Having listened to all of the extant episodes of high-quality radio Westerns (Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Frontier Gentleman, The Six Shooter, and a few others) and detective/crime programs (Dragnet, Richard Diamond, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollars, Box 13, Philip Marlowe, Broadway Is My Beat, Let George Do It, Pat Novak…For Hire, Candy Matson) and a few that were less than high-quality, e.g. Murder Is My Hobby, I’ve now turned to radio comedy. I’ve been listening to Burns & Allen for a few months. I began with the earliest extant episodes (from 1934) and at this point I’m listening to the episodes from 1946.

I find Burns & Allen extremely funny but I honestly can’t tell whether today’s ears would find it offensive. Although Gracie is portrayed as a Dumb Dora, George is the butt of every joke while between the two of them Gracie is obviously the talent. I don’t know that anybody ever had better comedic timing than Gracie Allen. Occasionally going head to head with the grand master of comedic timing, Jack Benny, she gives Jack a run for his money.

There are many running gags. George’s singing. Gracie’s “Beverly Hills Uplift Society”. George’s age and Gracie’s youth—an inside joke since in 1946 George was 50 while Gracie was 51.

Their orchestras provide an interesting window into the development of music through the period. In 1938 through about 1941 Artie Shaw’s orchestra provided the music for Burns & Allen. The Shaw organization was simply brilliant. I don’t think there’s any other word for it. After Shaw Paul Whiteman took over. Then the lesser-known Felix Mills. Then Meredith Willson’s (he later composed The Music Man) Chiffon Music, sometimes with the Les Paul Trio, some of the earliest electric guitar on radio.

I only have another 50-60 Burns & Allen programs left which should take me into 1948, just about the end of the radio series. I’ll probably turn to the Benny program then.

November 9 is pretty early for snow to be sticking in Chicago. I don’t recall an accumulation of snow at all in Chicago before Veterans Day.

In an article at the Atlantic anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom struggles to define what is meant by “middle class”:

The question of how to define the middle class is one of the perennial mysteries of American social life. Most people say they’re “middle class,” so how can we know what this really means? Every few years some intrepid social scientists venture a new definition.

This September, the Brookings Institution economists Richard Reeves and Katherine Guyot argued that the middle class is “the middle 60 percent of households on the income distribution,” which represents $37,000 to $147,000 for a three-person household. Full stop. Downplaying the importance of education, they wrote that income is the most useful measure of class because it captures all of the other conditions that make a person middling, including consumption, education, and relative social standing; it is not only how much money individuals take home.

That actually makes a certain amount of sense. Were incomes distributed in a statistically normal distribution two-thirds of the people would be in the middle—between one standard deviation below and one standard deviation above median income.

Dr. Zaloom examines and rejects income as a metric for middle class-ness, finally latching onto a certain level of security as an indicator for being middle class. That, too, makes a certain amount of sense.

Some of her other suggestions, e.g. valuing education, possessing the amenities of a middle class lifestyle, etc., I think are flatly wrong. Those are strategies for achieving the security of the middle class rather than metrics for it. Indeed, I might argue that seeking the amenities of a middle class lifestyle without adopting the behaviors and habits of mind that are the hallmarks of the middle class in the United States are a key factor in undermining the middle class.

My favorite definition of “middle class” is that it has less to do with your income than with your sources of income. The lower class is paid by the hour; the middle class receives a salary; the upper class’s primary sources of income are rents, royalties, and dividends.

I think I’m distinctively qualified to comment on class by virtue of my family background and upbringing. My father’s family was bourgeois in the extreme. The traditional family occupation for the Schulers was milk broker. In Switzerland you can hardly get more bourgeois than that. My mother’s family on the other hand was not lower class, middle class, or upper class. Artists and performers are not members of a class, something that can be measured by their relationship with security: zero. They are outcaste.

I spent the first part of my childhood among the lower middle class, the “working class”, and its second part among the upper middle class and petty aristocracy. That gives me a certain level of perspective.

You won’t read it in the history books but, just as the secret of American military success does not reside in its generals but in its non-coms, the secret of American cultural success is in its middle class. To be middle class is to accept the behaviors and habits of mind of the American middle class.

Over the period of the last sixty or so years, a significant portion of the American population has been trying to erode the middle class, rejecting its behaviors and values, while still pursuing the appurtenances of a middle class lifestyle. They are phonies in the same sense that Jack Kerouac was a phony. He may have gone on the road but he always returned to mama.

In the end I think I arrive at a similar destination as Dr. Zaloom albeit from a different direction. It’s very difficult to speak of the “middle class” in the U. S. any more. I think that’s a very sad and ultimately self-destructive error.

In an op-ed in the New York Times billionaire environmentalist (that very phrase is so fraught with irony I can barely stand it) Tom Steyer illustrates handily why impeaching President Trump is likely to become for House Democrats what repealing ObamaCare was to House Republicans after the midterm elections of President Obama’s first term of office:

Should the establishment refuse to give up conventional orthodoxy and take up impeachment proceedings when the new Congress convenes, freshmen members — many of whom ran and won because of their promise to stand up to the president — must challenge the establishment and demand a say over the agenda. An overwhelming majority of people in this country elected them to hold this president accountable. There is no majority without them. That means no one has the votes for a leadership title without their support.

