Elba

 He just... won't... go... away. After Trump was hit with the civil damages claim in the New York AG's case against his businesses, we all thought that his bad behavior had finally caught up with him. Here, at last, was an actual negative consequence for his actions; and there seemed no obvious way around it. I even made the mistake of feeling sorry for him. Half a billion dollars in damages seemed exorbitant to me, no matter what he'd done, and I didn't see how the court could have arrived at such a figure. 

Never was pity so wasted. A friend of mine always accuses me of taking my favorite Robert Lowell line about "pity[ing] the monsters" a little too far; and surely it turns out I need not have wasted those tears over Trump's civil damages order. Because here he is, just a handful of days later, and he has become a multibillionaire overnight, thanks to the cult-like willingness of his followers to sacrifice their financial security to boost the stock price of his intrinsically valueless social media company. 

Bears vs. Serpents

 It is a trite observation of Donald Trump at this point that he is the quintessential con man. His recent business ventures, such as hawking golden tennis shoes and $60 Bibles have only underscored the point. We are used to it by now. It has long been a familiar observation among us that Trump is doing for American politics what generations of hype-men, multi-level marketing scam artists and Ponzi schemers have done for American capitalism. 

But with Trump's latest foray into securities fraud, he seems to be making the analogy obsolete. No longer will we need to argue that Trump's political career is like a financial scam. Because now, Trump is simply perpetrating a classic financial scam in tandem with his political ambitions. The whole plan to take Trump's preposterous media company "Truth Social" public, after all, has been a classic pump-and-dump scheme; except happening candidly, blatantly, out in the open. 

The Inverted Moral Universe

 In a recent post on this blog, I was observing how frankly incomprehensible the Republican moral universe is to me—even among the branches of the GOP that are still relatively "mainstream." We had some further illustrations of this over the past week. Take, for instance, the passage of a long-overdue spending package to fund the government. On the one hand, this was great news—the looming government shutdown was averted. This was hailed as a victory for the "normal" branch of the GOP, which ultimately opted to govern rather than to sabotage the state (and for this, they have been pilloried ever since by their own even more radical right-wing flank). 

Yet, if you look at the details of the spending bill, you see how utterly weird even the "normal" side of the party is. After all, they needed to negotiate for a few "wins" for their side, in order to justify their policy compromises to their base. But what were the "wins" of which they were so proud? The New York Times notched the policy victories on both sides, in dispassionate prose. Republican negotiators, they noted, were proud of the fact that they had expanded ICE detention capacity and cut off humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees. Democratic negotiators, meanwhile, were proud that they had funded Alzheimer's research. The contrast could not be more stark. 

Planet ISIS

 ISIS's atrocities keep failing to slot into our preferred geopolitical narratives. After mysterious explosions killed almost 100 civilians in Iran at the start of the year, I gritted my teeth for the conspiracy theories to start pouring in. I thought we would hear endless rumor-mongering that Israel and/or the US were somehow behind it. Maybe Seymour Hersh would even write a Substack post declaring that his trademark anonymous "sources" inside the US intelligence services had told him as much; and since no other evidence would ever emerge on either side to confirm or refute it, we would never really know the truth or be able to cast doubt on this narrative. 

But instead of any of that happening, the Islamic State came forward and claimed responsibility. 

Much the same thing happened this past week, following the horrific attack on civilians gathered at a concert hall in Moscow. After this atrocity happened, I thought we would once more be in for an endless merry-go-round of conspiracy theorizing, and would never really know the truth. After all, it would plainly be in the interests of Putin's government to try to attribute the attack to Ukraine—which they immediately proceeded to do. And I confess that this prompted an alternative conspiracy theory in my own mind, which I quietly entertained for the first few hours after the attack—namely, I speculated that Putin planned it in order to make a bogus attribution to Ukraine and anchor support for his war effort. 

