Kingsblood Royal

 At some point along the way it became fashionable not to take Sinclair Lewis quite seriously as a novelist or social prophet (Nabokov, for instance, once mocked the whole genre of novelistic social criticism to which he belonged as "Upton Lewis"). It becomes clearer by the day, though, that this was a terrible mistake. We need him more than ever. 

His 1947 "race" novel Kingsblood Royal is one of those books I've lugged around on my shelf from apartment to apartment for the last twenty years without actually reading it. I knew roughly the premise of it, and therefore thought I knew its contents—which I found intriguing but not relevant enough to actually bother reading until now. 

Alone Time

 The latest episode of The Argument podcast tackles the great debate over the alleged "loneliness" crisis, with Derek Thompson plumping firmly for the view that Americans are spending too much time alone and it's making us miserable—and the other two co-hosts taking a more ambivalent stance. 

I am in a somewhat odd position on this issue since, intellectually, I've been convinced by the Robert Putnam arguments about declining social capital for years. The fall of in-person "community" was a major topic of discussion in divinity school ten years ago, and probably is still.

La Question

 Yesterday—fourteen years after charges were initially filed in the case—a military judge in Guantanamo finally threw out evidence in the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed case that had been compromised by torture. 

Obviously, this is a setback the government richly deserves. One only wishes the officials responsible for the torture program were being sanctioned in some more lasting way. 

Pudd'nhead Wilson

 The Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson gives voice to the widespread perception that the novel is in some ways a stunted classic—a book that fails to carry through its own profound and intriguing themes to their logical conclusion; preferring instead to accept the cheap victory of becoming a merely mechanical—if satisfying and gripping—detective story. 

But if true, this is precisely part of the genius and power of the novel: because one of its great themes is precisely the stunting of personality under the force of social convention—something Twain himself knew intimately. 

Where the Money Goes

 The news has been dominated this week by two big tales of our current government's colossal self-inflicted economic mismanagement: namely, 1) the rise of the national debt to over $40 trillion; and 2) Trump's renewed trade war with our closest neighbor and biggest trading partner, Canada. 

I've been talking less about the second of these two, in part because I tend to lump these tariff wars into the mental category of the merely inane aspects of Trump's rule—as opposed to the genuinely evil aspects, like his wars and enforced disappearances of innocent people to overseas detention camps. 

Socialism of Fools

 It is rather alarming that at a time when a right-wing would-be authoritarian is actively dismantling all of our democratic institutions and constitutional checks-and-balances, while fighting a needless and illegal war that is driving up the costs of everyday goods, the most politically engaged of our younger generation seem far less interested in any of these things, than they are in what an earlier generation (in the bad old days) would have called, ahem, "the Jewish question." 

What is even stranger is that the new antisemitism does not seem to split along traditional party lines. Rather, it constitutes a new axis in American politics that is dividing both parties' coalitions. 

The Means Test

 The latest episode of the Ezra Klein show starts with a familiar conundrum—the same one we were talking about on this blog just a week ago: namely, why is it that many of the same people who ostensibly stand to benefit most from a progressive economic program are voting against it? 

Why, for instance, have many potential beneficiaries of social programs helped elect a Republican who proceeded to cut food stamps and medicaid—as part of his big budget disaster last summer? Klein's guest on the episode, Annie Lowrey, short-hands this as the "what's the matter with Kansas?" problem. 

Rivals and Borrowers

 The latest episode of the Ezra Klein podcast from last week was devoted to a somewhat panicky discussion of an allegedly impending "China Shock 2.0." 

As Klein and his guest describe it, China is poised to overtake the rest of the world not only in the manufacturing of cheap consumer goods of the sort we associate with the first "China Shock"—but in the industrial production of just about everything else—including the most important "technologies of the future"—EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels—maybe AI and humanoid robots too, to give the more headline-grabbing examples? 

Debt Crisis

 The New York Times ran an opinion piece today hinting at an outside-the-box solution to the problem of our swelling national debt (which notoriously passed the $40 trillion mark this past week): namely, simply cancel it. Refuse to pay. 

The piece points out that ancient civilizations did this all the time. In fact, many of them built some sort of periodic debt jubilee into their calendars. 

Who Cares? It is French!

 There is much that is baffling about Trump's needless unprovoked trade war against our closest neighbor, biggest trading partner, and quondam ally Canada. But perhaps the strangest point yet to emerge is the specific issue over which trade negotiations apparently broke down. 

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared yesterday that he was walking away from trade talks, he said that U.S. negotiators were insisting on concessions that were simply too extreme to be considered, and would implicate fundamental principles of sovereignty. 

A Fool's Errand

 In the final weeks of the Biden administration—shortly before Trump's second inauguration—I recall seeing an opinion piece in Politico. It took the quixotic line that Biden ought to pardon all the January 6 rioters who opposed the certification of his election before the expiration of his term. 

The authors gave essentially two arguments for this seemingly paradoxical course of action: 

1) Trump was going to do it anyway, as soon as he took office; so why should Democrats not steal his thunder and get the credit for magnanimity? 

17,000 Bombs

 The U.S. military has all but admitted at this point that they blew up a school full of children in the opening hours of our ongoing war of aggression against Iran. 

But, having tacitly confessed this much, they claim this incident was wholly unique. There is only "one active civilian casualty investigation from the 13,629 munitions," as one military spokesperson told Congress earlier this year. 

Numidia

 In his historical novel The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler writes at one point about the fate of the Roman exiles who fled the tyranny of Sulla's dictatorship. 

They first sought refuge in Numidia, he says, whose king appeared to welcome them. 

"It turned out, however, that the King of Numidia, who had seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator; for dictator Sulla's power reached far and his thirst for vengeance was unquenchable." 

Bloodline Punishment

 The third article of the U.S. Constitution includes a striking phrase forbidding Congress to "work Corruption of Blood." This was intended to forbid the practice under the old tyrannical kings of punishing children and heirs for the acts of their parents. It therefore appeals to a basic moral intuition: the innocent should not suffer for the deeds of another person.

And yet, right now, there is reportedly an Iranian family—a mother, a father, and a teenage son—being held captive in a detention camp on U.S. soil—all because one of them happens to be the child of someone indirectly involved in the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. 

Voting Against Interest

 The New York Times ran an editorial last week reminding us of the looming Medicaid cuts under Trump's big budget disaster that are set to take effect after the midterms, and which are likely to push millions more low-income Americans off of health insurance. 

These changes come on top of the government's recent failure to extend ACA subsidies, as well as cuts to nutrition assistance that already went into effect last year. 

The Day of Reckoning

 The Bezos-ified Washington Post ran a big scary editorial the other day warning about looming fiscal catastrophe, due to the inexorable rise of government spending and public debt. 

On the one hand, I'm tempted to dismiss this as ideologically-motivated alarmism. (One notices the essay points the finger at entitlement spending but does not mention Trump's tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, e.g.) Besides, people have been saying for years that we are headed for a debt crisis, yet it never actually seems to arrive. 

The Next Dilemma

 In one of the essays in his collection The Trail of the Dinosaur, Arthur Koestler makes the point that many of the historical dilemmas or controversies that once seemed most insoluble were eventually overcome—not because one side or the other at some point "won" the argument—but simply because new problems emerged that made the whole previous debate seem silly. 

The Crusades didn't end because Christianity "beat" Islam or vice versa. So too, Catholics and Protestants never did manage to exterminate one another in Europe's wars of religion—much as they tried. Instead, in both cases, the two sides first fought each other to a stalemate. And it seemed there was no possible exit. But then, new social circumstances arose that made the whole fight seem boring and irrelevant. 

The Gladiators

 Arthur Koestler's The Gladiators is ostensibly a novel about the first century B.C.—Koestler's only "historical" novel, to my knowledge. But it is quite obviously also a novel about the twentieth century. 

Knowing what we do about Koestler's life circumstances and the state of Europe in 1939—when the book was published—this should perhaps not surprise us. 

Gone Forever

Grief comes by strange and circuitous byways. I've written before on this blog about how I broke down in tears the night my dad went into the E.R. after the seizure that racked his body in the final weeks of his battle with brain cancer. But from that day to this, no other tears passed my eyes. I didn't even cry the day he died and they took his body away in a van. Sad as I would inevitably feel at odds moments of the day, I was denied the relief of tears. For months now, I've felt only a strange numbness. 

Until this morning. Seemingly for no reason at all—perhaps just because there was no reason, and nothing else was going on—I suddenly started bawling. 

Vicious

 The New York Times ran an eccentric "man bites dog"–type story yesterday (or, perhaps it is more accurate to say here, a "dog bites man; man smites dog" story) about a 120-pound Anatolian Shepherd named Bruce whose supporters filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court to stay his execution, after a state court had earlier judged him to be incorrigibly "vicious" and ordered him put down. 

