Fools in Old-Style Hats

 The New York Times ran a long-ish piece yesterday on America's proliferating (if you will) "pronatalism" movement. And in fairness, some of the policy ideas these votaries of procreation are pushing seem pretty innocuous. I buy the idea that there are many people in this country who would love to have more kids if they could, and simply face economic barriers to doing so. So I support some of the measures people are promoting to make it more possible for them to have the families they desire. 

There are one or two passages in the story, however, that sound a more ominous note. One is a line they quote that was tucked away in an executive memo from our new doofy Real World-starring Secretary of Transportation. I hadn't noticed it until the New York Times called attention to it yesterday, and one could be forgiven for missing it the first time through. But basically, the line directs executive agencies to funnel transportation resources specifically toward "high-birth-rate areas." 

The Other Problem With That Signal Chat

 The news headlines have been dominated all week by the administration's incredible blunder of accidentally including a journalist on a privileged Signal thread, in which multiple high-level members of the government's national security team shared confidential details of attack plans, in the ongoing U.S. bombing of Yemen. 

In the days since this news broke, much of the pubic outrage has rightly focused on the administration's astonishing incompetence in enabling this leak in the first place. But there's something else troubling about that Signal thread that deserves to receive more attention: namely, the administration's obviously complete indifference to civilian casualties from their strikes, as demonstrated in the chat. 

The Usefulness of Uselessness

 I was reading the ancient Chinese sage Zhuangzi this weekend. And one of the themes he returns to time and again is the idea that there are advantages to being useless. He notes that the most ugly, useless, and cumbersome animals are the ones least likely to be killed and eaten, or stripped for their beautiful fur. The most useless trees, likewise, are seldom cut down for their wood. 

 Likewise, he introduces a human character named Outspread the Discombobulated (according to the Brook Ziporyn translation), who is so mixed up and uncoordinated that he is no good for anything. But precisely for this reason, Zhuangzi observes—when the military recruiters came to conscript people into the army, he was passed over. 

Haussmannization

 I'm been reading the early novels in Émile Zola's landmark Rougon-Macquart series, and just finished the second one, The Kill. There's something deeply emotionally gratifying about reading these books in our present moment. Zola chooses as his subject the moral and economic world of the Second Empire, which he depicts as a society of bottomless corruption and rapacity, founded in an act of ruthless democide. This atmosphere of constant mendacity, greed, and cronyism in high places, which pervades the novels, seems all-too familiar to us now, at the start of the second Trump presidency.

The author started publishing these novels after the Second Empire had already fallen—but as a young journalist, Zola had cut his teeth criticizing the imperial government; and he had originally planned and started writing the novel while Napoleon III was still in power. So, the early novels in the series still have a freshness and immediacy to their anger. These are raw works of explosive political fury, directed against still-fresh wounds to the French republic. Zola is hardly, then, the detached naturalist that he sometimes imagined himself to be; here, he does not disguise his political and moral indignation. 

The Rat and the Apostate

 I was reading Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Peter Bell the Third" yesterday (contained in the Penguin Classics edition of Selected Poems and Prose). It's the kind of satirical piece that's so up my alley it amazes me I hadn't already discovered it years ago. I want to travel back in time to share it with my younger self; he would have appreciated it even more than I did. 

After all, one finds in the poem—among many other gems—an explanation for one of my favorite lines of Brecht's poetry. In "Contemplating Hell," Brecht observes that his "brother Shelley" once declared that Hell must be a place much like London; whereas Brecht (he writes in the poem)—having now been to Los Angeles—finds that it must be even more like that. 

The Machine-Wreckers

 Yesterday—for the second time in as many months—Trump proposed sending U.S. citizens to prisons in El Salvador. And, before we all scoff and move on, saying, "well, that would be illegal and unconstitutional"—let me just point out that I would also think the Constitution has something to say about deporting noncitizens to El Salvador without any due process. But Trump did it anyway. 

Just last week, he designated noncitizens as foreign gang members without any way for them to contest this allegation. He deported them to the waiting brutality of El Salvador's most notorious jailers, without even first securing a removal order from an immigration judge. This would seem to violate both the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the principle of habeas corpus. But Trump did it anyway. 

Justice for Hire

 Apparently, in Pam Bondi's incredibly self-degrading career in sycophancy, it's no longer enough merely to grovel on behalf of Donald Trump personally (the "greatest president in American history," Bondi called him—during Trump's notorious visit last week to DOJ headquarters). Now, Bondi also has to toady to Elon Musk, who has become a kind of outward extension of Trump's ego. 

I don't know how else to describe the revolting spectacle this week of Bondi trying to cast a handful of minor property crimes against Tesla facilities as "domestic terrorism." 

Negative Framing

 The conventional wisdom in the advocacy messaging world is that people don't respond to negative framings. They don't just want to hear about problems from you without clear solutions. You need to give them hope as well, in order to prompt them to take action. 

But I was talking to my dad the other day, and he raised an interesting counterpoint. He was talking about an article he had recently read that spelled out point by point the cumulative evidence we have so far about Trump's anti-democratic agenda. 

Paul Who?

 In the original version of his "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," Auden included the famous lines: 

Time that with this strange excuse

Pardoned Kipling and his views,

And will pardon Paul Claudel,

Pardons him for writing well[.]

It's a perennially relevant stanza, as we debate these days whether this or that famous artist, film director, or musician is to be pardoned for their politics or personal behavior. 

Sick: A Poem

 Being sick was simply something to do 

A writer's substitute for war-experience 

Having been cursed with birth at a time 

Of unprecedented national abundance and stability.

But enough years went by

That the world got sick too

And so—my health markedly improved.

Blue Bloods

 I was skimming through a long-form New York Times article yesterday. It recounted the life's work and mission of a writer who has devoted her career to weening people off psychiatric medications. She benefitted from going off the pills, so she is encouraging others to do so as well. 

And yet, she is not a medical doctor or an epidemiologist or a psychologist. So—how did she get a book deal to dispense mental health advice to the public? 

A Cold Unjust Walk

 It's a beautiful day here in Iowa City. The sun is shining. The air is balmy. I give thanks for this green grass and this blue sky and all I see. 

And yet, when I turn to the news, all is changed. I see the Associated Press photos in my inbox of men our government has entombed alive in black site prisons in El Salvador. I see the guards with their masked faces and weapons holding them prisoner without charge or trial or conviction. 

And I am overwhelmed by the contrast. I think—how can these two things both be in the same world? How can there be light, here, while innocent men weep with futile despair in darkness there, because of the deliberate actions of my government? 

Bury the Statue of Liberty

 In just the past few days, the U.S. government has violated multiple federal court orders to deport people without due process. They have invoked a 1798 law that was passed as part of the notorious "Alien and Sedition Acts" that grossly violate the Bill of Rights. 

They have used this specious legal authority to deport Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador—a completely different country. And they have applauded the Salvadoran government for incarcerating these individuals with no due process in one of the country's most notorious prisons. 

Oligarchs

 The New York Times ran a story a couple days ago about Gavin Newsom's rather surprising decision to appear on a podcast with MAGA arch-propagandist Steve Bannon. The main takeaway from the journalist's account was that the two men—despite their supposedly polar-opposite politics—ended up finding a surprising amount of common ground. They both, after all, were able to converge around the rhetoric of economic populism. 

