Testing Education

“Any thing you can’t measure you can’t manage.” So said Wilbur Ross in his confirmation hearings to become commerce secretary. Data-driven decisions are usually better than those based on hunches, intuitions, and common sense heuristics (hello, Kahneman and Tversky), but measurements even if good and reliable will not always define how to manage. And sometimes there must be management without good measurement. These and related thoughts were prominently in my mind while reading about another confirmation hearing, that for education secretary.

We measure reading and math proficiency, but choices often have to be made about the significance of the data. For example, imagine two third grade classes, each with twenty students. At the beginning of the year, each class has ten students that read at the appropriate second grade level and ten that read only at the first grade level. At the end of the school year, assume thirteen students in one class are reading at the appropriate third grade level, but the remaining seven are still first grade readers. In the other class, ten students are at the third grade mark, and the other ten have made it up to the second grade level. Which class has been more effective?  One class has 65% of its little charges reading at the appropriate level while the other one has only 50% doing so. But in the second class, all the kids improved, while 35% in the first class did not. If the two classes were taught by different methods, which method would you most encourage? However you answer that question, your answer is driven by values that don’t depend on the measurements.

As my own education taught me, not all that is important can be meaningfully measured. I thought that I had received a good education before going to college. My state, and certainly my town, were, as many places are, self-congratulatory about how good the educational system was. I did learn to read and do math. I did those things quite well, and my scores on the national tests placed me in the tiniest top fraction in the country.  For me, the standardized testing of my day was a blessing, and I got into one of the nation’s  top colleges.

Some publication gave the median SAT scores for my college class. Mine were well above that median, and I gloated to myself about how well I was going to do. But then school began.

My classes had Choate and Exeter and New Trier and Stuyvesant boys, and while their standardized scores were not likely to be as good as mine, I realized quickly that in some fundamental ways, they were better educated than I was. It was not that they knew more things than I did, but they knew how to think better than I did. We both could read The Sound and the Fury, but they had a better understanding of that book’s Easter symbolism.  I could learn the facts of the World War I peace process as well as anyone, but they could think better than I about the consequences of the treaties. I could memorize facts with the best of them, but I had never learned to think about the meaning of those facts.

I quickly learned that while I could read and that while I knew grammar and sentence and paragraph construction, I could not really write. One of my early papers, I think, actually had written on it, ”You can’t write.” This was even though in high school I got an A on everything I wrote. In college, I thought back on how little meaningful feedback I ever got on those papers. Few outside of the math teachers in my high school actually pushed me to be better.

I started to learn that often my writing problem was a thinking problem. If my writing was unclear, probably my thinking was unclear. I learned that the writing and thinking processes went together–that often the best way to think about an issue was to write about it. I had to clarify my thoughts, make my thinking more logical, think about whether and how my sources supported my positions. In other words, I learned I could not write well until I could think well.

Perhaps what was hardest for me to learn was that I needed not only to consider what I did know, but to ponder what I did not know. Could those gaps affect my thinking, and if so, was there a way to get that knowledge? I learned I needed to have a skepticism about what I thought I knew so that I would challenge myself to fill the gaps in my understanding.

When years later I taught law students at a school that did not attract top college graduates, many of my students would tell me that they had a writing problem. They knew the material, they would say, but could not explain it on paper. However, when I probed their knowledge, it was almost always deficient. They couldn’t get the material on paper because they didn’t know it well or how to think about what they did know.

On standardized testing, only a few in a hundred or a thousand were better than I was entering college, but those tests did not test everything that was important, and my education up to that point had been crucially deficient. But even if that education had been better, would there have been good measurements for what I lacked? I accept that there were reasonably good and objective measurements of my geometry prowess or reading comprehension skills and my factual knowledge of history and literature. But I am agnostic about how well thinking can be measured. If it can’t be, what then? Thinking, which means something in addition to reading comprehension and solving equations, is crucial to a good education. Wilbur Ross said that if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed. But often, as in much of education, we need good management even when there might not be good measurements. Can that be done?

Got Work?

The doorbell would ring. It was usually early evening. I would curse. Someone at the door at the hour invariably meant one thing: Someone was going to ask me for money.

We did not have the luxury of a filter between us and the street in our row house—no doorman, no buzzer system. Anyone could walk the few feet from the sidewalk and push our bell. We either had to ignore it or deal with whoever was there. And, for quite a stretch in our neighborhood, it was people asking for money.

We don’t know if we were targeted or if our neighbors had the same thing happen to them. We never talked about it with them because there seemed to be no way to stop what always seemed like an intrusion.