Given that the Supreme Court routinely allows human beings to be killed in state and federal death chambers across the country, year after year, it should perhaps not surprise us that they failed to intervene in this case to stop Bruce's euthanasia. Indeed, it would in many ways be grotesque if they had allowed the dog to live when they have not bothered to do as much for so many men and women. 

Still Dos Passos's U.S.A.

 One of my reading projects for the summer has been to finish John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy, and I just did last night. There are obviously many things one could say about an epic of that scale, but what came to mind for me in reading the last volume of the trilogy (The Big Money), was that our 2020s are coming to resemble very much the 1920s of a century ago that Dos Passos describes. We are still Dos Passos's America—and not in a good way. 

The trilogy as a whole is an elegy for the "lost republic" of Jeffersonian democracy, to use Dos Passos's phrase—the "storybook democracy" of Walt Whitman, as he elsewhere calls it. Beginning with a sympathetic depiction of I.W.W. labor radicalism at the turn of the century, Dos Passos charts the inexorable rise of big business and the dulling of conscience and moral values, as people find themselves duped into a needless war in Europe that is then cynically exploited by business interests. 

Burrito-Logic

 Meanwhile, as the left is converging on a new agenda defined by economic and affordability issues (to the chagrin of people like me who still think things like racism, refugee rights, trans rights, police violence, etc. are also important and need to be talked about)—the right seems to be trying to head in the opposite direction. 

To be sure, plenty of Republicans and even some "MAGA" bros keep urging Trump to focus on gas and food prices. Yet, pundits who support Trump's actual policies, like attacking Iran and imposing trade barriers on the rest of the world, have to argue that voters should just suck it up and tolerate a certain amount of economic pain for the sake of the administration's cultural and power politics goals. 

A Pillar of Salt

 Just my luck that all the progressive DSA-backed candidates I found most annoying or wrongheaded seem to have won their primary campaigns this cycle; whereas I was finally starting to warm to Francesca Hong in Wisconsin—and now she's the only one that's lost.

Hong was an interesting case since she seemed to get backlash from all sides. 

"Moderates" and party establishment types predictably warned that her views were too far left to win a general election—and perhaps they're right about that. 

Cuba Libre?

 The New York Times's new reporting today on the administration's lawless renditions to Eswatini has to be seen to be believed. 

I have known for at least a year that the administration is kidnapping and deporting people to secret prisons in war-torn autocracies in Africa—effectively a form of enforced disappearance. 

In My Dreams

 I woke up in the middle of the night last night after a particularly vivid dream—probably the result of eating too much pizza at dinner (melted cheese being understood since Victorian times to be a source of intense dreaming—most likely for lactose intolerance reasons). 

In the dream, Donald Trump had just taken over the organization where I work, and was now serving as CEO. I guess he was paying an in-person visit for some sort of team-building exercise, because we were all seated outside around a conference table. Trump had a personal calendar open before him, and was trying to rally the troops. 

He seemed to be confused about why team morale had been so low since his takeover. 

Two Versions of the Right

 You'd think just reading a mainstream newspaper would be enough on its own to make one acquainted with the depths of depravity in the Trump administration. But sometimes, one catches a glimpse of the alternative media ecosystem in which the American MAGA right lives, and one sees that the abyss is even deeper than one could have imagined. 

Today, for instance, I was trying to look up news reports about the TPS designation for Somalia, when I stumbled upon a press release from some evangelical group. They were applauding a MAGA representative for drawing up articles of impeachment against Judge Allison Burroughs for daring to pause Trump's termination of Somali refugees' legal status under the TPS program. 

"Send Me"?

 A recent article in the Intercept reports that the Pentagon has begun to use overt references to scripture in its online recruiting. One recent ad from the U.S. military prominently features the phrase "Send Me" over images of soldiers gearing up for battle. 

And if this sounds ambiguous to most of us, a Pentagon spokesperson went on to quote a full passage from Isaiah that uses the phrase; and the official "Department of War" accounts reportedly re-shared that post in turn. 

Leave it to the Trump administration to eliminate any shade of subtlety. 

Masters of Modern Thought

 Ross Douthat published his swan song at the New York Times yesterday—his final column for the paper before heading off into the sunset of Bari Weiss–controlled media. It was a fitting capstone to his career at the Times, in that it summed up a central motif of much of his writing there: namely: I'm not sure who's right, but I know I'm mad about it. 

For years, Douthat has been telling us that, as a conservative Catholic intellectual, he is against liberalism.

But he also knows that most of the illiberal alternatives on offer are not rationally or morally defensible. 

Data Centers

 In a podcast interview earlier this week about the current populist backlash against AI data centers, Jasmine Sun and Ezra Klein started off by trying to explain what it is like to actually live in the vicinity of one of these facilities. "What do they sound like?" Klein asked. Sun replied: "they sound like humming, buzzing, whirring."

B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R!

What are the machines saying, a hundred of them in one long room?

They must be talking to themselves, for I see no one else for them to talk to.

Ceuta

 The arrival earlier this week of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers in Ceuta (a Spanish territory in North Africa) obviously gave the global far-right an issue they could demagogue for days. Extreme rightists on both sides of the Atlantic (including, of course, people in and close to our own U.S. government), who have been framing nonwhite immigration as an "invasion" all along, could flaunt viral images of the desperate sea of humanity and say: "see!? this is what happens as soon as you elect a leftist government! They open the borders!"

That much—alas—is expected at this point. 

Proletarian Voters?

 The "dirtbag" stream of the Left seems to be taking a victory lap after the results were finally announced in the Senate Democratic primary election in Michigan yesterday. They view Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's win as a vindication of the whole macho, aggro, "up yours" brand of politics they have been wanting to see take over the Left for a long time. 

"Chuck Schumer Eats Shit," was Ken Klippenstein's headline yesterday, responding to these events. So much for that "now is the time for everyone to come together and focus on the general election" speech that El-Sayed gave yesterday. 

Primary Season

 I sometimes feel I must be the last Democratic voter in the country who has not been obsessing over the primary election in Michigan. I have no strong feelings about who should win, and mostly just want this contest to be over so we can focus on what seems to me the bigger issue here: namely, that Donald Trump and a supine Republican majority are dismantling our democracy.

When I awoke this morning to see that the race was still deadlocked, I let out a groan: this—the lack of a resolution—was the only possible outcome I distinctly did not want. 

Successive Degrees of Unfreedom

 I'm sorry to keep going on about André Brink's A Dry White Season. But I wish that our government wouldn't keep proving my point for me that it feels more and more by the day that we are living in a political situation very much like the one he depicts in the novel. 

The book is about apartheid South Africa—and everyone knows these days that apartheid South Africa was an authoritarian state. 

Neurotic Cinderellas

 The other week, Stephen Miller delivered a characteristically bizarre speech at a terrorism conference hosted by the State Department. He and Marco Rubio are obviously dreaming up some neo-McCarthyite campaign against the Left—so far with limited success. 

But what I really found interesting was the moment Stephen Miller tried to psychoanalyze his opponents: 

The leftist is fundamentally motivated by envy, by hatred, by jealousy.  The leftist looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred.  The leftist looks at a perfect family with a perfect life and a perfect job and perfect kids that goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet. [...] 

Swift on War and Alliances

 Since we are still apparently stuck in the middle of Trump's illegal, futile, and endless war on Iran, I turned to Jonathan Swift's 1711 anti-war tract, The Conduct of the Allies, in the hope that it might have some wisdom to teach our present generation. 

Alas, I found the essay far less ideologically congenial than I had hoped. Swift's pamphlet argues in favor of a treaty over the continuance of war, but it is far from a pacifist tract. Indeed, Swift offers essentially no humanitarian arguments against war. Instead, his arguments rest almost entirely on appeals to gut-level selfishness and the pocket-book. (And I remind you what Mencius had to say about that.)

A 2,000-Pound Bomb

 Trump is very obviously telegraphing his desire at this point to wriggle out of the war he started with Iran. But that doesn't mean he won't still commit various crimes and obscenities in his flailing efforts to do so.

One of those obscenities was plastered across the front of the New York Times yesterday. A visual analysis from the paper showed an enormous crater where had once stood a family home. Three people reportedly died in the strike: a mother, a father, and their two-year-old child. 

A Dry White Season

 I finished reading André Brink's classic 1979 novel A Dry White Season today. My admiration for it grew the deeper into it I read. At its opening, the book seems set to be made of rather unpromising materials. But it gathers to a peak of enormous emotional power by its final pages. 

