American Football

 I have long said that the Trump administration's crudely chauvinistic rhetoric, about their various wars and extrajudicial killings, reminds me of nothing so much as the speaker in Harold Pinter's satirical 1991 poem about the Gulf War, "American Football." 

But at his latest press conference today, Hegseth made the comparison seem even more inevitable. 

Pinter's poem satirizes the sadism and cruelty of the American war juggernaut—and its apologists—by adopting the voice of a triumphant schoolyard bully: 

Into Hell, Into Prison

 My dad just finished a week-long stay in the hospital. It was one of the best facilities in the country. He was in a lovely new building with lots of natural lighting. By the end of his time there, he had a room to himself. A room with a view, at that. 

But "Even in this island richly blest [...] Earth is too harsh," as Edna St. Vincent Millay once put it. Even the best of possible hospitals is still a hospital. And thus, in spite of all its efforts, it still felt like a kind of prison or carceral institution. 

"War is Hell"

Pete Hegseth was asked yesterday about the four U.S. service members who had already lost their lives at that point due to Trump's illegal Iran bombing. (Now, it's up to six.) He blithely responded: "War is hell and always will be." 

War? What war? I thought we were just engaged in a "strike" or a "special operation" of some sort. If this is a war, then the U.S. Constitution is very clear who has the authority to make it: Congress, not the president. 

For God and Phallus?

 It goes without saying that there is no rational, legal, moral, or humanitarian justification for Trump's murderous war of aggression in Iran—which has so far taken the lives of four American service members and hundreds of Iranian civilians—many of them apparently elementary-age schoolchildren. 

If you search for a logical answer to the question: why are we are war with Iran?, you will find none. But if you search for explanations at the level of the nether-reaches of psychology—you will suddenly find a surfeit. From the standpoint of the libido and the Id, Trump's war suddenly seems over-determined. 

Default Goodness

 In recent days my dad has had a bad case of "ICU delirium" in the hospital—by all accounts not an uncommon condition, when someone has been trapped in an unfamiliar setting for days, with irregular sleep and meals, and a rotating cast of faces. 

The result, whatever its cause, is that dad's subconscious self is coming out into full view, in the form of hallucinations and misconceptions about his surroundings. 

The thing is: it turns out to be practically the same as his fully conscious self. 

Stupidity Street

 When we were waiting in the hospital the other night, my mom said that her go-to way to feel better in an emergency was to watch bird videos on her phone. Live streams of nesting egret families are her form of digital comfort food. 

Likewise, one of my dad's happiest nights before he went into the hospital was when we went out for a picnic amidst the Florida wetlands and watched the varieties of avian life at sunset. I spent minutes filming a roseate spoonbill that came by, as it made its curious swinging sweeps in the water for food. 

Whence Kindness and Gentleness Come

 I woke up shivering this morning with the weight and misery of my dad's deteriorating health condition seemingly concentrated into a little ball in the center of my gut. I curled up into a fetal position and wrapped myself more tightly in the down comforter to feel better and get more warmth. But it didn't do much good. 

"Comforter," I apostrophized to myself, "where, where is your comforting?" 

I get that G.M. Hopkins wasn't talking about bedclothes when he wrote that line. He was talking about Jesus, or God, or whatever. But I never believed in any of those characters. I know I have not been abandoned or forsaken—because there was no one to do the abandoning and forsaking.