I'm sure NW will be along with apposite comments at some point, but his soon-to-be-102-year-old mother broke her hip this morning (on the other side to the one that got stuffed full of titanium five years ago), so we're both currently at the hospital.
Holy moly. I hope she recovers well.
Yes, best wishes.
On the article, I do think traditionally-conceived moral rot in the top echelons is plausible - "greed is good" actually being the ideology of so many, plus so much money sloshing around to curry favor with, is bound to have some effect. But even if true, that is not as much a degeneration as an evolution, given the posited prior world of well-intentioned leaders brings its own monstrosities (dulce et decorum est).
(Is "at the hospital" used in contrast to "in hospital" where the former does not imply the person is a patient? Or is usage just Americanizing?)
It's only American if you get an incomprehensible statement with the heading "THIS IS NOT A BILL."
Is "at the hospital" used in contrast to "in hospital" where the former does not imply the person is a patient?
Yes. NW's mother is in hospital; Ume and NW are at the hospital visiting her, and possibly arguing on behalf with the staff of the hospital.
Very sorry to here this, Ume. Hope she recovers well.
Anyway, I have my doubts that failing up was really ever blocked for the upper class anywhere for very long. Lots of people get old and write about how the kids today after fucking up.
Perhaps when NW gets back from the hospital someone could tactfully remind him what the name of the country he lives in is, as he seems to be getting it wrong about 20% of the time.
Scexit will set that right soon enough.
The Guardian is a fine English newspaper and its journalists are all educated and knowledgeable men, so they'll realise that correcting this error is the gentlemanly and Christian thing to do.
Snatched moment: Warnock not at all the same as Patrick Melrose classes they didn't need jobs. Her class did at least the one I was writing about did.
Good wishes appreciated. I'm leaning against a wall in the ward where they are putting her in for the night. No doubt she'll be shifted to another one later.
Jobs are great. They give you money and a way to explain why you exist to people who don't care otherwise.
If we get UBI in the next 50 years, future historians with access to films but not government archives will have trouble pinpointing when it started, as film characters of all classes tend to speak as if staying permanently unemployed has no downsides except not living up to your potential. (In particular right now thinking of the black-best-friend character in Captain Marvel, although to be fair she may have moved in with her parents.)
I don't understand your Old Worldy class system. Anyway, I think the cleverness point applies.
||
Go see Us
This is oddly, obliquely relevant to this thread.
|>
No spoilers. I'm waiting until it's on Netflix.
My son saw an ad for "Us" on Youtube, and insisted on sleeping with his parents for the first time in years. I am irrationally biased against the movie for that reason.
16: Did they say that Maria is unemployed in Captain Marvel?
They did not have the option of failing upwards
I guess I'm not sure of the definition of "upper middle classes" in pre-Thatcher Britain. From the book I read last year about Kim Philby and his set, falling up seemed like a pretty live option. Maybe they were upper class? I thought in England you needed a title for that.
22: Not explicit, but it left that impression (something about her continuing to sit on her butt in Louisiana).
I know people with jobs who often sit on their butts in Louisiana.
OK. Mother is more or less safely in hospital. We have to drive over and pick up her things later tonight. There will be an operation tomorrow or the day after. I am dreading the aftermath. But for the moment a little peace.
I have to admit that I was thinking about her and her family a bit when I wrote about Mary Warnock, whose grandfather was a rich Austrian banker. But the class involved is roughly the one the Orwell said he belonged to: people whose parents managed to get them into public schools but who had no expectations of inheriting enough to repeat the trick with their own children.
AcademicLurker: two points about Philby -- first, the secret service was astonishingly dysfunctional and to end up there in peacetime was for most people in that class an evidence of failure. Possible and partial exception, John Le Carre / Cornwell. Second, Philby was protected to the extent of becoming the Observer's stringer in Beirut. That was not failing upwards.
There was, if you like, a floor on failing downwards. Schoolteaching, like Captain Grimes, is one example. But I can't think of anything in that generation to match the career of Boris Johnson, who has fucked up almost every job he ever had.
