A Poem For Friday

800px-Countee_Cullen_Headstone_2009

In 1925, Countee Cullen, a young star of the literary movement that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance, was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Witter Bynner Undergraduate Award. That same year, he graduated from NYU and published Color, his debut volume of poems. Major Jackson, the editor of the recently published Countee Cullen:  notes in his wonderful introduction that Color sold two thousand copies in its first two years and that “as a result of his resolve to master the high literary tradition of poetry, Cullen emerged in the mid-1920s critically acclaimed by both black and white readers.”

Tomorrow at 3 pm, the Poetry Society of America and the Library of America present Yet Do I Marvel: ATribute to Countee Cullen just steps from Cullen’s grave in the cullencBronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery, also the resting place of such luminaries as Herman Melville, Damon Runyan, Miles Davis, Irving Berlin, W.C. Handy, Judy Garland, and Joseph Pulitzer. The 400-acre rural-style cemetery is also a magnificent urban public park, easily accessible by New York subway at the last stop on the #4 line. Major Jackson, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Robin Coste Lewis will read poems in tribute to Cullen, with musical performances by the mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran joined by guitarist Brandon Ross. For more details, check out the PSA’s event page here. We’ll be posting poems from the new volume over the weekend, beginning with his “Yet Do I Marvel”:

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

(From Countee Cullen: Collected Poems, The Library of America, 2013, ed. Major Jackson. Poems © Amistad Research Center, Tulane University. Reprinted by permission. Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Dying An Anti-Hero’s Death

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWDU1iSRk2M&end=85]

Alyssa wonders if the passing of James Gandolfini marks the end of the Anti-Hero Age of television:

The anti-hero genre Gandolfini made popular has soldiered on in the years since Tony Soprano flipped to “Don’t Stop Believing” on the jukebox and Gandolfini went on to play generals, CIA directors, and kind-hearted monsters, leaving space for the legend of The Wire‘s Omar Little, the pathos of Mad Men‘s Don draper, and the rise of Breaking Bad‘s Walter White. But as Gandolfini is laid to rest, anti-hero television is showing some decided strain. If the purpose of The Sopranos was to ask how far we could sympathize with a man like Tony Soprano who was a criminal and the head of a family, a serial cheater who also loved his children, and a man whose closest friendships could end in blood and be bound up by murder, maybe in the intervening years, we’ve found our answers, and it’s time to move on to other questions.

In a later post, Alyssa ventures as to why few female anti-heroes exist:

There really isn’t an equivalent framework available for women, who get penalized rather than rewarded for displaying masculine traits like aggression, physical force, ambition, or selfishness. Efforts to create female anti-heroes with masculine qualities like Damages’ Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) have failed because those characters are initially seen as evil rather than admirable. And trying to make anti-heroism work in a distinctly feminine way, by giving heroines characteristics like weakness, indecisiveness, or self-absorption, as has been the case with Girls, doesn’t quite land either. Shows with difficult female heroines have to travel in a different direction than shows about difficult men do, dismantling distaste for their female characters and building sympathy for them, rather than moving toward a moral revelation about how we’ve fooled ourselves by worshiping that man.

There Is No Business Like Cannabisness

Reason interviews a DC Rabbi who is opening a medical cannabis dispensary about the challenges facing his business, despite its legality under local laws:

Meanwhile, Walter Hickey chats with Kayvan Khalatbari, the owner of the “second oldest marijuana dispensary in all of Colorado,” about the importance of well-established local regulations:

As far as federal intervention, we haven’t had any in Colorado because it is the most regulated. You look at a state like California, the reason they’ve had such issues is they have no framework. They’re not vertically integrated, they have no clue where this product comes from, and there’s no oversight to it. You’ve got people growing in their homes and in their backyards and selling to these centers, that’s why they’ve had all these raids, that’s why they’ve had all these issues, there’s very little oversight even on a local level. Here in Colorado, we’ve got the most regulated system in the world. The only intervention we’ve had federally has been through IRS audits, those have not been debilitating to businesses. …

The other way they’ve gotten involved is by sending letters to places within a thousand feet of schools. While in California where they go in and raid these places, what they say in the letter is you have 45 days to move to another location. That’s the feds playing nice. In other states — Massachusetts, New York, Illinois — they’re going to be even more regulated than Colorado. I think that we can expect — hopefully, knock on wood — they’re going to to be pretty left alone.

