Baby Music

There is a line of withering criticism in Harold Schonberg's Lives of the Great Composers that has been scarred into my memory. Short and pungent, Schonberg's line writes off the entire twentieth century musical movement of minimalism—the movement that gave us Philip Glass and John Adams—as little more than (*gasp*) a "kind of baby music."

This line caused me instant grief and dismay, when I first read it. Because of course, I loved the first Philip Glass piece I ever heard, and have loved every other one since. How delightful!, I had thought. How palpably recognizable as music! If only all art compositions were this accessible. What an oasis we have here of simple repetitious pattern-making, after the great desert of 20th century atonal, twelve-tonal whatnot. 

I'm very angry about a beloved 1961 film

It is always an interesting experience to finally get around to seeing some famous, acclaimed, and beloved film and discover in the process how smug, awful, complacent, and dishonest it actually is. So it was with me turning for the first time to Blake Edwards' 1961 classic movie adaptation of the Truman Capote novella, with Audrey Hepburn, and with its heart-stabbing original musical number that brings unwilling tears to the eyes no matter how much one dislikes the rest of the film, and with very little else to recommend it. 

I'm not just talking here about the unwatchable racist and unfunny Mickey Rooney yellow-face scenes. Those are there, and they are just as terrible as one has heard, and they have already been justly criticized at length elsewhere; and anyways one might be able to suffer through them if there were something else in this movie that was tolerable to make up for them—as I fully thought and had been told there would be. There is not, as far as I can tell, apart perhaps from the inimitable transatlantic accent and rapid-fire diction of its heroine. 

Gaddis Annotations

As previously mentioned, I am making an attempt on the works of postmodern author William Gaddis of late, and—as forewarned in the previous post—next on my list was Gaddis' Carpenter's Gothic: his third novel, published in 1985, and thitherto his briefest. As others have noted, the book is a kind of condensation of the themes and obsessions that had appeared in his previous books (until, that is, these themes and obsessions were condensed over again in his posthumous Agapē Agape). 

I have not been tackling Gaddis's works in any kind of linear or chronological order—instead starting with his second novel J R, before moving on to his collected nonfiction, The Rush for Second Place, his short posthumous final novel, the aforementioned Agapē Agape, and coming round most recently to Carpenter's Gothic. 

Authors and Their Names

Authors and their names are confusing; no one would deny it. There's a Carver and a Coover, both of whose first names start with "R." There's a Joyce Kilmer, who wrote about trees, and a Joyce Cary, who wrote about the horse's mouth; and even though horses eat oats, neither of these individuals is Joyce Carol Oates. 

There's a Julian Barnes and a Nicholson Baker and a John Banville who will all be found rather close to one another on the shelf, at your local bookstore, and whose publication in later-20th century modern literary paperback format will fail to show much obvious visual grounds for differentiation. 

There's a Will Self, which sounds—and who sounds—like a Martin Amis character.

An exorcism

It was at some point in watching the images pour in from this weekend's MAGA protests in DC, reading about self-declared "Proud Boys" tear down and trample a Black Lives Matter sign, flashing each other three-fingered "white power" salutes along the way—any last flimsy pretense of there being a firewall between the President's MAGA movement and his most openly far-right, white supremacist supporters completely abandoned.... 

At some point in seeing this last most grotesque and dangerous mutation of the legendary Millennial unwillingness to grow up on display: these man-children who—as a friend of mine remarked with disbelief—"have named their group after a song that only appears in the Broadway version of the Disney Aladdin musical"... 

Be Secret and Exult/Mind the Merde

The other night, I happened to partake of a particularly delightful Vulture article by Rachel Handler, answering the questions that have crossed all our minds about the suddenly inescapable new series on streaming, Emily in Paris. The show—the latest from Sex and the City-creator Darren Star—has for whatever reason been aggressively marketed to me the last few months; each time I open Netflix its slick imagery and pastel colors confront me anew on the top banner. Either it's a demographic misfire, on the website's part, or it's a case of the algorithm knowing me better than I know myself—hard to say which. 

Probably the latter. Because, as much as I have managed not to watch the show, and promise myself I never will, it seems to have invaded my subconscious on the strength of silent imagery alone. I already found myself the other night waking from a particularly lucid nightmare—featuring me trapped in Paris, trying to buy something expensive at a clothing store, and discovering to my horror that my credit card had been declined. Whatever it is about this show that lodged in my brain, it is not something I have been able to assimilate to my conscious sense of self, but it appears to be potent nonetheless. 

Lords of the Earth

Earlier this week, Politico ran a piece pooling the thoughts of various thinkers and commentators on the American scene, collectively responding to the question of what Donald Trump's presidency says about us as a group—that is, the people of this country. While a multitude of explanations were offered for the Trump phenomenon, my mom—when she read the article—thought that there was an even more fundamental factor at work to which no one had given due credit: she argued that Trump's raging, vengeance-fueled base—seemingly so unaccountable in light of the fact that they are not actually among the worst off, that they enjoy many relative advantages in American society—is motivated most of all by a sense of disappointed expectations. 

The generation that makes up the hardest kernel of the Trump movement, my mom observed, is neither the oldest nor the youngest of those still among us. They are the great middle—those born too late to inherit the memory of the Great Depression and the sense of relief in its aftermath; and born too early to understand the pervading sense of impending crisis that many people in their thirties, twenties and younger take for granted. Instead, they were raised on the expectations set off by an unprecedented and perhaps unrepeatable epoch of economic growth and transformative social change: the American mid-twentieth century. 

"I think better of our legal system"

 So... the sitting U.S. president is actively trying to subvert the outcome of a free and fair election, just because he lost. We all know this. Yet, in my circles at least, we aren't really talking about it. A conspiracy of silence is maintained, though it sometimes—as this morning—breaks down, when Trump and his goons send up some particularly alarming trial balloon of authoritarianism, and we can't help but mention it to one another.

Why the hesitation to speak? We tell ourselves, it is because silence is the best strategic choice. To acknowledge Trump's bogus assertions, by contrast—even for purposes of refuting them—only gives them more oxygen. It lends credence to the idea that there is some real controversy as to the outcome of the election still, or that Trump has some realistic path to hold onto power. 

About that NYT UFO Story...

Over the last three years, the New York Times has published a series of embarrassingly credulous accounts of a U.S. government program investigating U.F.O. activity. The fact that such a program exists within the Defense Department is beyond dispute—it has received Congressionally-appropriated funds with a six-month reporting requirement—and the Times cannot be faulted for thinking this fact odd enough in itself to merit a write-up. But when the reporters start to describe what their sources have told them about the program's alleged findings, and to present these assertions as credible—that is where the eyebrows rise.

One of the more recent entries in the Times series, for instance—published over the summer—asserts that "[n]umerous associates of th[is] Pentagon program" believe not only that the military has encountered unexplained aerial phenomena that appear to perform feats that far exceed the current technological capacity of human societies: but even that the U.S. government has retrieved material from mysterious downed aircraft (at least some of it extraterrestrial in origin). Further, they claim that these materials contain technology and metallic alloys our scientists are not currently able to explain. 