Both men, for instance, have come to despise Elon Musk. Steve Bannon was railing at various points in the interview against "oligarchs"—and Newsom agreed with him (they only differed over which of the two parties was most responsible for creating them). Perhaps most surprisingly, Steve Bannon even put in a kind word for Lina Khan—the Biden administration FTC appointee who has been the face of the populist Left's efforts to deploy antitrust enforcement more aggressively, in order to break up big tech companies. 

Careful

 Any discussion of "microaggressions" has more or less fallen off the cultural agenda at this point. One of the two major parties is currently in the process of staging a fascist insurrection and dismantling our constitutional order, seemingly for the sole purpose of ensuring that no white man will ever have to attend a sensitivity training at work ever again. In the face of this unprecedented threat, liberals are choosing their battles. They are mostly just trying to clutch at whatever scraps of the rule of law still remain, and letting the right essentially have its own way on what are seen as some of the lower-stakes cultural issues. 

But it's worth reminding ourselves that the whole "microaggressions" conversation was never actually saying anything very radical in the first place. The point was just that people can blunder their way into hurting people's feelings—sometimes—not because they are being intentionally cruel or malicious—but simply because they take their own life experience to be the norm and—if they are being emotionally clumsy in the moment—they can forget about other people's life situations. All the "sensitivity trainings" were ever trying to do was to help people to be a little more cognizant of the feelings of others; to tread a bit more carefully. 

The Tragedy of Little Marco

 In the annals of political cravenness and turncoat-ery, the astonishing volte-face of Marco Rubio over the past few years must rank as one of the more glaring and deplorable. Here was a man who—as U.S. senator—presented himself as something of an internationalist. He even—dare I utter the forbidden syllables—seemed at times to care about human rights. He objected stridently to the crimes of authoritarian regimes around the world. As recently as 2022, he was saying in public that deporting people to the hands of Maduro's regime in Venezuela would be tantamount to a "death sentence."

And look at him now. He has sold himself for "a handful of silver, [....] a riband to stick in his coat," as Browning once wrote of another great political turncoat past. Rubio, who once represented the best in the bipartisan defense of human rights and the principles of democracy, now spends every day mouthing the crude "America First" slogans of his MAGA paymasters. 

Object Permanence

 I found myself wondering the other night whether the economic chaos of the past week had started to eat into Donald Trump's approval ratings yet. So I clicked over to the polling aggregator site FiveThirtyEight to check the latest updates from the national polls. My stomach fell out of me, as soon as I did so. The website was no longer there. 

I googled around and learned that this was no temporary disruption to its service. The site had in fact been permanently closed. 

I Looked Up From My Writing

 I was excited to see a notification yesterday from a blogger I've followed for years. Surely, I thought, this wise person will have something timely and relevant to say about our political crisis. I opened the post, and was immediately disappointed. It was mostly about the creative difficulties he is having with a sci-fi screenplay he's been working on. 

I confess I felt vaguely indignant. A sci-fi screenplay? That's what you're choosing to talk about? At a time like this? It felt somehow obscene. How could one write a blog—or anything else—right now, and not make it about the one big story: the political chaos of our times? 

Potent Quacks

 Just minutes after I published my previous post about RFK Jr. and the measles outbreak in Texas, the breaking news came across my notifications that Trump has apparently withdrawn his original nomination to head the CDC—a close Kennedy ally who has expressed similar views on the MMR vaccine. Apparently it was a bridge too far—even for this administration—to have the nation's leading infectious disease monitor be overseen by a doctor who is mostly known for questioning the efficacy of childhood vaccinations, while we are in the midst of the worst measles outbreak and flu season we have had in years. 

So, I guess that's welcome news. But it doesn't change the fact that HHS as a whole is still headed by a man who promotes these same views of the MMR vaccine—and who has discouraged its use in the past. Plus, Trump's other remaining nominees to key public health posts—such as Dr. Mehmet Oz—have a similarly eyebrow-raising track record when it comes to promoting medical misinformation. With the withdrawal of Trump's original CDC pick, then, we may be spared one "potent quack" in the administration (to borrow a phrase I quoted last time from the poet and surgeon George Crabbe)—but there are others. 

Cod Oil Salesman

 Now that the measles outbreak in Texas has turned into a public health crisis, Americans may be starting to second-guess whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is really the best person to be running our Health and Human Services Department right now. Perhaps, that is to say—in the face of a genuine public health threat—it was not the best idea to install, as the head of our public health agencies, someone who is mostly known for opposing all scientifically-tested public health interventions. 

This, of course, is a pattern with the Trump administration. Trump's cabinet picks are mostly people known for trying to destroy the very agencies they are now overseeing. His choice to run the FBI has written multiple children's books depicting DOJ as a fire-breathing dragon, because it dared to investigate Trump's malfeasance; Trump's pick to run the U.S. intelligence community is mostly known for denouncing the latter (once again, for showing insufficient personal loyalty to Trump), etc. 

Siege

 Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted openly on social media that his goal in imposing ruinous tariffs on Canada is to forcibly incorporate them into the United States. And such is the chaos of our times, that this revelation didn't even register as the biggest news item of the day. 

But there it was, spelled out in black and white, for all to read. Trump explicitly framed the tariffs as leverage to force Canada to accept U.S. annexation: "The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State," he wrote. "This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear."

Arbitrary Arrest

 Since taking office in January, Trump has made innumerable moves to retaliate against political speech he doesn't like. These steps have ranged from barring the Associated Press from the White House press pool (all because they were unwilling to replace the Gulf of Mexico in their style guide with Trump's preferred name, "Gulf of America"), to revoking federal building access to law firms that represent Democrats, to trying to withhold Congressionally-approved funds on vaguely-defined ideological grounds (combatting "wokeness," etc.)

But this week, the administration took the repression to a new level of outright tyranny. Because this was the first time that government agents showed up to a person's home and arrested them—simply for engaging in First Amendment–protected activity. The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil—a Columbia graduate student, who played a significant role as a mediator during last year's campus protests over the war in Gaza—was transparently an effort to stifle his speech. The administration is not even trying to hide it. 

Opportunists

 By the end of Trump's first term, he had managed to alienate just about every last member of his own administration. Anyone with the slightest scrap of integrity or commitment to the rule of law—from Mike Pence to Bill Barr—eventually had to admit they'd had enough. Trump asked things of them that they simply weren't willing to do. 

One would think that systematically putting off the Old Guard of the Republican Party in this way would put a damper on Trump's chances for a return to power. Back in January 2021, when just about everyone in the party had turned against him in disgust, it seemed that there was no one left in Trump's camp. One assumed he had no political future. 

A Soldier's Grave

 Trump has telegraphed for a long time that he means to sell out Ukraine. We've all been able to see this coming. He's been telling us for years he is on Putin's side in this war. But still—even knowing this—the past week's events were especially hard to take. Because this week was the first week, since Putin invaded, that Ukrainians have actually been dying as a result of the United States's betrayal. 

It started with Trump's suspension of all U.S. military aid to Ukraine. But this, on its own, would not have been fatal. The Ukrainians had enough supplies to wait out the pause until Zelensky could thaw relations with the White House (as many people still thought was possible, at the start of the week). But then, Trump also cut off intelligence- and satellite imagery-sharing with Ukraine too. 

Happiness is Relative

 If you were watching the stock market numbers last Tuesday, you would have seen them plunge into the red. This was a predictable result, of course. Trump chose that day to launch an unprovoked trade war against our two closest neighbors and biggest trading partners: Mexico and Canada. It amounted to a bizarre first strike in the economic equivalent of nuclear war—except, one lobbed against our own allies, with whom Trump himself inked a trade deal in his first term. Of course markets would not react well to this madness. 

