Missing Tapes

 Did it finally happen? Did Trump just reach peak Nixon? 

All throughout his presidential campaign and tenure, after all, Trump invited a sense of continuity with the former president. There seemed to be echoes of the Nixon-era "Chennault Affair" in the parallel foreign policy Trump's campaign team ran in the lead-up to the election. Trump himself was personally connected with historical figures from the Red Scare era like Roy Cohn. And the Donald even gathered to his banner some of the same self-described dirty tricksters, viz. Roger Stone, who made their bones doing electoral skulduggery for the Nixon campaign (and who, in Stone's case, bears a tattoo of the former president in case anyone forgot the connection). 

Protean Career Plans

 In my shambolic journey through young adulthood, I once joked that at one time or another I had managed to consider every possible career and life trajectory other than joining the military. Now, earlier this summer, I finally managed to cross that last missing item off the list. Despite opposing nearly everything the U.S. military has done in my politically-conscious lifespan, I strangely found myself a month or so ago checking out the procedure for officer enlistment in the U.S. Navy, and seriously thinking about doing it. 

What drove me to this unlikely consideration was primarily the same old motivation that has prompted people throughout history to take the King's shilling: the promise of job security. Specifically, it occurred to me that the military employs lawyers, and that they get benefits and tenure for about as long as they want to stay there. What appeals to many people about the military, after all, is that they seem to want you there (at least they give you that impression before you have mortgaged your freedom to them) and that they have resources to throw around. Plus, it offers to many young people a solution to the omnipresent existential dilemma that confronts us in the state of freedom. The military, whatever else it does, at least tells you what to do. And that's something!

The UFO Flap Comes for Congress

 Well, the never-ending UFO story is back, with high-profile members of Congress joining hands across party lines to give yet another imprimatur of respectability to the theory that extraterrestrial craft are visiting Earth. The latest flap was prompted by an alleged military intelligence "whistleblower" who came forward with the staggering claim that the U.S. government has recovered technology of "non-human origin" from UFO crash sites—and is keeping it a secret from the rest of us. 

If these claims sound preposterous on their face, Very Serious People are lining up to assure us they are in fact highly credible. After all, Congress is convening a hearing to discuss the allegations, and the likes of Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio have cosponsored legislation demanding answers from the executive branch on any secret UFO programs it may be operating, as well as on any "biological evidence" they may possess "of living or deceased non-human intelligence." Think Roswell and Alien Autopsy. 

Froth on a Daydream

 The arrival of a new bull market on Wall Street has myself and a lot of people waiting uneasily for the other shoe to drop. Why is it that the Fed keeps raising interest rates, economists keep warning about a potential downturn, and yet stocks keep rising and economic data keep coming in better than expected? The incongruity imparts a magical sheen to the markets, and whenever people start to engage in magical thinking about the economy, we can trust we are probably in the presence of a bubble. There is a "tulip mania" afoot, of the sort Donald Barthelme wrote it was ever a public duty to confront. 

Yet, to see the froth is not necessarily to resist bathing in it oneself, while it lasts. One still checks back on the stock ticker each day, hoping to see those numbers rise. I have even developed a superstition that if I can somehow manage to resist the urge to look at the results each day, until after markets close at 4 PM Eastern, and save up all that dopamine for one big rush at the end of trading hours, then this very restraint and forbearance on my part would somehow itself act to drive prices higher. 

Correcting People

 One of my ongoing debates with a friend, which I've described on this blog before, concerns our long-standing difference of opinion on the topic of the appropriateness of "feedback." He is of the view that, if you catch someone making a mistake or committing an error, you should instantly apprise them of it. After all, he argues, are you not doing them a favor in doing so—because you are saving them from the fate of having to walk around with a false belief? 

I, meanwhile, am of what I prefer to call the Ken Jennings school of thought on the issue—based on a quote the Jeopardy star once delivered on a podcast. The Jennings view is that it is rude—an undesirable and unattractive personal trait—to correct people or point out to them that they are wrong. Even if one thinks or knows that they are wrong, therefore, one should pretend not to notice the fact. 

