Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Tolstoy: A Free Writing

I've been home with an awful sinus infection for the last five days while Katherine has been down in Phoenix with Bud and Janet. I was just too sick to go, plus I didn't want to infect anyone. Most of the time I've been hanging out on the couch watching movies and taking a variety of medications. (I would advise against doing sinus rinses with any degree of regularity.) The last two days my headache subsided enough to let me read and I managed to finish Anna Karenina. I initially started to read it because after I read Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and some reviews that basically said it couldn't compare to the greatness of Russian novels, I wanted to see if the reviewers were right. Plus, just like Zelig and the neurosis caused by his failure to read Moby Dick, I didn't want Tolstoy's masterpiece lurking over my already hopelessly neurotic head.

Where it usually takes me less than a week to read a novel, I have been in Anna Karenina for about two months. As an excuse, I will hasten to add that I have been mostly engrossed in political stuff in my liberal magazines and that, plus the headache I've been having since Thanksgiving, have slowed me down a bit.

Furthermore, let us face it. Tolstoy is tough sledding.

I have never been able to understand how anyone can start reading a book without compulsively reading it until it is done. Personally, I have a hard time remembering what has transpired if my last reading was more than a couple of days ago. My friend Bud only seems to read when he is on an airplane or by a swimming pool. The result is that it takes him a year to finish a piece of pulp fiction. No wonder he does not relish reading.

I've discovered that Tolstoy is different. Sometimes I went as much as a week between opening the book, but the plot was so clear and the characters so memorably drawn that I never once felt lost. But that is not what I want to talk about.

I started reading it defensively. Why, I wondered, does a book have to be a CLASSIC in order to be great? Why does the fact that Freedom is easy to read and impossible to put down make it more trivial than Anna Karenina, or War and Peace, or Brothers Karamazov? Why does, according to the reviewer mentioned above, Tolstoy reach tragic heights when Franzen's wonderful novel is just a romance?

Sure enough, as I was reading it I kept wondering if the reviewer had actually read Anna Karenina, or was he just spouting conventional wisdom? At first glance, the characters seem every bit as small compared to the "big picture" as any of the characters in Freedom. Whole chapters are devoted to meaningless parties and horse races and grouse hunts where characters busy themselves with the minutiae of social discourse and worrying if they are wearing the right clothes, or creating socially acceptable impressions. Just like Franzen's novel, a good deal of Anna Karenina is focused on the political scene in Russia in the middle to late 1800's. Some scenes are clearly satirical. Some are didactic. Some are pointless

When I taught Edith Hamilton's definition of tragedy I always pointed out her comparison of Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary. Hamilton maintained that Emma was a small person who dies a pathetic death while Anna is a great person who dies tragically. For the first 600 pages of the book I didn't think Edith knew what she was talking about.

But then I got to the last 150 pages where Anna spends most of them contemplating suicide over, to put it rather simplistically, a love gone bad. Where Emma's taking of arsenic is a completely selfish escape from a situation of her own doing, Anna's is characterized by dozens of pages of introspection and increasingly bitter insights into the nature of the world. She walks on the train platform by a varied collection of humanity, each scene disgusting her further. Her walk is a lot like Yossarian's through Rome looking for Nately's whore, or Dante's descent into Hell. The scene builds and her final throwing herself under the train is a jolt this reader will never forget, not because it is pathetic and painful like Emma's suicide, but because she is too magnificent in her delusions to end thus. There is nothing in Franzen's novel, maybe in any novel, to compare.

Juxtaposed to that is what has become my all time favorite character--Levin. This wonderful man goes through the whole novel loving his work, being confused by the inane pomposity of Russian nobility, pursuing meaning while the rest only discuss philosophy as a kind of parlor game.

He wants to know the answer to those key questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Is there a God? If not, why keep on going? The reader can see that Levin lives his life as if he knew the answers to the questions. Levin can't see that simple truth until the end. The answer to meaninglessness is DOING WHAT IS NECESSARY. He contemplates suicide, but he has his wife and his child and his in-laws, and his peasants, and god knows what else that he has to live for.

"But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living."


He kept passing the open windows.

We see Levin in the pages of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby ("So we beat on . . . "), and in Wally in My Dinner With Andre.

Levin comes to this realization in a flash of insight, just like most of us do, but with a lot more poetry. And then, and this is what I most like about the book, as soon as he gets up from being in the field and looking at the dome of the sky, he reenters the real world with its pettiness and selfishness and joins in whole heartedly.

"I shall go in my same way, losing my temper with Ivan the coachman, falling into angry discussions, expressing my opinions tactlessly; there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife; I shall still go on scolding her for my own terror, and being remorseful for it; I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it."