Usually it was a man in his twenties or thirties. Most often the person simply said, “I don’t have any money. I am hungry. Could you help me?” On one occasion a man was standing there with what I assumed was his son. He asked if we had cans of food that we could give him. The spouse hearing that got something out of the kitchen cabinet. When giving this to the man, she told him to come back in a week. She spent hours finding a food pantry that would help the father and son. The two did come back, and the spouse told them about the fruits of her labor. That food pantry said they never went.

A few tried even more of a con. The pitch was along these lines: “I am in a big jam. My mother was just taken to the hospital, (or some variation of an emergency). I was going to drive there, but my car would not start (or some variation of car trouble.) I don’t have any cash, and I have to pay for a jump (or a car service). Could you help me?”

If you have sometimes found being approached by a panhandler unpleasant or perhaps even vaguely threatening, answering that evening doorbell was more so. The home should be a place of respite, and this made it feel not entirely secure. Nothing bad ever happened. No one threatened, but answering the face-to-face request for money was never easy. Mostly we said no because we quickly found that giving something on the doorstep meant an increasing number of intrusions since invariably the money-seeker would soon be back.

Marvin, however, broke the pattern. He, too, rang the doorbell and said that he needed money, but instead of asking for it, he asked if there was any work he could do for us.  Of the myriad people who’d come to the door, he was the first, and only one, that asked for work. By then I seldom if ever gave money to the others at the door, but I found myself wanting to help Marvin.  All I could think of that moment was to ask him to sweep the sidewalk. He did, and I paid him, and a long relationship began.

There have been many ups and downs.  At the beginning, Marvin would come too often. I had to tell him time and again not to come more than once a week and would send him away when only a few days had elapsed since his last sweeping.  Sometimes he rang the bell too late at night, after the daughter was asleep, and I would get angry with him.  There was a stretch when he had been drinking and difficult to deal with. He would disappear for stretches, and when we thought he was permanently gone from our lives, he would reappear. The wife once invited him in to ask about his life history. Mostly it was boring and repetitive as he cataloged rehab attempts and incarcerations, but the pattern changed when one judge released him from jail early. He is still grateful to that judge, and that incident appears to be the one that started the change in his life. He was given and found a church that has given him activities, contentment, and fellowship.

Our relationship began more than thirty years ago. He still sweeps for us and has done other custodial tasks. But it has gone beyond that. On winter nights, when ice and snow were piled at the curb and on the sidewalks, he would wait for the wife to come to make sure that she safely made it into the house. She went to the hospital with him when something was wrong with his eyes, and he was clearly frightened about his condition. We have tried to help him in other ways, including having a fund for him dispensed by his church. And it all started when he didn’t just ask for money but asked if I had any work for him.

FIRST SENTENCES

“The small white steamer, Peter Stuyvesant, that delivered the immigrants from the stench and throb of the steerage to the stench and the throb of New York tenements, rolled slightly on the water beside the stone quay in the lee of the weather barracks and the new brick buildings of Ellis Island.”  Henry Roth, Call it Sleep.

“Toxic water streamed with gold like the belly of a turning fish: sunset over Newtown Creek.”  Kate Christensen, The Astral.

“Fame requires every kind of excess.”  Don Delillo, Great Jones Street.

“America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp.”  Sam Lipsyte, The Ask,

“As I entered the lobby of The New York Times at 10:30 P.M., normally deserted at that late hour, I found myself in step behind a lissome woman with wavy ash-blond hair, wearing a snug-fitting black dress.”  Arthur Gelb, City Room.

“Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage.”  John Galsworthy, The Man of Property.

“I was looking for a quiet place to die.  Someone recommended Brooklyn.” Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies.

“It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him.” Knut Hamsun, Hunger.

“Every age creates its own Shakespeare.”  Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All.

“Nearly everything she said was truthful, but because she laughed so much her friends often believed she was joking and remained her friends.”  John O’Hara, Andrea.

“This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of breadwinning.”  Joseph Conrad, Youth.

“It is a remarkable fact about the United States that it fought a civil war without undergoing a change in government.”  Louis Menand, Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.

“Close to three million years ago on a campsite near the east shore of Kenya’s spectacular Lake Turkana, formerly Lake Rudolf, a primitive human picked up a water-smoothed stone, and with a few skillful strikes transformed it into an implement.”  Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin, Origins: What New Discoveries Reveal About the Emergence of Our Species and its Possible Future.

“The dream of reason did not take power into account.”  Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry.

You Think I’d Crumble . . . That’s Me in the Corner

A decade or so ago I went to Israel on an unusual junket—all expenses paid to study terrorism from an Israeli perspective. My reactions were all over the map.