“You Broke The Faith With This Nation”

Robert Bateman believes that the above exchange shows “what ‘Congressional Oversight’ is supposed to be about”:

Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs and had her arm sewn back on, mostly, lays it down. A businessman is called out. It seems his company got something like $500 million in contracts from the government, primarily because his company was a “small business, disabled veteran owned.” His disability? When he was in prep-school, he twisted his ankle playing football. The prep school was the one at Monmouth, which is the feeder for West Point, but if you come in from civilian life, it has no military obligation at all. …

Representative Duckworth, who knows something about sacrifice to your nation, tears this man a new orifice. And I, for one, would ask that everyone, regardless of politics, forward the clip. This man, and those like him, hurt us.

RedState’s streiff blames the system, not Braulio Castillo:

Stipulated: the VA system is broken. Stipulated: an industry exists to help veterans get a VA awarded service connected disability rating. Stipulated: the military services are a part of that system. Regardless of what “Doctor” Duckworth might think of Mr. Castillo’s injuries, the facts are that he applied for the disability rating and the VA granted him that rating.

Marc Herman attempts to sort out why Castillo’s VA disability rating is higher than Duckworth’s:

How did Duckworth’s terrible injuries—she was hit with a rocket-propelled grenade—justify a lower VA disability benefit than Castillo’s old football knock? Well, the GAO has looked into how the VA assigns disability ratings several times over the past few decades, most recently late last year. It found the system to be pretty much a disaster, which is significant in a country where 2.4 million people have served in conflicts over the past decade-plus. Duckworth notes that the average wait for a disabled soldier to get a VA review of his or her injury is nearly nine months. … As long ago as 1988, the GAO looked into the matter, and found that the disability assessment system hadn’t been broadly updated since 1945. …

What sort of conditions might have shown up in a medical chart after 1945 but not before? Anything they’d invented by the time of the Vietnam war, say. Helicopters, for example. Or Agent Orange.

Speaking The Same Language Differently

“Today, we recognize that French and Portuguese are different languages,” writes R.L.G., “but Arabs are not often sure (and are sometimes at odds) about how to describe ‘Arabic’ today”:

The plain fact is that a rural Moroccan and a rural Iraqi cannot have a conversation and reliably understand each other. An urban Algerian and an urban Jordanian would struggle to speak to each other, but would usually find ways to cope, with a heavy dose of formal standard Arabic used to smooth out misunderstandings. They will sometimes use well-known dialects, especially Egyptian (spread through television and radio), to fill in gaps. …

In Europe, we call “French” and “Spanish” “languages”, but in Arabic, we call these varieties “dialects”, despite the lack of mutual intelligibility. Some linguists make the point bald: these are different languages, they say. But Arabs themselves consider Arabic a single thing, with local variety. All educated Arabs learn the Koranic-based language that linguists call “modern standard Arabic”. It is used in political speeches, news broadcasts and nearly all writing—but nobody speaks it spontaneously in the marketplace or over the dinner table. Most people struggle to write it correctly.

Ask Josh Barro Anything: Conservatives We Should Pay Attention To

In our final video from Josh, he reveals his picks:

Josh Barro is currently the politics editor at Business Insider. He has previously written for Bloomberg View, and before that was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Watch his previous answers here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Are The Humanities Really In Crisis?

Jordan Weissmann fact-checks the recent worries from David Brooks and Verlyn Klinkenborg:

As The Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month, the number of undergraduates earning degrees in English, foreign languages, history, or philosophy fell by about half between 1966 and 2010. But as shown in this great graph courtesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the late 1960s were actually a historical outlier, no doubt connected to the sudden flood of baby boomers onto campus. Most of the subsequent drop-off, meanwhile, actually happened in the 1970s. Since then, the humanities have accounted for roughly 6 to 8 percent of all college degrees.

None of this is particularly shocking. The typical college student in 2013 is not the typical college student of 1966. They’re older. There’s a good chance they commute to school, or are taking classes online. And they’re more pre-professional. As an industry, higher education has expanded to cater to them. According to the Department of Education, firefighting, homeland security, and law enforcement majors now make up about 2 percent of all graduates. They barely existed in the 1970s. Health professions now account for almost 8 percent of grads, more than double their share four-decades ago. Suffice to say, the 28-year-old going to school today to finish a B.A. in nursing, or criminal justice, is not the same student who would have been studying Homer in 1972.

