My girlfriend and I saw Tadpole the other night. It’s not terrible, but the main character, a 15-year-old Manhattan boarding-school student who pines after his stepmother and reads Candide in translation despite his alleged fluency in French, brought back Holden Caulfield to me like a bad oyster. (Note to Tadpole director Gary Winick: nobody prepares grilled cheese sandwiches in advance.)

Holden was 17 in 1951, which means that, like a lot of his fans, not to mention his creator, he’s collecting Social Security. Salinger too is retired; he had the good sense to stop writing when he had nothing left to say. So can we retire Salingeriana and Salinger retreads too? Would that be OK?

What everyone remembers about Holden is his passion, his positive mania, for sniffing out everything “phony.” This keeps him very busy, which is good because he has nothing else to do. Ernie the piano player is a phony because he puts in too many arpeggios. His roommate is a phony because he’s vain and stupid and succeeds with girls by sounding sincere. The guy across the hall is a phony because he describes a great basketball player as having “the perfect build for basketball.” A girl he dates is a phony because she likes the Lunts and says “grand” too often. (Here Holden may have a point.) A teacher he used to like is a phony because he turns out to be an alcoholic homosexual who married for money.

Now all of these people are ghastly in their own way. But showing off is one thing, and vanity is another, and envy is a third, and affectation is something else. It gets us nowhere to lump these traits together and call them “phony.” This can’t be chalked up to Holden’s adolescent argot either. “Phoniness” recurs constantly in Salinger, no matter which book, no matter who’s narrating.

In Salinger’s universe only children are never phony. It helps to be dead too. The only truly sympathetic characters in Catcher in the Rye outside of Holden himself are his sister Phoebe and his late brother Allie, a sort of proto-Seymour Glass who died of leukemia and wrote poems on his baseball glove in green ink.

This harping on “phoniness” is indispensable to Salinger’s continuing appeal. For all Holden’s modesty, his ejaculations of “I’m an idiot, I’m a madman,” at bottom he feels superior to the phonies and provokes the same feeling in the reader. And Salinger’s settings, fancy boarding schools and prestigious colleges, intensify the feeling by elevating the baseline. It’s always pleasant to feel superior, and especially pleasant to feel superior to the Ivy League. And the beauty part, for the reader, is that no actual achievement, no objective superiority, is required: it’s all a matter of having your heart in the right place. (Many readers also appreciate that you can kill the complete works in a couple afternoons.)

But whatever else you can say about Catcher in the Rye, at least no member of the Glass family appears. Here’s a typical example of middle-period Salinger. Salinger is writing in the person of Buddy Glass, in Seymour: An Introduction:

It seems to me indisputably true that a good many people, the wide world over, of varying ages, cultures, natural endowments, respond with a special impetus, a zing, even, in some cases, to artists and poets who as well as having a reputation for producing great or fine art have something garishly Wrong with them as persons: a spectacular flaw in character or citizenship, a construably romantic affliction or addiction — extreme self-centeredness, marital infidelity, stone-deafness, stone-blindness, a terrible thirst, a mortally bad cough, a soft spot for prostitutes, a partiality for grand-scale adultery or incest, a certified or uncertified weakness for opium or sodomy, and so on, God have mercy on the lonely bastards. If suicide isn’t at the top of the list of compelling infirmities for creative men, the suicide poet or artist, one can’t help noticing, has always been given a very considerable amount of avid attention, not seldom on sentimental grounds almost exclusively, as if he were (to put it much more horribly than I really want to) the floppy-earned runt of the litter. It’s a thought, anyway, finally said, that I’ve lost sleep over many times, and possibly will again.

This passage is not the best in the Glass works but it is by no means the worst. The comment on his own fervent and rather ghoulish admirers is amusing — Salinger, like the sainted eldest Glass, Seymour, is a sort of suicide poet himself — but let’s look at the style for a second.

Salinger’s books, like many thin volumes, have earned him an undeserved reputation for brevity. In fact, as this passage shows, he is a gasbag. Sentence for sentence, he’s right in there with Thomas Wolfe; he just doesn’t write as many sentences. The snobbish qualification “to put it much more horribly than I really want to” is characteristic. He can’t think of anything better than “floppy-eared runt” yet he wants to let his reader know, sotto voce, that he isn’t really happy with it either. One might object that this is the voice of Buddy Glass, not Salinger himself; but in Franny and Zooey, where he’s narrating on his own account, he writes exactly the same way.

