Strange Irony of Fate

 In his immortal collection of concentration camp stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski recounts one episode of attempted resistance. As a group of people were being herded into the gas chambers, one woman made a lunge for one of the guard's holstered weapons. Freeing it from his belt, she waved it around and fired several shots into the commandant's gut. 

As he lay expiring on the ground, the commandant seemed genuinely shocked and indignant about what had just occurred. What could have made the woman want to do such a thing? "Oh God, my God," he reportedly said, "what have I done to deserve such suffering?" (Vedder trans.)

Stabbed in the Back

 At one point in his 1904 book of political and social commentary, The New Star Chamber, Edgar Lee Masters (one of my personal writer-poet-lawyer heroes) observes of the Spanish-American war and its aftermath: "Everyone knows that the Filipinos were our allies and that we betrayed them; that we broke our word with Cuba and that the course of the president has been uncandid and inconsistent."

He was referring to the fact that the U.S. pretended to support the national liberation struggles of both Cuba and the Philippines, in their effort to free themselves from Spanish domination—and then, when the U.S. had used the blood of their patriots to defeat Spain, turned around and stabbed them in the back by trying to assert a new U.S. claim to imperial rule in the former Spanish Empire. 

Alone Again (Naturally)

 I've always found the second half of Gilbert O'Sullivan's song "Alone Again (Naturally)" to be much more effective than the first. The 1972 hit single opens, as you may recall, with a story about the speaker being stood up at the altar and threatening to hurl himself off a tower in order to punish his erstwhile bride-to-be. After the chorus and bridge and all that, the song then shifts to a second narrative: about the death of the speakers' two parents. 

The first part of the song always strikes me as a bit forced and artificial. It has all the makings of a sentimental, mawkish scenario that the songwriter invented purely for the sake of wringing self-pity. The events position the speaker too perfectly as a unilateral victim, with the jilting bride as a cartoonish villain. I can't really bring myself to believe that any of this happened—or would happen to anyone—as described. 

Last Call for the AI Ark?

 There is an odd disconnect right now in the public's attitude to AI. On the one hand, the era of hype and fear about the new technology appears to have peaked around 2023 and to have been on a downward slope ever since. We've all gotten used to the presence of chatbots now. And however impressive they are—and I do indeed continue to be wowed that we have built a robot brain that can convincingly mimic human conversation—they also seem to be transforming our lives rather less than we had either hoped or dreaded. In daily life, they often provide little more to us than a variant on the old-fashioned search engine experience—a handy way to gather information from the internet quickly. 

Generative AI is in many ways so extraordinary compared to prior generations of information technology that I think we all assumed it would have to change the world. But sometimes, it may in fact be possible to build something amazing that nonetheless has little discernible impact on our daily lives. A few years into this collective social experiment, and jobs have not been systematically displaced by the new tech. The chatbots have proved most adept at drafting unwanted discussion posts or term papers for lazy college students; but any writing or creating that requires going beyond the most generic, mediocre, statistically-average boilerplate still requires a human touch. 

A Visit from Ahor

 Arthur Koestler's memoir Arrow in the Blue—a book that held great personal meaning for me when I first read it as a young aspiring writer and aspiring lefty activist—begins by introducing us to a sort of private cosmology that Koestler developed in childhood. It was largely a Manichaean universe, in which two countervailing forces battled each other eternally, with no ultimate victor.

On one side of the fight was Ahor—which stood in Koestler's mind for "Ancient Horror." It was a presence that Koestler associated in childhood with visits to the dentist; but which in adulthood would assume much more serious forms—his stint in a French concentration camp at the outset of the war, for example; or his sentence to prison in Franco's Spain for his reporting on the civil war. In essence, Ahor represented the forces of writhing, squirming evil—ever present in posse—that lie just beneath the superficial appearance of normality and stability in human life. 

A Pleasant Fiction

 In his Reflections on War and Death, Sigmund Freud writes at one point of the "feeling of strangeness in a world which used to seem so beautiful and familiar to us," which he and many of his contemporaries experienced at the outbreak of World War I. (Brill/Kuttner trans. throughout.)

The feeling, he said, came from a sense of "disappointment" or disenchantment at the spectacle of the way so-called "civilized" societies had descended into barbarism. The governments that had set themselves up as the embodiments and enforcers of morality internally were now behaving with crude brutality and dishonesty in their relations to other states. 