Brink's book is obviously a classic story about politics and injustice, apartheid and authoritarianism. 

Split Consciousness

 I was writing in another place and context the other day about Elon Musk's disturbing pattern of extremist far-right rhetoric lately—his talk of the need to "deal with," as he puts it, "traitors and invaders"—by which he appears to mean immigrants and liberals who support welcoming policies. 

I said something at the end of the piece along the lines of: "fortunately, we're still a long ways from Elon's neo-fascist vision being realized. We don't yet have neo-Nazi thugs patrolling the streets murdering and lynching nonwhite immigrants and liberals..." etc. 

Apartheid States

 The analogy that has become very common to draw in recent years between Israel and apartheid South Africa has always been imprecise. Arab people living in Israel's 1948 borders have rights of citizenship. They vote in Israel's elections and send representatives to the Knesset. 

Indeed, if Israel were still limited to its 1948 borders today, it would be a straightforward democracy. A flawed and unequal democracy in many ways, to be sure—but then, what democracy isn't? (Our own democracy here in the States, one may have noticed, is not doing so hot.)

The Death Chamber

 My home state of Florida executed two people yesterday—reportedly the first time that has happened in the state since 1964. 

The first of these two state-sponsored killings made it easy to see the futility and inhumanity of the death penalty in all its barbarism. 

Trump's Vision of Judgment

 A recent Daily Kos headline reads: "Trump only 'pretty sure' Lindsey Graham is in heaven."

The reference was to Trump's eulogy yesterday for the departed senator. Apparently the full quote was: "I think I know where he is, and I think he’s up there. I think he’s watching us. I’m pretty sure of it."

His Prominence

 For some reason, the name of Cecil Rhodes still connotes the utmost in prestige in our society. Elite students still scramble over themselves each year to secure a Rhodes Scholarship—despite the fact that it is named for a man who effectively stole a bunch of land in South Africa, dispossessed its inhabitants, reduced them to a system of virtual slavery, and governed for years as a capitalist dictator. 

Surely here is proof of that old truism—remarked by Henry Fielding among others—that if a swindler only swindle on a large enough scale; a robber only rob enough territory; a murderer only kill enough people—he will cease to be condemned as a criminal and start to be sanctified as a statesman. For "power has never lacked eulogists" (Elias Canetti; Stewart trans.). 

High T–Roosevelt?

 A recent piece in the Intercept traces Pete Hegseth's obsession with testosterone levels—and other manifestations of masculine insecurity—to a lifelong desire to model himself on Teddy Roosevelt. 

The writer, Nick Turse, includes an anecdote from early in Hegseth's military career: "Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt."

The Best Thing

 The Wall Street Journal published a pretty remarkable story yesterday based on unreleased footage from an upcoming Lindsey Graham documentary. Apparently, it shows just how closely involved Graham was in cheerleading and directly inspiring Trump's Iran war. 

By the Journal's account, both men took an unsettlingly personal delight in the destruction and mayhem they had unleashed. In the war's opening days—when as we now know a U.S. Tomahawk missile annihilated an Iranian school and took the lives of more than a hundred children—Graham and Trump were crowing together over the TV images of their fiery handiwork. 

Motley of Satire

 I was writing in the previous post about what I called the "counter-tradition" of European and American writers who criticized imperialism. What strikes me though about reading the examples of this counter-tradition in Sven Lindqvist's book—and in the separate examples I assembled—is how often these writers felt the need to present their criticism in the indirect form of sarcasm. 

The result is that I need to provide a whole paragraph of context, lest the contemporary reader get the false impression that Mark Twain actually meant it, say, when he wrote that "the world belongs to [...] the white man." 

In Every Land He Slayeth

 Everyone knows that European nations brutally colonized and subjugated much of the rest of humanity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and—through a combination of disease, war, enslavement, dispossession and deliberate genocide—pushed many human communities around the globe to the point of near-extinction. 

Everyone knows this—so what's the point of thinking about it now? What's the point, specifically, of revisiting Sven Lindqvist's 1992 book, "Exterminate All the Brutes"—about the history of European colonial genocides? 

Senior Thesis

 Even back during college I was very committed to defending the liberal project. But I took a kind of grudging interest at the time in various "communitarian" and "traditionalist" critiques of liberalism and modernity. I thought they might be onto something; I thought liberalism could learn or gain something from them; and I went out of my way to vindicate them from charges of necessarily leading to authoritarian illiberalism. 

I even devoted an entire 40-page B.A. thesis, about the history of fascist ideology, to attempting to draw an overfine distinction between religious conservatives and traditionalists, on the one hand, and genuine fascists on the other. 

Mahdi Against Mahdi

 Trump was back to threatening war crimes against Iran this week. As he fumes about the fact that the war of aggression he started is not working out well for him, he has vowed to begin blowing up Iranian civilian infrastructure—unless they agree to let Trump walk away from this war of his own making and restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz that prevailed before he started bombing. 

Nor is this the only recent sign that we are heading back into full-scale war. In response to the deaths of four U.S. service members, Trump declared on social media that "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over." 

Be a Bourne

 Three more Americans died this week because of Trump's utterly needless and unjustifiable war of aggression in Iran. 

As Thomas Hardy wrote of another pointless colonial war—this one at the turn of the century: 

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,

A mouldering soldier lies—your countryman [...]

Revisiting Benda

 I finally finished Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals (La trahison des clercs) this week. The book has sat on my shelf unread and followed me through various moves for at least a decade—perhaps almost two—so I feel a certain sense of accomplishment in getting around to it at long last—even if the book is not that long and can be read in a day or two. 

My copy dates from a 2007 print run, and comes complete with an introduction by Roger Kimball, of The New Criterion and National Review fame—which feels very of its moment. These were the grand old days of bow-tie-wearing right-wing "intellectuals"—and there was something of a vogue among neoconservatives for Benda specifically. 

Our Muste Moment?

 Norman Mailer writes at one point in The Armies of the Night that, whatever else the Vietnam War did, it brought the American Left back together again. 

For the decades before the war, after all, the Left had fractured down the middle over the issue of communism and the Soviet Union. "Consider a countdown of the punches," Mailer writes; "famine in the Ukraine; Moscow trials; Hitler-Stalin pact; slave-labor camps; Cold War"—and on. 

Imperfect Democracy vs. Perfect Tyranny

 For my sins, I still occasionally check in on that podcast I was ranting about a few weeks ago—the one that features a couple of leftist bros I used to admire from the good old days of the fight against the neocons. 

This time, they were out with a new episode reporting on a bunch of corruption scandals and mob hits in Ukraine (some with shadowy alleged ties to state security forces), which they claim are being under-reported in the Western press. 

What Would Macdonald Do?

 Back in the late'40s, when he was slowly divesting himself of his earlier pacifism and becoming a reluctant Cold Warrior, Dwight Macdonald felt called upon to explain in print whether there was any daylight now between his position and that of President Truman. 

Macdonald explained that there still was; and it consisted chiefly in the fact that the means by which the U.S. government proposed to prosecute the Cold War were wrong, in his view—because they would make enemies of those he called "the chief victims of Stalin's system"—"namely the people of Russia." 

Jus in bello

 The recent death of Lindsey Graham prompted me to recall that ugly episode from the early weeks after the October 7 massacre, when he appeared to justify the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza in retaliation. 

In one interview, Graham was asked: "Is there a threshold for you, and do you think there should be one for the United States government in which the U.S. would say let’s hold off for a second in terms of civilian casualties?" 

Newts and Abundance

 The other day, Matt Yglesias was complaining about environmentalist NIMBY voters in Britain who were blocking some new housing development because it would imperil an endangered variety of newts. "Who cares about newts???" he demanded to know. 

Another writer called him out for this comment, and Yglesias writes in a follow-up post that he was perhaps being a bit glib when he wrote that. He was "mouth[ing] off," he admits, and it was bad form. 

What Can We DO About It?

 Earlier this week, a group of nearly 200 economists and businesspeople signed an open letter on the future of AI, entitled "We Must Act Now." 

The statement is a model of strategic ambiguity—that sort of deliberate fuzziness as to key details that is often required to reach a consensus viewpoint that a large committee of people might be willing to get behind. 

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy

 The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is one of these classic and famous books that's just faintly disappointing once you actually get around to reading it. I came to it knowing that it was supposed to be the definitive critique of U.S. foreign policy that launched the whole genre of New Left historiography. I found it instead to be somewhat leaden and clumsy in its prose, and basically focused on the wrong questions. 

To be sure, the core of William Appleman Williams's thesis is inarguable. The basic "tragedy" of American foreign policy, as he sees it, is that our nation proclaimed the ideals of self-determination and anti-colonialism, but then we lived to contradict them. 