As a kid, shekels was a slang term for money, but now I was buying chewing gum with that decidedly non-biblical currency. Back then I had often looked at the pictures and maps in my Thomas Nelson Revised Standard Version Bible during the boring parts of church, but only when I went to Israel, did I realize how small the country is.  (Bethlehem is but six miles from Jerusalem.)  More than once on the trip, I was told that Israel is about the same size as New Jersey.  (Is there be any other way that New Jersey is like the Holy Land?)

Of course, especially on this trip, there were constant reminders of terrorism—the disco across from our Tel Aviv hotel where partygoers were bombed waiting to enter; the Gaza checkpoint where soldiers had been killed; the meeting with the man disfigured by an incendiary device tossed into his car. These reminders of terrorism made it hard to remember that someone in Israel is more likely to be killed in a car accident than by a terrorist and that per capita more people are killed by guns in America than by terrorists in Israel even though guns are everywhere in Israel.  Soldiers carrying guns are a common sight.  (My favorite—a soldier in sandals carrying a gun slung over one shoulder and the biggest, reddest purse I’d ever seen balancing on her other side.)

One image of Israel: security, security, security.  Searches to get into the hotel; lengthy interrogations and more to get into the Knesset.  Sometimes I did wonder about the efficacy of these measures.  The first time I went to a Czech restaurant the guard controlling admission did a cursory search. The second time, he simply said, “Have you got a gun?”  I said no and was nodded in.  Would a terrorist tell him he had a gun?  By the third day at the hotel, our group was generally waved around the security check point.  Does that mean a terrorist committed to staying at the hotel for at least three days could then avoid security?  Or is it that I and the rest of the group did not look Palestinian?

My northern European looks did not stop El Al from subjecting me to rigorous scrutiny.  Going I was pulled aside from the other passengers, interrogated, and my suitcase thoroughly, I say thoroughly, inspected.  Returning it happened again, but then I had a touch of turista, and the experience seemed to take even longer.  I did get on the plane even though Ihad fudged the truth.  On the day of departure, it was market day near the hotel.  I went to poke around and ended up buying some gifts of Dead Sea mud and some bee products.  I did not give much mind to these casual purchases until I was asked at the airport whether my items came from the stall in the market, or whether the seller had gone into the back to get the facial mask and pollen rejuvenator.  Sick I may have been, but the mind quickly decided the right answer for getting on board—I picked them off the shelf, handed them to the proprietor, and then paid for them.  Everything was in my sight.  But as soon as I said that I was not absolutely sure that I really knew how the transaction went.  Wanting to get home, I did not voice this little doubt.  I was a bit a nervous on most of the flight home.

We were exposed to many intriguing people—terrorism experts in academic institutions; drone pilots; agents who were incredible marksmen and, as indicated by a film of an actual incident, could snatch a suspected terrorist off the street, throw him in a van, and drive off in a matter of seconds.  Perhaps most striking was the professional interrogator for one of the intelligence agencies.  He entered the room, and his bearing, his aura was such that I would have told him anything he asked me.  He maintained that a professional interrogator almost never needed to use physical force, implying that Americans did not have professional interrogators, but he also went on to discuss whether shaking a subject should be considered torture.

I also saw more usual tourist sights—the cars haphazardly parked; the Tel Aviv waterfront;  Caesarea being set for a beautiful evening, seaside wedding reception; the I-would-not-believe-it-if-I-had-not-seen-it rest stop in homage to the King, not David or Solomon, but Elvis Presley.

We spent a few hours touring Jerusalem.  Our guide for the day impressed me when, for reasons no longer remembered, he talked about the obverse of a coin.  Note, not the obverse side of a coin, which would have been incorrect. I was unsure if I had ever heard a native English speaker use obverse, and my admiration increased when I found out he was certified to give tours in many languages in addition to English.  He took us in and out of many religious places, and of course, it was important to remember whether the place was Jewish, Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic, or Muslim in order to put a hat on or take it off.   I think the Upper Room was pointed out, but then another place was said to be perhaps the site of the Last Supper.  Mary’s burial place was there, but, then again, a location in Turkey is venerated as the place where her Assumption took place, and of course, it is not clear to Assumption believers whether she actually died. (And I think that some believe she died in India.)

We passed stations of the cross and the crucifixion and burial places.  I wondered how people could be so sure that these were the right locations and why there was no marker for the doorway where the Wandering Jew refused aid.  Perhaps these doubts about authenticity led me to blasphemous thoughts.  I was told to plunge my arm through a hole so that I could feel the rock on which the True Cross stood.  As I did, my mind returned to the sixth grade Halloween parties where, blindfolded, we put our hands into bowls of grapes and spaghetti and told we were feeling eyeballs and guts.  Of course, many of these now revered sites were “authenticated” centuries after the events by, I believe, Constantine’s mother, who also collected many relics, perhaps the relics that Mark Twain later saw in his travels to the Continent and the Holy Land.  Even if they are in the places where the events happened, I wondered why are they regarded as holy sites?  If a religion is universal, then no place could be more sacred than another.

