We're Weaving, We're Weaving!

 There's a lot one could say about Trump's decision to unilaterally torpedo the global economy this week with across-the-board tariffs. But what's particularly sticking in my craw this morning is just the rank unfairness of this policy to countries who spent decades redesigning their domestic economies, under pressure from Washington—only now to see more bullying from the U.S. government in the opposite direction. 

After all, maybe the U.S. was wrong to pursue neoliberal globalization so aggressively in the first place. Maybe it was a mistake. But the now irrevocable fact is that it happened; we did it. We imposed this system of trade on the rest of the world. Countries throughout the developing world were pressured to give up the protective tariffs that shielded their domestic farmers from competition and to throw their markets open to cheap, heavily-subsidized U.S. crops. 

Fools in Old-Style Hats

 The New York Times ran a long-ish piece yesterday on America's proliferating (if you will) "pronatalism" movement. And in fairness, some of the policy ideas these votaries of procreation are pushing seem pretty innocuous. I buy the idea that there are many people in this country who would love to have more kids if they could, and simply face economic barriers to doing so. So I support some of the measures people are promoting to make it more possible for them to have the families they desire. 

There are one or two passages in the story, however, that sound a more ominous note. One is a line they quote that was tucked away in an executive memo from our new doofy Real World-starring Secretary of Transportation. I hadn't noticed it until the New York Times called attention to it yesterday, and one could be forgiven for missing it the first time through. But basically, the line directs executive agencies to funnel transportation resources specifically toward "high-birth-rate areas." 

The Other Problem With That Signal Chat

 The news headlines have been dominated all week by the administration's incredible blunder of accidentally including a journalist on a privileged Signal thread, in which multiple high-level members of the government's national security team shared confidential details of attack plans, in the ongoing U.S. bombing of Yemen. 

In the days since this news broke, much of the pubic outrage has rightly focused on the administration's astonishing incompetence in enabling this leak in the first place. But there's something else troubling about that Signal thread that deserves to receive more attention: namely, the administration's obviously complete indifference to civilian casualties from their strikes, as demonstrated in the chat. 

The Usefulness of Uselessness

 I was reading the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi this weekend. And one of the themes he returns to time and again is the idea that there are advantages to being useless. He notes that the most ugly, useless, and cumbersome animals are the ones least likely to be killed and eaten, or stripped for their beautiful fur. The most useless trees, likewise, are seldom cut down for their wood. 

 Likewise, he introduces a human character named Outspread the Discombobulated (according to the Brook Ziporyn translation), who is so mixed up and uncoordinated that he is no good for anything. But precisely for this reason, Zhuangzi observes—when the military recruiters came to conscript people into the army, he was passed over. 

Haussmannization

 I'm been reading the early novels in Émile Zola's landmark Rougon-Macquart series, and just finished the second one, The Kill. There's something deeply emotionally gratifying about reading these books in our present moment. Zola chooses as his subject the moral and economic world of the Second Empire, which he depicts as a society of bottomless corruption and rapacity, founded in an act of ruthless democide. This atmosphere of constant mendacity, greed, and cronyism in high places, which pervades the novels, seems all-too familiar to us now, at the start of the second Trump presidency.

The author started publishing these novels after the Second Empire had already fallen—but as a young journalist, Zola had cut his teeth criticizing the imperial government; and he had originally planned and started writing the novel while Napoleon III was still in power. So, the early novels in the series still have a freshness and immediacy to their anger. These are raw works of explosive political fury, directed against still-fresh wounds to the French republic. Zola is hardly, then, the detached naturalist that he sometimes imagined himself to be; here, he does not disguise his political and moral indignation. 

The Rat and the Apostate

 I was reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Peter Bell the Third" yesterday (contained in the Penguin Classics edition of Selected Poems and Prose). It's the kind of satirical piece that's so up my alley it amazes me I hadn't already discovered it years ago. I want to travel back in time to share it with my younger self; he would have appreciated it even more than I did. 

After all, one finds in the poem—among many other gems—an explanation for one of my favorite lines of Brecht's poetry. In "Contemplating Hell," Brecht observes that his "brother Shelley" once declared that Hell must be a place much like London; whereas Brecht (he writes in the poem)—having now been to Los Angeles—finds that it must be even more like that. 

The Machine-Wreckers

 Yesterday—for the second time in as many months—Trump proposed sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador. And, before we all scoff and move on, saying, "well, that would be illegal and unconstitutional"—let me just point out that I would also think the Constitution has something to say about deporting noncitizens to El Salvador without any due process. But Trump did it anyway. 

Just last week, he designated noncitizens as foreign gang members without any way for them to contest this allegation. He deported them to the waiting brutality of El Salvador's most notorious jailers, without even first securing a removal order from an immigration judge. This would seem to violate both the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the principle of habeas corpus. But Trump did it anyway.