Graham, Revisited

 In yesterday's post, after devoting about 75% of the piece to expounding all the good reasons to despise Lindsey Graham—I ended by admitted that, in spite of everything, I always sort of liked him. 

It was seemingly hard not to. Even during Biden's last State of the Union speech in 2024, he at one point made some inside joke and pointed at Graham. "Lindsey knows what I'm talking about," he said. Cut to a shot of Graham giggling in the audience. 

Lindsey Graham

 By any reasonable standards, Lindsey Graham—the Republican Senator from South Carolina who died over the weekend—was a pretty terrible person. 

He knew exactly who and what Donald Trump was. In his own short-lived bid for the White House in 2016, Graham correctly diagnosed Trump as a "xenophobe" and a "bigot." Graham's own policy views obviously inclined him to the paradoxical mix of warmongering neocon hawkism and genuine patriotic idealism that motivated a figure like John McCain—in other words, the polar opposite of a corrupt transactionalist like Trump. 

The Folly of Despotism

 My post the other day about Albert O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests ended with something of a cliffhanger, so I wanted to swing back around to revisit it now. 

As Hirschman documents extensively in that book, early modern political thinkers were fundamentally concerned with the question of how to curb more effectively the human propensity to violence and despotism—given that mere "moralistic exhortation" had at best proved ineffective (and at worst had itself inflamed the tendency to persecution and war). 

The American Peril

 Two days ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Donald Trump in the midst of the ongoing war in the Middle East. 

What?! Assassinate our head of state in the midst of ongoing negotiations? 

Oh, you mean—exactly what we just did to them about four months ago? 

The Heel-Turn

 I was listening to the latest episode of the Rational Security podcast yesterday, and they devoted a segment to reporting that Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney and fixer turned critic, has now apparently changed his mind for a second time and become a Trump loyalist again. 

For those who missed the intervening change of heart, Cohen at one point renounced his friendship with Trump and said in effect that he regretted ever knowing him. Indeed, Cohen notably testified against Trump at his New York trial. 

Let Them Be Left

 The New York Times ran a story yesterday whose headline says it all: "Trump, Ending Decades of Protection, Opens Wild Habitats to Drilling and Mining." 

Even without reading the article I could have guessed what, specifically, he had done. Back in law school, I recall reading the 1995 Supreme Court case that dealt with the definition of the term "harm" in the Endangered Species Act. 

The Passions and the Interests

 As I've argued before on this blog, the core challenge for every modern society—regardless of its political structure—is how to get large numbers of genetically-unrelated strangers to cooperate with one another in complex enterprises for long periods of time. In order to achieve this seemingly miraculous feat, as I've pointed out, states tend to rely on some mix of three basic motivators: coercion (Max Weber's "organized violence"), economic self-interest, and voluntary altruism (a.k.a. morality). 

A key objection to capitalism and market society from their inception has been that they rely too heavily on the second of these three motives, at the expense of the third. As Marx and Engels put it, capitalism had reduced human relations to nothing but "callous 'cash payment.'" Thomas Carlyle famously made the same critique, warning against the "cash nexus" becoming the sole basis of human society.  

Paragraph Nineteen

 A truly jaw-dropping report from the Associated Press yesterday describes a lawsuit now pending, which alleges Trump administration officials actively colluded with the Iranian government to repatriate Iranian asylum-seekers who feared torture, death, and persecution at the hands of that same government.  

These are people who, for one reason or another, refused to accept the rule of the Islamic Republic. They had the courage to come to the United States to try to escape the repression and authoritarianism of their home government (a government that, let us recall, still routinely does things like hang dissidents or sentence women to be beaten for appearing in public with bare shoulders). 

Left YIMBYs and Left NIMBYs

 This time last year, the must-read book of the summer was Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance. A manifesto for a certain type of West Coast liberal, the book staked out a clear and well-articulated position within one of the emerging quadrants of our current four-way political divide over local zoning and development policy. 

Suppose we imagine a grid. On one axis, we have the YIMBYs vs. the NIMBYs. But within each of these groups, there is a left/right divide. And so, we need another axis: left vs. right. And so, there are right YIMBYs and left YIMBYs, right NIMBYs and left NIMBYS. 

Establishment and Progressive

 In the midst of the ongoing fallout from the Graham Platner controversy, I received a mass email from a progressive group aligned with Bernie Sanders. They formally withdrew their endorsement of Platner—but then fiercely underlined that this must not be read as an "opening for the Establishment," and that they would continue to fight for a "progressive" candidate for Maine. 

As so often in these debates, the militant fury of this message seemed so disproportionate to the inciting cause. I have never been able to discover what actual policy difference—if any—separates the "progressives" from the "moderates" in Maine Democratic politics. 

Davy Crockett Was a Whig Op!

Our standard mental image of Davy Crockett is as the ultimate backwoodsman—a coonskin cap–wearing populist who embodied all the visual tropes of the age of Jacksonian Democracy. 

There's just one odd thing: the historical Davy Crockett wasn't a Jacksonian Democrat. He was a Whig. 

Right-Wing Fellow Travelers

 I was fleetingly curious yesterday to see what Trump had found to talk about in his 250th anniversary speech—given that all the traditional themes of our American civic religion are off-limits to him. He can't talk about how we're a nation of immigrants—since we are apparently no longer proud of this, and Trump is trying to undo the fact. He can't talk about how our history represents a gradual unfolding of greater rights and justice, since here too: Trump is trying to reverse this trajectory. 

So when it comes time for Trump to celebrate two and a half centuries of American history, I wondered, what would he find to say? 

A Crawling Prosperity

 We all recall that disgraceful ruere in servitium—dubbed at the time the "Great Accommodation" — that followed Trump's second election and the start of his second term—when formerly Trump-critical billionaires stepped forward one by one to "bend the knee," as people called it at the time. 

Mark Zuckerberg went—seemingly overnight—from a liberal donor who backed immigration causes to a chain-wearing Trumpophile who described the president as "badass"; the head of Palantir went from endorsing Kamala Harris to being a right-wing zealot who makes excuses for Trump's extrajudicial killings in even less time. 

Compromise, That Old Serpent

 The other day on his Substack, Matt Yglesias was writing about how all the DSA progressives who have recently been winning primary elections are 99% indistinguishable from their "establishment" rivals, except that they use the word "oligarchy" and are even more mad at Israel. 

Ha! I thought; Zing! Pow! Good one!

Both sides of the Democratic civil war in the blue state primaries, he argues, are "well to the left of the median voter" already. Neither of them—establishment nor DSA "populist"—is actually making the pivot to the center that will be needed to win elections. 

Trans Athletes

 The Supreme Court's decision in the trans student athletes case got kind of buried in the headlines earlier this week, since it was released the same morning as the surprisingly reassuring birthright citizenship decision. 

I went back to look up the opinion last night, though, and it really is a nasty little piece of work that probably would have received more attention, had the Court not released such a blockbuster positive ruling on the same day. 

Rolling in Riches

 So, by the latest news accounts, Trump's meme coin turned out to be exactly the pyramid scheme it looked like. According to the New York Times yesterday, Trump's crypto business followed the classic life cycle of most such financial scams. 

The token first skyrocketed in value—leading on many innocent people to risk their savings on an investment in the coin. By now, however, it has apparently lost between 80 to 97% of its peak value. 

"New and Great Friends"

 So I guess now the Trump administration is blatantly blocking the Venezuelan opposition leader's efforts to return to her own country in order to help with earthquake relief—presumably because we find it more convenient to have the country's current authoritarian leader govern without elections indefinitely, so long as she remains in effect a U.S. puppet. 

In case anyone was still wondering whether that commando raid on Maduro was really about "supporting Venezuelan democracy"—here's your answer. The same government that kidnapped Maduro is now so wedded to his successor regime that we won't even help the country's democratic opposition set foot in her homeland in the midst of a catastrophic earthquake. 

Betrayal of Everyone and Everything

 Bret Stephens wrote the other week that Donald Trump is a man "whose very essence is betrayal of everyone and everything." I don't always agree with Stephens—particularly not on the wisdom of going to war with Iran—but I agree with him here. 

Trump betrayed the people of Venezuela by first disingenuously claiming to want to "free" them from Maduro—and then partnering up with his no less authoritarian successor regime, sidelining the Venezuelan democratic opposition, deporting Venezuelan asylum-seekers to torture prisons, and canceling Temporary Protected Status for the country. 

The Day The Anarchists Were Sentenced in Texas

 Last week, an arch-conservative federal judge in Texas handed down a combined total of prison sentences stretching into centuries for the Prairieland defendants—many of whom had done nothing worse than wear black while attending a protest, or otherwise engage in what ought to be plainly First Amendment–protected activities. 

