Catastrophism

 In the midst of another brutally hot summer (Tampa—where I've been all week—just experienced its hottest day on record), the Trump administration is making another move to undermine the government's ability to mitigate global warming. Specifically, the administration is reportedly eliminating the EPA's "endangerment" finding vis-a-vis climate change. As I understand it, this change will effectively make it all-but impossible for the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions on a large scale. 

In order to justify this destructive move, the administration released a report reiterating the contrarian right-wing position on climate change—which has evolved, in recent years, from denying the existence of global warming outright, to now saying—yes, it's happening; but it's no big deal. I'm reminded of Schopenhauer's line—about the long journey that every idea takes from being condemned as paradoxical to being deprecated as trivial. We have reached the "climate change is real but insignificant" stage. 

The Goats

 Sitting for the Florida bar exam the last two days, they had us herded each morning into long, theme park–style waiting lines on opposite ends of a conference center—as we piled into a single vast, cavernous chamber to take the test. Beholding the sea of people in snaking lines before me, I found myself once again obsessing over my chances of passing—as I'm sure everyone else there was as well. 

The most maddening thing about the bar exam is that your odds depend entirely on the curve. So—it's not a question of how well you did, but of how well (or poorly) everyone else did. If you feel confident on part of the test, a nagging voice says: "but maybe that was easy for everyone, so it does you no good." And if you feel miserable about part, a mean-spirited voice hopes: "but maybe everyone else did worse." 

Unsubscribes

 Yesterday, over on my other blog, I finally posted something about Gaza. Almost immediately, two people un-subscribed from the list. And it's not like I was swimming in attention to begin with. 

Of course, there are any number of possible reasons. Maybe those people just got too many emails. Maybe they were just looking to reduce the amount of spam in their inbox. 

Report from the Besieged City

 The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem published a report this morning—arguing; apparently for the first time; that the Israeli government's actions in Gaza and the West Bank now amount not only to war crimes—but to actual genocide. They lay out the evidence: the coordinated policy to bomb, displace, and starve Palestinian civilians; the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure—including homes, hospitals, and the entire system of food production; the unprovoked killings at the Israeli aid distribution sites and the denial of aid through any alternative channels; and on; and on. 

Is this genocide? I don't know. At this point, I'm less interested in words than in deeds. The fact, whatever we call it, appears unmistakeable by now that Israel's conduct in Gaza (and, increasingly, the West Bank) has caused the systematic killing and displacement of innocent people. And the United States—our own government and our own tax dollars—are of course abetting this. 

Techno-Utopias

 In one of his essays, George Orwell remarks that even a socialist utopia would never be perfect—because it would still have toothache. 

Which always stuck me as funny. Because just a few decades after Orwell wrote, we had all but abolished toothache from the face of the Earth—at least in advanced industrial economies. 

Nicholson Baker's "Baseless": A Review

 Nicholson Baker's book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, had a somewhat uncanny quality when I found it in a local bookstore, sometime during the first two years of the pandemic. Here was a then-new release that took an obsessive deep dive into the history of biological and chemical warfare—including the deliberate manipulation of viruses to make them more deadly and transmissible to humans. But it did not say anything about the COVID-19 pandemic—mostly because it hadn't yet reached the United States at the time the book was published. 

The timing of the book is therefore downright eerie. It mostly deals with a three-month period in 2019, which Baker records in the form of a personal diary. The final version of the book appears to have gone to press in early March 2020—right on the eve of the COVID lockdowns. So, here is a book that dwells relentlessly on the subject of artificial pandemics and germ research gone wrong. And it appears just days before the start of a global pandemic that would spark an ongoing debate—still raging—over whether it could have been triggered by an accidental spill-over from a lab engaged in gain-of-function research. 

Capitulation

 I have little to add beyond the obvious by way of commentary on the repulsive sequence of events in the Paramount-Skydance deal. Here is a media conglomerate with a pending merger before the FCC. They entered into a craven settlement agreement with Trump that compromised their editorial independence. Then, when a late night talk show host criticized them for their capitulation to government censorship and bullying—he was suddenly fired (supposedly for "economic" reasons). 

