"Opportunity"

 A few years ago, when a spate of horrific killings of Asian Americans was in the news, a friend of mine who's Chinese American wrote down a few of his thoughts—trying to answer the fundamental question that follows every senseless atrocity: why? One of the words on his list was a simple one: "opportunity." I was struck by this phrasing and asked him to explain. He said that Asian Americans were attacked perhaps simply because they were there; because it was easy; because they were visible; because they were vulnerable. It was as if there was a kind of simmering rage, resentment, and latent capacity for cruelty inherent everywhere in human life. Then, when it gathered itself into expression, it was most often directed against those who stuck out; the ones in the most exposed position. They were the ones people had the "opportunity" to strike. 

I've been thinking back to his comment this week as our country faces another wave of bias-motivated attacks against racial and religious minorities—this time crystalizing around groups who have been conflated and lumped together, in some segments of the public mind, with events in the Middle East. There was the murder of a six-year-old Palestinian-American child, Wadea Al-Fayoume, in Illinois on October 14. There was the rash of online death threats and calls for mass murder targeting Jewish students at Cornell University—and many similar antisemitic incidents breaking out around the country. 

Israel... Gaza... Gaza... Israel...

 If I seem at times to be lurching back and forth 

with every change in the news

It's because I am

It's because

there is no shortage of horrors.

MAGA Goes Full-Lindbergh

 As a friend has reminded me several times in recent weeks, it was always only a matter of time before the MAGA movement decided to follow the course of its own festering antisemitism to its logical conclusion—namely, demanding an end to traditional US support for Israel. “Give it five years,” this friend told me, “and MAGA will have done a complete about-face on this issue.” It now appears he was right about everything except the timing. MAGA is already making the pivot he anticipated, except it’s happening now; not five years from now. 

The mainstream media may not have noticed it; in part because it is confined to those online corners of the evolving MAGA-sphere that most people try to ignore, in the hopes it will exhaust itself and go away. If you had only been paying attention to Trump himself, after all, you would not have concluded that any major policy realignment was afoot. Apart from a few characteristically bizarre and controversial quips (about Hezbollah being “smart,” e.g.), Trump has mostly hewed to the conventional Republican line of attacking Democrats from the right on this issue. 

The Badness of King George

 A couple days ago, Politico ran a tremendously witty piece about the unexpected reappearance of George W. Bush; and the events the article describes are indeed striking. Most of us have gone years without thinking of the former president; and when we have at all, it is inevitably with nostalgia and affection. Yes, I confess this—even as someone who utterly loathed and railed against Bush II when he was in office—even as someone who knows full well and thoroughly condemns all the ways in which the former president was most likely a war criminal (the torture program, extraordinary rendition, CIA black sites, Guantanamo, and on). 

In spite of all this, alas, political memory is appallingly short (even if the life of Bush's forever prison in Cuba and other worst legacies is not). We are left, after a passage of years, with vibes rather than facts. And the lingering aura around Bush is one of decency—especially compared to the Republican party of today. The result has been an inescapable drift among millennials toward viewing the former president with affection—even among those of us who went to high school in the Bush years and developed our first sense of political identity around hating him. 

Homage to John Heartfield

 After John Heartfield, "Madrid 1936: No Pasaran! Pasaremos!"

"Dead Bodies and Ruined Houses"

 At the beginning of her virtuoso essay about war and patriarchy, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf describes a series of photographs she receives each week "from the Spanish government"—urging support for the Republican cause in the Civil War. The pictures showed the effects of fascist violence—particularly of the bombardment of civilians. Woolf describes images of charred corpses, including those of children. She offers these photos as self-sufficient proof of the "beastliness" of war, the waste of war—which she summarizes as the Wilfred Owen view of war—arguing that the mere sight of these images makes the case for pacifism and disarmament virtually self-evident. 

In her 2003 book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag cites this passage in order to argue that Woolf was perhaps oversimplifying. After all, Sontag notes, the uselessness and brutality of fighting and of the use of force in general is not the only possible conclusion one could take from the photos. Quite to the contrary, many were moved to take up arms precisely because of seeing photos like that. The pictures didn't teach them that the use of force was always unjustified. They showed them what happened when fascist violence was left unchecked, and underscored the reasons for resisting it—by arms if necessary. 