But the most striking part of the Jerusalem trip was its beginning and end. Before we entered, the obverse-coin guide brought us to a place that overlooked Jerusalem. He pointed out things in the old city; where Bethlehem was and is; the Palestinian-controlled territory; the wall marking the boundary (although Israelis called it a fence, not a wall); and the mural-painted wall (this was called a wall) behind us, which prevented Palestinians down below from shooting into Israeli apartments up above.

Our location was a parking lot, and a nearby food van was, like many other Israeli places, playing old American rock and roll.  The third song I noticed was Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive.  I almost laughed at the remarkable fortuity.  I know that the song is about a woman’s strength in rejecting a lover who walked out, but what better chorus could there be as I looked out over Israel and Jerusalem than I WILL SURVIVE.

During this trip because of the sensitive places we often visited—military and intelligence facilities—we were accompanied by heavily armed, young men, and in Jerusalem I fell into step with such an escort. A few moments later, some men rounded a corner shouting and elbowing others aside.  I asked the escort, born and raised in Israel, what that was about, and he replied, “Just some Arabs showing off.”  He and I exited the old city together, and I was visually assaulted by a row of tacky tourist shops.  American rock and roll came from them, too, and the first song I heard outside the old city was R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion.  I smiled and said to the escort, “That doesn’t seem right for Jerusalem.”  He stopped, paused a beat, and thoughtfully said, “I think that is the only way.”

Is that right?  Can there only be peace if we lose our religion?

The daughter’s crack art 

            She did not talk much as a child. She seldom played with other children. Mostly when she came home from first or second grade, she drew. She did not do the classic stick figures of mommy and daddy or a rudimentary house or cat. Nothing representational. She did abstract drawings, but these were not quick slashes of crayons across paper. She could often spend an hour or more on one. She seemed to have some sort of plan and carefully placed straight-edged lines of one color alongside half-circles of another. She would end up with strokes shooting off at angles seemingly held in place by the occasional curve. She did not look for approval; she drew only to satisfy herself. I don’t remember her ever saying, “Look, Daddy, at what I made!”

          One day, however, the daughter had made some different art. She had been with Cleta to the park at the end of the block. Calling it a park was then somewhat generous. When we moved in, there was a triangular plot that was mostly empty but had a cemented-up old movie house and a few other vacant buildings. Those structures were eventually torn down, some minimal landscaping had been done, and a park proclaimed. Vacant land stood across the street from the site’s hypotenuse; a boarded- up hospital bordered one side; and a nursing home the other. (Later on the park was redesigned into an attractive space; a Catholic charity converted the hospital into housing; and nice row housing was constructed on the vacant land.) A few people used the park during the day back then but not many, and I could only guess what happened there during the night. I certainly did not go into it after dark.

            When I came home that evening, Cleta said, “Look at what she found in the park and what she did with them.” She showed me a piece of construction paper to which were glued tiny, plastic vials with colorful tops. They were arranged in some careful pattern that clearly pleased the daughter’s eye. This time I could see pride in her. She knew she had made something special, and I agreed inwardly and outwardly. It was striking.

            While I evinced sincere admiration, I also tried to keep the horror off my face. While Cleta and the daughter did not recognize the plastic containers, I knew what they were; they were crack vials. The different colored tops denoted, in effect, different brands of crack. I might have guessed it before, but now I really knew what happened in the park at night. As I looked at the art and the pride on the artist’s face, thoughts flashed and crashed in my mind, I resolved to say nothing about the origin of what were now part of an innovative collage. The park was safe during the day, and I did not want Cleta and the daughter to be afraid of going there.

The mother got home later, and I showed her the daughter’s art, but I played dumb when the topic moved to the source of the vials. Much to the daughter’s consternation, however, I made her wash her hands time and again that evening.

Much later, not from me, the daughter did learn that this art incorporated crack vials. This is a story we now share. Amazing what fathers and daughters can bond over.

Snippets . . . . Snippet It Real Good

A visual for your movie: In an urban mall outside the windows of a Marshall’s store containing mannequins adorned in fashionable, but reasonably priced, clothing are five teenage girls dressed in Orthodox Jewish attire chatting, smiling, even giggling, eating large Kosher dill pickles.

I asked the server in my local Biergarten what part of Germany she was from. She replied, “The best part. Austria.”

How would you react if you found out that Trump’s favorite novelist was Zadie Smith?

I wonder what Pat Paulsen would say today.  When he “ran” for President, he said, “I want to be elected by the people, for the people, and in spite of the people” . . .”Issues have no place in politics.  They only confuse matters.”. . . I wonder if he would still say, “The current system is rigged so that only the majority can seize control.”