What if his job is to create an island dystopia?
Ajay: OK. there are relevant differences with Scotland. I should have been clearer. But I think the imperial classes were British rather than just English, even if they conformed to English mores. eg both my parents were mostly Irish protestants, one born in Belfast and one in Dacca, both socialised to be English. Warnock's father was half an Austrian Jew, but a housemaster at Winchester. Tony Blair, who was certainly born into that world.
BoJo's failures make it absolutely necessary to postulate a floor for some class of people; what gets me about this story was how he was equally incompetent at covering his tracks, which you'd think the intelligentsia would want to assess. He wasn't, like Stephen Glass, making up a story from marginalized people; it was from an Oxford don who would notice the article and to whom people would listen.
Philly and Johnson both wanted to destroy the United Kingdom. It sure looks like Johnson is better at it from where I sit.
I don't understand how the country is functioning with that big of a pile of uncertainty hanging over everything, but maybe you get used to it when it creeps up over months.
33: Don't look at me! I jumped out of that pot a long time ago.
Hoping for the best for your mother, NW.
Our company branch there has two tractor trailers full of supplies sitting in their parking lot in case the supply chain is disrupted. Very efficient allocation of capital.
But I can't think of anything in that generation to match the career of Boris Johnson, who has fucked up almost every job he ever had.
Possibly the Boris Johnson phenomenon has been made possible by the global political and social changes which have made the Remittance Man obsolete.
I had to look up "remittance man". Apparently in the past the word "remittance" had the exact opposite connotation.
Raise a glass to Moreton Frewen, the Mortal Ruin -- to everyone else.
Remittance man
Remittance man
Doing all the remitting he can
Pays the bills that are in the red
Or do the bills pay him instead
Remittance man
1/14: Best wishes; I'm so sorry. After having had three elderly relatives with dementia and broken hips, I would suggest you consider not doing surgery to replace the hip (in case you weren't already). Rehab is hard at that age, and leaving it broken with pain management and avoiding general anesthesia for the first few weeks and a wheelchair might be kinder. That was the clear right decision for one, surgery clearly right for the other, and the last (my mother) was an edge case.
Sending best wishes for your mother, NW.
(Pretend I put that in an order that makes more sense. Pain management for the first few weeks, etc)
Re: ability to fail upward or lack thereof posed by Mossy, I suppose since pre-Thatcher Britain had more class mobility, the likelihood of actually missing opportunities in favor of someone more clever or competent was probably higher. In a more stratified society, less so. So, there's a small, uncompetitive pool of folks filling positions and performing poorly.
29: Imperial classes? Scotland was different?
38: Sinecures for the dissolute, okay, but how do such people get promoted? The remittance men (also new to me) apparently just rotted quietly.
47: Less mobility, clearly. What were the mechanisms, what changed? (One can guess, but better if the Brits can detail it themselves. (Apologies to ydnew if a Brit. (Apologies to Brits if they find the term offensive.)))
From the OP link: One of my mother's schools had as its motto, "I can, I ought, I must, I will", and that sense of being impelled to action by duty shaped the whole generation. It did not make for ease.
Was the unease related to fear of downward mobility, per Orwell's definition? And what took the unease away? Where did the impulse to action (and not purely for self interest) come from, and why did it go away?
48: American, but here: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/05/how-social-mobility-got-stuck
"I can, I ought, I must, I will"
The least Gen X thing ever.
"Herrenvolk meritocracy" is a great coinage. Much superior to noblesse oblige -- the standard phrase used to describe similar social arrangements.
Pre-Gen X, or maybe just on the cusp of that demographic revolution:
As first a Brownie, and then a Girl Guide, growing up in Canada way back in the mists of time, I used to recite the following pledge:
I promise to do my best,
To do my duty to God, the Queen, and my country,
To help other people every day, especially those at home.
My dad, he didn't much like that bit about a duty to the Queen. He used to make fun of it, in a way that made me realize there was some kind of larger issue at stake. My mum, though, she really wasn't up for that sort of anti-Brit propaganda, and anyway, she loved the cute uniform that we had to wear (the Canadian Brownie uniform was seriously adorable, with a scarf adorned with maple leaves).
