News broke today that Trump has convened the so-called "God Squad" of executive branch officials to grant an exemption from the protections of the Endangered Species Act to expedite his proposed oil and gas drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. Predictably, they signed off on his plans.
The winner here is the fossil fuel industry. The losers include all of us who must reside on a warming planet—plus the animal life that supplies much of the biodiversity of the region.
Last night, an ad played for fifteen seconds at the start of a YouTube video—and I'm still kicking myself for letting it play to the end. I was effectively suckered in. Goddammit, their tricks worked on me.
The ad consisted of a series of wholesome images and awe-inspiring scenes, set to the sounds of a child's voice asking some very valid questions: "Why are we here?" "Is someone punishing us?"
Here's the thing about living with a loved one with terminal illness. They are still alive. You can wake up every morning and see them. If you are mourning their absence in advance, you can still go and give them a hug. That, surely, is something.
But it can also give one an illusion of normality. On a given day, you can catch yourself up in the miniature struggles for survival and daily living. You can lose yourself in your work. You can forget, for a time, that anything's changed.
In an essay on Emily Dickinson, collected in his Required Writing, Philip Larkin refers in passing to "the psychologists' assertion that an obsession with death conceals a fear of sex."
Larkin—whose poems evoke more than enough dread of both—may have known whereof he spoke.
I've never been a good barfer. I can count on one hand the number of times in my conscious (post–five year life old) life when I've thrown up.
Once was when I was on a bike ride for a DACA advocacy action for work, and I misjudged ahead of time my ability to bike several miles uphill without having the slightest prior physical training or exercise.
Jesus Christ! That was all I could think to say to myself, when I read the AP story this morning about Pete Hegseth's latest blood-curdling "prayer" to the troops.
Hegseth has a long history at this point of invoking God's name to defend his various wars and atrocities. ("Ye hypocrites! are these your pranks? To murder men and give God thanks!" as Robert Burns would put it.)
In the long weeks when Trump was telegraphing his coming Iran war, I argued against the idea of bombing another country on moral grounds. I said: the United States has no right under international law or justice to invade a country without any plausible theory of self-defense from an imminent threat. Nor did our government have any right to undertake an action that was so obviously fraught with risks to human life on both sides.
But what I didn't emphasize so much was the strategic or prudential case against going to war—largely because that's not the kind of thing I'm so good at thinking about. I didn't realize it would be such a disaster to the U.S. government from a purely self-interested standpoint too. I didn't realize it would play so terribly with Trump's own audience in opinion polling. I didn't realize that bombing Iran could upset the whole global economy. And so, now that all those things have come to pass, I feel I missed a chance to say "I told you so."
In that Erdogan Pizza book I've been talking about all week, John Dolan writes at one point about the perverse pride he takes in being a lapsed Catholic.
Emphasis on the Catholic. As in, it's not that he's proud to be a lapsed Catholic, so much as a lapsed Catholic. It's the specific confession from which he has fallen that constitutes the badge of honor.
I was quoting earlier this morning from John Dolan's excellent book Erdogan Pizza. And doubtless you will find me gushing about it again. The book is a delight. I was a fan of Dolan's "War Nerd" columns back in the day, and I was thrilled to realize that his prose has retained all its sparkle and wit over the years.
Dolan was and remains a brilliant writer. His secret? To make sure he is always saying something interesting. You'd be surprised how many "great writers" don't—or can't—accomplish as much. It calls to mind one of Bukowski's observations:
For more than a decade, I've maintained a little black notebook in which I record the names of all the books I've read. For extra dopamine reward, I even add a little circled star next to each one—to congratulate myself on having finished it.
I notice in the first pages of the notebook however—from back in 2012 or so—there are a lot fewer stars. This is because, back then, I would write down the name of the book before I had finished it.
In his one-of-a-kind travelogue/memoir, Erdogan Pizza, John Dolan writes at one point about the capitalist revolution that swept through industrial China in the 1980s—part of the country's Deng Xiaoping era of opening up—and set off a craze for new spiritual movements among the elderly and others suddenly confronted with unprecedented change.