A Sunday School teacher once said to me, “There are three main religions in this country: Christians, Jews, and Catholics.”

Thought experiment: Whom would you more likely vote against? Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton? If it is not the same, does that indicate a bias against or for women?

In the world of Bob Ross, you were shown how to paint “happy little bushes,” spoken in an almost inaudible voice.  Nothing wrong with that, was there?

“I believe in children praying—well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant.” Joseph Conrad, Victory.

Outside Green-Wood. Flamingo Furniture. Full Serve. Marino’s Italian Ices (on the move).  Baked in Brooklyn (with one of the four greatest smells, baking bread). Club XStasy. Top Nest.  Weir Greenhouse Restoration. A National Landmark. Est. 1838. And no Starbucks.

What would you have wanted to ask the attractive, young Asian woman sitting on the subway in a going-to-the-office dress and sensible shoes reading Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer?

Would you want to bank at the place I saw recently where the clock above the entrance always reads 7:10?

In a trip to Montreal, I learned that it was a magnet for some. Thus, the young woman working in a souvenir shop was from Nova Scotia, and she had come to Montreal to learn French. In a restaurant, a young, rail-thin woman had come from France during the winter.  Even though she was from the Alps, she had found the Montreal winter remarkably cold in spite of its being mild by Quebec standards.  I asked her what she thought of how French was spoken in Montreal. After a thoughtful pause, she replied, “Interesting.”

Perhaps you know what I only recently learned outside the General Post Office: the ZIP in ZIP Code is an acronym for Zone Improvement Program.

I have never learned to open a bag of potato chips properly.

Shut Up, You Elites

His hair is distinctive, one could say impossible, but there it is. A microphone is only a few inches from his lips, but he still leans into it. He does not really yell into the mike, but the voice is certainly not conversational. His words can be adamant; they can be bullying. He denounces enemies, enemies that stand in the way of greatness. He talks about the alliances he has entered or created and how strong they are. He makes promises about how he will perform, performances that he guarantees will be great. There is nothing nuanced in what he says; there are no ambiguities. It is a world of black and white; of good and bad; of greatness or failure. There is not a single shade of gray.

He pauses often, seemingly waiting for his audience to catch up. The audience reacts visibly and audibly. Each denunciation, each bragging claim elicits a hoot or holler. He encourages the audience to mock his opponents, which often responds with a sing-song chant. This is an interactive, audience-participation performance. The speaker supplied an initial energy, but he soaks back energy as the frenzied crowd reacts to him.

The audience doesn’t really care about the specifics of his promises. They know as they are uttered that many can’t be kept. Indeed, they won’t be surprised if contradictory promises are made in a week or a month or that the alliances announced today are changed tomorrow or that the enemy previously castigated in absolute terms is now a dear friend. The audience is there not for truth, but for an attitude, and he supplies and feeds that attitude.

This audience seems bound together by something more than what most audiences have. They know that others, “nice” people, “successful” people, “elite” people not only do not share their enthusiasm, those others, this group knows, think there is something wrong, ludicrous, maybe even shameful or dangerous in what this audience feels. Here, however, together with this crowd and the performer who understands their visceral reactions, each can indulge the passions they all enjoy, and this brings them all closer together.

Perhaps this is a Trump rally, but what l was trying to describe was pro wrestling. Since the rise of Trumpism, I have thought that those who are mystified by the appeal of Donald Trump might learn something by trying to understand the allure of professional wrestling.

Professional wrestling remains strikingly similar to what it was in my childhood of Verne Gagne with his sleeper hold and his between bout pitches for a nutritional supplement, good guys (Wilbur Snyder, for example) and bad guys (definitely Dick the Bruiser) in a simulated reality of pain, danger, and unbelievable heroics. The business, however, has changed in some important ways.

What I watched growing up was largely regional. Different parts of the country had different wrestling companies. As a friend once said about a wrestler, “He was the world heavyweight champion of the greater Cleveland area.” The spectacle might have been similar everywhere, but we did not all see the same performers.

Vince McMahon of what is now the WWE (World, or is Worldwide, Wrestling Entertainment) changed that. His wrestling organization, started in the Northeast by his father, did not respect others’ territories. He drove many regional operations out of business or bought them out as they started to fail.  WWE now dominates the business, and wrestling fans today for the large part all see the same product. The rise of cable television, the Internet, and other media has given more choice for news and entertainment and fragmented popular culture. We don’t share as much in common as we once did.

Professional wrestling, with its nationalization, has gone in the opposite direction. The odds are overwhelming that its fans will all know, and probably have opinions about, Kevin Owens, The Undertaker, the New Day, and Triple H. Wrestling is one of the few popular forces that is producing an increasingly unified cultural base, but a base that is out of sight to the rest of America.