But then, if you checked back on the markets the very next day—Wednesday—you would have seen something odd. The markets were back in the green. Why? It wasn't because Trump had changed tack yet. As of Wednesday, the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico were still in effect. But Trump had issued a one-month carve-out for a handful of car companies, and his officials were hinting that more would come. 

Crying Love

 The New York Times reported last night that the state of South Carolina just executed a man by the barbaric method of firing squad—the first such execution in the United States in more than a decade. 

There is so much that is ugly and brutal about the story. One could dwell on the shabby cruelty of organized society and its licensed violence—the cowardice of shooting a defenseless unarmed man in the heart, while he is shackled to a chair. 

Killing With Misrule

 Elon Musk was on X yesterday claiming that—contrary to widespread reporting—no one has actually died as a result of the Trump administration's humanitarian aid cuts. Now, I get why Elon would want to say this. Even a complete sociopath wouldn't want that on their conscience. And so, Elon does what any emotionally immature person would do—he just denies the truth, and constructs a more satisfying alternative reality in his head. And his control of the X platform means he can then promote this alternative reality to others. 

But regardless of what Elon needs to tell himself in order to sleep at night, it's just demonstrably false to say that no one has died as a result of the administration's policies. I'll cite one example from an area of work that I know well, from my previous job: Burma. When the Trump team's "stop-work" orders went out to USAID projects around the globe, a number of U.S.-funded hospitals serving Burmese refugees at the Thai-Burma border were forced to close. Reuters reports on one lung patient who died shortly thereafter as a result. 

Banned in Russia

 Hopefully I've said enough pro-Ukraine things on the blog by this point to be considered outlawed and interdict in Russia. I'd consider it a mark of dishonor not to have done something imprisonable in Putin's regime by this point in history (though I mean by this no disrespect to the Russian people, who are as much Putin's victims as anyone—who have resisted him bravely and at infinitely higher personal cost—who have gone to prison by the thousands for daring to challenge his government). 

But a few months ago, the Russian government added yet another reason why I might be banned in the country: my defense of singlehood. As part of Putin's broader effort to portray himself as a bulwark of "traditionalism," in order to pander to the extreme right and erode support among U.S. conservatives for backing Ukraine's defense (a strategy that is plainly working—viz. J.D. Vance), the Russian Duma also recently passed a law proscribing the deliberate promotion of "child-free lifestyles." 

Personality-Binding

 In a conversation a few months ago, a friend shared the view that orthodontia could be described as similar to "foot-binding"— in other words, a kind of deliberate bodily mutilation. My friend was not endorsing this viewpoint himself—just observing that it existed; but I immediately leapt to agree with it. "Yaaaas," my heart said—that's exactly it. It's tooth-binding. 

"But it's just cosmetic!" people say, in defense of the practice. "It's just because straight teeth look better!" Well, that's what they said about foot-binding too!

No More Words

 Tuesday morning this week was particularly bleak. Trump was needlessly torpedoing the global economy and the U.S. alliance system yet again. Markets around the world were tumbling. All I wanted to do was to stay at home and shelter-in-place to wait out the apocalypse, but instead I had to trudge to campus for a long day of class in the middle of a particularly brutal late-winter day. 

But even to describe what I felt that morning on a continuum of ordinary anxiety or disgust or indignation wouldn't quite do it justice. Every day I wake up loathing Trump and what he is doing to this country—and to our partners and allies around the world. But that morning was something unique. What actually went howling through me was something more akin to horror. My inner state could best be depicted as a kind of Francis Bacon painting. 

Tweezers

 Here's a certain proof of William James's thesis 

That an emotion—philosophically defined—

Is really indistinguishable from the physiological manifestations that accompany it: 

Whenever I am using a pair of tweezers to denude my nose 

Of excess nostril-hairs, 

It always brings tears to my eyes. 

The U.S. s'ennuie

 The New York Times "On Politics" newsletter yesterday quoted Elon Musk in a recent interview describing MAGA efforts to dismantle the federal government as a "revolution." And, in truth, there is something a bit "France, 1792" about the whole atmosphere under this new regime. 

Conservatives, of all people, were once upon a time supposed to be the ones who knew that such a comparison was not necessarily flattering. But, oh well. Here we are. I guess all I can do now is hope that the revolutionary fever eventually subsides—as history suggests it inevitably will. I just hope I don't lose my head, in the meantime. Thermidor can't come soon enough. 

Ordo Amoris?

 Amidst all the annoying and terrible things J.D. Vance is doing (such as berating one of the most courageous leaders in the world on live TV for daring to defend his country), you'd be forgiven for missing the fact that Vance is also touring around social media these days, trying to be—literally—more Catholic than the Pope. Despite converting to the Church only about six years ago, he has since donned the vestments of social media's Catholic-splainer in chief: putting himself at odds, in the process, with the Pontiff himself (who might be said to know something about the subject). 

The latest episode in this ferula-measuring contest started with Vance trying to excuse his administration's so-called "America First" policies by explaining that they are actually (in spite of appearances) consistent with Catholic teaching.

Nothing to Lose

 Just about everybody apart from the most extreme MAGA diehards seems to have been embarrassed by Trump and Vance's behavior this week—when they viciously berated and lectured President Zelensky of Ukraine while his country is fighting for its life. Even a few congressional Republicans finally broke their silence and offered a few words in criticism of Trump's style. 

People still seem to be missing a key fact here, though. Even the people who are criticizing Trump still appear to believe that Zelensky somehow cost his country a worthwhile deal—that his personal "style" in some way upset Trump and tanked an otherwise valuable agreement. A friend shared a headline from Politico along these lines that read: "Zelensky Forgot the First Rule of Dealing With Trump." 

Mercenaries

 The Lawfare Daily podcast yesterday had on two journalists who had recently been reporting from Africa's Sahel region. One of the themes they spotlighted was the growing role of Russian mercenaries—particularly, the Wagner group—in propping up authoritarian regimes in the region. When a wave of military coups swept the Sahel in recent years, the U.S. largely pulled out any military support for the post-coup military regimes, forcing them to turn to Wagner. 

While ending U.S. support was the right choice, in my view (and in the eyes of U.S. federal law), it did create a vacuum that Putin was able to fill. The Russian forces could claim to be offering military aid to the new regimes "with no strings attached" as to democratization, human rights, etc. And now—with the Trump administration dismantling humanitarian assistance as well, the U.S. appears poised to cede whatever lingering influence it still had in the region to Putin. 

Puerilism

 The worst thing about the style of this new/old administration—well, after the perversity, the stupidity, the moral ugliness are all taken into account, perhaps—is just how juvenile they all seem. I won't say "young," because many of them are very much not young. But unmistakably juvenile—even the old ones. They are living embodiments of the "puerilism" that Johan Huizinga associated with the far-right politics of the 1930s—and which he saw as the opposite of all true youthfulness, playfulness, and humor.

The "puerilism" of the administration is most obviously on display in the actions of Musk's team of twenty-something "DOGE" hacks who are currently running around the federal government firing all the adults. But one can see it too every time J.D. Vance opens his mouth. 

The Rod

 As I opened my retirement account this afternoon and saw that once again whole percentage points of value had been erased from the stock market today, I winced. It hurt, as it always does. But at the same time, I accepted it. It seemed a measure of justice. We had it coming. 

