Reading any given newspaper this week would furnish you with plenty of examples of the insane malice of this administration.
We talked in the previous post about the DOJ trying to reintroduce firing squads to federal death row.
The Trump administration is also apparently floating plans to deport Afghan refugees from a U.S. military base where they've been living in Qatar to the war-torn state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Reading through the evening edition of the New York Times last night, it was all too painfully clear that in our world of abysmal chasms between poor and rich—some lives are seen as utterly disposable, others as infinitely precious.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night—as William Blake once put it.
One of Trump's odd-ball riffs that he periodically refers back to is his ongoing contention that he probably isn't going to make it to heaven after death.
"I want to try and get to heaven, if possible;" as he put it; "I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole."
I am fascinated by these right-wing influencers who seem to have suddenly discovered that war crimes are bad. I am happy for them, don't get me wrong. I'm glad that when Trump threatened to annihilate Iranian "civilization," many of these MAGA pundits suddenly discovered that threatening genocide or mass murder against a civilian population is a moral wrong.
But—this was hardly the first time Trump demonstrated a sociopathic disregard for human life—and on all the previous occasions, these same MAGA die-hards were cheering him on.
My uncle embarked earlier this week on a multi-week sailing trip from Jamaica to Mexico. I was realizing how little I actually understood the geography of that part of the world, so I looked it up. That's when it occurred to me my uncle would be passing through the Caribbean Sea.
As in, the same part of the world where the U.S. government is still regularly blowing up boats—burning alive all their passengers—without inspection or even a chance to surrender. (Four more such attacks occurred in just the last few days—bringing the total number of deaths above 180.)
Anatole France is well known as an anticlerical writer of the Left. But it is intriguing to see what a nuanced attitude to religion he takes in his largely forgotten and seldom-read 1895 work, The Well of Saint Clare—a book plainly inspired by the medieval Golden Legend (a work that held great personal meaning for France).
To be sure, there are many traces in the volume of France's skepticism. His attitudes to religion range from the Epicurean and Lucretian (characters repeatedly denounce the fear of death as a delusion brought about by the false belief in personal immortality) to the Swinburnean.
Mark Twain's Is Shakespeare Dead? opens with an autobiographical confession. He says that he first came to question Shakespeare's authorship of his plays in a spirit of playful controversy. He took the part of the devil's advocate mostly to keep his Stratfordian riverboat captain entertained: it gave him someone to argue with. But once he had defended the Baconian position often enough, the habit grew into real conviction, in an almost Pascalian manner. He writes:
Study, practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly. After that, I was welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else’s faith that didn’t tally with mine.
