Infernal Sadism

 So let me get this straight. In the past several months, the Trump administration has deliberately murdered more than 80 civilians in drone strikes at sea—because it claims these people were transporting drugs. 

Most of them appear to have been poor fishermen. If some of them were in fact transporting drugs (and we have nothing but the administration's say-so to believe it), they were likely trying to pick up a tempting pay-out for their families by moving a few kilos of cocaine alongside their usual catch. They were not traveling with the far deadlier fentanyl, which is trafficked over land routes—making a mockery of the administration's purported rationale for the attacks, even if it wasn't so patently spurious on its face already. 

Ruere in Servitium

 Almost a year into the second Trump administration, the mad rush of the nation's rich and powerful to demonstrate craven submission, self-degrading fealty, and "anticipatory obedience" to Trump continues apace. If we hear less about it now than we used to, it's not because it has become less common—but rather, that it has become so common as to be unremarkable. 

Any given week, the news headlines will furnish you with fresh examples. This or that major university just cut a deal with Trump and agreed to install a regime of MAGA censorship to ensure that its curriculum will henceforth be compatible with this administration's white nationalist priorities. This or that major corporation has turned another humiliating moral somersault in order to please its masters on the Potomac. 

The Teacher of Crime

 You can always count on Trump to exploit any tragedy as an excuse to smear and stigmatize a vulnerable group. In the wake of the shooting in D.C. of two national guard members, Trump of course wasted no time in blaming Afghani nationals collectively, and calling for a halt to all further migration from that war-torn nation (even though U.S. intervention over decades is a large part of what made it so war-torn). 

Now, on Thanksgiving weekend, Trump has broadened his attack to include immigrants of every nationality and legal status. Borrowing a term from European white nationalists, Trump called openly on social media for "reverse migration"—a term that in Europe is generally understood to refer to a call for the ethnic cleansing of non-white people from the continent, regardless of their citizenship status. 

Bloody Faith

 A decade or two ago, the values of liberal democracy seemed so securely entrenched in a hegemonic position in world thought, that many on the Left believed they could thumb their noses at them with impunity. Many of us thought that—in a world where seemingly every available shade of opinion in the mainstream parties fell somewhere within the liberal-democratic axis—the biggest threats to left-wing values could only come from "neoliberalism" and "neoconservatism." 

This led many of us to make common cause with post-liberal conservatives, "communitarians," and "trad cons"—since they seemed, for the moment, to share the same enemies. This was the era when you could see Norman Mailer getting interviewed in the pages of the American Conservative, say, and think nothing of it. They both opposed the Iraq War—right? So what was there for them to disagree about? 

The Tribute That Vice Pays to Virtue

 The most insufferable thing about neoconservatism—back in its heyday—was always its rank hypocrisy. The neoconservatives of the Bush era supported war; they supported militarism; they supported torture and surveillance and indefinite detention and other cruel abuses of executive power. But all the time, they dressed it up in sanctimony. They said: we are doing these things because we are more in favor of democracy and human rights than you are. We are doing it because we want to see liberal democracy triumph everywhere. 

In short—even when they were bombing civilians and sending people to CIA black sites—they still declared it was all in the name of universal values. (Which is why Harold Pinter ironically entitled his poem about the Bush administration's chauvinism and aggression "Democracy," for instance.)

The Spoon River Clarion

 In recent days, the Intercept reported on a federal case in Texas in which a young man has been indicted literally just for possessing and transporting anarchist zines. There is no question that the material in these magazines is First Amendment–protected. So, how could moving them around be a crime? 

The feds' theory of the case is that he was deliberately moving these magazines in order to hide evidence that could incriminate his girlfriend. But there is nothing at all incriminating about these materials. All they could reveal, if investigators found them, was that his girlfriend had an interest in anarchism as an ideology—or, at the very least, was reading about it. 

Which—again—is not a crime. 

A Menace Which Was Worse

 Trump's recent ultimatum to Ukraine to accept a Russia-friendly "peace" deal before Thanksgiving amounts to a pretty obvious case of appeasement. But people on both the left and the right have tried to muddy the moral clarity of the issue by portraying the Ukrainian government as just as flawed as Putin. 

Everyone knows that Putin is a dictator. But the "America First" brigade can also point to Ukraine's lack of wartime elections (permitted under the Ukrainian Constitution) to say: "but see, Zelensky is an unelected dictator too." 

Let's Not Invade Nigeria and Venezuela

 The timing of a major attack on a Catholic school this week in Nigeria is—I confess—a bit uncanny—and not at all helpful for those of us who oppose U.S. military intervention in the country (though this is, to state the obvious, hardly the worst or most important thing about it). 

For weeks, after all, Donald Trump has been catering to evangelical voters by railing against alleged anti-Christian persecution in the country. But when he first started talking about it—it wasn't all that clear exactly what he had in mind. 

Peacock vs. Southey

 Thomas Love Peacock is often regarded—perhaps due in part to his irresistible name—as a "light" novelist. He wrote short social satires, we are told—comedies ending in marriage—with alliterative titles—which all feature a group of pedants and eccentrics gathering in a country estate somewhere in order to debate various philosophical and political issues. 

Indeed, all of this is true; but only up to a point. The description I have just given you, of the default Peacock novel, accurately describes Headlong Hall (his first novelette); Nightmare Abbey (minus the usual alliteration); and Crotchet Castle—works that do indeed belong to the tradition of "learned comedy" (much like those of Swift, the elder Samuel Butler, or Laurence Sterne). 

The Projection of the Self

 The excellent newsletter Garbage Day had a piece out earlier this week about the latest Epstein revelations. They dwelled in particular on the fact that one thing we learned from the newly-released data trove of Epstein emails was just how close the pedophile financier was, in life, to Steve Bannon. 

This is—to say the least—richly ironic. Bannon, after all, has probably been more responsible than any other figure in politics for mainstreaming right-wing populist ideology. His whole ostensible worldview is a quasi-conspiratorial one, in which a corrupt and Machiavellian "globalist" elite exploits and abuses ordinary people for their own profit. 

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bonum?

 Back in September, when a generation of progressives was being cancelled from the right for saying something negative about Charlie Kirk after his death—another group of liberals was being cancelled from the left for saying something positive about him. Ezra Klein was one of the people in the latter category. He landed in hot water with his fellow progressives, for daring to pen something approximating praise of the deceased right-wing podcaster. 

"Charlie Kirk was practicing politics the right way," read the title of Klein's piece, published the day after his assassination. And to be sure—the authors of op-eds in the New York Times rarely get to choose their own headlines. But in this case, the title was not inconsistent with the contents of the piece itself. 

Kings Must Murder Still

 In Trump's tirade yesterday—in which he laced into an ABC journalist for daring to question Trump's royal guest about his complicity in the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi—one word particularly stood out to me: "insubordinate." That's what Trump called the woman who asked the question (among many other cruel things): "insubordinate." 

Insubordinate? To whom? Who exactly does she supposedly work for here? Trump? Or the crown prince of Saudi Arabia? 

Hide the Shame!

 The revelations that have emerged from the massive data trove of Jeffrey Epstein emails released last week have obviously been pretty distasteful. But—for the most part—I haven't found them particularly destabilizing to my worldview or to my understanding of human nature. 

After all: most of the people who have been further discredited—as we've learned the extent of their friendship with Epstein over the years—already seemed like jerks or creeps to start with: Woody Allen, Larry Summers, Alan Dershowitz, etc. And that's not even to mention Steve Bannon or Trump—about whom no revelation, however dark, could possibly surprise me at this point. 

Imperial Rhetoric

 I spend so many days of the week now basically agreeing with Bush-era neoconservatives on subjects like Trump, or Vladimir Putin, that I often forget what a chasm still separates our views. If I was in need of a reminder, though—Bret Stephens's column yesterday in the New York Times gave it to me. 

"The Case for Overthrowing Maduro," it was called. And yes, it amounted to a standard Bush-era argument for deploying U.S. military force to topple a Third World dictator. 

Democracy: Training Grounds for Virtue

 For weeks now, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has been launched on what seems to be the world's most improbable redemption arc. 

At first, she just broke with her party on the Epstein files and Israel. But I didn't think much of this at the time. Some observers theorized that these moves represented an emerging effort to distance herself from Trump—but I wasn't persuaded. I could think of a much darker through-line connecting these cases. 

Cobbett's Snuff

 The New Yorker ran a piece yesterday about the age of political assassination we seem to have entered—represented by the multiple attempts that have been made on Trump's life; the killing of Charlie Kirk; and the murder of the United Health CEO Brian Thompson just over a year ago. 

The author of the article rightly criticizes the "cult of personality" that has sprung up around the alleged Brian Thompson assassin, Luigi Mangione; but it appears that cult is here to stay regardless.