The United States cannot threaten all of its allies and betray its friends and lord it over others with impunity forever. Eventually, the piper collects his due. As I saw the stock values once again in the red for the day, therefore, Rossetti's line came back to me: "the rod/ Weighs in thine hand to smite thy world."

Believe Beatrice

 Stripped of its trappings of period melodrama, Percy Bysshe Shelley's verse drama The Cenci is a modern story. In many ways—specifically—it's a #MeToo story. It's the story of a woman who is sexually victimized by a powerful man (her own father, in this case), and who is unable to obtain justice through the existing mechanisms of the state because no one will believe her accusations. 

It's essentially the same story that played out during the Pete Hegseth nomination to run the Defense Department. Hegseth faced accusations of rape and various kinds of abusive behavior toward women. He retreated behind the claim that the most prominent allegation against him was anonymous—conveniently leaving out the fact that the anonymity was due to a non-disclosure agreement that he insisted she sign. 

Another Carthaginian Peace

 During the first year of Russia's invasion in Ukraine, I spent a lot of time on this blog quoting John Maynard Keynes's line (written in the wake of the Versailles treaty) about the dangers of imposing a "Carthaginian peace" on a defeated adversary. I was very concerned about plans that some Western leaders were floating to seize Russian central bank assets and impose ruinous reparations on the country, after the war. I thought (and still think) this would be an unjust form of collective punishment for Putin's crimes that would chiefly harm innocent Russian civilians. On prudential grounds, I also thought it would breed generations of resentment and ultimately cause more conflict down the road. 

What I could not have foreseen at the time, however, is that—just three years later—the U.S. government would indeed be trying to impose a "Carthaginian peace" on one of the parties to the war—except, they would be trying to impose it on our ally, Ukraine, rather than on Putin's Russia. But I know of no other way to describe the mineral rights "deal" that the Trump administration is currently trying to force down the throat of Ukraine's (rightly) reluctant leadership. While Ukraine's negotiators originally floated the idea of a mineral rights partnership—as a way to appeal to Trump's "transactional" character—the U.S. seems to have twisted the original idea into a form of ruinous one-sided reparations. 

The Demokos Trap

 My mind changes by the day as to whether Trump is more likely to start a war in Taiwan by siding too aggressively with the pro-independence movement—or by siding too aggressively with the PRC! Either way, however, he seems to be intent on upsetting the current modus vivendi that—however imperfect it may be—has allowed the island to exist and flourish for decades in a state of relative autonomy, peace, and democratic freedom—without inviting outright conflict with the much larger and more powerful Orwellian superstate on the mainland. 

On the one hand, Trump's team has made a number of gestures that read to the PRC regime as escalatory. Most notably, Trump's State Department recently removed language from its website about not supporting Taiwanese independence—taking a step closer toward abandoning the "One China" policy that was key to normalizing relations with the PRC a half-century ago. (I wouldn't defend "One China" on the grounds of logic or morality, by the way—but it has certainly helped to keep the peace; and given the likely toll of an outright war for Taiwan, that is nothing to sneer at.)

Musk and the "Great Men"

 I feel the need to write a brief follow-up to my post yesterday about Elon Musk, since it seems the topic is even more in the zeitgeist than I had realized. I don't just mean the fact that Elon is in all the headlines (that's obvious, unfortunately); but, specifically, that people are debating just now how much he qualifies as one of the "great men" of history, how much he is vindicated by "results," etc. 

The latest dust-up appeared to start when a Musk biographer posted on social media that the Tesla founder is not as smart as people think he is. Nate Silver and others retorted that this is preposterous, leading to a debate over the "great man" theory of history. Someone compared Musk to Genghis Khan. Musk himself reposted a podcast episode about the history of the Mongol ruler. 

Momentous

 I periodically check in on a certain podcast that represents—one could say—the sort of "defense hawk establishment" perspective on U.S. foreign relations. The hosts are mostly drawn from center-right think tanks. They believe in NATO and U.S. military spending and the projection of U.S. power (in both soft and hard forms) abroad. They are what used to be known as the Republican mainstream. 

The second Trump administration has clearly presented them with a certain rhetorical dilemma. On the one hand, they can't exactly ignore the fact that Trump is dismantling all the things they claim to believe in. They can't pretend they missed the news that Trump has threatened to invade a NATO ally, sell out a democratic ally to Putin, and radically eviscerate U.S. foreign aid.

Results

 I was talking to a friend who lives in the Bay Area the other day. I pressed him for answers as to why so many people in the tech industry (even the few seemingly normal ones) still admire Elon Musk. I mean, every day reveals new abysses in his character of stupidity, ignorance, malice, incompetence, and creeping affinity for fascism. What could people possibly like about him at this point? 

I used as my exhibit a recent-ish piece by Noah Smith. The article argued that Musk has too much power (too true!). But I thought it was revealing of Smith's intended audience that—even in the course of making this point—he nonetheless has to genuflect briefly before the possibility that the true Musk may of course be a "stand-up guy." Apparently, that is still the default view in the Bay Area. 

Strange Labor

 Since the current U.S. presidential administration has repeatedly indicated that it wants to follow the lead of William McKinley by acquiring overseas U.S. territories—I thought it would be a fitting time this month to read J.A. Hobson's classic 1902 treatise Imperialism. There's a lot of insight to be gleaned from the book. But one of the most disturbing and memorable passages (I found) is Hobson's discussion of the problem of forced labor. 

As apologists for the British Empire will be swift to point out, the UK did not practice overt slavery in its colonies during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Indeed, many European authorities during the "Scramble for Africa" period used their opposition to slavery as a supposed moral justification for the imperial project. Even the blood-thirsty King Leopold of Belgium, perversely enough, claimed to be "liberating" the Congo from the scourge of human slavery—even as he introduced an indistinguishable form of coerced corvée labor in its place. 

Somebody is Missing

 In today's "Dealbook" newsletter from the New York Times, the reporters note just how far Trump has managed to normalize the idea of doing business with Saudi Arabia in recent years—despite the Kingdom's horrendous human rights record. 

Trump himself attended the Saudi sovereign wealth fund's summit for foreign investors (the FII conference) this week in Miami Beach, Florida. While there, he publicly praised the Saudi officials in attendance. 

God and King and Law

 Trump took another dramatic step forward in his normalization of authoritarian rhetoric yesterday. As the New York Times reports: he specifically shared a picture of himself wearing a crown, accompanied by the slogan "Long Live the King." 

In reality, of course, Trump is not a king. He is the elected president of a republic that was formed through a revolution that overthrew a king, and which guarantees in its constitution a republican form of government to all its member states. 

1956 All Over Again

 Ever since it first became clear that the MAGA movement would eventually sell out Ukraine to the Kremlin, I've periodically quoted from E.E. Cummings's poem "Thanksgiving (1956)"—written in response to the highly reminiscent episode from that year, when the U.S. government abandoned Hungary to its fate at the hands of a Russian invasion.

The 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary served as proof, for Cummings, that the West was not actually going to defend the freedom of small countries when it counted—at least not unless it served their naked self-interest to do so. Rather, they would stand idly by as a "monstering horror" swallowed up those countries that had the temerity to protest against authoritarian rule. 

This Be The Post

 Politico ran a piece yesterday commenting on the as-yet-unconfirmed reports that Elon Musk's thirteenth child was just born to yet another woman. The article framed this as a source of tension in the neo-fascist MAGA movement—one that pits the "family values" social conservative stream against the tech bro culture that has embraced Elon's decidedly "non-traditional" family structure. 