Images

 Modern poetry has been derided as unintelligible; but there are things that seem incomprehensible because they do not actually have anything to say—like much modern academic writing in the humanities—and then there are things that seem incomprehensible because people expect them to say things that they never had any intention of saying—like much Symbolist and modernist poetry. Would you say that the lush imagery of Rimbaud is incomprehensible, for instance? William S. Burroughs thought not. In one of his interviews in the collection The Job, he offers a series of extracts from the academic and literary intellectual organs of his day, bloated with jargon and empty phraseology. Here, he implies, is the truly incomprehensible. He then contrasts it with a series of words and images quoted from Rimbaud. Here, he says, is lucidity. Even if Rimbaud is not "understandable" in the sense of offering a linear narrative or structured logical argument, nevertheless, at the level of language—in terms of his ability to convey an image to the reader's mind—he was the model of clarity. 

Burroughs could have said the same of Nobel Prize-winning poet St.-John Perse, who also reportedly influenced Burroughs's literary development. I have just been reading Perse's Anabasis—an epic prose-poem set in an aestheticized ancient world reminiscent of Flaubert's Salammbô or the Temptation of Saint Anthony. Here is a work of poetry that is "incomprehensible," if one seeks narrative resolution or strictly rational development. But, in the sense in which Burroughs found Rimbaud to be comprehensible, Perse too is an eminently clear writer. He fulfills the criterion that Burroughs set for all language: it should approximate as closely as possible the technique of the hieroglyphic. It should communicate an image for a concrete thing, not an abstraction; and it should send it straight to the mind, with minimal ideological or conceptual filtration. The more abstract language becomes, Burroughs says, the further away it gets from truth; the more it can deceive and mislead. And there is nothing abstract in Perse's poem. 

Wresting Their Neighbor to Their Will

 A friend of mine gets annoyed with me every time we talk about social media, and the host of related topics that are often linked to it in the zeitgeist: such as the alleged crisis of mental illness and loneliness among teenagers and young adults. He thinks society needs to do a better job of regulating digital media—and no doubt he is right, up to a point. He is persuaded by the studies and whistleblower reports that have mounted up in recent years indicating that excessive use of social media correlates with mental health problems among the young; and he argues that we would be better off limiting or controlling access to these websites rather than allowing them rage like a brush fire through the minds of the impressionable youth. 

Whenever I express my skepticism of these claims, he accuses me of being needlessly contrarian and refusing to follow the evidence. And I admit that I haven't read the studies and reports that undergird the present legislative push to protect young people and teens from social media. All I'm really going on—just as my friend suggests—is a gut instinct. But I insist that there is something to it. As a character in Goethe's Elective Affinities says at one point, intuition is often just a shorthand for the accumulated experience of many prior others placed in similar situations. And so, I insist, my instinctive skepticism toward the alleged "youth mental health crisis" is actually informed by historical experience. 

Digital Nomads

 There was a time not long ago when I had four houses. I don't mean that literally, of course. I am not now and have never been a billionaire. But it was indeed my privilege to have, for a brief point in time, no fewer than four different places in my life where I could crash on any given night and expect to find a welcome. There was my usual place in Boston. There was my sister and brother-in-law's place, where I had mostly been staying since the start of the pandemic lock-down. There was my parent's home. And there was also a family place in Wyoming. And since I was working from home during the pandemic, I could complete my job from anywhere with a WiFi connection. So you better believe I took advantage of my mobility, hopping from one location to another and back again, until I had completed the full circuit multiple times. 

Looking back on it, this sounds awesome and enviable to me, as it does perhaps to you too. I sometimes wonder why I ever gave it up. After all, what I am describing is nothing other than the "digital nomad" lifestyle, which came into vogue during the pandemic and was often depicted as the most desirable of possible existences. After all, since so many of our jobs had gone remote, we could theoretically do them from anywhere. So why not move around? Why not take that next Zoom meeting from Iceland, if we were so inclined? 

