Curtis Bowman

Reflections on the Past Year - #3

I've gotten into the habit of posting an autobiographical entry to mark the anniversary of my return to Texas. This year is no exception.

For those of you who don't already know, I flew back to Texas on June 21, 2003. If you aren't familiar with the story, then you can look at my academic autobiography. It will explain why I left Philadelphia after seventeen years and returned to Denton. My earlier autobiographical posts tell the story as well.

The previous two anniversary posts concentrated on my academic writing and my efforts to get settled back in Texas. The latter mostly consisted of my dealing with the house that I inherited from my parents. Fortunately, the work on the house was completed well over a year ago. Consequently, this time around I won't need to write about the many renovations that took up so much of my time in the past.

Towards the end of 2005 the Fichte chapter that I described in last year's post, i.e., the introductory piece on Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, appeared in volume 3 of Central Works of Philosophy. The series is edited by John Shand and published by Acumen Publishing.

I have to confess that I caused to the volume to appear later than the publisher had planned. Because I was so overwhelmed by work and the house, and because I had hurt a tendon in my right hand in the summer of 2004, I fell behind on my chapter. Both editor and publisher were patient, and so by early 2005 I had managed to complete my contribution. It turned out fairly well, I think. It's a good place to begin to understand Fichte's philosophy, if I do say so myself.

Another overdue project appeared in 2005. Many years ago Paul Guyer, Fred Rauscher, and I began work on what would eventually be published as volume 13 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. This time, though, I was way ahead of everyone else! My collaborators were the ones who had to catch up, because I had finished my translations in 1999.

Things were in a bit of a lull in the summer of 2005. The Fichte chapter was done, and I decided to take some time off to work in the yard. (Oh, how I miss Philadelphia! Everything green belongs to the city!) I also decided to delay resuming work on the translations that I've been preparing for a volume on Fichte and the atheism dispute that Yolanda Estes and I started years ago. It seemed to me that I should instead begin to make good on some plans that had been on hold for a while.

If you look at my CV, you'll see that the philosophy of art is one of my academic interests. For several years I'd been thinking about taking music lessons. There are any number of ways in which a technical knowledge of music could fit into my future writing and translation projects. For example, I might begin to write about Theodor Adorno's views on music. The thought is hardly far-fetched. As I write this post, I'm in the middle of writing a proposal for a book on Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that Adorno co-wrote with Max Horkheimer in the early 1940s. In the future I could easily branch out into Adorno's aesthetics of music. I've also given some thought to re-translating some of Richard Wagner's prose writings. Doing so would require some technical knowledge of music.

Besides any possible academic use that I might have for a technical knowledge of music, I thought that I should just do something entirely new to me. My current situation as an independent scholar gives me the opportunity to do things that I've never done before. So I started taking piano lessons at the end of August 2005. I'm no musical genius, but I've been making progress.

That same August I started going to a gun range in Dallas to do some shooting. I've always been interested in military history, but I've never really known much about guns. I inherited several from my father when he died in 2002. I kept them, of course, although I didn't know much about how to use them. When I moved back to Texas in 2003, I started to do some on-line research to determine whether any of them were of any value. I figured that they wouldn't be worth much, and my research confirmed my suspicions.

As I looked into the matter, however, I thought that I should learn about them. A little carnage to go with my culture, you might say. It would be something else entirely new to me. So I signed up for a class, learned the basics, and started going to the range once or twice a month. I'll have more to say about this in future posts.

Towards the end of 2005 I resumed work on the Fichte translations. They're my main academic project for the next year or so. I hope to have my portion completed by this time next year, but, unfortunately, it will probably take longer than that.

In late 2005 horror film maven Steven Schneider contacted me again, this time about contributing an entry or two to a European horror film guide that he is editing for the British Film Institue. I chose to write an entry on Häxan, a thoroughly odd, but fascinating, Danish silent film from 1922. I wrote a 500-word entry by the end of March 2006. The book hasn't appeared yet. More on it when it appears.

