Seemed the better way
When first I heard him speak
Now it's much too late
To turn the other cheek

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it's not the truth today

I wonder what it was
I wonder what it meant
First he touched on love
Then he touched on death

Sounded like the truth
Seemed the better way
Sounded like the truth
But it's not the truth today

I better hold my tongue
I better take my place
Lift this glass of blood
Try to say the grace 

Ninety-six words, thirteen of which have two syllables; the rest are monosyllabic. Another way to count, removing repetition: The song uses fifty-one different words, four of which have two syllables. The spareness and simplicity of the language match the spareness and simplicity of the music: 

My friend Holly Fish made the above image for me. Call me indulgent, but I wrote today’s newsletter about my dog Malcolm. 

I loved WandaVision right up to the last episode, which except for a few wonderfully moving moments – the ones in which Wanda says goodbye to the world she had made – I disliked intensely. The last episode did not offer fan service, but rather franchise service: all that had gone before, all the weird juxtapositions of visual and narrative style that had made the series so fascinating, disappeared and we ended up with boss fights and the laying of groundwork for future movies and TV shows. It felt incredibly cynical, and cynical in a way that I’ve come to expect in the productions of the MCU. But I was more disappointed in this case than I would have been in others because the first few episodes had convinced me that here the MCU was doing something significantly different than it had ever done before. But nope, that was just a ruse. In the end they were what I thought they were.

At an especially important moment in Tim Keller’s lovely and honest essay about confronting death, The Atlantic neatly inserts this link to Ezekiel Emanuel’s essay about wanting to die at age 75. Oddly enough, though, if you visit Emanuel’s essay there’s no link to Keller’s.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I don’t think the link placement was deliberate — I assume that these things are at least partly automated. The placement seemed ironic, that’s all.