No Pasarán Round 3

I am updating my John Heartfield-inspired photomontage yet again (previous versions available here and here) in order to promote J.D. Vance over Matt Gaetz. Vance has earned his place alongside Tucker and Trump as one of the leading pro-Putin turkey-vultures. The original Heartfield piece I am hearkening back to can be found here. 

J.D., Putin, and Trump

 Earlier this week, Charles Sykes penned a piece in Politico offering an apt analogy between today's so-called "America First" neo-isolationists and the isolationists of the 1930s. (It's not like they've made it hard to draw the comparison, by the way—they even borrowed the same slogan from their 1930s forebears!). Much as the isolationists back then refused to support efforts to resist Hitler's aggressive ambitions in Europe, today's isolationists want to give Putin free rein to trample over our allies and trigger the next world war. 

In an effort to resist them, Sykes offers a lesson from history. He says that FDR, in a series of speeches leading up to the 1940 election, managed to make the isolationists appear ridiculous by the simple device of rhyming their names. "Martin, Barton, and Fish," he chanted in several speeches—which, as Sykes points out, perhaps lodges in the brain because it subtly evokes the same cadence as the childhood rhyme "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod." He therefore suggests that Biden ought to come up with something similar (while conceding that verbal fluency is not Biden's strong suit). 

The Circuit Judge

 I was listening to the oral arguments yesterday in the case to decide the short-term fate of the Texas immigration law SB4: the one that is notoriously designed to empower Texas state law enforcement officials to act as if they were immigration agents, with full powers of removal. The main thing that has emerged from the litigation is how utterly bizarre this statute is. It has layers upon layers of weirdness and illegality to it. 

Perhaps the most stunning thing about SB4 is that it appears to contemplate the existence of a sort of Texas-specific deportation power. It describes Texas state officers removing people to foreign territory in Mexico. And, unlike the federal removal power, this Texas state deportation power has no exception for any humanitarian claim or U.S. treaty obligation, such as asylum or withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture. How could this possibly be legal? 

The Horror in the Heart of Farce

 Michael Kruse published a great essay in Politico yesterday, describing how Trump uses humor to make his extreme views and misbehavior more palatable to his audience. Trump has been described many times as more an entertainer than a politician, and it can't be denied that he has the beats and timing of an accomplished comedian. As Kruse's article points out, his rallies often have more the feel of an off-color stand-up routine than a stump speech. And as the piece goes on to observe, Trump is not unique in this regard. It's a tactic that has been deployed by other demagogues before him. 

The strategy has also proved remarkably effective. On paper, after all, Trump's alleged crimes are horrifying (he has conspired to subvert a federal election; he has compromised the nation's security by willfully retaining classified documents, etc.). No less appalling are Trump's openly-avowed plans for the future: his commitment to building new detention camps, his promise of retribution against his political opponents, his pledge to carry out a mass deportation campaign that would rip apart communities. But by making a punchline of it all, it just... doesn't seem real. 

Vladimir Chichikov

 Over the weekend, Vladimir Putin sailed to victory in yet another "election" with a predetermined outcome. Among the various red flags that this was not in fact what any of us should consider a "free and fair" vote were that the leading opposition figure recently died while serving time on political charges in a Russian prison, most other forms of overt criticism of Putin's regime have been criminalized and silenced, and international observers were not allowed in most locations to monitor the polls. 

Yet, as an article in Politico makes clear, perhaps the most glaring indicator of the bogus nature of this process was the fact that the vote totals in some areas did not match the actual population count. The conclusion was unmistakable: in Putin's Russia, the dead rose up to vote. 

Fear of Immortality

 The centerpiece of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things is his extended argument against the possibility of an afterlife. The great expositor of the Epicurean system tells us that much of our misery in life stems from our fear of immortality. If only we would realize that our life spans are necessarily finite, then—he argues—we would appreciate that all suffering must naturally have an end, and that whatever did or did not happen to us while we were alive can have no meaning to us once we are no longer here. It is only theological systems that threaten us with eternal existence that would deny us this comfort, and so—in Lucretius's telling—if we can persuade ourselves that these systems cannot possibly be true, then life (and the afterlife too) would hold no more terror for us. 

