Getting Sick

Being the only person in my law school class still wearing a face-mask every day to ward off COVID-19, I have at times felt like a paranoid oddity. Classmates passing me on campus outdoors have been known to do a double-take when I wave hello. "Oh, it's you," they say. "I barely recognized you without the..." The reaction I get to the N95 around my nose and mouth is, I imagine, somewhat akin to what people who wear religious garb must experience. Thoughtful and enlightened people around them in society know they are supposed to not comment on it; certainly not negatively. But they notice it nonetheless. And the occasional comment slips through.

Given this uncomfortable situation, I have at times thought of following the lead of my classmates (and basically everyone else around me in public) in ditching the mask. The arguments in favor of doing so are familiar to all and have apparently proved convincing to the majority of Americans: so long as one is fully vaccinated, including with the Omicron-targeted booster, a case of COVID is only as likely to kill you as the flu (a disease that we ought to all vaccinate ourselves against, but which didn't prompt any of us to wear masks pre-pandemic). 

Issue Spotting

 Our 1L Torts professor warned us: as soon as we went home for the holidays, mid-way through our first law school year, we would start to bore everyone in the family to tears by spotting legal issues everywhere. As she explained it, this was part of the oft-mentioned process of "learning to think like a lawyer." The people and setting you remember from holidays past would be the same; but you would now be scanning everything that happened for potential causes of action. 

I have noticed this to some extent; but where I experience the greatest warping of my brain in the aftermath of the first semester is when it comes to non-law-related reading. Even when one turns to a novel in the hope that it will provide one with relief from thinking about final exams, one finds one can't help but read each book with part of one's mind as simply an extended fact pattern on a test. One starts to perform mental "issue spotting" on every page.

Repeating Himself

A couple years ago, I emerged from my office building at lunch hour to put some change in the parking meter. At my car's last known location, I met the yawning horror of an empty space. "No!" I thought. "But why not just a ticket? I'd pay for it! Just don't say they towed me; anything but that!" Of course, that is precisely what they had done. I looked over at a sign I had no memory of glimpsing before. It said something about an extremely rare farmers market event in which everything on the block would be towed, and this-- of course-- happened to be that one day. 

Fuming while I waited for the Lyft to arrive to take me to the impound lot, I found my sardonic fury crystalizing into verse. Not wanting to lose the thought, I jotted down the lines in an email to myself in my phone (I append them as a footnote below, if you want to read the lines); then promptly forgot all about them. 

Belittlement

 It's final exam period of the first semester of law school and--against all my inclinations and better judgment--I find the anxiety creeping into me. "Don't worry," the deans and professors and administrators all say. "I wasn't worried," I reply. "But should I be? You're making it sound like maybe I should be worried." The tests are just 100% of my final grade for each course, so if I do poorly then all my work earlier in the semester will have been pointless; but I shouldn't worry. The tests are just rigorously curved so no matter how well I do it might not count: the only real question is how everyone else did; but I shouldn't worry too much about it; it's not that big a deal.

And I stand there listening to all this and try to stuff the rising anxiety back down my gullet. "No!" I bellow to the anxiety; "I am NOT going to worry about this! You can't make me care about this! I'm a grown man! I'm over thirty. I don't have to care about school or tests or grades anymore. I've been through all that. I've worked for a living. I've done work for pay, and no one there ever said I needed to be anxious. So why should I be anxious over work that I'm paying for the privilege to do! You can't trick me into believing this is real life. I've seen real life and it does not resemble school!" Such are my inner lines of resistance, as the fear nevertheless inevitably burbles within me. 

Therese/Tiresias

 Observers of the American scene might be forgiven for thinking that the culture war obsessions of the recent midterm election were unique to this third decade of the twenty-first century. The Five Thirty-Eight politics podcast informed us the other week that rightfully-defeated Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker made a point-- for instance-- at every campaign event of bringing up the specter of Trans women competing against cis-women in sports (in their view, his harping on these esoteric themes was one of the reasons his campaign failed to resonate with average Georgia voters), and how unfair this would purportedly be. Then there was the distinctly post-Dobbs debate about state legislatures' role in regulating abortion, in which Walker's own alleged hypocritical funding of several abortions inevitably intruded. 

As 2022 as these debates might seem, however, world literature attests that they are as old as the culture war itself. Turning to Guillaume Apollinaire's groundbreaking surrealist drama, The Mammaries of Tiresias, we find all the same questions that still haunt our cultural warriors' imaginary: anxiety over a perceived breakdown in traditional gender roles, debates between pro- and anti-natalism, fear of looming catastrophe if people were permitted to cross over or otherwise defy the gender binary... Apollinaire's play--  in which a woman transforms herself into a man, goes off to conquer the world, and her husband starts to asexually procreate in her absence, in order to sustain the population of their local Zanzibar-- presages the modern-day world of far-right commentators raving about how the Trans movement will supposedly depopulate the Earth. 

Beards

A couple months ago, my dad happened to say to me in passing, "You know, why don't you try growing out your facial hair?" I was irritated and vaguely alarmed by the suggestion, and it took me a moment to settle down enough to realize there was nothing intrinsically offensive in what he had said. It was just an idea. I could take it or leave it. And there was nothing wrong or immoral about growing out a beard, was there? So why had I reacted with anxiety and a flash of anger? 

It required some introspection before it occurred to me that the beard here was symbolic of something greater in my private psychology--some proposed treachery to myself. As soon as I was able to grow facial hair, after all, I had been shaving it smooth, and therefore the suggestion to let it grow was an insinuation that I might violate my own inner taboos and habitual practices. And what my dad hadn't realized when he spoke was that I was precisely in the midst of contemplating such a self-transformation--just not in the realm of facial hair. So for him to suggest a change along these lines made me feel caught out in the open. 

Otiose

 Friends keep trying to creep me out about artificial intelligence even more than I already am. They show me websites that will generate an endless number of variations of original artworks; software that will write article copy for you that has never existed before. The visual productions are uncanny. The written prose the AI generates is somewhat less impressive. The quality of the writing is low, and it gives me more the impression of a search engine cobbling together component parts of the internet. It does not give me the spine-tingling subjective sensation others describe of communing with an actual mind. 

I admit, though, that I do worry about jobs. As I've argued before, the AI probably will not displace the need for human cognitive labor. The output of these machines is often flawed, and will require human workers to check and correct it. I can't imagine all companies opting to fire their human editors and replace them with machines, at least not anytime soon. I can, however, foresee an epoch when copywriters will be expected to save time and increase our efficiency by first generating the copy through an AI, and then editing and massaging it from there. 

President Ubu

 I have mentioned before on this blog that I have a tendency when reading great works of the theater to suddenly picture in my mind's eye the costumes and setting re-staged for the Trump era. I don't want this to be the case. I don't like the ex-president invading my thoughts any more than I like him invading my news feed. But I can't help it. So many plays, in both the farcical and the tragic vein, deal with the excesses of human folly and arrogance being cut down to size. The spectacle of hubris punished is, after all, the classical template of drama. And when a twenty-first century American sees one of these swaggering theatrical leads strut out onto the stage, who else can they think of but our clownish yet terrifying ex-president? And if we accept that a historical production could well be re-staged with the lead actor now done up in orange clown make-up, what better play to serve as our vehicle than Alfred Jarry's proto-surrealist masterpiece, Ubu Roi?

It would have been argued in prior decades, perhaps, that Jarry's eponymous protagonist is too extreme a caricature to be portrayed in the costume of any real-world politician. Father Ubu, as he is known in the play, is after all a comically exaggerated monster of appetites. Driven solely by pride, cupidity, and gluttony, he is both a watchword of lust and an utter craven. In short, he puts one in mind of Plato's theorized template of the "tyrannical man," whose soul is given over into the custody of his basest hungers. He is, in this respect, a universal archetype, not to be reduced to any one time and place, but rather representing an aspect of the human soul: the devil in all of us who must perennially be wrestled to the ground by our better natures--the part of us the poet John Davidson had in mind when he said: "If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,/ He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all."

On Egdon Heath

Obsolescent Angst

 Conversations about AI are getting harder to avoid: mostly because they are no longer meandering speculations about what might be; these days, they are reviews of what's already occurred. As a result, we are all starting to grapple with the melancholia of obsolescence. The obsolescent angst, if you will.

A couple months ago, of course, I would have waved aside the notion that machines might one day be able, say, to create an original work of visual design. "Oh come on," I would have said, "what a ludicrous sci-fi scenario. Save it for your screenplay. Never gonna happen." Now, when I draw breath to say the same thing, friends text me images generated by AI that were created in less than a second--all of them utterly convincing, impossible to distinguish from the work of a human intelligence, and no more acts of plagiarism than most products of the human imagination, which likewise works through a process of agglutination rather than creation ex nihilo. 