I Number Him in the Song

 When the news broke the other week that Dick Cheney had died, I didn't, at first, know what—if anything—I wanted to say about it. 

On the one hand, I could say—with Shelley—"I hated thee, fallen tyrant!" This man was, after all, one of the bete noires of my youth—a dark wizard of the Bush administration who was at least partially responsible for the torture program, extraordinary rendition, the invasion of Iraq that cost a hundred thousand civilian lives, the fact that there are still human beings pining in Gitmo to this day with no charge or trial or prospect of release, and more. 

Where Extremes Meet

 I never could quite bring myself to buy into the Wilhelm Reich theory that the psychic origin of fascism lies in sexual repression. After all—so much of the modern far-right seems grounded much more in a psychology of indulgence. The implicit promise of today's extremist movements often seems to be the release from all inhibitions—the relaxation of any moral norm or cultural taboo that could conceivably constrain one—rather than the repression of one's drives. 

But I had to give Reich's notion a second look yesterday, after listening to Ezra Klein's interview with John Ganz about the "groyperification" of the American right. Because one thing that their analysis of Nick Fuentes revealed is that the cult of sexual self-denial does indeed play a central—if rather paradoxical—role in the extreme right "Groyper" movement. 

Insolent Praise

 Recently, global human rights watchdogs completed a review of the U.S. air strike in April that killed more than 60 African asylum-seekers at a detention camp in Yemen, in the early months of this administration. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they concluded that, yes, the strike was indeed a war crime—an unjustifiable attack on a civilian target that served no discernible military objective. 

This was the same strike, let us recall, that senior administration officials were discussing over that notorious Signal chat that they accidentally leaked to a journalist. The chat shows Vance, Hegseth, and others crowing over the results of the strikes—even as we now know they were snuffing out the lives of more than 60 innocent civilians. 

Reprieve

 The Associated Press reported yesterday on a case from Oklahoma in which the governor's last minute clemency spared the life of a death row inmate, Tremane Wood, just hours before he was slated for execution. 

This last-minute act of clemency is surely to be applauded. But a gruesome twist in the story came when the inmate—shortly after learning that his life would be spared—reportedly collapsed in his cell due to "dehydration and stress." He had to be rushed to the medical unit, where the same state government that had been set to kill him mere hours before now strove (successfully, as it proved, for now) to save his life. 

The Empty Breadbasket

 Gordon Comstock—the (anti?)hero of George Orwell's excellent novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying—about the dilemmas of the would-be starving artist—suffers from a fate that many of us can relate to. 

On the one hand, Comstock's family perceives him as "clever." He is good in school. He reads books. He has intellectual aspirations. They therefore assume he will go far and "Make Good." Indeed, Comstock's sister trusts that he will be the one to redeem the family fortunes. 

Court Intrigue

 When the news broke yesterday about Trump's name showing up in the Epstein emails, I confess that I mostly just rubbed my palms together in typical Resistance lib glee. "Oohoo boy, looks like more bad news for Trump! Gimme gimme!" I said. 

A friend called me up shortly afterward, though, to say: "actually, I think we just lost the midterms." The latest round of Epstein headlines—in his view—were the best thing that could have happened to Trump; and the worst that could have happened to Democrats. 

Do tell, I said.

The Lesser-Known Orwell Novels

 This week, I've been reading some of those overlooked and often half-forgotten books from the middle of George Orwell's career: the realist novels of the 1930s, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air. They are deeply strange and surprising books. I don't say I dislike them. To the contrary, I found them both entertaining and highly readable. 

But what strikes one most about them is how different they are from the Orwell we know from the essays and the political writings. 

Whereas the Orwell I idolized in my youth was a democratic socialist, compelled to stake a clear moral position on every issue of the day—these two books from the middle of his career are fiercely, provocatively apolitical—with an almost philistine contempt for socialist do-gooders and anti-fascist democracy-defenders, and for many of the causes we now most associate with Orwell. 

The Ruin of the State

 It is morally abhorrent that Trump has been going out of his way to deny food stamps benefits to hungry families throughout this federal shutdown. I know this intellectually. But—for whatever perverse reason—it was only an Associated Press story that ran over the weekend—about the impact of this policy on people's pets, specifically—that really brought home its human impact to me. 

Trump's decision to fight a district court judge's order—mandating the disbursement of SNAP payments to the states—and to threaten various penalties against states if they proceeded with paying out full food stamps benefits anyway—has meant that many impoverished families faced food insecurity this week. And, as a consequence—the AP points out—this often means hunger for their animals as well. 

The Violence of Neurotic Guilt

 We know we've reached a low point in modern history when the "mainstream" conservative movement seems to be openly debating with itself whether to make common cause with Neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. But that appears to be what's happening this week—in the wake of Tucker Carlson's interview with Nick Fuentes—and Kevin Roberts's bizarre decision to go out of his way to defend it.

In just the past week, seemingly—the main dividing line within the MAGA movement has become whether or not to join forces with Fuentes's extreme-right "Groyper" movement. Tucker Carlson, the ever-repulsive Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule, and the leadership of the Heritage Foundation seem to be on team Neo-Nazi.

Smoked into Spirit

 The New York Times ran a gut-wrenchingly sad story earlier this week about a Guatemalan woman who was shot to death in Indiana for mistakenly entering the wrong house. 

She was working an ordinary day on a cleaning job. But she accidentally tried to enter a house that was in front of the one she was supposed to clean. For her mistake, she received a bullet to the face. 

Torture Without a Memo

 The Bush administration's post-9/11 torture program (which was briefly back in the news this week due to the death of Dick Cheney, and the various obituaries that were published afterward to chronicle his career and try to assess his legacy) was surely among the low points of my lifetime, when it comes to U.S. human rights abuses. 

From the standpoint of the human rights campaigner, however, it at least had the advantage of being a specific policy. It therefore could be reversed. It could be seen as a temporary aberration. And one could measure progress against it. When the Obama administration took power and rescinded the torture memos (even though they kept up many other abuses of power under the War on Terror), one could notch a victory. At least we knew that one awful moral blot on our history was behind us. 

Après-moi

 For the last several days, Trump has been pressuring Senate Republicans to do away with the filibuster. In response, they have raised all the obvious objections to this plan from a GOP perspective: Democrats will eventually come to power again. Without the filibuster, they would be free to enact a far-reaching agenda. They might even use simple majority votes to enact DC statehood and thereby secure a permanent legislative majority in the chamber, etc. 

Trump's response to this was revealing. He said—in essence—that Republicans just need to use their post-filibuster powers to change so many election rules, before the midterms, that Democrats will never be able to win an election again. 

Pinkertons of Prey

 I think we're starting to notice a pattern here. First, we see a hospital report or cell-phone footage of ICE agents tackling a protester—or inflicting violence or tear gas on a random civilian who happened to be in the vicinity at the wrong time. There is a wholly justified outcry from the public. 

And so, ICE starts to blame the victim. They say: "Oh, they rammed our vehicle; oh, they were throwing stones; oh, they were impeding our activities; oh, we were afraid for our safety (even though we are heavily armed, and they are not)."

Bertrandism vs. Mamdani-ism

 Zohran Mamdani's victory in the New York City mayoral elections Tuesday elicited a number of high-handed, sneering remarks from centrist- to center-right commentators. Several of them even used a version of the same phrase. "There’s just not that much to be achieved through 'soak the rich' rhetoric"—Matt Yglesias wrote yesterday. Bret Stephens, writing in the New York Times, similarly dismissed Mamdani's DSA platform as nothing more than battle plans for "soaking the rich." 

I'm reminded of Bertrand's monologue to Jim Dixon, in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, about the political agenda of the postwar British Labour Party: 'But their home policy... soak the rich ... I mean ...’ He seemed to be hesitating. ‘Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn’t it? I’m just asking for information, that’s all. I mean that’s what it seems to be, don’t we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn’t it?" 

Blown to Smithereens

 Earlier this week—as you may have already forgotten—Donald Trump threatened to resume U.S. nuclear testing after a thirty-year hiatus. The reason, he said, was that the other side had done it first. 

This, however, was simply not true. No one had broken, or even threatened to break, the testing ban but Trump. 

What appears to have happened is that Trump misinterpreted a news headline from days earlier. What had happened—as the news media widely reported—is that Russia had tested nuclear-powered weapons. 

Mailer Marginalia

 In his great history of the footnote as a literary form, Anthony Grafton argues that the essential innovation of the footnote was to introduce a structure of parallel narrative to historical writing. Once footnotes became the default method of citation in historical scholarship, that is, works of history now came equipped with not one, but two ongoing narratives: first, the author's primary chronological narrative, and second—the sly, often more ironical, discursive editorial narrative that accompanies it through the footnotes. 