And now—lo and behold—according to the most recent reporting—their merger deal has been approved. Apparently, it pays to bribe the President—to the tune of $16 million dollars. Especially if you include sweeteners in the deal like punishing Trump's critics for him. 

Inhuman Agonies

 I was reading the New York Times's reporting today on the hunger crisis in Gaza. You'd need to have a heart of stone and a stomach of steel not to be upset by the images of malnourished children with vertebrae jutting from their emaciated forms—or crying as they beg for a meal in a press of desperate people waving buckets to collect the meagre calories they need to survive. 

What hurts most about reading these stories and seeing these photos is the knowledge that the food they need to live is all there—just a few miles—in some cases, mere feet—away. There is no natural reason why that eighteen-month-old child in the photo should resemble a withered skeleton. The milk and nourishment he needs to live exists—there are multiple global humanitarian agencies standing by to deliver it—just give it to him!

Edmund Wilson and the Income Tax

 Edmund Wilson's The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963) is an eloquent plea for tax resistance as a form of protest. Few today could disagree with Wilson's critique of the budding national security state as it existed at the time he was writing. Indeed, the tract often reads as astonishingly prescient. Here, in 1963, Wilson was already warning about U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia. 

He wrote of U.S. troops herding Vietnamese villagers into makeshift concentration camps and torching their crops. He wrote about napalm charring the flesh of innocent civilians—focusing mostly on events in the Korean War; but with an ominous note from Wilson that he had heard "rumors" the weapon was already being deployed in Vietnam (and how right he turned out to be). 

Kicking While He's Down

 Ever since the 2024 election, I've found myself taking Joe Biden's side in every Democratic intra-party fight. Which surprises me—since I wasn't exactly a fan of his during his presidency. In fact, I was pretty relentlessly critical. But for whatever reason, every attack line that has been tried out on him since the November 2024 loss has just struck me as so much balderdash. 

I was never able to get excited about Biden's various pardons of family members and high-level Democrats, to shield them from the risk of retaliatory prosecution. All those who criticized this move at the time should look at what Trump has done to the Justice Department in just a few brief months in office—and tell me honestly if they still believe Biden made the wrong choice. 

Let Them Mind Their Own Affairs

 For most of this week, I successfully managed to avoid paying any attention to the "Kiss Cam" story about the Coldplay concert. I instinctively felt it was none of my business—and that the social media schadenfreude surrounding the humiliation of the two people caught on camera—without their consent—was fundamentally distasteful. But yesterday, a friend finally backed me into watching the video. I had no choice. I've now seen those five seconds of footage—like, apparently, all the rest of the nation. "Now you've done it"—I told him; "you've forced me to formulate a definite opinion on this. Which means I'll have to write a blog about it. Thanks a lot for adding another item to my to-do list!"

Having watched the video, I concede that there is some inherent physical comedy in the scene—particularly in the man's conspicuous dropping out of view. It's worth a couple seconds of laughter. But now, someone has lost his job for it. Two people have been subject to public humiliation and shaming. Their lives may be destroyed. They may be dogged by this everywhere they go in public until the end of time. And for what—a couple seconds of laughter on our part? Was that worth it? Is a momentary "lol" on social media for us worth "years of regret and grief" for them? (Dunbar). 

Presidential "Character"

 I took a trip down memory lane this week by reading some old Gore Vidal essays from the early Bush years. Writing of the 2000 election—so dull in its campaigning, so lively in its result—Vidal reminds us that one of the Republican talking points at the time went something as follows: "sure, Bush may be a dope—but at least he has good character. At least he's not a liar."

This was meant overtly as a dig at Gore's (and yes, there is a relation) alleged tendency to embellish the truth. ("I invented the internet," anyone? Doesn't that take you back?) But it was also—Vidal reminds us—a subtle way of gesturing toward the character flaws of Gore's Democratic predecessor, Clinton—with his marital infidelities and his tendency to dodge touchy questions. 

Notes on Notes on Democracy

 H.L. Mencken's Notes on Democracy (1926) is a great liberal guilty pleasure for the Trump era—the sort of book to be tucked under the mattress so that no one knows one is reading it. To be sure, Mencken scourges and flogs no one so ruthlessly in the book as he does the starry-eyed capital-L "Liberals," as he calls us—"the only surviving honest believers in democracy," in Mencken's phrase (which, he would have us believe—perhaps not entirely convincingly—he does not intend as a compliment). And yet—there is a kind of Liberal Id to which this book appeals, in our political moment. 