The Tragic Vision

 As a teenage socialist I turned to Brecht's Mother Courage hoping to find there some good Marxist dogmatics-- a real-life instantiation of Brecht's theoretical commitment to abolishing the individualism and fatalism of the bourgeois theater. Yet, when the play was done, I found that the scene that lingered longest and moved me the most-- as it has perhaps many prior readers-- was one that concerned a highly individual action: it is the moment when the deafmute Kattrin-- knowing that an army is about to ambush and massacre a town of sleeping villagers-- climbs into a tree and beats a drum in order to warn the civilians; putting herself on the firing line in order to save the lives of innocents. 

What strikes one about the scene is not only its poignancy-- but also its utter incompatibility with Brecht's ostensible commitments. I suppose one can say that it serves the play's overarching antiwar message; but it does so in a humanistic way that by no means aligns with the theory of "epic" and revolutionary theater that is supposed to govern the whole. After all, in his didactic mode in the same play, Brecht generally scoffs at sacrifice (think of the song "How Fortunate the Man with None"). He mocks morality as null when faced with the problem of an empty belly. All such "noble suffering" and individual self-immolation is supposed to be made unnecessary by a coming world which-- instead of demanding martyrdom-- instead renders it unnecessary by abolishing the conditions that called it forth. 

The Anomalous Bicephalus

 At various times during the Trump presidency, I fantasized about famous plays that should be re-staged for the contemporary era, with costuming and set-pieces redesigned (plus maybe a few key names and lines of dialogue altered) so as to make an implicit commentary on political events. Most of my picks had probably occurred to others: a rendering of Richard III, with the increasingly despotic and isolated central character cast in the image of Trump himself, and the various henchmen whom he betrays and executes bearing the names of former members of the administration whom Trump had cast out; Ionesco's Rhinoceros reimagined to refer to the contagion of Republican election denialism, or perhaps to the more literally infectious spread of COVID-19 under Trump's insouciant watch... and so on. 

But all of that was before I learned of a play by Dario Fo that requires even less re-envisioning to establish its contemporary relevance. For it turns out that Fo--the Nobel Prize-winning playwright best known for his political farce the Accidental Death of an Anarchist--was also the creator of a forgotten 2003 work that features both Vladimir Putin (twenty years younger then, but just as vicious), as well as a bombastic, thin-skinned, right-wing, overly litigious and possibly mobbed-up media figure with an eerie tendency to make excuses for Putin's atrocities. In Fo's case, the thin-skinned politician was Silvio Berlusconi. But there is no reason why a contemporary restaging of the play could not cast him with a spray-on tan. Skin, after all, can be orange as well as thin. 

An Epigraph for Election Day 2022

Leafing through the mellifluous yet frequently indecipherable collected poems of Wallace Stevens during odd evenings the last few months, I found the book to be of greatest use in general as a tool to fight insomnia. (I mean that in the least derogatory way possible. I just literally find it a helpful means to lull the mind to sleep while engaging it in a diverting but non-taxing activity that does not involve backlit screens. There is a certain level of difficulty and obscurity that verse can attain at which it completes the horseshoe and becomes simple to read again--the mind submits and stops trying to make particular sense of it.) 

But one poem in the volume woke me right up. It seemed to have a special emotional urgency: particularly for this looming election day.  

De Selby's Paradox

 In Flann O'Brien's posthumously-published surrealist satire, The Third Policeman, a side character of some importance is a certain crank scientist and mad philosopher by the name of de Selby (who also appears in this role in O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive). Through the use of various side-discourses on the fictional theorist's postulates (sometimes confined to footnotes), O'Brien (real name Brian O'Nolan) satirizes the scientific method. He does so specifically by having de Selby first point out a seeming paradox or inconsistency in our everyday working understanding of the world, and then using these difficulties to arrive at an utterly zany conclusion. 

As O'Brien's narrator describes the mad scientist's "customary line" in his own terms: he proceeds by "pointing out fallacies involved in existing conceptions and then quietly setting up his own design in place of the ones he claims to have demolished." (A real-life practitioner of the de Selby method might be found in the great Charles Fort, who used the inexplicable accounts of scientific anomalies he found in newspapers to argue, among other things, that intergalactic cross-dimensional vessels must sometimes breach our reality in order to lure us up for dinner. "Maybe we're fished for, by supercelestial beings" as a character in William Gaddis's The Recognitions summarizes the theory.)

The Millipede

 Listening on a recent road trip to the audio version of Andy Kroll's A Death on W Street—a book detailing the bogus right-wing conspiracy theories that swarmed around the 2016 murder of Seth Rich and the effect they had on his family and friends—I went through a series of emotions. First: disbelief. These theories are easily refutable, as Kroll demonstrates. How was it that they were allowed to fester with so little factual grounding? It can't be! 

But then, once one has processed this emotion, another realization comes in its wake. Of course these theories became popular. There's nothing simpler in the world. Kroll in one section of the book reviews some of the reasons scholars most commonly give for the appeal of conspiracy theories, before concluding that none of them is quite satisfactory. Perhaps the real explanation is simpler and more common to all humanity than we wish to believe: the basic love of mystery. The sense of seeing secrets revealed. Who isn't drawn to that?

Bad Things

 As it has so often the past several years (when to start the clock on this—March 2020? November 2016?)—the morning news sent a bolt of white hot terror through me with the first headline. Musk's acquisition of Twitter. It's finished. The deed is finally done. 

Everything about this is demoralizing and terrifying. First of all, there's the simple fact of how disgracefully Musk behaved through the whole ordeal. He acted far below the standard of any responsible executive and will apparently face no consequences for it. We have here yet another vindication of what is becoming the dominant style in our social and political life: the mugging smirk of the little boy who misbehaved and got away with it. More evidence that the bad guys are winning. 

For All [Hu]mankind

 In mid-summer 1969, then–Nixon administration speechwriter Bill Safire wrote a speech that was never given. It might in fact be the most famous undelivered speech in history: the words that President Nixon would have read aloud, if the Apollo 11 mission had failed, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had perished in the attempt. 

One of the more chilling and macabre details of the piece—and perhaps the reason it sticks in the memory—is that it does not contemplate the astronauts' sudden and fiery death mid-orbit or upon reentry (an appalling fate, but one that would be mercifully brief). Instead, the speech was concerned with an even more ghastly contingency: one in which the men were unable to leave the moon's surface after landing, and were left stranded on that alien surface indefinitely to wait out their slow and agonizing end. 

Fortean Jurisprudence

In one particularly provocative line in his famous study, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn declares that the academic disciplines of the natural sciences—far from being the domain of un-bigoted rational inquiry, as they are often portrayed—are in fact a "narrow and rigid education" to be compared at best to "orthodox theology." (That modifier "orthodox" is crucial to sustaining Kuhn's point: at the liberal divinity school I attended, after all, "theology" was taught in such a nebulous way that it could scarcely be described as even talking about god, let alone doing so in a way that was "narrow.")

Kuhn may be exaggerating for effect, and his point at any rate wasn't to impugn the rational validity of the sciences. Rather, it was to contrast the way in which episodes from the history of the sciences are treated in science class with the quite different picture that emerges from a more free-ranging examination of that history. When the history of science is discussed at all in science class, Kuhn relates, it is only to appear in the role of salient episodes—almost miniature morality tales—that show how a previous theory failed under test conditions and a new paradigm was established in its wake. 

That Bridge Explosion

 If there is one certainty in the war in Ukraine, it is that Vladimir Putin will always be sure to re-establish his role—should it be in doubt for even an instant—as premier villain of the piece. Any time the Ukrainian forces do something the least bit morally questionable, Putin will retaliate with terror bombing of civilian targets, thereby swiftly reestablishing the moral balance that has obtained throughout the war. 

Here I was over the weekend feeling somewhat uneasy about the conduct of the Kerch Strait Bridge attack, for instance (still not officially claimed by Ukrainian forces, but believed to be attributable to them); even more so about the flagrantly unlawful, strategically ill-advised, and morally bankrupt assassination of a civilian on Russian soil, which U.S. intelligence reportedly has attributed to Ukrainian forces; but before I could ready any prose on the subject, Putin was sending missiles into residential areas, damaging a kindergarten classroom, and destroying civilian infrastructure projects all over the country, making any alleged Ukrainian misdeeds pale in comparison. 

Selling Out

 I was listening to an episode of the Omnibus podcast today that was devoted to the subject of the anti-consumerist movement of the late twentieth century (ranging from Situationism, to No Logo, to Ad Busters, to "monkey-wrenchers," to "culture jamming," and all the rest of it); and as I listened, I became subtly aware of two distinct facts: 1) everything about this movement—its ideology, its methods, its total conviction of its own righteousness—would have seemed self-evidently correct to my younger self, especially in high school. And 2) every one of these intuitions that—as I say—would have seemed so patent to me once upon a time—is now lost to me. 

