What's Tony Thinking

At the Weekend, April 12 -13

Holy Week begins tomorrow, which is Palm Sunday. The word most associated with Palm Sunday is “Hosanna,” which means, in most definitions, “Save us, we pray.” But that’s the genteel, the polite, version. What it really means is “SAVE US, dear God, right now, right this very minute!”

It is a cry of desperation. Which is a far cry from the way it comes across in most contemporary Palm Sunday worship services. There it is more or less, “hip, hip, hooray for Jesus!” “Three cheers for the guy on the donkey!” “Go Jesus!”

But the desperation angle is more real, and we’re more real when we’re feeling it, when it’s two in the morning and we’re wide awake and at the end of our rope. Someone, can’t remember who, said, “There is an alliance between desperation and truth.” Maybe Graham Greene? When you are really up against it and have exhausted your own resources, i.e. when you are desperate, and throw yourself utterly on the mercies of God, you are likely to speak the truth.

“When you’re in despair, you’re teachable,” is the way Anne Lamott puts it.

Governance by whim. Tariffs one week, gone the next. Tariffs at such-and-such a rate on Monday, but a different rate altogether on Tuesday. America was designed to avoid governance by the capricious individual, a.k.a. “the Mad King.” But here we are. Andrew Sullivan sums it up this way in his “Weekly Dish” column:

“Trump’s second term can therefore be seen, I think, as the negation of the American idea. America is about the dispersal of power. Trump is about its intense concentration. America is about legal authority. Trump is about raw power. America was founded on a faith in reason. Trump embraces his own instinct alone. America is designed for a wide diversity of opinion. Trump governs solely for those who agree with him. America was designed to banish the corrupting trappings of monarchy. Trump is larding up the Oval Office with golden trinkets, planning a massive military parade to salute him, and his House allies have bills to replace Franklin for Trump on the $100 bill and carve him into Mount Rushmore.”

Undergirding the founders belief in the “dispersal of power” in the Constitution, a.k.a. “checks and balances” was a low anthropology, or if you prefer, a realistic doctrine of human nature. They viewed human beings as highly susceptible to self-deception and corruption, what I would call “original sin,” though there’s nothing “original” about it. So they crafted a government that figures in a realistic view of human nature, and builds limits on the damage one individual or group can do. Can it hold? Not if we don’t understand the government we’ve got, and the reasons behind it. That said, not all the blame falls on Trump. He’s moved into the vacuum left by a polarized, pathetic Congress.

Class Matters. Highly recommend this review of Richard Kahlenberg’s book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges.

Kahlenberg has waged a long battle saying that that if you really want diversity on college campuses you need to pay less attention to race and more attention to class. Reviewer James Traub says that Kahlenberg’s moment may finally have come.

“Enter Richard D. Kahlenberg, who has been arguing for virtually his entire adult life that our race-based system of affirmative action pits the white working class against Black people, and aligns the Democratic Party with middle-class or well-to-do beneficiaries of color against Americans who see themselves as the losers in a zero-sum game.” (emphasis added)

To which Traub adds a note that attentive Dem’s might glean from the 2024 election results, although Kahlenberg would have said they should have cottoned onto it long before. “A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster.” That bit about “from which elites themselves were largely exempt” pretty well defines what is meant by “luxury beliefs.”

Moreover, race and class are not an either/ or, but a both/ and. “Kahlenberg has long argued that we need not choose between these two goods: If universities offered a boost to students who overcame socioeconomic disadvantage, they would admit enough working-class students of color to preserve racial diversity while enhancing class diversity.”

The College Application Essay Is a Crock. While we’re on the subject of college, and as we’re in the season when students are receiving “the letter(s),” take a gander at Yascha Mounk’s well-placed rant against what the college essay has devolved into, “The College Essay Is Everything That Is Wrong with America.” Here’s a teaser:

“The college essay is a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests. The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they’ve faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.”

You may have noticed that I am brightening or clogging your email in-box (depending on your point of view) a little less frequently of late. Partly it is living in the world of Trumpian chaos and the consequent chronic vertigo. And partly it is because I’m getting my ducks in order for a three week trip, two weeks of that hiking in Britain’s Lake District and Yorkshire Dales in May. As we will be hiking 12, 14 and 16 miles a day, I am spending more time on preparatory walks, pack on back. That and the the other details of getting ready to be gone for nearly three weeks.

Hope you have a lovely spring weekend.