The perils we face, in a nutshell
As look-it-in-the-eye a summary of what we’re in for as I’ve seen. This New York piece by Ed Kilgore does all your hand-wringing for you in one place. One-stop shopping for all your angst needs. You can stop looking now for the articulation of your dread that will top the last one.
There’s a weird power and relief in naming things. Cue Rumpelstiltskin.
After an unusually long period of anxious anticipation (on my part, at least), the year 2020 arrives this week bearing many fearful possibilities balanced mostly by the hope of narrowly evading them. . . .
[F]ar and away the most likely path to a second Trump term is a second Democratic challenger to Trump who becomes more of a political problem than a solution. . . . Democrats could choose a challenger so old that the prospect of infirmity or mortality — or worse yet, actual infirmity or mortality during the general-election campaign — could give Trump just the kind of advantage he needs. . . .
[I]f the nomination contest indeed does turn into a battle of the late-septuagenarians . . . Republicans and media types alike will magnify [their ideological and policy] differences into a veritable Spanish Civil War of irreconcilable conflicts between Democrats in Disarray. . . . The silver lining for Democrats in that scenario is that they wouldn’t have to dwell on the fears many harbor about nominating another woman . . . or a gay man.
Back in March, I outlined seven hellish developments we can expect if Trump is reelected, ranging from an indelibly slanted federal judiciary and a shredded social safety net to a permanently Trumpist GOP and a shattered opposition party. But more terrifying than any of these specific possibilities is what a second “mandate” (following Trump’s all-but-certain acquittal on articles of impeachment) would do to the recklessness of a president who already believes the Constitution authorizes him to do any damn thing he pleases.
During Trump’s first term . . . observers have had to struggle daily with whether and how much to write about the unmistakable parallels of Trumpism and 20th-century fascism — the contempt for the rule of law and for democratic norms, the jingoism and militarism, the racism, the championship of cultural reaction, the brutal rhetoric, the love of violence and war crimes, the hostility to independent media, and the frank preference for tyrants and demagogues ruling other countries, among other traits. A reelected Trump would . . . make the possibility that he would refuse to peacefully give up power in 2025 a lively issue rather than just a paranoid fantasy. . . .
Three years into his reign, it’s harder than ever to accept that so many wage earners lionize this billionaire surrounded by billionaires who has never sided with working people in any conflict with the malefactors of great wealth, or to accept that so many law-abiding people celebrate his lawlessness, or to accept that millions of Bible-believing Christians look at this heathenish bully who exemplifies every vice and form of idol worship the Good Book warns them about and see a redeemer.
Iran: This Isn’t Over.
“President Trump said in a White House address Iranian strikes resulted in no casualties and Iran now ‘appears to be standing down.'” ~ Axios
Just a guess:
Iran, unlike Trump, is focused on results, not optics. And they can wait. They announced that they would take the high road and retaliate proportionately and lawfully on an appropriate, military target. They then immediately launched a strike that proved ineffectual.
That was way too easy. It looked phony, diversionary, like a decoy.
Looking humbled now is good cover if you’re dealing with a fool like Trump plus a whole lot of Americans indulging in wishful thinking about American invincibility. It isn’t even that wily.
Watch them strike hard just pre-election and cut him off at the legs. (Despite the tingle of Schadenfreude, this is not something to look forward to or exult in. Many people will die. So I hope I’m wrong.)
And with that: off to the laundromat. Life goes on, until it doesn’t.
The climate road not taken—in 1980 (a story with Iran in it)
Few people remember that we had a real chance to go another way that long ago—and rejected it.
Jimmy Carter’s presidency is remembered for his cringeworthy soft-spoken piety and sincerity (so uncool and unmacho it was un-American), and for his engineered impotence over the Iran hostage crisis (the Reagan campaign was working behind the scenes with Iran to delay the release of the hostages till after the 1980 election—a much-mocked “conspiracy theory” that proved to be true). With the election of Ronald Reagan, America shook off its warranted malaise and soul-searching and strode into a sunny “morning” of hearty, manly, steak-eating extractive industries, Wall Street casinos siphoning wealth upward, and chest-beating denial. We’re now reaping the reckoning and denial is still the medicine of choice, though alternative energy is now far cheaper and more efficient than it was when Jimmy Carter first advocated it.