Why is consumerism bad, again? What's the problem with commodity fetishism? As a teenager, these questions would have seemed to hardly warrant asking. Indeed, they would have seemed self-annihilatingly absurd. "Those things are bad by definition!" And so the tactics of the movement intending to disrupt them—ranging from the unlawful (such as defacing billboards) to the basically innocuous (such as organizing a nationwide "Buy Nothing Day") would have seemed no less self-evidently righteous. But nowadays, even the relatively benign aspects of these movements strike me as wrongheaded, even harmful if taken too seriously. 

Florida Sublime

 For most of my life, there has been little to celebrate in the fact of coming from the Sunshine State. Arriving in Florida at the turn of millennium, after spending the first ten years of my life in Texas, I was confronted by a sudden vacuum of "state pride." It was a shocking contrast. 

The Texas school authorities had made the indoctrination of us elementary schoolers in the ideology of "Texas pride" a core—if not exclusive—goal of our primary education. Right after the pledge of allegiance to the United States, we recited the "Texas pledge." And we had to read The Boy in the Alamo—a book conveniently leaving to one side the fact that the whole conflict was fought over slavery and (alas) Texas was not on the side of freedom—multiple years in a row. 

The "Madman" Theory

 With the war in Ukraine by all accounts going against him on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin is adopting a strategy long familiar to theorists of deterrence: namely, to behave so erratically that you manage to convince your adversary that you are capable of anything. Many of Putin's recent actions can be interpreted in this light. There was the attack on a natural gas pipeline widely suspected to be the work of Russian operatives. There are the blatantly fraudulent votes he is conducting in Ukraine's eastern provinces in order to formalize his attempted annexation by conquest, in violation of international law. And there are his increasingly open threats to use nuclear weapons. 

Of course, Putin explicitly only threatened nuclear retaliation if Russia itself is attacked. But this is a red line the Western powers have themselves drawn in their own support for Ukraine, and the coalition in support of them would quickly crumble if the war turned into an aggressive incursion across Russia's borders. Putin knows this. So why is he suddenly talking about the possibility of resorting to nuclear weapons? The fear on the part of many analysts is that—after converting Ukraine's conquered territories into nominally "Russian" land, he will speciously portray any attempt to wrest them back (or even to continue the war in the parts already held by Ukrainian forces), as an "attack on Russia" legitimizing a nuclear response. 

Divisible Estates

 When the news broke that the billionaire founder of Patagonia was transferring the company—and with it a huge portion of his family's personal wealth—into a charitable trust, even a cynic would be hard-pressed to object to his actions. After all, the gift constituted a voluntary renunciation of billions of dollars of private wealth and a commitment to devoting these funds to the worthy public purpose of responding to the global threat of climate change. 

New York Times coverage in the Dealbook newsletter though offered an alternative perspective. Prof. Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School points out that such massive transfers of wealth into charitable trust also enable the family to dodge a billion dollar tax bill: which would have greeted them if they had left the company by will to their heirs. 

"Owning the Libs"

 At some point in the ascendency of Donald Trump, a great sea-change occurred in the terms of debate between the American left and right. It was a change so vast in its consequences and so sudden in its execution that many of us are still baffled by it. We continue to try to wage the old contest on familiar ground, even as the main struggle has shifted over onto entirely different terrain. 

It used to be the case, we may recall, that the left and right wings of the U.S. political spectrum were both competing for the mantle of virtue. Both sides could be presumed to share a set of broad social values in common: patriotism, personal liberty, equality of opportunity, the basic elements of an open, free, and multicultural society. Whether they were the best possible values or not, they were ones that every American politician had to at least appear to espouse. 

Progress

 The religion of progress has seen better days. Not so long ago, the Steven Pinkers of the world could tell us that the "better angels of our nature" were on a sure and steady upward trajectory, and we knew exactly what they meant. Nowadays, an email can land in our inbox with the heading "we're in a worse place than I expected"—and that one too hardly needs elaborating. Such pessimism is as self-evident to us today as the optimism of Pinker would have been five years ago. 

The headline in question came from an interview with Bill Gates, conducted by David Wallace-Wells. A friend sent me the link to make sure it came my way, but the truth was I'd already noticed it. The headline, once glimpsed, was hard to unsee. Here was a figure we associate with the gospel of progress—millennium development goals, public health, the gradual amelioration of the human condition—saying that the project of global betterment is actually not going so well. 

More Border Hypocrisy

 The gas bag of hypocrisy about the management of the U.S. southern border has now swollen to staggering dimensions on all sides. On the one hand, we have the Florida governor paying for migrants from Texas to be flown across the country under false pretenses and deposited on Martha's Vineyard—which, if the stories of people being misled as to where they were being taken are true, surely amounts to a rights violation on a grand scale—something akin to kidnapping or enforced disappearance. 

Yet, DeSantis claims that these flights were voluntary and made with full knowledge as to their destination; and whether true in this case or otherwise, certainly a great many of the transportation schemes from Texas to northern cities that have been undertaken in recent months by border state demagogues (Abbott has also been working this angle) have involved migrants who willingly signed up for the trip. After all, many asylum seekers have family members already in the country, with whom they are seeking to reunite, and who live in northern cities. The Republican governors' grandstanding therefore provides a free opportunity to travel to a place they were already trying to reach.

Gaddis Annotations Part II

 With the dawn of my law school career, friends who had been down this path before me started recommending must-read books for 1Ls. One friend was particularly insistent that I read A Civil Action, going even so far as to send me a copy in the mail. Such is the inordinate contrariness of my nature, however, that the very fact of its being recommended has so far proved an insuperable barrier to my reading it. Instead, I would forward my own candidate for essential law student reading: William Gaddis's A Frolic of His Own, in which the great postmodern novelist does for the legal profession what he did in J R for the worlds of high finance and corporate America. 

While all of Gaddis's books are delightful, I'm confident now in stating that Frolic is my personal favorite. Partly it's just that I read it at exactly the right time. Perhaps alone among novelists, Gaddis has realized the literary potential latent in the art of judicial opinion-writing, as well as the possibilities for Socratic dialogue that exist within the method of civil deposition-taking (in this novel's case, the extended transcript of a deposition furnishes grounds for a Socratic dialogue about Socratic dialogues, specifically—the "self-referential" nature of contemporary art being another sub-theme of the novel). 

Exclaiming Against the Gods

I was talking with a friend on the phone the other day when he suddenly let out a gasp, followed by a long "Ewwww!!" I asked what had happened. He explained that in bending down to pick up what he thought was a piece of wood from the ground, he realized too late that it was actually a cockroach. His fingers had made contact with the bug before its many legs started wriggling and he dropped it, appalled. 

I commiserated. Something similar had happened to me on a call, when I had lost my train of thought due to the scurrying of some many-legged arthropod that had suddenly appeared from a crevice in my wall. "Isn't it the worst?" I said. What was terrible about it, I said, was not only the momentary feeling of alarm and revulsion. It was also the knowledge that if one didn't act immediately, while the grotesque creature was still within sight, it might escape; and then one would have to endure the rest of one's days knowing that it was still crawling about somewhere on the same premises, and could emerge at any moment. 

Icarian Flights

Saturday's episode of the Slate Money podcast led off with a discussion of President Biden's recent decision to grant partial debt relief to some student loan borrowers, provided they are earning below a certain income threshold. The chief point they wanted to stress was that—however much the policy may seem to benefit a relatively privileged subset of the community (we live, after all, in a society in which only about half of the people will ever attend any amount of college)—we shouldn't be deluded into thinking this partial debt cancellation is a giveaway to the upper-middle class. To the contrary, the hosts emphasized, many of the people who will benefit most from the policy are those who enrolled in a program and never completed it—ending up with debt but no degree to reward them for the expense—and those graduating into low-wage professions. 

The policy is manifestly not, therefore, what it is often portrayed to be in the right-wing imaginary: a free gift of taxpayer money to spoiled kids with professional parents who saddled themselves voluntarily with debt in order to get MFAs. Such a person, the Slate Money hosts emphasized, is as much a fictitious bogey of right-wing punditry as the hypothetical food stamps recipients buying lobster and steak in the check-out line. It is, that is to say, a figment used to mine the rich vein of social resentment upon which conservative rhetoric feeds, not an accurate picture of the debt relief policy's typical beneficiary. 

Cold Calls

 In the lead-up to law school, as people learned I was planning to attend, everyone had something to say about "cold calls." A memorable scene from 1973's The Paper Chase shows the young protagonist caught mortifyingly unprepared to answer a question in class, and rushing off to the bathroom immediately afterward to vomit in anxiety. Lawyers would regale me with anecdotes from their law school days about embarrassing or particularly memorable times a professor stumped them. And probably an actual majority of our orientation week, as we were readying ourselves to finally begin, was spent listening to various people—everyone from professors to the dean to 2Ls and 3Ls—tell us "not to worry so much about cold calls."

