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Plain, Honest Men

Plain, Honest Men
by Richard Beeman

by Richard Beeman

The lesson we learn from reading Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution is the same lesson that applies to all things, everywhere: context is everything.
In the case of the Constitution, context is not just everything, but it’s crucial to understanding what that document says to us when we read it now, some 226 years after its creation.

For instance, take the fetish for “strict construction” that pervades so much of our political discourse today. Those who want to adhere to a literal interpretation of the Constitution like to cite the Framers’ intent when rendering their view of the document. But, as author Richard Beeman makes clear in his account of the Constitution’s creation, a lot of the ideas, articles, clauses--even individual words--in the Constitution did not reflect the unanimous views of the Framers. Or even, for that matter, a consensus among a minority of those men. Several provisions that made it into the final draft of the Constitution lived to achieve enshrinement only because they proved to be compromises that no one liked, but that everyone in the room hated least. Are such parts of the text really worthy of sacred treatment today, when the very men who committed them to parchment had such mixed feelings about them then?

Thus, Professor Beeman’s account of the constitutional convention renders a very valuable service: it reminds us that, to use the well-worn cliche, the Constitution is a living document--not simply due to the intent of those who wrote it, but also because of the tension that went into creating it. As the narrative makes clear, agreement was a rare commodity in Philadelphia during that summer of 1787, and the document that resulted from almost five months of debate comes down to us as a mixture of genius and warts, one that practically begs future generations to interpret and modify its meaning and intent.

Nowhere is this fact more clear than in how the delegates dealt with slavery. Beeman tells us that, for the delegates, the slavery question mostly loomed over issues of representation and power relationships among the states; the moral dimension held little sway during the debates. While a few members of the convention did express their moral outrage over the institution, such ethical concerns had little effect on the ultimate compromise that apportioned representation by counting slaves as three-fifths a person. The author rightly calls out for their failings these representatives of a revolutionary generation that had declared, barely eleven years before, that “all men are created equal”; yet, he also makes perfectly clear that abolitionist sentiment was not going to make headway against the demands of delegates like John Rutledge and the Pinckneys of South Carolina. In the end, the compromise that made slavery a part of the Constitution happened because without it there might not have been a Constitution. Such were the dynamics of the meeting in Philadelphia, and Beeman gives his readers a clear picture of just how much difficulty went into creating the document by which we still live to this day.

Another great service rendered by Plain, Honest Men lies in the resurrection of a number of men who have been long since--but unjustly--forgotten. As Beeman’s story makes clear, the efforts of men like Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut--two key facilitators of the “Connecticut Compromise,” which created the bicameral Congress and apportioned representation by population in the House and by state in the Senate--should still be celebrated, though today those names are shrouded in obscurity. For this reader, learning about admirable and important members of the Pennsylvania delegation like James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris generated a great deal of pride for my birth state, thanks to their crucial contributions to the workings of the convention.

Of course, Beeman pays fair homage to more than just the forgotten. James Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, gets his due for the groundwork he laid in getting the convention together and setting its agenda. And, hanging above all like a great portrait prominently displayed, the character of George Washington--his position as President of the convention, his formidable influence over the proceedings, what he meant to the people of the young nation--gives the narrative a powerful and heroic focus. Plain, Honest Men reminds us that we do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants; it is no wonder then that the nation they founded, with the Constitution they created, has been able to stride so far.

This wealth of historical erudition comes in a package that is accessible and inviting even for the casual reader. Beeman’s prose, while rarely elegant, does the yeoman’s work of telling the tale in a clear and intelligible voice. Occasionally, the text does get heavy; Beeman is forced to recap many of the key debate points several times throughout the narrative, given both the complexity of the issues and their reappearance throughout the narrative’s timeline (a product of the fact that the delegates themselves kept going back and reopening questions that everyone thought had been answered). Thanks to those recaps, certain parts of the book feel like a slog. However, the writing never gets so bogged down that the reader feels tempted to call it quits, and the rewards of reading Plain, Honest Men outweigh any negatives.

Of course, the greatest reward comes in the form of a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the Constitution and how it came to be. If more of today’s politicos and pundits read Plain, Honest Men and learned its lessons, we might achieve the kind of consensus we will need to guarantee success in the next two centuries of the American experiment.

