An Odd Couple

  Mason B. Williams' City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York maps my political genome.  During my entire youth in New York City in the 1930s and early 1940s, I was molded by the titans of the book's title: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.  How could such heroes not have left an indelible imprint on my political genome, which remains almost unmutated to this day?

  They were an odd couple: Roosevelt, a patrician scion of an old New York Dutch family, raised to be a country squire, who thought cities were too large; La Guardia, the son of immigrants, for whom urban life represented the vibrancy of the nation. Roosevelt, from relatively conservative origins, who became the very definition of a liberal Democrat; La Guardia, a natural liberal, who worked his way up through the small New York City Republican Party (there were some liberal Republicans then!) to avoid becoming a vassal of the Democratic Tammany Hall, a corrupt machine organization. 

  Both had enormous charm, charismatic in their outreach to the people, spellbinding in their speeches.  I well remember FDR's "fireside chats" over the radio, then still an unfamiliar venue for a politician.  Invariably starting with the words "My friends," he indeed entered the nation's living rooms as a friend, coherently explaining the reasons for his policies.   (Listen here to the first of them, just days after he took office, clarifying the bank holiday he had proclaimed.)  I remember too the weekly radio talks by the "Little Flower"—the meaning of "Fiorello"—particularly those toward the end of his mayoralty in 1945 when the newspaper-delivery union was on strike and he resorted to reading the Sunday funnies over the air.  (Get your laughs here watching a film of him reading "Dick Tracy" to the kids.)

  The two were born in 1882, and therefore were in their twenties and thirties during the Progressive Era of the first two decades of the 20^th century.  It was the era of the muckrakers, who exposed political corruption, squalid living conditions of the poor, monopolistic practices, dangerous working conditions, and unsanitary food-processing.  It was also an era—from the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt through that of Woodrow Wilson—of legislative and constitutional reform, e.g., the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act, the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and Interstate Commerce Commission (both controlling monopolistic practices), and the passage of amendments creating the income tax, direct election of senators, and woman suffrage. 

  Those Progressive decades made a major mark on the political philosophies of FDR and La Guardia, philosophies that had to await a renaissance until after the Roaring Twenties—a decade characterized by a diminution of governmental involvement in society and the start of the Great Depression.  Then, at the depth of the Depression in 1933, the odd couple came together in their new roles as president and mayor-elect to show how a strong federal government, in an until-then little practiced complementary relationship with cities, could redefine the nation's urban life.

  Both men saw the Hoover administration's policies during the first three-and-a-half years of the Depression as grossly inadequate to address the meltdown, especially in their lack of attention to cities, many of which, including New York, were teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.  They advocated a much more proactive federal government, which would pump money into the economy by vast expenditures on infrastructure projects in the states and cities in order to stoke employment. 

  They both hit the ground running.  FDR had his famous One Hundred Days in early 1933, in which a spate of acts of Congress and executive orders reversed Hoover's cautious approach.  The Little Flower, after quickly cleaning up the corruption and disorganization of New York City's Tammany-suffused municipal government, was the first mayor to approach Washington to propose federal funding of municipal projects; he had elaborated a list of them for Roosevelt well before taking office on January 1, 1934. 

  The fruits of La Guardia's achievements under joint federal-city funding are legion, recognizable even to those who are not New Yorkers: the Lincoln and Queens-Midtown Tunnels, the Triborough Bridge, the Henry Hudson and East River (now FDR) Drives, the New York Municipal (now LaGuardia) Airport, the renovation and improvement of a much-deteriorated Central Park, as well as construction of myriad other parks, schools, public housing projects, and sports facilities, and support for music and the arts.  At the Little Flower's urging, the Roosevelt Administration thus poured hundreds of millions of dollars into New York City's economy, creating tens of thousands of jobs, helping to revitalize and modernize the city, and removing the specter of bankruptcy.  The city would scarcely be recognizable as it is today had it not been for those investments.

  The FDR-La Guardia relationship was uniquely robust.  As Williams puts it, they had a common purpose "beyond the simple renovation and augmentation of the common wealth.  They sought, too, to elevate people, families, and communities by using the power of government to meet [needs] private production could not—with the ultimate aim of promoting happiness."  Williams quotes Roosevelt saying that La Guardia “is the most appealing man I know.  He comes to Washington and tells me a sad story. The tears run down my cheeks and the tears run down his cheeks and the next thing I know, he has wangled another $50 million out of me.”  La Guardia's clout with FDR increased even further when he was elected president of the U.S Conference of Mayors in 1935, a position to which he was re-elected annually for the next ten years, making him one of the most influential politicians in the nation.