The reader of a work of history thus has two voices going in their head at the same time, as they work their way through the book: the main historical narrative, plus the editorial commentary. 

Complex and Simple

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is—it cannot be said too often—historically complicated. Too complicated to lend itself easily to being boiled down into signs or slogans—which makes the proliferation of signs and slogans in this conflict especially frustrating. 

But some things about this conflict are actually remarkably simple: such as that no one, on either side, can justify the killing or persecution of civilians. And we shouldn't let people invoke the complexity of the historical circumstances to disguise this truth—to cloak the indefensible. 

The Siege of Chicago

 My one-time home city of Chicago has been swarming for months now with Trump-deployed federal troops (ICE, National Guard, FBI, you name it). All of this is known only to me by hearsay—I haven't been back to the City of the Big Shoulders for years at this point—at least not for any purpose more substantial than a flight through Midway. 

But the images are inescapable for anyone following the news. ICE agents in military gear rappelling down the sides of apartment buildings; kicking down doors; searching people's homes without a warrant; ransacking people's private belongings and hauling them outside to wait in zip-ties in the backs of black vans. These are the dystopian nightmares of our news feeds. 

Heresy Hunting

 This morning, I woke up thinking of "men as innocent as I am / Bent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars." (MacDiarmid.) Because right now—Tennessee is holding a man in jail literally for doing nothing more than what you or I might have done on a typical day—namely, criticizing the far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk on social media. 

The Intercept this weekend had the story. There is not much more to it than what I said above. The case does not have some further legal wrinkle that could explain how a state government can get away with violating the First Amendment rights of one of its citizens so flagrantly. A county sheriff in Tennessee really did just take it upon himself to arrest a man for posting negatively about Charlie Kirk online. And he has been in jail ever since. He remains there to this day. 

"Predistribution" and the Democrats

 The most recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast was interesting, in that it presented a number of ideas I would have whole-heartedly endorsed a couple years ago—and which I therefore wanted at first to leap to my feet to applaud; but which I find a bit hard to square with more recent political experience. 

Headlined "Can Economic Populism Save the Democratic Party?"—the episode sounds at first like it's going to be another warmed-over version of the stock Bernie Bro critique of the Democratic establishment. But Klein's guest ultimately makes a more sophisticated point. 

Butchery

 This week certainly did not lack for more hideous news. The Trump administration yesterday reportedly moved an aircraft carrier into position in the Caribbean—yet another show of military force, threatening a potential action against Venezuela—as well as a sign that the administration means to double down even further on its current drone war in the region—which has now, as of this week, killed more than 40 people. 

Meanwhile, human bodies are reportedly washing ashore in Trinidad. No one is quite positive where they come from—but they have all been hideously mangled and burned and chewed up like something out of Gottfried Benn's "Morgue" poems. The most likely explanation is that these are victims of the Trump administration's extrajudicial killings by drone. 

Gentrified Democrats?

 The New York Times opinion page ran a piece yesterday charting what it describes as the "gentrification" of the Democratic Party. 

Over the last few generations—the piece observes—the two major political parties in the U.S. have essentially swapped positions—at least when it comes to their class valence. 

"Americans who lived in wealthier areas used to have mostly Republican representatives," the author notes. Today, the opposite is the case. 

Soviet Antisemitism

 Every one-time communist has some cherished floor—some moral bottom line—below which they thought their disillusionment could never sink. In Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook—her floor is antisemitism. No matter what else she discovered the Soviet regime might be capable of—she thought—at least they would never do that. 

Even as it became harder and harder to avoid the reports of purges, hangings, deportations, and gulags, then—she still managed to persuade herself that Stalin's government would at least never stoop to outright antisemitic persecution. It would retain that one moral distinction. "[W]e all had some illusions," she writes: "mine was that anti-Semitism was 'impossible'."

It Had to Go Somewhere

 Yesterday, Jonathan Blitzer published an article in the New Yorker trying to answer the question of why the Trump administration has become so infatuated with its campaign of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea. 

It seems, from Blitzer's explanation, that the administration's interest in this bloodshed is, if anything, overdetermined. Blowing up boats full of civilians checks a lot of boxes for different members of Trump's team. 

Unknown to Glory

 More than a month after Charlie Kirk's assassination, people are still getting canceled for saying the wrong thing about his death—even on the other side of the Atlantic. The Associated Press reported yesterday that the head of the Oxford debating society was forced out this week for reportedly celebrating the killing in a group chat. 

Meanwhile, right-wing activists across the country are continuing their campaign to turn Kirk into a martyr and a patriotic symbol. In my home state of Florida, Republican state legislators have proposed using state funds to coerce public universities into renaming college roadways in Kirk's honor. One county has already reportedly rechristened a highway in his memory (at least on one sign). 

A Ruthless Few

 As Trump continues his campaign of retaliation against perceived dissidents—including members of his own former administration—it's interesting to watch the steady moral deterioration along the way in the kinds of people he can find to do his bidding. They just get worse and worse. 

Trump's first attorney general, after all—back in his first term—was Jeff Sessions—and we thought at the time that he was as bad as they could come. But even he had enough integrity to recuse himself from an investigation in which he had a conflict of interest—and Trump never forgave him for it. 

Joyce's Exiles

 The scatological themes of the previous post reminded me of something I wanted to say at some point about Joyce's early play, Exiles. 

I grant that the psychoanalytic reading is perhaps the lowest form of literary criticism. But some authors simply cry out for it. Joyce etched his psycho-biography into every page. Not only does Exiles feature the same episode involving Joyce's mother than haunted the mature artist, and his fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus—the one in which he refused to kneel by his mother's deathbed, because of his rebellion against the family religion—it also dwells in places on Joyce's other great Freudian obsessions: defecation and micturition. 

Merde

 Over the weekend—in response to nationwide protests against his rule—the president of the United States chose to post an AI-generated video on social media of himself spraying the American people with poop. 

We're so inured to this sort of thing by now it barely registered. I thought: "well that's perfectly typical of him" (In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, to borrow a line from the poet Isaac Rosenberg). AI slop from our hog president. And I moved on.

Dead Bodies

 Trump's campaign of serial murder in the Caribbean Sea has now left upwards of thirty bodies in the ocean. And his fight over social media this weekend with Colombian president Gustavo Petro seemed to underscore what we all already suspected at this point: many of the people Trump is killing in these extrajudicial executions are not drug traffickers at all—but just ordinary and completely innocent fishermen. 

Petro on Saturday accused the U.S. government of murdering one of his country's citizens in these strikes—and he was no "narco-terrorist." In September, the Colombian president claimed, a fisherman by the name of Alejandro Carranza was adrift in a small craft that had lost power. He had sent out a distress signal. Instead of obeying the universal law of the sea and of humanity by rendering him aid—the U.S. government blasted him from the skies. He had no ties to drug traffickers whatsoever. 

Nothing Whatever to Say

 Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson—the third novel in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy about Roth's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman—is a book about a writer trying to escape the curse of writing. 

It's really not so unusual. Writing is not the sort of activity you enjoy. It's a compulsion, in which a small dose of reward chemicals that comes from having written is bookended by long periods of agony: first, there's the period in which you have an idea you want to express. It builds inside you until you can't tolerate the inward "pressure of clauses and sentences" (George Eliot) any longer. 

The Anger of the Gods

 So I guess Trump really is doing the whole authoritarian repression bit. 

Not only has he secured flagrantly baseless and politically-motivated indictments against two of his perceived political enemies in recent weeks—the Wall Street Journal also reports this morning that he is readying plans to turn the IRS into an arm of his repressive apparatus. 

Young Republicans

 Probably by now we've all seen the Politico story about the leaked group chat messages from the nation's Young Republicans—a sprawling network of Gen Z party activists that includes some staffers and other people in influential positions in the nationwide GOP. 

The reported messages are obviously racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, and everything else awful you can think of. The people who wrote these quips come across as simply dreadful—the worst you can imagine. (It's as if the made-up Stephen Glass story about CPAC from the '90s was reborn in living color.)

Other People

 Shelley once wrote (in his "Peter Bell the Third") that "Hell is a city much like London." (Bertolt Brecht replied that, with all respect, Hell must be even more like Los Angeles.)

It has also been said—most quotably of all—that Hell is other people. 

Martin Amis wrote a novel called Other People, set in the city of London. And its conclusion appears to be that Hell is not only a city like London, and other people, but also is life itself. 

Money

 Once or twice in my life, I've had a sudden influx of cash. I don't want to exaggerate—we're not talking about the lottery here. We're talking about the ordinary kinds of windfalls that can occur in an adult person's life: an insurance check after a car wreck, say. Or the sale of a home. But still—enough money that I felt like I should do something with it. 