Poison Tree

 At about the middle of the day I checked my email to find a series of messages from a friend. These missives at first expressed anger with me. Then, interpreting my lack of response as a reproach, the messages started arguing back and forth with one another. They vacillated as to whether or not they were truly mad, how mad they were if so, and whether or not I should treat the whole thing as a joke. 

When I saw them, I suffered the quasi-physical reaction that usually occurs in me when I detect conflict—specifically, when I realize someone is angry with me. I can only describe it as a kind of tearing sensation in the gut (I once wrote about it in a poem, available here—the one that starts "When it happened it..."), which then congeals into a kind of throbbing emotional lump in my stomach. 

Improving People

 In my first months of law school, I welcomed the encouragement and advice of others. I assumed I would be first in my class, so I found nothing to resent in people asking me how my grades were looking. I felt entitled to dream big about my future legal career, so I had nothing against people quizzing me about how prestigious my 1L summer internship was going to be. 

Then, as law school continued, and my record proved to be persistently less than perfect, I started to panic. "Uh oh," I thought. "I'm letting everybody down." It became an intolerable snub to hear someone say, "I assume you're going to be top of your class"—because I knew I wasn't. When friends said, "You're going to become a judge someday, right?" I had to cringe and admit it was unlikely. 

Free Fire Zones

 The wake of mass atrocities and terrorist violence is the very hardest time to call for restraint in response. It was hard vis a vis U.S. actions after 9/11, and it is hard to demand of Israel today. But such moments are also the most important possible time to issue such a call; for it is in precisely such times that restraint is otherwise least likely to be observed—and when fundamental human rights violations that would not ordinarily be countenanced may be committed with impunity. 

There is no doubt in my mind, to be sure, that Israel is now waging a just military operation in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, by its actions, made itself a legitimate military target, and Israel has the right if not duty to intervene to topple them—just as any other state would be justified in removing a political entity from power in a neighboring territory that had engaged in massive unprovoked aggression against its civilian population (and nota bene that all attacks on civilians are by definition "unprovoked"). 

"Refusal of Aid Between Nations"

It's almost hard to recall anymore, given the mountain of horrific global events that have piled up since then, but it's been only a week and a half since a handful of far-right Republicans nearly shut down the federal government—remember that? And it was all primarily because they refused to provide additional aid to Ukraine in its defense against Putin's aggression. When their leadership did the right thing—albeit at the last moment—and agreed to fund the government for a few more weeks, they voted him out of office for it (just for a measly CR!)—and this, despite the fact that the continuing resolution he negotiated didn't even include the Ukraine aid they fought against so strenuously. 

It's hard to understand what their categorical objection to Ukraine aid could possibly be about, other than an ideological affinity for Putin and a support for his aggression. After all, do they oppose extra spending in general? Why, then, in the immense galaxy of the federal budget, are these the only earmarked funds they seemed to care about? Do they have a principled objection to militarism? Or at least a consistent ideological commitment to isolationism or foreign policy "restraint" of some kind? Um, excuse me, these are the same people openly advocating a war with Mexico. The only thing that's left as a possible explanation is that they endorse Putin's actions, or at least don't give a damn about the fate of Ukraine. 

Doomscrolling

 At some point a few years ago, my relationship to the news profoundly changed. What had once been a last-resort maneuver to stave off boredom—checking the headlines—became an engrossing activity that demanded its own significant allocation of time and mental effort. Instead of being a sleep-aid (reading a few articles before bed) it became an obstacle to rest. Opening up a news website meant girding oneself for fear, and what usually greeted one upon peeking inside was indeed a lightning stroke of white-hot terror. And even if this began during the pandemic, it has long outlasted its worst phases. 

The dynamic is often blamed on social media, of course—with its infinite supply of new content that allows one to obsess over a story or event, without ever reaching the bottom of an article or exhausting the supply of instantaneous reactions. But this can't be the whole story. After all, I have found that my new emotional relationship to news has outlasted even my personal boycott of Musk-owned websites and indifference to most other social media platforms. I'm still "doomscrolling," that is to say—even if it's only through the live blog updates on the New York Times home page. 

