Panhandling

 A few weeks ago, during my stay in London, I was walking down a deserted street in the early dawn. It was somewhere in Bloomsbury, near University College London, and so far I had encountered no one on my walk. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a strange man approached me. He launched into a speech—something about desperately needing a few quid to buy a train ticket, and how he'd pay me back if I just sent him my address. 

I have to admit, it was a masterwork in the panhandler's art. Not because his story was convincing: it wasn't. I didn't believe it for an instant. But he had captured the element of surprise. He was introducing a familiar set of techniques—the patter, the sob story, the ask—but in a context that took me off-guard. This was not a crowded street corner; he did not have a cardboard sign and a tin can; and so—something about this familiar routine playing itself out in a new place ensured that I could not simply say no and pass on. I could not default to my own usual repertoire in such circumstances—the awkward downcast eyes, the muttered apology as I decline, the slightly-quickened shuffle past. 

Millennial Nostalgia

 At some point in the mid-2000s—whenever it was they first allowed high schoolers onto Facebook—the first group I signed up for on the newly-unveiled social media preserve was called "You might be a Nineties kid if...." Its opening posts included a number of references to specific cultural ephemera from our childhoods. "Wait a minute—you half-remember Rugrats? I half-remember Rugrats!" I was enchanted. I had discovered the joys of nostalgia. 

Of course, by the "Nineties," we really meant the three years from 1997 to 1999, which was the only part of the decade for which we were remotely conscious. Our ages likewise guaranteed that the only cultural products we remembered from that era were media aimed at young children. So, what we were really talking about were not "the Nineties" writ large, so much as Nickelodeon cartoons from the tail end of the 'Nineties. 

We Need a Marshall Plan, Not a Versailles Plan, for Eastern Europe

 It was rumored for months, if not years, but now it's official—the Biden administration is backing plans to seize frozen Russian assets that are being held in U.S. financial institutions, as a down payment on Ukraine's eventual postwar reconstruction costs. There are several reasons why I think this is a terrible idea. But first, let us hear the case for the other side. 

The moral argument for expropriating Russian assets for this purpose is simple: Putin's government is responsible for starting this war in the first place. His invasion has caused untold suffering and economic damage to the people of Ukraine. And plainly, the aggressor—the guilty party—should be the one to foot the bill for these costs. 

8:25 PM

 At 8:25 this evening, Central Time, the state of Alabama executed a man by suffocating him to death with nitrogen gas. It was the first time this method had been used to kill a prisoner in U.S. history. 

I'm not sure it is better or worse than receiving a lethal injection—or, for that matter, death by electrocution or firing squad. The horror of the scene lies not so much in the method used or the suffering it caused; but in the fact that the government—the institution nominally charged with protecting the life of its citizens—deliberately strapped a man's face into a mask with the intent of forcibly ending his life.

The Power of Negative Thinking

Over the last year, I've occasionally waxed gloomy to a friend about the frustrations of law school and my fear of not finding a job—or at least, not the right job—on the other side of it. I noticed that he tended to withdraw or go quiet when I launched into this subject. It's not to say he was rude. But however he was responding, it wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted sympathy; I wanted reassurance. Instead, I kept running up against some sort of emotional barrier I couldn't break through. 

Eventually I pushed him on this enough that he gave me an explanation. Maybe, he said, just maybe—and this only after I extracted some sort of answer from him by relentless pestering—it was possible that he was withdrawing from me whenever this topic came up because it triggered some part of him that feared my negativity. He was well aware of the precariousness of his own life ambitions, after all. And some part of him (a small, fractional one, he insisted), feared that if he listened too much to my own pessimistic wallowing, it would somehow lead him to lose faith in his own hopes. 

The Edge of the Universe

 We really need to get the philosophers and the theoretical physicists back in the same room again—or, better still, merged back into the same person, the way they would have been in the eighteenth century. Because the modern physicists keep telling us that they've come up with some theoretical model of the universe that defies the categories of our minds. When we point this out to them, they tell us, "Yeah, it's hard to explain; we can't really picture it; but the math tells us it must be so." 

To this, the philosophers retort: math can't tell us something that violates the categories of cognition and perception! This is because math is itself a product of those same categories. The mind that thinks the math is the mind that struggles in vain to comprehend that which it appears to disclose. Something has gone wrong somewhere!

De Maistre's Lockdown

 In 1790, the exiled French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre spent 42 days under house arrest in Turin, for his role in a duel. Famously, he was not permitted to leave his room. He emerged on the other side of it with one of the most witty and delightful 70-page novellas ever penned. 

