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: 

Bridge Day

 This morning, I was driving over the George Washington Bridge while listening the latest episode of the Ezra Klein show. 

Klein was reminding us on his podcast about some of Trump's recent megalomaniac threats against the people of Iran. 

Dishonoring a Cinder?

 The decision of the Taiwanese opposition leader to meet with China's Xi Jinping yesterday met with foreseeable blowback from the current Taiwanese government—who quickly (if obliquely) portrayed their conversation as appeasement. 

"[H]istory tells us that compromising with authoritarian regimes only comes at the cost of sovereignty and democracy, and will not bring freedom or peace," Taiwan's president reportedly said after the meeting, while pressing for more defense spending. 

The Massive Fact

 At some point in divinity school, I remember spending a long afternoon brooding over an academic paper about St. Augustine's debate with the Manichees. Slowly, after toiling through all the metaphors and thought experiments (there was a man tied up and forced to wield a sword at one point; that much I recall), I came to understand the "problem" of free will with which Augustine contended. 

After all, it has often been proposed in popular apologetics—as a solution to the question of theodicy—that perhaps God does not actively wish us evil (in spite of evidence to the contrary), but rather chose to endow us with free will—and all our suffering stems from that. (Perhaps not our own free will, but that of our first parents—in which case, one has to ask what kind of freedom we inherited, but no matter...)

A Nuclear Threat?

 Trump's threat yesterday to destroy the "whole civilization" of Iran, unless they agreed to his terms for a ceasefire deal, was many things. It was genocidal, for one. If Trump had actually followed through on his threats in a way that had killed or erased a lot of civilian targets, a statement like that would meet anyone's definition of the "intent" requirement under the Genocide Convention. 

But was it an implied threat of nuclear annihilation, specifically? I didn't read it that way. I interpreted it as a characteristically (though evilly and irresponsibly) hyperbolic restatement of Trump's earlier threats to attack bridges, power plants, and other civilian infrastructure in Iran (which would be a war crime in any case, even if no nuclear weapons were involved—so I hardly mean to absolve Trump for any of this). 

The Moon's Full Gaze

 As the Artemis II astronauts completed their loop around the moon this weekend, the news reports were full of descriptions of the sheer awe and wonder the lunar travelers experienced as they beheld the Earth's natural satellite up close. 

One astronaut, in her amazement, even coined a new term for the feeling, which quickly went viral: "moon joy." 

Obscenity

 A video recently went viral, according to the Intercept, of body cam footage showing a small town police officer wrestling a grandmother to the ground at a No Kings protest. 

Her crime? 

Wearing an inflatable penis costume. 

Neo-Orthodoxy

 As I was scrolling through the headlines on the New York Times yesterday, the storied paper insisted I pause over one video. The thumbnail showed the lugubrious face of Ross Douthat. The headline below it read: "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?"

The answer, presumably (given the source) is going to be "yes." 

Soaking the Poor

 Well, Trump has unveiled his new budget request for the coming fiscal year—and it appears to be a nightmarish exaggeration of a classically evil GOP wish list. It proposes to spend 1.5 trillion more dollars next year on the military, as Trump wages an illegal war of aggression in the Middle East and routinely threatens similar invasions in Latin America. 

And how does he propose to pay for this? By slashing safety net programs for the poor, of course. 

Freedom to Obey?

 Those last two books of Bertrand Russell's career—Unarmed Victory (about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sino-Indian war) and War Crimes in Vietnam—both written in the tenth and final decade of Russell's life—are both oddball entries in his oeuvre that share a number of eccentricities in common. 

I won't say they are my favorite Russell books. They are missing some of the wit and wry humor that are so conspicuous and delightful in the middle phase of his career (though there are still flashes at times of both in the books). 

The Great Whales

 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. 

Then How Come...?

 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?" 

Wastrels of Our Sorrows

 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. 

The Psychologists' Assertion

 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. 

Objective Correlatives

 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. 

High Help and Proved Complicity

 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.)

Wrong Slogan

 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." 

Opiate

 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. 

The Great and Little Enemies

 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: 

Unearned Laurels

 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. 

Young and Confident

 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." 

Pearl Harbor

 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!"

Legal Complacency

 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. 

"Allegiance per blunt instruments"

 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. 

Deferential

 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. 

Bloated Chief

 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. 

Lèse-majesté

 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. 

A Conscientious Objection

 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. 

White Phosphorus

 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. 

Leave to Toil

 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. 

Troubled Oil

 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 Murder Hate

 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.

B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates

 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?

