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.