Testosterone

 After the spectacle of the UFC cage-fighting on the White House lawn yesterday—not to mention Elon Musk's debut as the world's first trillionaire, in the same week he was personally egging on a lynch mob in Belfast to burn asylum-seeking families out of their homes—you might think that more brain-dead testosterone is the last thing this society needs. 

You might think, in such a world, that mindless, infantile masculine posturing is "the one thing a man has had too much of," to borrow a phrase out of context from D.H. Lawrence. 

A Roman Holiday at the White House

 Trump's UFC face-smashing party on the White House lawn last night catered to a long-running sadistic interest of his in blood sports. I was reminded of an earlier news cycle in which he mused about segregating martial arts leagues by immigration status and pitting undocumented people against U.S. citizens to fight each other for his amusement. 

In short, this is a man who gets off on the idea of other men bloodying their faces, while he looks on from a position of safety—like the Roman emperors of old watching a gladiatorial game. 

Pagan MAGA

 The endless social media flame wars that define our modern politics gave us one piece of nastiness last week that I thought was unintentionally revealing. Stephen Miller said something gross and mean about Senate candidate James Talarico. 

The official Democratic Party account clapped back at him by calling him "ugly." (You see what I mean about this not being exactly our most lofty and inspiring moment in national politics?)

A Painless Death?

 The Supreme Court unexpectedly did the right thing yesterday when they granted a zero-hour reprieve to a death row inmate in Alabama, sparing his life (if only temporarily) from imminent execution by nitrogen gas. 

The case prompted a surreal back-and-forth in the lower courts, though, about just how painless the various available methods of execution in American prisons might be. 

Irish Avatar

 Seeing the reports of the race riots in Northern Ireland yesterday—in which gangs of masked men burned Black and immigrant families out of their homes, like something out of a turn-of-the-century pogrom, or the 1921 Tulsa massacre—I thought of John Berryman's words: "culture was only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery."

There's something particularly heartbreaking about seeing this evil in Northern Ireland, which has known its share of violence, persecution, and oppression before, and ought to make common cause with its victims. Byron wrote in his poem "The Irish Avatar" that he could only be glad that the heroes of Ireland's freedom struggle past were no longer alive to see what the country had come to. 

Boats and Men

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy last weekend to commemorate the D-Day landings. In a tortured metaphor, he yet again echoed this administration's standard racist talking point that today's nonwhite migrants and refugees are staging an "invasion" of Western Europe. 

"Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies," Hegseth intoned. "Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

The Weak Suffer as They Must?

 Yaroslav Trofimov writes today in the Wall Street Journal about how the "weaker" countries around the globe seem to be putting up a surprisingly good defense to the aggression of great powers.

Back at the start of the second Trump term, Trofimov notes, the phrase on everyone's lips was the one from Thucydides: "The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must." We thought we were back in the era of naked conquest, imperialism, and social Darwinism. As Stephen Miller notoriously put it in an interview: "We live in a world, in the real world [...] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power."