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.