I cannot think of anything better than being on the other side of Donald J. Trump in a negotiation. One can be sure that he will grab the glory of the show and you will walk away with the substance in your back pocket. In fact under the cover of the Trump claiming victory and his greatness, you will not be noticed dumping the real profits off at the bank.
He said Zelenskyy had no cards to play, that Putin had executed a brilliant real estate acquisition. Now, Zelenskyy has the world paying him for drone tech, and Putin's real estate is all in grave sites.
The North Vietnamese Army did not defeat us; the Viet Cong did because they exploited our foolishness. The same with the Taliban. But we did not pay them off. We faced up to the hubris and fears that got us into Vietnam. Perhaps we will learn from Afghanistan.
Reading What’s in Trump’s reported 14-point MOU with Iran (The Hill) all I could see is ignomny and defeat, no learning from the mistake of Trump's excursion, nothing but a spinelessness. Even Nixon's peace with honor was not this dishonorable. The one thing I cannot get away from is that this is just what we deserve for our arrogance, for letting Trump anywhere close to the Oval Office.
I have been spending too much time doing research, trying to catch up with 30 years in a couple of weeks, but going down rocking. Reading and writing until my eyeballs feel like pinpricks and my brain is swirling. I started doing this thing of sleeping for a few hours and then getting back up to work.
Starting the day with new stuff from Ray Wylie Hubbard:
There has not been much to report. I did the group thing last Friday. The notes are around here somewhere. I think I will add them separately.
CC was found and she is alive.
I made it to church Sunday. The standing wore me out and I did not accomplish much else on Sunday. About the only other places I have been have been Payless or Walmart or the convenience store. I just came back from the convenience store.
Oh, I did laundry one day. Thursday or Friday. I talked to the niece when I did. Yes, it was Friday.
Another thing from last Friday: the phrase "all this useless beauty" got stuck in my head. It came to me as part of a song; one I could not remember. Then I tracked it down a few days later.
I have been keeping to Coke Zero or to one 2-liter of RC Cola.
We had heavy rains last night, after I called it a day.
I have decided that the Georgia Supreme Court writes tiresome opinions. It must be an institutional thing, since the same style persisted over 30 years,
The law is not a profession; it is an obsession, more like a disease of the brain.
Rock on.
I started this post days ago, meaning to write around these things.
There was something atavistic about the skunks, their ancestors living under my house generation after generation. I felt watching them Woolf’s deeper, darker explanation for why, while indifferent, nature soothes the afflicted. “Inside the transcendent communion with nature,” she wrote, “resides the most disquieting fact of existence—the awareness of an unfeeling universe, unconcerned with our fate.” This indifference calmed and conciliated compared with the weight of my loved one’s concern.
This sounds more like me up to 2010:
Woolf understood that those in pain are susceptible to illusion. “This monster,” she writes, “the body, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of wings into the rapture of transcendentalism.” It is assumed by believers that religion comes down from above, but if God exists, human bodies made him. The idea of the supernatural felt disrespectful to the stark reality of a damaged body like mine.
***
Woolf called illness, “the great confessional,” a rare space where “truths are blurted out.” But I had found her truths existential, and almost impossible to bear: “…how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads…”
The odd thing since I got home is that with my body falling apart I have not succumbed to the weariness and then the depression as I used to . I have learned to work around the problems and the pain. More importantly, I have medical insurance and a willingness to use that I did not have once upon a time. It is also good that I have done much to eliminate the stress, have learned to pace myself, and do not have a life where I have to keep throwing myself against a wall just to survive. On the other hand, the bureaucracy that has undertaken supervising my life does not understand that I have time only for writing, that is my job before I kick the bucket, my poor PO seems to think I am an isolated misanthrope when I feel like nothing of the kind.
When I was young, I was quite the reader of Heavy Metal. It seems to me now that that stopped in my thirties. Perhaps because the magazine became harder to find; perhaps because it no longer amazed me; perhaps because I turned to things that would make me money. Will it survive? Will its survival matter? Have our times gotten too shriveled with conservatism.
Anatomy of a Galileo Forgery(JSTOR Daily) forgeries are so much fun, yet this one on this day when lethargy has begun to overtake me again, I am troubled with the thought of history being undermined.
Both of De Caro’s copies of the Sidereus had a title page blemish that turned out to match perfectly a legitimate 1964 facsimile copy of the book. In that facsimile edition, a photo retoucher had failed to correct a paper blemish that the camera read as an ink dot … and here it was again four decades later, pointing to one of the sources of the De Caro fakes.
