Race to the Bottom

 A New York Times op-ed yesterday delved once more into the biography of Marco Rubio—pointing out his bizarre chameleon-like ability to adapt himself to rapidly changing political environments. 

The contradictions have only mounted in Mr. Rubio’s latter-day alliance with Donald Trump, the authors write, and not just on the issue of immigration. Mr. Rubio has shifted from an impassioned champion of U.S. foreign aid to one of the dismantlers of the United States Agency for International Development. He has gone from piquant adversary of the president’s first-term foreign policy to an enabler of legally disputed strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats and a cheerleader for the president’s hegemonic approach to the Western Hemisphere.

Lord of the Drones

 I have no patience whatsoever for the people who cite Obama's drone strikes as if these somehow excused or mitigated Trump's ongoing campaign of drone murder in the Caribbean and Pacific. Tu quoque is not a valid form of argument; and no precedent, however obscene, can normalize or relativize the fact that our government right now is blowing up civilian vessels in two of the world's oceans—murdering all their occupants—without even the pretense of there being armed actors on the other side. 

That said, it's probably a good exercise for me to occasionally look back and remind myself: Obama's drone strikes were also really bad—even if they were not exactly the same thing as what Trump is doing now. A poem by Heathcote Williams from that era, "Lord of the Drones: The President and the White House Fly," gave me that reminder that I needed, when I read it this week. 

200 Bodies

 As of yesterday, the Trump administration's campaign of extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean and Pacific has now claimed the lives of more than 200 people. 

The New York Times, in a haunting story yesterday, investigates one of the under-examined aspects of this ongoing atrocity: its impact on the livelihoods of coastal communities that fish in these same waters. 

The Divine Pig

 Both Nicholas Kristof and Noah Smith (the blogger) devoted their respective columns this week to the atypical subject of pigs and animal cruelty. 

This was no coincidence. The subject may be outside the usual beat of both writers, but they turned to it this week because Congress is actively debating right now—as part of the Farm Bill—a measure with the hideously apt name of the "Save Our Bacon Act." 

Wigged Oracles

 At the time Arthur Koestler wrote his Reflections on Hanging (1956), Britain was still defying the trend among other Western democracies by continuing to apply the death penalty. Despite the country's celebrated liberal traditions, the UK clung to the practice of hanging people by the neck till dead, long after most of its peer nations on the continent had abandoned capital punishment as a brutal and archaic relic. 

Today, that same mantle has passed to the United States. Great Britain has long since joined the rest of the democratic world by ending the practice of judicial murder. And so now, it is the U.S. that is the outlier; the U.S. that lags far behind the rest of its democratic peers in terms of moral progress by still executing a score or so of people every year, across its fifty states. 

The Body

 Dad was always clear that he wanted to die at home, and we honored that wish. We set up round-the-clock at-home health care and hospice visits in the last weeks of dad's life. And ultimately, he died in our living room, as he intended. 

But the fact that we had kept this promise to him made it feel all the more wrong that—as soon as he had died—strangers came into our home and wheeled him out on a stretcher, to be packed away in some grim and musty Florida funeral parlor. 

Gone to Feed the Roses

 I suppose there are basically two attitudes to death (and really just about everything else)—both of which are true, so far as they go. William James called them the healthy-minded and the sick. (And he made no secret of his greater affinity for the sick-souled way of seeing the matter.)

The healthy-minded say: "I accept the universe." They say: "death is a part of life." They say: "What death? Does not death bring forth new life? Does not the corpse of one being provide food and nutriment for the sprigs and branches of new life?"