Sunk Costs

 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? 

On His Blindness

 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." 

American Football

 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: 

Into Hell, Into Prison

 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. 

"War is Hell"

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. 

For God and Phallus?

 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. 

Default Goodness

 In recent days my dad has had a bad case of "ICU delirium" in the hospital—by all accounts not an uncommon condition, when someone has been trapped in an unfamiliar setting for days, with irregular sleep and meals, and a rotating cast of faces. 

The result, whatever its cause, is that dad's subconscious self is coming out into full view, in the form of hallucinations and misconceptions about his surroundings. 

The thing is: it turns out to be practically the same as his fully conscious self. 

Stupidity Street

 When we were waiting in the hospital the other night, my mom said that her go-to way to feel better in an emergency was to watch bird videos on her phone. Live streams of nesting egret families are her form of digital comfort food. 

Likewise, one of my dad's happiest nights before he went into the hospital was when we went out for a picnic amidst the Florida wetlands and watched the varieties of avian life at sunset. I spent minutes filming a roseate spoonbill that came by, as it made its curious swinging sweeps in the water for food. 

Whence Kindness and Gentleness Come

 I woke up shivering this morning with the weight and misery of my dad's deteriorating health condition seemingly concentrated into a little ball in the center of my gut. I curled up into a fetal position and wrapped myself more tightly in the down comforter to feel better and get more warmth. But it didn't do much good. 

"Comforter," I apostrophized to myself, "where, where is your comforting?" 

I get that G.M. Hopkins wasn't talking about bedclothes when he wrote that line. He was talking about Jesus, or God, or whatever. But I never believed in any of those characters. I know I have not been abandoned or forsaken—because there was no one to do the abandoning and forsaking. 

Famous States

 The CIA was reportedly involved in providing key intelligence to enable the hit this week on an alleged cartel boss in Mexico. And even as Mexican authorities sought to downplay the level of U.S. involvement in the strike—perhaps for internal political reasons—Trump bragged about it openly. 

Given that the U.S. has murdered 150 people and counting in ongoing strikes on civilian vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific—not to mention all those earlier U.S. drone strikes—it may seem that the taboo against extrajudicial killings and foreign assassinations has simply vanished. 

Death in Cuba

 Like everyone else, I am unsure what to make of the reported incident yesterday, in which an American-registered speedboat apparently exchanged fire with the Cuban coast guard. 

The Secretary of State of course immediately disavowed any U.S. government involvement in the incident. And indeed—it must be said—if this was a CIA op, it was an even more obviously foolhardy and doomed one than the Bay of Pigs. Ten people on a motor boat in the Gulf were not going to incite a revolution that would topple the Castroist regime. 

Taking Fright

 In his study of Rimbaud, Henry Miller challenged us to name the last time a single poem, unassisted, had succeeded in changing the world—the way it had in his subject's day. 

Well, I don't know about a poem. But I do know that a single Substack post appears to have briefly tanked the U.S. stock market yesterday. The week before that, a single X post generated a similar panic in the software industry.

Buying Peace?

 As another round of talks start up to try to negotiate an end to the war sparked by Putin's invasion of Ukraine, President Zelensky of Ukraine has continued to warn about the risks inherent in trying to buy Putin off by offering him pieces of another country's territory. It is "a big mistake to allow the aggressor to take something," he reportedly put it. 

I was reminded of something I was just reading in Montesquieu's Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. He says that the Western Roman Empire, in its waning days, sometimes made overtures "to appease with money the peoples threatening invasion." 

Governing in Prose

 The old phrase "campaign in poetry; govern in prose" got tossed around a lot back when Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City. 

Now, I guess we are getting a sense of what that means. 

A Sneer is Not an Argument

 Trump officials are always very proud of their crude aggressiveness in interviews. 

Pam Bondi gave a disgraceful performance on Capitol Hill last week. When she was grilled about the Epstein case or whatever it was, she responded by calling Jamie Raskin a "washed-up loser lawyer." 

I imagine she considered this a great rhetorical victory. 

Invisible

 Trump's campaign of extrajudicial killing in the Caribbean and Pacific has long since fallen below the top fold of the newspapers. It is no longer treated as either a major news story or a particularly urgent political scandal. 

But that's not because the killings have stopped. Just yesterday, the U.S. government murdered another 11 people at sea. The week before that, they killed 3 people in yet another strike on a civilian vessel. 