At a moment when just one-third of all Americans trust their government to do what is right, winning a majority has to mean much more than just frustrating Republican legislative goals and scoring debating points. Democrats must stand up for the safety of the American people and our entire democratic system.

We cannot allow this to be an argument about what Republicans will permit — it’s about demanding the truth and protecting the foundations of our free society. Anything less would mean abandoning the Constitution.

Basically, it will be an act of self-preservation. Their increasingly radicalized base will demand it. Not to mention increasingly radicalized big donors like Tom Steyer. When you take the king’s shilling, you are the king’s man.

In response to Mohammed El-Erian’s plea for Congress to unite on an infrastructure spending bill at The Hill:

Infrastructure is an area that in the past has attracted broad-based support. By potentially enhancing supply and demand at the same time, it is one of the few policy areas that simultaneously benefits both companies and workers. And it is a promising area if the U.S. is to maintain its strong economic and financial performance.

Like other advanced economies, our country faces the challenge of supplementing its short-term cyclical growth impulse with longer-term secular contributors.

Absent the required structural reforms, the economy will eventually experience what both Europe and Japan are feeling now: a slowdown in economic momentum, the threat of falling back into stagnation and a higher risk of recession and destabilizing financial volatility.

An infrastructure modernizing plan would be one of the ways to improve the probability of a more powerful cyclical-secular handoff. It would upgrade aging facilities that increase business cost and lower business efficiency. It would place the economy in a better position to benefit from technological innovations and compete internationally. And it would help crowd-in other sources of demand, investment and production.

I can only point out:

1. Under present law the federal government bears much of the cost of new highway and bridge construction while state and local governments foot the bill for most of their maintenance.
2. We do not have a great need for new highway or bridge construction.
3. Such problems as exist are maintenance problems. The federal government is in no position to adjudicate among competing priorities at the state and local levels.
4. Congress could appropriate $1 trillion in the form of block grants to state and local governments and it would disappear without a trace and without substantially improving roads and bridges.

If you really want to modernize and you want it to be financed at the federal level, the way to accomplish it is with a much more tightly defined and structured plan. A federal program to improve the power grid, analogous to the Interstate Highway System, would be a good way to do that. We could really use a better, smarter, more redundant power grid and private industry won’t construct it.

Mohammed El-Erian reminds me of an old joke about a man who moved to a small Maine town at two weeks of age, lived to 92, and died. On his tombstone his neighbors carved the message: “He was almost one of us”. I think that Mr. El-Erian is a very smart guy but also extremely naive about the United States and its politics. We are an enormously large, very decentralized, and complicated country. Our infrastructure problems aren’t due to a lack of money. They’re due to differing priorities and how the priorities are established.

Boy, I really draw a different conclusion about Tuesday’s elections than the wisdom that’s emerging from the media. I think it underscores what Trump’s election in 2016 proved. There is a cadre of people who are extremely dissatisfied with politics as it was. And you can’t win an election simply by throwing money at it.

Yes, money continues to matter in electoral politics. But how much does it matter? Beto O’Rourke raised and spent nearly twice as much as incumbent Ted Cruz and was defeated nonetheless. On the other hand in Florida Rick Scott raised and spent about twice as much as Bill Nelson, the incumbent whom he defeated. In Missouri incumbent Claire McCAskill raised and spent more than three times as much as her challenger, Josh Hawley, and went down to defeat.

The news reports this morning are filled with the story of a gunman who walked into a Southern California nightclub and started killing people. Eleven are dead including the gunman who as of this writing remains unidentified. The sad event took place in Thousand Oaks, considered one of the safest communities in the country.

I predict that the reactions will be predictable with people merrily riding their hobbies. Some will claim that tougher gun controls would prevent recurrences of such events. Second Amendment advocates will chime in with claims that if the people in the club had been armed only the gunman would have been killed.

According to the reports the gunman was armed with a single handgun. Even if we were to repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate the hundreds of millions of handguns and long guns presently in Americans’ possession, it would not eliminate the possibility of one crazy person obtaining a firearms and killing people.

One of those killed was a sheriff’s deputy. Was he armed? I suspect he was. Were others in the club armed as well? If every single person in the club had been armed, I suspect that the death toll would have been higher as frightened people, not sure where the shots were coming from, killed each other in the crossfire.

There is a connecting thread between this, other similar events, and many, many other developments in modern life. Personal empowerment is dangerous. It’s dangerous when a single motivate individual, crazy or just angry, can kill a dozen people. It’s dangerous when people can move about, freely and unhindered, without being searched or even remarked on. It’s dangerous when people can publish whatever they care to, unrestrained and unmonitored by media or government watchdogs.

It will take a lot more to end events like this than disarming the law-abiding citizenry or arming everybody. It would take orders of magnitude more police officers, curfews, and surveillance checkpoints. We’d need a police state.

In a country of 330 million people there are bound to be many, many crazy, angry, or otherwise motivated people. We need to recognize that and decide how much liberty we’re willing to relinquish for imagined safety.