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Life of Pi
By Yann Martel

How odd that I would read this book before seeing the movie. I guess my film viewing habits really have fallen off the table.

A more germane topic, however, concerns all this book wishes to tell us about life, and faith, and maybe truth--though that last one is highly debatable.

Author Yann Martel covers a lot of philosophical ground in Life of Pi, his somewhat spectacular story of, succinctly, a boy and a tiger on a boat. I say “somewhat spectacular,” because Martel’s ultimate storytelling gambit--which story is the “real” story?--actually winds up undercutting the impact of the trick he’s trying to play. If there had been one twist at the end of the book--some ambiguity in one aspect of Pi’s amazing journey, some distinct item that would provide a sharper, clearer “Aha!” moment for the reader--that might have served everyone’s needs rather well. But laying the entirety of the adventure on the line? I call that a bit of overreach, an act of authorial hubris that has too much potential to leave readers feeling excessively manipulated and to undo whatever good work Martel hoped to achieve. (I also happen to think he bungled the ambiguity; there are elements of the supposedly metaphorical story which, within the narrative’s reality, should have been easily verifiable one way or another.)

For me personally, “Life of Pi” shows another problem arises that highlights why, at this stage of my life, I find it so difficult to read fiction. Martel liberally sprinkles an encyclopedia’s worth of obscure knowledge--mostly, in this case, zoological knowledge--throughout Pi’s first-person narrative. It is exactly the kind of brazen authorial showboating that ruins fiction for me. Nonfiction works must be well-researched and extensively referenced, or else the author’s authority withers and perishes; but fiction has different demands. Showy displays of the author’s research may be good for attracting critical attention and awards--”Oooh, such extensive research you did--here, have a shiny object...”--but a writer who flamboyantly exhibits his research inevitably takes this reader out of the story. Here I am, reading a story, and then the esoterica drops: suddenly, I’m not reading a book--I’m staring at a Everest-sized pile of index cards (or the digital equivalent thereof). It’s a lot like watching a movie and seeing a boom mike that was accidentally left within the upper corner of the camera’s view; instantly, the illusion is broken, and I start to wonder about the competence of the person who put this thing together.

On the other hand, Martel deserves high praise for his skill as a prose stylist. Thanks to my own writing and editing work, I’ve developed a constant need to assess the quality of any text I read--especially when I’m reading fiction. But with “Life of Pi” my stylistic alarm bells almost never rang out loud. Martel crafts excellent--almost lyrical--prose. Without question, his literary skill is consummate and expert. In that sense, “Life of Pi” is a breath of fresh air versus other recent works, so many of which have been published seemingly without benefit of compositional skill or professional editing. From a ‘words on the page’ point of view, “Life of Pi” is a joy to read.

So we find a very mixed bag when we consider “Life of Pi.” The book has so many devoted fans that I doubt any critique by me would have much impact on how others feel about it. I should probably recommend this book for reasons of cultural literacy alone. But I do wish the author had not been guilty of literary overreach. A gesture made presumably to teach was, in the end, too grandiose to effectively instill its lesson. Martel may have felt that he needed something epic to get through to modern readers, but a smaller, subtler effort was all we really needed. Perhaps it would have been better if, as a guy trying to make a statement about faith, Martel had had a little more faith in us.

Ace in the (Memory) Hole

I guess we really do change over the course of our lives. I recently had one example of my changing tastes/moods/whatever confront me in an unexpected way: I no longer listen to the Adam Carolla show.

This came as something of a surprise to me. I have been listening to Carolla regularly ever since the "Loveline" days back in the late '90s. I was on board from the start when the Aceman moved to morning radio back in the middle of the last decade, and I joined him on his post-firing journey into the new medium of podcasting--of which he has now become one of the leading impresarios, if not an actual new media mogul. I even read his first book. That's a long history as a relatively devoted follower.

True, I never bothered much with his television ventures like The Man Show or Crank Yankers (the former just never interested me, the latter--puppets acting out crank phone calls--should have passed without comment just for stupidity alone). And it is also true that I never kept pace with Carolla's output; once he moved his gig into downloadable territory, I invariably fell further and further behind the recent stuff, until my most recently listened to episodes were dated nearly a year behind the newest postings.