Inwardly, I rolled my eyes at all this. The Paper Chase kid? What a whiner! Boo hoo. What, had he never been called on in undergrad? What's the problem? All the lawyers telling us what a terrifying yet formative experience it was to be put on the spot during a 1L doctrinal class—how could it possibly be as big of a deal as they said? Hadn't they ever done public speaking before? I assumed the problem was simply that they had started law school so relatively young. Once you've been, like me, inured to the workforce for several years—I was telling myself—a professor asking you a question can hardly be the most terrifying thing you've ever endured, in the scope of life's challenges. 

An End in Themselves

We are now a full year past the U.S. withdrawal and evacuation from Afghanistan, and it seems that the Afghan people are once again to be made to suffer for the actions of their rulers. And, just as on all the previous occasions, this will be an injustice piled atop an injustice, since ordinary Afghan civilians are already the primary victims of Taliban rule, then as now; and, just as before—they are to be punished for the deeds of the very people who are victimizing them. 

Because of the Taliban's actions, the Afghan people were punished with twenty years of war, occupation, innumerable counts of collateral damage and U.S. war crimes, the full extent of which may never be known. Because of the Taliban's actions, the Afghan people had the assets of their central bank—which, because of the unique structure of the institution in Afghanistan, includes the savings of innumerable ordinary Afghans—frozen, destroying much of the economy. 

I Will Set My Bow in the Heavens

I of course don't really believe in divine signs or portents, or in a divinity capable of dispensing them, but I cannot deny that my heart was lifted on some pre-rational level, when I saw this rainbow set above a liberal church, on a late June day, in a city known as "Providence." It did indeed feel as if some deity were smiling down upon the liberal faith. 

In a society where the culture wars have once again put LGBTQ rights in the crosshairs, it seemed moreover to have a special meaning that the symbol took the form of a rainbow, and that it appeared above a congregation whose wayside pulpit supplies a constant stream of gender- and sexuality-affirming messaging. Moreover, the photo was taken—as I mention—last June; that is—in the midst of Pride Month. 

Sacrifice Zones

 If you were following the news these past few weeks exclusively through the mass mailings in your email inbox, you might be forgiven for thinking that there were two quite different climate bills pending before Congress. 

On the one hand, you would have seen news headlines informing you that the most historic, generation-defining climate legislation ever to pass a chamber of Congress had just become law. You would have been told that climate activists were thrilled at the bill, which was the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history and would likely slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 30-40% by the end of the decade. Great news!, you would have thought. 

Escalation

 At some point after Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the rumors started flying: do you think Taiwan will be next? Mostly, though, I only heard this possibility mentioned in order to pooh-pooh it as an example of right-wing paranoia. Some extreme hawks were apparently making the argument that, if Putin were not immediately ousted from eastern Ukraine—including the areas he unlawful seized in 2014—then China would leap to the conclusion that the West posed no plausible deterrent threat to their own territorial ambitions, and they would invade their quasi-independent self-governing island neighbor. 

As I say, though, I rarely heard anyone take this argument seriously; they mostly just brought it up as an example of needless fear-mongering. As grand strategy, after all, it relied on an overly simplistic model of deterrence, and elided the differences between heterogenous situations. Besides, this sort of "domino theory" wasn't necessary to make the moral or strategic case for supporting the Ukrainian defense in the first place. Putin's invasion was and is wrong intrinsically: not because of what signals it might or might not send to other global powers who have an eye on expanding their sphere of influence. 

Ready When Trouble Came

 Browsing in a bookstore yesterday, I picked up a paperback copy of Don DeLillo's 2020 lockdown novel, The Silence. It turned out to be a fortuitous year to find it. The book—really more a novella or long short story than a full novel, brief enough to be read in a sitting—is set two years in the future from when it was published: 2022. Thus, we are now living in the not-too-distant future DeLillo described, and can compare it against his vision of what the next two years might hold. 

Despite being projected two years ahead, though, DeLillo's novella is unmistakably a product of its own moment: the first, vaccine-less year of the global pandemic. It is, as I say, a lockdown novel. It is not so relentlessly topical as to refer to COVID-19 by name. Rather, its characters are trapped in place by a mysterious blackout seemingly caused by a simultaneous worldwide failure of electronic technologies—what one character describes as "the total collapse of all systems." 

Insider Knowledge

 A friend is always accusing me of the annoying authorial habit of writing on this blog with a presumption of “insider knowledge.” That is to say, instead of simply explaining clearly what I mean by a particular reference or allusion, I will drop some offensive adverb that hints that the reader is supposed to already be familiar with the work I am about to cite. When my friend is not in fact familiar with it, he takes it amiss. 

What my friend resents most is a phrase like: “As Yeats famously observed….” I suppose he would prefer I say, “As William Butler Yeats once wrote”—and perhaps add an “the Irish poet” after the surname for good measure. He is convinced that such explanation is the least I owe my reader, and that my reluctance to append it can only stem from a craven impulse to seem au courant—to try to establish myself as part of an “in” crowd: one of the ones who “know.”

Explaining Oneself

 There is a scene early on in Sartre's Nausea, in which the angst-ridden narrator sits regarding a group of young people at a nearby café table. He wonders at the seemingly effortless flow of their conversation. One will ask a question, and the other does not struggle to answer. How, he wonders, are they able to provide such ready accounts of themselves? "[T]hey tell clear, plausible stories," he remarks. "If they are asked what they did yesterday, they aren't embarrassed: they bring you up to date in a few words. If I were in their place, I'd fall over myself." (Alexander trans.)

This is, as they say, the story of my life. In any social situation involving people I don't know well, I struggle mightily to answer even the most basic questions. "How was your weekend? What did you do?" "What's that book in your hand? What's it about?" It's not that these questions have no answers, or that I could not possibly supply them. It's that the answers defy any simple explanation that could be conveyed in the setting of a light conversation. To every one of these innocuous bids for small talk, I'm inclined to reply: "I'd love to tell you; how many hours can you spare?" 

Extremism in Defense of Vice

 It's hard to say in which activity cultural reactionaries take more delight: the persecution of vices they do not routinely practice themselves, or the ferocious defense of the ones they do. It has happened more than once that a right-winger who would vehemently defend the punitive incarceration of anyone selling an ounce of weed will also be the first person to denounce as creeping tyranny the news that New York City, say, just imposed an incremental tax on soda. Generally, they will hold both views without detecting the least contradiction between them, and perhaps there isn't one. So long as one is not troubled by the Categorical Imperative, at least, one can be against the vices of others and passionately in favor of one's own. 

I was thinking about this in reading the arch-Tory George Saintsbury's 1920 work on oenology, Notes on a Cellar-Book. I went to the book expecting a light introduction to the joys of connoisseurship. I was unprepared to find in its pages quite such a blistering polemic against the evils of Prohibitionism. One might think that for a traditionalist and product of the Victorian era like Saintsbury, the question of whether or not to ban alcohol could go either way. But Saintsbury is clear in his own mind: the attempted abolition of booze was an instance of Pecksniffian reformism, intrusive modernism, and—worst of all—a frontal attack on one of his own dearest pleasures. And for the conservative, the creature comforts, even or perhaps especially when they take the form of cherished private vices, will always come first. 

Fixed Slices

 Well, Hungary's ever-repulsive prime minister Viktor Orbán was back in the news this week for the worst possible reasons—this time for making a public statement so scorchingly blatant in its racist ideology that even one of his political allies condemned the remark as "Nazi" rhetoric. One might be tempted to dismiss his comments as the irrelevant prattling of a tinpot tyrant—except that Orbán enjoys a terrifying and growing amount of international clout, including in this country. 

This year's CPAC—the annual event that sets the agenda each year for allegedly "mainstream" movement conservatism in the United States is—lest we forget—scheduled to host Orbán next month as a featured speaker. That is, one of the dominant fora in the U.S. Republican Party and conservative movement is going to provide a star platform to a man who rants about "race-mixing"—a further step in the GOP's increasingly open, no-holds-barred endorsement of outright white nationalist ideology. 

A "Devil" Disclosed

In his Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes begins with a stark warning that the unexampled prosperity of the recent past had left people unprepared for the possibility of real economic catastrophe. He argued that Thomas Malthus, at the dawn of modern political economy, had "disclosed a Devil" lurking below the surface of prosperity—the specter of mass starvation. During the affluence of the late 19th century and the belle époque, Keynes wrote, "the Devil [...] was chained up and out of sight." But with the harsh peace terms imposed on Germany in the wake of the First World War, Keynes argued, "Now perhaps we have loosed him again."

Keynes' invocation of Malthus was unfortunate (though in keeping with his contrarian affection for the oft-maligned cleric). As Alex de Waal has argued in a famous book on famine theory, Malthus' concept of catastrophic famine has little empirical support. It is more an a priori deduction from the (highly questionable) assumptions of his theory than a historical reality. There never really was a truly Malthusian famine, and there probably never will be. 