Death in Venice/Death in America

Well! That passage certainly has taken on new resonance in light of current events. We are looking at a paragraph from Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (in the 2004 Michael Henry Heim translation). Mann's protagonist, Aschenbach, is here learning the truth about a rampant cholera epidemic in the city, which Venetian authorities have conspired to hush up out of fear it might disrupt the tourist trade—and all the enterprises that depend upon it. They are like Ron DeSantis telling people to get back in the bars and the Orlando theme parks in the middle of COVID-19 because he has an eye on the tax revenue. 

Back to Normal?

During the two years I worked in a church in the north Boston suburbs, I became close with two aged congregants who shared a remarkable past. Political refugees from the earliest waves of fascist persecution in central Europe, one of them had stories to tell of the shelling of Red Vienna's tenement blocks by the repressive Dollfuss; the other had braved the path of secret migration and exile to reach the United States. 

Lifelong left-wing intellectuals, they remained committed democratic socialists, and when the 2016 election happened, they were some of the few people in my life who were neither emotionally crushed nor particularly surprised. "You have to remember," one of them told me, "a large percentage of the people in any given society are absolute bastards."

Election Week 2020

Okay, one more...

... Brecht-elicited reflection on Trump before we break to go harvest some election results this evening.... So, you may recall a moment in the final debate when Trump was asked about his administration's family separation policy. He offered a lot of misleading information in response, testing out a number of possible lies to see how each looked after it landed. 

The kids weren't really traveling with their parents, he said; the Democrats are just as bad; we're trying to reunite them, etc. But then, after Biden had delivered his reply, Trump seemed to remember the crowning bleat of dishonesty that he had meant to deliver from the start: "They did it!" said Trump—meaning the Democrats; "We changed the policy. They did it. We changed." 

Another Resistible Rise

 In the closing days of such a high-stakes, world-historical election as this, one is wracked by fears that one has somehow still not done enough. One has not said enough to persuade one's compatriots; one has not written enough or marched enough. Even if one has spent four years filling a personal blog with rants against Trump, it still seems there are unappreciated dimensions of his terribleness. 

This, more than anything, accounts for the sudden spate of activity on this blog as we gallop across the finish line of the 2020 vote. I keep realizing that there are aspects of the Trump phenomenon that I have still left unexamined, and that this may be the last chance to do so when it can still make a difference to the outcome. 

Wake Me When It's Over

 Like millions of other Americans, I cannot get Donald Trump out of my brain. Not this weekend, at any rate. I sit down with family. We chat. We watch a show. As soon as it is paused, my look glazes over. My consciousness is instantly invaded once more by the man in the White House. I am wracked over again with loathing. Every second I do not keep up the stream of intentional distraction—the instant I turn off the spigot—the orange goblin comes stomping back in. What's going to happen on Tuesday? I think. What tricks is he going to pull? I am like Brecht in his incongruous California exile, wishing he could write of trees, but finding instead that his mind is full at every turn of "horror at the housepainter's speeches." (Kuhn/Constantine trans.)

All of this is made much worse, of course, by the fact that I know I ought to be thinking about nothing else. A society with two hundred plus years of democratic elections and peaceful transfers of power experiencing one of its most perilous, hair-raising moments—what exactly should a citizen be thinking about every second of the day, a few days before an election, apart from this? Thus, this particular obsession and rumination is harder to dismiss than the average debilitating panic. One cannot so easily write it off as unhealthy. It might very well be unhealthy: indeed, I'm sure it is. But it seems nonetheless obligatory. 

Lost Leader II

And so it appears that just as the Trump administration may be grinding at last to its operatic conclusion, the eerily parallel trajectory of Glenn Greenwald is experiencing its own Götterdämerung. Greenwald has now completed his transformation—begun during the Trump candidacy four years ago—from crusading civil liberties advocate into craven mouthpiece for Trump and Putin's propaganda. 

We watched him appear as a regular guest on Tucker Carlson. We saw him cited with approval by Russian state-owned media. It made our stomachs turn. We didn't want to believe it. Was this really the man who broke the Edward Snowden story? 

The Whole Animal

As long-time readers of this blog will know, I'm not one to always personally seek out the latest Ross Douthat column, but a friend yesterday put one directly in my path in a way that proved unavoidable. In this piece, Douthat explains his reasoning behind why he has decided (thank God) not to vote for Trump in 2020, but he wrestles as he does so (in a joking way) with the voice of what he calls his "right-wing id," which tries and ultimately fails to convince him that Trump's administration has fulfilled many of Douthat's own policy aspirations. 

There is much I disagree with in the piece, per usual. As thoroughly critical of Trump as Douthat is in this column, I still think he manages to significantly understate the threat the man poses to democracy and the rule of law, particularly if he were to serve a second term. There are also places where Douthat flirts with a kind of moral equivalence-hunting that is tiresome. It's no longer a sign of moral independence, amidst the mountain of Trump's criminality, to make a point of saying that the media should also devote some attention to Hunter Biden. No, the media should not. 

When Crimes Pile Up...

I had driven down to Florida to see my parents only a few short weeks ago, and now was making my way back to my home in Massachusetts. In the time between these two multi-day road trips, however, my attitude toward how best to make use of the time behind the wheel had done a complete 180. On the drive down, in mid-September, I had been desperate to avoid thinking about anything related to the election, if I could possibly avoid it. We had two months still to go, and if I could have put myself into a deep space-style cryo-sleep, the way they presumably will for future trips to Mars, I would gladly have done so. "Wake me when it's over!" was my philosophy. 

Now, we had less than two full weeks left, and it felt as if the grains of precious time were slipping through my fingers. A few days from now, either the curse might be lifted at last, or an even longer and darker night would settle over America. Either way, it was plainly my patriotic duty to understand the moment of history we were passing through fully while it lasted—whether that was for the sake of chronicling for posterity an episode of temporary madness our country had endured (a "parenthesis" in history as some optimistic intellectuals later wished to dub Europe's fascist period after the war had ended)—or in order to say I did not walk into the new even more hideous era with my eyes shut. 

Conformists

Time and again over the past four years—weekly, daily, it seems—we have watched as the president said or did something vile, obscene, offensive, scandalous, vicious, cruel, and altogether odious. And then we have headed over to FiveThirtyEight to check the man's approval rating. And, once again, we see it hover at a steady, immovable, 40% of the population. Who are these loyal foot soldiers? we ask. What could possibly undergird such stubborn apathy? 

What makes it all particularly strange is that Trump's brand of awfulness takes such myriad forms. If it were as simple a matter as only offending one value system, or of always attacking the same stigmatized groups, then the craven partisanship that some people feel toward him would be easier to explain. But in the course of his time in office, Trump has separately transgressed the ethical framework of every constituency one might expect to back him. 

