As of yesterday, the Trump administration's campaign of extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean and Pacific has now claimed the lives of more than 200 people.
The New York Times, in a haunting story yesterday, investigates one of the under-examined aspects of this ongoing atrocity: its impact on the livelihoods of coastal communities that fish in these same waters.
Both Nicholas Kristof and Noah Smith (the blogger) devoted their respective columns this week to the atypical subject of pigs and animal cruelty.
This was no coincidence. The subject may be outside the usual beat of both writers, but they turned to it this week because Congress is actively debating right now—as part of the Farm Bill—a measure with the hideously apt name of the "Save Our Bacon Act."
At the time Arthur Koestler wrote his Reflections on Hanging (1956), Britain was still defying the trend among other Western democracies by continuing to apply the death penalty. Despite the country's celebrated liberal traditions, the UK clung to the practice of hanging people by the neck till dead, long after most of its peer nations on the continent had abandoned capital punishment as a brutal and archaic relic.
Today, that same mantle has passed to the United States. Great Britain has long since joined the rest of the democratic world by ending the practice of judicial murder. And so now, it is the U.S. that is the outlier; the U.S. that lags far behind the rest of its democratic peers in terms of moral progress by still executing a score or so of people every year, across its fifty states.
Dad was always clear that he wanted to die at home, and we honored that wish. We set up round-the-clock at-home health care and hospice visits in the last weeks of dad's life. And ultimately, he died in our living room, as he intended.
But the fact that we had kept this promise to him made it feel all the more wrong that—as soon as he had died—strangers came into our home and wheeled him out on a stretcher, to be packed away in some grim and musty Florida funeral parlor.
I suppose there are basically two attitudes to death (and really just about everything else)—both of which are true, so far as they go. William James called them the healthy-minded and the sick. (And he made no secret of his greater affinity for the sick-souled way of seeing the matter.)
The healthy-minded say: "I accept the universe." They say: "death is a part of life." They say: "What death? Does not death bring forth new life? Does not the corpse of one being provide food and nutriment for the sprigs and branches of new life?"
"The first day after a death, the new absence / Is always the same," Philip Larkin wrote. Today, I woke up to a house without dad in it. The caregivers were all gone. His hospital bed in the living room had been stripped of its linen. They wheeled his body out last night, after I had a final chance to say goodbye.
Dad's last hours were very peaceful. After a final round of morphine, he just lay there quietly and comfortably for a few hours. We sat in the living room with him, listening to him breathe. Then, between 8 and 9 o'clock, he just stopped. We sat there, poised, listening for another breath that did not come.
Since many far-right influencers have recently gone from viewing Trump as God's anointed on Earth to the literal Antichrist (viz. Tucker's recent musings on the subject)—and meanwhile, Peter Thiel is purporting to lecture on the subject in Rome—I thought it might be a good time to read up on the vicissitudes of the early modern Antichrist, as told by Christopher Hill.
And it turns out that Hill's book on the subject, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England, explains even more about the fate of Trump's MAGA movement than I thought. Indeed, the book offers a window into the sort of archetypical progression (or retrogression) that every revolutionary movement undergoes once it obtains power.
