After Nature

 I just finished reading W.G. Sebald's first work—After Nature—and I find, curiously, that it contains all his later work in condensed form. An extraordinary and enviable coherency of vision this discloses—to have his themes and aesthetic worked out from the first book on. 

This first book of his—really, a poem (but a poem on the model of his unclassifiable later prose works)—fills me—as does every work of Sebald's—with an utterly sui generis sensation: a kind of gentle melancholy, a quiet nostalgic yearning and sadness—much like the grey Norfolk seascapes and landscapes he describes. 

The Artist's Wages

 At one point in his Past and Present, the great British belletrist Thomas Carlyle takes up the Chartists' rallying cry, "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work." Ultimately—he endorses the sentiment. But not before allowing himself a bit of sarcasm. 

He admits, after all, that fair wages for work is desirable—but when in all the history of human creation, he asks, were they so apportioned? For the great artists and thinkers of the past—what wage did they ever receive for their toil, but scorn, poverty, prison, and the scaffold? 

Justice Blindfolded

 Every line is worth reading in Justice Jackson's and Justice Sotomayor's searing dissents in today's birthright citizenship case. Taken in tandem with Sotomayor's dissent earlier this week, in the case where the Supreme Court allowed Trump to resume his rapid-fire deportations to third countries where people face a risk of torture—without notice or a chance to plead their case—it makes for a damning portrait of the state of our democracy. 

The dissents in both cases lay out a frighteningly similar course of events. First: the executive branch sneeringly disregards federal law and the protections of the Constitution (in particular, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, at least as applied to immigrants and the children of immigrants). Then, lower court judges do their jobs by ordering the White House to stop violating federal law. Then, the administration thumbs their nose at the judges, treating them with insolent scorn and defiance. 

The Deserted Village

 On a somewhat recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast, Klein was speaking to the economist Ken Rogoff about Trump's notoriously misguided tariff plans. Both of them were agreed that the tariffs were a disaster (or would be, if Trump didn't keep chickening out about actually following through on them). But Klein was trying to steel-man aspects of the administration's argument for the sake of the intellectual exercise. 

At one point in doing so, he asked Rogoff if there was any truth to the idea that a strong U.S. dollar—the country's "exorbitant privilege"—was generally bad for U.S. manufacturing. Now, I thought from Macroeconomics 101 that the answer would be yes: all else being equal, a higher valuation for a country's currency will correlate to lower exports (because it becomes more valuable to hold assets from that country in currency rather than in physical goods). 

The Socialist Ticket

 Since the main source of national media I consume (the New York Times) doubles periodically as a local rag—I have been forced to think far more than I would ordinarily about the city's explosive mayoral election (in which I cannot vote—seeing as I am not, and have never been, a resident of New York City). 

I had no particular stake in this or preference for the outcome. All I have gathered so far is that there is a young firebrand progressive who's running as a democratic socialist (and who also happens to be the son of a prominent leftist academic who wrote a book about Sudan that I reviewed critically years ago). 

Crusaders

 Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth climbed to the podium today at a press conference to try to justify his administration's recent act of war against Iran. 

He mostly just managed to prove that his administration is every bit as fundamentalist and theocratic as the fundamentalist theocratic Iranian regime they are attacking. 

Overcompensation

 Well, then. That happened faster than I expected—but roughly as I expected. Just hours ago, I wrote on this blog that there was no way Trump would be able resist the urge to drop a few bombs on Iran, now that the opportunity had presented itself. He is far too predictable in his masculine insecurities not to. 

After all, the media just devoted a whole week of coverage to the great big "bunker-buster" bombs that the United States is supposedly the only country to possess. Wall-to-wall commentary emphasized that only these great big bombs would be great big big enough to blow up the Iranian nuclear sites. 

The Iran War Did Not Take Place(?)

 It is a characteristic of the Trump presidency that even his worst atrocities have an air of unreality to them. 

Of course—for Trump's victims—the results of his actions are all too real. To this day, there are hundreds of innocent people who wake up every morning in a forever-prison in El Salvador—because Trump sent them there; to be confined on the U.S. taxpayers' dime; in rank contravention of U.S. law and treaties and the orders of a federal court. 

Stone Statues

 In one of the strangest (and most intriguing) passages of his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud suggests that human beings have a kind of nostalgia for our pre-animate existence. He notes that all displeasure in life stems from a state of tension—caused by a discord between what we have and what we want—and that much of human mental life is devoted to quenching this desire so that we might attain a state of repose. This condition of repletion appears to be the goal of all we seek—the ultimate telos of all our striving: a will-less state without any more effort or desire or motivation. 

Indeed, the mystics of every religion have defined salvation in similar terms. The Buddhists have always been admirably literal and ingenuous about this. The goal of meditation is nirvana, non-existence, annihilation; the extinction of the self. But most other religious movements that have contemplated some kind of ultimate transcendence of the human plight have been led to speak in similar terms. 

Nearest to God

 Since our country seems to be drawing ever closer to the brink of another war in the Middle East—a war that bears an uncanny resemblance to our last great misadventure in the region (save one letter in the country's name)—I thought it would be a good time to take down a short book that has sat on my shelf unread for years: Norman Mailer's Why Are We At War?—a brief collection of reflections and interviews he wrote on the eve of the 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq. 

Mailer—along with Harold Pinter (whom he quotes in the volume)—has the distinction of being one of the few literary intellectuals who called the Iraq War right from the outset. He wasn't beguiled by the strange fairy lights of a worldwide Jacobin revolution or neo-Trotskyite transformation that seduced so many people on the Left. He saw Bush's war for what it was: a great, big, murderous, atrocious, hubristic, imperialistic boondoggle. (And criminal war of aggression to boot.)