Robert Coover's "A Political Fable" (1980/1968)

 Eureka! If there's one work of fiction about American politics crying out for rediscovery in the age of Trump—to help explain our present mess to us (and I use the term advisedly)—I believe I may have just found it. It comes from the oeuvre of Robert Coover—a postmodern novelist known for his rather surrealistic takes on 20th century public figures, making full-throated use of some typical postmodern techniques of pastiche and juxtaposition along the way—all of which appear in the present "novel." 

This, however, is not among his best-known works, and thus it was a new name to me when I spotted it on the high shelf in a used book store in Providence, Rhode Island (the city where Coover made his career). I am referring to his A Political Fable—published in book form 40 years ago, after first appearing as a 1968 short story, "The Cat in the Hat for President."

Medford

 

Doing Nought

 I found myself with some time off work this past week, and since geographic location has become irrelevant to my job in the age of Zoom, I decided to light out for Florida and spend a month or so with my parents. Thanks to COVID, flying was not an option, but no matter: I had plenty of time to spread out a multi-day socially-distanced road trip. I therefore evolved the following scheme for how to do a 21-hour drive in a relatively civilized manner. I would make the journey over four days, stopping in a (suddenly cheap) hotel each afternoon. I would listen to audiobooks in the car, read a novel into the night, and otherwise make full and pleasant use of my vacation days. 

The reality was something different. I had not fully taken into account what it would mean to perform this odyssey in the midst of a pandemic. To be sure, I was in a mask and hand-washing the whole time. The hotels seemed relatively deserted. But that did not prevent my paranoia from running away with me. Sitting up late nights and early mornings obsessively scanning every inch of my inner state for possible signs of COVID was as much fun as it sounds. I therefore hit upon a different plan, after keeping two days to my original hotel schedule. Instead of spending two more days on the road, I would just make a 12-hour-long bee-line for Sarasota. 

Ruthless

The other week my sister showed me a YouTube video that used a compelling example to make a semi-familiar point about contemporary liberalism. In brief, the argument runs: Republicans play dirty, and therefore so should we. It is a notion I disagree with, but in the wake of the horrible news of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's passing, I fear it will only gain adherents.

Taking the example of Obama's response (or lack thereof) to the procedural chicanery that Mitch McConnell pulled at the end of his second term to deny him another Supreme Court appointment (the Merrick Garland atrocity), the YouTuber was arguing that instances like these show how liberals will continue to "get rolled" (to borrow a term from a recent discussion on The Weeds podcast on this theme), so long as they retain their devotion to a set of procedural norms. 

Obsessions

I have always been obsessive. This blog should testify to that claim if it conveys nothing else. For most of my childhood, however, my obsessiveness continually ran up against a problem: the vehicles I selected for it were too small. There's only so far you can go with an interest in, say, the quadratic formula. First thing you can do is you can write it. After that, however, there isn't much else apart from writing it again (which I did, many a time). As a result, I frequently exhausted my chosen obsessions, and was forced to move on to fresh ones. 

At some point toward the beginning of high school, however, I at last settled on two subjects that seemed capacious enough to permit me never to get to the bottom of them: literature and politics (more specifically, political morality, by which I mean those aspects of politics that do not require math, or anything other than a humanistic education). You may think I have violated the obsessives' rules already by choosing two topics—isn't that cheating?—but you must understand that for me the two formed one continuous entity. 

The Enormous Doom

In the renewed scrutiny last week of Trump's previous comments on the military, one older, on-the-record remark of his kept coming up: a 1998 conversation with Howard Stern in which Trump—riffing on his deferment from the military draft—said the struggle to avoid sexually-transmitted infections in the dating scene was his "personal Vietnam." It's the kind of comment that, coming from a comedian, might be funny in a grotesquely poor-taste kind of way. Coming from someone who claims national leadership, it is repellant (though what else is new?)—but we will come to that a bit later.

What I want to point out first is that Trump is not the first to make this "joke" (or whatever it is) upon the vaunted glories of military service. Reading E.E. Cummings' memoir of his war-time internment in France, The Enormous Room, I discover the following observation: "This Great War For Humanity, etc., did not agree with some people's ideas, and [...] some people's ideas made them prefer to the glories of the front line the torments [...] attendant on venereal diseases." 

Trump's "Have You No Decency" Moment?

Ever since the Trump phenomenon began, we have been waiting for his Face in the Crowd moment—the big reveal when a hot mic catches the populist demagogue blabbing his true feelings for the American people writ large. 

We are all Patricia Neal after having switched on the broadcast, screaming, "Talk! Talk, damn you!" Show the people the true face behind the con! Show us what we knew all along—that you care about no one other than yourself, that you have nothing but contempt and loathing for anyone halt or unwell, anyone with less power and money than you!

Convolutions

In his unfinished final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gustave Flaubert confronts his two eponymous clerks with the outraged priest of the village, while they are busy expounding a position of modern skepticism. In the course of the book, the two men have undertaken a study of the totality of human knowledge, passing from one subject to another until each has been thoroughly consumed and exhausted. 

At the time of their argument with the cleric, they have just finished with geology and biblical history, and the experience has turned them into village atheists. As they seek to confound the town notables with their new insights, one of the local aristocrats ventures to observe, "Take care [...] you know the saying, my dear sir; a little learning takes you away, a lot carries you back." (Krailsheimer trans.)

Lost Weekends

 Holiday weekends are always a time of paralysis by freedom. I can spend weeks suffering acutely from the apparent scarcity of time. With work hours occupying a good part of every day and a thousand other necessities crowding out the evenings, I find myself making the fullest possible use of every interstice of time. I write at improbable and inconvenient moments—lunch hours, late nights. 

I find myself sleepless at 5 am, and I seize upon this gift of unexpected wakefulness to read another 40 pages of whatever book I started earlier in the week. I am like the art historian Winckelmann as Walter Pater portrays him in a classic study—oppressed by teaching duties by day, forced to forego sleep at night in order to nourish his mind with tomes of history. 

Mere Anarchy is Loosed

This week I, much like—I hope—a surprisingly small number of other Americans—tuned in to watch both of the first two nights of the "Republican" National Convention. That is, the annual Convention of the Republican Party you might recall, except a Republican Party that now has no former presidents, no leaders of any previous Congress, no former nominees for high office, not even any significant members of prior Republican administrations (one of whom appeared last week instead over at the DNC). 

It is the "Republican" Party, that is, as hollowed out by a personalistic autocrat who has alienated everyone who still retained a shred of moral autonomy. A "Republican" convention with most of the headline speakers made up of members of Trump's immediate family, with the remaining slots filled by various bogus characters from MAGA-land (Pam Bondi, Matt Gaetz, etc.), right-wing culture war touchstones, and a handful of people (Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, e.g.) smart enough to know better and cynical enough not to care.

Errata and Marginalia 015: O'Hara

John O'Hara, Appointment in Samarra (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), originally published 1934.