As a teenager, I used to seriously snark on the neo-Victorian "separate spheres" ideology of that "especially those at home."
I can't say that I regret my time as a Brownie and a Girl Guide, though.
I always knew that this was some sort of British-y protestant thing, and I never quite felt that I belonged, but I believed that these were good people, whose ideals I'd do well to emulate. And they taught me how to canoe, and how to tie a proper knot, and how to bake a cake from scratch. And the notion of a duty to the common good is something that has sort of stuck with me, though we can argue, of course, about the parameters of that commons, and about the duties and responsibilities that therefore entail...
I never took noblesse oblige to imply meritocracy. (And noblesse oblige was the first reaction I had to that motto.)
Back to Brexit, though I'm sure the daily parliamentary conturbations are of interest to fewer and fewer, I was surprised by this in a Grauniad explainer:
While there has been talk of MPs trying to seize further control of the Commons and push through an agreed plan via statute, this would appear constitutionally very tricky; it is the executive which is supposed to push laws, not the legislature, and so the main lever on May would thus be political pressure.I realize tight central control over the parliamentary majority is a longstanding Westminster tradition, but has it really made it this far, that something passed by Parliament might be unconstitutional if not proposed by the PM? It's an interesting spin on parliamentary supremacy if so.
I wonder how much food and ammo David Cameron has in his basement.
JPJ grew up in a Margaret Atwood novel.
I was an Boy Scout and all that. I still can't read that motto without dropped by voice at the end of make it "I will?"
I never took noblesse oblige to imply meritocracy.
Ah, but believers in noblesse oblige understand privilege and merit to be correlated - or at a minimum, they aspire to make it so.
And of course, meritocracy is likewise only loosely related to merit. There's a good reason that you and I immediately made the connection between the two.
56: ?
61: Was there ever a formal theory of noblesse oblige? China had the nandate of heaven theory, merit self-evident by right of conquest. Buddhist polities had "merit-making". In practice as you say all shades of rationalization. But still interesting, maybe significant in terms of how people are socialized.
To answer Moschar's original question:
To what extent was this actually true? What mechanisms prevented upward failure, and why did they break down? The article cites essentially moral decay, which obviously is part of the story but I can't believe is all of it.
We lost the empire and stopped fighting wars. Running an empire (well, most of it [1]) required competence, because some forms of failure[2] were impossible to disguise. The same is even more obviously true of wars. By the end of any long war, the people keeping the army running are going to be quite good at their jobs.
Whereas Boris Johnson's career has been spent
in jobs where failure had no immediately obvious catastrophic consequences.
[1] "But as it is, my language fails / Go out and govern New South Wales"
[2] Starving millions of Bengalis not counted as a failure. Though, actually, you could use the career of Louis Mountbatten as a hinge point for failing upwards. Did anyone ever give him a responsible job after partition?
Ah, but believers in noblesse oblige understand privilege and merit to be correlated - or at a minimum, they aspire to make it so.
I say Class X because there is no definition of it. To talk of an upper or ruling class is nonsense. The upper class, if the term has any meaning at all, means landed gentry who probably do belong to Class X but form only a small proportion of it. The ruling class are, I presume, politicians and servants of the State--terms which are self-contradictory. I wish there were some explanation of Class X. We are politically a democracy--or should I say that we are an oligarchy with its ranks ever open to talent?--and the least class-conscious of nations in a Marxian sense. The only class-conscious people are those who would like to belong to Class X and don't: the suburban old-school-tie brigade and their wives, especially their wives. Yet we have a profound division of classes which defies analysis since it is in a continual state of flux...
Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male
You could use the career of Louis Mountbatten as a hinge point for failing upwards. Did anyone ever give him a responsible job after partition?
Yes, he was First Sea Lord and Chief of the Defence Staff.
Whereas Boris Johnson's career has been spent in jobs where failure had no immediately obvious catastrophic consequences.