A few weeks ago I noticed that Thoemmes Continuum had published a paperback edition of my three-volume Winckelmann set, which originally appeared in hardback in 2001. I say "noticed" because no one at the press had contacted me. I stumbled across the new edition while I was looking up some information on-line. Not being notified was a bit annoying, as you can easily imagine, but I'm glad that the set is available in paperback. I corresponded with the press, and I was quickly sent my complimentary copies of the paperback edition.

As I mentioned above, I'm working on a proposal for a commentary on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. I've been at it for a while, but only now have I really been able to do the serious writing. I'll soon have a draft, which I'll send to an editor who has expressed an interest in the project. If I get a contract after the usual review process, then I'll have two book projects, this one and the Fichte translations, to keep me busy.

So I seem to have come to terms with being an independent scholar who is no longer pursuing a career as a professor. At least for now I'm content to remain in Texas. I don't really see any compelling reason to attempt to return to academia. Besides, that whole guns thing would probably cause me problems at some schools, I reckon.

PA Employees Still Haven't Been Paid

Suitcases full of cash aren't enough to undo the financial collapse in Gaza.

Peter Beinart on the Liberal Legacy That Bill Clinton Inherited

Peter Beinart of The New Republic has written up a useful history lesson in a defense of Bill Clinton, who in recent years has been criticized by some liberals for having emptied the Democratic party of its principles. Beinart responds by asking us to look at the legacy that Clinton inherited when he took office:

By draining the party of its core convictions, the critics allege, he left Democrats in the intellectual wasteland in which they find themselves today.

The charge ignores two small things: the 1970s and the 1980s. In reality, the Democratic Party didn't lose the confidence of its convictions when Clinton became president; it lost them when he was in graduate school. From Harry Truman through Lyndon Johnson, Democrats stood for three basic things: enlightened anti-communism, an expanding welfare state, and racial integration. Between 1968 and 1972, under pressure from Vietnam and racial conflict, two of those three collapsed. By 1972, George McGovern was urging the virtual abandonment of anticommunism and advocating racial quotas. Then, in 1976, Democrats nominated a relative economic conservative, Jimmy Carter, who showed little interest in extending Johnson's Great Society largesse. And, poof--there went principle number three.

From 1976 to 1992, each Democratic presidential nominee tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together, and each failed, until Clinton. Carter ran on character--as a decent, capable man who embodied the small-town virtues forsaken by Richard Nixon. And it worked--until economic recession and the hostage crisis stripped him of his reputation for competence and left him ideologically naked.

In 1984, the Democrats nominated Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, who looked like a prisoner of the party's fractious, multicultural factions. While serving numerous parochial interests, his campaign never defined any broader national one. As one Mondale speechwriter admitted, "We had a hell of a time putting down on paper what this campaign was going to be all about."

In 1988, Michael Dukakis barely even tried. "This election is not about ideology," he declared. "It's about competence." And, when Lee Atwater shrewdly invoked cultural issues like crime and the Pledge of Allegiance, which required not merely technocratic solutions, but statements of belief, he crumbled.

This, like it or not, is the history that preceded Clinton. He did not create liberalism's crisis of faith; he inherited it. And, in 1992, he became the first candidate in two decades to offer a coherent response. His adviser Bill Galston called it the "politics of reciprocal responsibility." Government would provide opportunity, but it would demand responsibility in return; it would not give something for nothing. This idea--manifested in Clinton's pledge to "end welfare as we know it"--angered some liberals. But it told blue-collar whites that Democrats would distinguish between people who "played by the rules" and those who didn't. (Clinton's tough stance on crime sent the same message.) By the time Clinton signed welfare reform in 1996, the public's image of government was changing. When people thought of the beneficiaries of government help, they were more likely to think of people like themselves.

