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. 

The Informer

 The New York Times reports this afternoon: J.D. Vance was apparently interviewed today on Fox. When the hosts asked him what he wanted to see happen to Democratic officials, who purportedly oversaw the 2016 investigation into alleged Trump-Russia ties, he replied: "I absolutely want to see indictments."

It would seem, as Byron once wrote of Southey (after the latter submitted a list to the administration of allegedly "Satanic" fellow writers he wished to see prosecuted for sedition—including Byron), that Vance has set about "adding to his other laurels the ambition of those of an informer." 

The Grand Bargain?

 The fight over partisan gerrymandering in Texas that dominated the headlines this past week has shown another spotlight on just how little protection remains for voting rights in America. Thanks to a 2019 Supreme Court decision, there is essentially no upper limit on how nakedly partisan a gerrymander can be—so long as it does not intentionally target race. 

And now—the New York Times points out this morning—the Court's conservative majority appears poised to weaken these safeguards even further—specifically, by stripping section 2 out of the landmark Voting Rights Act. The result would be that plaintiffs going forward would no longer be able to bring after-the-fact challenges to redistricting maps that dilute minority voting power. 

Makers of Notches

 Back in March, we know that the Trump administration kept two flights in the air after a federal judge specifically ordered them to turn around and come back. We know that the planes were carrying over 200 people whom the administration was trying to deport without any due process whatsoever to a secret prison in El Salvador, where they would be confined in torturous conditions at the U.S. taxpayer's expense.

We know that the administration defied the federal judge's order willfully—maliciously. A whistleblower who worked on the case (and who was certainly no liberal for most of his career) has since come forward to report that one of the Justice Department officials working on the case—Emil Bove—suggested to his underlings that they would need to say "F-- you the the courts" if the latter stood in their way. 

Invaded Again?

 The New York Times just reported—mere minutes ago—that the Trump administration has ordered the U.S. military in secret to conduct lethal operations against drug cartels in Latin America (of course, without Congressional approval—but what else is new, when it comes to U.S. military interventions?)

Almost immediately, the Mexican government issued a public statement saying that they had not approved any such operations in their own territory. They are not working with U.S. forces and have not signed on to any lethal U.S. activities within their borders. 

Threnody for Hiroshima

 In his classic poem "For the Union Dead"—one of the various images that Robert Lowell encounters on his tour through Boston Common in the early 1960s is that of a picture of a mushroom cloud—used as an advertisement for a safe: 

on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast.

Constructive Treason

 Trump would like nothing better than to be able to promulgate ex post facto laws or bills of attainder; to have a special Star Chamber in which the ordinary rules of evidence and due process do not apply—in short, to get away with all the ancient abuses of power of the pre-modern British monarchy that our United States Constitution expressly proscribes. 

His approach to every criminal case is to first figure out the person he wants to accuse of being guilty—and then to go about finding something to charge him with. His hirelings in the administration—Gabbard, e.g.—have spent recent weeks laying the groundwork for a ludicrous prosecution for "treason" against former president Obama, for his purported involvement in the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation (much of which occurred, let us recall, under Trump's own first administration!). Trump's Justice Department has apparently already opened another fishing expedition to buttress these accusations. 

The Anthropocene

 Another disturbing fact reported in that David Wallace-Wells essay I was just writing about in the previous post: there is essentially no such thing anymore as wildlife. At least not as we tend to think of it. 96% of mammalian biomass on the planet—he notes—is now made up of humans and livestock. The animal kingdom, in short, is increasingly composed only of our species—and the animals we farm in order to feed ourselves. Everything else—that flaps or swims or crawls upon the earth—we have destroyed. 

Wallace-Wells uses this statistic—that haunting "96%" datum—as one more reason to think that the "natural world" as such no longer exists. We are living "after nature"—to borrow the name of a poem by W.G. Sebald. One section of Sebald's poem tells the story of Georg Steller, for instance—a hero to science, who brought back some of the first reports from the Russian far east about the previously unknown sea mammals who lived there. 

The Plastocene

 In an essay published early this week in the New York Times, the science writer David Wallace-Wells rattled through some of the more disturbing recent empirical studies about the omnipresence of microplastics in the human environment. 

Wallace-Wells notes that some researchers are now re-examining their laboratory equipment to make sure it is not itself contaminated with microplastics—because, if we take their findings at face value, they show an almost inconceivably high quantity of plastic content in the human brain. 

