[...] 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.
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??
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