"China in the first generation of restored capitalism must've been exciting as Hell if you were young and confident," he writes, "but terrifying if you were anything else."
Back when Trump staged his cowardly unprovoked sneak attack on Iran's navy—and most especially after the U.S. blew up an Iranian war ship with a torpedo, killing over a hundred people who were not legally at war with our country—the first thing I thought of was Pearl Harbor.
"This is Trump's 'day of infamy!'" I thought. "He's doing to another country just what Japan did to us at Pearl Harbor!"
With the release of Leqaa Kordia yesterday from detention, the last of the protesters has been freed from immigration detention whom the administration targeted last year based on First Amendment–protected activity.
There's a tendency to want to celebrate this news. And yet—here—in this country—a person still spent more than a complete year of her life in a practical gulag—confined under a plastic structure, chained to a hospital bed—merely because she attended a protest that displeased our government.
This has not overall been a good few weeks for civil liberties.
Our Secretary of Defense has openly called for a major cable news outlet to be acquired by one of Trump's billionaire cronies so that it will cover Trump's war more deferentially.
Trump's chief goon over at the FCC has openly threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of disobedient news outlets that refuse to toe the government line on the war.
Given that Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made no secret of his distaste for Trump's illegal Iran war—many Britons are rightly wondering why U.S. bombers are nonetheless still taking off from U.K. airfields, heading for the Middle East.
"For many Britons, the air traffic has brought back memories of the ill-fated invasion of Iraq in 2003, when R.A.F. Fairford was also used for U.S. operations and became the site of long-running antiwar protests," the New York Times reported yesterday.
In his family history of the Byrons and Trevanions, A.L. Rowse at one point asserts that Lord Byron (the famous one) was "no real radical," in spite of his apparent lifelong devotion to the people's cause. The evidence for this claim? Byron displayed pride in ancestry, Rowse says. He used "feudal" terms like "vassals" in many of his poems. And, most important of all—according to Rowse—he had "unquestioning admiration" for Napoleon.
"Byron was," in all these regards, "at the opposite pole to his friend Shelley," Rowse insists, with strange confidence.
In throwing out the federal indictment against Fed Chair Jerome Powell yesterday, Judge Boasberg wrote that "the government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the president."
But of course, under this Justice Department, "displeasing the president" is the one and only crime worth charging. It is the only substance of the government's accusations against Lisa Cook, James Comey, Letitia James, and many others.
Well, I have to hand it to Anthropic. Despite being a profit-making entity, they were actually willing to take one on the chin this past week in their conflict with the Pentagon—and all for a point of principle.
Of course, I can't applaud them for wanting to work with the Pentagon in the first place. But they did have a certain moral line they refused to cross.
The United States used it in Fallujah in 2004. Israel reportedly deployed it in Lebanon in 2023. And now, according to Human Rights Watch, it's back again. In the second front in the current spiraling Middle East conflict that has opened in Lebanon—HRW reports—Israel has reportedly used white phosphorus munitions once again over populated areas.
This was not the first time I had read about this chemical—a deadly incendiary often used for illuminating areas, but which causes gruesome burns if it touches human skin—in the past week. The New York Times reported a few days ago that one of the motives behind Trump's executive order to protect the chemical glyphosate is due to its role in producing WP—a major source of profit for U.S. arms makers.
In yet another exercise in pointless cruelty, Trump revived this month one of his various mean-spirited policies from his first term aimed at punishing and deterring asylum-seekers: namely, the work permit rule.
Initially, of course, Trump simply wanted to destroy asylum entirely. On day one of his current term, he issued executive orders purporting to basically declare people ineligible for humanitarian protection wholesale.
Yesterday witnessed a whipsaw for the ages on the oil markets. At the start of the day, when I looked at the news, everything sounded like it was going to be unspeakably dire. The Strait of Hormuz seemed like it was about to shut down for the first time in recorded history. Oil prices were skyrocketing. Markets were tumbling.