But another way to see it is that the strange obsession with high birth rates is a unifying factor in an otherwise divided extreme-right movement. One of the few things that Catholic theocrats, xenophobic nativists/white nationalists, and Silicon Valley eugenicists can all agree upon—after all—is that high-status white males (if no one else) should be producing a lot of offspring. 

Duress

 After the war, the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt apparently tried to excuse his collaborationist stance toward Hitler's regime by invoking the Herman Melville story "Benito Cereno." (According to a forward to one of his works by Tracy Strong.) 

As you may recall, the twist at the heart of Melville's story is that the people who appear to be captaining the titular vessel are not actually the ones in charge. While they may seem to be acting out of their own free will, they are actually only doing so because they are in terror for their lives. 

Let's Hear It for the Sullivans

 The career prosecutors who resigned this week from the Eric Adams case in the Southern District of New York surely faced an unenviable dilemma. 

On the one hand, Trump's political appointees had issued an order that no career prosecutor could ethically obey. They could not in good conscience proceed with dismissing the prosecution for political reasons—especially not when the administration was apparently doing so as a tacit "quid pro quo" for Adams's cooperation on immigration enforcement (notably, the Department ultimately moved to dismiss the case "without prejudice"—ensuring that they could hold the threat of renewed prosecution over Adams's head going forward, as a way to secure his ongoing compliance). 

The Grave of Liberty

 Amid ongoing public alarm over whether or not Trump—in his push to expand executive power in unprecedented ways—might at some point simply refuse to comply with federal court orders and cause a constitutional crisis, it can't be a good sign that Trump chose to post a comment on social media today saying—in effect—that he views himself as above the law. 

My first thought, when I read the comment, was that it sounded like Carl Schmitt for Dummies. Trump was invoking an inchoate version of the Nazi theorist's concept of the "state of exception." And it should not be lost on us that several figures in Trump's orbit—including the Vice President—have been influenced by Schmitt in their ideological development. 

The Not Doing of a Thing

 Yesterday—inexplicably—the stock market roared upward again, with some major indices gaining more than a full percentage point. How could this be? I wondered. What could stock traders possibly have to be optimistic about right now? 

Our president is a madman trying to dismantle the federal government. He's provoking needless trade wars against our allies and upsetting the global order. We just had two straight days of worrying inflation data. The Fed chair indicated that interest rates will not not be coming down anytime soon. What could this market possibly be feeling good about? 

Someone Had Plundered

 Yesterday must have been a pretty deflating one for any foreign policy observers out there who still thought Trump's mercurial behavior might result in an unexpected last-minute shift toward favoring Ukraine's defense. All the signals from the administration in recent days tend to indicate—to the contrary—that they do indeed plan to execute the worst-case version of their threatened "America First" policy when it comes to the Eastern European nation fighting for its life. 

First, Hegseth went out of his way to tell European policymakers that the United States is fundamentally uninterested in supporting the continent's defense against territorial aggression. And then—later in the day—Trump had a call with Putin, the read-out of which suggested that he does indeed intend to sell out the Ukrainians. The terms he and Hegseth have identified for a "negotiated peace" to the conflict would essentially amount to unilateral concessions to Putin's war aims. 

Sane-Washing

 I was listening to a podcast on my walk home this afternoon, on which a group of scholars and commentators were providing a thoughtful "political and legal analysis" of Trump's recent "proposal" to bulldoze Gaza, permanently deport its entire civilian population, and redevelop it as a beachfront resort.

"Maybe it's a bargaining position," they suggested. "It's outside-the-box thinking that is already forcing some changes in the region," they said. "Transferism has always been closer to mainstream Israeli foreign policy thinking than many people suggest," they offered. 

Thirty Tyrants

 I was reading Robert Fagles's translation of Sophocles's Oedpius at Colonus yesterday. The introduction in the Penguin Classics edition tells me that the play was most likely first performed at what could be described as an all-around low-point in Athenian history. The city had recently faced a humiliating military defeat. After years of conflict with its neighbors, it was at the low ebb of its imperial fortunes. 

Even worse, it was facing occupation-from-within. The city's democratic institutions had been overthrown, and supplanted with a Spartan-backed dictatorship made up of thirty tyrants. (All of which is all-too-relatable, as we face the dismantling of our own democratic institutions at the hands of the Putin-backed dictators who have gained power over our own government machinery.)

Perverting Truth

 What's most unsettling about J.D. Vance—the thing that makes him so eerily effective in the dark wizardly of propaganda—is not only that he lies and cheats. Anyone could do that. It's that he always manages to seem so righteously aggrieved when he lies. It's like, at the very moment he's picking your pocket, he genuinely feels he has the moral high ground. He is the past master of putting on the "seeming-to-be-wronged-when-actually-you-yourself-are-doing-wrong" look (to quote Aristophanes).

This weekend's controversy about a fired "DOGE" employee is a typical example. The Wall Street Journal had earlier managed to link the 25-year-old employee to a social media account that posted overtly racist comments about Indian people and other minorities (the racism of the posts, by the way, was not something subtle or questionable. It was stuff like: "Normalize Indian hate" and "I was racist before it was cool").

Legal Rage

 Of all Pam Bondi's grotesque orders at the start of her reign as our new Attorney General, none knocked the wind out of me quite so much as her suggestion that the Justice Department would now try to lean on state prosecutors in order to secure new death penalties for the people whose federal capital sentences Biden had just commuted. 

Apparently, serving out the reminder of their lives in federal prison is not enough to satisfy the malice and vindictiveness of our new AG. The government must also pursue them to the ends of the earth, layering on a second prosecution and further capital sentence for crimes for which they've already been convicted and sentenced. 

Ni Shocked Ni Awed

 In this third week of the second Trump presidency, the Big Man himself seems just as unhinged as ever. But he has also gotten suddenly less scary. 

The game-changer for me was seeing how quickly Trump chickened out on his own tariff war. To be sure, the whole situation was alarming. For twenty-four hours, Trump held a loaded gun to the head of the world economy. He took the global system to the brink—for no reason at all—by declaring an unprovoked trade war against our closest neighbors and allies. It was the economic equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

2025: The Limit of Thought?

 A number of dates have been proposed over the years for the end of the world. Jesus estimated two thousand years ago that the apocalypse would be coming any day now. Sir Thomas Browne, writing more than sixteen hundred years after that, said it was "too late to be ambitious"—because the demise of human civilization was due at any moment. Two hundred years after that, Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote (perhaps more metaphorically) that the world was imminently bound to "fall asunder, being old." 

Closer to our own time, many people looked to the year 2000 as a nice round number on which the world might choose to end. When the Y2K apocalypse failed to materialize, many New Age types turned to the Mayan Calendar to suggest that the end times were due in 2012. They even got a Hollywood movie out of the premise. 

Solidarity vs. Scapegoating

 It turns out, when you are utterly unhampered by morality, scruples, or any devotion to the truth, it's actually very easy to be a demagogue. Thus, there was no great tactical genius behind Trump's decision to redirect blame for an aviation disaster—that occurred on his watch—by blaming "DEI" (code for women, trans people, racial minorities, and people with disabilities). Anyone could have done it—it's the oldest trick of scapegoating in the book. Yet—it worked, for all that. 