The wrestling business has also changed because, while it is not trumpeted, it is not now hidden that the contests are not real sporting events. While perhaps back in the day, some fans may have thought that the spectacle was a legitimate sport, today it is acknowledged that wrestling is “sports entertainment.” All but the most naïve of wrestling fans know that while the wrestlers can be athletic and do take risks, the violence is simulated and the outcomes follow predetermined story lines. Wrestling’s popularity has fluctuated through the years, but its popularity does not seem to have been harmed because those involved no longer steadfastly maintain that it is “real.” Instead, it has always been a form of reality TV; something that pretends to be real.

The allure of pro wrestling to the outsider is hard to fathom, but it must have something to do with the power of simulated reality, violence, simplistic good and evil, outrageous characters, and the continuing tensions of a soap opera. As epic poems, sagas, novels and movies show we want, maybe need, superheroes and supervillains. At least some of the time, we don’t want caveats and tough choices. During the wrestling shows, we have those heroes and villains and only easy choices. Who and what is good or bad is crystal clear.

It is not my point and beyond my abilities to intellectually analyze the allure of wrestling, and any way, the appeal may largely be visceral and, thus, cannot be satisfactorily explained to those who don’t feel it. But what should be recognized is that the spectacle has had an enduring appeal. And if I am right, that Trump at a rally performed much like a pro wrestler talking to the audience and that audience responded much as wrestling crowd does, it may make sense for those who can’t grasp Tumpism to try to grasp pro wrestling.

When Trump was gaining traction in the political arena, this wrestling fan thought back to one of the WWE storylines. It featured Donald Trump. Oh, yes, Trump has been a part of pro wrestling for quite some time. I don’t remember all the storyline’s ins and outs, but as I recall, Vince McMahon backed one wrestler and Trump another, and either Trump or McMahon would have his head shaved depending upon which wrestler lost some big event. This went on for weeks or maybe even months, but of course, no one could really believe that Trump was going to appear bald to further wrestling ratings. The mere thought of it, however, whipped up the crowd.  Politicos studied Trump’s business record and pop culture critics talked about The Apprentice, but pundits mystified about his appeal should also have been studying Trump on Monday Night Raw and then watching more of the wrestling shows.

Perhaps roots of Trump can be found in Huey Long and William Jennings Bryan, but we should also consider Gorgeous George. Gorgeous George was perhaps next to Milton Berle early television’s biggest star. Professional wrestling has always presented itself as what is now called reality TV, and GG was really America’s first huge reality TV star. Gorgeous George (George Raymond Wagner), often shortened by TV announcers to Gorgeous or Georgie, was in wrestling parlance a heel, a bad guy. (Good guys are babyfaces or just faces.) He broke stereotypes. In what was a supposedly testosterone-fueled world, his character displayed effeminacy. Flunkies would proceed him up the arena’s aisles spraying perfume in his path. He entered the ring wearing elaborate robes no “man” would have been caught in—festooned with ostrich feathers, for example. No one but his valet could touch his robe, and the referee in a Chaplinesque routine would be repeatedly blocked from doing so. And he had that hair. It was some sort of yellow or straw color never seen in nature, and it was curled and primped in ways that only permanents and feminine implements could produce. His hair was secured with what otherwise would have been called bobby pins; his were called Georgie pins. Before a match, he would elaborately remove and toss them to the crowd. The hair was central to the character. The storylines often said that he would not fight someone unless they contracted not to touch his hair. And late in his career, as other wrestlers were eclipsing him, he fought a match where the loser would have his locks sheared. Gorgeous lost the match and his hair.

There is a line from Gorgeous George to Trump. This path meanders with stops for Muhammed Ali and James Brown, both reportedly fans of Gorgeous. It goes through Ric Flair, William Regal, and other wrestlers. But although the line goes to him, Trump in some ways has flipped Gorgeous George.  Gorgeous played the heel to fill the arenas with those who came to jeer him. Trump, too, acts the heel, but not to the faithful in front of him. Trump unites with the audience and together they act as the heel to all who are not Trump’s fans. It provided pleasure akin to that at a wrestling spectacle when he would say and the crowd when join in denouncing little Mario, that nasty woman, the lying press.

Gorgeous entered the arena to work and work up the audience. When they frenziedly taunted him, he would appear to break and shout back, “Shut up, you peasants.” The crowed would roar with delight. Trump’s again has shifted the heel’s performance. His audience roars because Trump and his audience vicariously seem to shout to all those that are not enthralled by him, “Shut up, you elites.”

What Me, Prejudiced?

Let me give you some facts. Then form your image.