One Foul Blotch

 The thing about Trump's first administration is that it wasn't exactly lacking in right-wing thugs. Just look at Trump's first two attorneys general! Nor would I have had anything good to say at the time about the kind of people Trump appointed to the federal bench. His judicial appointees in Term 1 were mostly Federalist Society–approved rock-ribbed conservatives—not my kind of people, in short. "How could it get any worse than this?" I would have asked. 

It turns out—it can get a lot worse. There is a lower form of humanity even than a Jeff Sessions or a Bill Barr—who at least had enough respect for the rule of law to recuse themselves from investigations where they had a political conflict of interest; or to decline to parrot the outright falsehoods Trump wanted them to say. Likewise, there is something worse in the world, it turns out, than even the Federalist Society—it's called Emil Bove. 

The Spirit of the Age

 During our current great period of cultural Thermidor, we bear more than a little resemblance to the England of the 1820s. Now, as then, the star of political reaction is in the ascendent. The worst kinds of corruption, abuse, and authoritarianism are welcomed on the political right. And meanwhile, the response from the left has been strangely muted. We are slightly mortified now by what seem like the excesses of an earlier political age of idealism and sweeping plans; and so we feel we have no leg to stand on as we watch our hopes be destroyed and betrayed.  

By the 1820s, most of the British intelligentsia—who had once hailed the French Revolution as the dawning of a new age and the clarion call of the liberation of humankind—had either converted to the cause of reaction and "Legitimacy"—or died or gone abroad. Even those who remained loyal to the cause of "Reform" felt that they could not defend it quite as naively as they had done in the 1790s. So it is with us today: liberals are mostly a tad embarrassed by the language they used just five years ago. All the heroes of 2020 are now either derided on the right or quietly ignored on the left as a sort of family shame. 

I Hail Thee Brother

 In any controversy between Byron and his critics, I will always incline to take Byron's side. And I've said before that one of his most admirable traits as a poet is his sympathy with animals—particularly his justified contempt for the overweening human pride that arrogates to our species "a sole exclusive heaven" and denies the existence of a soul in animal kind. 

He wrote about this most poignantly in his "Epitaph to a Dog." And in his "Cain: A Mystery," one of the reasons he gives for empathizing with humanity's first murderer is that—even if he ends with his brother's blood on his hands—at least his sacrifice to God was not bloody; at least he placed only plant life on the altar, rather than animals. Cain: the first vegetarian. 

What God Abandoned?

 The New York Times reported yesterday that, due to the collapse of any international response to the security crisis in Haiti, the Haitian government has been forced to hire private security contractors (mercenaries, in short) to help fend off the gangs (which really operate in Haiti more like paramilitaries). As one might imagine, it's already going terribly. 

But what choice did Haiti have? The rest of the world has stopped paying attention to the nation's suffering. The much-ballyhooed Kenya-led multinational security mission never amounted to much. 

The Evolution of Ideas

 In his famous book on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn tries at one point to acquit himself of the charge of relativism. It's not—he argues—that he believes scientific advances bear no relationship to truth; it's more that they change through a process akin to natural selection. He encourages us to think of the evolution of thought as much like the evolution of species. 

In much the same way as we have had to jettison the idea of any teleological "evolution" in the natural environment—so too, we should no longer think of ideas as moving along a linear vector of progress. But they do adapt over time through a process of trial-and-error, such that they eventually become more viable—workable—adapted, that is to say—to whatever it is that scientific ideas do. 

Susceptible to the Truth?

 I leaned over to my parents in a movie theater last night, and showed them the headline glowing on my phone. "This is horrible," I said. "Which one?" my mom asked; "the fact that Trump just fired the labor statistics person, or the fact that he just moved a bunch of nuclear submarines into position?"

Really, I could have been talking about either. And the New York Times has a piece out this morning arguing that they are really two facets of the same story. Both reveal that whenever Trump is confronted with stubborn facts he can't control—he acts impulsively to blot them out of existence. 

A Threefold Curse

 As Trump announces another unprovoked round of global tariffs on U.S. trading partners—the Wall Street Journal published a piece today illustrating the devastating effects these new trade barriers are already having on one small country: the African nation of Lesotho. 

Ever since taking office, Trump has seemed to pursue this vulnerable nation with especial sadism. In his first major speech to Congress after returning to power, Trump name-checked Lesotho as one of the places from which he proposed to strip global aid—deriding it as a place "no one had ever heard of."