It must be a near-universal adult fantasy, at least in places proximate to an open road, to imagine one day simply refusing to answer the phone or email, getting behind the wheel, disappearing and leaving the responsibility of one's life behind, and basically becoming an inebriated self-destructive wreck. As Karl Ove Knausgaard described it in a recent book, he would sometimes picture himself pursuing this itinerary in the following form: "Take the ferry to Poland and drive down through Europe, stay in cheap hotels in ever-changing towns, drink, drink, drink." (Burkey trans.) It is not necessary to ever come close to living out such a scenario—or even to have a taste for alcohol—to cherish it as an escapist fantasy; indeed, perhaps it is the greatest homebodies who are most likely to nurse it in their hearts. 

One turns to O'Hara's classic novel, Appointment in Samarra, on the assumption that it will offer one the vicarious pleasure of the kind of fantasy Knausgaard is describing. It is, by repute, the great novel of the "bender"—an account of the gratuitous self-destruction of an apparently successful adult male who decides one Christmas to shred his ties to human society through an escalating series of anti-social acts. And indeed, this is in summary roughly the plot of the novel. But the feel of the book's content is not quite in keeping with its subject matter. The story, the title of O'Hara's classic, and the Somerset Maugham fable from which it is derived—all lead one to expect an atmosphere of overhanging, inexorable fate. Instead, it skates along the surface of things.

Let It Not Come Near Me

 At around 10 pm Friday night, as I was washing up for bed, I heard the most bone-chilling scream coming from my sister a floor below me. With a newborn in the house, it was hard to hear it and not immediately assume the worst—any number of horrors shot through my mind—but the scream had more in it of surprise and disgust than of agony. Before I could even finish spitting the toothpaste from my mouth, my brother-in-law had called on the phone and I had my answer. A bat had been circling round the bedroom. 

There are people who will let out at this point a snort of anticlimax. Bats aren't so uncommon in New England—many people have stories of encountering one indoors. It is even politically correct in some circles to express a kind of affection for animals that creep and crawl and squeak and fly on leathery wings. Surely the progressive thing to do—a triumph of reason over instinct—is to appreciate the necessary role that verminous reptiles, rodents, insects, etc. play in our urban ecosystem. Still better to retort, when told a shudder-inducing story about meeting such a being, "But bats are cute!"

Emergency Powers

Remember when we saw Star Wars: Episode III, in the nadir of the "War on Terror" epoch, and we all immediately grasped the heavy-handed political point George Lucas was trying to make? 

As you recall, Lucas has Emperor Palpatine seize total power at the end of the prequel trilogy by invoking a sort of Carl Schmitt-ian "state of exception." "I will surrender these emergency powers when this crisis has abated," he falsely promises, in the very moment when the audience knows he is actually becoming emperor-for-life. Oh my God! we all thought. This is just like Bush and the PATRIOT Act!

And then years go by. Bush, while authorizing torture and thus committing war crimes, does not in fact become a dictator. We enjoy two democratic elections after his departure from office in which we witness a peaceful transfer of power. We start to think: huh, maybe all of that was a bit overstated. Nothing really terrible happened (so quickly we forget). 

The Deluge

People who have gone through cognitive behavioral treatment for an anxiety disorder—or some variant of the same—will have learned certain truths about the world that they can use to ground themselves in the moment and maintain their emotional equilibrium. 

When they feel the panic rising within them, chances are they repeat some inner mantra along the following lines: your anxiety does not reflect reality. It may be how you feel, but it doesn't tell you anything about the outside world. The mere fact that you are scared does not mean you are actually in danger. 

Collaboration

The Trump administration, in its mere 3.5 years in office, has of course already managed to chew through multiple rounds of senior officials, seeking to filter out anyone who shows the slightest flicker of moral independence or simply of interests at odds with the personal whims of the president. 

Moreover, since there are limits to how quickly they can transform our society into an authoritarian despotism, most of those people whom they have regurgitated are still at liberty, still hanging around, and now—increasingly—granting interviews to the press. 

Klaus Mann's Mephisto (1936)

The Trump era is obviously a fitting time to revisit the classics of anti-fascism. However: I find that when I think back to reading, say, Friedrich Reck's Diary of a Man in Despair, in the first year of the Trump presidency—Trump Year Zero—there is a noticeable difference between then and now. At the time, reading of republican Germany's descent into dictatorship and tyranny seemed a frightening warning of one possible future. Now, turning to Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto, we find something that reads more like a chronicle, a précis, of the last three years. 

What strikes one most about the novel in light of our present experience is the sense of how quickly an apparently stable world can be overthrown—how easily the assumed bulwarks of democracy may fold under pressure. It's just beyond belief, goes one of the refrains of a brief authorial interjection in the midst of Mann's novel (Smyth trans.) The regime was supposed at some point to run up against a barrier it could not surmount. Yet it gallops along, overturning the established order in a matter of years, erecting concentration camps, hunting down and torturing its enemies, driving opponents into exile. 

Tennyson and Consolation

I know of four occasions—I remember each one vividly—in which I have been suddenly and overwhelmingly confronted by the horror of the fact that I will eventually die. None were in settings very obviously designed to inflict upon one thoughts of mortality. Twice were in the shower. Once while driving. Once after waking up in the middle of the night. 

Julian Barnes has a phrase from a novel I never quite finished that described what I felt then: the "sudden sense of the lancing hopelessness of the human condition." Barnes' point in context was that one never forgets it, when it happens. I certainly did not, in my case.

Wolves and Exiles

I was talking to a friend last night about the universal, all-consuming subject—covid—and he happened to mention in passing (or maybe not so in passing) that if things got truly dire here, he could always pull up stakes and move to Canada. After all, he had dual citizenship, having been born in our northern neighbor. 

A sudden prospect of despair and jealousy gaped before me, at mention of this. Oh right, I thought. I'm trapped. He's not. For the barest instant, I felt some tiny taste of what it must mean to be an exile or refugee, to have one's home country seen as a generator of problems, to be eyed as needy and suspect. 

Categorical Imperatives

Back in some impossible past, many news cycles ago, there was a stir on the internet over the fact that Trump's campaign manager posted a Tweet, in which he compared the president's effort to get re-elected to the Death Star's laser cannon opening fire. The response was a collective: "Umm... does he not realize they're the bad guys?"

This is only a relatively recent and light-hearted example of something that is actually deeply horrifying at the heart of this administration. Trump as both candidate and incumbent has been willing to associate himself, time and again, with what we all previously took to be the symbols of absolute evil. 

A Wraith's Progress

I was recently talking to a friend from grad school about papers we had written for class years ago. In a fit of bootless remorse, he couldn't stop thinking about how bad they allegedly were, and about all the things he'd like to do differently with them now, if he had the chance. I assured him that they probably weren't as bad as he was remembering, so we resorted to the original copy to see. 

We found one paper that was quite thoroughly-argued and excellent; but there was one thing strange about it. It kept promising that there were even more arguments on the way. "In the second part of this paper, which will be forthcoming," it would say, "we will supply more substantial historical evidence to prove this point."