Another one of these windfalls came my way the other day. And I found myself inwardly reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin. The one where he thinks about the money in his drawer at home, and how it always reproaches him for not spending it. Here I am—says money—ready to be put to use. I'm here to give you a good time. And yet, you just sit at home reading as always! From the way you live, you might as well not have me. Who would know the difference? 

The End, The Beginning

 In his novel Zuckerman Unbound—the second in the original "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy—Philip Roth portrays a typically tragicomic episode in which the eponymous author (and Roth alter ego) Nathan Zuckerman tries to find words of comfort for his dying father. 

Zuckerman is regarded as something of a traitor by his family—for depicting them in crude satirical terms in his scandalous bestseller Carnovsky (the fictional counterpart to Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint). 

Love Among the Ruins

 I continue to be baffled by how seriously everyone is taking Trump's vaunted peace plan for Gaza. I get that we had unambiguously good news yesterday—as the Israeli hostages were freed and humanitarian aid started flowing again to Gaza. It's easy to be swept up in the good feelings from that. 

But I keep reading articles that then pivot to Trump's plans to rehabilitate the Palestinian authority and transition to a period of peaceful coexistence in the Strip—without seriously questioning his motives or underlying agenda. 

Bought and Sold for English Gold

 The relief and joy are certainly palpable today, as we watch the long-overdue ceasefire in Gaza finally being implemented. My heart too swells to hear about hostages being released after years of captivity and desperately-needed food and medical supplies finally being allowed to flow unhindered into the Strip. 

Everything that's happening today is undoubtedly good news, compared to all that has gone before, the last two years. 

And yet, I can't help but feel a bit queasy about what comes next. 

A God-damned Lie

 If I have to read one more think piece—à la Ross Douthat's latest—praising Trump as a peacemaker for his ceasefire deal in Gaza, I will scream. 

Where was this man of peace when Netanyahu was starving Gaza's civilian population all through the last spring and summer? 

Where was this man of peace when Trump was bombing 21 innocent people from the sky, in a series of targeted killings in the Caribbean Sea without charge or trial? 

A Living Hell

 In his last days in office, Joe Biden commuted the capital sentences of 37 people on death row. It was an admirable act of mercy (though one that regrettably stopped short of halting all scheduled federal executions). 

Trump of course hated this decision. But when the president commutes your sentence for a federal crime, that's pretty much a done deal. Even Trump's team of lawless goons haven't found a way around it yet. 

Ham Sandwich

 The New York Times published a piece earlier this week documenting the almost surgical precision with which the Trump administration has fired Black officials in senior positions and replaced them overwhelmingly with white men. 

Could this pattern of discriminatory hiring and promotion be a mere coincidence? I would find that more plausible if the Pentagon right now wasn't run by a man who belongs to a church whose pastor has stated in the past that Black people were better off under slavery. 

What Are You Saying, Dean?

 Saul Bellow's 1982 novel The Dean's December is a plodding, humorless, self-righteous, and self-serious slog of a book. It's also—I'm sorry to say—a racist book. Which is exactly the kind of criticism that one hesitates to make against a recognized literary classic, under threat of being accused of PC Stalinism. But I read this whole thing through with an open mind—indeed, actively wanting to like it—and I really do not think the charge in this case is misplaced. 

At the novel's outset, we think it is going to be about a crime—a murder of a student, specifically, committed under ambiguous circumstances. But like much else in the novel, this never really goes anywhere. There is no mystery to be solved, and we never learn anything more about the crime—which, perhaps, is the point. There is no meaning to it. It's just another day in the whirlwind of the "moronic inferno," as Bellow calls it. 

Argentina: Cui Bono?

 So, I'm not opposed to "bail-outs" on principle. I have no wish to punish the innocent Argentine public for the sins and mismanagement of its leaders. Nor is it absurd to want to forestall chaos in one corner of the global financial market in order to prevent contagion elsewhere. 

What I am opposed to, though, is using taxpayer dollars for the sole purpose of saving the bacon of a handful of rich investors who happen to have a personal connection to the Treasury Secretary. 

Our Tempestuous Day

 For at least two months now, the conspiracy theories have circulated on the Left that Trump is suffering from some hidden disease. Maybe he's experienced a stroke, causing part of his face to sag. Maybe—the rumor went at one point—he's already died and been replaced with an AI avatar. 

There's obviously no actual evidence to support these rumors. But I will say, the man does not look well. And Trump himself has repeatedly felt the need to address speculation as to his health. As recently as yesterday, he was harping on his good health to a group of journalists. 

Permanent Underclass?

 The New Yorker yesterday informs me that a growing number of online commentators and Silicon Valley tech influencers believe the age of AI automation is finally at hand. Pretty much regardless of our field, they say, we are all about to be replaced by machines, and consigned to a permanently unemployable "underclass," like so many Silesian weavers. 

This wave of automation will come in inverted order from how it unfolded in the early nineteenth century. Instead of displacing hand work—this wave is going to start with brain work. 

Censored Broadcast

 The Trump administration——————————————————————————————————————————————— idiots ————————

(Homage to Heinrich Heine)

To Be An Editor

 Well, Bari Weiss played this well. 

Like many before her, she figured out how to leverage an elite-centered persecution complex about "wokeness" into a grand paranoid narrative, upon which others delighted to project their own inflated sense of victimization. 

She managed to recast a highly idiosyncratic set of sharp-elbowed opinions—founded in prejudice and self-interest—as evidence of her high-minded intellectual independence. 

The Political Id of Martin Amis

 Martin Amis was undoubtedly a hero of my young adulthood and literary apprenticeship. But unlike the other heroes of that time in my life—Orwell, Koestler, Hazlitt, say—it wasn't because I sensed any deep kinship with Amis in his moral and political sensibilities. To the contrary, I often felt far removed from him in those domains. The main reason he became a paragon to me was simply that he is such outrageous good fun to read. 

I couldn't explain the science behind it, but for some reason every page of prose Amis ever wrote sends reward chemicals directly into my brain. Which is partly why I haven't read every one of those pages yet—I have to save something to tide me over in my old age. 

Masters of Provocation

 Ever since Trump started deploying federal troops to U.S. cities, I've been calling this Trump's "Peterloo." I quoted the lines from Shelley in response to the 1819 massacre—when British troops open fired on protesting workers: 

I met Murder on the way

He had a mask like Castlereagh 

With all the controversy over the masks that Trump's agents wear—to disguise their identities as they go around tackling and manhandling people in courthouses and places of business—I thought the lines (indeed, the very title) of Shelley's "Mask of Anarchy" seemed eerily apt. 

Poor Petition

 Vice President J.D. Vance is very very sure that the—now 21, as of yesterday—people his administration has extrajudicially executed without charge or trial on the high seas in recent weeks are all "terrorists" and "criminals" who really really deserve it...

—except when he admits he isn't; and they might not be. I missed it at the time—but apparently, in the middle of last month, Vance "joked" before an audience of hundreds that the people the administration is murdering arbitrarily in the Caribbean might just be local fishermen. 

A Real Minority of One

 The Democrats' current shutdown strategy seems to me like a typically muddled product of committee thinking. What exactly is it supposed to achieve? 

By every conventional measure, it is bound to be a political failure. It will alienate many voters. The party making demands in shutdown negotiations almost never gets what they want, if history is any guide. By rejecting a clean continuing resolution—even for an admittedly worthy policy cause—Democrats will seem like the intransigent ones and will take the blame for the shutdown in the public eye. 

Plugson Redivivus

 Yesterday, Matt Yglesias published a piece on his Substack arguing that corporations ought to do good things rather than bad things. This may seem obvious—but it actually flies in the face of some conventional wisdom in the pro-market literature, which tends to see all economic activity as morally neutral. 

Indeed—for the true ideologues (Yglesias cites an article by Milton Friedman as an example)—profit-making transactions are good precisely to the extent that they make money. After all, if a company can realize a profit from a transaction in a free market, that means they have created something of value that people cannot obtain elsewhere. 

Kipling the Rebel and the Anti-Rebel

 Rudyard Kipling's first, heavily-autobiographical novel, The Light that Failed, does not stint on literary quotations. Throughout the text, there are allusions to or snatches of poetry lifted from Emerson, Andrew Marvell, the King James Bible, and the works of the 19th century Scottish poet James Thomson—among others.  

But the young Kipling—despite his evident urge to quote—somehow avoids making any allusion to the one piece of English poetry that one would most expect to find its way into a book on this subject: namely, John Milton's sonnet on his blindness ("When I consider how my light is spent"). 

Billy Budd, Former FBI Director

 James Comey has never been my favorite person. Like a lot of Americans, I was deeply annoyed by his decision in 2016 to drop an October surprise on the Clinton campaign, seeing it as unfair and unnecessary (which of course makes it ironic that Trump is now persecuting him so relentlessly—since Comey probably did more than any other single human to put Trump in the White House). 

