The Imagined Meritocracy, Rosy Muniment

Everyone has their own views on James. To Ellen Moody he was an aggressive lover of other men; to Sheldon Novick he was coy about homosexual practices. Others believe he was a tortured celibate; this also applies to the lens we bring to the text.-- the spastic dowager

When I raised my voice in transmission to Gregory Zacharias about my weariness in the role of the good lieutenant, perhaps I should have paused to reflect on why I always find myself in the uniform. I have been trying to revise, simply revise, a poem of mine which I like. It sits in my strongest manuscript which I am attempting to take out of moth balls and put it back into the contest circuit. Since the title of the poem is appropriate to cite in anticipation of this evening's spectacle, I will feed it to you: "A Festive Independence". Do you see what the immediacy of the digital age has done to those of us who had some sense of tranquility before it? As a member of the Henry James Society, until the early summer of 2014, I am now coddling the aggrieved ego of the non academic acolyte, and have done so in an attempted sympathy, with doubts in the back of my mind as to whether or not I didn't make things worse. I take no quarrel with Lionel Trilling's attempted rescue of The Princess Casamassima. Lionel's knowledge illuminates Henry's motives for the novel, but here, James's masterful ambiguity fails him, because anarchy is not amendable to the qualities of the fairy tale. Hyacinth is almost a protean transvestite for his beauty, and little convincing as the man in the middle between zealotry and aesthetic appreciation, and yet I think of James at his most invested in his middle years, his most cynical, trying to keep his creations, the doll-like Rosy, from "blowing her brains out." This is how the narrator leaves the poor girl, dreaming of aristocratic finesse and their vivid estates. Yet James did disability cultural a favor by pitting Rosy in a dialogical contest with the fabled Tiny Tim, because we have two extremes on the spectrum, pity, and the tyranny of guilt.

Every time I reveal that cerebral palsy necessitates dependence on my power chair, and that I am one of those in poverty who Henry James varnishes in semi-gloss, affluent white males, either in the vigor of their public roles, (Niall Ferguson), or in looking to me for assertive sympathy, convey the same sentiments, the same sorrow for my *situation*. Perhaps I am better off that Greg assumes the posture that I'm a disruptive force.

This certainly applies to Edward Snowden's mortal fear. Dana balances the bone stuck in my throat, and though I rarely agree with any columnists opinion in its entirety, Milbank touches upon the crux of the problem. Snowden's paranoia about Obama is overblown; Snowden's cowardice flies in the face of the gravity of his actions. Outsourcing security clearances to USIS represents the real problem, more so than whether or not his ass is fried. I'd contend, even if Snowden evades the executive branch for the time being, his ass is fried anyway, but you cannot run the CIA on absolutist free market models.