That’s right. Did you know or (if you’re old enough) remember that Jimmy Carter pushed for clean energy independence when OPEC prices soared and there were gas lines around the block? I am old enough and I did not remember. My cousin Joan Levin (my mother’s second cousin—their grandfathers were brothers) reminded me:
When we moved to DC my first job was at DOE. One of President Carter’s goals was to produce — darn, I can’t recall the numbers – I think it was like 40 quads (quadrillion kilowatts) of energy from NON-fossil sources by the year 2000.
So this was our mission in the Solar and Conservation unit where I worked. Our job was to encourage production of non-fossil energy sources with government grants, loans and cooperative agreements. So this included solar, wind, water movement, and yes, even [methane biogas from cow manure].
But when Reagan was elected he famously said that Carter’s Solar and Conservation programs would make us “hot in the summer and cold in the winter” and shut them down. And that’s when I left DOE (where I could have stayed forever because I was civll service, but doing what?) and went to work for Public Citizen Health Research Group where . . . I wrote books and articles with doctors.
This was just an aside in a spirited discussion of Joan’s lifelong avocation (she’s a lawyer) as a writer of occasional songs and lyrics that can approach Gilbert & Sullivan levels. Methane biogas was the occasion for the following, which she used as her audition to write for the 1981 Hexagon charity revue in Washington.
The scene opens with an actor in the role of Barry Commoner, a
well-known environmentalist of the day, and author of “Politics of
Energy,” explaining the possibilities for the intestinal gas of
cattle. (Sadly, methane now turns out to be a climate change
issue, but that was not an issue being discussed at that time.)(Recitative, 4/4 time)
I used to burn the midnight oil, and lie awake each night;
Reflecting on what I could do, to set our country right!
Our President has told us that this crisis equals war,
And every citizen must act to help our country score!
So here’s a plan that I devised to keep our Nation strong,
And send those tanks of foreign oil,
Right back where they belong!
OH —–(3/4 time)
Be a “Farter for Carter,”
Break some wind if you can!
Harness “church creepers,” one may be a sleeper,
To power the launch of our energy plan!
Eat some beans, they are tuneful!
We’ll build a new fuel source from scratch!
Be a self-starter, be a “Farter for Carter!”
Just remember: Don’t light that match!
Hexagon did hire her as a writer, though they didn’t use that piece. I was telling her how much my dad would have loved it (he was helpless to resist even bad butt humor) when she sprang this surprise on me—Carter’s clean energy advocacy. Now I dimly begin to remember. It seemed like a quixotic, utopian idea at the time, with the technology still in its early, expensive stages. There was a way, in 1980, but not a will.
In hindsight (ha ha), what a tragic missed opportunity.
“The hit had less to do with national security . . .
” . . . than it did with an aggrieved, hysterical sense of national honor”—a “civilizational insult.”
LIGHTNING BOLT!! Trump’s narcissism is America’s narcissism.
He . . . embodies . . . us.
😱
P.S. Do read the article at the link, by Spencer Ackerman, in full. It’s a hard-hitting dissection of the endless “War on Terror.”
A couple of samples:
Trump possesses greater clarity about what the war on terrorism is than his journalistic or security-sector critics. His great political insight is to recognize that, for his supporters, the war on terrorism’s grotesque subtext of violence against nonwhites who are viewed as alien marauders is its emotional engine.
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Whether Trump destroys Iran’s heritage or not, he reveals his understanding of victory: defilement, in cultural terms, of those who would frustrate him. Under Trump’s watch, the foreign battlefields of the war on terrorism have seen intensified bombings, raids, and other punitive measures. Even those who fought America’s wars for it can be abandoned to their violent fate once Trump sees them as encumbrances, just more subcontractors to stiff. With an embrace of brutality comes a delight in transgression, particularly when the typical lawyers or liberals or foreigners or Deep Staters howl objections. They walk into Trump’s trap: Aren’t these the people who got us into these stupid wars?