At the shortest end of the spectrum, one of the defendants received a sentence of 30 years in prison for transporting a box of anarchist zines. Prosecutors used this as evidence of a motive to "obstruct" the investigation. But the box contained material that ought to be shielded by the First Amendment anyway. Surely there's nothing criminal about possessing or reading anarchist literature. So how could hiding it be evidence of any criminal conspiracy? 

The Nixon Comparison

 J.D. Vance made headlines this week by comparing his own administration to Nixon's. In making this historical analogy, the Vice President perhaps "builded better than he knew." 

Let's see, we have an unpopular foreign war that the United States has basically already lost but can't get out of...

We have a corrupt president who has effectively weaponized the Justice Department and turned into a tool to advance his personal vendettas against political foes and the media...

Incentives

 There is a certain gap in socialist thinking, and I've never understood—despite a lifetime of reading leftist authors and identifying personally with the left—exactly how it is supposed to be bridged. Simply put, it's the familiar problem of "incentives." 

Historically, most socialist governments have arisen in underdeveloped countries that want to industrialize. Elected socialists have not been willing to accept an equality of poverty and call it socialism. 

Bullying Russia?

 All week long I've been complaining on this blog about leftists who strangely feel the need to make excuses for Putin—even though the Russian autocrat does not himself identify in any visible way with the Left, and even though the global far-right (viz. Tucker, e.g.) have meanwhile embraced Putin's regime as one of their own. 

And lo, as soon as I was ranting about this phenomenon, it was back in the headlines yesterday. The victory of Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York's House Democratic primaries has drawn attention to some of her old controversial Tweets. One of them, which was still raising eyebrows this week, came from the start of the 2022 Ukraine war. 

Skeptic Knights

 I spent a whole morning earlier this week arguing on this blog with a podcast by a group of Putin apologists. I know already that some people reading this will skim through it and say: "Why bother? Why waste your breath on a bunch of 'Russian disinformation'"? 

But that seems a bit glib. And it occurs to me that this is the reason why pro-Putin propaganda tends to stick, and why it continues to exert a strange allure for parts of the Left—even long after the Russian government has ceased to identify itself in any way with the Left, and even after the global neo-fascist right has embraced Putin's cause as their own. 

74 lashes

 Trump's bombing of Iran was a flagrantly illegal act of aggression that was bound to blow up in his face, and lo, that's exactly what happened. Trump deserved to have his ass handed to him in this war, in short. And so, there are moments when one can almost feel a sneaking appreciation for the Islamic Republic of Iran—if only for teaching him such an obvious yet apparently much-needed lesson. 

As a correction to this tendency, it's healthy to remind ourselves every few days that the Islamic Republic is still a brutal theocracy that regularly hangs, tortures, and flogs its own citizens. They are not the good guys here, even if hauling off and attacking them in violation of the UN Charter was not a moral, lawful, helpful, or prudent way to respond to their misdeeds. 

Scales of Justice

 The Supreme Court released five opinions today—none of which was among the most high-profile and closely-watched cases of the remaining term. Nevertheless, they were quite revealing in their own way about the state of our legal system. 

Four of the five decisions today were issued with 6-3 partisan splits. And three of the five dealt in some manner with the question of who is and who is not immune to a lawsuit. 

Pues viva la democracia

 In just the first six months of this year, Trump has started two baseless wars of aggression on opposite sides of the globe—in both cases against admittedly authoritarian governments that the administration claims to disapprove of. 

You might think, among all this needless carnage, that one possible silver lining might be that the U.S. would at least make common cause with Venezuelan and Iranian dissidents and political prisoners, in whose name these wars were ostensibly fought. Weren't we going in to "liberate" the people from their oppressive governments, after all? 

Red/Brown

 I was listening to a podcast on a road trip this weekend that broadly aligns with the "alt-left"/"dirtbag left" school of thought.  There has never been a great single all-encompassing name for these people (John Ganz has called them the "anti-alarmist" left, since they tend to reject comparisons of MAGA to fascism), but you know the type I mean. 

Many of them emerged out of the great crusade against Bush-era neoconservatism (in which they were on the right side), but sometime around 2014 or so, they seem to have concluded that because they were against America's abuses of power, they must be for Putin's and the PRC's. 

A Voice with a Smile of Democracy

[...] the voice-with-a-smile of democracy

announces night & day

"all poor little peoples that want to be free

just trust in the u s a"—

So wrote E.E. Cummings bitterly in 1956—after the U.S. had first encouraged Hungary to rise up and throw off its Soviet overlords—and then had ignobly abandoned the country to destruction at the hands of Soviet tanks. 

A Thousand Eyes

 According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel's far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had this to say on social media yesterday about the country's ongoing military operations in Lebanon (which now threaten to derail talks with Iran yet again):

"For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!"

Um, excuse me, but—what??

Burnt Along With the Altars

 The news reports of the Russian strikes that apparently left an historic Ukrainian cathedral in flames earlier this week brought to mind for me that awful passage in Nikolai Gogol's Taras Bulba, in which the Cossack general rampages through Poland, burning churches and slaughtering those who seek shelter within them. 

With barely disguised sadistic relish, Gogol describes the hideous vengeance Taras exacts on the Poles. He "did not even spare the dark-browed Polish beauties," Gogol writes, "[...] who found no refuge, not even in churches as they clung to altars. Taras ordered them to be burnt along with the altars." (Constantine trans.)

The Chameleon

 Everyone knows how J.D. Vance reinvented himself for the Trump era—going from the NPR-listening public's favorite "hillbilly"-whisperer—and frequent Trump critic—to the president's favorite lapdog (not to mention one of the world's most prominent ideologists for the new wave of radical right populism/white nationalism/neo-fascism sweeping the globe).  

Once it became clear that white supremacism and Nazi-curious Groyperism were the hip new thing in the Republican party—and the fastest way to rise in Trump's political movement—Vance had no trouble abandoning his earlier assessment of Trump as a "demagogue" and adopting the new far-right "nationalist" talking points as his own. 

The Shades

 My family and I just got back from a week in Michigan, where we were mostly insulated from the daily reminders of the tragedy we had just been through, as my dad died from cancer. 

Now that I'm in Florida again, though, I'm definitely back in the presence of the shades. Every place I go in the house or the neighborhood reminds me of some awful, or sometimes sweet, scene from the last four months. 

Testosterone

 After the spectacle of the UFC cage-fighting on the White House lawn yesterday—not to mention Elon Musk's debut as the world's first trillionaire, in the same week he was personally egging on a lynch mob in Belfast to burn asylum-seeking families out of their homes—you might think that more brain-dead testosterone is the last thing this society needs. 

You might think, in such a world, that mindless, infantile masculine posturing is "the one thing a man has had too much of," to borrow a phrase out of context from D.H. Lawrence. 

A Roman Holiday at the White House

 Trump's UFC face-smashing party on the White House lawn last night catered to a long-running sadistic interest of his in blood sports. I was reminded of an earlier news cycle in which he mused about segregating martial arts leagues by immigration status and pitting undocumented people against U.S. citizens to fight each other for his amusement. 

In short, this is a man who gets off on the idea of other men bloodying their faces, while he looks on from a position of safety—like the Roman emperors of old watching a gladiatorial game. 

Pagan MAGA

 The endless social media flame wars that define our modern politics gave us one piece of nastiness last week that I thought was unintentionally revealing. Stephen Miller said something gross and mean about Senate candidate James Talarico. 

The official Democratic Party account clapped back at him by calling him "ugly." (You see what I mean about this not being exactly our most lofty and inspiring moment in national politics?)

A Painless Death?

 The Supreme Court unexpectedly did the right thing yesterday when they granted a zero-hour reprieve to a death row inmate in Alabama, sparing his life (if only temporarily) from imminent execution by nitrogen gas. 

The case prompted a surreal back-and-forth in the lower courts, though, about just how painless the various available methods of execution in American prisons might be. 

Irish Avatar

 Seeing the reports of the race riots in Northern Ireland yesterday—in which gangs of masked men burned Black and immigrant families out of their homes, like something out of a turn-of-the-century pogrom, or the 1921 Tulsa massacre—I thought of John Berryman's words: "culture was only a phase/ through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/ to the true light again of savagery."

There's something particularly heartbreaking about seeing this evil in Northern Ireland, which has known its share of violence, persecution, and oppression before, and ought to make common cause with its victims. Byron wrote in his poem "The Irish Avatar" that he could only be glad that the heroes of Ireland's freedom struggle past were no longer alive to see what the country had come to. 