Generally Accepted Riddling Principles

 In a recent episode of the Omnibus Project podcast, Ken Jennings was introducing the topic of a once-popular early-twentieth century pseudo-riddle—a nonsensical question that took the form of a riddle but in reality had no answer. In order to tee up this subject, he took us on a tour through the history of riddling more generally, from ancient times to the present. Some memorable landmarks on the journey included Samson's riddle in the Bible, by which he confounds the Philistines; the riddle of the Sphinx, in the myth of Oedipus; and—in modern times—the pseudo-Medieval riddles that Gollum poses to Bilbo in The Hobbit. 

Now, running down this roster, one is struck first of all by the ancient-ness and continuity of riddles: they are, as Ken tells us, the oldest known form of human puzzle-making. But one notices something else too, as soon as one inspects more closely any given one of these riddles—and that is their fundamental inadequacy. We have in our heads some notion of what a riddle should be. But every single one of the canonical examples adduced above seems to fall short of the ideal type. We can all sense that there is something just a little bit cheating or eyebrow-raising about all of them. 

Bros-to-Riches: An Examination of the National Myth

The recent crash and burn of the cryptocurrency bubble invites the question: why is our society so distinctly enamored of the pyramid scheme? Why do we keep re-inventing it under different guises? Whether in the form of New Thought and New Age–influenced scams of the classic pyramid variety, Multi-Level Marketing companies of the sort that made the fortune of the DeVos family and ruined those of countless less fortunate Americans, or today's crypto fads—they all hold out the same promise: that wealth can be generated indefinitely based on something other than the underlying use-value of the product you are selling, namely: the other participants in the scheme.

And the thing is: it can work! For a time. Which is why people keep signing up. As long as you find a supply of new marks, the current participants in the scheme can make money. Then, their expanding bank balances become themselves the best enticement for luring in new marks. And the cycle goes on. This, then, is the first answer to the question with which we began. Why do people keep reinventing the pyramid scheme? Because it works. Some people get rich from them, just as some people get rich from slot machines. As long as you are early enough in and early enough to pull out, you personally can make bank, even though the majority will always lose money in the end. 

Easter Eggs 006: Venturi, Brown, Izenour

It is somewhat jarring to find more than one positive reference to Tom Wolfe in Learning from Las Vegas—a collaboration by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour dating from the 1970s. After all, Venturi and his collaborators are the subject of enormous satirical scorn in Wolfe's own architectural criticism, specifically his 1981 From Bauhaus to Our House: a needlessly polemical send-up of modern architecture which—in light of Venturi et al.'s friendly citations to his work a few years earlier—now seems an act of gratuitous ingratitude. And while it's possible that Wolfe's ribbing was understood on all sides as friendly banter, his words about the architects have somewhat too much of the tang of personal ressentiment to be entirely explained away in this manner. 

Helpless Citizens

Throughout my life, when faced with a mechanical difficulty, I have always sought the longest path between two points, inviting the consternation of anyone who enters my orbit. The paradigmatic case came when I was giving my dad a lift somewhere in my car, some time in college. He noticed that the clock on the dashboard was showing the wrong time. "Do you want me to re-set that?" he asked. "Oh don't worry about it," I replied. "You just add on an hour and seventeen minutes to whatever it says there." 

The clock had previously been set correctly, you see. And this once-correct time had merely been obscured beneath the archaeological deposit of a seasonal daylight savings shift and a seventeen-minute battery outage that I had never gotten around to correcting it for. 

Mold as Metaphor

 It stands to reason that the week one decides to sell one's house is the same in which the economy sputters, interest rates rise nationwide—putting borrowing costs out of reach for many would-be buyers—and one discovers all the insidious creeping problems about one's property that one never noticed before. 

As much as one might like to see in all this a cruel jest of providence, however—or a just retribution for having benefitted for so long from artificially inflated housing prices—the correspondence of the last of these occurrences with the decision to sell is not wholly coincidental. After all, it's perhaps not strictly true that I had never noticed the mold growing around my HVAC system before. It's just that, so long as one is not actively trying to sell the place, and mold's presence or absence can only matter to oneself, one settles for convenient fictions at the expense of truth. Only the act of selling makes it necessary to confront what one would rather leave unacknowledged. 

C'est Moi, Encore

I was chatting with a friend the other week: giving him—as I often do—a verbal digest of the Six Foot Turkey posts that have appeared since the last time we spoke. Encapsulating the insights of my May 9 entry, "C'est Moi," I went through the same progression of thought all over again as I had in writing the original piece: I'm worried that the one short and sloppy novel that I wrote at age 27 and that will never be published by a real publisher or find an audience may in fact have been the only novel I have in me and the only one I will ever write because I think I'm discovering I don't have the ability to make up things that haven't actually happened to me, or to write about anyone other than myself, and so all I can really do is transcribe the actual events of my life, but maybe that's not so bad because how many great authors are really doing anything more than that?; weren't all the greatest authors really just writing thinly-disguised autobiography? Like Proust and Joyce and—

My friend cut me off here with a snort. "Wait," he said. "Are those actually the greatest authors? Or did you just hand-select a couple examples that fit your point?" Confirmation bias, in short. 

Speaking Out

 One of the most dearly-cherished myths of my liberal upbringing was that of the ultimate importance of "speaking out." When confronted with the history of twentieth century regimes that degenerated from democracy to autocracy, it was common to ask: why did it happen? And the simple answer always came back: "because people didn't speak out." 

When we read in our history books about the collapse of liberal democratic governments and their replacement with totalitarianism, we often wondered: "why didn't anyone speak out?" I guess we assumed that if anyone had, the terrible event could not have taken place. Pastor Martin Niemöller had said as much: "first they came.... and I did not speak out": the implication being that if he and others had spoken out, it would have made the difference. 

Trauma as Explanation

 Since becoming a parent—or really starting a bit before then—my sister has immersed herself in the writings of an interconnected group of thinkers: experts in the psychology of child development and preadolescent trauma like Gabor Maté, educational theorists who are developing more contemporary forms of the Montessori method, and a host of less well-known writers, bloggers, vloggers, TikTokers, and cogitators expounding the concept and methodology of "gentle parenting." 

The common thread running through all these sources is a belief in the capital importance of autonomy in the growth of the healthy personality. To this way of thinking, every person needs autonomy, including—if not especially—small children. They therefore should be allowed to exercise the utmost degree of free personal choice consistent with their own and others' safety, and trauma is what results when someone diminishes and violates that freedom and personal autonomy. 

Public Sacrifices

"Were the Rosenbergs framed?" This classic way of formulating the question implies that there are only two options: either Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the parents of two young children who were killed by electric chair on June 19, 1953 on charges of "conspiracy to commit espionage"—were wholly innocent victims of a postwar Red Scare, or they were guilty and therefore presumably deserving of their fate. 

On this reading, the conventional historiography of the case divides into two periods: (1) in the years immediately following their trial, educated opinion generally presumed they were innocent. This was due to left-wing suspicion of the government and the collective need to make atonement and beat one's breast over the excesses of McCarthyism, etc. 

Sunbeams

 When some friends visited me over the weekend, it soon occurred to us it was the first time we all had chatted since some recent major changes in my professional life. They were excited about my decision to follow their own recently-trod path into law school and had many questions about the journey ahead: what classes would I take in my first semester? What would I choose for my 1L summer internship? Had I been assigned to a section yet? 

Attempting to answer, I realized just how little thought I had given to any of these subjects. It was easy enough to look up the schedule for first year classes; I just hadn't done so. I should have some sort of plan for my summer vacations; but I didn't. And I had no idea what a section was. To be honest, the whole subject had scarcely occupied my thoughts this summer. I knew I was going to law school; but I had built no castles in the air; I had no bold daydreams of the adventure ahead. 

Collective Guilt

 A friend of mine was describing his hypothetical plans for a future political career. He informed me that if, in this role, he were ever called upon to give a speech denouncing the human rights violations of some foreign nation, he would try to do so in a way that avoided any taint of American self-righteousness. How would he do so? Well, he would be sure to condemn the United States's own violations—current and historic—in the same breath. He gave an example of the latter: the cultural genocide the U.S. government committed through the use of federal Indian boarding schools—the legacy of which the Interior Department recently discussed and acknowledged for the first time in a lengthy report. 

He said all of this; and then I immediately put my foot in my mouth. "Why would you need to apologize for that?" I asked. My point was not to deny a sense of historical responsibility. I could see why someone like me—a white man—might need to apologize for the crimes of my settler colonialist predecessors. But my friend's antecedents had come to the country by quite different means. What did he have to feel bad about? My friend said it sounded like I was implying he didn't belong in this country. I said, to the contrary, he has more right than I do, since his ancestors were not implicated in the crimes we were discussing, and besides, if there was one form of belonging no one should envy, it's surely collective guilt. 

The Selfishness of Animals?

