Gone Forever

Grief comes by strange and circuitous byways. I've written before on this blog about how I broke down in tears the night my dad went into the E.R. after the seizure that racked his body in the final weeks of his battle with brain cancer. But from that day to this, no other tears passed my eyes. I didn't even cry the day he died and they took his body away in a van. Sad as I would inevitably feel at odds moments of the day, I was denied the relief of tears. For months now, I've felt only a strange numbness. 

Until this morning. Seemingly for no reason at all—perhaps just because there was no reason, and nothing else was going on—I suddenly started bawling. 

Vicious

 The New York Times ran an eccentric "man bites dog"–type story yesterday (or, perhaps it is more accurate to say here, a "dog bites man; man smites dog" story) about a 120-pound Anatolian Shepherd named Bruce whose supporters filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay his execution, after a state court had earlier judged him to be incorrigibly "vicious" and ordered him put down. 

Given that the Supreme Court routinely allows human beings to be killed in state and federal death chambers across the country, year after year, it should perhaps not surprise us that they failed to intervene in this case to stop Bruce's euthanasia. Indeed, it would in many ways be grotesque if they had allowed the dog to live when they have not bothered to do as much for so many men and women. 

Still Dos Passos's U.S.A.

 One of my reading projects for the summer has been to finish John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, and I just did last night. There are obviously many things one could say about an epic of that scale, but what came to mind for me in reading the last volume of the trilogy (The Big Money), was that our 2020s are coming to resemble very much the 1920s of a century ago that Dos Passos describes. We are still Dos Passos's America—and not in a good way. 

The trilogy as a whole is an elegy for the "lost republic" of Jeffersonian democracy, to use Dos Passos's phrase—the "storybook democracy" of Walt Whitman, as he elsewhere calls it. Beginning with a sympathetic depiction of I.W.W. labor radicalism at the turn of the century, Dos Passos charts the inexorable rise of big business and the dulling of conscience and moral values, as people find themselves duped into a needless war in Europe that is then cynically exploited by business interests. 

Burrito-Logic

 Meanwhile, as the left is converging on a new agenda defined by economic and affordability issues (to the chagrin of people like me who still think things like racism, refugee rights, trans rights, police violence, etc. are also important and need to be talked about)—the right seems to be trying to head in the opposite direction. 

To be sure, plenty of Republicans and even some "MAGA" bros keep urging Trump to focus on gas and food prices. Yet, pundits who support Trump's actual policies, like attacking Iran and imposing trade barriers on the rest of the world, have to argue that voters should just suck it up and tolerate a certain amount of economic pain for the sake of the administration's cultural and power politics goals. 

A Pillar of Salt

 Just my luck that all the progressive DSA-backed candidates I found most annoying or wrongheaded seem to have won their primary campaigns this cycle; whereas I was finally starting to warm to Francesca Hong in Wisconsin—and now she's the only one that's lost.

Hong was an interesting case since she seemed to get backlash from all sides. 

"Moderates" and party establishment types predictably warned that her views were too far left to win a general election—and perhaps they're right about that. 

Cuba Libre?

 The New York Times's new reporting today on the administration's lawless renditions to Eswatini has to be seen to be believed. 

I have known for at least a year that the administration is kidnapping and deporting people to secret prisons in war-torn autocracies in Africa—effectively a form of enforced disappearance. 

In My Dreams

 I woke up in the middle of the night last night after a particularly vivid dream—probably the result of eating too much pizza at dinner (melted cheese being understood since Victorian times to be a source of intense dreaming—most likely for lactose intolerance reasons). 

In the dream, Donald Trump had just taken over the organization where I work, and was now serving as CEO. I guess he was paying an in-person visit for some sort of team-building exercise, because we were all seated outside around a conference table. Trump had a personal calendar open before him, and was trying to rally the troops. 

He seemed to be confused about why team morale had been so low since his takeover.