Not Mad, Just Disappointed

 When I saw an opinion piece a couple weeks ago from a certain New York Times columnist who has made a career for himself as a supposed human rights activist—a piece, specifically, in which he calls on the president to effectively terminate the U.S. asylum program—I was surprised by how little appetite I had to publicly rant about it on Twitter. It wasn't fun in the way it is to denounce the latest horrific statement from J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio, say. Rather, this one pained me. 

I could see all the points I'd want to criticize in the column. There was the rank hypocrisy of someone who had made a career calling for refugee rights abroad suddenly reversing course as soon as his own country and his own favored presidential candidate are facing the same dilemma at their borders. There is the fact that Kristof would certainly castigate Turkey, say, for shutting out Syrian refugees—yet, when humanitarian migration is happening at our border, he suddenly sings a different tune. 

Let Not the Land Once Proud of Him...

 I was as disappointed with Biden's debate performance last Thursday as anyone—and I'm just as scared as it is possible to be about the future of his candidacy, and the risk it poses of a potential Trump victory. But I haven't appreciated the role the news media has tried to play—in the wake of these events—as self-appointed kingmaker. Still less have I welcomed the snide and mean-spirited way in which some commentators have done so.

Ever since the debate last week, the New York Times has tried to railroad a certain narrative about what should happen next. On the left-hand side of the homepage, they show one article after another about "panic" inside the Democratic party. Then, on the right, they have the editorial pieces drawing the obvious moral that we are meant to reach from this information: replace Biden at the head of the ticket. 

Teaching to Kill

 Mike Gold's posthumous reputation has not done well. If he is remembered for anything these days, it is for being the epitome of the Stalinist literary hack—someone who submitted his contemporaries not to the bar of artistic judgment, but to the standards of Soviet propaganda. It was Gold who penned all those hysterical Daily Worker columns in which this or that modernist poet was accused of being a "reactionary tool of the capitalists" or a "sentimental bourgeois fantasist," etc. Such at least was the impression that had come down to me. Gold is the target, for instance, of an outstanding satirical poem by E.E. Cummings, "Ballad of an Intellectual," which convincingly and devastatingly accuses him of savaging his contemporaries mostly just to cover up for the fact that he lacked any real talent himself.

But it turns out Gold did write at least one beautiful and human book: his first and only novel—a thinly-veiled autobiography about growing up as the child of Hungarian immigrants in New York's Lower East Side at the dawn of the twentieth century: Jews Without Money. When all of the maniacal fulminations of 1930s propaganda and counter-propaganda have boiled away, leaving not a trace in historical recollection, this book still stands as a moving testament—probably because, for once, Gold wasn't trying to talk about more than he knew. Instead, he was writing about his own life and neighborhood—focusing on his "home town" and "home folks"—as Langston Hughes once advised every aspiring writer to do (by using reverse psychology). The book was therefore a bestseller—and one can still see why, today. 

Diseased Reasoning

 By this point, we've probably all moved on from the Kristi Noem/"Cricket" news cycle—and rightly so. For those who have already forgotten it (as they probably should): this was the controversy about the South Dakota governor and one-time Trump VP contender, after she revealed an episode from her past involving the brutal slaying of a pet dog. What was especially bizarre about this scandal is that it did not emerge from any sleuthing or oppo research. Noem furnished the anecdote herself in a memoir, in which she described how she killed the dog for being difficult to manage. With needless cruelty, she added that she "hated" the animal. Apparently, Noem thought telling this story would make her look good. 

I wrote a blog post about this incident previously, when it was still in the news. In my usual style, I was focused on how I could connect the incident to Byron, theology, and a bunch of other typical hobbyhorses of mine. It took sending the piece to my dad for me to step back from this and remember the actual moral stakes involved. In his response to the post, my dad cut much more closely to the heart of the matter—i.e., what was actually wrong with what Noem did. I thought the way he phrased it was more eloquent and succinct than anything I wrote at the time, so I wanted to share it here. He said: 

Continental Drift

 A sailboat carrying 122 Haitian refugees washed ashore on Key West last week—with at least two of its passengers having to be hospitalized for dehydration, after spending seven days on the open ocean. They are only some of the many people forced to flee their home by a raging humanitarian crisis in Haiti that has upending most aspects of daily life. And many of them may only experience a temporary reprieve in the United States before being deported back to the perils they fled. 

The Biden administration recently announced a welcome expansion of the country's current temporary protected status designation—shielding an estimated 300,000 more people from the threat of forced removal. But the cut-off to qualify for this status was June 3—too early for the people stranded in Key West. Meanwhile, the administration has been running multiple deportation flights to Haiti over the past year—even as the country was too dangerous for its own former prime minister to land his plane. 

There's Always Next Time, Right?

 I've been going back and forth the last two days as to how panicked I think we should be about the Supreme Court's ruling in the Trump immunity case. On the one hand, I'm frankly not surprised by the outcome. It was clear from the oral arguments that the justices were bound to exempt some presidential activities from criminal liability—and, in truth, I'm not sure they were wrong to do so. I see the strength of the argument that an executive official should not face criminal prosecution for actions they undertook within the scope of their role as a legitimate policymaker—the remedies for such actions, if they prove to be misguided, should be political ones, not criminal prosecution. 

The Court therefore had to draw a line somewhere between what constitutes a president's official conduct as the holder of that office, and what constitutes a private criminal action that they undertook while they happened to be president. I'm not sure the Court's conservative majority drew that line in the right place—probably they erred on the side of executive power. But I'm relieved that they drew the line at all. The Court stopped short of declaring the total immunity that Trump asked for; they left the door open to the possibility that a sitting president could be prosecuted for actions they undertook in office, so long as they were acting in a way that could not reasonably be described as part of their official duties. 

Too Late to Be Ambitious?

 In a classic essay on mortality, "Urne-Buriall"—which I also discussed in the previous post—the seventeenth century writer and polymath Sir Thomas Browne at one point makes a striking observation: "'Tis too late to be ambitious," he writes. Why? Because, he argues, the world will imminently be coming to an end. The Biblical prophecies gave the Earth about six thousand years of existence before the apocalypse would descend, he writes. And so, by Browne's reckoning, that puts the likely end of humanity within his own lifetime, or shortly thereafter. 

Browne therefore looks back with something like envy upon the generations that preceded his. They, at least—he reflects—could count on monuments to carry their name for centuries if not millennia to come. The people of Browne's generation, by contrast, could not rely on even this much. In his view, some of the men and women then breathing might live to see the second coming and the resurrection of the flesh—so what was the point of hoping to immortalize our legacies in the memory of generations to come? After all, there would be no such generations to come.