Tomorrow the Borysthenes

 Yesterday, after Mike Johnson announced his determination to hold separate votes on various foreign aid packages—including aid to Ukraine—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance took the bizarre step of heading over to the House to badger his colleagues in the other chamber to vote "No" on any Ukraine bill. Trump, meanwhile—Vance's svengali—is doing his best per usual to whip opposition to any further aid funding to Ukraine as well. And all of this comes as Ukraine is by all accounts in a dire position. Their backs to the wall, they will imminently lose terrain to Putin if the U.S. does not come forward with more aid. 

What is utterly bizarre about the situation is that the MAGA gang is not even pretending to have some morally cognizable motive for their opposition. It's not clear what benefit they stand to gain or principle they seek to vindicate by blocking Ukraine aid. Yet, they are so profoundly dug into this position! Vance seems to nurse an outright grudge against Ukraine. He actively seems to want Putin to win this conflict. Same goes for Trump. And I don't even know why.  I can't come up with any policy explanation, apart from just having an outright love of dictators and contempt for U.S. allies.  

Pareto's Prophecy

Vilfredo Pareto's Rise and Fall of Elites is often read as a foundational text in the modern disciplines of sociology and political science. Or else, it is viewed as a proto-fascist right-wing screed. Reading it for the first time yesterday, however, I found it to be neither of those things. More than anything, the book is an outstanding work of literary satire, directed—like all the best satire—not toward any one ideology, but against the excesses and hypocrisies of social mores writ large. 

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about this short treatise (which can easily be finished in an afternoon) is how funny it is. And indeed, this appears to be consistent with Pareto's intentions. His literary hero in the book is the ancient satirist Lucian. And in tone, the book puts one in mind more than anything of a Tom Wolfe essay about bourgeois radicals circa 1968. Or, to take a nineteenth century example, Pareto seems to be writing in the tradition of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. 

Theories of Laughter

 One time, during a work meeting, we were all sitting around the conference room at the office discussing sports injuries. I had none of my own to contribute, so I tried to offer one from my family's experience. "We went skiing one winter," I explained, "and my mom tore her ACLU." 

I immediately turned beet red. Everyone else laughed. Of course, I had meant to say "ACL," the common abbreviation of the knee ligament that is so frequently destroyed in ski collisions. But, having started on those first three letters, my mouth unconsciously went on to shape the fourth letter of the other famous acronym that begins in the same way. I had been guilty of an automatism. 

Why, though, was this slip of the tongue funny? It seems to me that here is a good opportunity to test the rival theories of humor that have been propounded over the ages. 

The Two Sets of Parents

 In his pioneering effort in the psychoanalytic study of myth, the famous Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Otto Rank takes his point of departure from the fact that societies all over the world have told versions of the same story about their chosen founding figures and culture-heroes. The birth-story of Moses provides a particularly well-known and archetypical example, but there are countless others. The archetype still recurs in modern pop culture as well. Think of the origin story of Superman, which is essentially the Moses legend with a space opera twist. 

In its basic form, the story goes like this: an originally high-born hero faces some sort of persecution from birth, designed to prevent him from coming into the world (frequently, in the myth, there has been some prophecy that he will grow up to destroy and/or supplant his father). He is therefore hidden or left exposed, only to be rescued by humble parents, who raise him in ignorance of his true origin. Through a course of events in adulthood, he eventually discovers his true parentage and takes his rightful place at the head of the nation's destiny. 

Esteem Systems

 Back when the rising generation of MAGA acolytes were still seen as news, one often heard people complaining about how the Josh Hawleys and Elise Stefaniks and J.D. Vances of the world were supposed to be smart enough to know better. "What's the matter with these people?" they would ask. "They all have Ivy League educations! They all went to Yale or Harvard for undergrad and/or law school. Yet, here they are catering to the lowest common denominator in our politics. They have become right-wing culture warriors, opposed to everything that higher education is supposed to inculcate in people, despite their own elite educational pedigree!"

To my mind, though, there was never any paradox about all this. Nothing could be more predictable. The same type of people with the inner drive to wedge their way into the U.S. Congress will also be the type of people who will wedge their way into elite institutions of other kinds. They tend to be people who crave power: and getting into certain academic institutions is a path to power, just as entering politics and parroting the emergent ideology of one's chosen party is a path to power. 

Parent as Deity

 My sister was telling me the other night about a theory of childcare she recently came across. It holds that the ideal parent should act toward their child in much the same way as an ideal God would act toward humanity. In other words, you should love your child unconditionally, but your will should also be ironclad. You should exist above and beyond your creation; you should not long for its approval; and its pleadings and negotiations should have no power to divert you from your purpose—so long as your purpose is fundamentally just and beneficent. Which, of course, it will be; because you are God. 

Admittedly, Freud would say that the reason for this family resemblance between the parent and God is not accidental—since the latter is merely a projection onto the cosmos of our primal recollection of childhood dependence, which some of us then carry with us into adulthood. And so too, it is no coincidence that our individual conceptions of God will often mirror our experiences of our own parents—or our cultural expectations of parenting in general. If we had angry and capricious parents in our lives, we will probably conceive of God in much the same style—and the contrary is also true. 

Twilight vs. Vampire Diaries

 I have only seen one Twilight movie, and I have only seen one episode of the 2008 CW series The Vampire Diaries. But I already feel it is clear that the latter is a much better show than the former. Why? How could that be, when the two properties are so fundamentally similar? 

After all, both are supernatural romantic dramas in which actors in their mid-twenties pretend to be high school students. Both feature broody male vampires as their primary love interests. Both male leads are trying to go vegan, but struggle to tamp down their vampiric urges. Both find their taste for blood is especially aroused by the female protagonist, for whom they nurse a devouring passion that may be either a passion that devours or a passion to devoir—or both.