He has actually been sacked several times for various acts of incompetence or mendacity. It's more that failure for him seems to have no lasting consequences. But you could say the same for Liam Fox, or indeed George Monbiot.
Also the Bengal famine didn't happen during Mountbatten's term as viceroy.
62.1: Just a joke about being noble to the concept of being noble.
An interesting way to look at it might be through the prism of Kenneth Pollack's "Arab Military Effectiveness"; being puzzled that Arab armies are so terrible at fighting and keep losing wars and yet nothing seems to change is a result of assuming that Arab rulers think their armies should be winning wars, and will be unhappy when they lose them.
They do not: they think their armies should be keeping them in power, and Arab armies are, historically, very good at this. Arab rulers have incredible longevity in office and this is largely due to their readiness to use armed force to stay there.
So, instead of saying "Boris Johnson is crap at his job and doesn't suffer any consequences! In fact he keeps getting promoted! This is weird and inexplicable!" flip it round, and say: "Boris Johnson is suffering no consequences and keeps getting promoted, and therefore, in the eyes of his employers, he is doing a very good job; what can we therefore deduce about what his actual job is?"
The parliament seized control of itself?
Seems more promising than voting on the same thing fifteen times.
Mountbatten clearly wasn't UMC. In the NW theory, when does Britain start being run by the UMC meritocrats?
Possibly not before the postwar period when the less functional members of the old UC were being converted to genteel poverty by taxes? At least that's my synthesis of books from then.
They were always going on about Death Duties. I've been a call bearer. It's not that hard.
On the face of it I don't buy the war/empire argument. A fair number of democracies don't have empires or hot wars, and developed without them. I don't know of any demonstrating the same kind of incompetence as the UK.
I feel like questioning the foundations of this. Was it "pre-Thatcher" that was less meritocratic ('scuse Michael Young for the moment)? Really? Cameron's government was IIRC the most Etonian for many decades and plenty of people thought the Blair/Brown governments were an oligarchy of Oxford PPE graduates. On the other hand the ridiculous posho general/minister/official was a stock figure of fun since like forever.
The remittance men (also new to me) apparently just rotted quietly.
Surely it was impossible for them to rot, as they were already pickled.
I think you could make a case that the deference that supposedly died in the death of deference was that towards institutions, not to individuals. people didn't defer to Whitehall because the permanent secretary was an Etonian, they did just as much if he worked his way up from the civil service administrative class (within the service subculture, maybe even more) - it was the ministry they were deferring to.
Alex Renton's excellent book Stiff Upper Lip points out that the numbers of public school boarders actually peaked as late as 1968 for boys and not 'til the end of the 70s for girls - the postwar era was a boom for private education in parallel with the boom in public education. There are actually more schools who identify as such by joining the headmasters' and headmistresses' conference now than ever before, although the numbers are down from the peak and the fees waaaay, waaay up.
***LOON TRIPLE POST***
On Ajay's point about Boris Johnson, I would say you can use this model to explain the apparent collapse of government competence generally. The choice of relying on thinktank chancers and long term backbench MPs (ie ones who have been repeatedly passed over for real responsibility) rather than the civil service, a defining feature of Cameron and after, can be explained by their real jobs being the opposite of the civil servants'. If you think the institutions are a force supporting a social order you hate, obviously you're going to seek advice from people who can be counted on to destabilise it and create chaos.
Alex Renton's excellent book Stiff Upper Lip points out that the numbers of public school boarders actually peaked as late as 1968 for boys and not 'til the end of the 70s for girls
Well, that's UK population growth for you. How does it look in percentage terms? (Percentage of the school-age population, not of the overall population, of course; the UK population has been ageing for some time).
82: I feel that the conversation about politics could do with a bit more focus on competence. At present it is limited to ideas and sincerity.
Alice (the politician) says that she wants to, let's say, set up free after-school care. Bob (the public) considers this on two axes: first, do I think that free after-school care would be a good thing to have, given how much it will cost in taxes? And, second, if so, do I think that Alice sincerely wants this, rather than just saying so to get me to vote for her? If Bob reckons the answer to both questions is yes, he'll support Alice.
