Gotham Diary:
Body Jersey
9 January 2014

What bothers me most about Chris Christie is the general failure, among a majority of New Jersey voters, to recognize the man’s unfitness for public office. This has nothing to do with his stated political views or the kinds of programs that he would like to see enacted. He is not unfit, that is, simply by virtue of being a conservative Republican. It is something else altogether. It has something to do with bullying, with throwing his weight behind actions that only those in political power can take.

What’s interesting about many of these actions is that they’re not necessary or useful to the bully; they don’t further the cause or advance the program. All too often, they betray a lack of judgment that exudes the locker-room stink of aggressive insecurity. The Watergate break-in is a classic example. Nixon was leading in the polls and had nothing much to learn from “intel” about what the other side was planning for the election campaign. More recently — right now — in Turkey, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, still a very popular leader, makes self-defeating moves against his political opponents, apparently for no better reason than to demonstrate that he can. Such men are surrounded by loyal retainers who, in Ian Kershaw’s phrase, “work toward the Führer.” They ask themselves, what would the boss like me to do here? This is how the trouble starts. It metastasizes when the boss decides to protect the retainer who has laid an egg. Faced with an embarrassing situation, the boss flails in confusion, his brain flooded by conflicting, but not contradictory, moods: You are supreme! You are vulnerable!

Whether Nixon or Mr ErdoÄŸan was prone by nature to succumb to this confusion, it is pretty clear from the discourse of Governor Christie that aggressive insecurity is a defining characteristic. The governor’s response to the Fort Lee fiasco seems to parallel the decision-making that led a Port Authority executive to block local access to the George Washington Bridge. Because the governor was supreme in the land, one of his lieutenants reasoned, a dissident such as the Mayor of Fort Lee must be punished. Except, of course, that it was the residents of Fort Lee, not the mayor, who suffered, and the vindictive act turned out to be a clumsy mistake. The governor’s first response was one of supremacy: he dismissed complaints with any argument he could think of, including the ridiculous proposition that the blockage was a traffic-planning test. Now that the mechanics of working-toward-the-Führer have come to light, the governor bewails his vulnerability: he was duped! What the blockage and the governor’s response to the ensuing scandal share is a lack of commitment to clear thinking.

In 1908, a new phrase came into usage: “body English.” It denotes “a bodily action after throwing, hitting, or kicking a ball, intended as an attempt to influence the ball’s trajectory,” according to the Internet. You don’t hear it much anymore, although as I recall it came up often during my very brief law-school fling with pinball machines. Body English is usually unconscious, but it is always pointless. I propose adapting this phrase for political use. Let’s call it “body Jersey.” And let’s agree that men and women who lack the self-awareness and self-control to resist the body Jersey impulse don’t belong in politics.

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In this week’s New Yorker, Evan Osnos writes about the renewed prestige enjoyed by Confucius in today’s China. He is quick to point out the highly mediated quality of this prestige, which renders Confucius a kind of Colonel Sanders of wisdom, complete with smiley-face popularizations by the likes of Yu Dan. “Unlimited possibility leads to chaos,” Yu tells Osnos, because you don’t know where to go or what to do.”

We must rely on a strict system to resolve problems. As citizens, our duty is not necessarily to be perfect moral persons. Our duty is to be law-abiding citizens.

On balance, I take this to be a distinctly un-Confucian remark, but it ought to surprise no one that a compilation of sage statements put together over two millennia ago is open to interpretation. A great deal of what Confucius has to say strikes me as completely passé, especially his understanding of relationships, predicated as it is upon thoroughgoing inequality. I respond keenly to his injunction to “rectify the names,” to call things by their proper names — in short, to be clear about what is going on. But Confucius is not best approached as an authority figure. Osnos writes that Confucius “never imagined that he would become an icon.” He was clearly an inspiring speaker; that is why his remarks were collected by his disciples. But he would be better honored by a new book of wisdom, a collection of contemporary observations. It would be a handbook of everyday counsel for intelligent people, designed not to illuminate anyone’s inner life but to help differing people share the same world. It would have the force not of law — Confucius was suspicious of laws, and in any case we’ve already got more than we need — but, more powerfully, of convention.

I don’t know how Analects came to be the title by which Westerners know the most personal of Confucian texts. The word comes from the Greek for “to pick up,” and, if the connection seems obscure, I encountered a stray ray of enlightenment a few weeks ago while reading somewhere about a Roman servant called the “analecta,” whose job it was to sweep crumbs off the dining table. (The Chinese, Lun Yu, means, roughly, “selected sayings,” and is as plain as “analects” is arcane.) I suppose there would be no harm in calling my proposed update The New Analects, especially if “crumbs” figured in the subtitle. But would you file “body Jersey” under “B” or “J”?