Professor Cogito or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Ceiling

All fears that the nation today would fail to avert financial apocalypse should be laid quietly to rest. (Though this still leaves biblical apocalypse open for October). A new law to raise the debt ceiling has been passed, yet few soothsayers in the Beltway could really have doubted its passage. The lead-up to those eleventh-hour negotiations, a rather convenient bit of suspense in any political drama, was remarkable not simply for the intransigence of both sides, but for its theatricality. In staging this battle, congressional leaders proved themselves more invested in the narrative of their conflict with each other, than in the future of the country. What shall we call it? Unscrupulous political dramaturgy.

What shall we call the resulting compromise? A farce.

Lucian Freud Has Died

As told by one of his models:

The artist with the all too penetrating gaze, Lucian Freud, has died. What his eyes saw in the human form, his hands rendered, not as Michaelangelo or Titian had done -- that is, with a newborn reverence for the human body -- but more probingly, in long sessions, under the shadow of the first half of the twentieth century. What his portraiture revealed was his subjects' own stark humanity, shorn of grace in a graceless world.

Many years ago, I sat for my own portrait in Lucian's studio. If I remember correctly, the work lasted six months. But I rather enjoyed the time I spent with him. The man had a genius for story-telling and often regaled me, as I lay naked on a bed, with wonderful anecdotes and reminiscences. Of the early, hungry days in the East End, he had great picaresque tales. (I seem to remember a string of encounters with a devious landlord). Of artist friends, he was generous and kind; of predecessors, most discriminating, though often brazenly iconoclastic. (He had, for example, no mercy for the pre-Raphaelites). When I wasn't laughing, I was looking back at him, into his eyes, which I imagined always saw more than I saw in myself, at times seemed almost remorseless.

When Lucian first showed me my portrait, I nearly recoiled from it, much as Dorian Gray had from his decaying likeness. Though I'd seen and known other of his works, it almost never occured to me, at least not while I lay there and listened to him, that I could be exposed to the same scrutiny. But there I was, all of myself, swathed in nothing but the flesh tones of my body, lying uneasily on a bed. And in my anxious gaze, the faint recognition that I had never been so naked.

Something unlikely

It is unlikely for a tradesman to have the name Thornton Stanwick III. If a plumber introduces himself with that name, you could be certain that he has escaped from somewhere and is eagerly expected back. In the rare instance that Thornton Stanwick III really is a plumber, then you might wonder what tower of glory he has fallen from, how he came to his present condition, and what the other Thornton Stanwicks would say about him. Moreover, what on earth would possess someone to name a child Thornton Stanwick?