The question not asked is: is Alice actually going to be able to deliver free after-school care, or is she going to try to do so but cock it up in some way?
In the NW theory, when does Britain start being run by the UMC meritocrats?
Looking solely at prime ministers, they have been UMC or LMC rather than aristocratic for some time now. The only really aristocratic PMs in the last century were Churchill and Eden. But Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher, May, Blair, Brown, Attlee, Baldwin, Chamberlain were all solid middle-class, and Major and MacDonald were LMC at best.
I didn't know that about Major. He always looked like the model of an upper middle class English person to me.
He had a much more UMC head than Blair or Thatcher.
87: he's one of only two postwar PMs not to attend university (the other one was Churchill); he left school at sixteen and went to work as an insurance clerk. His father was a former music-hall performer and failed seller of garden gnomes.
How do you fail at selling garden gnomes? They sell themselves!
Very understandable. Take care of yourself.
He left school at 16? Where did he learn to talk like that?
Most people learn to talk by the end of kindergarten. Some even earlier.
2nd 92.
I do believe the demands of warfare have been central to state development, and the absence of such demands may help explain the current decrepitude of some states. I'm not convinced that the absence of those demands is sufficient to produce the level of incompetence (and the really remarkable increase of incompetence) in Britain.
Also, being open about this sort of attitude is fairly new:
Mr Hancock said the government would listen to MPs but "can't pre-commit to following whatever they vote for".
Historically, if the government felt it couldn't commit to following what the House voted for, the government resigned.
He left school at 16? Where did he learn to talk like that?
Major's accent is not, to UK ears at least, noticeably posh. He went to a grammar school in South London in the 1950s, and he sounds like it.
Has there ever been a time when Parliament directed policy in the absence of any government being in place? Perhaps a caretaker government that was avowedly not steering anything?
98: Back when King Arthur and all the knights were prancing around the countryside looking for the Holy Grail.
Has there ever been a time when Parliament directed policy in the absence of any government being in place?
1649:
Be it Declared and Enacted by this present Parliament and by the Authority of the same, That the People of England, and of all the Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging, are and shall be, and are hereby Constituted, Made, Established, and Confirmed to be a Commonwealth and Free-State: And shall from henceforth be Governed as a Commonwealth and Free-State, by the Supreme Authority of this Nation, The Representatives of the People in Parliament, and by such as they shall appoint and constitute as Officers and Ministers under them for the good of the People, and that without any King or House of Lords.
But the point at issue is that if the government feels it cannot act on the instructions of the House of Commons, it normally asks HM to dissolve Parliament and "goes to the country", i.e. fights an election. What Hancock is saying here implies that the executive will simply ignore the legislature and go its own sweet way. You may be familiar with this sort of this, but over here it has novelty value.
98: pretty sure not. The whole point of a prime minister is supposed to be that she commands the confidence of the House. If she cannot get her flagship policies through the House, she goes to the country, or someone calls a vote of no confidence and she loses and has to go to the country.
We've never had a situation before where the House refuses to support the government's main policies but also continues to support it in votes of no confidence, and we've never had a situation before where the PM has been unable to go to the country at will.
Maybe the old solutions are the best. Invite a foreign noble to become the new king.
102: How about a modern twist on the old solution? Surrender sovereignty to the European Union.
Our traditional solution to an over-mighty executive that refuses to be constrained by parliament involves abridging the executive in question.
The Dutch royal family had three princesses, one of which is not too much older than Prince George, if marrying into the current line helps.
|| All charged dropped against Jussie Smollett! What happened???? ||
There's usually a downside to letting an 11-year-old run things, but it's all relative.
John Major made a poignant remark in some interview about regretting not having attended a university because, if he had, "people might believe that I've read all the books that I've read."
107: Chicago Sun-Times has a state's attorney saying publicly "We believe this outcome is a just disposition and appropriate resolution to this case." Sure makes me think of a frame-up against Smollett.
Although they also mentioned community service and forfeiting his bond. Maybe he did it but he has mental health issues and expensive lawyers got him the disposition white people usually get for that scenario.
