THE SEARCH: We don't exactly agree with Van Jones!

MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2024

Except, in one way, we do: Long ago and far away, Binx Bolling was involved in "the search." For the record, Bolling was a fictional person. He was the main character of a highly regarded novel.

We were in college at the time. Full disclosure! We never could get to the end of the (widely acclaimed) book, although our girlfriend did.

We believe we may have been assigned the text in a course in 1969. But who was Binx Bolling, and what was the novel?

Below, you see what may be the most pompous thumbnail account the leading authority has ever produced:

The Moviegoer

The Moviegoer is the debut novel by Walker Percy, first published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in 1961. It won the U.S. National Book Award. Time included the novel in its "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005." In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Moviegoer sixtieth on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century.

The novel is heavily influenced by the existentialist themes of authors like Søren Kierkegaard, whom Percy read extensively. Unlike many dark didactic existentialist novels (including Percy's later work), The Moviegoer has a light poetic tone. It was Percy's first, most famous, and most widely praised novel, and established him as one of the major voices in Southern literature. The novel also draws on elements of Dante by paralleling the themes of Binx Bolling's life to that of the narrator of the Divine Comedy.

In addition to its existentialist character, the novella is also deeply phenomenological.

At the time, we may have missed the way The Moviegoer drew on elements of Dante. As regards Binx Bolling's search, the authority tells us this:

Plot summary

The Moviegoer tells the story of Jack "Binx" Bolling, a young stockbroker in postwar New Orleans. The decline of tradition in the Southern United States, the problems of his family and his traumatic experiences in the Korean War have left him alienated from his own life. He daydreams constantly, has trouble engaging in lasting relationships, and finds more meaning and immediacy in cinema and literature than in his own routine life.

The loose plot of the novel follows the Moviegoer himself, Binx Bolling, in desperate need of spiritual redemption. At Mardi Gras, he breaks out of his caged everyday life and launches himself on a journey, a quest, in a "search" for God. Without any mental compass or sense of direction, he wanders the streets of New Orleans' French Quarter, and Chicago, and then travels the Gulf Coast, interacting with his surroundings as he goes. He has philosophical moments, reflecting on the people and things he encounters on the road. He is constantly challenged to define himself in relation to friends, family, sweet-hearts, and career despite his urge to remain vague and open to possibility.

"What is the nature of the search?" you ask. Really it is very simple; at least for a fellow like me. So simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

The italicized material is from the text of the book itself, in which Bolling serves as narrator. As you can see, Binx Bolling was sunk in "everydayness," but he was trying to stage a "search."

(We're starting to remember! The young not-quite-a professor sent our girlfriend's term paper off to Walker Percy himself, whom he may have known. And Percy himself wrote back!)

We ourselves were busy stopping a war, but that's a whole other story. As for Bolling, he was involved in a search—or perhaps, he was involved in a search for a search, in a flailing attempt to follow in the footsteps of the northern writer who had once described his own search in this famous manner:

Walden; or, Life in the Woods

[...]

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. 

Something like that! For the record, Walden is full of literary allusions too, Dante no doubt among them.

Percy wrote in 1961; Thoreau had written long before that. Now we're engaged once again in a great civil war—and our own Blue America, or at least so we say, is involved in a type of a search.

At least as a matter of theory, we want to know how it is that we lost an election to Donald J. Trump! In truth, we didn't lose this year's election by much—and the numbers haven't changed a great deal from where they stood the first time he ran. 

The numbers haven't changed all that much! Here are the numbers from Trump's first campaign, and from the campaign in which he finally managed to win the popular vote:

Nationwide popular vote, 2016
Hillary Clinton (D): 65,853,514 (48.2%)
Donald J. Trump (R): 62,984,828 (46.1%)

Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024 
Donald J. Trump (R): 77,300,739 (49.80%)
Kamala Harris (D): 75,014,534 (48.33%)

At least at the Cook Report, this year's numbers seem to be holding. Quite a few more people voted this time—155.2 million compared to 136.7 million back in 2016. 