Why I'd Vote for the Wealth Tax

When I was a teenager, my Republican classmates at the small Florida private school I attended were a great mystery to me. Their political decisions seemed to rest on the most ludicrous and morally offensive bases imaginable. Each election cycle, they looked at which of the candidates on the field would advance their self-interest. Then they voted (or planned to vote) for, rather than against, that person. 

This, to my mind, was getting things obviously backward. It was axiomatic that political virtue consisted in voting against one's self-interest. I voted (or planned to vote) for the Democrats precisely because I assumed they would eventually disadvantage me. They would raise taxes, including the ones our family paid. And therein lay the nobility of the gesture of supporting them. 

Con Drop

It is not every professional training that culminates in a warning not to immediately sleep with your fellow participants, but that is what happened on the occasion I have in mind today. We had reached the end of a two-day course for ministers in how to teach a sex-ed curriculum. I suppose the topic was therefore sufficiently in the air that our facilitator felt the need to address it. 

"Now, we've been through an intense experience together over the last few days," I recall her saying. "You may be having strong feelings for each other. I advise you to wait it out and not act on those impulses immediately."

I didn't need to be told twice. Or once, for that matter. At the end of two days with a roomful of ministers, many of them a good two generations older than me, this was the last thing I wanted to do. It was, to borrow a phrase from Jeremiah, "something I neither commanded nor spoke of, nor did it even enter my mind."

Errata and Marginalia 014: Roussel

Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, translated by Rupert Copeland Cuningham (New York: New Directions, 2017), originally published 1914.

It is at first glance a dangerous proposition to attempt to spot errors in one of the works that helped birth to the world the movements of Surrealism and Dadaism. After all, how is one to say what is intended and what is not in a 251-page "novel" that features a pile-driver made of human teeth, the reanimated flesh of Danton's head, a character named "Princess Hello," and other oddities? On second glance, however, one realizes that it is immensely easy to spot such errors, because Locus Solus is in fact a perfectly logical and straightforward work. 

As we follow the inventor Canterel around his opulent estate, we are presented one after another with a series of patent absurdities. Yet, as we pause to contemplate each one, Canterel explains to us the precise mechanism of their operation—in excruciating detail—as well as the story of how they came to be. These narrations often take the form of Romantic or melodramatic vignettes, involving bandit lords, rescues from subterranean dungeons, ancient prophecies fulfilled, and the like—generally quite effective on their own terms, and well-executed, if not entirely in earnest. 

The Price of a Stocking-Frame

I allowed myself my first cash transaction today since this pandemic began. While buying a soda at an auto supply store, I decided after a moment's hesitation that I would not bother to put the handful of dollars involved on my credit card. Instead, I reached into my wallet and pulled out a twenty that had been sitting there untouched since early March.

Seeing it in my hand, I realized the bill was freighted with a ghastly symbolism it would not have possessed for me just two weeks ago. A twenty dollar bill. As with any other bill that finds its way into my wallet, I had no first-hand knowledge of this one's provenance. It had just been churned out of some ATM in a 7-11 months before. Who knew if it was a legitimate bill or not.

For the Union Dead

There is a sadness in the fact that, amidst the protests against police violence in Boston Common last night, the rear side of the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was tagged with graffiti. It is of course impossible to shed tears over mute stone being vandalized, when the protests are about the infinitely graver offense of taking human lives. Still, though, the symbolism is potent and heart-wrenching: this spray paint ended up on the city's most well-known monument to Black union soldiers, in the midst of protests condemning systemic anti-Black racism.

One way to read this incident might be as an insult to the memory of the soldiers and their colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, who are depicted on the other side of the statue. Another, however, might be to see it as a tribute to what they fought for. The graffiti is a commentary not on the men who are memorialized in that statue, perhaps, but on the city that officially commemorates them, that pays lip-service to what their lives stood for, yet which maintains conditions throughout the Boston area of segregation and dispossession of Black communities.

The seasons totter in their walk

It will not require much further elaboration if I say that it feels as if our society—our world—were teetering on the edge. Our president is saying he may call in the military against people protesting police violence; he has threatened the use of "ominous weapons" against people gathered outside the White House; he has discouraged people from voting... We are slouching toward something; or perhaps we are still at the pivotal moment, when choices matter most. One way lie fascism, authoritarianism, genocide; the other—a deeply flawed yet surviving multiracial democracy, which maintains an internal capacity to critique and improve itself.

It is an apocalyptic summer, capstone to an apocalyptic spring. More than 100,000 people have died in this country from a raging pandemic with grossly unequal and structurally racist effects; millions have been thrown into unemployment. And we are only beginning to grapple with the impact this crisis will have on the Global South. What happens when economies that have been made dependent on food imports, tourism, or remittances by neoliberal policies suddenly have to reckon with something approaching involuntary autarky? There will be hunger, unemployment, suffering on a massive scale...

Crocodiles and Snakes

Recently on an assignment for my job, I worked my way through "Burma's Path to Genocide": a powerful and disturbing new virtual exhibit from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which documents the systematic exclusion and persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar over a period of decades, culminating in an act of outright genocide in 2017.

Among the many things in the exhibit that inevitably hold one's attention was a section about the instigating rhetoric from Burmese media that preceded the 2017 atrocities. The exhibit cites multiple examples, including editorials in state-owned media in Burma that insinuated all Rohingya are potential terrorists, or that compared Muslim minorities to "fleas" and other animals.

To Pedantry

If it wasn’t for all
The annoying people who
To my consternation
Have corrected me
I’d never know
There’s a hard “G”
In Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Or that the first name of the most famous Waugh
(Neither Auberon nor Alec, I mean)

Easter Eggs 004: Waugh

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

HEROES and heroes

It appears that some progressive leaders in Congress are disappointed with the HEROES Act (House Democrats' proposal for the fifth coronavirus relief and stimulus bill) that was dropped on Tuesday afternoon. They have pursued against it a reasonable and familiar line of argument: it does not, they say, go nearly far enough (no automatic stabilizers, no paycheck guarantee, etc.). And it is hard to argue with them on that point, as the country takes a nosedive into economic depression.

On the other hand, one might be justified in doubting the value of holding this debate, since the 3.3 trillion dollar legislation is almost certain to never make it past the Senate or Trump's desk anyway. It was drafted without bipartisan negotiations. Republicans, meanwhile, are holding out for things like immunity from liability for businesses, which are not likely to make it far with Democrats, in turn. So, the bill will most likely never become law, at least not in its present form.

To the slaughter

"The Slaughter-House" by Alfred Hayes is a poem that has been much on my mind this past week, as reports have continued to populate my news feed about the appalling conditions essential workers are facing in the meat processing industry, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hayes is somewhat of a left-wing hero, having penned both the lyrics to "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," as well as the screenplay for The Bicycle Thief. One might, therefore, expect his treatment of the meatpacking industry to resemble Upton Sinclair's. It should be a naturalistic exposé and a cry of the conscience, right?

