"This is a sacred place."

So said Dave Douglas, the jazz trumpet player, in the middle of his in-between-song banter last night.

It was the first time I had heard any such statement made about a music venue. Normally, it would seem like a ridiculous and perhaps sacrilegious thing to say. But I doubt anyone in the audience was surprised to hear this asserted about the Village Vanguard.

You can hear a complete concert here — the same group and venue, from earlier last week.

Douglas described two of his songs as being about "November 2008 and the wonderful change that occurred in this country." Both of those songs — "The Presidents" and "Campaign Trail" — are on his latest album, A Single Sky. (The music on that album isn't actually representative of last night's show since it's performed by a big band.)

It was a great show, and the pianist, Uri Caine, was particularly magnificent. His solos were so adventurous they were practically little songs unto themselves. You wouldn't have guessed that his piano-playing was a major departure from the group's past: he played only keyboard (Fender Rhodes) in the group for almost 10 years and just recently switched to piano.

Uri Caine's albums based on Beethoven and Mozart would make great Christmas presents for anyone who likes classical and/or jazz music (not for me — I already have them). They're much better than I would have expected a jazzified version of Beethoven or Mozart to be.

Will the oath flub prompt law review editors to finally see the light on split verbs?

Steven Pinker wrote an op-ed in the New York Times* hypothesizing that Chief Justice John Roberts flubbed the presidential oath of office out of a desire to unsplit the split verb in the Constitution ("will faithfully execute").

I'm glad to see that the letters in response to the op-ed are coming down on the side of split verbs:

Thank you to Steven Pinker for demonstrating that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in administering the oath of office to Barack Obama, was likely tripped up by nothing more sinister than his own pedantry.

While adverbs like “faithfully” are usually movable within a sentence, clarity is best served when they are placed as close as possible to what they modify. When they modify a verb with an auxiliary, like “will execute,” you cannot get closer than between the two.

The prohibition against split verbs (as Chief Justice Roberts would probably put it) is not necessarily so.

Another letter writer shines a spotlight on law reviews:

My thanks to Steven Pinker for his denunciation of the so-called split infinitive rule. This rule, allied with its twin barbarism called the “split predicate rule,” has especially afflicted the prose of lawyers and legal scholars.

For decades, law review articles criticizing judicial decisions have included such convolutions as “the court adequately has failed to analyze ...”

The op-ed itself also discussed law reviews:

Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have “internalized the bogus rule so that they actually believe that a split verb should be avoided,” adding, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer distinguish alien speech from native speech.”

Frankly, I'm a little surprised that so much attention is being paid to a particular type of academic journal -- law reviews -- in the popular press. Is it really the case that this practice is mostly confined to law reviews? If so, that makes it all the more ridiculous for law review editors and authors to sheepishly obey a nonexistent rule.

When I was a law review editor, I sent an email asking if we could give ourselves permission to split a verb by placing an adverb between an auxiliary verb (like "have" or "will") and the main verb. (I wasn't even going to touch split infinitives, the most reviled type of split verb.) For instance, do we write, "They can already do so," or, "They already can do so"? The answer I got back was that we should write, "They already can do so" -- that is, not split the verb -- because this makes the writing more "formal." In other words, the phrasing is so awkward that you'd never come up with it spontaneously; thus, it's well-suited to an academic journal.

* You have me to thank for providing you with this link; the fusty old Times didn't see fit to actually link to the op-ed anywhere in the page of letters responding to it.


UPDATE: A Metafilter commenter has a different theory of what was going on in Roberts's mind -- and Obama's:

[O]ne cannot execute as president without reciting the oath word-for-word. Obama voted against the Supreme Court nomination of Roberts, and this is probably his way of getting back at him. It couldn't have been that hard to read it correctly, he was reading it off a sheet of paper! This was probably to create illegitimacy in the president, but Obama, the constitutional scholar that he is, caught it and gave him a "WTF" look.

Now he's really President.

He's signing stuff:

President Obama

We can finally say it without speaking in the future or conditional tense. This is America's first family now.