Wild Spiders

 At most news out of the Trump administration, I feel only a kind of impersonal disgust, revulsion, contempt or indignation. 

The current crisis over Greenland, though, is one of those times in the Trump era (and there have been a few before) when I have felt something closer to actual panic. 

These are the moments when you realize we are not led merely by a cruel and incompetent man—but by a kind of Hitlerian maniac, who would destroy the whole world and everything in it just to impose his arbitrary will on others. 

The Last Straw

 There's something for everyone to hate in Trump's new alliance with the authoritarian leadership of Venezuela. Every possible type of idealism, on either side, whether of the right or the left—no matter how debased or misguided—has taken a severe beating from this partnership made in hell. 

Neocons who thought the point of invading Venezuela was to install the democratic opposition candidate have obviously had to swallow their words. Now, they must accept that they got the war they wanted—but not the democracy. 

Je-m'en-foutisme

 Lion Feuchtwanger's The Devil in France—his memoir of internment and flight from wartime France, as the country was being invaded by the Nazis in 1940—invites obvious comparison with Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth. Both books were written by cultured and lettered men, speaking multiple languages, of impeccable anti-fascist convictions, who found themselves locked up and treated as "enemy aliens" at the start of the war. Both books cover much the same period and events:

France's paradoxical wartime internment of German anti-fascist refugees (even as France was being overrun by these refugees's worst enemy); the fall of the prewar government and its replacement with the collaborationist Vichy regime, which promised to hand the German refugees over to the invading Nazis in the notorious nineteenth clause of its armistice agreement; and the refugees' subsequent desperate efforts to escape from a country that—overnight—had become enemy territory. 

Betrayal

 If there is any constant at all in Donald Trump's ever-shifting foreign policy positions, it's that genuine friends to any pro-democracy movement, anywhere in the world—no matter how much it might appear to align with U.S. interests—should never trust him. The people of both Iran and Venezuela are having to learn that cruel lesson all over again this week.

The Iranian protest movement the past few weeks has been waging a heroic struggle in the teeth of overwhelming and brutal repression. 

Body Count

 How many people did the U.S. government just kill in our recent, undeclared war in Venezuela? 

The Trump administration has made clear, in so many words, that they don't care. They made sure to emphasize that no American lives were lost in the fighting. There was no death on "our side," as Trump put it bluntly, a few hours after the incursion. 

They pointedly declined to express any opinion on the number of Venezuelans who might have lost their lives. The message was clear: they don't care. They don't see those lives as having any weight or significance. 

If the Whole World Was a Cake

 It's almost impossible to overstate the madness of the fact that NATO troops are deploying to Greenland right now—not to defend the island from Russia or China—but to deter aggression from the United States. 

For years, the fear with Trump's rhetoric about NATO was that he might repudiate the U.S.'s obligations under the treaty and refuse to come to the aid of other member states if they were attacked from Russia. 

The Debasement Trade

 The Trump administration's latest attack on Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, this week—in the form of a transparently baseless criminal probe—suggests that they really are set on compromising central bank independence by any means necessary. 

I doubt there is any complex economic motive behind this—at least not in Trump's brain. He has made clear overtly that he wants the Fed to bow to his wishes to cut interest rates, and really—the reasons why he would want this are if anything overdetermined. Lowering interest rates tends to make the stock market go up—which Trump regards as a barometer of his political success. It would also benefit him even more directly by keeping aloft the obscenely elevated valuations of various speculative assets—crypto, e.g.—in which Trump is personally invested, and from which he stands to gain. 

Constant Querulous Prohibition

 A friend of mine who's a relatively new parent was complaining to me the other day that his life often feels confined these days to nothing more than "roaming and rotting." His one-year-old son—who has recently acquired the ability to walk—wakes up early and toddles off on a series of perambulations around the house. The rest of my friend's day is then made up of following along behind him to make sure he doesn't hit his head on any table corners, chew on any electrical cords, swallow any choking hazards, etc. (that's the "roaming" part); or else sitting with him in a play pen while my friend tries to keep both his own brain and a one-year-old occupied (that's the "rotting"). 