Nor is Mencken so far removed from the liberalism he derides as he at times pretends. Mencken's screed against popular government can read at times as a kind of dark liberalism—what he calls "libertarianism" in the book. But keep in mind that for him and his era, this term did not yet mean what it does today: i.e., a kind of unthinking worship of capitalism (indeed, Mencken is as contemptuous of the "plutocracy" as of any other American institution—and attributes to democracy the fault above all of being gulled too easily by monied interests and big capital concentrations). 

A Merely Defensive Battle

 Staying in my parents' condo this summer, I happened to see on the wall a framed photo of Chicago's Grant Park—taken during Barack Obama's 2008 Election Night victory celebration. My family and I were in an apartment overlooking the park that night, and we heard the cheers go up across the city. Seeing the photo cast my mind back to the scene—from what was probably the best summer and fall of my political life. 

I happened to graduate high school and start college that same year—in the same city where Obama held his election night victory rally (and where he had resided as a law school professor before running for office as Illinois's junior senator). I had seen Obama speak on the campaign trail. To me—and everyone else—he represented the end of the long night of the Bush administration and a chance for both racial healing and social progress for our country. 

Byron Among the Megafauna

 Lord Byron in his Cain: A Mystery puzzles through many of the classic moral and theological problems of the Book of Genesis. Why was it fair—for instance—for Yahweh to plant the Tree of Knowledge within easy grasp of Eve and Adam, if he never intended for them to eat of it? 

In the classic version of the theological problem: if Adam and Eve were tempted to sin by eating of the tree—why then did God create in them a proclivity to temptation? And if they were not tempted to sin, then they acted out of mere randomness or curiosity—so it cannot have been a guilty act. 

The Flood

 The nation as a whole this week has been gripped by the horrifying scenes at a Texas summer camp inundated by floodwaters. Even Ted Cruz—not someone known for great empathy or moral imagination—seems to have been touched in his humanity during his visit to the disaster scene.

He described what it meant to behold one of the destroyed campers' cabins—and to realize that children had been swept out of their beds in the middle of the night into a raging river. The human brain recoils from contemplating such a tragedy. Cruz himself was overcome with tears. 

Have you forgotten yet?

 It's now been more than 110 days since the U.S. government sent 238 people to the CECOT prison in El Salvador—without charge, trial, or conviction—to be confined for perhaps the rest of their lives on the White House's orders. They're still there more than three months later—with no contact with their families or attorneys, and no confirmation that they are even still alive. 

Revelations in recent days have confirmed the extent to which the U.S. government directly controls their fate. Marco Rubio apparently even undertook negotiations with the Venezuelan government—offering to release the Venezuelan prisoners in El Salvador in exchange for Americans held captive in Venezuela. 

The Post-Human Future

 The economist and Substack blogger Noah Smith penned a disturbing piece the other week declaring the dawn of the "post-human age." He suggests that the combination of generative AI (able to mimic convincingly the various outputs of human intelligence), declining birthrates, and our increasing immersion in digital worlds—in preference to real-life human relationships and communication—seems to be paving the way for a future in which flesh and blood human beings are ever less needed and ever more redundant. 

So far, of course, we have merely a recapitulation of the kind of techno-pessimism that we've been hearing for decades—if not centuries. We are all disturbed by the ways in which our species' technological achievements both underline our power and yet increasingly render us otiose and unnecessary. It's the fundamental paradox of the industrial age—the age of the "demon of Mechanism," as Carlyle once called it—in which a growing set of human tasks have been automated—and we begin to fear that a future may come in which the machines' own creators are no longer needed. 

Weather Machines

 In his 1941 memoir of wartime France, Scum of the Earth (a book that seeks to trace the psychological and historical roots of France's ignominious capitulation in the face of Nazi aggression)—Arthur Koestler at one point shares a particularly instructive episode of political history. 

