Diary

I had planned to begin commenting by now on a biography of Gustave Flaubert that I've been reading, but I just got sick of it and gave up. Several years ago I read a shorter biography, and I thought that this one might be more informative. However, I found the author's writing style too distracting with respect to the elements that are important to me. I like to focus on family background, upbringing, early influences, personality, interpersonal relationships and career. This book does include that information, but, unfortunately, because the author is an academic, he has to throw in the the history of Rouen, where Flaubert was born, and the history of French medicine, since Flaubert's father was a doctor. The author is an American academic, and this may work in American academic circles, but, as I've said, I generally dislike academic writing styles. As an alternative, I've ordered a biography of Ottoline Morrell, and will probably be reporting on that soon. I'm not especially interested in the Bloomsbury Group, with whom Morrell interacted, but she seems to qualify as an interesting person, in part because of her relationships with Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. She was a fringe bohemian – not common for a British aristocrat. We'll see how that goes.

I am sorely in need of reading material with winter closing in. Because of the weather, I usually don't hike as much at that time of year. At this point I don't have any special projects, because the house is in full working order, there are no rodents inhabiting it, and I'm not interested in improvements. Many suburban housewives would prefer a larger stove, a dishwasher and an island – but I'm not a suburban housewife. Some of the walls are white, but I have no reason to paint them. I could probably use a few area rugs, but I don't really need them. The house isn't exactly swarming with visitors. As far as the outside is concerned, even though the yard is surrounded by trees, I haven't had to remove any fallen trees or limbs, because it hasn't been as windy here as in Middlebury.

Another reason why I need distractions is that I don't really want to follow the news now. Consciously or unconsciously, it can be disturbing to see images of a free active criminal on a daily basis. In the news coverage, you can watch as he assembles his new criminal gang, and it is disconcerting to think about the chaos that may ensue. The news media are continuing their unprofessional neutrality on the behavior of the people in power. It seems possible that corporations, if not the billionaires themselves, will actually take over the federal government. That would include Congress, the Supreme Court and the President. The silver lining, though, is that Trump is such a poor executive that he is almost guaranteed to fail. He will still make horrendous mistakes even when his advisors recommend otherwise. So, as I said, it's only a matter of time before he disappears.

I've been thinking a little about the Republican and Democratic ideologies of recent years. Actually, neither were ever very good. The Republicans have long been about business and personal wealth, but they used to have a sense of noblesse oblige that has gradually disappeared. Republicans usually had fairly selfish outlooks, but those were held in check by their religious beliefs or a vague moral sense in their peer group. Now they seem almost exclusively selfish, to the extent that they don't even trust each other and are literally becoming a band of thieves. The Democratic tradition from FDR up to Jimmy Carter focused on helping the needy in the aftermath of the Great Depression. That all changed under Bill Clinton, when the presidency suddenly became business-friendly. Today, under neoliberalism, both parties favor business over people, and this partially explains why voters didn't get excited by Kamala Harris: she didn't represent a discernible populist change as far as low- and middle-income people were concerned. Other reasons for her failure were her sex, race and the relatively limited exposure to the public that she had compared to Donald Trump. Unfortunately, voters are really stupid and vote mainly on the basis of familiarity. Trump is proof that you can now become President if you have enough photo ops. He has inadvertently created a dangerous copycat phenomenon in which people say to themselves "God, if that idiot can become President, I could do it!" Unfortunately, this has caused a large cadre of slimy Machiavellians to cluster around him. However, I don't think that this situation will necessarily turn out as badly as you may think – eventually Trump will fail and lose his attractiveness to followers. How many people are emulating Joseph McCarthy today?