Strange Meeting

 Amidst the wall-to-wall coverage of Israel's war with Iran—with its constant focus on equipment, ordinance, and geopolitical strategy—it can be easy to overlook the human reality of what it means to have bombs falling on a city with roughly the population density of New York. 

The New York Times has helped to rectify that gap. In a piece yesterday, they told the stories of some of the civilians who have already lost their lives in the bombing: a 24-year-old poet; a Pilates instructor; an equestrian; an eight-year-old child. People who had lives to look forward to, just like us. 

Deathbed Conversions

 In 1852, decades after he wrote it, a sick and dying Heinrich Heine attached a preface to his own Religion and Philosophy in Germany that—strangely—rejected many of the arguments of the book he was now laying back before the public. He now regretted—he wrote on his deathbed—having spoken so mockingly years ago about "sacred things." He had rediscovered the wisdom of the Bible, he claimed. 

He now rejected the insolence of the German Left Hegelians, whom he accused of having the hubris of humanity's first parents in the Garden of Eden—that is, of daring to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He accused Hegel and the other philosophers he had celebrated in the original work of being like the Serpent who tempted them, offering the promise that they "shall be as gods."

The Primal Horde

 There's something about Trump that invites Freudian metaphors. At the "No Kings" march I attended yesterday, a number of the signs made reference to Trump's military parade as perhaps an elaborate form of physical over-compensation. "Small dick-tator energy" read one of the banners. 

I was reminded of Harold Pinter's judgment on the militarism of the Bush administration: "The big pricks are out / They'll fuck everything in sight," the Nobel Laureate wrote. My fellow protesters would argue that a little prick like Trump needs to see the big pricks of America's arsenal to make up for it. 

Informants

 According to the Wall Street Journal yesterday, far-right white supremacist groups have apparently been resharing a meme online that invites people to inform on their neighbors' immigration status by contacting ICE. The image shows Uncle Sam tacking up a "wanted" poster, with an actual phone number people can use to contact the feds. The text under the image bids people to "Report all foreign invaders." 

That's disturbing enough. But far worse is what happened next: official government accounts, including the actual Department of Homeland Security profile on X, reshared the image—"foreign invaders" rhetoric and all. Good god; what is happening to this country?

Show Me Thy Work!

 I will be deep in the mire for the next two months of the ordeal of prepping for the bar exam. It's even more excruciating than people told me it would be. Not because the content isn't interesting—in fact, much of it is fascinating. I always enjoy a good three hours or so each morning—when my brain is fresh and I still allow myself to put down the cups of coffee that I will have to deny myself after lunch—in which I genuinely enjoy immersing myself in the law. 

The misery sets in around one or two PM, when the morning light has faded (and with it the caffeine), and yet it seems that no matter how many bar prep lecture videos I just completed, I am nowhere closer to my goal. Then I face the long sadness of plucking away at a few topics when I no longer have the mental stamina to endure them, while waiting for the next day to come when I can enjoy another blissful three hours of caffeinated peak mental activity. 

Trump's Peterloo

 Trump has always been drawn to the idea of deploying the military against protesters. In his first term, some of his own military advisers managed to restrain him from doing so. But now that these people have been forced out of his circle, and he has surrounded himself entirely with sycophants, he is free to put these powers to the test. So, one had a sense he was just waiting for an excuse. 

The Los Angeles protests this weekend appear to have offered him the pretext he was looking for. They were largely nonviolent demonstrations. But, after Trump mobilized the National Guard (without the consent of California officials), the violence has foreseeably escalated. Now, it appears that people on both sides of the riot shields have been injured. The situation could still get worse from here. 

Wrangling Pirates

 Well, this was a week "when men fell out, they knew not why," to borrow a phrase from Butler's Hudibras. For some reason, Trump and Elon Musk suddenly started hating each other the last few days. And I can't pretend I haven't enjoyed the spectacle. The great thing about two utterly horrible people criticizing each other, is that everything each says against the other is entirely justified. 

Trump is right that Musk is erratic, possibly drug-addled, and most likely motivated by various financial conflicts of interest (the electric vehicle subsidies he would lose out on if the current tax and spending package passes, e.g.). Meanwhile, Musk is absolutely correct that Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill" would be a disaster for the national debt and a ruinous blow to future generations. 

Camus, Romantic

 Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus could just as well have been called The Myth of Prometheus. Because really, the entirety of the essay can be found anticipated and paraphrased in Byron's poetic tribute to the Titan who taught humankind the use of fire. Camus's ideal for how to confront life is that of the "metaphysical rebel," as he would put it in a later work—the human being who accepts their fate without flinching, in defiance of the gods—those who choose to live "without appeal." (O'Brien trans. throughout.)

"There is no fate which cannot be surmounted by scorn," as Camus puts it. The ideal "absurd man"—the person who sees and acknowledges the absurdity of man's fate but embraces it anyway—the tragic figure—who, like the protagonist of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge—avers "I—Cain—go alone as I deserve—an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!"—is the same ideal that Byron articulates in his poem: 

Sins of the Fathers

 According to news reports and their own statements, the Trump administration has apparently arrested and detained the entire family of the suspect in the Colorado fire-bombing case—including five children. Now, they are trying to deport them through expedited removal—apparently without any legal basis to do so (assuming they came into the country under the same visa as their father). 

There's something profoundly authoritarian and chilling about this. Imagine if the police tried the same in a criminal context—a horrible crime was committed, so the cops go and arrest the suspect's wife and children, in the hopes of being able to extort information out of them. It's the kind of thing that would ordinarily happen only in dictatorial regimes.