Clash of Messianisms

 The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday about how the U.S.-Israeli assassinations of Iran's senior leadership appear to have succeeded only in bringing a more hardline, fundamentalist faction to power. 

Specifically, the new generation of Iran's leadership—left behind from the first wave of the illegal U.S.-Israeli bombings and assassinations—subscribes to a belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi: a Messiah-like figure in Shia Islam. Believers in this theological doctrine apparently welcome the present war with the U.S. as the beginning of an apocalyptic scenario that will bring about the end of the world. 

Player Pianos

 The great William Gaddis devoted a whole book (his last, Agapē Agape) to the theory that the development of the player piano marked the beginning of the end of the arts. 

(Long before this final novel was published, Gaddis had already displayed an interest in the theme. As far back as The Recognitions, characters in Gaddis novels are forever announcing their intention to write a masterwork called Agapē Agape one day and ranting about player pianos as the root of all evil.)

Total Blockade

 I was just writing the other day on this blog about Bertrand Russell's critique—in his 1963 book Unarmed Victory—of the Kennedy administration's policy of blockading Cuba. It seemed very relevant to Trump's policy of shutting off oil shipments to Cuba today. 

I didn't realize when I wrote the piece, however, how painfully relevant it would also shortly become to Trump's policy toward Iran. Indeed, Kennedy's Cuba blockade has become the news media's go-to point of reference for the last time the United States imposed a total blockade on another country. 

Suddenly Uprose Hungary

 At long last, Hungary's "illiberal" quasi-autocratic president Viktor Orban has been voted out of power. Neither the Kremlin's relentless support, nor Orban's capture of civil society and major media organizations in Hungary over the last sixteen years, nor a last ditch effort by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump to intervene in his favor, proved enough to save his campaign. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Orban together again. 

Seeing Putin's man in Budapest stripped of power, as ordinary Hungarians defied his relentless pro-Kremlin propaganda in order to vote for European unity, Ukraine, and liberal democracy—I can only think of E.E. Cummings's words: 

Bridge Day

 This morning, I was driving over the George Washington Bridge while listening the latest episode of the Ezra Klein show. 

Klein was reminding us on his podcast about some of Trump's recent megalomaniac threats against the people of Iran. 

Dishonoring a Cinder?

 The decision of the Taiwanese opposition leader to meet with China's Xi Jinping yesterday met with foreseeable blowback from the current Taiwanese government—who quickly (if obliquely) portrayed their conversation as appeasement. 

"[H]istory tells us that compromising with authoritarian regimes only comes at the cost of sovereignty and democracy, and will not bring freedom or peace," Taiwan's president reportedly said after the meeting, while pressing for more defense spending. 

The Massive Fact

 At some point in divinity school, I remember spending a long afternoon brooding over an academic paper about St. Augustine's debate with the Manichees. Slowly, after toiling through all the metaphors and thought experiments (there was a man tied up and forced to wield a sword at one point; that much I recall), I came to understand the "problem" of free will with which Augustine contended. 

After all, it has often been proposed in popular apologetics—as a solution to the question of theodicy—that perhaps God does not actively wish us evil (in spite of evidence to the contrary), but rather chose to endow us with free will—and all our suffering stems from that. (Perhaps not our own free will, but that of our first parents—in which case, one has to ask what kind of freedom we inherited, but no matter...)