110: I don't know about a frame up. It was a more or less victimless crime except for the press people who were taken in, and it looks like his career is wrecked at this point anyway. I could see the DA's office concluding there are better things to spend money on.
Too bad that no lawyers read unfogged, or they could weigh in on this.
If there's mental health or other issues, I'm glad that got taken into account, but if he filed a false report of a hate crime at a time when so many real ones are happening and being minimized for political reasons, I don't think it's really victimless.
101. Perhaps May and her supporters should get round the FTPA by voting no confidence in themselves. Also, endearingly honest.
If you want a no deal Brexit, won't a vote of no confidence get you that? There's no way to elect a new government before no deal, is there? Even with the extension.
My understanding is if something happens that requires a new election that might result in some definitive change in direction, whether general election or referendum, the EU is inclined to grant enough additional extension time for that.
Would parliament need to approve an extension also, before the no confidence vote?
The EU should allow them to remain only on the condition that Jussie Smollett is granted UK citizenship and appointed Prime Minister.
116 is true. But if Parliament wanted a no-deal Brexit it could vote for one directly. And I imagine a VONC is not the preferred route for the no-deal fans because it risks putting Corbyn in.
nw and ume, warmest thoughts to you both and NW's mother, i hope she is comfortable and remains so.
re: leadership, one of alexandra ocasia-cortez's witness questionings in a committee hearing came up during dinner table conversation a couple of weeks ago, one of the workaday ones where she is just going through well-researched questions and pursuing a line to reveal useful information, and her public discussion about how she can attend all her committee hearings and be very well prepared because she doesn't spend hours every single day calling big ticket donors. i said without really having thought about it before "what she is doing, and the prep work of her staff to allow her to do that, those are jobs that people actually want to do, not the call center crap" and the budding public servant across the table looked me in the eye and said, quietly, "exactly."
there will always be the people like b johnson who don't want to do any work and just want power and adulation, but there are also always going to be people -- of all political leanings and persuasions -- who really want to serve and do substantive work. we've got ourselves in such a screwed up hole re: how we finance politics and public service here in the us that it isn't clear to me how we break out of it, but we have to.
Literally any of the other candidates for the Labour leadership in 2015 would be prime minister by now. So would Ed Miliband, David Miliband or Ed Balls. The only reason that this hasn't happened is that the Labour party picked a leader who is unacceptable to a large majority of Labour MPs and to every other MP from every other party in Parliament, and he is - unlike any of his predecessors - perfectly happy to continue as leader even when it is perfectly obvious that he has lost the confidence of the parliamentary party, because he doesn't understand how Parliamentary politics works and doesn't care.
They did, back in 2016. Most of his shadow cabinet resigned and 172 Labour MPs voted against him in a vote of no confidence. Only 40 MPs voted for him. That would have been enough for any previous leader of any previous party. Th*****r resigned because she only got 56% of her party backing her.
But the membership voted to keep him. And Corbyn, like May and Trump, has cracked the secret of modern politics, which is: you don't have to do anything except the things you have to do.
Scotland was the only nation where the party voted to get rid of him. (Also the only nation that voted majority-Remain.) Proving once again that democracy is a great idea as long as you don't let the English vote.
Assistant state attorney basically saying "Smollett did it but we decided we could go easy on him".
124. Is there some legal backstop that Corbyn is using to stay in power? If a party leader is voted against by that much of a majority, is it just a custom that the leader resigns? Is he making the excuse that he is still popular with the membership? (Is that even still true? A lot of Labour supporters are Remainers, and Corbyn is a not-so-closeted Leaver, not to mention an anti-Semite) Is he just emulating his "heroes"?
124: the backstop is simply that losing a VONC among your MPs leads to a leadership contest, in which you can run, and in which the choice of leader is up to the party membership, not the MPs.
Corbyn is extremely popular with a lot of party members (including many recent joiners) but extremely unpopular with the MPs. So if you VONC him, he just runs for leader and wins.