Boats and Men

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy last weekend to commemorate the D-Day landings. In a tortured metaphor, he yet again echoed this administration's standard racist talking point that today's nonwhite migrants and refugees are staging an "invasion" of Western Europe. 

"Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies," Hegseth intoned. "Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

The Weak Suffer as They Must?

 Yaroslav Trofimov writes today in the Wall Street Journal about how the "weaker" countries around the globe seem to be putting up a surprisingly good defense to the aggression of great powers.

Back at the start of the second Trump term, Trofimov notes, the phrase on everyone's lips was the one from Thucydides: "The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must." We thought we were back in the era of naked conquest, imperialism, and social Darwinism. As Stephen Miller notoriously put it in an interview: "We live in a world, in the real world [...] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power."

The Literary Underground

 As someone with a law degree and professional writing/communications work experience, I occasionally get alerts on my LinkedIn page from robo-recruiters offering hourly contracts to train AI models to wield my own skill set. 

Apparently I'm not unique in this. A recent article in Wired says it's an open secret among screenwriters that the only way to pay the bills now is by picking up some extra income on the side teaching AI how to do their jobs for them. 

Hegseth the Pétainiste

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy over the weekend to deliver a D-Day speech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he used the occasion—ostensibly commemorating the time U.S. troops liberated Europe from fascism—to pointedly amplify the talking points of European fascists. 

Specifically, he implied that non-white immigrants to the continent are "invaders." Today, he said, "different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

The Sacred Texts

 I am remembering why I like Walter Kaufmann so much. 

In his essays in Existentialism, Religion, and Death, Kaufmann applies the daring and untried exegetical method of simply believing that people may have actually meant what they said. 

Kierkegaard may really have been what we would now call a religious fundamentalist. 

White Racist Rule

 Well, it happened again. I fell for the mirage of the "Grand Bargain." 

When I first heard that even a conservative appeals court with two Trump-appointed judges had struck down an Alabama voting map for intentionally discriminating against Black voters, I thought: ah, here's a perfect opportunity for the Roberts court to do the right thing. 

Race to the Bottom

 A New York Times op-ed yesterday delved once more into the biography of Marco Rubio—pointing out his bizarre chameleon-like ability to adapt himself to rapidly changing political environments. 

The contradictions have only mounted in Mr. Rubio’s latter-day alliance with Donald Trump, the authors write, and not just on the issue of immigration. Mr. Rubio has shifted from an impassioned champion of U.S. foreign aid to one of the dismantlers of the United States Agency for International Development. He has gone from piquant adversary of the president’s first-term foreign policy to an enabler of legally disputed strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats and a cheerleader for the president’s hegemonic approach to the Western Hemisphere.

Lord of the Drones

 I have no patience whatsoever for the people who cite Obama's drone strikes as if these somehow excused or mitigated Trump's ongoing campaign of drone murder in the Caribbean and Pacific. Tu quoque is not a valid form of argument; and no precedent, however obscene, can normalize or relativize the fact that our government right now is blowing up civilian vessels in two of the world's oceans—murdering all their occupants—without even the pretense of there being armed actors on the other side. 

That said, it's probably a good exercise for me to occasionally look back and remind myself: Obama's drone strikes were also really bad—even if they were not exactly the same thing as what Trump is doing now. A poem by Heathcote Williams from that era, "Lord of the Drones: The President and the White House Fly," gave me that reminder that I needed, when I read it this week. 

200 Bodies

 As of yesterday, the Trump administration's campaign of extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean and Pacific has now claimed the lives of more than 200 people. 

The New York Times, in a haunting story yesterday, investigates one of the under-examined aspects of this ongoing atrocity: its impact on the livelihoods of coastal communities that fish in these same waters. 

The Divine Pig

 Both Nicholas Kristof and Noah Smith (the blogger) devoted their respective columns this week to the atypical subject of pigs and animal cruelty. 

This was no coincidence. The subject may be outside the usual beat of both writers, but they turned to it this week because Congress is actively debating right now—as part of the Farm Bill—a measure with the hideously apt name of the "Save Our Bacon Act." 

Wigged Oracles

 At the time Arthur Koestler wrote his Reflections on Hanging (1956), Britain was still defying the trend among other Western democracies by continuing to apply the death penalty. Despite the country's celebrated liberal traditions, the UK clung to the practice of hanging people by the neck till dead, long after most of its peer nations on the continent had abandoned capital punishment as a brutal and archaic relic. 

Today, that same mantle has passed to the United States. Great Britain has long since joined the rest of the democratic world by ending the practice of judicial murder. And so now, it is the U.S. that is the outlier; the U.S. that lags far behind the rest of its democratic peers in terms of moral progress by still executing a score or so of people every year, across its fifty states. 

The Body

 Dad was always clear that he wanted to die at home, and we honored that wish. We set up round-the-clock at-home health care and hospice visits in the last weeks of dad's life. And ultimately, he died in our living room, as he intended. 

But the fact that we had kept this promise to him made it feel all the more wrong that—as soon as he had died—strangers came into our home and wheeled him out on a stretcher, to be packed away in some grim and musty Florida funeral parlor. 

Gone to Feed the Roses

 I suppose there are basically two attitudes to death (and really just about everything else)—both of which are true, so far as they go. William James called them the healthy-minded and the sick. (And he made no secret of his greater affinity for the sick-souled way of seeing the matter.)

The healthy-minded say: "I accept the universe." They say: "death is a part of life." They say: "What death? Does not death bring forth new life? Does not the corpse of one being provide food and nutriment for the sprigs and branches of new life?"

The New Absence

 "The first day after a death, the new absence / Is always the same," Philip Larkin wrote. Today, I woke up to a house without dad in it. The caregivers were all gone. His hospital bed in the living room had been stripped of its linen. They wheeled his body out last night, after I had a final chance to say goodbye. 

Dad's last hours were very peaceful. After a final round of morphine, he just lay there quietly and comfortably for a few hours. We sat in the living room with him, listening to him breathe. Then, between 8 and 9 o'clock, he just stopped. We sat there, poised, listening for another breath that did not come. 

The Tail of Antichrist

 Since many far-right influencers have recently gone from viewing Trump as God's anointed on Earth to the literal Antichrist (viz. Tucker's recent musings on the subject)—and meanwhile, Peter Thiel is purporting to lecture on the subject in Rome—I thought it might be a good time to read up on the vicissitudes of the early modern Antichrist, as told by Christopher Hill. 

And it turns out that Hill's book on the subject, Antichrist in Seventeenth Century England, explains even more about the fate of Trump's MAGA movement than I thought. Indeed, the book offers a window into the sort of archetypical progression (or retrogression) that every revolutionary movement undergoes once it obtains power.

Dread Level

 My dad is dying slowly in the living room. He's on twenty-four hour hospice care, and I pass his bed of sickness every time I get up for a meal or to refill my coffee. There's nothing particularly to do but wet his lips and administer doses of morphine. 

Somehow, my brain has managed to normalize the situation. At some point, it sprang out of the gear of crisis mode, and I started to think about other things and pick up abandoned lines of thought. 

The Whole and Every Whit

 This week brought us news of another AI-related controversy in the literary world. Apparently a number of readers are speculating that this year's winner of a major short story prize was actually created by (or with significant help from) a chatbot. 

This seems to be part of the misery we all live with these days—and it wounds in both directions. 

For those of us who write our own stuff and aren't winning literary prizes for it—we are jealous at the thought that other people are getting ahead and winning laurels by cheating. 

A Vassal Republic

 It seems increasingly like our elite institutions are all pulling together to enable Trump's next act of aggression, imperialism, and robbery—this time, against the people of Cuba. 

For months now, the U.S. has maintained a crippling oil blockade that has sabotaged the island's economy, leading to rolling blackouts and almost certainly causing the preventable deaths of Cuban civilians by interfering with life-saving medical treatment. 

Peasant Theology

 In the first chapter of his classic book of cultural history, The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton studies a handful of folk tales in their earlier renditions, in order to get a glimpse into peasant mentalités under the Old Regime. 

He takes from these stories the conclusion that peasant life in the seventeenth century was brutish and short—that the world for these men and women was unforgiving and remorseless, and so the tales serve primarily to warn against the dangers of naively trusting one's fellow people. The only virtues they applaud—in Darnton's telling—are those of low cunning; a sort of hostile pawkiness in the presence of one's neighbors. 

Their Own Affairs

 The Russian government—that great exemplar of "Christian" and "Western" values, according to our neo-fascist Putin admirers in this country—recently sentenced a woman to eighteen months in a labor camp. Her crime? Writing K-pop fan fiction with a gay theme. 

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., our own Putin-inspired fascists are sending out criminal subpoenas against trans health care providers. The march of regress carries on. 