Detailing a trail of shady library exchanges; forgeries used to replace stolen originals; originals with added forged details to increase their value; and multiple forged copies (De Caro claimed he made five copies of Sidereus Nuncius), Wilding argues that the SNML “is merely the most sophisticated example we have so far detected in a long run of forgeries, whose primary aim was to stand in as surrogates for stolen copies.” Eager to disabuse people of rooting for clever forgers and the schadenfreude of seeing experts conned, Wilding writes, “these books are the product of organized crime” undermining history and the institutions that make history possible.
But is not history always undermining itself?
We found out today that Donald J. Trump has not even made an agreement to end his “excursion” into Iran, but only an agreement to make an agreement. How many will tout him as a genius? That he is the greatest dealmaker in history? Plenty.
And I’ll mention one point in particular that seems not to be getting the attention it deserves. The memorandum of understanding to be signed Friday reportedly says that Iran will not impose tolls in the strait of Hormuz for the next sixty days. This is presumably the basis of Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll-free.” But the government of Iran says that the strait will operate in the longer run “under Iranian arrangements.” This seems likely to be true, since Iran has established the principle that it can close the strait, has paid no price, hasn’t repudiated a right to do so in the future, and will be more interested and able to enforce its will in the months and years to come than we’ll be able to stop them.
***
Could the humiliating loss to Iran—along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration—be a kind of blessing? Could it provide a spur for us to arrest and reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence? Indeed, the American people don’t seem to have been too impressed by Trump’s White House cage circus. Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?
Why It Matters(Sheila Kennedy) should leave depressed about the people but I think there are more who want to be better human beings, who think Trump and his ilk are not better human beings. Meanwhile, we live with their stupidity.
Gerrymandering in Indiana is worse than 95% of the U.S., new report says (wthr.com). The Indiana Supreme Court wrote in its last abortion case that if the people of Indiana have control of the legislature and can amend the constitution. Quaint legal fiction or a delusion, I leave to you, dear reader. I think it is BS. Indiana is in the hands of one political party that will not let the people decide for themselves.
Over time, a dominant party tends to fill watchdog roles — attorneys
general, inspectors general, ethics boards, judicial appointments — with
loyalists. These watchdogs may not be corrupt themselves, but they tend
to become less aggressive when it comes to investigating the ruling
party.
Long tenure also gives a party time to build patronage. Government
jobs, contracts, licenses, and permits flow disproportionately to allies
and donors. What begins as political favoritism can gradually morph
into corruption (Illinois and New Jersey are classic examples of states
where decades of machine politics have created cultures where
“transactional behavior” is just “how things work”).
In competitive states, scandals can be exploited by the opposition
party, but in states where the opposition is permanently weak, the
dominant party doesn’t have much incentive to police itself. The
discipline imposed by an external threat is missing.
This year, for the first time in a long time, Indiana Democrats are
running candidates in most of the districts thought to be “safe” for
Republicans, and the new Lincoln Party is also attempting to upend the
GOP’s lock on Hoosier governance. Perhaps the state is on the cusp of a
revived competitiveness–and a more competent and less corrupt
governance.
Reading American Patriotism Has Always Privileged the Hopes of the Future Over the Sins of the Present (Literary Hub) is a good antidote to my thinking that Trump is a giant hairball in our national history, it is time for us to just shut up and get off stage. He is that hairball. Diving back into legal history keeps reinforcing the idea that if you think there has been no systemic racism in this country then you need to look up the word thinking in the dictionary. It has been here, it lingers behind the mean-spirited cowardly parasites who think birth gives them status. What is also to be seen is how we have tried to follow our better angels. I thought in the following to see a glimpse for a better future.
Such is the problem of patriotism: a higher law that is really a lower law, because it substitutes a theory about America for the reality. It esteems the state above the person, the shell above the contents, in the hope that what is good for one will be good for the other. It has never worked that way. Where patriotism has meant exceptionalism—the belief that America was born to lead—it has wreaked havoc on the cause of democracy and fair dealing, at home and abroad.
America’s descent, on its 250th anniversary, to the demagoguery of an unapologetic nationalist is not the aberration many want it to be. It is the consummation of forces that have been latent from the start: a rumbling warfare between a political theory of equality and a more visceral urge for mastery. And while “America First” may represent a particularly abrasive form of the phenomenon, it cannot be isolated from a tradition that has long confused the strength of America with the substance of democracy. When the answer to Donald Trump is a renewed and refined patriotism, drawing on the example of Abraham Lincoln and a civil war that claimed nearly a million lives, it is clear that we need to go deeper.