But however annoying one may find him, Comey is—if nothing else—a Boy Scout. He follows the rules. 

On My Own

 Last month, I wrote a post on this blog sharing Samuel Butler's delightful, if pseudo-scientific, theory that each life-form comes into the world equipped with an unconscious memory of the accumulated experiences of all the beings that came before it—and that this vast heap of prior experience is what goes to make up the peculiar form of unconscious knowledge we call "instinct." 

One consequence of the theory (which Butler spells out) is that we can only inherit the memories that our parents possessed at the age they had us. Until we reach the age our parents were at our conception, then—we can safely depend upon the backstop of accumulated habit and experience to guide us safely through life. After we cross that invisible threshold, however (age 32, in my case)—then we are on our own. 

The Less Deceived

 I haven't ever really had much to say on this blog about the Jeffrey Epstein affair. It just struck me as the kind of horrible thing that happens, but about which there is not much to say. 

For a long time, I also thought people were probably exaggerating the importance of the scandal. Epstein seemed like a charismatic con artist who had sweet-talked his way into the inner circle of a number of rich and famous men; but that didn't mean the latter were involved in or knew about his crimes. 

The Burden of His Cash

 The Wall Street Journal ran a headline yesterday that I had to read multiple times through to even begin to understand. I had to rub my eyes and blink. Surely there had to be a mistake somewhere. I knew all the individual words. But I couldn't seem to fit them together into some rational meaning. The words couldn't be saying what they seemed to be saying. 

"Trump Plan Backs Tony Blair as Postwar Gaza Leader," the headline read. 

Wait... Tony Blair? That Tony Blair? Which Plan Backs Who as Postwar Gaza What? 

The Uncanny

 The other day, I was listening to a podcast revisiting the history of the "Slenderman" moral panic—from the earlier days of the internet. One of the hosts of the episode observed in passing that one of the reasons why this fictional character was so effectively creepy was that there was something instantly "familiar" about him, as soon as you saw him. 

This reminded me of a stray observation Freud makes in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego—namely, that the essence of the "uncanny" is always both to be at once strange—yet strangely familiar. "[T]he characteristic of uncanniness suggests something old and familiar that has undergone repression," as Freud puts it. (Strachey trans.)

Tucker's Latest Antisemitic Canard

 I didn't watch it—but reportedly, one of the most skin-crawling episodes from the Charlie Kirk memorial service last weekend came when Tucker Carlson decided to insinuate a Protocols-style antisemitic conspiracy theory about Kirk's death. (A theory that has proliferated on the right in recent weeks.)

Carlson—in the course of a speech in which he also giggled eerily—first likened Kirk to Jesus. He then imagined that in Jesus's case, a group of people "eating hummus" decided to kill him for daring "to tell the truth about them." And then he strongly implied the same thing happened in Kirk's case. 

Kelp Pickles

 The other evening over dinner, my sister was explaining to me some of the theories of the marriage counselor behind the hit show Couples Therapy. In my sister's telling, the doctor's core contention is that all friction in marriage (and other relationships) comes from encountering radical otherness. We get angry with other people when they do or say things—react to certain stimuli—in ways we cannot imagine responding ourselves. "Why are you doing that?" 

"Case in point," said my brother-in-law, picking up something from the counter. "Why do we suddenly have kelp pickles in our kitchen?" My sister commended him for reacting to this otherness more or less the way you are supposed to—that is, with curiosity. "See"—she said—"you at least asked a question about it. You didn't just respond with fear and hostility. You weren't instantly like 'how could you have wasted money on kelp pickles?'"

Slugs and Mire

 I couldn't bring myself to watch any of the Charlie Kirk memorial service last night—but it seems, from the reporting, that Trump hasn't lost his shock-comedian's instinct for grotesque bathos. 

It sounds like Erika Kirk—Charlie's widow—to her credit—actually tried to deliver a message that was generous and big-hearted—indeed, noble. She said that she forgave her husband's killer. She said that she tried to return love for hate, instead of more hate. 

Anxiety of Influence

 George Lucas in interviews—when he is asked what influenced him to create Star Wars—will always cite spaghetti westerns, Kurosawa samurai films, the scholarship of Joseph Campbell, Flash Gordon film serials, etc. All of which makes him come across as very humble and credible and self-disclosing. He is duly acknowledging the creators who inspired him. He is properly attributing his sources. He is giving credit where credit is due. 

But a knowledge of psychoanalysis tells us that people often reveal in order to conceal—they tell us everything they can possibly think to divulge about themselves—except for the one, big, hairy truth. 

The World's First Fan Fiction

 Samuel Butler—though he is mostly known now for the immortal, posthumously-published satirical bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh—spent much of his life as an author producing works of nonfiction—specifically, speculative scholarship (let us call it), on such diverse topics as evolutionary biology and the authorship of the Odyssey. 

I turned to these books initially for their entertainment value; rather than in the belief that they would carry scholarly conviction. After all—Butler's hypotheses—when stated baldly—have a way of sounding ludicrous and needlessly contrarian.* 

Refugee Blues

 Yesterday, the manic cruelty of Trump's war against immigrants reached a new climax, when he decided to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Syrian nationals. 

The way the administration justified the move was typical of their rhetoric. 

"Conditions in Syria no longer prevent their nationals from returning home," DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin first declared: a statement which—while absurdly untrue—at least gestures toward the statutory criteria for TPS; and so is less insane than it could be. 

Stylish Misquotation

 At one point in his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism—in the course of making some point about modern alienation and anomie—the social theorist Daniel Bell quotes the line: "man stands 'alone and afraid in a world [he] never made.'" 

Bell does not cite a source for this observation—probably because it has long been held to be the preferred stylistic practice—whenever one is quoting a line of poetry specifically—not to name one's source; but rather to leave it to one's readers to either recognize the line instantly or feel embarrassed with themselves for not doing so. 

From Colbert to Kimmel

 It's no surprise that Trump has come for the comedians first. That, it would appear, is what dictators always do. 

Trump turned Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel into improbable martyrs for free speech because autocrats fear nothing so much as a joke. "His Majesty knew that a joke is a dangerous form of opposition," as the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski puts it in The Emperor—his classic study of the reign of Haile Selassie. And so—Kapuscinski shows—his Royal Highness would take elaborate precautions throughout the day to ensure no possible crack would emerge in his appearance through which irony or satire could enter.

Bitter Jesting

 Last week, I wrote about recent right-wing efforts to gin up racial hate and inter-communal violence in the United States, by relentlessly publicizing a freak incident of homicide, apparently committed by a mentally ill homeless man (who happened to be Black) against a young white woman on a train in North Carolina. 

The main right-wing move after the case was to draw attention—not only to the race of the suspect (shades of Willie Horton)—but also to the fact of his alleged criminal history (shades of Willie Horton again). If he had still been in prison—the argument runs—then he never would have knifed an innocent stranger on a train (as he is alleged to have done). 

Fire from then on...

 Early this week, Trump posted yet another snuff film online, showing what purports to be his extrajudicial execution of a boat-full of people traveling in the Caribbean sea. This video was—if anything—more ghastly than the first. The earlier video had been filmed in infrared. All one could see was the usual white blob of flame against a black background, as the ship exploded. 

This week's video—by contrast—was shot in color. The grainy quality of the images gives them the look of a found-footage horror film. This was a home-video type of snuff film. The short video shows a boat bobbing in the waves. Seconds later, it is suddenly overcome with flames. The three people on board were presumably reduced in those moments to charred corpses. 

Paper Hoarders vs. Tidiers

 My brother-in-law's family maintains a giant warehouse in New England where they keep a mountainous stockpile of consumer goods and household artifacts they have accumulated over the years. 

Every time I think of this hoard, I feel a glow of excitement and gratification. I like to think of so many things held onto and maintained, all in a big pile. I know of no way to explain this reaction on my part, other than by that "tendency to the heap" that William Hazlitt once deemed a universal feature of the human mind.

Most of the family on my side, though, feel differently. The thought of the pile—the heap of accumulated stuff—makes them shudder with horror. They itch and burn with the desire—restrained only by the laws of private property—to get in there and start throwing things away. 

The Boston Kidnapping

 The Wall Street Journal published an article today, collating more than a hundred videos of ICE arrests in the Boston area. Together, they provide a chilling glimpse into a series of DHS operations—codenamed "Patriot" and "Patriot 2"—that appear designed to target Massachusetts in retaliation for proclaiming itself a sanctuary jurisdiction. 