The Voyage autour de ma chambre is final proof, if any more were needed, that the celebrated techniques of postmodernism are no invention of the twentieth century. De Maistre, like Sterne—who plainly influenced him (and whom he references several times in the book)—was already writing "metafiction" more than two hundreds years ago. His narrative, as he travels from one side of his room to the other, over the course of 42 days, is periodically interrupted by Shandean digressions—many of them on the subject of the book itself, and the difficulty of writing it. Move over, John Barth—de Maistre was already doing Lost in the Funhouse. 

Arabia Felix

 Aden, Arabie—French communist author Paul Nizan's first and most well-known "novel" (I place the word in quotes because the book is really more of an autobiographical essay or screed, devoid of conventional character or incident)—begins with a famous line about what it means to be twenty. And, perhaps, one has to be twenty in order to understand it. For Nizan takes for granted two fundamental political claims that are generally self-evident only to the very young: 1) that society as we find it is utterly corrupt, evil, and debased; and 2) that all of this could be fixed, if only we had a "revolution." 

I believed both these things myself when I was an adolescent (so perhaps we should actually lower the ideal age at which to read Aden, Arabie from twenty to fifteen—for I had become less secure in both convictions by the time I reached college). Now, in my thirties, I could not explain why either seemed to me so obvious. I am in the position of the mature Wordsworth, looking back on his youth and surveying his irrecoverable lost convictions: The things which I have seen I now can see no more. [...] Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Close Readings

 I picked up Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn mostly to see what the methodology of "New Criticism" has to offer. Brooks's collection of essays is considered to be a representative work of the movement (which is almost a century old at this point, so hardly "new" anymore), and I was wondering what insights his vaunted technique of the "close reading" of poems might disclose. Having finished the book, I'm not sure I'm convinced. 

The famous tenets of the Brooks approach include: 1) concentrate on the work itself, rather than the biography of the author; 2) examine the "structure" of the poem; and 3) avoid paraphrase—or at least, never mistake a paraphrase for the true and complete "meaning" of a poem. Beneath the surface clarity of these doctrines, however, it's not always clear that Brooks is genuinely applying his own principles—or how much they contribute to our understanding of the poems if he is. 

A Silence Spreads

 Earlier today, Michelle Goldberg published a truly sobering column in the Times. Her main point—or at least, the lesson I took from it, after applying it to my own situation, was: it’s not just me. That is to say, I’m not the only one who feels like they don’t have the energy to struggle against Trump a second time around. I was hoping this was merely a personal matter: I spent the four years of the first Trump presidency as a professional activist, after all, and eventually I ran out of steam. But I assumed that other people, especially younger people, would not be in this same boat. They would still be up for the fight ahead. 

But no, Goldberg confirms: apparently, the resignation is universal. Surveying the present ideological scene on the left, she finds a general sense of disengagement and fatalism. People are simply tired, just as I am. There’s nothing new to say about Trump. He’s terrible in all the familiar ways. We’d love to go out and think about something else for a change. But he’s still there; and demands that we keep jousting with him. If we don’t, he rides back into the White House unobstructed, and has an even more destructive second term than his first. American democracy itself may not survive. But who among us has the energy left to stop this? 

One Vote

 This primary season, a familiar debate is playing out: should liberals and moderates cross party lines to vote in the Republican primary, just so we can do our part to minimize the risk of a second Trump presidency? 

If I lived in a state that permitted independents to participate in the GOP primary, and which held a conventional primary with secret ballots, this would be an easier choice. I am no fan of Nikki Haley, to be sure, and disagree with all of her policies (apart from her robust support of Ukraine and our other democratic allies); but I have no trouble at all seeing that the country would be better off with her in the White House than Donald Trump. 

Flosky and Sackbut

 At some point during one of those pointless and interminable GOP primary debates that were available for streaming only on Rumble (in which the worst and leading candidate declined even to show up, rendering the whole exercise futile), an advertisement popped up for the site's own content. Rumble, recall, is one of the various attempts that have been made, some with greater success and longevity than others, to create a right-wing version of Twitter (now, of course, that's just Twitter, or "X"), or a right-wing YouTube, etc. This ad for Rumble showcased some of the platform's name talent. Tucker Carlson was there, as well as various other right-wing goons. 