One of the things those people told them was not to start a war with Iran. For the Trumpists, though not only for them, Iran, the supposed architect of Radical Islamic Terror, has been at war with America since 1979, all while the U.S. refuses to fight back. This long cultural insult is inflamed by the insistence on restraint from the same political, diplomatic, intelligence, and military voices whom many allies of Trump view as enemies of the president. Cowing them into submission is as delectable for the nationalists as vaporizing Soleimani.
Thoughts and finds 2
It’s actually funny to read grave and somber reports of world leaders “tweeting” threats at each other.
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“power tries to blind us to our power.” But, without being too starry-eyed, there are other models for human civilization than “the rule of men, the rule of profit, and the soul-crushing rule of religion (true idolatry),” models we don’t know enough about. So says a man whose young sweetheart was abducted and murdered decades ago, and who went on to study and write about Minoan civilization.
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You may be tired of my flogging Claire Berlinski, and I wouldn’t blame you—she’s an odd taste even for me—but trust me, or don’t, there are good things in this post.
- Her first instincts are hawkish and she started out exulting on Twitter about Soleimani’s death, the first thing Trump had done that she agreed with. But she’s drastically toned that down as the shadow of possible consequences has lengthened over her. This post does a great job of enumerating all the salient factors that NOBODY KNOWS.
- She asked readers to free-associate the first five words that come to mind about the decade just past. And she publishes lots of the results. Try it yourself, if you like, before you read them. Mine were: Robots in all Christmas windows (That was when I knew in my gut that we’ve gone down the wrong road.)
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Not interested in recaps (of more than five words), not interested in predictions. We have seen and we will see.
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There is a book called Patriotic Gore. (I remembered only the title, so had to look it up. It’s by Edmund Wilson and is a study of the literature of the Civil War. Wilson served in the ambulance corps in France in WWI and ever after was as antiwar as it gets: opposing U.S. entry into WWII, calling postwar America “the United States of Hiroshima,” and refusing to pay his taxes.)
Probably because of that book title, the word “patriotic” itself has always been gory to me. It is red and black, like fresh and clotted blood. It has an aorta of vowels in its heart spelling “riot.”
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I had no air conditioner my first summer in New York, 1968. I’d sit on the fire escape to cool off, and the Puerto Rican granddads in their sleeveless undershirts sat out on the sidewalk below, on folding chairs. 12th Street between A and B, before the East Village drowned in drugs. It was just a family neighborhood, but I dreamt of corpses laid out in rows on the sidewalk at night, their blood, darker than the dark, running down to the street. (Vietnam.) This song is the sound of that summer to me: sweaty flesh and the undirected yearning of new adulthood.
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Morning rituals: Feed and clean up after the cats; sit down with breakfast; look at the weather app, look at the newsletters. Is it going to snow today? Is the world going to end today? Things it’s useful to know as you plan your day.
(Reading the news feels to me like a survival instinct—a useless vestige of the prompt to scan for predators before you came out of your cave. That instinct was aimed at local threats you could actually do something to prevent or avoid. Robbed of any immediate, actionable object, vigilance becomes chronic anxiety and scanning the news becomes an addiction. Rolf Dobelli thinks we should quit.)
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Another beautiful song. Maybe this one is the sound of now. I don’t know, but I’m playing it over and over.
Soleimani said the battlefield . . .
is “‘mankind’s lost paradise.”
A chilling statement; a portrait of the formidable, ruthless man who made it.
Republicans think Trump is a better president than . . .
Guess who(m).
(I’ve got a few posts lined up on the “drafts” runway ’cause I needed to give you guys a break. But this is too astonishing to wait.)
“An Economist/YouGov survey from November showed more Republicans believe that Trump is a better president than was Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, who won the Civil War and emancipated the enslaved. Lincoln, the first Republican president. Lincoln, who delivered the Gettysburg Address before Twitter came along and perfected the art of presidential communication.