The Beetle Leg

 Well that was an experience! John Hawkes's experimental 1951 novel The Beetle Leg is short enough to be read in a morning, but I found it required the afternoon to then go back over it thoroughly enough to make sense of it. After all—Hawkes, according to an oft-quoted remark, sought to eliminate the usual encumbrances of character and plot from prose fiction. This makes the book considerably harder to read; but none the less emotionally powerful and ultimately rewarding for that. One might fear, after all, that an absence of traditional novelistic touches would render the book dull—but such proves hardly to be the case. 

For one thing, Hawkes's prose is not as truly bereft of recognizable narrative landmarks and human elements as the quote might lead one to expect (Beckett's The Unnamable, say, goes much further in this direction toward utter literary "flatness" and minimalism). And it is precisely the fact that these familiar elements seem present in the novel, even as they just elude one's grasp, that makes the novel so entrancing. Hawkes's prose gets into you like fish hooks (which play an unforgettable role in one of the novel's most disturbing hallucinatory scenes). It stays at just the outer limits of accessible meaning, and therefore becomes profoundly tantalizing. 

Probabilities

Walter Faber is a man for our time. I am referring to the protagonist of Swiss author Max Frisch's poignant and haunting 1957 novel Homo Faber, which I read this week. In his antihero Faber, Frisch has given us the archetype of the total technologist: a man who believes that humanity is a mere transitory stage of evolution, destined to be replaced by machines; a man who regards feelings such as "hopes and fears" as a byproduct of humankind's cognitive limitations—specifically, of our inability to accurately weigh the probability and improbability of various events—and one that ought to be transcended.

For people reading the novel in 1957 or the decades since, Faber's extreme technological anti-humanism might have struck them as a caricature. But picking up the novel now, in 2023, at the crest of the wave of techno-utopianism and transhumanist speculation touched off by the dawn of generative AI roughly a year ago, Faber just seems like an early emissary of an ideology that has become increasingly prevalent, particularly in Silicon Valley. Today, even more than in Faber's time, there is frank talk of the possibility of machine algorithms replacing most human creative and cognitive functions. 

Accidental Indictment of an Anarchist

 In the days after the Trump indictment in Georgia came down, most of us on the left were celebrating: accountability has come! Justice is on the way! But even then, a few crusty civil libertarians could be heard muttering: "be careful what you wish for." After all—the left-liberal contrarian take went—as much as we might like this one indictment, the legal authority used to secure it is nevertheless dangerously sweeping and over-broad: I am referring to Georgia's sui generis RICO statute. 

Then, as if to underline the point, just a few short weeks later the Georgia RICO law was back in the headlines: this time being used to indict more than 60 left-wing activists involved in the "Stop Cop City" protest movement. The event and its timing could not have more vividly illustrated the crusty civil libertarians' warning: this is not a good legal authority, because it allows the criminal actions of a few individuals to become the basis for indicting an entire political movement and ideology. 

Butterflies

I'm so excited for the new season of Supreme Court oral arguments to start

All day long I'm looking forward to my walk home so I can hit play on Pulsifer v US

So many hours of bingeable content coming our way

The first episode just dropped today

All my favorite characters are back

Their contracts were renewed for the next season

And all the major plot lines are coming to a head

Will they or won't they destroy the administrative state?

Will they or won't they eliminate any constitutional basis for the Federal Reserve system and plunge us into a global depression? 

Find out

This term on

SCOTUS TV!

Harrying Mexico

 In each of the last two Republican primary debates, the same bizarre line has cropped up (usually emanating from DeSantis, but echoed by others of the candidates who are trying to occupy or at least flirt with the MAGA/"nationalist" lane of the party). Usually one of the candidates will be asked about Ukraine, and whether the United States should continue supporting the country's defense. The candidate first will hem and haw (if they are one of the aforementioned MAGA/nationalist lane types), because they don't want to utterly antagonize and alienate the party's more traditional hawkish wing, but they also don't want to lose the votes of the party's neo-fascist Putin-loving contingent that is sometimes over-generously described as "isolationist." 

After unburdening themselves of whatever vague and noncommittal response the Ukraine question first elicited, the candidate then executes the pivot to what they really want to talk about. "The real problem," they say, "isn't the invasion happening at Ukraine's border; it's the invasion happening at our border!" or: "Instead of spending money to defend Ukraine's border; we should be spending money to defend our border!" Then comes the litany about Mexican drug cartels, asylum-seekers, and undocumented immigration, with the candidate usually winding up by declaring their intent to invade Mexico on "day one" after they take office.