And then the face of Glenn Greenwald popped up. There he was, the once-vaunted journalist who broke the Edward Snowden story; the once-celebrated advocate for civil liberties and critic of the excesses and human rights violations of the U.S. war on terror; now hawking a right-wing social media site, alongside ads for survivalist kits, gold coin investment scams, and Hillsdale College. 

Based on a True Story

 Sometime during the last winter Olympics, in order to get in the proper spirit, as well as to celebrate the return to the ice of the Jamaican bobsled team, some friends and I settled in to watch a classic—the 1993 live-action Disney film, Cool Runnings. We were expecting it to be a cringe-fest, as so much family-friendly '90s fare has become; but we actually found it has held up well. 

To be sure, some of it has aged poorly. We probably didn't need that speech from Junior implying that Jamaica's economic problems are due to a lack of personal ambition (*yeesh*). But fundamentally, the movie remains profoundly watchable, and retains its power to pull on the heart strings. This is because it grasps the fundamentals of character and story. All the people in the movie have some conflict they are trying to resolve; they all develop and grow over the course of the film; they are flawed in interesting ways but are ultimately redeemable; and so on. 

Car Crash

 Today on the road, on what was supposed to be the second and final day of my drive home, I caught a wind gust at some point on the highway through Indiana, and it sent my car drifting across the ice. I felt the wheels lose traction on the road just slightly, and realized I was sliding out of my lane. I overcorrected for it (or something), and I suddenly found myself swerving in the other direction. Then I swerved back, and realized the car was now entirely out of my control. 

"This is it," I thought. "So this is what this feels like. I always wondered." In some sense, I became a detached observer. "Oh interesting," I thought. "This is losing control of the car. This is what that feels like. I've heard of this." Then I slammed into the guard rail and the airbag blew. The car was totaled; but I was okay. 

Tomas Tranströmer has a poem about losing control of his car on an icy road in Scandinavia. He talks about how his present reality shrank away from him. His whole adulthood, everything about his personal identity, fell away, leaving only his naked vulnerability before the verdict of chance. 

The Owl's Cry

 Driving across the country today, I decided to halt my journey in Cleveland, figuring that was a good half-way point between my family in Rhode Island and my destination in Iowa. As I hit the corner of Pennsylvania that one passes through on I-90, I started to see warnings about a high wind. By the time I got to Ohio, leaves and sticks were blowing across the highway. And in Cleveland itself, a runny sleet started battering down on me. I decided I had made the right choice to cut the drive in half, and pulled into my hotel for the night outside the city. 

I finally glanced at my phone at this point, and saw that I'd missed a text from my mother earlier in the day saying I should call her to talk about the weather on my drive. I did so now, and this was the first I had heard that the Midwest and especially Iowa—my destination—was in the midst of an epic snow storm. Whatever I had driven through in Cleveland was just the outer edge of this same complex. And the next few days were not expected to be better. The snow itself was going to die down; but it is to be replaced by life-threatening cold temperatures. I felt very grateful in that moment for my warm hotel room. 

"The eternal spirit of the Populace"

 I recently had the privilege of taking a law school study abroad course in the UK, where—among other things—we focused on comparing the UK system of criminal punishment to that of the United States. The differences between the two that appeared to us were in many cases the obvious ones—the ones most familiar to longstanding critics of the US administration of justice. The UK system is, like most of those of Western Europe, broadly speaking more lenient than that of the US. It is generally more favorable to defendants, and results in less harsh penalties. Prison sentences in the UK are typically much shorter than those in the United States; and of course, the UK, like most of the developed world, has long since abolished the death penalty, even as the US continues to enforce it (to our disgrace). 

These were all the obvious differences, as I say, that I came to the UK expecting to find; they were not really news to me. More interesting to my mind were the cracks we found that are beginning to appear in this familiar narrative. For instance, the UK government has made some relatively recent (as in, during the last few decades) changes to its criminal justice system to make it less favorable to defendants. A 2003 reform, for instance, removed the traditional protection against double jeopardy, which the US still retains, for the limited number of circumstances in which substantial new evidence comes to light in the aftermath of a trial. Such legislative reforms, no doubt, are just the tip of the spear of public opinion. We read one survey finding that an overwhelming majority of the British public regards current criminal penalties as too lenient, and would like to limit protections for offenders. 