A lot of Labour supporters are Remain, but that doesn't matter. His net approval among Labour supporters is 2% but that doesn't matter. Only the views of the membership matter, and the membership is apparently willing to overlook Corbyn's support of Leave and keep voting for him.
This is different from the US situation where you can't be the leader of the House Democratic caucus unless the House Democratic caucus wants you to be.
126: This doesn't make any sense at all, does it? If you wanted to go easy on him, you allow him to plead guilty, and ask for a light sentence. You don't drop charges and allow him to continue to claim that he's innocent.
130: Again, not inconsistent with how rich white people get treated. DAs can drop charges if they think it would be too hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and expensive lawyers and publicity factor into that calculation, so.
Not that I trust the word of the DAs/SAs. But if they found solid evidence it was a frame from beginning to end, I imagine they would be clamming up in anticipation of being sued themselves.
Isn't the rule under which Corbyn was selected as party leader new-ish? Couldn't the MPs revert to the old rule?
Maybe they'd need a new leader to be allowed to change the rule back.
The MP's do not control the party as an organization. The same membership would have to vote to change the leadership selection process.
This is good re drivers of current UK political sitch: http://www.inthelongrun.org/articles/article/the-illusionary-norm-of-political-stability-the-unruly-democratic-politics
125: We have the same democracy problem in the US, but it's with the white people.
Yeah, Scotland is comparable to California in almost all important respects.
Wine is important to both places if you count Buckfast.
Thanks all for the good wishes. It is possible that the 'tariat has supernatural powers: in any case, I spent lunchtime writing a column while waiting for the theatre to ring me with the news that she had died. They did not. In fact by 3:30 she was back in her bed, conscious, coherent, oriented, free of pain, and eating buttered bread and marmalade with real appetite. But it was when she complained because the bread was white that I knew she was well.
So unless she picks up an infection in hospital, she should survive this one too, and with any luck be back in her care home in a week or ten days. I still can't really believe this.
Not the least of my good fortune is that some people pay me for work which is just sufficiently demanding to take my mind off the crisis, but not so demanding that I would need the bits of my mind which were grinding away in the background.
If any of you by any remote chance drink alcohol, raise a glass to my mother this evening.
140.4 is asking a lot! Alcohol? Unfogged?
140.1 is great news!
That's super, NW. Congrats.
"But it was when she complained because the bread was white that I knew she was well." ❤ this woman.
Consider me drinking on her behalf already.
That's wonderful to hear, thanks for sharing the positive report.
Great news. I'd be drinking now, but it would be off-putting to the people on the bus.
138: Aberdeen and Los Angeles: twin metropoli of oil and culture.
(Actually, are there still oil wells in that part of the world? I remember there were derricks* working in the background of one of the Philip Marlowe books.)
* In Aberdeen they have Dereks**, and Neds as well.
** There was one in the Bay City Rollers, I'm sure.
yes, see bakersfield/kern county.
Hooray! I'm glad to hear she's doing well.
Incidentally, there's a good piece on class in England by Alex Renton, who got himself thrown out of a better school than I ever managed, here .
Ajay's explanations up to 128 are spot on. Corbyn will have to lose an election before the party gets rid of him and unfortunately the rest of us will be stuck with the results.
Great. I bet he's really good at that.
Only 281 days until I can boycott Israel.
If somebody else wants me to certify that I'm not doing business with Israel, I think I can manage both at the same time without straining my conscience because I didn't do it on purpose.