Fixed Ideas

I have not watched the new Michael Moore-produced documentary about climate change, Planet of the Humans, but the early reviews are not encouraging. The thrust of it appears to be not the anticipated defense of a Green New Deal, or any other of the policy proposals currently trending on the left. Rather—and perhaps surprisingly—it is devoted to attacking renewable energy sources as a false solution to climate disruption (and relying on dated and often patently inaccurate information to do so).

If, in the film's judgment, wind and solar will never actually manage to achieve steep reductions in carbon emissions, what are we to do? Well, un-grow the economy, it would seem, and get rid of most of the humans. How? The film doesn't advocate killing us, per se; rather it relies on that unnerving technocratic phrase, "population control." 

Easter Eggs 003: Williams

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

Easter Eggs 002: Bell

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

From Julian Bell's Van Gogh: A Power Seething:

Easter Eggs 001: Theroux

A series dedicated to the strange and interesting things that can be uncovered by closely reading books. 

From Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania:

A Poem

Reading biographies
  Of famous people
    It's like, wow
      Who didn't have syphilis?

If Trump had stabbed their mothers...

Last week, we watched with horror the spread of a bizarre and inexplicable contagion—and it was not the coronavirus itself. Somehow, in spite of all evidence and reason, Trump's approval rating for his handling of the COVID-19 crisis was trending up!

Since that time, the rate of infection of this social delusion has stabilized. People seem to have remembered that they dislike Trump, and his approval rating has started to move back toward where it was pre-crisis (though it's certainly not evident that he's losing support, on net). As a friend put it to me in an email: "There are two curves I'm watching right now... thankfully this one's finally starting to bend down."

Transcending Death

Walking outside the other day to fetch a take-out dinner from a place where the employees were all wearing masks and gloves, dodging as I went every other human being I could spot, usually by crossing over to the other sidewalk whenever I saw them coming from a block away, and holding my breath whenever there seemed a possibility of our sharing air, however fleetingly, I passed a local meditation center with a message on its road-side pulpit. "Transending Death" it said. It was missing a "c" but I took its point. The message was timely.

Without overdramatizing my own relatively privileged experience of the pandemic, in which I have so far been insulated from the worst losses many people are feeling, it is nonetheless safe to say that mortality has been somewhat more prevalent in all our minds in recent weeks than it was before. A friend was recently talking to me over video chat, and he declared, with semi-seriousness, "If I die from coronavirus I want you to be my literary executor." I instantly replied that he must be mine in turn.

Yes, it's bad

Over the past weeks and months, Donald Trump's reactions to the coronavirus pandemic have consistently tracked in lockstep parallel to those of the average minimally-informed member of our society—except with about a twelve day lag-time. At first, it was a scary thing happening far away, and thus somebody else's problem. Then, it was something that was going to reach us, but would basically just be another version of the seasonal flu—bad, but by no means catastrophic. Then, it was something we had to take seriously for a couple weeks, but that would eventually pass.

And now, this week, something changed. He knew someone personally, he told us, who had gotten terribly sick from the virus. Now, it had started to seem real to him. He apprehended the magnitude of it. And he was ready to do what it took to try to slow the spread of the contagion.

Errata and Marginalia 013: Farson

Daniel Farson, The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (London: Vintage Books, 1994), originally published 1993.

The gilded gutter life, that is, of Francis Bacon the twentieth century figurative painter, not Francis Bacon the Elizabethan philosopher—the latter of whose life may have been no less gilded and gutter-ridden, for all I know, but who is at any rate not the subject of this book (though the family of Bacon the painter alleged descent from the author of the Novum Organum, according to Farson). The book is more personal memoir of a friendship with the painter than artistic monograph. It is, for that reason, a vastly more interesting trove of gossip than one might expect. Gilded Gutter Life is devoted to that most fascinating of all subjects: Artists Behaving Badly.

Think I Could Turn and Live with Animals

I recently read Irish novelist Edna O'Brien's short (and itself quasi-novelistic) 2010 biography of the great Romantic poet Byron in Love. While not adding wholly new dimensions to the classic Byron legend, nor demolishing any aspects of it, it nonetheless makes some of the features of that legend live again for a new generation of readers.

Two familiar features of Byron's life come through strongly in O'Brien's treatment. First: he was utterly abominable to many of the people around him, particularly those who most looked to him for care and support. And second: he surrounded himself, throughout his life, with wild, fierce animals.

Bitter Bread

Trump is madly, disastrously wrong (no surprise) in his threat to reopen the economy sooner than public health experts advise—thereby disrupting what may be humanity's last possible chance to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Besides, the economic damage is going to come from the virus's transmission and its impact on our health system, as much as from trying to shut the economy down—and these effects will be even worse if we end the time of social distancing.

All of that is true and notorious. That does not mean, however, it is entirely false to point out there are costs on both sides of the policy question, where this virus is concerned.

The costs of social distancing will be relatively light for some of us, and easy to bear. If we can work from home without loss of income, the worst we have to face is boredom and loneliness. But for those who are losing paychecks, unable to make rent, unable to find customers, unable to pay utility bills, living precarious existences in the informal economies that support vast sectors of humanity—it is true that recessions, in addition to viruses, take lives.

Errata and Marginalia 012: Trelawny

Edward Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 2000), first published 1858. 

One didn't pick up a copy of Edward Trelawny's memoirs of his time spent with Shelley and Byron because one thought it would have something to tell us about our present coronavirus-dominated existence. And yet that is what one finds there—perhaps because it is what one would find anywhere, with covid on the brain.

All I can say is that mandatory quarantines play a surprisingly large role in Trelawny's iconic account of Shelley's demise—and, in the author's telling, may even have caused or hastened the poet's untimely death.

Journal of a plague year (or week, at any rate)

Obviously with the coronavirus situation we are all confronting in new ways the facts of our mortality—and, less dramatically perhaps, the impermanence of things. Most of us will survive this pandemic. We will all eventually emerge from our various states of quarantine, social distancing, remote working, etc. But the world we come back to may not be the same.

There are obviously any number of horrific ways in which this may prove to be the case. But, selfishly and stupidly perhaps, my thoughts along these lines tend for the moment to fasten onto one bite-sized and manageable idea: used book stores. Will they still be there, when all of this is over?

A Dance to the Music of the News Cycle

Homage to Poussin

Stigma and Genius

Is it just the sheerest romanticism - this old notion that the artist and the stigma go together - that where one finds one, one will soon enough find the other? It is probably just a hallmark of the literature of consolation. But it impresses itself upon the receptive mentality nonetheless. Byron with his clubfoot. Flaubert with his epilepsy. Swift with his mysterious dizzy and giddy spells. And there is if anything the even longer list of those artists whose personal lives marked them out as sexually ambiguous, counter-normative, "queer." Come to think of it, the three just named could be fitted under that heading as well, giving it an expansive reading. Then there is Tchaikovsky, Forster, Gide, Leonardo, Hart Crane, and on and on. And this is not even to mention the list of painters, writers, composers, etc. who have belonged to religious, ethnic, and national minorities within their own society.