When a friend first sent me a news alert referenced in the last post—the one in which Pope Francis criticized some people as "selfish" for choosing to have pets instead of children—a passage from Whitman came to mind. In the famous section of the "Song of Myself" that begins "I think I could turn and live with animals...," the poet justifies his preference for quadrupedal life by observing that animals, unlike humans, "do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,/They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God[.]" Which seemed like a particularly fit rejoinder to the Pope's comments—not only because the poet's words justify a love of pets, but because they abjure the whole framework of sin and self-mortification in which condemnations of the "selfishness of others" are so often posed. 

In turning back to Whitman's verse to find the exact phrasing, though, a different resonance struck me. The reasons the poet gives for wanting to "live with animals" are the same that Freud gave—as cited in Dombek's book discussed in the previous post—in seeking to explain why people are drawn to "narcissists." The animals, Whitman says, are lovable because they are "so self-contain'd." Freud speaks of the attraction of the narcissist in similar terms, and compares it explicitly to the reasons why people find delight in animals. Dombek quotes the passage as follows: "The charm of a child [...] lies to a great extent in his narcissism, his self-contentment [....] just as does the charm of certain animals which seem not to concern themselves about us, such as cats and large birds of prey." 

Regarding the Selfishness of Others

As Kristin Dombek notes in her book-length essay, The Selfishness of Others, every articulate generation believes that it is living through an epidemic of selfishness. Never the selfishness of themselves, of course—not of the writers and presumptive readers of thought pieces denouncing the new selfishness—but of others. Particularly those who are not present in the conversation to defend themselves, and who therefore can be treated as polemical fair game: children, the very young, members of various nonconforming social groups who lack spokespeople in the immediate vicinity. 

Dombek was critiquing this myth of selfishness and the new narcissism—which we all believed in, by the way, in the years before her book was published; myself included. Despite being a Millennial, I would quote uncritically statistics from major news articles deploring the "declining empathy scores" reportedly found among the college-bound young, without inquiring much into the origin of such figures. (As Dombek shows, many of the core empirical claims of the then-trending belief in a crisis of "narcissism" fell apart under scrutiny—or at least became much harder to substantiate.)

The Už

 A friend of mine so loathes the effort involved in explaining complex facts about his life, that it has become a running gag between us that every time I ask him something that threatens to call forth such a response ("what's happening at work?", for instance), he responds with the catch-all phrase: "oh... you know... the usual."

Except he doesn't say "the usual." He says only the first two letters of that word, "the us," but pronounced as they are in the word "usual." It's a simple enough sound to make. It is one that occurs in plenty of American English words. "Casual," for instance. Or the second g in garage. There is no difficulty whatsoever in saying it conversationally. 

More to say on Keynes, Ukraine, etc...

 After three lengthy blog posts at a pace of one a day, I'm as ready as my readers no doubt are to move on from the subject of Keynes and World War I comparisons. But the world keeps hurling events in my path that leave me more convinced than ever that we are in danger of repeating that history. With pressure now growing in the United States for the White House to confiscate the assets of the Russian central bank and hand them over to Ukraine, we are seeing the groundwork laid before our eyes for a Versailles-style bargaining posture that not only threatens to prolong the war indefinitely but—if it did ever bring it to an end—would lead to a ruinous and most unrestful peace. 

Of course, as we discussed last time, the U.S. has in the very recent past expropriated the sovereign wealth of a foreign country—Afghanistan—and specifically its central bank reserves. And while legal experts say that confiscation was on firmer legal ground—due to the fact that we do not recognize the current Afghan government—it was morally, I say, on far shakier terrain. After all, that was a country in a far more vulnerable economic position—facing humanitarian crisis and risk of starvation, one to which the U.S. owed a unique historic debt in the wake of a twenty-year occupation, and one whose central bank assets included—due to the distinctive way the bank was set up—the savings of many ordinary Afghans. 

The Carthaginian Peace

 I went on last time about Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace at such length that it may have felt exhausting; but there is still one further key sense in which the book resonates with our time that I was not able to explore then in much depth: namely, the way in which the Allies' treatment of their defeated adversary resembled a recent particularly disgraceful episode in the annals of U.S. military history. (More on that shortly.)

Keynes's chief purpose in the book, let us recall, was to decry the Treaty of Versailles, which he saw as a dishonorable and ultimately self-destructive effort to take advantage of a defeated foe. The ruinous settlement that the treaty imposed, Keynes argued, was really a sort of "Carthaginian peace," meaning that it was peace attained through the cruel and utterly gratuitous extirpation of the already defeated and prostrate enemy. 

"A sandy and false foundation"

Writing in his 1919 classic The Economic Consequences of the Peace, J.M. Keynes warns his English contemporaries that they are living on borrowed time. In the wake of the first World War, he observes, many felt a glow of triumph and renewed prosperity. Not only had their nation won the great struggle and crushed the wicked adversary, but now their economy was in a position to reap the spoils. What could go wrong? 

Keynes insists (and it would take less than a decade to prove him right) that the general economic crisis caused by these events had only been delayed, rather than averted. It might be possible to disguise for a time the real cost of the war and—worse still—the peace imposed after it, but eventually everyone on the globe would feel the effects of the victorious Allies' decision to effectively shut down and dismantle their defeated foe's economy. 

World War Analogies

 In searching for historical analogies to make sense of the present-day war in Europe, the first that came to mind—for me as for so many others—was to the origins of World War II. After all, the pattern seemed so familiar. Putin had established a pretext for invasion through various disingenuous claims about a trans-historical ethnic solidarity and the need to protect the rights of Russian-speaking minorities, which he then used as a rationale to hive off the territory of his neighbor. 

On analogy to the events in Europe in the late '30s, then, Putin's annexation of Crimea would be something akin to the Anschluss; the effort to provoke a situation in the Donbas which would justify intervention would be the equivalent of the Sudetenland Crisis; and Putin's final decision to simply drop all diplomatic pretenses and invade outright could be analogized to Germany's unprovoked incursion into Poland in 1939. 

It's obvious that this analogy has force: I still continue to believe it has relevant lessons to teach us. But suppose that the war in Ukraine is not only like the start of World War II, but is also unfolding a bit like the course of World War I? 

Ichabod

During the great struggles of the Northern abolitionists in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the worst setback for their cause—the most bitter in its defeat and the most heinous in its consequences—came not exclusively from the pro-slavery politicians of the South, but also in part from one of their own elected representatives and former champions: New Hampshire's Daniel Webster, who notoriously let them down by backing the Compromise of 1850. 

This was a deal with the Southern states that was billed as necessary to preserve the union—but it came at the cost of enacting the federal Fugitive Slave law, which forced Northern states to return people escaping slavery to the hands of their captors. Webster's decision to countenance such a bargain was seen by many in the anti-slavery cause as the ultimate betrayal. It prompted John Greenleaf Whittier for one to pen the mournful words in "Ichabod": he who might/ Have lighted up and led his age,/Falls back in night. 

Lewis's Prophecy

 As I recall, there was a resurgence of interest in Sinclair Lewis's 1935 political novel, It Can't Happen Here—about the hypothetical rise of a fascist dictatorship in America—just about the time that Donald Trump was running for office. It's not hard to see why. Not only was Trump just the kind of carnival-barking demagogue that Lewis prophesied would be the downfall of our democratic institutions; the title also conveyed something of what we were all feeling: 

The prospect of a Trump presidency was just the sort of unthinkable-monstrosity-gradually-unfolding-before-our-eyes that Lewis seemed to have in mind. We all said to ourselves, in the early months of Trump's candidacy, "it can't happen here," and yet we—like Lewis's characters—lived to see it happen; the phrase therefore lent itself to the title of a thousand journalistic think pieces of the time—used with the same ironic tone with which Lewis intended it—one of which appeared on this blog, shortly after Trump won the GOP nomination. 

C'est Moi

 At some point a few years back—around 2017 or so—a friend pointed me to a publisher seeking manuscript submissions for young adult novels. I was intrigued by the challenge and so thought I might try my hand at writing a potboiler. I read the website closely to better understand what they were looking for. It appeared—at that point at least—that stories involving teenage vampires were still very much in demand. "Sounds simple enough," I said to myself. 

Okay, so—teen vampire romance. How to write that... I thought. I knew that there needed to be a protagonist. So I gave her a name and put her in a high school classroom. But then what should happen? I knew that there was supposed to be a vampire, but that his vampiric identity shouldn't be immediately obvious. He should pass incognito among us, carefully seeking out plausible excuses to avoid mirrors, garlic, and sunlight. So I made up a character and put him in the same classroom.

Projection

In his critical and philosophical work about fellow writer Jean Genet, Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre tells an anecdote about meeting a friend after the second world war from whom he had been long parted. While they were delighted to see each other at first, Sartre relates, they subsequently fell out over politics. This led to some heated exchanges, in the course of which his friend would slip into a repeated linguistic error. The third time this happened, claims Sartre, "he looked at me irritably and asked [...] 'Why do you keep making that exasperating mistake?'" (Frechtman trans.)