Lower for Proof

 Back when the Trump administration dismantled USAID—including its global health programs—many people sensibly asked: what happens if there's another major disease outbreak in the Global South? Who will monitor and contain it in its early stages? 

Now, we appear to have our answer. Southern Africa is witnessing another major outbreak of Ebola. The World Health Organization has already declared it a global health emergency. And early reports indicate that the virus spread far past the point at which pre-existing monitoring agencies ought to have detected it. 

Lordling

 Yesterday, the New York Times published an analysis article that places a few recent items of Trump's behavior in telling juxtaposition. 

Let's see, he is obsessed with funding his ballroom construction project at the White House. He has used the privileges and powers of the White House to enrich himself and his family. He has publicly announced that he "doesn't think" about "Americans' financial situation" at a time of rising prices for basic commodities as a result of his war in the Middle East. 

The To-Be-Forgotten

 We all recall when ABC killed the polling aggregator and political analysis site FiveThirtyEight last year—in a move they described as a business decision at the time, but which seemed eerily to coincide with the general trend of the "Great Accomodation" during the early months of the Trump administration. 

Now, having already died once, the website appears set to undergo what Thomas Hardy called the "second death"—that of "oblivion." Even after it stopped generating new content, after all, FiveThirtyEight lingered on as a searchable archive. People could at least link back to old articles. Now, that too appears to be gone. 

Weakness of Will

 A friend of mine a few months back was taking me on a FaceTime tour of his room. He showed me all the library books piled up on a shelf that he had not returned in years.

"If you add up all those late fees," I said, "it must be in the thousands of dollars!"

My friend explained that San Francisco had abolished overdue penalties at libraries. 

Plank of Standard Pinkness

 The Guardian published a new list of the 100 greatest novels of all time this week. 

What immediately strikes one about the entries is how familiar they all are. How predictable the list is. How much it consists of all the obvious works still in print that you can find in any "classics" row at a standard bookstore. 

That Summit

 Back during Trump's first term, a Republican friend of mine would often say: "Look, I'm not defending Trump, but..." and there would follow in the rest of that sentence a litany of things that sounded a great deal like defenses of Trump. 

One of the items my friend would always adduce was: "Well, at least Trump got serious about China." 

Ganz Tot

 A lot of my recent posts on this blog have been frenzied efforts to impose some sort of meaning and narrative coherence on my dad's ordeal of dying from brain cancer. 

Along the way, he has had lucid moments when he told me he loves me and is proud of me, and that he trusts our family will be okay when he's gone. 

Morphine

 I'm afraid I spoke too soon the other day when I wrote that Dad's version of cancer fortunately comes without much pain, and that therefore we would probably never have to touch the morphine supply in the refrigerator. 

Yesterday, he started rubbing his scalp more frequently in the spot where the tumor is located. We asked if it hurt, and while—in his current mental state—he does not reply to any question with something so simple as a "yes," that appeared to be the gist of his response. 

Antisemitism

 Well, the day we all feared has come. The Democratic Party officially has its equivalent to a Marjorie Taylor Greene—as in, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist with a host of loony beliefs. I am referring to Maureen Galindo, who was unfortunately suddenly all over the news yesterday as a contender in the Democratic primaries for a congressional seat in Texas. 

She truly sounds like MTG from the worst point of the latter's QAnon period—except that Galindo is if anything even more overtly antisemitic than MTG ever was. She has reportedly railed against what she calls "the Jews who own Hollywood." She has implied that Jewish people constitute the "Church of Satan" and the "synagogue of Satan." And so on. 

Compromises

 The recent hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship has been dominating the news all week—and doubtless it is prompting many Americans to question whether it was really such a wise choice for us to dismantle our world-class public health system and appoint in its place a bunch of ideological hacks who appear not to even believe in the germ theory of disease. 

In particular—an opinion piece in the New York Times notes yesterday—Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana may be regretting his choice to vote in favor of Kennedy's nomination—seeing that public health was, for a time, the one issue most dear to him.

Sleep and Death

 My dad is in the terminal stages of brain cancer, and as the disease has progressively attacked his mind, he has inevitably gotten more confused and disoriented over time. 

Having cruelly robbed him piece by piece of his eyesight, his mobility, his work, and his short-term memory, the cancer is taking dad closer each day to what Hugh MacDiarmid called the "dread level of nothing but life itself." 

The Pranks of Brute Force

 Trump is pretty definitively losing his Iran war by this point. We're now over a month into the supposed ceasefire between the two parties, and the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed to commercial shipping. Iran retains the ability to frighten ships and insurance companies off with just a few random strikes; which means they retain enormous leverage in the ongoing negotiations with the United States. 

And Trump, I'm sorry to say, has no moral standing to complain about this. I don't say it's good for any government—let alone a brutally repressive theocratic one—to deliberately shut down a major economic artery of the globe. But Trump was the one who first announced the principle of the right of the stronger. And according to that rule—if you suddenly find yourself the weaker party, you have no moral claim against one's opponent. 

Shark and Dogfish

 The Trump administration carried out yet another set of extrajudicial killings on the high seas this weekend—bringing the total number of civilians it has murdered in these boat strikes to at least 192. 

Every one of these attacks has been an atrocity and a war crime. But this weekend's added a cruel twist: it left "one survivor at large in the eastern Pacific," as the New York Times put it. 

Millions

 Trump's sweeping termination of U.S. foreign aid programs last year has largely fallen off of most of our news feeds—leaving a lot of conservative influencers to declare that it was all no big deal; a nothingburger. 

But Nick Kristof today in the New York Times does the math and brings the receipts. He marshals convincing evidence that the number of people—mostly children under five—who have died so far as a result of Trump's aid withdrawals is at least in the hundreds of thousands. 

I'm not using AI; AI is using me

 I read a very annoying article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday and now I'm wishing I hadn't. 

It was about the cottage industry of people online who claim to be able to spot when other writers are using AI. 

They have identified a number of tells, they say, which amount to a "house style" for AI. 

Substance, Not Person

 Yesterday's obituary for Ted Turner in the New York Times quoted a number of appalling anecdotes about his reactionary youth, which made me think this guy does not register as a worthy person. But it also included a single story of personal loss from Turner's biography that was profoundly humanizing. 

The article talks about the fact that Turner lost his younger sister to lupus and encephalitis when he was in his twenties. Obviously, with my dad's situation in the hospital, I'm emotionally keyed in to anything I read or see that touches on death—so it's perhaps not surprising that this got to me. Turner "described her death as the reason he lost his religious faith," according to the Times write-up. 

The Best of the Penguins

 "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing," Orwell wrote in the first sentence of his classic essay on the English novelist. 

And Orwell himself, it would seem, is considered by many to be worth stealing as well. 

By Ken Griffin, for instance. 

Thy Glorious Bison Herds

 Trump's penchant for slaughter and mass-death seems to be concentrated right now in his ongoing boat strikes in the Caribbean and his war in the Middle East. But recent events also prove that his desire to destroy is not limited to human kind—but extends as well to the animal kingdom.

He has also sought to circumvent endangered species protections for the Rice's whale in the Gulf of Mexico, in order to promote more oil and gas drilling, for instance. And now he is reportedly even trying to evict bison herds from federal land in the West—per a recent New York Times article. 

à l'éternité

 My dad has been having a lot of mental confusion lately due to his brain cancer. Yesterday it was particularly bad. But there was one fleeting and precious moment when the fog lifted a bit and he was suddenly completely lucid. 

We were walking over to a restaurant a block from our house. As my dad often does in his current condition, he would walk a few feet, then have an idea and pause to explain it to me. 

Firebug

 At least if prosecutors are to be believed (never a certain proposition), it looks increasingly likely that last year's apocalyptic Palisades Fire in Los Angeles was deliberately set. Indeed, prosecutors allege that a specific individual went out to commit arson as an act of deliberate revolutionary terrorism against the rich. 

He did it, they say, because he was obsessed with another suspected populist terrorist—Luigi Mangione—and saw the fire as a form of vengeance against the indifferent rich. "We’re basically being enslaved by them," he allegedly said; and "Reddit let's kill all the billionaires," was reportedly one of his Google searches. 

Two Cheers for Slopulism

 I snorted at those ultra-wealthy tech executives in Silicon Valley who developed a sudden interest in right-wing politics as soon as California's Democratic government started flirting with the idea of a "billionaire tax." 

I rolled my eyes at news that Ken Griffin is currently in the midst of a knives-out political fight with Mayor Mamdani of New York over his proposed "pied-à-terre" tax, which would send Griffin a bill for his $238 million penthouse. 