What actually happened here? Let's review. The Trump administration came into office a couple weeks ago vowing to dismantle the federal government. They proceeded to do so—imposing a hiring freeze and trying to strip federal workers of civil service protections in order to replace them with MAGA goons. Then—just a couple days into their campaign of destruction—there was a critical failure at a major federal agency that appears to have been due to understaffing. 

Another Bubble Burst

 A friend sent me a cartoon earlier this week from the New York Times that offered a particularly bleak window into the state of the contemporary heterosexual marriage. My friend said he found the piece "unsettling" but insightful. I agree it's unsettling—and I would even grant that it's gesturing toward an insight—but I'm not sure it gets there. Or maybe it reaches a different insight from the one it intends.

There are a number of strange things about the piece. One is the title—which I'm sure was chosen by an editor, rather than the author, since it reflects very little of the cartoon's actual contents. The Times's chosen headline reads: "I Quit the Patriarchy and Rescued My Marriage." But in the course of the cartoon, it's by no means clear that she either quit the patriarchy or saved her marriage. 

Ease Has Demoralized Us

 Future historians will be hard-pressed to explain why the United States—at the very moment it was at the pinnacle of its global power—decided to blow up its own economy and take the rest of the world down with it. Why—when we were the world's only advanced economy to emerge more-or-less unscathed from the pandemic; why—when we were the most prosperous nation in the world, and had just managed to pull off a soft landing from the post-pandemic inflation without losing employment; why—with all these successes and the future looking bright—did we choose that moment to torpedo our own alliance system and sabotage our own economy by antagonizing our closest friends and trading partners? 

The true answer may come down to the quirks of one man—Trump—and his outdated 1990s obsession with NAFTA and his creepy preference for our nation's authoritarian adversaries (including China and Russia) over our friends and treaty allies. But let's suppose for an instant that there is some deeper sociological explanation that transcends the idiosyncrasies of one elected leader. Let's suppose, on some level, the American people wanted this. Why? Why destroy a global alliance system and economic order that overwhelmingly benefits our own nation and has secured to it an enviable position of prosperity and global leadership. Why are we doing this to ourselves? 

Perishing Republic

 It's hard not to feel that today marks the end in some way of the American experiment. Trump's unprovoked trade war against our two closest neighbors and allies—Mexico and Canada—may not be the single most destructive decision in the nation's history. But it stands out as among the most gratuitously destructive. 

Mexico and Canada, after all, did nothing to deserve this wanton act of aggression. Up to the moment Trump declared his new levies, they were willing to make any concessions that he asked of them. But ultimately, Trump didn't even post any demands. There was nothing he wanted from them, other than to attack them and needlessly eviscerate another set of crucial relationships with our nation's friends and partners. 

Montezuma's Revenge

 As of this morning, Trump is still saying he's about to impose sweeping 25% tariffs on all goods from Mexico—even though he signed a free trade agreement with them during his first term, and they remain a close ally, friendly neighbor, and one of our two largest trading partners. The Mexican government has tried to offer him concessions—but it seems there's nothing he actually wants in exchange (so much for that "Trump's tariffs are just bargaining leverage" theory). He's just pointlessly, vainly torpedoing our international relationships for its own sake. It's the ultimate acte gratuit. 

Mexico and Canada have, understandably enough, threatened to retaliate if Trump goes through with this. And who can blame them? It's Trump who started this trade war in the first place, without the slightest provocation from either of our allies. So I can't fault them for defending their interests. But a lot of Americans will suffer cruelly as a result—not least in our agricultural sector. And so, one of the many ironies of Trump's policy is that the people who will pay the price are not Mexican nationals—but U.S. farmers in states that voted overwhelmingly to return him to the White House. 

Spy on This

 In addition to his sweeping purge of federal officials who work on issues related to diversity, inclusion, and accessibility for people with disabilities—Trump has also expanded his witch hunt outside the reaches of government. One of his executive orders targeting DEIA programs—notoriously—directs officials to identify up to nine non-profit organizations to investigate for diversity- and accessibility-related thought crimes. The weird specificity of this number is especially chilling. Why nine, and not eight or ten? Its arbitrariness is part of the point—because the point is to make a show of arbitrary power. 

It's not clear that any federal agencies have yet opened such investigations (though this dark night of the nation's soul is still young, friends—give it time). But nonprofits were treated to a creepy little surprise this week nonetheless—as the New York Times reports—when an unexpected new sign-up appeared on their email lists. It would seem that an address belonging to the government's internal DEIA monitor—the same account the administration is using to goad government employees into ratting on one another about prohibited DEIA activities—has apparently been enrolled in all of their mailing lists. 

"Where Were the Lawyers?"

 The bizarre episode this past week, in which the Trump administration briefly appeared to shut down all federal domestic spending, seems—increasingly—to have all come down to confusion over a comma. The incident began, we may recall, with an internal memo from the acting director of Trump's Office of Management and Budget. The memo contained one crucial—yet opaque—operative provision: it ordered everyone in the executive branch to freeze "all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by [Trump's recent] executive orders."

Read that sentence again, and tell me: does the phrase "that may be implicated by" modify the phrase "all Federal financial assistance"? The administration swore that it did. In a "clarification" issued the next day—which really only took one "from darkness to darkness," to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde—OMB insisted that the original memo had only required a pause on that assistance which was implicated by the executive orders (though no one knows what that may have been either—since there are no federal grants that go by the proscribed names of "green new deal," "transgenderism," etc.)

Saturday Night Massacre

 Trump is doubling down this week on his attempts to purge the federal workforce of nonpolitical civil servants and anyone else who doesn't embrace his personality cult. Obviously, the whole effort is disturbing. But I think the move that stands out above the rest as even more chilling than the others is his decision to revoke federal Secret Service protection for John Bolton and other former officials who are facing credible death threats from malign actors. 

This move strikes me as the creepiest of all, because it is Trump's first flirtation with outright violence against people whom he sees as dissidents. His various other moves to force out civil servants take aim at people's livelihoods, to be sure. But this is the first move he has made that seems to strike at people's lives. That is the aspect of the decision that makes it less Nixonian Saturday Night Massacre—and more Hitlerian Night of the Long Knives. 

A Joyless Experiment

 A New York Times article yesterday reminded me that one of the various schemes Kash Patel has proposed over the years—in order to punish the Justice Department for maintaining its political independence vis-a-vis Trump—is to hollow out the FBI building and turn it into a "museum of the 'deep state'." Obviously, this is absurd. But I had to think for a minute about why it struck me too as so distinctly totalitarian and creepy. Why did it all feel so eerily familiar? 

Then I remembered: of course! That scene in Eimi! In E.E. Cummings's experimental modernist travelogue of that title—which takes its author through the bowels of the 1930s Soviet Union in a manner analogous to Dante's tour of hell—Cummings recounts one episode in which he stops by the famous cathedral in Moscow. The church building has survived into the new regime, you see; but it has been repurposed. It now serves as an "anti-religious museum" to propagandize against the old faith. 

Refusal of Aid Between Nations

 Well, the second Trump administration is shaping up to be just as horrible as advertised. That certainly didn't take long. Shall we count the ways? The man's full cabinet is not even installed yet—and already, they've pardoned insurrectionists and signaled a willingness to work with the same. They've suspended the entire U.S. refugee admissions program—leaving hundreds of allies stranded in Afghanistan, for instance, who helped the U.S. war effort and had already been approved to travel. 