Enormities

 Yesterday, I read a political pamphlet that has sat on my shelf for years—a slender (20 pages or thereabouts) volume by the Scottish writer and poet Tom Leonard, called "On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait." The piece, published in 1991, is a gut-wrenching excoriation of the moral indifference of British and US citizens, who passively consumed TV news portraying the Gulf War as a righteous struggle, and raised few if any objections to the slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops after they had been rendered defenseless—or to the bombing campaigns and sanctions that disrupted civilian infrastructure, sowing the seeds of a massive humanitarian crisis that would go on to afflict Iraq's people for the next decade and beyond. Reading it now, thirty years later, it is impossible not to see parallels with the U.S.-backed war in Gaza. 

Leonard, to be sure, drastically oversimplifies the moral issues of the war. He never provides a serious response to the question of what the international community is supposed to do when one country blatantly violates the sovereignty of its neighbor. To the extent he considers this matter at all, it is merely to point out that Kuwait was an unattractive despotic regime in its own right, and that anyway, both its and Iraq's borders are the relatively recent products of imperial diplomacy. But such is equally true of innumerable governments in the global South. If we start viewing every country whose boundaries were drawn in part by colonialism as therefore illegitimate, and lacking any right of collective self-defense, what's to stop any nation on Earth from invading its neighbors if they choose to, or starting any war through unprovoked aggression?

October 7/January 7

 The other day in London, near the hotel where I've been staying the last two weeks, I passed by a small demonstration in front of a Quaker meeting house. I had only to glimpse one word on their signs—"Ceasefire"—to know what it was about. I hurried by with my head down, feeling the same nauseous twist of indignation and disgust that I have experienced in the vicinity of every similar demonstration these past four months. "What?"—I wanted to say to them—"So Israel is just supposed to accept the periodic mass murder of their own citizens? They aren't supposed to lift a finger to fight back?" 

I was reminded all over again that I am not a pacifist. Because pacifism seems to have no good answer—pretend as it might to the contrary—to the question of what people are supposed to do when "turning the other cheek" will simply mean getting massacred. At least Gandhi was honest on this point. As Orwell reminds us, when the pacifist sage was asked how the Jews might have applied his principles in the face of the Holocaust—Gandhi replied (in Orwell's paraphrase) that "the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide," so as to "arouse the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence."

The Principle of the Bag

 That familiar Trump administration feeling is back: I have become anxious and avoidant about the news again. I end almost every day with a quick scan through the headlines of the major news outlets: but I have increasingly started to dread doing so. Why? Because I know that, several times a week at least, I will see something about Trump that infuriates me, and which I will want to avoid thinking about, but which will somehow also be perfectly keyed to seem to require some response from me. I won't want to acknowledge it; but I will feel I have no choice. With a sense of exhaustion, I say to myself: well, there goes tomorrow morning... Another blog post will have to be on the way. And it won't be on something fun that I'd actually like to talk about. 

I couldn't tell you if Trump manages to accomplish this by a sort of second nature, or by conscious premeditation—but whatever its source, the dynamic is familiar to us all by now. Trump will say something outrageous; but it somehow manages never to be something that we can simply write off as "another offensive comment from Trump...." It won't just be more of the same; for if it were, we would all have become inured to it by now, and the comment would have no effect. No, Trump is aware that he must somehow find a way to give another turn to the screw. So whatever he says will be appalling in some slightly new way, some slightly more disturbing way, such that we are forced to talk about it again. 

Incongruities

 In his colorful joint biography, Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey applies the humane liberal conscience of Bloomsbury to the world of the Tudors. He notes that the people of the Elizabethan Age lived amidst what strike us now as intolerable "incongruities." On the one hand, there is the unparalleled beauty of their verse and drama; the aesthetic pleasantries that poured forth from a nation experiencing cultural renaissance. On the other, there was what seems to us now a shocking level of casual brutality: Strachey cites the pitting of fights between stray dogs and captive bears, which passed for daily amusement; the vile punishments to which offenders were subjected: ranging from the removal of one's ears to the even more ghastly and horrific mutilations that awaited those convicted of high treason. 

Yet, perhaps the vividness of this contrast so overwhelms us because we sense it is true also of Strachey's, and our, age as well. Strachey lingers with particular disgust over the cruel fate that befell a certain Dr. Lopez—Elizabeth's personal physician, as well as an immigrant and refugee from the Inquisition in Portugal—who was falsely accused of engaging in a treasonous plot and ultimately railroaded to the execution grounds by means of bogus testimony obtained through torture (or the threat of torture). (Frances Yates has written compellingly of the atmosphere of antisemitism and witch-hunting that lurked under the surface of the apparently jovial Elizabethan age, and which she claims Shakespeare subtly protested against. We find evidence to support her account on both points in Strachey.)