My son is back in Seattle with his mom after a week’s visit with me in Atlanta. It was quiet and uneventful. He’s almost eight, and this school break week was very different from last year, when we took the train to San Antonio and then on to New Orleans. Last year he needed more accompaniment, someone to keep him moving, someone to supply things to do. This year, not so much – he has a sense of what he wants to do even when he’s somewhere he doesn’t want to be. There is too much demand for video games, too much demand for television programs (although in his favor, he prefers documentaries), but there’s a growing sense of self-created desire that comes through in him.
Parlour games
There is a terrific essay from 1941 in Harper’s magazine, “Who Goes Nazi?”, by one Dorothy Thompson, that has been making the rounds recently. The idea is pretty simple and simply brilliant: Ms. Thompson assembles a hypothetical party in Manhattan and surveys the crowd and asks the titular question. The people are caricatures – my guess is if any of them were too carefully drawn there would be a libel suit – but you get the picture. It’s making the rounds these days because of the facile anti-Trump conflation of Trump and Hitler, which is a bit strong but anyway, it’s still a brilliant essay, especially when one thinks about the moment of publication – August 1941, Lend-Lease in full swing, isolationism dominating the American political landscape, Pearl Harbor still months ahead. As a historian, I prefer to see it in that light, as a whimsical thought piece with a dark twist. It’s how I like my fiction, for that matter, so as an experimental non-fiction piece, it’s natural that I’d be attracted to it.
The philosopher as asset manager
I really enjoy playing the Game of Life with my son. I’m speaking, of course, of the Milton Bradley board game version, not the four score and then some journey we actually live and which does not appear to be a game at all. We have a recent version of the game which I actually don’t enjoy – it’s all millenial, with multiple career choices and lots of overpriced real estate – but when we’re in Maine together, we play the version I played when I was a kid. I don’t remember precisely when we got it, but the box has a 1978 copyright and the clothing worn by the family enjoying themselves around the game looks solidly Carter administration. My sister and I played endlessly and now my son and I, one generation later, are doing the same.
An educated guess
My son is in second grade, and complains regularly about it. Part of it is my fault; I’ve been pushing him to read, both together with me and on his own, since he could speak, and he now reads a lot. Unfortunately, the books of the moment are from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. I take heart in the fact that it’s written about and for middle school boys, and my son is thus reading comfortably at a level three of four levels above his grade. But the books do encourage a negative attitude about school in general. His second grade teacher is good, but this is her first experience at this grade level: interestingly, up until now in her career, she’s been a middle school teacher. And like his father, my son is a relentless and laser sharp critic.
Similarly
Mark’s most recent post had me thinking on multiple levels – about the way education works, also prompted by a link to another essay which bothered me to no end from Matt Boutte, who trenchantly commented on Mark’s ramblings – about economics as a discipline, and how it intersects (or really acts as a skew line) versus the actual conduct of economic activity – about the actual articles he cited, one of which I read and had a similarly visceral reaction to, the other of which I stand tempted to read but, really, why?
And then I got distracted.