I held off looking at the stock market numbers all day—in part because I couldn't bear to witness the carnage. But when I finally dared to check them after markets closed at four, I blinked in incomprehension at what I saw. Everything was green. The numbers had all gone up by the end of the day. And oil prices were back down.
I never found "Make Love Not War" to be a very eloquent slogan or an elegant solution to a human dilemma. The notion that the libido can simply be channeled from one outlet to another, i.e. that if people did more f-ing there would be less shooting, has always struck me as a very naïve, hydraulic model of human psychology.
In truth, the sex drive is no more innocent than the death drive; and plenty of people throughout history have managed to be sexually active at the same time that they were busy butchering other humans. Genghis Khan comes to mind. His prolific career as a mass murderer does not appear to have made him less prolific in other senses.
Of all the "experimental" and "avant-garde" novelists of the twentieth century, B.S. Johnson's work has lasted in a way that others' simply has not. (Who rests in Robbe-Grillet's mean flattery now?) And I can't help the feeling that his books succeed for reasons largely if not wholly unrelated to their formalistic experiments and convention-breaking eccentricities.
The things one most remembers from Albert Angelo, say, are the hideously realistic portrayals of life as a substitute teacher in working class England—not the pieces of paper cut out from the text. But then again, I have to ask myself—did I only pick up the book in the first place because of its formalistic experiments?
Of the various Senate Republicans who have expressed skepticism in the past about the president's war-making powers, a curious number of them nevertheless voted against the resolution this week that would have constrained Trump's ability to continue his illegal bombing of Iran.
The New York Times yesterday highlighted the case of Todd Young, the Senator from Indiana, who in the past had "warned of the dangers of a legislative branch that had ceded its war-making powers to the executive branch." Nevertheless, he helped vote down the war powers resolution. What gives?
As readers of the blog know, my dad is recovering right now from a week-long stay at the hospital for septic shock. On top of that, he has a brain tumor in his right temporal lobe that has robbed him of vision on the left side. He also has severe hearing loss that long predated the cancer, but which has certainly not been improved by the tumor or the fact that he is currently down one hearing aid because of an accident in the ICU.
As he put it to me at one point: "This would all be a lot easier if I could see or hear."
I have long said that the Trump administration's crudely chauvinistic rhetoric, about their various wars and extrajudicial killings, reminds me of nothing so much as the speaker in Harold Pinter's satirical 1991 poem about the Gulf War, "American Football."
But at his latest press conference today, Hegseth made the comparison seem even more inevitable.
Pinter's poem satirizes the sadism and cruelty of the American war juggernaut—and its apologists—by adopting the voice of a triumphant schoolyard bully:
My dad just finished a week-long stay in the hospital. It was one of the best facilities in the country. He was in a lovely new building with lots of natural lighting. By the end of his time there, he had a room to himself. A room with a view, at that.
But "Even in this island richly blest [...] Earth is too harsh," as Edna St. Vincent Millay once put it. Even the best of possible hospitals is still a hospital. And thus, in spite of all its efforts, it still felt like a kind of prison or carceral institution.
Pete Hegseth was asked yesterday about the four U.S. service members who had already lost their lives at that point due to Trump's illegal Iran bombing. (Now, it's up to six.) He blithely responded: "War is hell and always will be."
War? What war? I thought we were just engaged in a "strike" or a "special operation" of some sort. If this is a war, then the U.S. Constitution is very clear who has the authority to make it: Congress, not the president.
It goes without saying that there is no rational, legal, moral, or humanitarian justification for Trump's murderous war of aggression in Iran—which has so far taken the lives of four American service members and hundreds of Iranian civilians—many of them apparently elementary-age schoolchildren.
If you search for a logical answer to the question: why are we are war with Iran?, you will find none. But if you search for explanations at the level of the nether-reaches of psychology—you will suddenly find a surfeit. From the standpoint of the libido and the Id, Trump's war suddenly seems over-determined.