Gymnopédie

When I was younger and used to fight against turning on the radio in various contexts, when it was proposed as a way to pass time and fill the silence, I was sometimes accused by friends of disliking music. This, however, was a misunderstanding of the situation. The truth has always been that I run either extremely hot or deathly cold on any specific piece of music. Many bore me. When one does move me, however, it grasps me unspeakably. I will be able to think of little else the rest of the day. My feelings will have been entirely waylaid and held prisoner by a single tune.

Listening to music, therefore, is for me an enterprise fraught with emotional danger. It is very difficult for me to find anything, therefore, that I can safely trust will be "easy listening."

Errata and Marginalia 011: Glendinning

Victoria Glendinning, Jonathan Swift: A Portrait (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,  1998)

One wants very much to make an idol of Jonathan Swift. He has come down to us as a relentless opponent of cruelty, a merciless teller of hard truths, a "champion of liberty"—as the translation of his Latin epitaph puts it—and so on. Besides, he is so very much myself, is he not? His life is among the few in history that has touched so directly and impressively on church, state, and the art of letters—the three domains around which my own obsessions gather (i.e., religion, politics, literature). 

He gives us all hope that you can spend a few short years close to the heart of policymaking, dine out on it for years (though there is a self-deprecating passage cited in the present volume in which he addresses how quickly people start to doubt that he ever was as important a person as he claims), and then be cast back into clerical obscurity— and nevertheless still join the ranks of the immortals through the power of the pen. He is polemicist, prophet, policy analyst, muckraker—in short, all the things I want to be. 

Fecal Matters

In Carson McCullers' novel Clock Without Hands, the racist Southern judge and bourgeois gentilhomme Fox Clane is depicted in one scene sitting upon his toilet as if it were a throne. McCullers indelibly describes his feelings upon the successful completion of an afternoon's evacuation of the bowels: "When the odor in the bathroom rose, he was not annoyed by this; on the contrary, since he was pleased by anything that belonged to him, and his feces were no exception, the smell rather soothed him. So he sat there, relaxed and meditative, pleased with himself."

In the context of the novel, the judge's feelings of self-satisfaction upon the successful voiding of his colon, and the resulting smell, serves as a wonderfully apt symbol of his entire approach to life: the patronizing assumption of superiority with which he lords it over his household, his society, and all who belong to both. Stripped of what we know about this character's individuality, however, Fox Clane's reaction to the aroma of his own dung has a more universal element than that. It is a fact that none of us minds the stench of our own droppings to quite the same extent we mind the smell of others'.

Welcome to the Clone Wars

Within two days of each other, two highly significant events took place: 1) it was confirmed - including by the Senator himself - that Russian intelligence-sponsored troll accounts are interfering in the Democratic primaries to support Sanders; and 2) Sanders won in the Nevada caucus by a landslide. Thus, we are one step closer to a scenario in which the two major party contenders in the 2020 U.S. presidential election are also the two individuals Vladimir Putin's interference campaign has backed since 2016. Sanders v. Trump: the two Putin-approved candidates, going head-to-head.

Of course, there are some crucial moral distinctions between the way Sanders and Trump have responded to this situation. The Senator did not try to deny the truth of reports about Russian interference to bolster his campaign, for one thing, once they became public. He also denounced these efforts to influence the U.S. election and described Putin as an "autocratic thug." He made clear that any "assistance" from troll accounts in the primaries was unwanted and unwelcome.

Preparing

My sister, brother-in-law, and I made a pilgrimage yesterday to the Harry Potter theme area at Orlando's Universal Studios. By the standards of other members of our generation, this was a decidedly belated voyage. The attraction has been open for a good ten years or so now, so we were late to the game. Speaking for myself, however, this did not in any way diminish the sense of wonder.

Harry Potter is a fantasy franchise perfectly suited to the tourist who, like myself, does not want to go on roller coasters. Sure, the place has its rides; but they can be skipped without forfeiting the overall experience. The real purpose is merchandizing, and among fantasy or sci-fi universes, is there any other that can boast so many in-universe stores, shops, and things to buy?

Small differences

The New York Times ran a story yesterday in the run-up to the Nevada caucuses. It seems that the rampaging online Committee of Public Safety known as Bernie Sanders supporters (is there not a reason their flagship publication is dubbed - without apparent self-criticism intended - Jacobin?) have found another victim. In this case, she is the elected head of Nevada's largest union, representing culinary workers in the state's vast apparatus of hotels and casinos. Her crime was to come out in opposition to Sanders' Medicare-for-All plan, due to the union's fears of losing the quality private health insurance plan they won through long and difficult contract negotiations.

Is it ironic to see the self-appointed most-left, most-pro-labor, most-pro-working-class wing of the Democratic Party lining up to denounce a union leader who is trying to do right by her members? And not only denouncing her, but - apparently - sharing her home address online, sending her death threats, calling her home phone to leave threatening messages? (Bernie himself, let it be noted, has not encouraged this behavior; here as elsewhere, the Senator is a far more decent man than his declared admirers; but his response to the incident was decidedly weak.)

Valentine's Day 2020

A friend who is well aware of my intransigent singleness sent a missive today by text with greetings for the holiday. "Thnx!" I replied, with a heart. Then, he asked, "How do you relate to this holiday?" Meaning: what do you make of it, seeing as this day is not particularly set up for people living outside of traditional couple relationships, and that much of our popular culture therefore assumes Valentine's Day must be a period of mourning and repentance for those of us who by choice, inclination, or circumstance find ourselves single.

With a rapier flash, my reply came to me- and it was an accurate and honest one. What do I make of Valentine's Day? "I use it as a chance to advocate for family unity for couples threatened with separation by US immigration policies," I wrote back. For this is the literal truth. I knew it in an instant, as well as all it implied.

Errata and Marginalia 010: Forster

E.M. Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), originally published 1905.

Forster's first novel—the short, brisk, acidly funny Where Angels Fear to Tread—is, like much of his work, a study in culture-clash. Fussy, conspiring, duplicitous, clever, self-controlled English people mix themselves up with open-hearted, corruptible, generous, brutal Continental Europeans, and disaster inevitably results.

All sides contribute to the debacle, for all are possessed of virtues as well as vices distinctly their own, and these sets of traits are wholly incompatible with one another. One virtue reacts upon another, foreign one, and becomes vice; and so all are guilty, without at any stage meaning each other real harm.

Or, as one character puts it—the English moralizer, Harriet—it all ends up "like one of those horrible modern plays where no one is in the right." As such, the novel manages to veer from the most civilized comedy to the most genuine horror, without ever losing its sincerity or coherence of vision.

Thy tongue hypocrisy

Last week, I attended an event about religious persecution around the world. On the stage were leaders representing the Yazidi, Uighurs, Rohingya, and other groups of people currently experiencing genocide, apartheid, and other systematic violations in their home countries. It was a human rights event, but one tailored to a highly specific audience: namely, evangelical Christians who had flown into town for the National Prayer Breakfast.

