Photo of the Day: Deer Seen From Highway, NJ

I took the photo accompanying this post from my bus window, on the way home from New York, off I-95 in Northern New Jersey. The frightening thing, though, is that in the last couple of years, the same photo could have been taken far closer to home—even right on my street.

Until recently, I had never seen deer so often and so close to where I live. It illustrates an ecosystem badly out of whack.

Deer, like the one in this photo with her young, are sweet, beautiful animals. But I fear for their safety—and ours—in such large numbers and in such close proximity. 

More traffic accidents involving deer are likely to occur (just this past week, in Bergen County, I saw deer carcasses just off the road on Routes 4 and 17), and, watching the plight of good friends of mine, I worry about the spread of Lyme disease in this area.

A few weeks ago, area officials were supposed to meet in my town, Englewood, to consider a regional approach to controlling the deer population, according to this article in The Northern Valley Press. This situation has been years in the making, and it’s a shame that it has taken this long just to hash out options for dealing with it. We area residents had better hope that a comprehensive, humane way can be developed to ensure this problem does not dramatically worsen.

Quote of the Day (Russell Baker, on Summer)

“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Russell Baker (1925-2019), “Observer: The Strangest Shores,” The New York Times, June 27, 1965

Photo of the Day: Yoga in the Rain, Times Square, NYC

The last couple of years, when the first day of summer rolls around, I’ve gotten used to seeing Solstice in Times Square. I’ve smiled indulgently as hundreds of bodies, even as they meditate in leader-leg yoga sessions at the crossroads of the world, twist their bodies into shapes I would not dare try lest I suddenly discover a muscle I didn’t know I had by wrenching it.

Doing all of that on a really, really warm day is not what I’m accustomed to doing. But heck, could this be what these practitioners have in mind when they talk about “hot yoga”?

But that practice took on what I could only think of as sadism this morning on my way to work. Not only were hundreds of people out around 9 in the morning, but they were doing so when the day was still rather humid. 

Worse than that, the weather was, as it seemed to have been most of this week, rainy. And here everyone was, squatting on the ground again amid a steady, dispiriting drizzle.

What was this, a new form of capital punishment?

Quote of the Day (Robert Benchley, on His Morning Torture by Pigeons)

“Although I live in the middle of a very large city, I am awakened every morning by a low gurgling sound which turns out to be the result of one, two, or three pigeons walking in at my window and sneering at me. Granted that I am a fit subject for sneering as I lie there, possibly with one shoe on or an unattractive expression on my face, but there is something more than just a passing criticism in these birds making remarks about me. They have some ugly scheme on foot against me, and I know it. Sooner or later it will come out, and then I can sue.”—American humorist and film actor Robert Benchley (1889-1945), “Down with Pigeons,” in The Best of Robert Benchley (1983)

Quote of the Day (Alan Brinkley, on Historians’ Treatment of Conservatism)

“While historians have displayed impressive powers of imagination in creating empathetic accounts of the past, they have seldom done so in considering the character of conservative lives and ideas.” —Columbia University professor of history Alan Brinkley (1949-2019), “The Problem of American Conservatism,” American Historical Review, April 1994

The history department at Columbia University was one of the principal factors attracting me to the school in the late 1970s. Looking back on my four years being taught by its excellent faculty, I have no regrets whatsoever.

Well, okay, maybe one. Because he didn’t arrive at Morningside Heights until nearly a decade after my graduation, I never had a chance to take a course with or even attend a lecture by Alan Brinkley.

Brinkley—who died on Monday at age 70—quickly became one of the university’s most acclaimed teachers, and even, despite his professed distaste for academic administration, even provost of the school for a couple of years.

His influence on a generation at the university, then, was considerable. But so was his impact on how historians came to view liberalism, conservatism, and the catastrophe that redefined these movements for nearly the next century: the Great Depression.

Brinkley’s article for American Historical Review might not have significantly kick-started the intensive study of conservatism that has occurred in the last two decades (surely, the electoral success of Ronald Reagan might have had something to do with that). 

But it instilled a sense in academe that conservatism should be examined in all its varieties, with at least something approaching the same rigor and seriousness accorded liberalism.

But Brinkley had already exerted influence early in his career through his first book, Voices of Protest (1982), an outgrowth of his doctoral thesis that ended up winning him the National Book Award for history. 

Though conceived as an analysis of two populist movements of the past—Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth Society and Fr. Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice—it should be read now as a warning of the discontents with the latent potential to disrupt the American political landscape that was finally realized in the last Presidential race:

“This casual mingling of themes commonly associated with opposite political poles did not originate with the Long and Coughlin movements; nor did it end with them. The populists, from whom both men derived so much ideological strength, had exhibited similar contradictions; so did later political phenomena: the George Wallace movement of the 1960s and the New Right of the 1980s, which combined populist rhetoric with cultural conservatism. Underlying all such movements in varying degrees has been a common impulse: the fear of concentrated power, the traditional American resistance to being governed—whether by private interests or by public institutions.”

And this sentence seems especially ominous: 

“Were these many protest movements to unite into a single force, they might be capable of toppling the entire structure of traditional party politics."