It's common whenever we get a new president to feel like "I can't believe that's our new president!" (That one!) There is some of that. But I've gotten so used to the idea of Obama as President that the whole thing feels inevitable -- it would have just weird if it had happened any other way.

With so many crises he has to face (and that's just counting the ones we're aware of today -- others that we're not anticipating will pop up in the future), he has a chance to be a great president or a failed president or anywhere in between. I voted for him thinking he'd probably be at least a "good" if not "great" president, but there's no way to know.

His critics will point out everything he does wrong saying that this proves that he's not a "messiah" after all -- but really, does anyone still view him as a messiah? There's no question he'll make some mistakes. The standard to judge him by isn't "messiah" -- if that's the standard you set for him, you're guaranteeing he'll fail. The standard is whether he does a better or worse job of fixing our enormous set of problems than the average president would have. But that question is so complex and unknowable that I don't feel able to judge.

SIDENOTE: This post inaugurates a new tag, one I've been waiting a long time to create: President Obama.


(Photo from President Obama's Flickr photostream.)

3 thoughts on Election Day 2008 (with photos of the Obama family watching the results)

(All these photos are from Obama's election night Flickr set.)


1. Considering that I've been supporting Obama since he announced his campaign in early 2007, I was surprised that my own reaction on the night of Election Day was muted. I had to tell myself, "You should be really excited." 

Maybe this is because I assumed he'd win, so I'd already gradually absorbed the news. 

Maybe it felt wrong to be gleeful about how America is transcending its history of prejudice on a night when California, of all states, deprived people of their right to marry who they want regardless of gender.

Maybe it's that Obama has such a facility at making you feel like you really know him personally that seeing him win was like seeing your friend become president. Sure you'd be happy for them, but you'd also be nervous about all the things that might go wrong.

2. Naturally, conservatives are debating what caused McCain to lose. This conversation between Jonah Goldberg and Ross Douthat -- taped a few days before Election Day under the assumption that Obama would win -- is a particularly thoughtful example.

How can they possibly figure this out? Wouldn't you need to run numerous experiments to determine what really caused the outcome? But since the circumstances of this election are unique, there's no way to perform even an approximation of a controlled experiment.

If you want the GOP to stay tethered to the right, you'll say McCain lost because of his history as a centrist maverick, which cast a shadow over any of his attempts to position himself as more traditionally conservative. If you'd like the GOP to become more moderate, you'll say he lost because he played too much to the Republican base; he should have just been his old self. You can avoid critiquing McCain in either direction by blaming it on all sorts of other factors -- the Bush administration's incompetence, the financial crisis, Obama's dastardly scheme to get young people excited about participating in democracy...

How can you choose between these theories in an intellectually honest way? Exit polls? But even those are flawed and offer only hints about how voters actually made up their minds.

People love to feel like they know why things happen. But can you really assume this when minds are involved?

3. No one again will be able to seriously doubt that America is ready for a black president -- or a female president.

Oh, people will make the same old, tired complaints. They'll say it doesn't count because he's not a "real" black person, whatever that means. And they'll play up Hillary Clinton's defeat as a crushing blow for women.

So let's remember that Obama won a decisive victory including would-be deep-red states like Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana. This happened despite massive race- and religion-based attacks on Obama that make the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988 seem dignified by comparison. (I'm including not just the official McCain campaign but also outsiders' campaigning that McCain tolerated.)

As for Hillary Clinton -- if you believe in treating women as adults who are the equals of men, then please give her enough respect to say she failed. She wasn't a passive, helpless victim. Out of the whole field of 20+ presidential candidates, who were mostly white men, she came in 2nd or 3rd overall. That's no injustice -- that's just the rough, adult world, where you try really hard and risk failure if you make too many mistakes. 

There are still groups that probably can't expect to have a fair shot at the presidency for a while -- gays, atheists, etc. But in the future, when a woman or a black person runs for president, we can fairly assume (without knowing to an absolute certainty) that the candidate himself or herself is the one who's responsible for the outcome, whether it's bad or good.

And this one's pretty good.

Obama !!!

Time to feel good about America again.