He notes that Leon Blum's left-wing Popular Front government in the 1930s at one point undertook a program for the relief of French farmers. Having noticed that the farmers were getting shafted on payments to a retail monopoly, the Blum administration stepped in to buy produce from the farmers directly. As a result, payments to farmers increased several times over. 

Thoughts and Prayers

 Various Trump-world figures are offering their "thoughts and prayers" this week for the victims of the Texas floods—an empty gesture of ersatz solidarity, which conveniently brushes aside the fact that it was their own DOGE cuts that dismantled the National Weather Service and cut down the nation's various climate-monitoring agencies—not to mention the recent big abominable bill that slashed clean energy measures designed to stop catastrophes just like this one. 

Karoline Leavitt stood up at the White House press conference and declared a "time of national mourning"—while making sure in the same sentence to absolve the administration of any possible blame for the catastrophe. Melania Trump likewise issued a rote statement expressing her condolences to the families affected—sending both "thoughts" and "prayers." Given the way her husband's actions have contributed to the disaster—the clichéd words for many rang hollow. 

Thou Shalt Not Kill

 Trump of course on the campaign trail never once hesitated to blame a natural catastrophe on a Democrat—no matter how brazenly he had to lie to do it. 

But now that 100 people are dead in Texas from a flood on his watch—he suddenly talks about the importance of never "politicizing tragedy." 

Trumpublican

 Well, so Trump ultimately signed his big abominable bill into law—and all in time for his self-imposed July 4 deadline. And after it happened, Jamelle Bouie made a good point over on the New York Times op-ed page: what is most striking about it is just what a blandly predictable sort of Republican bill it is. It's horrible to be sure—a disaster on multiple fronts. But it's disastrous in all the ways that Republican governance usually is. 

Bouie's point is that Trump's weirdness tends to distract from all the ways he is also just a typically awful Republican president. We focus so much on all the eccentric and bombastic ways he is terrible—that we tend to miss the ways in which he is also just ordinarily terrible. On top of all the unique ways in which he is awful, he is also just a Republican. And fundamentally, what that always means—when push comes to shove—is that he will cut taxes for the rich. 

Wide Range of Interests

A close friend who's also a new parent texted me the other day to confess—somewhat shamefacedly—that he was really struggling with the lifestyle of raising a newborn. The message couldn't have been more timely for me: I had just spent a long holiday weekend with my family on extended childcare duty. Usually, as an uncle, I have the easiest task in the family—I can sign off whenever and go home. But an exception arose this week since my brother-in-law has been recovering from surgery. 

What strikes me is that we all feel rather guilty about admitting that this much childcare is hard. The kids are a delight, and we love them—so why should this be difficult? My mom expressed to me the other night that she was exhausted; she worried it must be a sign of aging. My friend in his text said something to the effect of: I know I'll look back and treasure these as the good old days, but right now, I just feel FOMO—like I'm missing all the fun things happening online or in the larger world.

The Worst of All Worlds

 We are now a full ten years—as of this summer—into the Trump era. A "low, dishonest decade," if ever there was one (to borrow Auden's phrase). And what has continuously struck me about it—pretty much every day for these past ten years—is how completely different it is from every other political or intellectual controversy in which I took part in the past. 

Every other political argument in which I played a role, however slight (or at least—was aware of at second-hand) was between rival interpretations of the same liberal democratic tradition. I remember the days of the Neoconservatives and the Euston Manifesto and the anti–Iraq War protests. There, one always felt pulled in two directions at once. 

Loutish Laughter and Animal Applause

 Donald Trump led his little Children's Crusade on a gleeful march this week down to the so-called "Alligator Alcatraz"—a new immigration detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which right-wing politicians have openly advertised as a human rights atrocity waiting to happen. Cue the "jokes" from the administration about how no one could escape from it without ending up in the guts of an alligator or a python. Such passes for "humor" under the complete and systematic brutalization of our current political culture. 

I call it the Children's Crusade since it seems to be the Gen Z members of Trump's staff who delight most—second only to the president himself—in this revolting banter. It's the most perfect display one could ask for of what Johan Huizinga once called "Puerilism." It was a trait he saw as endemic to the political culture of 1930s fascism (which in every respect our current far-right rulers seem intent on mimicking). One recognizes its flavor by the unique combination of sophomoric bullying, crude insolence, and inane jugglery.