Then there’s the jumbo list of authorial flaws in the middle of the paragraph. Salinger likes lists. Franny and Zooey has one, of the contents of the Glass family medicine cabinet, that’s nearly three times this long and apropos of nothing.

Not having read Salinger in fifteen years I didn’t remember how awful, how self-conscious, how snobbish the style is; how full it is of parenthetical throat-clearing, pedantic qualifications, go-nowhere asides, shuck and jive.

Only the Glasses, among the adults in Salinger, get a phoniness pass. As Zooey says to Franny, “Whatever we are, we’re not fishy [phony], buddy.” This is partly because of their surpassing brilliance, which, like most surpassing brilliance in literature, we have to take mostly on faith; and partly because they’re more like overgrown child prodigies than actual adults. (All the Glasses appeared as children on a quiz show called “It’s a Wise Child.” Wisdom…children…get it?) But the Glasses, like Holden, are all potential, no achievement; all faith and no good works. What do they amount to as adults? Buddy, a literature professor at a cow college. Franny, a student and aspiring actress prone to fainting spells when near vulgarity. Zooey, a television actor. Boo Boo, a Tuckahoe housewife. Walt, dead in the war; Waker, a Jesuit priest. And finally Seymour himself, a suicide at 31. (He leaves 184 double haikus, and they are brilliant, masterly, Buddy tells us so. He can’t actually print any of them, though, legal matter you understand. The trouble with having a literary genius as a character is that you can’t show much of his ouevre, beyond the occasional letter or piece of juvenilia, without being a literary genius yourself.)

And what sort of wisdom do these Wise Children impart to us? I yield the floor to Zooey, who finally snaps his sister Franny out of her religious mania with this:

“But I’ll tell you a terrible secret — Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know — listen to me, now — don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? …Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”

All of a sudden we’re not supposed to feel superior any more. We’re supposed to feel humble, because Christ is in us and of us. Gosh, I never heard that before. There’s something cheap about this sort of fake wisdom, something tawdry, meretricious, something…what’s the word I’m looking for? Phony. That’s it.

(Update: I posted this, in a slightly different form, on BlogCritics, which inspired Rodney Welch to comment.)

Greenspan made his famous remarks about “irrational exuberance” on December 5, 1996. The Dow closed that day at 6413. If you had bought the index the next morning and sold it at the open today (probably not a very clever idea), you would have earned a compound rate of about 3.75%. Now that isn’t great; you would have done a little better in bonds. But it beats inflation. So why is everyone acting like blood is running in the streets? Is there a divine right to 20% annual returns?

I never thought I’d see the day. A new contender giving undisputed champion of ponderous, literal-minded tendentiousness David Horowitz a run for his money? In this corner, the challenger, The Rittenhouse Review:

Remember back in grade school, there was that really annoying kid, the loud-mouthed know-it-all with the obnoxious parents who were always shoving Stalinist pamphlets in your parents mailbox and trying to unionize the cafeteria ladies?

You know, the kid who was always spouting a bunch of crap about the Rosenbergs and Rosa Luxem-something when all you wanted to do was play a friggin game of stickball?

Well, hes still around.

Only now he has his own weblog.

We call first dibs on “HorowitzWatch.”

And in this corner, the defending champion:

The Rittenhouse Review is a leftist blog with all the hallmarks of the species – the compulsive deception and the twisted understanding of the past and the future. For the record, I loved stickball when I was a kid. And unlike the Rittenhouse commies, I am no longer handing out Stalinist pamphlets. Actually, the Rittenhouse gang are evidently not old enough to have any conception of what it was like to be a youngster in the Communist left during the Cold War era. There were NO loud-mouthed kids in grade school handing out Stalinist pamphlets to anyone, let alone organizing the cafeteria ladies (thats what post-modern commies do). In those days we were very much like the Rittenhouse gang is now: always pretending to be something we were not. Liberals for instance.

I say it’s still Horowitz, but only on points. Can we all get back to stickball now?

A very sensible post on Zionism from Volokh/Non-Volokh. A highlight:

…as far as real politics is concerned, the best shouldn’t be the enemy of the good; we should support countries and governments not according to whether they conform exactly to an abstract ideal but according to whether they’re closer to the ideal than whatever else is on offer. By that standard, Israel as it is today is vastly superior to the alternatives, the best of a really iffy lot. To the extent Israel requires a tribal/nationalistic/religious/collectivistic mythology to maintain the will to defend itself against its enemies, well, that’s really sad, but possibly true.

