Closed System

 The other day, I found myself in a conversation with a very conservative Catholic. I kept worrying I would out myself somehow as a secular liberal. But somehow instead I kept being taken for a Protestant. 

In reality, I don't consider myself as a member of either camp. If anything, I aspire to live up to Graham Greene's dictum to be a Catholic in a Protestant country and a Protestant in a Catholic one. But I guess in this conversation, I was in Catholic country, and so I kept finding myself putting a gentle word in for Luther. 

Merry Men?

 As of the last reporting I saw yesterday, UK authorities still have no clear account of the motives or identity of the people they arrested earlier this week outside of the Fairfold air base. They released the suspects surprisingly quickly, however, which tends to suggest no one actually thinks they were linked to a violent terrorist plot. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, one emerging theory among the locals holds that "the men, all from London, may have been in the area to steal fuel[.]"

Farm Populism

 Reading V.L. Parrington's epic three-volume study of the Main Currents in American Thought, it is clear that a persistent theme in the work—indeed, a characteristic obsession of Parrington's—is that American farmers and agrarian interests have long been the source of every progressive, popular, democratic, pacifist, humane, and reformist impulse in American life. 

John Dos Passos's USA trilogy often reflects the same assumption. When Wilson's war in Europe looms, the characters in Dos Passos's epic often talk as if it were a given that the small farmers of the great Midwestern Plains would be one of the surest political obstacles (alongside industrial workers) to this push for war and profiteering. 

Higher Law

 I attended a talk the other week about the state judge who was prosecuted—and convicted—last year for allegedly shepherding an immigrant out of the backdoor of her courtroom in order to protect him from ICE arrest. 

This incident always stood out from other times the administration has targeted or prosecuted people for First Amendment–protected activities because in this case, arguably, the judge actually did sort of kind of break the law. 

Noli Me Tangere

 The New York Times reported yesterday on the debate surrounding Washington State's graduated tax on incomes greater than a million dollars a year. "Critics want voters to repeal it," the Times summarizes, "and bar state leaders from imposing income taxes in the future, arguing the millionaires tax will drive out wealthy entrepreneurs and eventually lead to income taxes on everyone else."

Here, one is reminded of that scene I was just talking about from Anatole France's Penguin Island (1908), in which the wealthiest penguins approach their kind-hearted lawgiver, Father Mael, to plead an exemption from any form of progressive taxation. As they solemnly insist, hat-in-hand: 

The Shah

 Now, in the midst of Trump's ongoing war in the Middle East, seemed like a particularly apt time to pick up Ryszard Kapuściński's classic book of reportage on Iranian politics, Shah of Shahs. 

The book convincingly and indelibly portrays the Shah's former regime as a nightmare state of total despotism, in which neighbors feared to confide in neighbors, lest they find themselves reported to the authorities, and the deadly Savak secret police exercised a reign of terror over the public. 

Racist Catch-22

 In the face of a rising tide of anti–South Asian hatred on the American right, a number of commentators have pointed out the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" quality to xenophobic racism. 

On the one hand, after all, the right accuses immigrants and racial out-groups of refusing to "assimilate," of living in Balkanized impoverished enclaves, of causing urban blight and bringing into the country various disruptive anti-social behaviors.