My friend obviously felt guilty even uttering a word of complaint about this; but I could relate perfectly well to what he was describing. Anyone who's provided any care of young children for extended periods of time—whether of relatives or their own kids, or as part of their jobs—will be familiar with the distinct boredom and misery it often entails. It's one of the few activities in adult life that requires both constant, laser-focused attention (to ensure the child's safety), but also a lack of serious mental stimulation. No one's going into a "flow" state from the sort of focus that childcare calls forth. The result is often a vague sense of mental vegetation instead. "Rotting" is a good word for it. 

On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year

 A decade or so ago, when this blog was in its relative infancy, I remember reading through some collection of Lord Byron's poetry and being reminded of the existence of one piece entitled (or sub-titled, in some editions): "On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year." 

The thought briefly occurred to me: "Someday, when I turn thirty-six, I should use this line as a title for a post." 

Cosplaying Imperialism

 Trump's decision to invite a bunch of oil executives to the White House earlier this week to discuss carving up Venezuela between them is just too on-the-nose to make any further criticism seem necessary. What's the point of denouncing Trump's Venezuela policy as petro-imperialism if he doesn't even bother to disguise it? 

I think of Pablo Neruda's poem "Standard Oil Co." (Schmitt trans.): 

Their obese emperors from New York

are suave smiling assassins

who buy silk, nylon, cigars

petty tyrants and dictators.

Ever in Extremes, Ever in the Wrong

 I knew before picking it up that Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger belonged to the first, "good" phase of Hitchens's career—when he was still a left-wing critic of U.S. foreign policy—and not to the bad, second phase of his career, when he became a neoconservative (ahem, "liberal hawk," he would insist) and an apologist for Bush's war on terror. 

What I hadn't fully processed, though—until I got around to reading the book recently—is what an incredibly small chronological gap separated these two radically different stages of Hitch's career. 

Murder in Minnesota

 Yesterday, ICE apparently shot a woman in the face in cold blood.

They did it in front of witnesses—with cameras rolling. 

Now, the public can see with our own eyes what happened. We see an ICE agent approach the vehicle, swearing profanities, and try to pry open the door. 

The Penalty for Piracy

 In his 1932 essay, "The Modern Midas," Bertrand Russell remarks that the policy of the Western Allies toward defeated Germany, in the aftermath of World World I, was "so absurd that it is difficult to believe that the Governments were composed of grown-up men not in lunatic asylums." 

As he proceeds to lay out, the victorious Allies of the Entente swiftly decided, after the war, that they wanted to impose a ruinous indemnity on the defeated Germans in order to punish them for their role in the war. Thus, they burdened their erstwhile enemy with a monstrous debt that had to somehow be paid. 

Post-Work

 Matt Yglesias had a piece on his Substack the other day about the "post-work future." He has spent his leisure time the last year reading 19th century novels, he tells us—and part of what he takes from these works is an example of how people who are "idle" by social design—the landed gentry of the age—can nonetheless make valuable and civilized use of their time. 

This is something we all may have to learn to do, Yglesias says, in a world where "work" assumes ever less prevalence and importance, due to changes in technology. 

Weakness and Struggles

 The massive protests taking place in Iran right now—which the ruling regime has characteristically met with death and repression—are generally understood to have been sparked most immediately by rampant inflation. The Iranian rial has reportedly lost more than half its value in the last six months, and food prices in the country have spiked by more than 60%. 

One can attribute this economic collapse—with some justice—to the economic mismanagement of the regime. And indeed, the Iranian president didn't do himself any favors when he effectively threw up his hands the other week and announced that he was basically out of ideas for how to address the country's many economic problems. 

The Forever Wars Continue

 Well, the long-telegraphed Trump administration attack on Venezuela has finally come, and it was even more deranged, gratuitous, sadistic, pointless, futile, criminal, bloody and murderous than I had anticipated. 

It has been clear for months at this point that Trump's goons would eventually move to attack Maduro. What I did not expect is that they would conspicuously snub Venezuela's democratic opposition in doing so—even though installing the properly-elected leadership of the country is the only move that could have given even a veneer of specious legitimacy to the action. 

Sanctions and Blockades

 In the emerging literature of apologetics trying to preemptively justify Trump's apparent regime-change operation in Venezuela, it has become standard to speak of the South American country as a "failed state." Which it is, in many respects. But the question is: who made it that way? 

We could speak, as so many pundits do, in vague terms about "economic mismanagement." As further clarified in the news articles, this phrase usually translates to something like: "Venezuela shouldn't have let its economy become so dependent on the single export industry of oil."