I guess that should have been a clue. Obviously, if I couldn't be bothered to listen frequently enough to keep current, the value must not have been all that great in my eyes (or, if you will, ears). Yet, I had been behind before, and made catch up efforts in the past. So why did I feel the need to abandon Carolla now?

My gut tells me to point the finger at the changes I've heard in Carolla's show in recent times. (I can't say how recent, because, remember, I was listening to year old shows by the time I pulled the plug.) For one thing, the promos just got overbearing; each episode of the podcast suffered from heavy intrusions of commercials for products that I would never bother buying. For the most part, I'm OK with someone making a buck for his efforts, particularly when he is supplying a product that has no price. But sometimes it seemed that the frequent commercials were damaging to the flow of the show, enough so to sap away the entertainment value. Let's face it: patience is a limited resource--test mine, or anyone else's, at our peril.

More troubling, perhaps, has been Carolla's ever-greater tilt towards right wing politics. One guest I recently heard on the show was some guy--I don't remember his name, and feel unmotivated to look it up, for obvious reasons--who wrote a book trashing the Occupy movement--a favorite target for Ace's ire. Carolla has long had a fairly conservative bent on many political issues (to be fair, he's relatively liberal on other, especially social, issues). I've heard him make comments with which I disagreed before--but, having done my own homework on Occupy and other issues, and knowing the fallacies embedded in Carolla's view of these issues, I found listening to his erroneous diatribes ever more tedious. Also, I started to suspect that some of his guests were not being booked "organically," but were coming at the direction of outside forces. (Carolla's affiliation with radio host Dennis Praeger may represent the nexus through which the "right wing echo machine" has recruited another outlet.) I can be forgiving when the intellectually lazy Adam Carolla forms a judgment that lacks a certain amount of depth; but I'll be damned if I'm going to be played for a sucker and drawn into listening to Fox News farm team players on the sly.

(An aside: Carolla's intelligence is a frequent butt of his jokes, but the man isn't dumb. He is, however, an untrained intelligence. Adam's strength lies in what he can diagnose through direct observation; anything that requires examination beyond surface details often leads him astray. That is the weakness that makes some of his rants tedious to listen to and undermines the show's quality.)

Perhaps worst of all, as the guest roster grew to include more junior league Hannity wannabes, fewer and fewer guests came on who really had something meaningful to offer. Comedians, once a staple of the show, largely faded from the guest roster. By the time I dropped my subscription to Carolla's show, it had been months since I had heard Dana Gould or Greg Fitzsimmons or any other comics on the show. While I get that it may not be possible to bring in one time staples like Joel McHale--he's grown too big for the show, of course--it would have helped immensely if Carolla's staff had made the effort to connect with the next round of up and coming entertainers, instead of bringing in people who just had a book to sell, or a political axe to grind (or most likely, both at the same time).

That lack of entertaining guests, I think, points to the tragic truth of why I had to dump Carolla's show: it had just gotten so boring. Each episode played out with such a sameness to it; the same rants, the same characterizations of the same people, a sameness to the tone of Alison Rosen's news...hell, even Bryan Bishop's drops--long an entertaining staple of the show--had grown repetitive and stale. The Adam Carolla Show has become, to use the hosts own oft-applied expression, fucked out.

Is there a larger implication in this act of mine? Probably not. I doubt that others are feeling the same way about the show as I do. The show still rides high on the iTunes charts, and once they're hooked, people will keep listening to/watching the same damn show for years regardless of quality. (For example, just look at all the ridiculously long-running series on TV these days.)

And now that I think about it, I'm not even sure my abandoning the ACS reflects any real change in myself beyond, perhaps, a sense that I no longer have time to waste on anything not really interesting to me. I don't seem to have missed the show since I formally stopped listening and deleted all the downloaded shows. (I have also deleted his website from my "Sausage Factory" at right; I can't in good conscience provide a link to a product I won't listen to myself.)

I guess all I'm really saying is, things change. A lesson none of us may have needed, but one that should not go unheeded. So it goes.