Nate Silver backs him up:

The relative decline of majors like English is modest when accounting for the increased propensity of Americans to go to college.

In fact, the number of new degrees in English is fairly similar to what it has been for most of the last 20 years as a share of the college-age population. In 2011, 3.1 percent of new bachelor’s degrees were in English language or literature. That figure is down from 4.1 percent 10 years ago, 4.7 percent 20 years ago, and 7.6 percent 40 years ago, in 1971.

But as a proportion of the college-age population, the decline is much less distinct. In 2011, 1.1 out of every 100 21-year-olds graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English, down only incrementally from 1.2 in 2001 and 1.3 in 1991. And the percentage of English majors as a share of the population is actually higher than it was in 1981, when only 0.7 out of every 100 21-year-olds received a degree in English.

Meanwhile, Peter Orszag parses the study that Klinkenborg mentioned, showing that college grads in general are slipping “further down the occupational ladder or out of work altogether.” Recent Dish on the humanities here and here.

Morsi’s Presidency Turns 1

Protesters Rally Against President Morsi In Tahrir Square

Fouad Ajami explores how the Muslim Brotherhood “hijacked” the revolution that began with “secular liberals, Christian Copts, young men and those daring women who defied custom and tradition to come out in the public square”:

[T]he Brotherhood had more than eight decades of political experience behind it. The military dictatorship had atomized the feeble liberals, leaving them unprepared for the contest over the new order. Like liberals elsewhere in hard, illiberal places, they were sure they embodied their country’s spirit. They were trounced by the Brotherhood and the hardline Salafis in the first parliamentary elections; the judiciary, a bastion of the old order, stepped in and dissolved the parliament. The democrats didn’t own up to the truth: While Egypt has a sophisticated intellectual elite, a modernist camp, and Europe isn’t too far away, it is a poor country with a high illiteracy rate and a population that the Mubarak dictatorship had been content to leave to darkness and the rule of superstition.

In the best of worlds, the Brotherhood would have been willing to tread carefully and to acknowledge the narrow mandate it had secured with Mursi’s election. But a paranoid movement that ached for power wouldn’t show restraint.

Leslie Chang checks in on the anti-Morsi protest movements:

The biggest challenge to the Egyptian government resides in a sweltering fifth-floor office in a crumbling building in downtown Cairo. It’s paper—millions of pieces of paper, sorted into stacks and piled on chairs and balanced atop cardboard crates. Each is a signed petition calling for the removal of President Mohamed Morsi and new elections, labelling Morsi “a failure in all the meanings of the word … unfit to administer a country the size of Egypt.” The petition charges the country’s leader with betraying the revolution, destroying the economy, and begging for foreign aid to keep the country afloat. Fifteen million Egyptians have signed it, which is two million more than voted Morsi into office a year ago. Many are expected to join mass protests on June 30th. …

After two years of watching politicians on both sides of the fence squabble and prevaricate and fail to improve their lives, Egyptians appear to be rejecting representative democracy, without having had much of a chance to participate in it. In a country with an increasingly repressive regime and no democratic culture to draw on, protest has become an end in itself—more satisfying than the hard work of governance, organizing, and negotiation. This is politics as emotional catharsis, a way to register rage and frustration without getting involved in the system.

Elsewhere, Steve Negus reviews Morsi’s first year in office:

For the winner of the first freely contested presidential election in Egypt’s history, Morsi has reached a point where he is quite vulnerable. When a mass movement says it’s going to try and remove you, and the army and the police signal they’re not going to do much to stop them, it’s sensible to worry — the opposition may swear up and down that they do not want a coup, but it’s pretty easy to imagine a series of events where one ends up happening anyway.

(Photo: Egyptian opposition protesters hold their shoes in the air, an offensive gesture, during a demonstration in Tahrir Square against President Mohammed Morsi, prior to a televised national address by Morsi on June 26, 2013 in Cairo, Egypt. By Ed Giles/Getty Images)

The Manliness Of Stay-At-Home Dads

Conor Williams isn’t conceding an iota of his testosterone:

Most definitions of masculinity can accommodate shirts soaked with sweat, blood, or ambiguous grime … but not applesauce … My son weighs more than most cannonballs, and he moves nearly as quickly—it takes a real man to shelter the house (and his sister) from these artillery-grade payload specs. I’m a tough guy—even when wearing a Björn.