  My political genome writhes painfully as I reminisce.  Despite the appalling difficulties that were faced during the New Deal era, it was for me an enthralling demonstration of how savvy, dedicated leaders can guide the progress of a nation for the better; as a naïf, I couldn't imagine a lesser sort of politican. 

  Now, almost three-quarters of a century later, many of my generation cannot fathom how and why the country has descended to its present state: a disjunct agglomeration of feuding jurisdictions and the pols representing them, all lacking a strong common commitment to the health and welfare of the entire polity, especially the least fortunate among us.  I cannot help harking back to a question I asked in a previous posting about our present fractious era:  "Is devotion to the collective good passé?"  Those of us who cut our teeth during the New Deal have reason to fear so.

Loving Murder

  Isn't it strange that so many civilized people relish murder?  Not the real thing of course, but the kind in fiction, the core of murder mysteries.  What is more relaxing than a killing or two, posing a puzzle for an intrepid detective to solve?  It is called recreational reading.  Why?

  I got the mystery-reading bug from my mother, someone who shuddered at the very thought of real violence.  We used to pass detective novels back and forth, having very much the same taste in them.  In the day, we both dosed on Rex Stout's stories of the obese, curmudgeonly, but brilliant sleuth Nero Wolfe and his wise-cracking sidekick Archie Goodwin.  I believe that she and I read all fifty-some of those books, and in recent decades I've re-read most.

  I don't cotton to books laden with blood and gore, like those written by Mickey Spillane starting in the late 1940s, with their excessively tough private eye Mike Hammer.  I prefer my mayhem in small infusions, at the cusp between thinking "whodunit?" and saying "yech!"  That being so, I'm more into the Wolfe/Goodwin kind of adventure; it is a subgenre originated by Arthur Conan Doyle, who paired the very cerebral and eccentric Sherlock Holmes with his dimmer sidekick, Dr. Watson.

  My epoch of choice starts in the 1920s, with Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and his sidekick Captain Arthur Hastings, who are immediate descendents of the Holmes/Watson duo.  Poirot's constant and smug reference to the "little gray cells" of his superior brain replaced Holmes' "Elementary, my dear Watson!"  A decade or so later, the Wolfe/Goodwin pair appeared.  Wolfe goes into a trance with his eyes closed and his lips pulsing in and out when his gray cells are working, and Goodwin doesn't dare interrupt.  Holmes, Poirot and Wolfe all have their foils on the police force, who alternately get furious with them and appeal for their help: Inspector Lestrade for Holmes, Inspector Japp for Poirot and Inspector Cramer for Wolfe.  Formulaic but satisfying.

  I am also an aficionado of the noir subgenre, incorporating the lone, acerbic, anti-hero detective who combines some of the brains of Wolfe with the brawn and wisecracks of Goodwin.  Starting in the 1930s, the tales of Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and the Continental Op were the prototype for this sort of private eye: hard-boiled, cynical, yet human underneath.  Another is Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of stories by Hammett's contemporary Raymond Chandler.  Starting in the 1970s, Robert B. Parker's Spenser (no first name ever given; "It's Spenser with an s," he insists) fits somewhat into this mold—little noir about him but plenty of wisecracks.  I've probably read every book starring these three gumshoes.

  Another subgenre is the police procedural, exemplified in the by-the-book investigations in Britain by P. D. James' Commander Adam Dalgliesh and Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse, both of which I find a trifle dull; and dour ones by any number of Scandinavian policemen like Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander, which I find too bleak. I like the Italian brio of Donna Leon's Commissario Guido Brunetti of Venice.  He is pensive but not at all dreary; not averse to cutting corners with a wink of his Italian eye; given to reading Dante and Latin classics in his spare time; deeply in love with his city and his wife; cynical about Italian politics and government, but accepting their corruption and the knowledge that the criminals he catches may never be prosecuted or convicted.  In the same Italian vein is Michael Dibdin's Vice-Questore Aurelio Zen, younger and much more cynical about the establishment than Brunetti. 

  All these mystery writers are best of breed for me, to whom I return time and again after sampling lesser writers.  They concoct just the confections that make me—someone who prides himself on absorbing more "intellectual" fare—read late into the night, avidly turning pages.  Recreational reading indeed, yet I cannot dismiss it as insignificant. 