In other words, Lucretius holds out the same hope that the poets and novelists have often referred to, when contemplating the suffering of life. Death, more than one has contended, is the ultimate commutation of life's sentence. If existence offers us no other balm, it at least promises this: all suffering must have an ultimate terminus, because all life has a terminus. At some point, as Thomas Hardy puts it, the gods must finish their sport with their victims. "All life death does end," Gerard Manley Hopkins writes—and calls this promise the only "comfort serves in a whirlwind." And Algernon Charles Swinburne similarly urged us to take comfort from the fact that the dead "rise up never," and that "even the weariest river/ Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

Making the Cut

 The great Benjamin Wittes—of Lawfare and Rational Security 1.0 fame—just put out a Substack post sharing the happy news that he has finally made the list of Americans sanctioned by Russia for activities opposing Putin's war. 

Wittes has spent the past two years hoping for just such an honor. He has traveled to capital cities around the globe in order to project messages denouncing Putin's invasion and war crimes onto the walls of various Russian embassies. He had written previously that the highest validation of his efforts he could receive would be for Putin's government to publicly acknowledge in some way that he had at least succeeded in annoying them. Now, by appearing on the list of sanctioned individuals barred from traveling to Russia, he has finally achieved that. 

Lucretian Physics

 I've been reading On the Nature of Things this week, and it must be said that Lucretius is hit-or-miss in the extent to which his physical theories have stood the test of time. Some aspects of his physics have not aged well. For instance, he seems to contemplate that the sun may have to be reignited each morning at dawn, in order to complete its heavenly journey before vanishing in the sea (even though other passages refer to the "antipodes," showing that Lucretius was no flat-earther). 

More plausibly, though no more correctly, he believes that sound is produced by emitting particles from the vocal cords that must reach the ears of strangers, in order to be heard, rather than being transmitted by means of a wave. And he seems to entertain, in at least one passage, that darkness may not be merely the absence of light—but the presence of a kind of murky haze or smoke. Something like the "black air" that figures in the theories of Flann O'Brien's fictional crank scientist De Selby. 

No Trust

 The progress of our civilization seems to be inseparable from the parallel growth in the arts of deception. Each new increase in economic efficiency and the speed of communications in our history has brought with it new opportunities for criminals to scam and gull the unwary. We still use the term "wire fraud" to describe the galaxy of interrelated crimes made possible by the growth of new forms of communication in the twentieth century, for instance. 

And even before that, the archetype of the con artist, the grifter, seemed inseparable from the American ideal of social and geographic mobility. I wrote glowingly on this blog, in a recent post, about how in America—compared to my recent two-week stint in England—I feel free to "define myself how I choose. Here, my future and destiny are my own to make." But the dark corollary of that same freedom may be an instability of self—an increased capacity for disguise. If people can be whoever they want to be; does that risk turning us into a nation of imposters? 

Deontological Welfare

 Earlier this week, the City of San Francisco made headlines nationwide by enacting a series of right-leaning ballot measures. The incongruity made for good copy in newsrooms far removed from the Bay Area: here was the country's most liberal city enacting measures that rolled back welfare protections. A friend of mine who was in a position to actually vote on these measures insisted, however, that some at least of the real policy issues at stake were more complicated than the simplistic headlines would suggest. 

He called me up earlier in the week, while considering these measures, and asked for my opinion on the drug screening one. The measure, in his telling, was designed to identify welfare recipients at risk of substance abuse disorder, and direct them to public services. He felt genuinely torn about whether or not this was a good idea. "What's the confusion?" I asked. "It's some sort of conservative anti-welfare thing. Evil. Bad. Vote no. I don't see the dilemma." 

The Last Days of D.C.