Playtime

 One of the various sources of the renewed wave of AI panic sweeping the ranks of pundits this week is the fact that the very thing we thought was most human and least likely to ever be automated—namely, artistic creation—is turning out to be one of the first casualties of generative AI. Screenplays, poems, novels, and illustrations turn out to be some of the things that are easiest to replicate with machines. Which is terrifying. 

But before we succumb to the general anxiety, let us ask exactly what it is we find so appalling about this fact. Are we feeling some threat of existential hollowness or erasure at the fact that something else can now do what we thought we alone could do? This hardly seems warranted. At any rate, the fact that AI chatbots can write blogs too is not all that intrinsically different from the fact that other human beings can write them. 

Peak AI Panic is Back

 I was saying just the other day on this blog that there was a weird and growing disconnect between the panic consuming the world of Bay Area AI developers, and the generally blasé attitude toward AI on the part of the rest of us "normies." 

This was definitely a week, though, in which the gap suddenly shrunk. The panic caught up with the rest of us—helped in large part by a single, well-written and algorithmically-optimized X post called "Something Big is Happening." 

Copernican Revolutions

 A friend was saying to me the other day that AI appears destined to create another "Copernican Revolution." 

He wasn't saying this in the sense that it would be a scientific breakthrough. Rather, he had in mind the sense of psychological homelessness and estrangement it would produce. 

Recall that before Copernicus, Galileo, and the rest dethroned the Earth from the center of the universe—our cosmos seemed like a cozy, womb-like environment build to humankind's needs and specifications. 

Our Man in Caracas

 The Wall Street Journal has a story out this morning that reads like a chapter from a Graham Greene novel. One of Trump's personal cronies and golfing buddies has reportedly been lobbying from behind the scenes for years to try to "pry open" the Venezuelan oil market for U.S. business interests. If this meant working with Maduro, that was fine with him. And so, for a while, he concentrated his efforts on trying to persuade Rick Grenell and the rest of the Trump administration to make nice with the ruling regime. Cut a deal with Maduro to accept deportations and get the oil flowing, he told them. 

Let us keep in mind, here, that "accepting deportations" means cajoling Maduro into being willing to collaborate with the U.S. government in its effort to forcibly expel asylum seekers—many of them pro-democracy Venezuelan opposition activists who, in a sane world, would be natural allies for the United States—back to the hands of the regime they fled. And intermittently, of course—though not always—Maduro was willing to do precisely that. And the U.S. government was more than happy to send innocent people into his clutches. 

Fear of Death

 In his book on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe—whom he groups together as "philosophical poets"—George Santayana discusses at one point those famous arguments in Lucretius's On the nature of things devoted to dispelling the fear of death. 

We have nothing to fear from dying, Lucretius assures us. Through a number of arguments, he seeks to persuade us that the soul cannot be immortal. It must, in fact, perish with the body. 

The Muggletonians

 In his capsule biography of the seventeenth century English preacher and self-declared prophet Lodowicke Muggleton, Lytton Strachey remarks toward the close of the essay that "one would be sorry if the time ever came that there were no more Muggletonians." 

E.P. Thompson, it is known, lived to see that sad era. In his book about William Blake, Witness Against the Beast, he describes his meeting with the last Muggletonian, with whose expiration in 1979 the entire prophetic sect sank into oblivion. 

"And that is what I have to put up with from you?"

 The Associated Press ran an appalling and heartbreaking story this morning about a man—an immigrant from Mexico and a father—who is now suffering from multiple severe brain injuries because ICE agents attacked him, reportedly fracturing his skull in eight places with a steel baton. 

When he woke up from the beating, he told reporters, he at first could not recall that he had a daughter. And still to this day—due to brain hemorrhaging and head trauma—he finds himself unable to remember treasured moments of his life, such as teaching his daughter to dance when she was five years old. 

Anti-Anti-Alarmism

 John Ganz mentioned in passing the other week—over on his Substack—a school of thought that he termed the "anti-alarmist left." He doesn't explain in detail who he has in mind, but I can gather from the context the sort of person he is envisioning: the type of smug leftist who refuses to call Trump a fascist; or who insists—at the very least—he is no more fascist than the entire U.S. imperial project has always been. The sort of leftist who—when presented with evidence of Trump's atrocities and extrajudicial killings—feels the need to interject with non sequiturs like: "well what about Obama's drone strikes?" 

(For the millionth time, let's say outright: Obama's drone strikes were also very bad. But he hasn't been president for ten years at this point, so can we focus for one second please on the person who is actually president right now, and will be for at least the next three years, and who is right now blowing up civilian vessels in the Caribbean, with no legal justification or due process whatsoever, and who appears set to continue killing more innocent people by these means at a rate of at least one per week?)