They've banned DEIA and tried to stir up an internal witch hunt against any government employee espousing even a disguised form of the forbidden "ideology." The "A" in DEIA—by the way—stands for "accessibility." I guess even people helping disabled veterans access benefits could be barred under the new regime? (Well, that would certainly be in character—Trump has never seen a wounded or captured soldier whom he wasn't immediately tempted to mock and disrespect.) 

A Gulf of Ignorance

 The news last week was hard to stomach. One can take one's pick of Trump's travesties from his first week back in the Oval Office—but one event stands out in my mind as emblematic of all the others. It is the fact that Trump's Interior Department really did go ahead and legally rename the Gulf of Mexico. A formal press release declares it is now known as the "Gulf of America." 

One hardly knows where to begin, with that one. There is the mindless chauvinism, obviously—mindless because, among other reasons, Mexico is as much a part of the "Americas" as we are, if it comes to that. We are operating at the mental level here of the narrator of Randy Newman's "Political Science"—except this is our actual president and our actual Interior Department speaking. 

The Ceasefire

 Over the past week, people across the political spectrum have been joining their voices to sing the praises of Trump, for the supposed diplomatic masterstroke of negotiating the short-term Gaza ceasefire. Progressives and the far "Left" lined up to declare that the pause in fighting just before the inauguration proved that Biden had never really wanted to to achieve a ceasefire deal in the first place, and that Trump was showing himself to be the true man of peace. Conservatives declared it yet another vindication of Trump's mythic "negotiating skills," his "madman theory" of diplomacy, etc. 

Everyone seems to be at one, therefore, in ignoring the obvious unsavory aspects of what's happening here. One is that, when the ceasefire deal finally came—the only thing that made the difference was that Trump finally told the Israelis he was in favor of it. Of course, he could have told them the same thing at any time over the past year and saved potentially thousands of lives. But it was in his political interest not to do so (credit due here to Matt Yglesias for the insight). The fighting made Biden look bad, so Trump had every reason to prolong it. He therefore led the Israelis to believe he would back them, until it was no longer expedient to do so.

God and Mammon

 Yesterday, Donald Trump got up before the world's business elite gathered for their annual summit at Davos, Switzerland, and told them for the hundredth time: yes, he does indeed plan to impose universal tariffs aimed at decoupling the U.S. economy from global supply chains. Alarming stuff. And yet meanwhile—over on Wall Street—the stock market ticked upward for the third day in a row. "Everything is fine; nothing to see here" seemed to be the collective takeaway. How is this possible? 

Part of what's happening here must be sheer wishful thinking. Trump keeps saying he is going to do this, but he still hasn't actually done it yet—so people will keep hoping that maybe he never will. But I can't think of any other time in financial history when merely the dim hope that someone might be slightly less bad than feared was enough on its own to actually send markets higher. So, something else must be happening here...

Remonstrations

 It's not every day that you get to see someone enact one of your personal fantasies. But yesterday, it happened. Bishop Budde of the Episcopal Church had the unique privilege of having Trump's ear as a captive audience for a morning worship service. And she did not let the opportunity go to waste. She gently but unmistakably chided Trump for the cruelty of his policies. She reminded him of all the people who are living in fear right now—LGBTQ people and immigrants especially—because of his threats. And she pleaded with him to show mercy. 

You may recall that I fantasized about exactly this moment eight years ago. Back in the fall of 2017, I was attending a DACA protest in front of the White House, when the police ushered us out to make way for the president's motorcade. When we asked why, they told us he was going to church. As I recall, it was a national day of prayer for the victims of the hurricane that September—so Trump had to put in a pro forma visit to a Protestant house of worship—Episcopalian, in this case. 

Et Tu, Rational Security?

 I was listening to last week's Rational Security episode, which contained a long-awaited segment on Trump's recent threats against Panama, Canada, and Greenland/Denmark. I was looking forward to this one. Finally—I thought—people who will do justice to just how bananas these threats really are. 

But no. To a person, everyone on the show concurred in downplaying the seriousness of the threats. "I don't really understand why everyone is making such a big deal about this," they said. "I don't know why foreign leaders felt the need to issue statements. Why did France and Germany respond, etc.?" 

The Speech

 Okay, I just finished watching Trump's inauguration speech. Once again, he benefitted from low expectations. He didn't immediately ignite a civil war, after all. Indeed, by his usual rally standards (and this should tell you a lot about his usual standards) this came across as almost normal. 

To be sure, there was some right-wing bomb-throwing sprinkled throughout. He promised to end diversity and inclusion efforts in the federal workforce—on Martin Luther King Day, of all times. He declared that there were only two genders (I guess intersex people also don't exist, by MAGA's lights?)

The Enemies List

 At the stroke of 12 today, Trump takes the oath of office. Talk about darkness at noon. 

One of the things he may immediately start doing, after being sworn in, is to lay the groundwork for his long-threatened "retribution" against his various critics (many of them members of his own party and even of his own prior administration, viz. Mike Pence and Bill Barr). Many observers fear that, if Kash Patel is actually confirmed as FBI director, he may quickly work his way down his notorious "enemies list" of former officials—including former Trump administration officials—whom he regards as obstacles to Trump's personal authority. 

Year Zero

 Eight years ago, I posted a far-from ebullient "Toast for Inauguration Day 2017." It featured a quote from the poems of Anna Akhmatova that I thought was particularly apropos for the occasion of Trump's first installation as president. I drink to our demolished house,/ the poem reads, To all this wickedness/ The coarse, brutal world, the fact/ That God has not saved us. (D.M. Thomas trans.)

At the time, I hoped there would never be an occasion to quote the poem a second time—at least not on the day of a second Trump inauguration. And when Trump went on to lose the next election, it seemed we would indeed be spared that fate. Yet, eight years later, here we are. Trump Inauguration 2.0. So, I offer the same toast again—to the wickedness, the brutality, and the repeat failure of divine intervention. 

Paper Prosperity

 In the two remaining days before he becomes president once again, Trump is devoting himself to—what else?—creating yet another financial pyramid scheme by which to gull the American people. This one is so blatant that it puts even his social media meme stock craze to shame. Now, Trump has unveiled a crypto token with his blood-spattered face on it. Prices apparently took off overnight, and people were already having trouble buying the tokens by late Saturday, because demand had so far outstripped supply. 

Why do people want these digital tokens? Do they generate income? No. Are they backed by the full faith and credit of any government? No. Do they exist anywhere outside of a stream of digital zeros and ones? No. So why—then—do they have any value at all? Because people say they do. And if you can convince enough other people that they have value for long enough, they can retain or even gain in value. To that extent, the value proposition works. But—the same is true of any Ponzi or pyramid scheme. 

Another Prisoner of Chillon

 There is no shortage of things to celebrate about the fall of Bashar al-Assad's brutal regime in Syria a couple weeks ago. When it comes to things to praise about the end of a dictator's reign, you can take your pick. But surely, one of the best aspects was seeing Assad's underground dungeons at last thrown open. People who had been immured for years in these dismal caverns could finally emerge blinking into the sun and reunite with their families: a thousand real-life versions of Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon" freed from bondage. Whose heart would not swell at their long-overdue liberation? 

But our joy and relief at seeing these captives set free should be tempered with heartache: not least because our own government was in some ways complicit in their doom. On a recent episode of the podcast "Rational Security," the human rights lawyer Michel Paradis reminded us of the fate of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen whom U.S. authorities detained and deported to Syria—on false suspicions of Al-Qaeda ties—where agents of Assad's government imprisoned and tortured him for nearly a year. It was one of the worst of many gross human rights violations in the early post-9/11 era. 