The parallels from history are hard to escape. In the nineteenth century, as today, Massachusetts tried to designate itself a "free state." This meant that people who reached its borders would be sheltered from being returned to slavery. But a pro-slavery federal government sought to punish the state for this stance and force their compliance with federal "fugitive slave" policy. 

Median Voter

 Ezra Klein in his most recent op-ed for the New York Times warns Democrats that they are at risk of losing their own base: "Democrats are this unpopular because their own side is losing faith in them."

He therefore calls on them to try something risky: dig in their heels on this year's spending bill. Demand real concessions—even at the risk of triggering a government shutdown. 

Sure—you might lose some of the "moderate" or "independent" voters by a show of party intransigence. But you would get your own team enthusiastic again. You would show you were willing to fight. 

Biden Day in the Committee Room

 When excerpts were released earlier this week from Kamala Harris's upcoming memoir—they added to a swelling chorus of criticism from Democratic pundits who blame the party's 2024 loss on Biden's supposed intransigence. The quotes we've seen so far from Harris's book maybe don't go quite as far as—say—the Jake Tapper book in laying all the blame on Biden; but they certainly align with the general emerging consensus that it was Biden's insistence on staying in the race so long that doomed the party. 

I continue to believe this take is entirely misguided. It relies on selective memory of the period to pretend that the Democrats had realistic alternatives at the time—merely because it's convenient for us in hindsight to find a scapegoat; and Biden will do as well as any, since his career is effectively over. And so the always-smug Pod Save America brigade—the insipid representatives of knee-jerk party orthodoxy—all join the pile-on. We have decided to sacrifice Biden because he is no longer of any use to us. 

Barbarisation

 Many explanations have been proposed over the years for the remarkable rise in violent crime and general breakdown of public order that occurred in the final third of the twentieth century. The potential culprits have ranged from lead fumes; to drugs; to the rise of liberal and permissive cultural mores; and more.  

One of the classical theories (distinguishable from but not entirely unrelated to the conservative theory that blames the breakdown on liberal cultural values) is Eric Hobsbawm's theory that traced the late twentieth century crime wave to the general breakdown of community that occurred with the accelerating trends of modernization and urbanization; the increase in anomie and social isolation that accompanied the worldwide movement from farms to cities; the replacement of Gemeinschaft with Gesellschaft. 

Daily Obloquy

 A recent post by Nate Silver about "Blueskyism" has renewed a years-old debate about "Cancel Culture" on the Left. 

Noah Smith weighed in this morning to offer a capsule history of the phenomenon. He offers a plausible account of why, for a time, it seemed so prevalent and inescapable in the progressive moment; and why it has since faded. 

He concludes that many of the same people who fomented cancel culture during its peak of 2018-21 or so are still trying to do the same thing—they are just doing so within the progressive echo chamber of Bluesky now; so the larger culture is not really paying attention anymore. 

Indirect Taxation

 In his Main Currents in American Thought, the historian V.L. Parrington treats it as axiomatic that the Left/liberal tradition hates tariffs. 

This is a valuable corrective to the confusions of our current ideological era—when many on the pro-labor Left seem unsure of whether they are supposed to be against Trump's tariffs or not. After all, the tariffs violate "free market" neoliberal orthodoxy—so shouldn't the Left like them? Besides, the Left spent decades railing against NAFTA; so doesn't that mean we support protectionism? 

Lyncherdom

 Sometimes, I realize I am somewhat sheltered within my New York Times–reading cocoon. You could keep up with that paper all week, after all—and I did—and come away with only the barest glimpse of the fact that the entire American right has spent the last few days foaming at the mouth and obsessively ginning up a lynching posse to inflict mob violence on a man accused in a North Carolina stabbing attack. 

The blatant racial overtones here would make the creative minds behind the Willie Horton ad blush. To be sure, the stabbing appears, from all we know publicly, to have been a horrific and unprovoked crime. But the right seized on this one incident—out of all the random acts of violence that occur in a nation of three hundred million people—for perfectly obvious and unsubtle reasons. 

Forced Confession

 Today marks another anniversary since the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States. Twenty-four years to the day have now passed since the tragedy. And still—almost a quarter-century later—there has never been a trial of the people responsible. Why? 

The U.S. government has no one but itself to blame for the delay. The Lawfare podcast today explains. With one eye on today's calendar date—they decided that now is a fitting time for an update on the Guantanamo 9/11 litigation, and why it has never resulted in an actual criminal trial.

Tock, Tock, Tock

 So—yesterday—we nudged a few minutes—if not hours—closer to nuclear midnight. And it didn't even make the day's top news. 

Remember how—briefly, yesterday—Russia invaded Poland's air space with drones, and a NATO member state shot down enemy aircraft over NATO territory for the first time in the treaty organization's history? 

This is, I hate to admit, a big deal. We just had a flash of a hot war for the first time between a NATO country and nuclear-armed Russia since the treaty organization was founded. 

Epitaphs

 Like the rest of the country, I was left reeling by the horrible news of the assassination in Utah yesterday. I never saw something like this coming; and I have to confess that the tragedy doesn't fit snugly into any of my preferred political narratives. 

After all—I tend to see people like Kirk as the extremists. Yet, I can't help but notice the fact that he was the one in that stadium who appears to have been willing to have a frank and open debate. Maybe it wasn't waged in entire good faith. But still—the premise of Kirk's appearance at the university was that he was open to arguing with anyone who wanted to come up and discuss his ideas.

The Moon's Reproach

 Well, here I was trying to let just one day pass without writing about Trump. I thought I would write about myself and my mood instead. But then comes the New York Times to tell me that now, even more information has come to light indicating the Trump administration really did murder outright 11 people at sea. 

These were the crew—or passengers—of a boat that the White House has insisted was carrying drugs. All the evidence they have given to substantiate their claim is a half-minute-long video of their own making, which shows the boat exploding in flames. 

No Worst There is None

 It usually comes to me at night, this melancholia. It appears "when we are caught without/ People or drink," as Larkin put it. Perhaps I have just had to urinate for the third time in an hour from having had too much tea, when all I want to do is lie still and sleep. 

I feel a kind of cosmic boredom in these moments. I think how little I enjoyed this evening. And how there will be another after it. And another. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. "And suppose tomorrow and tomorrow, and then nobody there"—as a character in Faulkner puts it. 

Judicial Supremacy

 Back when I was starting law school—during the middle-to-end of the Biden administration—the trendy heterodox left-wing take on the law was to oppose judicial review. 

This had all the appeal at the time of coming as a form of sacrilege to young liberal law students—and still more to people who went to law school in their thirties, like me—Millennials who had grown up associating the Court with vindications of individual rights and social progress, like the Obergefell decision. 

The Fortune of Emil Bove

 In the first volume of his Rougons-Macquart series, The Fortune of the Rougons, the novelist Émile Zola traced the roots of the French Second Empire to its bloody origins in an act of democide. He shows how the empire—born of Louis Napoleon's coup d'état—came to power through literally murdering everything that was young and innocent and idealistic in the French republican tradition. 

In order to symbolize this rise to power of murderers—Zola chose as the central images of his final passage of the novel two contrasting pieces of red. On the one hand—the red of the ribbon that is pinned on the breast of the Rougons—as a gift from the new emperor for helping him throttle French democracy. On the other—the red of the blood of innocents that was shed, in the massacre of French workers and protestors, through which the Second Empire claimed power. 

The Shandean System

 A while back, a friend introduced me to the semi-serious theory of "nominative determinism"—that is, the idea that people tend to take on, in adulthood, the traits or characteristics or profession that is most associated with their name. 

It's the sort of thing that—once you start thinking about—you can't help but spot everywhere. 

A Massacre in Korea

 The North Korean regime—as we all know—is one of the most bizarre, eccentric, paranoid, repressive, bloodthirsty, and totalitarian governments in the world. I don't deny any of those characterizations—not of a regime that has starved large parts of its population and continues to hold them in Stalinist gulags. 

But I will say this: it's certainly not going to make the regime less paranoid, repressive, and hermetic for the United States to periodically invade the country in secret, massacre its civilians, dump their bodies in the ocean, and then quietly ignore or deny before the world that any such thing ever occurred. 

Less Corn, More Hell

 America's farmers have generally been a highly conservative force in our politics—at least in the last couple decades. But that wasn't always the case in American history—and it might not be the case much longer, as they find themselves increasingly squeezed within the vise of Trump's trade policies. 

Trump's tariffs are the worst possible trap for people trying to make a living by farming crops for export. On the one hand—these taxes on imports drastically raise the cost of farm equipment; and on the other—they invite retaliatory trade barriers from other countries blocking U.S.-grown food staples. 

The Name of Murderer

 The Trump administration's strike this week on a Venezuelan vessel was a blatant violation of international law. Indeed, it was probably no less than murder—under the U.S. military's own formal definition of the concept. 