"Perfection is Death"

 A couple months ago, I shared with a friend the key take-aways from a post I'd written on this blog, grappling with the topic of perfection. I was writing in the piece about how I was seized at times by the sudden fear that I had previously enjoyed a perfect life, but that I had pointlessly smashed my own idyll in order to move to a new city and start a new existence as a law student. 

My conclusion in the blog, ultimately, was that, first, I was prepared to bite the bullet on the possibility that my previous life had been perfect because, second, perfection is something that always invites its own destruction anyway. Perfection necessarily means stasis, after all—which means immobility—since, why should one ever change what is perfect? Yet, the essence of life is movement and change. To stop moving is to drop dead. Therefore, I concluded at last, I was right to smash my own perfection and to embark upon a new, imperfect life, even conceding the truth of that perfection, because "perfection is inimical to life." Perfection is death. It must be destroyed, or else the organism, which requires change and motion, dies where it stands. 

Flation

  This week brought another round of the perverse spectacle of Wall Street wringing their hands over the supposedly "bad news" that the economy keeps growing and the labor market keeps thriving, at least according to the latest data. Obviously, the hand-wringing is a rational response from their perspective to the downstream effects of this news on interest rates—the latest data means that the Fed will almost certainly keep making borrowing more expensive, in its July meeting, in order to slow down wage and price growth. 

But this just pushes the question back a step further: why does our central bank need to keep battling against the very growth and labor market strength that are benefiting American workers and increasing our national prosperity? Is there no possible response to inflation, other than to fight so hard against what should be a manifestly good thing? 

Resolutions

 At some point in the middle of 2021, some internet self-help wisdom managed to trickle down to me sufficient to convince me that what I really needed to do in order to solve all my life problems and conquer adulthood was to make my bed right after I woke up. I therefore started doing so punctiliously each morning. I swore to myself that each day, before I did anything else, I would make that bed; because, after all, if I can't do something as simply as make the bed, how can I expect to accomplish anything else? 

I made it about two days under this new regime, then collapsed into the worst spell of melancholic depression I'd suffered in years, read Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, quit my job and went to law school. 

Ideas Reborn

My three-year-old nephew met me at the door of his parents' house yesterday with an urgent message: "hurry! There are ghosts everywhere! We have to catch them!" I instantly fell in behind to join the ghost hunt, before I even had a chance to say hello to the adults in the house. My sister yesterday compared playing with toddlers to a round of improv comedy, and I see her point. As she put it, you have to take a "yes, and" approach. You will get nowhere if you reject the premise your scene partner has already established. You just have to accept it and them supply whatever additional elements come to mind. 

I therefore accepted entirely that we were on a ghost hunt. We charged around from room to room using an air puffer and a toy hammer respectively to eliminate or frighten away the spectral intruders (except for those few that were deemed to be "friendly"). At a certain point, my nephew gestured at me. "Oh no!" he cried, "there's a ghost on your head!" I doubled over and began clawing at my scalp. "Ah! Get it off! Get it off!" Then, in the spirit of improv comedy, I hazarded a next development: "Are they octopus ghosts that drop on people's heads?"

Voluntary Loss

 A commonly-heard refrain in law school, whenever the topic of careers comes up, is that people are "thinking about" going into a public interest job, but they are also wrestling with whether or not they should instead "sell their soul and go into Big Law." Now, what's sad about this way of putting it is that, statistically, it would appear very few people ultimately make the public interest choice (many will not make the competitive cut for Big Law either, but land somewhere in the middle), so it would appear the market for souls is going strong. 

I'm worried by this fact that relatively few people make the "idealistic" choice, to be sure—but what troubles me even more is what this says for the future of corporate law firms. Evidently, these firms are staffed by people who go in already believing that the work they will do there has no moral worth. They therefore have already made the choice at the front end to check their conscience at the door. They have compartmentalized their moral selves from their work, and will presumably feel just fine therefore about acting in the workplace for the most mercenary reasons.