Sartre uses the story to illustrate the concept of "projection." That is, when a person discovers something in themselves that they are not willing to tolerate—some socially-unacceptable impulse, temptation, or plan—they turn around and attribute it to the other. "You are the one doing that, not me!" Hence the need of righteous society for scapegoats—outcasts and the underclass—to whom they can attribute their own worst impulses; hence the tendency for political adversaries to accuse one another of doing what they are plotting themselves, and using this as an excuse to preempt the other—and so on. 

Angsttraum

 One of the classic dream-types is the anxiety dream (I have no idea if Angsttraum is something they talk about in psychoanalysis, but it should be)—often intruding during that half hour or so of fitful light sleep that one catches after waking up slightly earlier than one's first scheduled obligation of the day, and drifting off again while knowing that an alarm is about to summon you to renewed effort and that there is not time left to fall back into a really deep sleep. 

For years, the most common setting for my anxiety dreams was the temporary stage that would be set up each year in my high school gymnasium for the all-school musical. No matter how old I got—how much chronological and physical distance I placed between myself and my teenage years—in a moment of high-anxiety snoozing I am always transported back to that gym; it's the night before the play; and I realize that I have procrastinated for too long the one key task of actually learning my lines. 

Singularity

 A friend and I have a running debate about just how worried we should be about the potential emergence of a "singularity"—i.e. a hypothetical technological intelligence possessing infinite powers. He thinks it's a real concern that stands a chance of overwhelming and subverting human civilization—if not the entire fabric of the multiverse—within the next few decades. 

Why? The thinking goes: machine learning and artificial intelligence are already showing enormous gains in sophistication. As machines manage to teach themselves how to do more and more things, they will eventually figure out how to augment their own intelligence and capacity. This would create an infinite feedback-loop in which machines become exponentially more knowledgeable, hence infinitely powerful. 

Not a sparrow falls...

 In my not-very-consistent attempt to keep up with each week's environmental news as part of my job, I came across an article describing what seemed an unlikely animal experiment. The scientists were attempting to measure the effects of fear—separated out from real physical danger—on a group of song sparrows. The control group was left alone to live their usual sparrow lives. The experimental group, by contrast, was subjected to a constant pulse of terrifying sounds associated with the birds' natural predators. 

Now, the ethics of animal testing are complicated and I'm not sure I have a thought-out position. In any event, there are far more questionable forms of testing out there than this experiment—ones that cause direct physical damage rather than psychological (and only indirectly physical) harm to their animal subjects. And none of that is even to mention the animal cruelty that takes place on an even vaster scale in the factory farms, fisheries, and slaughterhouses of the world. 

Takes

 We live in the age of takes—so much so that a person like Matt Yglesias—noted author of many a bad take on Twitter—can refer to himself and his colleagues as working within the "take space"; the implication being that takes are a kind of consumer product, and that the maker of takes is an expert craftsperson of our era—someone with the unerring hand and eye for publishing takes of just the right size and shape to win widespread acclaim. 

What is the secret recipe? What distinguishes a good take from a bad one? The first ingredient is obvious: a good take is one that people in its implied target audience will like. It therefore must be one they agree with. Not only that, it must be one they agreed with even before they read it. It can't, that is to say, set out to persuade anyone of anything; the scrolling brain rebels against such bullying—it must, on the contrary, flatter its readers' prejudices.

Pyrrha

 In his collection of philosophical parables and riddles, each centering on a hypothetical imagined city, Italo Calvino describes one metropolis that his narrator—Marco Polo; who is and is not the historical thirteenth-century Venetian merchant and traveler—visits after hearing of it only by name, Pyrrha. The city, the narrator reflects, is one he long pondered in thought before ever glimpsing it in fact. Having thought of it for so long, he conjured a version of it in his mind that came to have its own reality, and which he knew as the only Pyrrha. 

When the day arrived that he finally visited this Pyrrha and saw it with his own eyes, the invisible version of it that had existed in his mind was forced to cede the name. The imagined city could not be Pyrrha, since the real one was in front of him, and was plainly quite different; and it had already taken that name. Yet, the narrator cannot quite rid himself of the ghost of the imagined city. It still seems to have its own existence. Yet, if the real Pyrrha is before him, then what is the imagined city of his mind? The other city still exists, he declares, "but I could no longer call it by a name[.]" (Weaver trans.)

Errata and Marginalia 020: Pelevin

Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens (New York, Penguin Books: 2002); originally published 1999.

There are few things in this world as eerie as seeing satire come to life. There was the 2014 episode of This American Life, for example, which made a joke about a hypothetical dystopian future in which the president of the United States had become none other than the crass real estate dealer and reality TV personality Donald Trump. But it's not only in the United States where apparently sardonic and unserious remixes of our cultural detritus can turn out to be prophetic. Reading Russian author Victor Pelevin's novel Homo Zapiens (to give its title in the U.S. release), one has the sense that he foretold the entirety of the Putin era before it had even begun. 

To fully appreciate the extent to which this is true, it is perhaps necessary to read Pelevin's novel shortly after encountering Peter Pomerantsev's 2014 book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible—a journalistic account of his time making TV documentaries in Russia during the early Putin era, as the scope for genuinely independent media and civil society was steadily closing. I listened to Pomerantsev's book on a recent road trip. This weekend, I read Pelevin's novel in paperback. And what became frighteningly clear as I did so is that what Pelevin wrote as fiction in 1998—the tail end of the Yeltsin era—could be written as fact by the time Pomerantsev was publishing his book just 16 years later. 

Double Standards

 In Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms—which I read for the first time only recently, as part of a magpie-like quest, in reaction to current events, to gather various war materials into a single mental lump—there comes a major plot turn when the protagonist decides not to return to active duty at the Italian front, but instead to break for the frontier of neutral Switzerland. He has become, in effect, a deserter (though not a deserter from a proper army, as his paramour Catherine Barkley consolingly reminds him, but "only the Italian army"). And when Barkley and he together make a thrilling run for the border by lake, dodging Swiss and Italian coast guards under peril of interdiction and refoulement to Italy, they have become, in effect, refugees. 

Hemingway's protagonist, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, is aware of this—and aware that Switzerland like other nations has been known to jealously guard access to its territory—so he makes inquiries as to what happens to refugees who manage to evade border guards and make it into Switzerland. Careful, he is warned, you will be interned. Lieutenant Henry is aware of this risk, but he asks what it would mean in practice. Are we talking outright detention, with zero freedom of movement? (Think of the concentration camps that would be used decades later in France to jail Spanish Civil War refugees.) No, he is told, nothing like that. He would probably just have to check in with police periodically. In the language of some advocates and official government euphemists, Switzerland circa 1919 apparently favored "community-based alternatives to detention."

Litost

 In the spring of my twenty-seventh year, about five years ago, everything in my life was going just right. I was leaving my former part-time employment; I was a few months into my first-ever full-time job, with benefits. Modest enough accomplishments, in the scope of human ambitions, but to my mid-to-late-twenties mind, they signaled that my adult life was turning out to be more normal than I had always expected, and that things might in fact be okay after all. 

To mark this moment of transition, my co-workers at my former part-time employment invited me out for an evening of bowling. Now, I had always loathed bowling, darts, table tennis, and all other party games that required even a small amount of athletic ability and hand-eye coordination. Why did I loathe them? Because I was bad at them. But in my newfound twenty-seven-year-old-everything-is-going-my-way confidence, I thought I'd give it a try. 

Mask Up!

When news broke the other week about a major scientific study shedding new light on the perils of "long COVID," you can be sure it quickly found its way into my inbox. One of my close friends is just slightly further than I am on the side of caution, on the great COVID precautionary measures continuum that stretches all the way from those still maintaining perfect isolation to those gleefully and voluntarily breathing and coughing each day into the faces of total strangers. As such, he is perpetually concerned that I am in danger of backsliding in the direction of a maskless, caution-less existence. He therefore sees to it personally that every new piece of bad news about COVID is brought to my attention. 

And this piece was indeed attention-grabbing, from the headline down. Even relatively "mild" cases of COVID-19, the article reported, could be associated with significant losses of brain tissue and cognitive functioning, and it was unclear how long lasting those effects might be or whether they could ever be reversed. 

They also serve...

 The other day, a friend and I were playing a video game in co-op mode and were having the hardest time clearing one of the stages. The game was in part a conventional platformer, and the stage that was giving us such trouble required leaping up a series of narrow ledges that kept rotating back into the wall.  

One of the quirks of the game's cooperative mode is that, so long as one of us was alive, the other could fall off the ledge to their presumed death and still be allowed to regenerate where the other was still standing. But for the first five tries or so, this fact did us little good, because we both kept charging toward the ledge at the same time and trying to leap the narrow gap. We failed, and each time we were kicked back to the earlier checkpoint several minutes earlier in the game.