Even if we take the administration at their word that the vessel was carrying drugs—or that, at least, the U.S. forces that fired on it had probable cause to believe it was—there is still no indication that they needed to destroy the boat and its 11-member crew. 

Cinderella, My Hero

 This past week, a friend and I made use of our vacation in the Rocky Mountains to stay indoors and watch all the Disney Cinderellas ("Cinderellae?" my friend suggested) ever made. 

We watched the dreary and joyless and insipid live-action Cinderella remake from 2015. Barf. 

We watched the excruciating 1965 adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in which the characters mouth the words and lyrics of the original—in an anachronistic medieval setting (how does a medieval peasant girl imagine herself on an "African safari," e.g.?)—seemingly without realizing that any of them were meant to be delivered with life or humor. 

Florida's Potent Quack

 Yesterday, the governor and surgeon general of my home state—Florida—decided to eliminate vaccination requirements in public schools for some of the most common childhood illnesses. 

As a result, ancient enemies of humankind—horrors we thought he had vanquished decades ago—may soon be stalking the halls of our public schools again. Think: measles, mumps, rubella. 

Polanski's Desolate Attic

 I haven't seen the new Roman Polanski movie about the Dreyfus affair (now finally available for the first time in the United States after being released internationally more than five years ago). But a recent review of the film in the New Yorker is not encouraging. In Richard Brody's telling—the movie pretty obviously and unsubtly wants to draw an analogy between the Dreyfus case and Polanski's own exile and criminal conviction. 

This is disappointing for at least two reasons. First of all, the comparison (if it's really what the filmmaker has in mind) is totally misplaced. Dreyfus was famously an innocent man—framed for antisemitic and political reasons by the French military hierarchy. Whereas Polanski to all appearances really did drug and rape a minor many years ago (though he only pleaded guilty to a lesser included offense). So... I'm not seeing the connection here. 

The Sleep of Conscience Breeds Monsters

 In his classic history of American liberal thought, V.L. Parrington notes at one point that many of the great advocates of the Abolitionist struggle in letters—James Russell Lowell, e.g.—settled into a comfortable Brahmin conservatism after the Civil War. Convinced that they had won the struggle—the beast of the Slave Power had been defeated, and human bondage was no more—they thought their work was done. In effect, they retired from political life. 

Only Wendell Phillips (in Parrington's telling) refused to believe that all social problems had been solved at a stroke. He alone moved on from struggle to struggle. Only Phillips realized that when one victory has been won—it merely creates an opening for the enemies of justice and freedom to regroup and concentrate their forces elsewhere; and so—eternal vigilance is required. There was no comfortable Brahmin retirement for him.

Scouring Every Main

 Trump is of course fond of describing himself as a "man of peace." He claims that his eerie affinity for Putin is a product of his desire merely to "stop the killing" in Ukraine. He has repeatedly floated himself as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize (a bit of bragging that appears to have played a role in his deteriorating relationship with the Indian prime minister). 

And, of course, he crows constantly about having ended six or seven different wars in his first eight months in office. (I guess when so many wars start on your watch—it's easy to rack up a lot of hasty ceasefires in this manner. And if the same conflicts flare up multiple times in as many months—do you get to double- or triple-count them?)

A Maryland Kidnapping

 Having first illegally renditioned Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration is now seeking to abduct him yet again—this time, reportedly, to Uganda—a country to which he has no prior connection—and where the administration itself seems to believe that his life and freedom will be in danger (and that's precisely why—in their infinite, gleeful sadism, they are trying to send him there). 

As you may recall, they first brought him back to the United States to face transparently bogus criminal charges. But now, even they seem to have lost confidence in their ability to railroad him on this basis. They don't seem to have any interest at this point in actually trying to convict him—probably because they know their charges against him are a sham. So—according to his lawyers—they have held the threat of deportation to Uganda over his head in order to coerce a plea deal. 

Trump the Whig

 As Molly Ball was pointing out in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Trump's recent *ahem* "interventionist" approach to the U.S. economy has given rise to some rather bizarre ideological mésalliances. Most recently, Bernie Sanders felt obliged to praise Trump for acquiring a 10% stake in Intel for the U.S. government—an unprecedented arrangement that amounts in effect to partially nationalizing a publicly-traded company. Is the Left now supposed to like this, just because it's vaguely "socialist"?

Trump's tariffs have similarly split the left-wing coalition in the U.S. Organized labor and many pro-labor Democrats have spent the last several decades railing against NAFTA for allegedly displacing American workers. And now here comes a Republican president spouting the magic protectionist formulae—"tariffs," "bring back manufacturing jobs"—and they feel that in the interests of consistency they can't object to his plans (even if their constituents will actually suffer greatly from the tariffs, due to increased consumer prices and the costs of component parts that will actually harm manufacturing).

Another Dr. Stockmann

 The Trump administration's new CDC director now has to fight for her position—after no more than a month on the job—seemingly for no other reason than because she took seriously the responsibilities of her office: such as providing sound evidence-based public health advice to the public. 

Dr. Monarez appears to have clashed with RFK Jr. over his attempts to undermine vaccines. The news of her struggle with senior administration officials—after all—comes the same day Trump's FDA announced unprecedented new restrictions on access for the latest round of the COVID boosters. 

A Catholic in a Protestant Country

 In the aftermath of the truly horrendous school shooting in Minneapolis yesterday, the nation is already dividing—in all-too foreseeable partisan ways—over how to make sense of the tragedy. Liberals will perceive in these events another cruel illustration of the dangers of widespread access to guns—and I agree with them. Trump's MAGA coalition, meanwhile, will exploit the tragedy to stigmatize people and continue their increasingly hysterical war on crime. Shame on them for doing so. 

But meanwhile—I don't think it's off-base for the Right to interpret this massacre as the latest incident in a long history of anti-Catholic persecution in this country. Obviously, there's a lot we still don't know about the motive behind this shooting. But everywhere Catholics have been in the minority, they have suffered repression and violence. There's no reason to think that our society has transcended this longstanding bias today—any more than we have antisemitism or the other forms of ancient bigotry.  

Ironic Fascism

 The New York Times ran a piece yesterday about the Trump administration's growing tendency to attach "jokey," alliterative names to its various new ICE detention camps. It started with "Alligator Alcatraz," and all too quickly became a pattern. To this notorious prison complex in the Florida swamps was soon added other facilities for confining human beings—newly christened with such "cutesy" titles as the "Cornhusker Clink" (in Nebraska) and the "Speedway Slammer" (Indiana). 

As the Times notes, the device is part of the broader tendency on the administration's part to dehumanize their victims by reducing their suffering to a punchline. The people held in these various facilities are of course fathers and mothers. They have families and lives of their own. But the people who are imprisoning them—Trump and his army of trolls—are such fundamentally insincere, trivial-minded, and narcissistic people that the existence of such families and their pain has no reality for them. 

Cash Bail

 Trump gave a press conference yesterday—ostensibly for the purpose of announcing a new executive order to eliminate cashless bail. In typical Trump fashion, the meeting quickly devolved far from its original purpose; and the bail policy got buried in the day's other news coverage. But I don't want to lose sight of how bad that policy is on its own. Even without all the president's various other extracurricular diversionary shenanigans yesterday, backing cash bail is cruel enough.

It's hard to think of a more blatantly unfair system than cash bail. It is quite overtly a way of punishing the poor more harshly than the rich. Of course, courts may ostensibly set the amount of bail without regard to a person's wealth. But, given wealth disparities, people will always have vastly different abilities to pay it. The "equality" of cash bail thus becomes another of those deceptive "equalities" of which Anatole France spoke: such as "the laws forbidding rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges." 

Axël's Vacation

 A friend and I are traveling tomorrow to Wyoming. He texted me yesterday to tell me I'd better be excited—because studies have shown that most of the joy people experience in every vacation is to be found in the anticipation of it, rather than the real thing. 

"You'd better savor it now," he said, "because this is the only pleasure you're going to get. If you're not excited at this point, you're squandering it."

Je Suis John Bolton

 However much I detest 70% of John Bolton's politics—it's impossible not to start to like him now that Trump is sending federal agents to invade his home and intimidate him for publicly criticizing his former boss. Trump has made a martyr of him—and so, as with all martyrs, a glow of holiness now surrounds him, regardless of what his life was like before his immolation. 

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

Yet I number him in the song; as Yeats wrote: 

That USSR Sweatshirt...

 In his Religion and Philosophy in Germany, Heinrich Heine perceptively observes at one point—writing of the twisted ways of human political psychology—that "a secret predilection for the cause in which we formerly fought and suffered always continues to nestle in our hearts," even when we have outwardly disavowed or outgrown it. (Snodgrass trans.)

