Pues viva la democracia

 In just the first six months of this year, Trump has started two baseless wars of aggression on opposite sides of the globe—in both cases against admittedly authoritarian governments that the administration claims to disapprove of. 

You might think, among all this needless carnage, that one possible silver lining might be that the U.S. would at least make common cause with Venezuelan and Iranian dissidents and political prisoners, in whose name these wars were ostensibly fought. Weren't we going in to "liberate" the people from their oppressive governments, after all? 

Red/Brown

 I was listening to a podcast on a road trip this weekend that broadly aligns with the "alt-left"/"dirtbag left" school of thought.  There has never been a great single all-encompassing name for these people (John Ganz has called them the "anti-alarmist" left, since they tend to reject comparisons of MAGA to fascism), but you know the type I mean. 

Many of them emerged out of the great crusade against Bush-era neoconservatism (in which they were on the right side), but sometime around 2014 or so, they seem to have concluded that because they were against America's abuses of power, they must be for Putin's and the PRC's. 

A Voice with a Smile of Democracy

[...] the voice-with-a-smile of democracy

announces night & day

"all poor little peoples that want to be free

just trust in the u s a"—

So wrote E.E. Cummings bitterly in 1956—after the U.S. had first encouraged Hungary to rise up and throw off its Soviet overlords—and then had ignobly abandoned the country to destruction at the hands of Soviet tanks. 

A Thousand Eyes

 According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel's far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had this to say on social media yesterday about the country's ongoing military operations in Lebanon (which now threaten to derail talks with Iran yet again):

"For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!"

Um, excuse me, but—what??

Burnt Along With the Altars

 The news reports of the Russian strikes that apparently left an historic Ukrainian cathedral in flames earlier this week brought to mind for me that awful passage in Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, in which the Cossack general rampages through Poland, burning churches and slaughtering those who seek shelter within them. 

With barely disguised sadistic relish, Gogol describes the hideous vengeance Taras exacts on the Poles. He "did not even spare the dark-browed Polish beauties," Gogol writes, "[...] who found no refuge, not even in churches as they clung to altars. Taras ordered them to be burnt along with the altars." (Constantine trans.)

The Chameleon

 Everyone knows how J.D. Vance reinvented himself for the Trump era—going from the NPR-listening public's favorite "hillbilly"-whisperer—and frequent Trump critic—to the president's favorite lapdog (not to mention one of the world's most prominent ideologists for the new wave of radical right populism/white nationalism/neo-fascism sweeping the globe).  

Once it became clear that white supremacism and Nazi-curious Groyperism were the hip new thing in the Republican party—and the fastest way to rise in Trump's political movement—Vance had no trouble abandoning his earlier assessment of Trump as a "demagogue" and adopting the new far-right "nationalist" talking points as his own. 

The Shades

 My family and I just got back from a week in Michigan, where we were mostly insulated from the daily reminders of the tragedy we had just been through, as my dad died from cancer. 

Now that I'm in Florida again, though, I'm definitely back in the presence of the shades. Every place I go in the house or the neighborhood reminds me of some awful, or sometimes sweet, scene from the last four months.