One of the speakers who introduced the panel was Senator James Lankford, Republican of Oklahoma. He spoke feelingly and well, describing the impact it had on him as a small child to hear Corrie ten Boom speak about her family's role hiding Jewish neighbors from the Nazis. He told us of the need to show moral courage, when it really counted. He asked us to ponder: What would we have done, if we were called upon to stand up for what was right, even at risk to ourselves?

Errata and Marginalia 009: Twain

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); first published 1869.

Reading the early Twain classic, The Innocents Abroad, it is as if one can feel Samuel Clemens holding a straining Mark Twain by the leash. The sardonic voice of the incipient social critic is there, but it is still being kept in check by the more soothing tone of the mere "humorist"; the writer of palatable pleasantries.

Opening it, and going by reputation and title alone, one is hoping to find a book that makes satirical mincemeat of crass American manners and naivety while traveling overseas. But Clemens/Twain was aiming at a wider public than could withstand such mockery. Thus, most of the book's humor is at the expense of the travelers' hosts, rather than themselves, and it is not the sort of pungent wit to strain a nineteenth century sitting-room's intellect.

Romney's Finest Hour

McCain, thou shouldst be living at this hour! America hath need of thee! And since thou art not, Romney stepped into thy place.

Who could have foreseen it? Who would have predicted we'd have something to thank Romney for? Well, this blog did, although the rest of the soaring optimism of that earlier post does not hold up so well. The Senate did not in the end come through. The system was not redeemed. Trump did not go the way of Nixon.

Kicking away ladders

As confirmed by colleagues who attended the event, it will surprise no one to hear the representatives of our current government acquitted themselves rather poorly at this year's UN Climate Change Conference (COP25). Despite officially planning to withdraw from the global climate accords, the Paris Agreement, U.S. negotiators nonetheless sought to shape the discussions around this agreement to their own advantage, trying to take without giving. They were, in short, freighted with an immense load of self-entitlement.

Reading an older climate change book recently, however, to get some context—that is, Christine Shearer's brief 2011 work Kivalina: A Climate Change Story—I at least had the cold comfort of learning that such behavior on our government's part is not new. The preceding generation of climate negotiators went through something similar in trying to hammer out the Kyoto Protocol. There again, the United States wanted to sacrifice nothing, but receive all.

Rising up (n)ever

Back when I was working as a student minister, one of my least favorite tasks was the selecting of readings to accompany a ceremonial event. Going in, I had thought I would delight in such a chore, having falsely assumed that an appreciation for English poetry and a mania for quotation would equip me with any number of apt apothegms for any given occasion. Not so. The chief problem lies with poetry itself.

It is a great and prevalent misconception in our society that literary poetry is a delicate and soothing art, one of whose chief virtues lies in its ability to provide solace. In truth poetry—if it is in any way good or memorable—is violent, provoking, conscience-pricking, paradoxical, or otherwise upsetting. This makes it a particularly poor vehicle for performing the sometime ministerial office of comforting the afflicted (the alternative role of "afflicting the comfortable" is definitely not—however worth doing sometimes—suitable for all occasions).

A Low Dishonest Decade

I have an early January birth date in a year ending with a zero. As a result, my age has always corresponded roughly to the year in which we find ourselves; and the decades in my life have also tracked alongside the decades of our calendar - plus ten years' difference. Since we have just come to the end of another decade in our country's life and in my own, therefore, it seems there might be some reflections in order.

While we're on the topic of birthdays, by the way, I should note that I am deviously humble on the subject. At work, I never announce my birthday to anyone when it is coming. Indeed, I go out of my way to suppress and bury the fact. I also, however, leave just enough breadcrumbs leading in its direction that the diligent might be able to discover it and share with me their birthday wishes on the day of.

Donut Understand

Yesterday I was in a Dunkin' Donuts (I guess now officially just "Dunkin'") getting my morning coffee, when the two unbearable yet familiar yammering voices of the "Dunkin' Radio" hosts came over the audio system. It would seem that rather than pay royalties for a service like Muzak or simply turn on the radio, the company has devised a far more ingenious solution - that of creating their own broadcast. Largely, it consists of sugary beat-heavy pop songs interspersed with ads for nothing but Dunkin' products. There is also, however - worse than all the rest - a periodic "trivia" segment.

As someone who founded one plank of his teenage selfhood on the idea of being a "trivia buff," my heart sinks whenever this segment comes on. The so-called trivia questions are in fact designed to exclude anything that could remotely be described as specialized knowledge. They relate to matters of such universal familiarity that no one could ever possibly feel their intellect was being called into question. Yesterday's was particularly odious. In between the advertisements for new sugar-laden latte concoctions, our male and female co-hosts asked: "how many months have 28 days in them?"

Wisdom Turned to Folly

In his article posted yesterday in response to the Australian wildfires, Paul Krugman notes in passing an intriguing statistical fact about conservative climate change deniers. They are not, he observes (contrary to popular liberal belief) especially likely to be people lacking in scientific awareness and training. To the contrary, he cites a study in Nature showing that conservatives with high levels of scientific literacy and numeracy are more likely to deny the reality of climate change than those with little background in the subject.

This makes a perverse but comprehensible kind of sense. The fact that climate change is real is attested by the evidence of the senses, by ecological disasters that are already unfolding around us (such as Australia's wildfires), and by the headlines of any reputable newspaper. To deny it, therefore, requires a certain brilliance - the ability to mine for strange and exotic sources of quasi-information, say, or to interpret obvious data in surprising and contrarian ways.

Anytime, Anywhere

From the start of the "War on Terror" two decades ago, many policies implemented under its heading have been blatantly unlawful. In order to justify them, therefore, the two prior administrations - Bush's and Obama's - found it necessary to rely on certain legal fictions. Torture wasn't really torture, Bush's legal team said; it was "enhanced interrogation." We weren't really conducting assassinations in any country anywhere in the world, regardless of whether or not we were officially at war there, said Obama administration officials; we were simply engaged in a conventional armed conflict with an unconventional foe: one whose unique characteristic was that they operated across and beyond state boundaries.

A Cruel God

I have before on this blog called attention to the speech delivered by Judge George O'Toole at the sentencing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It is, without doubt, a stirring piece of rhetoric. The judge seemed to have sensed he had been handed a historic moment, and he rose to it -- aesthetically if not morally -- by delivering remarks worthy of any collection of courtroom oratory.

One of the risky devices the judge employed -- risky because it could bring charges of irrelevance and grandstanding -- but which O'Toole used in this case to great effect -- was to rely on pithy and oracular quotations from works of literature and musical drama. At one point, for instance, he quotes a line from the libretto of Verdi's opera Otello, based on the Shakespeare play. "I believe in a cruel god," sings Iago. The judge's purpose in mentioning this is not to endorse the Iago worldview, of course, but to attribute it to the man he is sentencing.