Heine had in mind his own youthful partisanship for Protestant Christianity—which he later shed but never entirely forgot (the ethnically Jewish and professedly "pantheistic" Heine's relationship to religion was complicated—see my earlier post on the subject). But the point applies equally well if not even more strongly to anyone who's ever been a Marxist. 

An Ignoble Lie

 The New York Times ran a gooseflesh-inducing article earlier this week about a group of racists in Arkansas who are trying to establish a "whites only" housing development. Obviously, such a complex would be a straightforward violation of the federal fair housing law and ought not to be allowed. But some proponents of the development are convinced that the deterioration of law and morals has already proceeded so far in Trump's America that they might be able to get away with it. 

One of the creeps behind this idea apparently moonlights as a "Plato scholar" on YouTube. To prove his bona fides, he is pictured in front of a bookcase stocked with English translations of famous Neoplatonists and ancient commentators on the Greek philosopher (Proclus, etc.). (The Times reporter notes that the shelf behind him also prominently displayed a copy of Mein Kampf—but he strategically turned this one around, with the spine facing in, before proceeding with the photo shoot.) 

Heaven and Hell

 Yesterday, in an interview, Donald Trump was asked about his goals in ending the Ukraine war. His response was uncharacteristically self-critical and disarming (though quite characteristically weird and unexpected). He said that he was trying to end the conflict so that he could "get into heaven." 

This raises the interesting (to me, at least) question of what exactly is Trump's cosmology. He seemed to be gesturing somewhat facetiously to the kind of pop culture version of Christian mythology we all have in our heads from movies like It's a Wonderful Life. But does he literally believe in it? 

Prometheus

 The Trump administration is turning out martyrs to science these days at a near-daily clip. Many of them will forever remain nameless in the media coverage—the countless people who developed the mRNA vaccine, for instance—the victims of the most recent episode in Trump's war on science. 

The work of these researchers saved millions of lives around the world; and spared countless Americans from being hooked to a ventilator in an emergency room—but for their efforts they are now being punished with funding cuts, and their work is to be undone for the crudest culture war reasons. 

Vindictive Prosecution

 Studying for the MPRE—the legal ethics exam they make all would-be lawyers take before they can be admitted to the bar—the instructors dwell in one unit on the responsibilities of prosecutors. Such officials must "seek justice, rather than merely a conviction," they say. 

Prosecutors must only prosecute in the courtroom, they also say, and not seek to prevail in the "court of public opinion"—such as by giving press conferences in which they smear the character of defendants with irrelevant character assassinations, rather than sticking to the facts of the case before them. 

Melodic Laughter?

 First Lady Melania Trump's latest intervention in global politics was characteristically inscrutable and perplexing. She appears to have authored a letter to Vladimir Putin calling upon him to "protect the innocence" of children. But Trump himself—when asked about it—seemed to have no idea what the letter was talking about. And the text itself does not clarify which children the First Lady has in mind. 

The most logical explanation would be that Melania was referring to the thousands of Ukrainian children Putin has abducted and forcibly deported to Russia, in order to indoctrinate them in anti-Ukrainian ideology (crimes for which Putin is currently under indictment in international court—and which provide a key piece of evidence for those who accuse him of perpetrating a genocide against Ukrainians). 

Technocrats vs. Romantics

 Noah Smith reposted an essay yesterday on his Substack that he originally wrote last year. He describes it as one of his favorite of his own pieces, and explains that a recent online debate that touched on similar themes prompted him to reshare it. I had missed the piece when it was first published, but I got a lot out of it this time, so I'm glad he re-shared it. 

Basically, Smith in the piece is taking sides in the perennial debate between tech utopians and their critics (whom Smith dubs—not unfairly—the "romanticists"). Technologists—particularly those of the utopian variety—tend to regard most forms of human suffering as temporary challenges to be resolved by improvements in efficiency and technique. 

Honor Killing

 The premise of Byron's 1813 work The Giaour might strike many now—when told in the abstract—as a case of crude exoticism or overwrought romanticism. Byron claims he based the poem on a tale he heard in Greece: about a woman who had been wrapped in a blanket and drowned in the sea for the alleged crime of adultery. The poem follows her lover's eternal quest for vengeance. 

Mere melodrama and Orientalism, one might be tempted to say. 

Blood Money

 The Wall Street Journal ran a disquieting piece yesterday about how the Blackwater mercenary group is taking advantage of the collapse of U.S. international security assistance to pitch itself as the hired guns of last resort. In a world where Donald Trump has slashed U.S. foreign assistance to the bone—if not choked it off entirely—Blackwater sells prospective clients on the idea that it can serve as a "gap-filler." 

"What God abandoned, these defended," perhaps—to quote A.E. Housman's "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries." Except God didn't abandon these countries—the United States did. And now, they have no choice but to hire mercenaries with an appalling human rights record to undertake a campaign of licensed murder. It's hard to think of anything more dystopian—this privatized outsourcing of killing. 

Life and Habit

 Samuel Butler was a crankish intellectual who devoted his life to erecting an anti-intellectual, anti-crank ideal. 

In book after book, he argued that the type of person one really ought to be is a "gentleman" of the old school—one who does not hold any belief too literally or firmly or uncharitably; who does not think about or examine anything in his life too consciously; one for whom, as he puts it in The Way of All Flesh, the great questions of life "have already passed into the unconscious stage"—where they belong. 

And Butler wrote a long series of tomes chasing down intellectual hares, riding crankish hobbyhorses, and exploring contrarian pedantic theories, in order to convince us of the beauty and nobility of this unselfconscious, unreflective, anti-intellectual type. 

The Special Relationship

 Trump's much-heralded "summit" with Putin in Alaska this week was a typically humiliating spectacle—specifically for Trump, but really for the whole nation. To be sure, a number of courageous Alaskans came to the event to unfurl Ukrainian flags and uplift messages of protest against the Russian dictator and his American stooge-in-chief. Rightly so. But all too many others conspired with Trump to roll out the welcome mat for a bloodthirsty mass murderer. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, 59% of Alaskans polled this week "said it was appropriate that Putin was invited to participate in the summit on U.S. soil." An outright majority of respondents—in short—saw no problem with bestowing the imprimatur of diplomatic legitimacy on Putin, or with treating him as a member in good standing of the international community—even as he continued to drop bombs on Ukraine during the very hours of the summit. 

The Last Human Element You Can Rely On

 Just days after October 7, 2023—I received a mass-mailing from a leftist advocacy group of some kind calling on us to help "stop the genocide in Gaza." 

I found this outrageous. Just days after Hamas's pogrom—a mass killing of Jewish civilians just because they were Jewish, at the hands of a terrorist group with an explicitly genocidal ideology—people were turning around and accusing the victims of genocide? 

The Social Picture

 Of all Trump's fascist excesses in his second term, there are few more nakedly repellant than his latest frolic of declaring federal "sweeps" to "clear out" Washington, D.C.'s homeless population. 

Dwell with me for a moment please upon the optics of this.

Here is a president who has used the power and influence of the office to turn himself into a newly-minted billionaire, through managing a variety of financial pyramid schemes from behind the Resolute desk. 

Deliverism

 Thomas Edsall had a piece yesterday in the New York Times about a city in the American southwest that had received millions of dollars in subsidies under the Biden administration's clean energy policies. 

Despite this largesse under a Democratic administration, and the resulting jobs and economic stimulus—the city's voting share that went to Trump and the Republicans only increased in the last election. 

Trump's Death Trap for the Third World

 How are poor countries these days supposed to feed themselves? 

In the old days, most nations of the world produced their own food through subsistence agriculture. It wasn't a high or glamorous style of living—and we shouldn't wax nostalgic about it. But it generally enabled people to survive. 

But the U.S. pressured many countries around the world in the late twentieth century to lower the trade barriers that protected local farmers. As a result, many of their subsistence agriculture sectors were overwhelmed and displaced by cheap, subsidized U.S. crops.

Finally Facing My Peterloo

When Trump mobilized the National Guard to L.A. in June, I compared his actions to those of the English administration in 1819, who sent troops to St. Peter's Field, in Manchester, to quell social protests. 

Indeed, with a few L.A. protesters torching some driverless vehicles, while issuing machine-wrecker statements, the context of the time was eerily reminiscent of the social upheavals of the early 1800s. 

The Living

 The Israeli military today killed a group of journalists reporting from Gaza. The Israeli government claims they were Hamas agents. Earlier, they had published a set of documents that purported to show their names on a list of members of several armed jihadi organizations. 

The reporters—and NGOs that monitor the rights of journalists—say this was a smear campaign meant to justify the IDF's attempt to silence critical voices. Netanyahu's government—this theory goes—simply does not want any international coverage of what they are about to do in Gaza.