I'm so happy to hear she's doing better NW! all best wishes! I have sadder news that I haven't really known how to share exactly. my mom died on the 6th here at home. that's supposed to be peaceful and everything, and she did fall asleep about 8 minutes before she died, and so she did technically die in her sleep as we all hope for. but for the last two nights of her night she was delirious and hallucinating, and insistent on getting out of bed. my sister and I had to sit on either side of the bed and pretty much hold her down gently and tell her it was going to be ok the whole night long, and she did know she was about to die. there's nothing to say to that. no amount of spamming the morphine button and or giving her lorazepam or haldol could calm her down. it was...a strange experience. sitting with the body was strange but also not strange, I did it with my grandmother. the thing that's left that's not a person but a sort of machine for living in is still that person also, and smells like them. and while it was soothing to hold her hand and weep it was also strange when she began to cool. I'm going home tonight and have to leave the house at 3am. I both want to and don't want to. I'm worried about my sister all alone. but the house is also making me unhappy, and maybe volunteering to look through photos for good ones my mom and is should have considered the fact that I would turn up plenty of photos of my stepfather and us. I only puked once, to my credit. I advise everyone to get out there and forgive your mom for everything she's ever done so that you can feel less sick when she dies. guaranteed 95% successful. warning: 5% may cause heart of lead to fall through your body leaving a burning trail of misery.
oh alameida, i am so sorry. take care.
My condolences and I hope remember to you take care of yourself.
There's probably a 'you' missing somewhere.
NW, I'm very glad to hear that your mother is on the mend. Waiting for the surgeon's report after a potentially lethal surgery is agonizing.
Al, I'm so sorry for you and yours. Plus the stirring up of memories. I wish you a safe flight back to Narnia and your spouse and children.
So sorry, al. Thinking of you and your siblings. (Was thinking of you anyway, in fact, as I research the family tree branch that goes back through South Carolina, all utterly unknown to me before last year, but your memories of it have painted a picture...)
of it = of South Carolina, as you write about it
The Pimento State. I guess because of the shape or maybe because Georgia and North Carolina are actually an olive.
I'm glad to hear your good news, NW.
My condolences, al, I'm very sorry to hear that. Take good care.
Al, I'm so sorry. You sound so deeply heartbroken.
140 was good to read. That sounds like very promising news, NW.
I'm very sorry, al. Having been there, I know that there is nothing that can prepare you for this loss. Please take good care.
140: Will do.
My condolences, alameida.
Oh, al, I am sorry. I know something of what it is like to sit up all night with a delirious person who thinks she is dying from one of my mother's UTIs. To have her die on top of all that fruitless and exhausting suffering is very cruel. condolences. take care.
Damn the one post that could have done without my erratic keyboard fucking it up.
I'm so sorry, alameida. Death is awful in so many different ways.
thank you all for all the good wishes, I really appreciate them. and NW I hope your mom is at home eating brown bread at any moment, if she's not already! I feel kind of guilty that I haven't felt sad enough which is dumb as I'm not trying to win a gold medal in the grief olympics. more just numb but with bouts of ugly crying--the snot running down your face kind, once for the whole 2 mile walk back from silver spring. I'm stuck in the SF airport with a delayed flight and for some reason I'm totally miserable now and may have to go to the bathroom to cry. I've decided I don't give a shit about what people think when they pass someone on the sidewalk who's bawling like an actual baby. in proust he doesn't realize the true impact of his grandmother's death for two years, until he's in the hotel suite they always stay in at the beach and he looks at the door to what was his grandmother's room, and suddenly it is truly brought home to him that he will never see her face again, never talk to her again, never touch her again. and he realizes his mother has known all this all this time and he didn't understand. I feel alternately like proust and his mother in this situation. when I think of things like how she'll never see her beloved peonies again I just get stabbed in the heart. I think that as I have fewer immediate responsibilities for her death I'll likely get sadder. at least I've stopped looking at disturbing pictures of me and my stepfather since I left them behind (and they actually were a bit disturbing even absent my perseverating on unpleasant memories; my brother made the full body wiggle and face that says "oh shit that's fucked up. also, who took this?") but anyway, thank you for listening and it really is soothing to have imaginary internet friends to talk to.
There's a good chance lourdes will appear in person in the international terminal at SFO in a bit. When does your flight leave?
sending you all kinds of thoughts from downtown sf, sorry you are stuck at airport on your own. there is a free unabridged audio reading of a la recherche here: http://www.litteratureaudio.com/livres-audio-gratuits-mp3/tag/a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu - i love it (bad readers are horrific - this is not badly read imo of course that's a very personal assessment etc), in case it would be soothing to download those suckers for the next leg of your journey.