Being Right

As we enter the third week of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, there seems to be a gathering awareness that one of the greatest barriers to ending this war and saving lives may be a counter-intuitive one: the very righteousness of the Ukrainian cause itself. If both sides were equally answerable for various crimes or misdeeds, after all, then arriving at a compromise and power-sharing deal would be a relatively simple matter to rally behind. The problem here is that the opposite is the case. Putin started it; he chose to unilaterally invade the sovereign borders of another country, and that country now has an unambiguous right to defend itself...

Yet, a country can be 100% in the right and still be militarily in the weaker position. Putin has the bigger war machine at his disposal. He can afford to prolong the conflict, and it is not his civilians, his people's children, his innocents, who are being butchered the longer he drags out the fighting. In order to de-escalate or end the conflict, therefore, Ukraine may have to give something up, even though, morally-speaking, they shouldn't have to do so; even though, in the domain of right and wrong, they are the injured party and shouldn't be forced to part with anything. 

How Does This War End?

 Just over a week into Putin's war in Ukraine, there seems to be general consensus that it hasn't gone very well for the invaders. Russian forces have still failed to take the capital; their confused and unwilling troops have been plunged into a war they did not choose; they have bombed and shelled civilian targets from the skies while still failing to establish effective aerial dominance over the country; their outdated equipment and methods of attack have been matched by a smaller but fiercer Ukrainian resistance...

Yet, for all the gloating some have felt at the ineffectiveness of the Russian war effort, and the genuine inspiration others have taken from the Ukrainian defense, every sober analysis still indicates that Putin can win the war. However poor and incompetent his strategy, he has the firepower, the numerical advantage, and the apparent indifference to and contempt for the fate of his own conscripted soldiers to eventually—emphasis on eventually—seize the entire country and decapitate its government. 

"Dying, but fighting back"

"...she cried so high thermopylae

heard her and marathon

and all prehuman history

and finally The UN"

So wrote E.E. Cummings back in 1956, speaking of the cries to heaven of another embattled Eastern European nation that was putting up a courageous resistance to Russian (or, in that case, Soviet) aggression. Back then it was Hungary; but today, it seems that the cries of Ukraine have been at least as far-reaching, since just this afternoon the UN Security Council voted over three abstentions to hold an emergency session of the General Assembly in response to Putin's invasion of Ukraine—only the 11th such meeting that has occurred in history. 

Thus, four days into Putin's war, I think it's safe to say that whatever the Russian president thinks he is achieving with all this, it is not a propaganda victory. Not only did he invade a sovereign and much smaller and weaker nation utterly without justice or provocation; he also didn't even do it particularly well. His forces have been stymied, at least for a time, by an unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance, and as a result, even the moral numbskulls who only know how to worship power are now turning on him. "They flee from me, that sometime did me seek."

"We fear for the quo pro quid."

 For weeks people said Putin would never do it. Would-be clever people on Twitter got easy likes for posting eye-rolling emojis and sarcastic comments along the lines of: "Oh yeah, that invasion which is totally going to happen any day now." Think tank analysts whose hot takes seemed to align eerily closely with Russian strategic interests said that it was really "the blob" that was preparing for war (using the derisive term for the often-justly-derided U.S. foreign policy establishment), rather than Putin, and was ginning up the conflict through their excessive media alarmism. 

Sure, Putin was building up troops on Ukraine's border. Sure, he was issuing bellicose encyclicals on the subject of the alleged historic and spiritual unity of the Russian and Ukrainian peoples. But it was all a stunt. An elaborate feint. A bluff to gain leverage. 

"Never to betray; never to condone"

 Well, it's happened. After teasing it for what felt like an eternity, Putin has finally gone ahead and declared the independence of two sections of eastern Ukraine, making this the second time in the last decade that the Russian autocrat has unilaterally hived off a portion of the sovereign territory of one of his largest contiguous neighbors. Whether targeted sanctions are the best that can be done about this is up for debate. Whether Ukraine could have de-escalated the conflict and effectively undermined Putin's propaganda efforts at an earlier stage by agreeing to grant further autonomy to the breakaway territories merits consideration (I have argued for that position myself). But we should not allow any of these questions of strategy to occlude the moral right-and-wrong of the matter. 

While Putin will continue to pursue his usual MO of constructing alternate realities, trying to relativize his own actions, and spinning kernels of truth into the dross of moral nihilism, the basic facts remain these: he unilaterally annexed the territory of a sovereign nation as recently as 2014; he armed separatist factions and deployed relentless propaganda to justify the seizure of still further territory in the country's east; he moved troops into formation with the apparent intent to invade that country while publishing manifestos declaring its historic unity with Russia; and now he has declared the independence of two territories that he had long since brought into his orbit, unilaterally redrawing the border of another sovereign state. Putin's in the wrong, and there should be no further debate about that. 

Cynicism

 In the sociological quest to understand why so many people are leaving their jobs this year—a phenomenon that has been dubbed "the Great Resignation"—it's easy enough to understand how pandemic-era burnout would be a factor. Harder though, is knowing at what stage one has the right to lay claim to experiencing it oneself. One can well imagine how health care workers, food service workers, warehouse and package delivery workers—and everyone else on the front lines of the crisis—would feel burned out (and then some). But what about those of us who work in relatively cushy office jobs? 

In many of the more tangible ways, after all,—especially if we don't have young children—our lives became easier after COVID hit. We work from home. We roll out of bed and are prepared for the day in the amount of time it takes to load Microsoft Teams and pour ourselves a cup of coffee. What possible claim could we have to feeling burned out? 

"The last poor plunder from a bleeding land"

 In the year-plus that Biden has been in power, there have been a number of key decisions he has made that could be described as disappointing, even devastating, policy betrayals... his decision to maintain Trump's anti-asylum Title 42 policy, for instance, or his failure to evacuate Afghan interpreters and other allies ahead of the military withdrawal from the country. Yet, his executive order unveiled yesterday seizing $7 billion in assets rightfully belonging to the people of Afghanistan—in the midst of an economic crisis—might be the most wicked and disgraceful thing yet. 

The enormity of this crime almost defies words; and one finds oneself even more at a loss to describe it because the substance of the policy has been occluded behind such mystifying rhetoric. What the order actually does is to forcibly expropriate the bulk of the reserves of Afghanistan's central bank, and place these assets under the control of the United States—all while Afghanistan's economy is collapsing and the country faces a hunger crisis. But what it claims to be doing, according to the administration's press release, is to "preserve certain Afghanistan Central Bank assets for the people of Afghanistan." 

Infinite Choice

 At some point in my fourteenth year, I had the mixed fortune to be touched—absolutely, incontrovertibly, and for all time—by a sense of vocation. I say it was mixed because it was both benison and curse: blessing, because I knew at last what I was. I was a writer. And not just any kind of writer. An essayist in a particular mid–twentieth century mode. Whatever George Orwell and Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling were, that was me. But it was also a misfortune to discover this, as I say. Because the vocation that was thrust upon me was one that provided no necessary route whatsoever to making a living. 

I knew that this was the case. It was, to be sure, many years later that I would read Paul Auster's memoir of his struggles in early career, but I knew already by instinct the lesson he had to teach: "Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman," he writes in Hand to Mouth. One should not expect to make a living at writing alone, he says. It is not among those practical arts that Thomas Carlyle dubbed the "Bread-Studies." It may be compatible with any number of other means of subsistence; but in itself it does not tell one which to pursue. 

The Tartar Steppe

Looking at the Wikipedia page of the twentieth-century Italian novelist Dino Buzzati, the other day, I encountered the following dry account of his life and career: "As he was completing his studies in law, he was hired, at the age of 22, by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain until his death."

Because any of the random atomic facts of the universe can be made to serve as grist for the mill of one's own existential anxieties, if you squint at them enough, this sentence quickly acquired personal meaning for me: "Aha!" I said to the universe: "See? It's not so odd to just take a job at a place and stay there until one retires! Loads of people do it! I'm sure he was perfectly happy!"

Appeasement?

 Everyone can agree at this point that the "Munich analogy" has been overplayed. Not only have Hitler/Nazi comparisons of all kinds come to be regarded as argumentative cheap shots (or worse, as relativizing the exceptionally evil in human history), but the Munich analogy in particular has been abused to the point of senselessness. Throughout much of the last century, it could serve as the final closing argument to support a maximalist position in just about any negotiation with rival powers, because the idea of conceding anything could be portrayed as "appeasement," hence "reminiscent of Munich," hence ultimately likely to trigger more, rather than less, war. 

But with all those caveats in place, Putin's expansionary gambits in Eastern Europe really do seem reminiscent of the events of 1938 in a more than usual fashion. This does not mean the Russian leader is bound to follow Hitler's genocidal and megalomaniacal path by some kind of inexorable teleology; nor does pointing out the similarity of his propaganda and tactics in this limited respect mean that he is like the Nazi dictator in all ways. But the particular manner in which he has gone about gradually enlarging the territory under Russia's effective control mirrors in an uncanny way the actions of Hitler leading up to the 1939 invasion of Poland.