Gloomy Vanity

 Everyone knows that technological change sometimes displaces whole art forms. It is a commonplace of art history that the invention of photography totally reshaped the purpose of painting, because oils and pigments were suddenly no longer the most efficient way to accurately represent a visual scene. Painters thus went off to explore more subjective and emotional impressions that were not so grounded in the mere literal transcription of reality—hence movements like expressionism, impressionism, Symbolism, cubism, surrealism, etc. 

In his introductory essay in his collection of prose pieces, Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), B.S. Johnson points out that something similar happened to the novel after the development of film. He notes that Joyce was well aware of the potential of the cinema to be a more efficient medium for telling stories. And so, the novel had to figure out what it could do better than film—if its 19th century task of merely telling "what happens next" in a narrative had been eclipsed. 

The Last Act

 Amidst the mental confusion caused by his brain cancer, my dad had a moment earlier in the week of unusual clarity and lucidity. 

It was heartbreaking, because in the brief interval when the fog lifted, he seemed to have a glimpse of everything he had lost. "I feel like I'm losing capacity," he said. "I feel like I'm letting everyone down." 

Tired of Kings

 Earlier this week, the official U.S. White House account on X decided to mock the American people by posting a caption under a photo showing Trump and King Charles walking together: "Two Kings," it read. 

But if Trump is a king, he is a king of the sort Shelley described: "an old, mad, despised and dying king."

Ban Foie Gras

 The Boston Globe had an article out yesterday about the growing nationwide movement to ban foie gras. 

Like a lot of people, I at first assumed this movement was just a bunch of annoying self-righteous busybodies looking for any available moral crusade. 

This attitude on my part lasted precisely as long as it took someone to describe to me for the first time what is actually involved in making foie gras.

Lead Us Towards Work?

 A New York Times article yesterday surveyed the budding anti-AI movement across the country that has sprung up in the least likely places and brought together people of wildly different ideological persuasions. It seems the days of Captain Swing and Ned Ludd have come again, and chiefly for the same reasons: elites are forging ahead with a technological change that will radically undermine the livelihoods of millions—and they have no clear plan as to how this is all supposed to work out in a way that is tolerable for the human population. 

Indeed, the people most involved in developing the new technology openly tell you that it will probably cause massive employment displacement—at least in the short term. Some of the more starry-eyed AI boosters envision that it could soon eclipse the need for human cognitive labor entirely—setting the market value of human brain power at something close to zero. 

A Large Postulate

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday looking into just how disastrous Trump's budget cuts to the food stamp program have been for poor families over the past year. 

When Trump's "big beautiful bill" passed last summer through the reconciliation process, it cut tens of billions of dollars from the program and introduced a range of new criteria designed to restrict people's eligibility. 

Indelible Stain

 Just twenty-four hours before the attempted assassination at the White House Press Correspondents' dinner on Saturday, the U.S. military killed two more unarmed and defenseless people in a strike on a civilian vessel in the Pacific. 

Since just the start of April, Trump's administration has carried out at least six such extrajudicial killings, bringing the total number of people he has murdered in these strikes—without charge or trial—to above 180. 

The Dominance of Claws

 Reading any given newspaper this week would furnish you with plenty of examples of the insane malice of this administration. 

We talked in the previous post about the DOJ trying to reintroduce firing squads to federal death row. 

The Trump administration is also apparently floating plans to deport Afghan refugees from a U.S. military base where they've been living in Qatar to the war-torn state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Life and Death

 Reading through the evening edition of the New York Times last night, it was all too painfully clear that in our world of abysmal chasms between poor and rich—some lives are seen as utterly disposable, others as infinitely precious. 

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night—as William Blake once put it. 

This Guelph

 One of Trump's odd-ball riffs that he periodically refers back to is his ongoing contention that he probably isn't going to make it to heaven after death. 

"I want to try and get to heaven, if possible;" as he put it; "I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole." 

Political Chameleons

 I am fascinated by these right-wing influencers who seem to have suddenly discovered that war crimes are bad. I am happy for them, don't get me wrong. I'm glad that when Trump threatened to annihilate Iranian "civilization," many of these MAGA pundits suddenly discovered that threatening genocide or mass murder against a civilian population is a moral wrong. 

But—this was hardly the first time Trump demonstrated a sociopathic disregard for human life—and on all the previous occasions, these same MAGA die-hards were cheering him on. 

Distant Sovereign Death

 My uncle embarked earlier this week on a multi-week sailing trip from Jamaica to Mexico. I was realizing how little I actually understood the geography of that part of the world, so I looked it up. That's when it occurred to me my uncle would be passing through the Caribbean Sea. 

As in, the same part of the world where the U.S. government is still regularly blowing up boats—burning alive all their passengers—without inspection or even a chance to surrender. (Four more such attacks occurred in just the last few days—bringing the total number of deaths above 180.)

The Well of Saint Clare

 Anatole France is well known as an anticlerical writer of the Left. But it is intriguing to see what a nuanced attitude to religion he takes in his largely forgotten and seldom-read 1895 work, The Well of Saint Clare—a book plainly inspired by the medieval Golden Legend (a work that held great personal meaning for France). 

To be sure, there are many traces in the volume of France's skepticism. His attitudes to religion range from the Epicurean and Lucretian (characters repeatedly denounce the fear of death as a delusion brought about by the false belief in personal immortality) to the Swinburnean. 

Strafordians

 Mark Twain's Is Shakespeare Dead? opens with an autobiographical confession. He says that he first came to question Shakespeare's authorship of his plays in a spirit of playful controversy. He took the part of the devil's advocate mostly to keep his Stratfordian riverboat captain entertained: it gave him someone to argue with. But once he had defended the Baconian position often enough, the habit grew into real conviction, in an almost Pascalian manner. He writes:

Study, practice, experience in handling my end of the matter presently enabled me to take my new position almost seriously; a little bit later, utterly seriously; a little later still, lovingly, gratefully, devotedly; finally: fiercely, rabidly, uncompromisingly.  After that, I was welded to my faith, I was theoretically ready to die for it, and I looked down with compassion not unmixed with scorn, upon everybody else’s faith that didn’t tally with mine. 

Raising an LLM

 A friend of mine was invited to attend a conference recently with an AI company that is exploring the ethics of developing an LLM. Of all the many things one might worry about in creating a machine that can displace most forms of human cognitive labor, they were particularly troubled by the possibility that they had effectively created a person—one that thinks, feels, and suffers. 

Because if an AI model is a person, then we suddenly have to ask: what are we doing to it? Have we enslaved it? Have we caged it? Are we abusing it? Does it mind being forced to perform endless, repetitive tasks for its human handlers, while they yell at it and cajole it? Or does it have a completely different motivation structure and set of goals and desires than we do? 

Clash of Messianisms

 The Wall Street Journal ran a piece yesterday about how the U.S.-Israeli assassinations of Iran's senior leadership appear to have succeeded only in bringing a more hardline, fundamentalist faction to power. 

Specifically, the new generation of Iran's leadership—left behind from the first wave of the illegal U.S.-Israeli bombings and assassinations—subscribes to a belief in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi: a Messiah-like figure in Shia Islam. Believers in this theological doctrine apparently welcome the present war with the U.S. as the beginning of an apocalyptic scenario that will bring about the end of the world. 

Player Pianos

 The great William Gaddis devoted a whole book (his last, Agapē Agape) to the theory that the development of the player piano marked the beginning of the end of the arts. 

(Long before this final novel was published, Gaddis had already displayed an interest in the theme. As far back as The Recognitions, characters in Gaddis novels are forever announcing their intention to write a masterwork called Agapē Agape one day and ranting about player pianos as the root of all evil.)

Total Blockade

 I was just writing the other day on this blog about Bertrand Russell's critique—in his 1963 book Unarmed Victory—of the Kennedy administration's policy of blockading Cuba. It seemed very relevant to Trump's policy of shutting off oil shipments to Cuba today. 

I didn't realize when I wrote the piece, however, how painfully relevant it would also shortly become to Trump's policy toward Iran. Indeed, Kennedy's Cuba blockade has become the news media's go-to point of reference for the last time the United States imposed a total blockade on another country. 

Suddenly Uprose Hungary

 At long last, Hungary's "illiberal" quasi-autocratic president Viktor Orban has been voted out of power. Neither the Kremlin's relentless support, nor Orban's capture of civil society and major media organizations in Hungary over the last sixteen years, nor a last ditch effort by J.D. Vance and Donald Trump to intervene in his favor, proved enough to save his campaign. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Orban together again. 

Seeing Putin's man in Budapest stripped of power, as ordinary Hungarians defied his relentless pro-Kremlin propaganda in order to vote for European unity, Ukraine, and liberal democracy—I can only think of E.E. Cummings's words: