We'd Surely Have Heard

Ten years or so after Al Gore began a countdown to irreversible climate disaster, David French penned a noxious little squib in National Review, drawing attention to Gore's earlier pronouncement. What was French's point? That a decade had passed, and the planet was still here. So much for Gore's doomsday clock, he crowed.

The rest of the piece was devoted to a nonsensical ad hominem. Didn't you know: Al Gore flies around the country in planes! So much for his carbon-free bona fides! Like all argumentative appeals to hypocrisy -- the famous tu quoque -- this is a decidedly self-defeating move. Are we admitting, David French, that carbon emissions are bad? That we shouldn't fly around in planes? Therefore climate change is a serious problem?

A Lost Leader

Browsing a book of classic English poems as a teenager, which I'd found on my parents' shelves, one gem in particular stood out to me -- and has remained in my mind ever since. It was Robert Browning's "The Lost Leader." Unlike many of the other poems I tried to auto-didactically force upon myself at that age, I did not have to pretend I found this one interesting. I knew at once what it was about, without having to pore over the words. I knew the sentiments, the stirring inward sensation of righteousness and betrayal, that had provoked Browning into writing it. I knew them well, because those feelings were my own.

On the most immediate level, of course, the poem is about Wordsworth. It is devoted to condemning him, in plain enough words, for having deserted the political left. Browning was deploring the great Romantic poet of the earlier generation for having become -- in later life -- an arch conservative and pillar of the Establishment, despite having been, as Shelley wrote in a poem on the same theme, the one-time prophet of English radicalism -- the unacknowledged legislator who had "weave[d]/ Songs consecrate to truth and liberty[.]"

All Changed, Changed Utterly

I feel like something is happening. A switch was turned. The lights came on. There are suddenly a lot of finest moments going around. Nancy Pelosi had one. Mitt Romney had one. The Lawfare podcast Rational Security certainly had one. Through forty-five minutes of an usually short, abrupt episode, they were on fire. This was the historical moment a podcast like Rational Security was made for.

Listening to it was when my moment came. I too was transformed. Up until I heard it, I was still thinking about the Trump/Ukraine story as something like a permutation of all the abuses and corruption that had come before. "Just another instance of his complicity in election interference." I was trying to think of how the case might be constructed that this violated campaign finance laws.

Art and Context

A friend was telling me recently about a YouTube prank, in which the jokesters took a few generic IKEA wall-art prints or floor rugs—each with a factory-produced abstract design—and mounted them as if they were great works of contemporary art. They then proceeded to ask passing connoisseurs for their estimates of the prices of the masterworks in question. The figures quoted were astronomical, and many a would-be judge of artistic merit pronounced the IKEA prints as showing great signs of genius.

Most of us will chuckle when we hear this—partly with delight at the idea of showing up those we imagine to be poseurs, but also with the guilty thought, "better them than us." I suspect the vast majority of us, after all, would be just as likely to fail the prank's test. Even if we fancy ourselves somewhat "up on" art, we are probably more than capable of confusing an unfamiliar work of abstract expressionism —if we are told that's what it is—with an industrially-produced IKEA rug (which are, after all, designed by former art students just as museum art is).

A Poem

What I find most unforgivable about the high modern Greats

Whether Possum, Auden, Cummings, or His Royal Magus Yeats

Is how later Cold War liberals swooned o’er their purplest pessimisms

Saying forsooth! they’d foreseen Stalin Trotsky and all our totalistic schisms!

Oh ye woosiest prophets and chroniclers, ye quacks of doom, take note

Examine the true thought-odysseys of the prescient Cassandras you quote

Heed that each of them when it counted was irretrievably duped

By whatever biggest totalism had just by him, waving, trooped.

Falling Out

In one of the many extraordinary footnotes in his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James appends a story that confirms his opinion that "conversion" comes in many forms. If the gaining or losing of religious faith offers the prototypical form of the experience, and the Protestant narrative of irresistible grace its ur-text, there are nonetheless a thousand other human experiences of forming and forsaking convictions that have since been modeled on it.

Thus, James writes: "I subjoin an additional document which has come into my possession, and which represents in a vivid way what is probably a very frequent sort of conversion, if the opposite of 'falling in love,' falling out of love, may be so termed." He goes on to quote at length from a young man's account, as he describes how he first developed an obsessive attraction to another person—and eventually snapped out of it. "The queer thing," he writes, "was the sudden and unexpected way in which it all stopped."

Pedantries

I was listening recently to a beloved Ken Jennings podcast, and I --along with the rest of the listening universe -- could not help but notice that his co-host (the also beloved John Roderick) kept pronouncing the name of the familiar brand of canned pasta-and-tomato-sauce-based-food-stuffs -- bizarrely -- as "Scabettios." I had to rewind and play it back twice to be sure I'd heard correctly. There was no mistaking it. Scabettios.

I wasn't sure if this was an inside joke or a slip of the tongue. I was certain that Ken would eventually explain it to us, if John offered no rationale. I waited. John said it again. Ken did nothing. One could almost hear him contemplating an intervention and deciding against it. John said it again. Scabettios. Still, Ken said nothing. John must have done it five or six times before finally Ken weighed in. "Why are you calling it Scabettios?" he asked.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall