Yesterday evening, the Trump administration's comms team apparently rolled out a set of retro flash games on the official White House website.
One of them is called "Rio Run." God help me, I clicked on it.
You play in the game as an old white man who wanders around the screen intercepting "border crossers."
The Trump administration is obviously flailing around at the moment to try to find the right formula that will explain away the disastrous failure of their war of aggression on Iran. "There is no war," they say; "war, what war?"; "and anyways, we're winning."
But yesterday, they seemed to converge on a new line: blame Ukraine.
Trump, in one of his various unhinged social media rants, suggested that the U.S. is not running out of munitions in its war, and has more munitions than ever, and anyways, if we are running out of munitions, it's because the Biden administration gave so many away to Ukraine...
Well, Milo Yiannopoulos—that one-time enfant teribble of the MAGA alt-right—has been deported from the country, allegedly for overstaying his visa.
Before anyone crows about this as poetic justice, though—or, still worse, concludes something like "wow, ICE may be cruel, but at least they're even-handed!"—John Ganz cautions us that this deportation appears to have been almost entirely the product of a creepy factional dispute within MAGA.
I admit that I haven't followed very closely the news this summer about Trump's ever-multiplying D.C. construction projects—the White House ballroom, the planned "Arc de Trump," the "Garden of Heroes," the "Reflecting Pool," and lord knows what else. Every time I see a headline about one of these stories (and they come at us almost daily now—viz. the latest this week about the Supreme Court's acquiescence in the ballroom litigation), I tend to scroll past it—thinking "bah, we have bigger fish to fry here people!"
But I really shouldn't think that. Trump's redesign of our nation's capital is actually central to his larger authoritarian project. It's his way of symbolically burying the old America and the old D.C.—the "capitol of a lost republic," as John Dos Passos called it (in his capsule biography of La Follette). Trump is driven to build in order to pave over the America that was—and to put some new gaudy wasteland in its place that will bequeath to posterity the essence of his tinsel soul.
I had been no huge fan of Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's Senate campaign in Michigan up to now (though everyone who can should of course vote for him to keep that Senate seat blue).
On the one hand, I never bought the insinuation that El-Sayed is personally anti-semitic. On the other, there should never be a "part two" to any statement in which you are condemning a hate crime against a synagogue. As El-Sayed has himself since acknowledged, he should have just said: this is terrible "full stop."
At some point along the way it became fashionable not to take Sinclair Lewis quite seriously as a novelist or social prophet (Nabokov, for instance, once mocked the whole genre of novelistic social criticism to which he belonged as "Upton Lewis"). It becomes clearer by the day, though, that this was a terrible mistake. We need him more than ever.
His 1947 "race" novel Kingsblood Royal is one of those books I've lugged around on my shelf from apartment to apartment for the last twenty years without actually reading it. I knew roughly the premise of it, and therefore thought I knew its contents—which I found intriguing but not relevant enough to actually bother reading until now.
The latest episode of The Argument podcast tackles the great debate over the alleged "loneliness" crisis, with Derek Thompson plumping firmly for the view that Americans are spending too much time alone and it's making us miserable—and the other two co-hosts taking a more ambivalent stance.
I am in a somewhat odd position on this issue since, intellectually, I've been convinced by the Robert Putnam arguments about declining social capital for years. The fall of in-person "community" was a major topic of discussion in divinity school ten years ago, and probably is still.