To the extent it’s true, Zionism is acceptable (but nothing for me to get enthusiastic about), but only because as a side effect it promotes democracy, secularism, and individual freedom. (On this account, statements like the “Zionism = Racism” resolution of the 1970s are objectionable — not because they’re false, but because they lack perspective, applying a standard against Israel that applies equally well against most other countries in the area.)

There have been a couple interesting comments on animal rights, so I wanted to move them up and devote another post to it. Susanna Cornett writes:

Your argument doesn’t really advance anything. Some of the arguments in favor of Singer (see Jason Rylander’s, linked on my page) point out specifically that some animals appear to make moral choices — i.e. choices based on what’s “right” vs what’s “expedient” or safest for them. Often it’s associated with protecting someone/thing they have a connection to, which arguably could be instinct, but then you’d face the argument that perhaps the same behaviors are instinct on the human level too.

You skid perilously close to Singer on your discussion of humans with less sentience (the young and mentally disabled) by basically saying they do have fewer rights. Well, yes and no. They have narrow ranges of “permission” to do things in our society, but no less rights in the basic shelter-food-protection triad. Less sentient humans can’t be used for experimentation, for example, while animals can.

Jason Rylander does indeed assert (casually, and without evidence) that some animals are moral agents. However, this takes him off of Singer’s turf and on to mine. Singer draws the line at sentience because if he gets into an argument over whether animals are moral agents he’s going to lose. Stephen Wise, PETA’s latest pinup boy, whom Rylander cites favorably, is no more reasonable than Singer, only more slippery. He won’t say exactly what’s required for rights, so he talks around the point about shared DNA and “sense of self” and “cognition” and “deception” and many other characteristics that were once supposed, somewhere, by someone, to distinguish humans from animals. Many red herrings don’t add up to an argument.

A few hundred years ago everyone thought animals were moral agents, which is why dogs were hanged for killing cattle, and then no one did, and now some of us do again. But if we confine ourselves to the evidence we find that it’s pretty sketchy. The WaPo story on Wise that Rylander cites recycles this chestnut about Koko the signing gorilla. It is the only piece of evidence in the story that animals can distinguish right from wrong, and it deserves to be quoted in full:

Wise reports this conversation from the day after Koko bit a caretaker, and her trainer asked what she had done.

“Wrong wrong,” Koko signed with her large dark fingers.

“What wrong?” her trainer signed back.

“Bite,” signed Koko. “Sorry bite scratch.”

“Why bite?”

“Because mad,” signed Koko.

“Why mad?”

Koko signed, “Don’t know.”

Before I give the great apes their Emancipation Proclamation I’m going to need a little more than this.

And I may “skid perilously close to Singer” by maintaining what is obvious, that children and mental defectives have fewer rights than normal adults, but hey, it’s a controlled skid. My disagreement with Susanna stems from a different understanding of what rights are. Her reference to the “shelter-food-protection triad” pinpoints the difficulty. These are goods, acquired by labor, not rights. A right is a sphere of action within which the reasoning individual is permitted to act unmolested. The Declaration of Independence guarantees the right to pursue happiness, not to acquire it. It seems apparent that the sphere of action is smaller, and thus the rights fewer, in the special cases of minors and morons.

Susanna does not object to my argument against animal cruelty laws (although she has defended them), but Norman Kabir does:

In the same argument you state that we are entitled to “rights” (very vague statement that you implicitly substitute with “law”) due to our moral agency. That moral agency separates us from other living things. And in turn gives us the right to torture or destroy them for any reasons we deem fit.

You don’t find it ironic that you use “moral agency” as a tool to sanction the infliction of pain and death on other lifeforms?

Oh right, property rights. I paid someone for it. That makes it ok. Who even needs moral agency when one can furnish a receipt?

Very principled indeed.

I trust I’ve cleared up some of my alleged vagueness about rights. But I deny that humans have “the right to torture or destroy [animals] for any reasons we deem fit.” I deplore pointless animal torture, who doesn’t? But it doesn’t matter to the animal whether it’s tortured in some vital experiment or because some sadistic creep likes to watch innocent creatures suffer. And it is very difficult to write a law against animal cruelty that will permit the former and forbid the latter. Such laws will inevitably used to harass medical researchers; indeed, they already are. If Norman, who supports medical research on animals, can figure a way out of this dilemma, I’ll be happy to hear it.