  Again, why this fascination with murder?  Could it be that murder mysteries serve a purpose akin to the fairy tales of our youth?  Do you remember the satisfaction, when being read a fairy tale as a youngster, in knowing that no matter how horrifying the ogres and evil stepmothers were, all would be put right in the end, that Snow White would "live happily ever after"?  For adults, perhaps murderers are the ogres, and Holmes, Wolfe, Poirot, Spade, Marlowe, Spenser, Dalgliesh, Morse, Wallander, Brunetti and Zen are the Prince Charmings, fairy godmothers and even the anti-hero Shrek, who will set everything aright.  As in our childhood, we remain comfortably secure as we read, knowing that good will overcome evil, that wrong will be punished.  It is a soothing and reliable balm in the face of an uncertain world. 

  Fairy  tales  and  murder  mysteries  recreate  the  world we  hope for,  which is  why they are called re-creational reading.

Lamarckism Revisited

  The concept that traits acquired during an individual's lifetime can be passed on to offspring and therefore affect evolution—a theory most associated with the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)—was relegated to the dust bin by the advent of Darwinism.  After Darwin, a new orthodoxy prevailed for more than a century.  In present-day terminology, it held that only traits already embedded in genes are passed on, and evolution occurs exclusively by natural selection of mutations in the genome.  Such mutations are purely random events, caused by errors in DNA transcription or by environmental factors.  Any suggestion of "directed" mutations—beneficial, nonrandom changes in the genome provoked by an organism in response to specific environmental challenges—was decried.  Further, the notion that changes in and inheritance of traits could occur through other than genetic means was anathema.

  That orthodox Darwinian viewpoint has been challenged in the past 30 years or so.  Modern studies have shown that directed, nonrandom genomic mutations can occur; that acquired non-genomic attributes can be inherited; and that both are subject to natural selection in the same way as are random genomic mutations.  These new insights and much else are discussed in a remarkable, but lengthy and hard-to-read book by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life.

  I will skip over Jablonka-Lamb's first dimension, genetics, for it is the Darwinian dimension, with which I assume you are familiar.  The second dimension, epigenetics, is the most astounding to me.  It turns out that molecular "markers" can attach themselves to the genome as a result of environmental impact or stress.  They do not change the genome, but can turn genes on and off, thus changing the expression of an individual's genetic traits.  What is surprising is that these epigenetic factors can be passed on to offspring.

  The earliest-discovered and most common epigenetic marker is methylation of DNA.  Small methyl (CH₃) groups can become attached to bases in the DNA sequence because of environmental influences and stress, but they do not change the DNA other than by turning genes on or off.  Remarkably, the methylation remains in daughter cells after cell division.  Even more remarkably, when methylation affects sperm or egg cells, it is inherited by an embryo and thus passed on to the next generation.  To quote from Jablonka-Lamb:

"[B]ecause it provides an additional source of variation, evolution can occur through the epigenetic dimension of heredity even if nothing is happening in the genetic dimension.  But it means more than this.  Epigenetic variations are generated at a higher rate than genetic ones, especially in changed environmental conditions, and several epigenetic variations may occur at the same time.  Furthermore, they may not be blind to function, because changes in epigenetic marks probably occur preferentially on genes that are induced to be active by new conditions.  This does not mean that all induced changes are adaptive, but it does increase the chances that a variation will be beneficial.  The combination of these two properties—a high rate of generation and a good chance of being appropriate—means that adaptation through the selection of epigenetic variants may be quite rapid compared with adaptation through genetic change."

This one astonishing paragraph was to me worth the price of the book.

  Less compelling to me, but still impressive, are Jablonka and Lamb's asserted third and fourth dimensions of evolution—behavioral and symbolic.  If I understand these dimensions correctly, they overlap with and extend what the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called "memes"—an analog of genes.  Just as a gene carries information about biological traits, a meme carries information about socio-cultural ideas, symbols, and practices that are passed from generation to generation but not necessarily to direct offspring.  That many memes are acquired under the influence of the environment and unrelated individuals, and propagated by social interaction rather than genetics, doesn't sound extraordinary—we know that species, especially Homo sapiens, pass on a vast repertoire of behaviors derived from their environment and social groupings.  More startling, however, is evidence Jablonka and Lamb cite indicating that acquired memes may also be inherited through bio-chemical means; for example, a mother's particular food preferences have been shown to be reproduced in her offspring through placental affects on the fetus.  The important point Jablonka and Lamb make is that memes as well as genes are subject to evolutionary selection: those that are advantageous for survival will persist, those that aren't will vanish.

  The focus of the Jablonka-Lamb book is therefore on information transmission as the basis of evolution, not only the biological information of the genome and its epigenetic markers, but also the behavioral and symbolic information of cultures. 