Meanwhile, the editors of the Wall Street Journal are more pragmatic in their reactions:

This is largely Mr. Trump’s failure, and the nearby table from the October Wall Street Journal-NBC poll puts his problem in sharp relief. While 44% of voters approve of Mr. Trump’s policies, nearly half of them dislike him personally. That 20% is five times the percentage who disliked George W. Bush but liked his policies when he lost the House in 2006, and 10 times the share that disliked Barack Obama in 2013.

More glaringly, the share of voters who dislike Mr. Trump personally but like his policies increased in the past two years. This is extraordinary for a new President and shows the extent of his missed opportunity. Some two-thirds of voters on Tuesday expressed satisfaction with the state of the economy, and these are people he’d win if he didn’t alienate them with his persona.

Unlike Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, Mr. Trump has made no effort to build a larger coalition than the minority who helped win the Presidency narrowly over Hillary Clinton. Instead he has played constantly to his base who are already loyal. If he wants to be re-elected, he will have to win over more of those suburban Republicans and independents.

Mr. Trump’s closing argument on immigration also looks to have been a bust. It didn’t help in suburban districts and may have cost Republican Carlos Curbelo his House seat in South Florida. White House aide Stephen Miller bears much of the responsibility for this misjudgment. He advised Mr. Trump to walk away from a potential deal trading legalization for the so-called Dreamers in return for money for border security and “the wall.” Then he urged the border crackdown that became the fiasco of family separation that further turned off suburban voters.

Mr. Trump could have improved his chances to hold the House by accepting a deal and declaring a border victory. Suburban Republicans want border security, but they also want a humane and generous immigration policy. Mr. Trump needs to rethink his immigration strategy for 2020.

The other liability for Republicans was their failure to repeal and replace health care. Democrats played on voter fears of repeal but the GOP could never point to the benefits of a replacement they didn’t pass. Then too many Republicans simply ran away from the subject, giving Democrats an open field. The late Senator John McCain delivered the final blow against reform, but the general GOP incoherence on the subject was also to blame.

I think I would be a little harsher on the Republicans than that. The Republicans need a health care policy beyond repealing the Affordable Care Act. Other than their opposition to ObamaCare they’re basically AWOL on the issue and Democrats took advantage of that vacuum.

I’ve got to admit that I have no idea what a viable Republican health care policy beyond repealing ObamaCare might be. They may have painted themselves into an ideological corner.

And the editors of the Washington Post are jubilant:

THE DEMOCRATS’ return to control over the House of Representatives is much more than a victory for one party. It is a sign of health for American democracy.

Distrustful of untrammeled majorities, the authors of the Constitution favored checks and balances, including, crucially, the check that the legislative branch might place upon the executive. Over the past two years, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have failed to exercise reasonable oversight. Now the constitutional system has a fresh chance to work as intended.

The Democratic victory is also a sign of political health, to the extent it is a form of pushback against the excesses, rhetorical and in terms of policy, committed by the Trump administration and propounded by President Trump during this fall’s campaign. Turning against the dominant party in Washington even in a moment of economic prosperity, voters from Key West to Kansas refused to accept the continued degradation of their nation’s political culture. Republicans retained control of the Senate, where the map this year favored their defense. But voters nationwide refused Mr. Trump’s invitation to vote on the basis of fear of immigrants; they did not respond to his depiction of his opposition as dangerous enemies.

Now the House will be in a position to investigate any number of potential administration transgressions and demand accountability: the awful separation of migrant children from their parents; the dubious decision to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census; the president’s harassment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation.

The new majority also has an opportunity to offer a positive legislative agenda. The Democrats achieved their victory Tuesday night in large part by promising to protect health-care coverage, especially for Americans with preexisting conditions. Though effective in winning over moderate voters, the campaign did not establish a clear mandate for much beyond that — eminently valid — objective. And of course, even if the Democrats set forth a list of specific proposals for the House, before or after Election Day, the Senate and Mr. Trump’s veto pen could block it.

Still, the party can outline an alternative policy direction for the country. It can begin with measures to shore up the Affordable Care Act but then move to reforms of federal gun laws. Where the Republican majority has denied science, the Democrats can offer an approach to climate change. They can propose relief to the “dreamers” and, ideally, other undocumented immigrants, along with generous but not unlimited opportunities for future legal immigration. They should propose to restore the United States to its rightful place as a welcomer of refugees; to end the disgraceful denial of congressional representation to citizens in the District of Columbia; to repeal the most egregious giveaways to the rich in the 2017 tax bill.

Tuesday was a good day for Democrats. It may also be a good day for Republicans, if they take the lessons of their House defeat to heart and reconsider the devil’s bargain they have made with Mr. Trump. Indeed, if the results help lead to a reemergence of that party’s better angels, then it will have been good day for America as a whole.

I wish they had actually mentioned some excesses other than President Trump’s intemperate speech. I can think of a few. Many considered Trump’s “Muslim ban” excessive. Troops to the border? I thought that while cutting corporate income taxes was long overdue cutting personal income taxes at the same time was excessive. What else? It sounds to me as through the excesses they’re complaining about are failures to enact their own pet priorities, an odd diction.