Thursday, December 2, 2010

When good is the enemy of perfect

Conservatives must be reeling a little bit today after reading a front page story in The Denver Post with the headline, "Economy making a strong '10 finish." Factories are getting busy again. The Dow is up more than 2 percent. Factory output, led by our bailed out auto industry, has grown for the sixteenth straight month. All regions of the country, except St. Louis and Philadelphia, are growing economically. Private employment has enjoyed the highest monthly increase since November of 2007.

This all sounds like a republican nightmare. The last thing the republican party wants is for something, anything, good to happen to the country because that might hurt their chances to make Obama a one-termer.

I'm sure the republican spin machine is whirring full speed to dismiss this news and reassure the faithful that things are still terrible in the USA and getting worse. And I'm sure all those Tea Partiers out there, the ones who still believe that Obama is not a citizen, but is instead a Manchurian candidate from Kenya bound and determined to turn our exceptional country into a socialist state, can't wait to gobble up the good/bad news that they want to hear from Rush and Glen and Sarah and the rest.

For example, consider the ad hominem spin Denver Post columnist and Mike Rosen wannabe David Harsanyi used a few weeks ago to put the kebosh on the reported resurgence of General Motors ("GM plan the Cadillac of failed ideas," The Denver Post, November 19).

After all the newspapers reported the surprising success of GM's initial IPO after their near collapse, Harsanyi rushed to convince himself and his readers that this was just so much political spin and nothing to brag about.

"Oh, good, the Obama administration has another imaginary victory for taxpayers to celebrate," he sneers in his first sentence, thus setting the tone for the rest of his rant.

He rips Obama's statement that GM "took another step to becoming a success story" with the scornful rejoinder, "Not 'survival,' but success. Taxpayers are going to make a profit even!"

He dismissively admits that GM has paid back in full the approximately $15 billion it borrowed from the government, but then reminds us that the approximately $43 billion taxpayers invested in GM stock remains a losing proposition and will never be recouped because, according to Harsanyi and the "many analysts" he cherry picks, GM will never again flourish.

This seems to fly in the face of GM's recent IPO. According to Politico's Morning Money (By the way, anyone who is now saying to themselves that Politico is just another liberal news outlet hasn't been paying attention, or is seriously reading challenged.), GM's IPO closed at 3.6. percent over the initial price, adding up to a $4 billion profit on the $36 billion the Obama administration put into GM.

"The $40.1 billion in repayments would mean the Obama administration has more than recouped its $36.1 billion. . .and the federal government would recover all but approximately $9.4 billion of its original $49.4 billion overall investment in GM ($13.4 billion of which came under the Bush administration)."

I don't know what any of that means, but it sounds better than Harsanyi would like us to believe.

But he uses other rhetorical devices to fire up the vitriol in his readers. He calls the money we invested in GM a "blank check." How so? From this casual observer's vantage point it seems that GM paid a heavy price for taxpayer's help.

He suggests that the recent safety recalls by Toyota and Honda are simply trumped up scare tactics by the Department of Transportation designed to give GM an advantage. Tell that to the Toyota owners who plowed into things when their gas peddles stuck.

Next he gets mad because companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, those of the bail out, will make a fortune on GM's IPO. It is unfair, he says, to the taxpayers who financed the bailout. So, what exactly is his point? Has anyone in the Obama administration ever said that the bailout was fair? Of course it wasn't fair; it was just necessary. And now we are seeing that it just might be successful.

He then goes on to explain how GM's payback of the initial loan is an illusion because it used TARP money. So what? It was GM's money and they obviously had achieved the liquidity they needed to use it.

He laments the poor share holders who lost money over GM's potential collapse and the government directed bailout by saying "Confiscating the property of investors for the common good isn't generally conducive to a healthy business environment." I understand Harsanyi's effort to lay down a sarcastic salvo got in the way of fairness, but he makes a non-point. Of course the method chosen to save GM wasn't "generally conducive to a healthy business environment," but this was not a normal situation and the business environment GM found itself in at the time was anything but healthy.

Finally, we get to Harsanyi's, and I'm beginning to suspect all conservatives', real complaint about the whole GM thing. Investors, he says, may want to "ask why GM is making ideologically motivated money-losers like the Volt. . . What happens when taxpayers divest themselves from GM's social engineering projects?"

His point is clear that the GM bailout and its movement toward environmentally sensitive automobiles is just another facet of Obama's socialist agenda, like having school children eat healthy food, or having bicycles available in metropolitan areas. IT IS ALL AL GORE'S FAULT FOR TRUMPING UP ALL THIS GLOBAL WARMING BULLSHIT.

Harsanyi just doesn't get it. GM's offering is continuing to grow. The taxpayers are continuing to get a return on their investment. Interest in cars like the Volt is high. All the naysaying in the world will not change that.

Of course the whole situation is unfair. Of course we have a rough road ahead. But I don't see the benefit of commentators like Harsanyi continually making good the enemy of perfect just to score partisan points.