If Clinton convinced Americans that government action could be moral, he also convinced them that it could be responsible. By reducing the budget deficit, he helped restore the Democratic Party's reputation for economic stewardship, which had been gravely damaged under Carter. And, by using market mechanisms to achieve traditional liberal goals, he found ways to fight poverty in an environment where large new programs were politically impossible.

To be sure, Clinton sometimes bobbed and weaved. But these two principles--the willingness to make moral judgments (think of school uniforms or the V-Chip) and the recognition that social justice does not always require new programs (think of Al Gore's reinventing government)--were the most important intellectual innovations in the Democratic Party in two decades.

And the results of all of this? They're impressive:

Clinton's 1993 decision to cut the budget deficit rather than propose substantial new spending helped lay the groundwork for an extraordinary economic boom. And, unlike the boom of the '80s, Clinton's genuinely benefited the poorest Americans. Under Ronald Reagan, 50,000 children escaped poverty; under Clinton, more than 4 million did. During Clinton's tenure, income rose faster for blacks and Latinos than for whites, and faster for single mothers than for two-parent families. By 2000, black and Latino poverty were at their lowest levels ever recorded.

And it wasn't only the economic boom. Clinton raised the minimum wage, he created SCHIP, which offered health insurance to children of the working poor, and he dramatically expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). These initiatives rewarded work, and none required large new government bureaucracies. But, on the ground, they changed lives. When Clinton left office, the poverty rate was 11 percent. But, as Ronald Brownstein has noted, when you factor in government policies, especially the larger EITC, it dropped to 9 percent. During Clinton's presidency, the percentage of Americans living in poverty fell by one-quarter. And, without particular policies based on a particular vision of government, that would not have happened. Morally and intellectually, Clintonism wasn't a miserable failure; it was a success.

We certainly haven't seen similar results in the past six years.

The printer-friendly version of Beinart's article is available here.

"What Would JFK Do?"

Jonathan Rauch offers us a lesson in foreign policy realism inspired by the example of JFK.

More from Jonathan Chait on Starving the Beast

Here's another column by Jonathan Chait devoted to conservative reluctance to abandon the "starve the beast" strategy.

Anne Applebaum Doesn't Seem to Know Very Much About Orson Welles

Unfortunately, book reviews are sometimes written by people who seem to have little to no familiarity with the subject matter of the book under review. I just encountered an example of this in the review of the second volume of Simon Callow's ongoing biography of Orson Welles that Anne Applebaum recently wrote for The Spectator.

Apparently, the new volume of Callow's biography covers the 1940s, the period in which Welles directed Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, It's All True, The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, and Macbeth. From her review it's impossible to tell whether or not Ms. Applebaum has actually seen any of these films besides Citizen Kane.

A large portion of the review deals with the making of It's All True, which Ms. Applebaum never mentions by name. It's certainly true that Welles's behavior in Brazil alienated him from the people at RKO, contributed to the mangling of the great-in-spite-of-it-all The Magnificent Ambersons, and caused the studio to put an end to It's All True.

Here is one of Ms. Applebaum's observations about It's All True: "Allegedly, he did film some scenes of intense beauty. . . ." This is a remarkable admission of ignorance. Some of the footage that Welles shot has been available to the public since 1993. I have it on VHS, and it's now available on DVD.

Consequently, there's no need to allege anything. Ms. Applebaum could have seen for herself whether or not It's All True contains scenes of intense beauty. Apparently, she couldn't be bothered to do so. Or, and this is worse, she doesn't even realize that she could have watched what's now available. If the latter is the case, then she should never have been given the assignment of reviewing Callow's new book.

The rest of Welles's career, according to Ms. Applebaum, was filled with "colossal failures and unfinished projects." You'll be forgiven if you get the impression that Welles never directed anything of interest or importance after Citizen Kane, which leaves you wondering why someone such as Simon Callow would bother to write a multi-volume biography of Welles.

Let us pray that the gods of publishing will henceforth protect us from ignorant and condescending reviewers!