The couple are in their sixties. They are retired. By dress and bearing, they are above middle class, but it is hard to tell how far above. He is a long time representative in the state legislature. Maybe even had been Speaker of the House. In South Dakota. He made his living as a lawyer. Not in for whatever passes for a metropolis out there, but in Spearfish, which, the woman maintains, has a population of 12,000. In the western part of state, near Wyoming. She was in education. Asked if she had been a school teacher, she was quick to say, “And principal.”

From these facts, what assumptions would you make about them? I had a friend who was raised in a Dakota, but for the life of me, I don’t remember which one. Is there really a difference? I do remember him telling me that that some Dakota relative of his raised turkeys. When he was about the size of the birds, nasty creatures he assured me, they scared him mightily, and he would sprint through the yard to get to the safety of the farmhouse. This couple, however, was definitely from that lower Dakota and did not raise turkeys.

The images, or shall we say the prejudices, I might have had from this information would, however, have to have been not so much tempered as shattered by additional factors. I was in my local having a beer and potato fritters when this couple couple sat next to me at the bar. I was quite confident from their look that they were not from the neighborhood, but they seemed perfectly relaxed as they ordered a beer, a glass of wine, and a pretzel. The bartender said something, and they replied, “South Dakota,” and that brought me into the conversation.

When asked what they were doing in a neighborhood bar in the not the trendiest part of Brooklyn, they gave a multi-part answer. Most of their retired friends from South Dakota were Arizona snowbirds; they wanted something different. The couple had moved to a garden apartment in an Upper Westside townhouse and now sought to do something in New York every day. They were in my area to go to the Irondale, a non-traditional theater carved from a reclaimed Sunday School auditorium connected to a historic church. They were going to see the Nutcracker Rouge, which is described as a Baroque Burlesque Confection. I know little about it except that it is quite raunchy. I don’t know about you, but my stereotypes of a small-town South Dakota lawyer/politician and principal did not include retirement to Manhattan much less attending a nearly naked Nutcracker in an obscure performance space in Brooklyn. I try to think of myself as open, but sometimes when I am surprised by somebody, I realize how much baggage I unconsciously carry in making quick assumptions about others.

And what would be your images when you hear of Spearfish, South Dakota? I certainly was not surprised that some later, quick research disclosed that it was over 90% white, but I was surprised by its climate. I jumped to the conclusion that it would be bitterly cold for the winter; in fact, the high temperatures average near forty degrees in January and February. Spearfish, however, is known more for some unusual weather. On the morning of January 22, 1943, the temperature was minus four Fahrenheit. A Chinook wind blew and within two minutes, the temperature was a plus 45 Fahrenheit. That two-minute temperature swing is the world record. Hey, what world records does your town hold? The woman, Katie, told me that the temperature continued to rise into the fifties that morning. Then the warm wind dissipated and the temperatures dropped to below zero in the next half hour. This plunge, a bit more gradual but greater than the earlier rise, was still so rapid that windows cracked.

The South Dakota couple, Jim I think his name was, was interesting, charming, and amusing. Right after they left, I felt as if I had make a mistake with them. I should have got their contact information so that I could have invited them to dinner. And perhaps see if I would find other prejudices of mine I was not aware of.

FIRST SENTENCES

“It’s not so easy writing about nothing.”  Patti Smith, M Train.

“It was in the days when theater companies toured not just France, Switzerland, and Belgium, but also North Africa.” Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences.

“I seldom dream.  When I do, I wake with a start, bathed in sweat.” Magda Szabor, The Door.

“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.” James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss.

“Melancholy as it is to stand at dawn and watch one’s house vanish over a cliff. I can’t deny that amid the attendant dust cloud of black thought is a whirling spark of exhilaration, as after the death of a partner or parent.” James Hamilton-Paterson, Rancid Pansies.

“My name is J.D. Vance, and I think I should start with a confession: I find the existence of the book you hold in your hands somewhat absurd.” J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.

“The Americans were coming, and Saddam Hussein was on his best behavior.” Christian Alfonsi, Circle in the Sand: Why We Went Back to Irag.

“The first time I met Sunee, I was in Klong Toey seeking a poor person whom I could ask why poverty existed, and she rushed right up to me, drunkenly plucking at my sleeve, pleading with me to come home with her.” William T. Vollmann, Poor People.

“On a hot night in Lokichokio, as a generator thumps in the distance and katydids cling like thin winged leaves to the lightbulb overhead, he tells his visitor that there is no difference between God and the Devil in Africa.” Philip Caputo, Acts of Faith.

“One of the few things that humanity has agreed upon for most of history is that its laws descend directly from the gods.” Sadakat Kadri, The Trial: A History from Socrates to O.J. Simpson.

“Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.

“If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it.” Charles Seife, Proofiness: The Dark Art of Mathematical Deception.