But by that account, Trump lost the nationwide vote in 2016 by 2.1 percentage points. He won the nationwide vote this year by a bit less than 1.5 points.

Especially given the craziness of the events which led to President Biden's withdrawal, that isn't a giant change in nationwide voter sentiment. But as Red American spear-chuckers insist that Trump won in "a landslide" this year, that relatively minor change has created a world in which those of us in Blue America are conducting a type of search, or at least we're attempting or pretending to do so.

How did we ever lose to that guy? It's a very sound question! It was already a very sound question back in 2016, when he came within 2.1 points of winning the nationwide popular vote.

Meanwhile, this:

Many of us in Blue America can't seem to think of a single reason why any decent person would ever have voted for Candidate Trump—and so an ersatz search is on, in which we seek an answer to that question. 

Some of us seem inclined to say that his voters are all "just deeply racist." Given the way we humans are wired, such assessments may sometimes feel good. 

On Saturday, though, CNN's Van Jones came up with a massively different assessment, the result of his own ongoing search.

For almost an hour, Jones spoke with Chris Cillizza, creating this videotape for Cillizza's Substack site. Over at Newsweek, Rachel Dobkin is only two years out of college, but as she starts her report on what was said, she basically gets it right:

Donald Trump Is 'Smarter' Than All His Critics—Former Obama Adviser

Van Jones, an ex-adviser to former President Barack Obama and current CNN political commentator, said on Friday that President-elect Donald Trump is "smarter" than all his critics.

That's basically what Jones said!  Below, you see a fuller chunk of his presentation:

JONES (12/14/24): I mean the problem is, you have a framework in your mind: "How can Donald Trump? How can Donald Trump? How can Donald Trump?" 

Guys, can we cut it out? Donald Trump is not an idiot. Let me just be very clear. Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all of his critics. 

You know how I know? Because he has the White House, the Senate, the House—

CILLIZZA: Totally agree.

JONES: —the Supreme Court, the popular vote. 

That's a small part of what was said.  You can see that part of the conversation at roughly the 29-minute mark of the Cillizza videotape.

At this point, we ourselves want to be clear! If we're take Jones to be speaking literally, we don't agree with what he said, or at least we don't agree with it totally. 

Putting it another way, that isn't the framework we'd apply in conducting this important search.

Is former candidate Donald J. Trump "smarter" than everyone else? We wouldn't assess the incoming president in terms of "smarts" at all.

Having said that, we'll also say this:

We strongly agree with one part of what Jones says as he continues. As a general matter, we Blues just haven't been especially smart as we conduct our current search, or as we pretend or attempt to do so. 

We wouldn't describe the incoming president as being especially "smart." But we would follow Jones is saying this:

We'd have to say that those of us in Blue America haven't been super-smart at all.

Citizen Thoreau wasn't always especially kind in assessing his Middlesex County neighbors. "Men [sic] labor under a mistake," he said at the start of his famous book. Also, "The mass of men [sic] live lives of quiet desperation."

Those weren't complimentary comments. He even threw this in:

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man,—you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind,—I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.

That was in his famous book's first chapter! And yet, history, by universal agreement, speaks well of this younger man's famous search.

Blue America is trying to figure why anyone would have voted for a person like Trump. In our view, the reasons go on and on and on and on, and then they go on some more. 

In our view, one miracle of this year's election lies in the fact he won the nationwide vote by so slender a margin.

With respect to what we Blue Americans may have done, down through the years, to let Trump peel away all those votes, we think Jones is conducting a valuable search. Tomorrow, we'll show you more of what he said when he spoke with Cillizza.

Still coming, a gentler version of that same assessment from former president Bill Clinton. Also, as to why we Blues perhaps can't see our own Blue nation's occasional lack of clothes, we will offer you this.

Tomorrow: Frustrated remarks by Jones