Capitol of the Lost Republic

 I admit that I haven't followed very closely the news this summer about Trump's ever-multiplying D.C. construction projects—the White House ballroom, the planned "Arc de Trump," the "Garden of Heroes," the "Reflecting Pool," and lord knows what else. Every time I see a headline about one of these stories (and they come at us almost daily now—viz. the latest this week about the Supreme Court's acquiescence in the ballroom litigation), I tend to scroll past it—thinking "bah, we have bigger fish to fry here people!"

But I really shouldn't think that. Trump's redesign of our nation's capital is actually central to his larger authoritarian project. It's his way of symbolically burying the old America and the old D.C.—the "capitol of a lost republic," as John Dos Passos called it (in his capsule biography of La Follette). Trump is driven to build in order to pave over the America that was—and to put some new gaudy wasteland in its place that will bequeath to posterity the essence of his tinsel soul. 

Very, Very Evil?

 I had been no huge fan of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's Senate campaign in Michigan up to now (though everyone who can should of course vote for him to keep that Senate seat blue). 

On the one hand, I never bought the insinuation that El-Sayed is personally anti-semitic. On the other, there should never be a "part two" to any statement in which you are condemning a hate crime against a synagogue. As El-Sayed has himself since acknowledged, he should have just said: this is terrible "full stop."

Kingsblood Royal

 At some point along the way it became fashionable not to take Sinclair Lewis quite seriously as a novelist or social prophet (Nabokov, for instance, once mocked the whole genre of novelistic social criticism to which he belonged as "Upton Lewis"). It becomes clearer by the day, though, that this was a terrible mistake. We need him more than ever. 

His 1947 "race" novel Kingsblood Royal is one of those books I've lugged around on my shelf from apartment to apartment for the last twenty years without actually reading it. I knew roughly the premise of it, and therefore thought I knew its contents—which I found intriguing but not relevant enough to actually bother reading until now. 

Alone Time

 The latest episode of The Argument podcast tackles the great debate over the alleged "loneliness" crisis, with Derek Thompson plumping firmly for the view that Americans are spending too much time alone and it's making us miserable—and the other two co-hosts taking a more ambivalent stance. 

I am in a somewhat odd position on this issue since, intellectually, I've been convinced by the Robert Putnam arguments about declining social capital for years. The fall of in-person "community" was a major topic of discussion in divinity school ten years ago, and probably is still.

La Question

 Yesterday—fourteen years after charges were initially filed in the case—a military judge in Guantanamo finally threw out evidence in the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed case that had been compromised by torture. 

Obviously, this is a setback the government richly deserves. One only wishes the officials responsible for the torture program were being sanctioned in some more lasting way. 

Pudd'nhead Wilson

 The Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson gives voice to the widespread perception that the novel is in some ways a stunted classic—a book that fails to carry through its own profound and intriguing themes to their logical conclusion; preferring instead to accept the cheap victory of becoming a merely mechanical—if satisfying and gripping—detective story. 

But if true, this is precisely part of the genius and power of the novel: because one of its great themes is precisely the stunting of personality under the force of social convention—something Twain himself knew intimately. 

Where the Money Goes

 The news has been dominated this week by two big tales of our current government's colossal self-inflicted economic mismanagement: namely, 1) the rise of the national debt to over $40 trillion; and 2) Trump's renewed trade war with our closest neighbor and biggest trading partner, Canada. 

I've been talking less about the second of these two, in part because I tend to lump these tariff wars into the mental category of the merely inane aspects of Trump's rule—as opposed to the genuinely evil aspects, like his wars and enforced disappearances of innocent people to overseas detention camps.