“’This should tell you everything you need to know,’ Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a prominent Trump critic, told me. ‘When national polling shows that these folks think that Donald Trump was a better president than Abraham Lincoln, you know this is fucked up.’” ~ Peter Nicholas in The Atlantic
Pushback with paws: Find out why Lincoln was the GREATEST president on my catblog, Purr View.
TOO MANY POSTS
I know. Still coming down from Facebook escape velocity. It must be annoying to get so many if you have subscribed. I hope that you feel free to trash them unread, if need be, rather than unsubscribe.
Aiming for once or twice a week, since WordPress doesn’t seem to do a “weekly digest.” Thinking of the blogs I subscribe to and how I would roll my eyes if they showered me with notifications. My inbox is a deep enough mess.
No more for a while.
Thoughts and quotes—sublime to ridiculous
“R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.” ~ via Michael Pollan
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Looking at what’s going on in the U.S. and elsewhere, the world is being run by a coalition or symbiosis of fanatics and opportunists. The opportunists have figured out how to goad the fanatics and use their fear, hate, and hysteria as fuel—much higher octane than any ordinary conviction—to propel them into power. Because of this dependence on their fuel, the fanatics have the opportunists by the balls. They are the Saudis of psychic energy, who must be pandered to.
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“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love’ — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
“It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
“It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
“It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.”
~ Adrienne Rich (via Brain Pickings)
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“The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy consciousness. . . .
“The unhappy one is absent. . . . It is only the person who is present to himself that is happy.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard (via Brain Pickings)
(Do go to that link and read the rest of that Brain Pickings.)
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“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin—real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. . . . At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.“
Howland was a protegé, no doubt lover, and lifelong friend of Saul Bellow, who had high regard for her work and untiringly promoted her (ironically culminating in a MacArthur “genius grant” that made her so self-conscious she could no longer finish anything). He also wrote about her mercilessly as a character, Dita Schwartz, in his novel More Die of Heartbreak.
What would she have made of the furor over her rediscovered work? [Her son] Jacob suspects she would be irritated by the focus on gender, a perpetual theme in reviews and articles. ‘I can hear her voice saying, “I’m not just a woman writer, I’m a writer,’” he says. ‘She thought of herself as an American writer, and more specifically as a Chicago writer,’ working in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, Richard Wright.
And yet she was a woman writer, writing from her own distinct perspective—as a daughter, as a mother—and that fact shifts the Chicago literature canon, which is still “a boys’ club, a sausage fest,” as Savage puts it. Its beginning is often traced to Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago,” Savage says, “where he actually personified the city as a working-class man.” (Interestingly, the few women writers added to the canon in the more recent decades—Lorraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sandra Cisneros—are all women of color.
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I am so sick of the word “productive.” It turns an individual into an industry. That it is unironically presented as the virtue most to aspire to just shows that capitalism has penetrated and petrified our souls.
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1/3/20 WWIII is in the wind this morning . . . but I still have to vacuum.
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Why is a chunk of cheese more satisfying than a slice?
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I think one reason I prefer posting on blogs, whether or not anyone reads them, is that I can FIND stuff I’ve posted again if I want to revisit it. In that sense it’s more like keeping a solipsistic journal, scrapbook, commonplace book.
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Whoever thought we’d live to see this day?
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OH, THE PLACES YOU’LL GO if you don’t have boundaries! I’m here to tell you, boundaries are overrated. Like “productivity.” Beware of the pieties of any age.
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High fliers have farther to fall.
(Reading in my mom’s memoir about the Great Depression, the suicides of speculators ruined in the Crash of 1929, and thinking of my late beloved neighbor Mamie Harmon, who lived through it, and who used to say in her scalding Southern accent, “WE need another DEPRESSION!”)
“I weep for my city;
it is committing urban suicide.”
(For what it’s worth, NYC now has a “mansion tax.” But it’s a sales tax, not a property tax.)
Ambiance 