Let's Not Bomb Iran

Bret Stephens over at the New York Times—who sometimes comes across as the world's last doctrinaire neoconservative war hawk—seems to have learned nothing from recent events in Venezuela. He spent months banging the war drum in favor of a U.S. regime change effort to topple Maduro and install democracy. In the end—he got the war he wanted, but not the democracy. So it goes. 

Now—apparently without any self-reflection or reassessment of this strategy—he has moved right along to doing the same thing with Iran. In multiple recent columns in the paper, he has called for a U.S. attack to overthrow the Islamic Republic in favor of—I don't know; whoever fills the void? (A role which presently appears most likely to be filled by the son of the former deposed Shah, that ruthless CIA-backed autocrat best known for the terror inspired by his secret police.)

Historical Comparisons

 It's hard to win an argument with this administration by drawing historical analogies—when they themselves seem so eager to embrace all the worst chapters of American history. 

Just yesterday, I was writing on this blog that the administration's actions in Venezuela were all too reminiscent of U.S. expansionism in the 1846 Mexican-American war. 

Permabear

 I was reading in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the career of the value investor Jeremy Grantham, sometimes known as the "Permabear." He has been saying for years—if not decades, at this point—that the entire equity market is in a bubble. We're talking more than just an "AI bubble" here. Plenty of people think those stocks are criminally overvalued right now. Grantham does them all one better—he thinks that the pricing of the entire stock market has gotten unmoored from any rational relationship to underlying earnings and other measures of intrinsic value. 

He's probably right; and this week is offering him a measure of vindication. Panic about new AI tools—and how quickly they can be used to build software performing a wide variety of specialized functions, with minimal if any knowledge of coding required—has sent software stocks into a tailspin. This "Anthropic" effect has been enough to pull down the larger tech sector for a few days, plus the larger stock indices—the Nasdaq and S&P 500—that are most reliant on it. Meanwhile, investors are "rotating out" into previously less favored parts of the market: mid-caps, foreign stocks, "defensive" sectors, etc. 

The Two Disillusionments

 I wrote the other week on this blog that the spectacle of what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela right now is enough to destroy any lingering idealism of any political species—whether of the right or of the left. Marco Rubio's testimony before Congress last week—in which he explained in detail how the U.S. is harvesting the proceeds of oil wealth that it is extracting from the South American country at literally the barrel of a gun—was the final capstone in this edifice of disillusion. 

Suppose you were a leftist idealist still smitten with the rhetoric and mythology of the Bolivarian revolution. If you hadn't had your "Kronstadt" moment yet—if Maduro's stolen election and his arrest and torture of hundreds of political dissidents hadn't been enough to convince you that this "revolution" was going the way of other Stalinist debacles past—then surely the spectacle of Maduro's own top henchwoman now openly collaborating with the Yankee imperialists for the sake of mutual profit should be the final nail in the coffin. 

Ministerial vs. Radical Evils

 There is a certain type of dialectical philosopher who is always trying to convince us that the good things we want to believe in are already present, implied as a necessary consequence, in the bad things whose existence we are forced to acknowledge. 

Albert Camus says that the rebel's metaphysical rejection of the universe implies a standard of ultimate values according to which that universe is found wanting. Ergo, nihilism actually incorporates and necessitates its opposite: there is thus "a path through nihilism that leads beyond nihilism." 

Not Good at Eating

 After much badgering over the past few months, my sister finally talked me into watching Kpop Demon Hunters on Netflix this week. I had to grudgingly admit, by the end of it, that I had enjoyed myself. It was pretty good and quite fun—even for someone who went in prepared to dislike it. 

One scene toward the beginning, though, struck me as an odd choice. The three main characters are taking a plane ride to get to a venue for a show. A flight attendant brings them their midday meal, and they fall upon it ravenously. "Carbo load!!" they shriek, before stuffing their faces with gimbap. 

Los Eternos Indocumentados

 Jean Guerrero had a fascinating piece in the New York Times the other day about Trump's recent bizarre (and no doubt, to many, inexplicable) interference in Honduran politics.  

Of course, there are any number of reasons why Trump would suddenly decide to pardon the former Honduran strongman Juan Orlando Hernandez—after he was convicted of a conspiracy to smuggle cocaine to the United States—and back the same candidate in the country's recent elections as the MS-13 criminal syndicate. Maybe it's just that he identifies with all would-be authoritarians and crooks; maybe it's just his innate love of gangsterism and corruption showing through. 

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."