Monday, March 18, 2024

The Horror in the Heart of Farce

 Michael Kruse published a great essay in Politico yesterday, describing how Trump uses humor to make his extreme views and misbehavior more palatable to his audience. Trump has been described many times as more an entertainer than a politician, and it can't be denied that he has the beats and timing of an accomplished comedian. As Kruse's article points out, his rallies often have more the feel of an off-color stand-up routine than a stump speech. And as the piece goes on to observe, Trump is not unique in this regard. It's a tactic that has been deployed by other demagogues before him. 

The strategy has also proved remarkably effective. On paper, after all, Trump's alleged crimes are horrifying (he has conspired to subvert a federal election; he has compromised the nation's security by willfully retaining classified documents, etc.). No less appalling are Trump's openly-avowed plans for the future: his commitment to building new detention camps, his promise of retribution against his political opponents, his pledge to carry out a mass deportation campaign that would rip apart communities. But by making a punchline of it all, it just... doesn't seem real. 

Vladimir Chichikov

 Over the weekend, Vladimir Putin sailed to victory in yet another "election" with a predetermined outcome. Among the various red flags that this was not in fact what any of us should consider a "free and fair" vote were that the leading opposition figure recently died while serving time on political charges in a Russian prison, most other forms of overt criticism of Putin's regime have been criminalized and silenced, and international observers were not allowed in most locations to monitor the polls. 

Yet, as an article in Politico makes clear, perhaps the most glaring indicator of the bogus nature of this process was the fact that the vote totals in some areas did not match the actual population count. The conclusion was unmistakable: in Putin's Russia, the dead rose up to vote. 

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Fear of Immortality

 The centerpiece of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things is his extended argument against the possibility of an afterlife. The great expositor of the Epicurean system tells us that much of our misery in life stems from our fear of immortality. If only we would realize that our life spans are necessarily finite, then—he argues—we would appreciate that all suffering must naturally have an end, and that whatever did or did not happen to us while we were alive can have no meaning to us once we are no longer here. It is only theological systems that threaten us with eternal existence that would deny us this comfort, and so—in Lucretius's telling—if we can persuade ourselves that these systems cannot possibly be true, then life (and the afterlife too) would hold no more terror for us. 

In other words, Lucretius holds out the same hope that the poets and novelists have often referred to, when contemplating the suffering of life. Death, more than one has contended, is the ultimate commutation of life's sentence. If existence offers us no other balm, it at least promises this: all suffering must have an ultimate terminus, because all life has a terminus. At some point, as Thomas Hardy puts it, the gods must finish their sport with their victims. "All life death does end," Gerard Manley Hopkins writes—and calls this promise the only "comfort serves in a whirlwind." And Algernon Charles Swinburne similarly urged us to take comfort from the fact that the dead "rise up never," and that "even the weariest river/ Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

Friday, March 15, 2024

Making the Cut

 The great Benjamin Wittes—of Lawfare and Rational Security 1.0 fame—just put out a Substack post sharing the happy news that he has finally made the list of Americans sanctioned by Russia for activities opposing Putin's war. 

Wittes has spent the past two years hoping for just such an honor. He has traveled to capital cities around the globe in order to project messages denouncing Putin's invasion and war crimes onto the walls of various Russian embassies. He had written previously that the highest validation of his efforts he could receive would be for Putin's government to publicly acknowledge in some way that he had at least succeeded in annoying them. Now, by appearing on the list of sanctioned individuals barred from traveling to Russia, he has finally achieved that. 

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Lucretian Physics

 I've been reading On the Nature of Things this week, and it must be said that Lucretius is hit-or-miss in the extent to which his physical theories have stood the test of time. Some aspects of his physics have not aged well. For instance, he seems to contemplate that the sun may have to be reignited each morning at dawn, in order to complete its heavenly journey before vanishing in the sea (even though other passages refer to the "antipodes," showing that Lucretius was no flat-earther). 

More plausibly, though no more correctly, he believes that sound is produced by emitting particles from the vocal cords that must reach the ears of strangers, in order to be heard, rather than being transmitted by means of a wave. And he seems to entertain, in at least one passage, that darkness may not be merely the absence of light—but the presence of a kind of murky haze or smoke. Something like the "black air" that figures in the theories of Flann O'Brien's fictional crank scientist De Selby

Sunday, March 10, 2024

No Trust

 The progress of our civilization seems to be inseparable from the parallel growth in the arts of deception. Each new increase in economic efficiency and the speed of communications in our history has brought with it new opportunities for criminals to scam and gull the unwary. We still use the term "wire fraud" to describe the galaxy of interrelated crimes made possible by the growth of new forms of communication in the twentieth century, for instance. 

And even before that, the archetype of the con artist, the grifter, seemed inseparable from the American ideal of social and geographic mobility. I wrote glowingly on this blog, in a recent post, about how in America—compared to my recent two-week stint in England—I feel free to "define myself how I choose. Here, my future and destiny are my own to make." But the dark corollary of that same freedom may be an instability of self—an increased capacity for disguise. If people can be whoever they want to be; does that risk turning us into a nation of imposters? 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

Deontological Welfare

 Earlier this week, the City of San Francisco made headlines nationwide by enacting a series of right-leaning ballot measures. The incongruity made for good copy in newsrooms far removed from the Bay Area: here was the country's most liberal city enacting measures that rolled back welfare protections. A friend of mine who was in a position to actually vote on these measures insisted, however, that some at least of the real policy issues at stake were more complicated than the simplistic headlines would suggest. 

He called me up earlier in the week, while considering these measures, and asked for my opinion on the drug screening one. The measure, in his telling, was designed to identify welfare recipients at risk of substance abuse disorder, and direct them to public services. He felt genuinely torn about whether or not this was a good idea. "What's the confusion?" I asked. "It's some sort of conservative anti-welfare thing. Evil. Bad. Vote no. I don't see the dilemma."