The Global Order Didn't Die; It Was Murdered

 The spiritual rot of our time is nowhere so evident as in the number of people—across both parties—who are rushing to normalize Trump's threats to invade Greenland (a neo-colonial assault that would—let us recall—also constitute a direct attack on a NATO ally, and thereby trigger Article 5 against... ourselves? I don't think the designers of the treaty ever contemplated that one). 

The punditry's response to Trump's bizarre and unprovoked saber-rattling (against, I repeat, countries that are already allied to us, at least until Trump succeeds in completely and permanently poisoning those relationships) has been all-too typical. In the immediate wake of Trump's comments, people mocked those who took him seriously. "He's just kidding," they said; or "it's a negotiating tactic." 

A Poem

 They say Moses wrote the Torah

There's just one small problem

He dies part-way through it

"Well, he

"Was gifted with foresight!"

They say. But—

Hebdomads

 On this day I complete my thirty-fifth year. I wasn't really sure how to feel about 35. I suppose I am now unambiguously in my mid-thirties. Adulthood is no longer a thing that can be procrastinated. It is already here. But other than that, I didn't have any particularly strong associations with this birthday. 

33 was a bigger milestone. The year of the crucifixion. 36 is the age at which Byron died in Greece—so I have that to look forward to. But I didn't have much to work with for 35. 

Fire and Ice

 The news this week presented quite the apocalyptic split-screen. Over in California, Los Angeles is in flames. An inferno has engulfed the city, and as of this writing, it has still not been contained. The cause of the fire was complex, but it was almost certainly exacerbated by dry conditions linked to climate change. 

Meanwhile, Trump is making headlines by fantasizing about an unprovoked war of aggression to seize U.S. control of Greenland—an ice-bound Arctic island nominally controlled by Denmark. An invasion of the island would be a direct attack on a NATO member, and thereby might trigger World War III. 

Left Populism

 Ever since the Democratic loss in the 2024 election (and, really, long before), we've heard periodic calls for a revitalized left-wing populism as an antidote to the right-wing racist and nationalist populism of Donald Trump. In the most simplistic form of the argument, people point to the resentment that right-wing populists currently try to foment against immigrants and minorities. They argue that, instead of seeking to counteract or subdue these political passions outright, the Left should instead seek to channel and redirect them against the working class's "true enemies": namely, the rich, and big corporations. 

Well, in the progressive social media reaction to the murder of United Health CEO Brian Thompson, the proponents of this argument essentially got what they wanted. The politics of rage, hatred, and envy were indeed stirred up and redirected against a left-wing–approved target: the CEO of a major corporation. And the results, I fear, are not pretty. Random strangers on X and Instagram celebrated the shooting death of a defenseless man—a father of two—in a public street. They heaped schadenfreude on the victim and his family before the body was cold. 

Change Elections

 Amidst the endless attempts to explain the unthinkable results of the presidential election last November, one persistent theme keeps emerging: the Democrats, we are told, lost because they were perceived as the party of the establishment. They had become the party of the status quo. Whereas Trump, bizarrely (since he was in office just four years ago) was once again perceived as the "change candidate." And Americans love change. 

So long as the Democrats had been perceived, by contrast, as the party of radical renovation—so this argument goes—they could still win elections. Obama was able to sail to victory twice because he had a message of "hope and change." But after eight years in office, Democrats had become the Powers That Be. Innumerable people said things like: "I voted for Obama, but then everything stayed the same." Or, eight years later, they said the same thing about Biden and Harris. So, out of vengeful disappointment, they voted for Trump the next time around. 

Ill Fares the Land

 The New York Times ran a piece on Saturday about how the Democratic Party lost the support of working class voters. The story is a familiar one from recent commentary, but probably has more than a kernel of truth in it, for all that. Basically, the author's contention is that the fundamental bargain at the heart of neoliberalism didn't work. Why? Because it failed to take account of people's deeper needs.

When Democratic politicians changed tack on issues like trade protection and globalization in the Clinton era, after all—it was clear to everyone that these policies would impose some highly-concentrated costs on blue collar workers in manufacturing industries. Some would lose their jobs; others would have to see their wages and benefits slashed in order to compete with cheap, nonunion labor overseas. 

The Self-Own of Censorship

 The New York Times ran a story yesterday about some inside drama at their long-time peer in legacy media, The Washington Post. Reportedly, one of the Post's cartoonists just quit due to concerns about editorial interference. Specifically, she alleged that one of her recent cartoons was killed for being overly critical of the paper's billionaire owner (and newly-minted Trump brownnoser) Jeff Bezos. (The paper disputes this narrative of events, and says the cartoon was axed for other reasons.)

If true, this story is interesting because it illustrates quite well the self-defeating nature of censorship. After all, the satirical point of the cartoon was that Bezos, Disney, and other big corporations and billionaire CEOs are enabling Trump's authoritarian rise (the cartoon also implicitly references Disney's recent decision to settle a lawsuit with Trump). So, by practicing censorship against the cartoon, the paper isn't exactly allaying the artist's concerns that it is abetting an autocratic turn in U.S. politics. 

The Yguduhs Won

 Well, it happened. Biden axed the Nippon Steel acquisition of U.S. Steel—likely dealing a death blow to the agreement (barring a successful legal challenge). I hope this doesn't simply doom U.S. Steel and lead to even more job loss in the industry, but there is a real danger that it will. The U.S. manufacturing giant agreed to this merger in the first place, let us recall, because it is struggling to stay competitive. Its current leadership has warned that it may have to close plants entirely; whereas the Japanese company that offered to buy them has committed to keep staffing levels the same. Biden's decision to block the deal, supposedly out of a desire to preserve union jobs, therefore seems completely misguided. 

I've been complaining for weeks now about how Trump is willfully squandering our political capital with our allies abroad—threatening tariffs and trade wars with Western Europe, Canada, Mexico, and our other close neighbors and friends. I've been warning that Trump can only strain these relationships so far without damaging them irreparably. And yet, I have to say—Biden is also not helping things much when he delivers a needless slap in the face of this sort to Japan. One of the most insulting aspects of the whole situation is that the administration ended up citing "national security" grounds as an excuse to block the deal; as if Japan—a close ally and liberal democracy—posed a threat to our interests. 

The Silver Payroll

 When Donald Trump launched his Christmas Day neo-colonial tirade against Panama, one of his arguments in favor of retaking the Canal (in violation of U.S. treaties) was that thousands of Americans had ostensibly given their lives to build it. (38,000, specifically, in Trump's telling.) 

Yet, as the New York Times notes—by way of correction—in fact, the vast majority of those deaths were of workers from Latin America and the Caribbean: migrant laborers who, we can imagine, were brought in to contribute to the U.S. construction effort under less than salubrious conditions. 

Rewatching Frozen

 I can never think back to that review of Disney's Frozen I wrote on this blog more than ten years ago without wincing. It strikes me now as unbearably pretentious. And the fact that my writing has not become any less pretentious in the decade since only makes it worse. Did we really—I think with a cringe of pain—need references to Nietzsche, Hobbes, and Martin Luther in that post? 

But when we re-watched the movie this past week with my nephew and niece (the first time I had seen it in the last ten years)—I had to admit that many of the same thoughts irresistibly occurred to me again. When Elsa stamps her foot during the "Let It Go" number and cries, "Here I'll stand/ And here I'll stay," I once again felt an overpowering urge to compare it to Martin Luther's historic foot-stomp: "Here I stand; I can do no other."