"All four ways of transmitting information introduce, to different degrees and in different ways, instructive mechanisms into evolution.  All shape evolutionary change. …  As molecular biology uncovers more and more about epigenetic and genetic inheritance, and as behavioral studies show how much information is passed on to others by nongenetic means, evolutionary biologists will have to abandon their present concept of heredity, which was fashioned in the early days of genetics."

For those of us who have been raised in the pure-genetics tradition, this is a big gob to swallow.  We were taught to ignore Lamarck and to disdain the USSR's ideologically motivated Lysenko;  now, it seems, some of their ideas may turn out to have merit.

Disenchantment Lurks

  I've only once before discussed a movie in this blog, having almost never been affected enough by one to write about it.  I need to perceive a theme on which to ruminate—as in [1], which pondered the randomness, transience and futility of fame.

  Such a theme arose for me in the newly released Before Midnight, the third part of a trilogy—the first two parts having been Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004).  Unusually, the third installment is even better than the first two, which were excellent in themselves.  (The second was nominated for an Oscar.)  Indeed, Before Midnight has been acclaimed in an extraordinary 98% of critics' reviews [2].

  Possibly unique about all three films is that each consists of virtually continuous dialog between the two main characters (Jesse and Céleste), which is unbroken by any substantial action other than walking about, or even by much background music.  It's a script that would be daunting enough for actors to carry off on a stage, and it's formidable in a movie.  Despite this difficulty, I found the performances pitch-perfect.  Luckily for realism, the actors themselves age throughout the almost two decades spanned by production of the trilogy, along with the characters they play.

  The three parts together show how time and events can first bring enchantment into our lives and then chip away at it.  For me, that's a penetrating theme.  Céline sets the motif in part two by saying, "There's an Einstein quote I really, really like.  He said, 'If you don't believe in any kind of magic or mystery, basically you're as good as dead.'"  When we become disenchanted, we die a little.

  I'll try not to be a spoiler, for I highly recommend your seeing at least Before Midnight, and if possible its predecessors, in sequence.  Still, I don't think I'll be doing you a disservice by revealing the basic plot line. 

  In Before Sunrise, Jesse and Céline, single and in their twenties, meet on a train to Vienna.  They spend a night together there, doing little more than wandering its streets, walking and talking, while becoming deeply enchanted with one another.  The magic infects us as well.  At the end of the film, Jesse and Céline part—Jesse to fly home to the U.S., Céline to return to France.   In the last seconds, they impetuously promise to meet again in Vienna in six months. 

  The story resumes nine years later in Before Sunset.  We find out that the promised meeting never occurred.  Jesse showed up, but Céline was unable to because of a death in her family; and they had no other way of getting in touch with each other.  Jesse has by this point written a book inspired by his encounter with Céline and is at an event in Paris promoting it, when he sees her in the audience.  Once more Jesse has a plane to catch, so they again spend their limited time together walking and talking. 

  Jesse is now in an unhappy marriage, tied to it by his love for his four-year-old son.  Céline is unhappy with her boyfriend.  Their enchantment is rekindled, and they wistfully explore how their lives would have been different if the meeting had occurred. We sense that this time Jesse is going to miss his plane, perhaps stay in Europe.

  Does it so far sound like a daytime-TV soap opera?  My abbreviated description might make it seem so.  Yet the poetry of Jesse and Céline's romance and the brilliance with which it is acted make us fall into their enchantment twice over.  Reviewers—so often cynical and hypercritical—have surrendered to its spell too.

  Fast forward seven-plus years in the story to Before Midnight, which opens at an airport in Greece.  Jesse is seeing off his now 12-year-old son, who is returning to his divorced mother in Chicago after spending a summer with Jesse and Céline—the two are now married and have twin girls.  For a third time we spend over an hour engrossed in their dialog.  Time and reality have taken a toll on their enchantment, and we gradually become aware of the sources of that wear and tear.  I'll leave the story here so that you can find out for yourself how it unfolds.

  The yin-yang principle of ancient Chinese philosophy has it that the world and we ourselves are acted upon by myriad complementary forces, seemingly opposite but actually interdependent and inseparable wholes: light/dark, hot/cold, life/death, love/hate, etc.  So it seems to be with enchantment and disenchantment—they come to us inextricably as a pair, parts of a continuum of amalgams.  We crave the first from our childhood, relishing the magic of fairy tales and Santa Claus; as adults we find a ready replacement in romantic love.  Yet disenchantment is necessarily admixed in it, unavoidable, like Iago whispering calumnies in the background.   Lucretius [3] said it well: "From the very fountain of enchantment there arises a taste of bitterness to spread anguish amongst the flowers."  We seem unable to savor the magic without also tasting that sourness.

  I'll let you find out for yourself whether Jesse and Céline succumb to bitterness.