“The day my wife left she gave me a list of who I was.” Chang-Rae Lee, Native Speaker.

“I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you.” Colson Whitehead, The Colossus of New York.

Barack Versus the Babe

When a President is leaving office, news stories from all over analyze what he has and has not accomplished. Invariably historians will be tapped to tell us where this departing executive stands in the hierarchy of Presidents—is he near the top like Lincoln and Washington and FDR; in the middle like, like—if they are in the middle who can remember them?; or at the bottom like Buchanan or George W. Bush.

These rankings, instead of making me reflect on Presidential history, turn my thoughts to Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron (according to one of his biographies, he did not like being called “Hank.”) When Aaron broke Ruth’s home run record, some people, supposedly putting the accomplishment into perspective but really trying to denigrate it, pointed out that it took Aaron many more at bats than Ruth had to get to 714 home runs.  Aaron responded, “But Ruth never had to face Juan Marichal.”  (My memory is that I read or heard from someone that Mr. Aaron said something like this. I have not verified this memory. You can do that if you want. Instead, whether Aaron actually said it or not, the insight remains.)

Ruth, of course, never batted with Marichal pitching. Ruth’s last major league appearance was before Marichal was born. (I did look that up.) The real point, however, is that Ruth did not bat against his day’s equivalent of Juan Marichal. Because major league baseball was segregated in Ruth’s time, he did not bat against the best pitchers, only the best white pitchers. For example, Ruth did not face Satchel Paige, even though Paige’s prime came when Ruth was playing. Paige was clearly an outstanding pitcher—some think the best of all time. In the frequent barnstorming and exhibition games of his era, he faced major league stars and pitched excellently against them. But Paige was black and could not play in the major leagues in the 1920s and 1930s. (I do not know what to make of the fact that Paige first played in the United States on an integrated team in 1933 in Bismarck, North Dakota. Or at least that is what a biography of Paige said.)

How many home runs would Ruth have hit if some of the weaker pitchers he faced had been replaced by Paige and other outstanding black players then barred from the major leagues? We can’t know.

Aaron, however, did face Marichal, as well as Bob Gibson and other outstanding black pitchers. Baseball had become integrated. Perhaps because he had to face all the best pitchers,  Aaron’s records are more impressive than Ruth’s. On the other hand, the nature of American professional athletics was changing during Aaron’s career. When Ruth played, baseball was the dominant sport, and the best athletes mostly concentrated on baseball. That may have been also true at the beginning of Aaron’s career, but by the 1970s, professional football and basketball had become more attractive to the athletically gifted, and probably not all the best American athletes homed in on baseball.

If we were comparing Ruth and Aaron to today’s players, we would have to factor in the internationalization of baseball. While there were Latin American players in Aaron’s day (but almost none in Ruth’s)—after all Marichal was a Dominican—the influx of Spanish-speaking players has mushroomed since then, and the major leagues are also seeing a steady flow of players from Japan Korea, and Taiwan and even Australia and the Netherlands.

In assessing players from different era we should consider the differing player pools but also that the game has changed in other ways—the pitching mound has been at different heights; gloves differ tremendously from those of yesteryear; night games were not always played or scheduled less frequently; travel was different; the number of double headers has changed; the use of relief pitchers has changed; spitballs, once allowed, are now banned; a ball that bounces over the outfield wall is no longer a home run; and so on.

This all leads me to the wisdom of Bill Russell (again, I have not verified that Russell said this, but the point remains even if he did not) when he stated that you cannot compare players from different eras. At best, players can only be compared to other players of the same era. You can conclude that Ruth was the greatest slugger of his day. You can debate whether Mays or Mantle were as good as Aaron, but you can’t meaningfully maintain that Tris Speaker was better than all of them.

And that conclusion should also apply to Presidents. To rank Presidents ignores the different conditions during which they held office. You might think Washington did a good job as the first one, but the world he faced and how the government then functioned is different from the environment other Presidents had. Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt’s temperament and abilities suited well the conditions when he was President, but TR would probably have been a disaster as President in 1861. The issues that one President confronts are not faced by another, and the nature of Presidential powers, federalism, and congressional authority have changed over time. As a result, the presidential playing field keeps changing, and it is well nigh impossible to compare performers operating in different games.

Rankings of Presidents from different eras, while giving occupation to some historians and pundits, shouldn’t be taken too seriously. The conclusion that George W. Bush was a better or worse President than James Buchanan or that Barack Obama ranks higher or lower than Grover Cleveland is merely a parlor game (at a time when there are few parlors.)  As with athletes, at most we can compare Presidents within an era, not across the whole history of the Presidential game.

However, Obama did seem to have a better basketball game than all the other Presidents.