 Earlier today, a colleague forwarded me a thread of messages from an email list serving left-wing inside-the-beltway PR professionals. The consensus of the group could be summarized as follows: the Biden campaign is an embarrassment; the president is not paying enough attention to people like themselves and heeding their advice; this is the sole reason his polling numbers are in the dumps; and now, as a result, the entire 2024 campaign is effectively doomed from the start. 

A few of them even said, in effect, "I'm giving up on this round. I assume Trump is going to win; so I'm just going to wait out the next four years and come back when there's a younger, more lefty candidate running in 2028." 

Circumscribed Conditions

 During the past year, much ink has been spilled over the mystery of why Americans seem so down on the economy, despite the many things trending in the right direction. We appear to have staved off a much-anticipated recession, even as the Fed has raised interest rates in an effort to cool the economy; wages have gone up; unemployment is at historic lows; inflation is cooling... So why is everyone still miserable and angry? 

A multitude of theories has been proposed. I've always thought that maybe the fundamental issue is that people hate inflation, and yet the policies that are needed to tame inflation themselves make inflation harder to live with—putting policymakers into an impossible bind. After all, people have been clamoring for the government to do something to lower prices; yet, the only way to do this on a sustainable basis is to loosen the labor market, increase competition for jobs, and otherwise cut down on people's discretionary income—so they can't afford to pay higher prices. And who likes that? 

First Known When Lost

 I had to go to England to realize I was an American. This statement of mine is "paradoxical" only in the sense in which Cleanth Brooks used the term, in the context of poetry: namely, in the sense of "compression." For, expounded at greater length, my point becomes much more banal. All I really mean to say, after all, is that, prior to my recent stay in London, I had always idealized the UK from afar as a kind of ancestral homeland. I had thought: there is the true mother country; and if ever I were to live there, it would feel like a homecoming. Yet, once I actually spent more than a week or two in the UK, I found it inordinately stifling. Only once I came back to the U.S. did I again feel free. 

One of the first things I realized, after coming to the UK, after all, is that British society is a vast apparatus for sorting people; and, what is worse, I had no place within it. Or, if I did have a place, it was among the lowest of the low. My ancestry is Welsh and Scottish, after all. 

Genghis Khan Revisionism

 Listening to the beloved Omnibus Project podcast today, I overheard one of the co-hosts observe in passing that "It turns out: Genghis Khan was actually good." This was presented—only half-seriously—as the emerging new consensus among historians; the trendy revisionist take on Genghis Khan that has now hardened into a new orthodoxy. And while I get that the point was made somewhat jokingly, this is still one of those historical takes that annoys me terribly. If there's anything we should agree upon, it is that Genghis Khan was in fact bad—bad enough to deserve his place in that Star Trek TOS episode, where he appeared as one of three holographic reconstructions of the worst specimens of human depravity in history. 

What was so bad about him? Mostly that he killed inordinate numbers of innocent men, women, and children. By some counts, he and his soldiers killed so many people that it caused a cognizable dip in the globe's total human population—something on the order of several percentage points. And even if these estimates are half-way exaggerated, and some of the contemporaneous tales of his atrocities inflated for effect—that's still a huge number of people. If Genghis Khan had killed all these civilians yesterday, or even twenty years ago, we would have no trouble condemning it. Does the fact that it happened in the distant past at this point make it much better? 

Confessional Blogging

 A friend was asking me yesterday how I have the confidence to blog about a topic that might already have been covered in the same vein by someone else. Am I not worried, every time I start writing, that I may have already been preempted in whatever I wanted to say by another blogger or Reddit poster writing elsewhere? 

The honest answer is that if I have been scooped, I take pains not to know about it. As soon as I get an idea for a post, I rush to put it down on this blog and send it off into the universe. I never check beforehand to see if someone else has already written about or had the same idea—mostly because I figure that someone else almost surely has. Better, therefore, just not to ever know about it.