***
My conviction, as a true believer in what the journalist Randolph Bourne called the “American promise,” is that America needs to shed the conceit of exceptionalism to fulfill its democratic mandate. We must lose the myth of preeminence to see the world as it is. From foreign policy to health care, education to the environment, questions of freedom and justice have been lost in the mists of national pride: the still-religious intuition that we have already arrived. The paradox, as Bourne defined it during the nationalist frenzy of World War I, is that America will have to become less patriotic before it can recover what is true and beautiful in its creed.
There are so many areas in which America excels Europe, thought Bourne, but in patriotism we follow and regress. As the irrepressible Emma Goldman lectured a jury, as she defended herself against charges of conspiring against conscription, there are more kinds of patriotism than carnivals of self-regard.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” she told a court in 1917, “we respect your patriotism. We would not, if we could, have you change its meaning for yourself. But may there not be different kinds of patriotism as there are different kinds of liberty? I for one cannot believe that love of one’s country must needs consist in blindness to its social faults, to deafness to its social discords, of inarticulation to its social wrongs.”
“Our patriotism,” she continued, “is that of the man who loves a woman with open eyes. He is enchanted by her beauty, yet he sees her faults.” Goldman loved the American people, and the “great possibilities” of a free society, but she hated the “cant” of an Americanism that trampled on freedom and expected to be thanked for it: the misconceived idealism that deemed a flag more precious than a person. Patriotism, Goldman argued in an earlier essay, had become a “Moloch” and a “menace to liberty,” a value that cheerfully “abrogates the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” When a court could sentence a man to ninety days in prison for quoting the nation’s founding document, in a manner supposedly subversive of the war, the crisis was complete.
LaCroix concluded with the observation that, at the time of that
speech, the young Lincoln “did not know what was coming.” He had no
inkling of the pivotal role he would play in the nation’s future, but
what he could do at that time of his life was offer his listeners a set
of ideas that would attach them to civic life rather than alienating
them from it.
There was much more. The full video of her address is available on Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/1199018583#t=1h18m28s. It
starts at the 1 hour 18 minute mark, and I strongly encourage you to
click through and watch the entire speech, which was far more powerful
than my efforts to describe it.
I had not heard the phrase “the mobocratic spirit,” but it is a perfect description of MAGA.
What Lincoln understood and emphasized was the central element of
true Americanism, which is allegiance to a specific approach to human
governance. It is that allegiance that separates citizens of the United
States from the “blood and soil” beliefs that underlie fascist regimes
and motivate Trump’s MAGA base. In a recent speech, Georgia Senator John
Ossoff recently reaffirmed Lincoln’s understanding of what makes one an
American, insisting that “Our national greatness flows not through our
blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race.
We’re a people united not by ethnicity, but by our shared convictions.
And that is what makes us exceptional.”
I finished with "Stranger Things" and "The Sandman" on Netflix. Winona Ryder has now graduated to mother roles and seems so far from Heathers, but damn she has got a way with an axe. "The Sandman" left me as cold as the graphic novels did until Shakespeare showed up. There is a dreaming, indeed.
Over on YouTube the algorithm turned up a Cary Grant movie I had never heard of This Is the Night . That it had Thelma Todd was what attracted my attention. I knew about her death but could never recall her from any movie. Attractive, funny, and, yeah, I can see why her death was a shocker. But it was another actress who caught my attention -Lili Damita - the rather notorious first wife of Erroll Flynn. I had never heard anything of her acting, so her being a charming fireball was a surprise. However, the fascinating thing about the movie was the opening; never seen one like it, call it jazz on film.
I was less impressed by The Brasher Dubloon; the novel is not my favorite Raymond Chandler novel, I like even Playback better; the movie is uneven, reminding me of better actors in the role such as Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum, but it beats Altman's The Long Goodbye.
This is the kind of movie that needs to be remade - good enough and could be better.
The same with this one, that never seems to come to life, and I understand why I have not seen it in too many decades to admit.
Thank you for submitting your piece "Agnes" to Thin Air online.
Our editorial staff has given it careful consideration and
unfortunately must pass at this time. Although we are not accepting your
work, our team was excited to have the chance to read and consider it.
We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
Kruger, Web Editor
And this was not much of a surprise:
Thank you
for submitting "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984." We
regret that we are unable to publish it, but we appreciate your interest
in The Paris Review.
I need to make some calls. I thought of calling KH last night when I got thinking of the distance between old songs and today. For some reason, I got to going through Hank Willaims Jr. songs just before bedtime last night. He's not a soul singer like Waylon, but I like what he's doing now with country blues. That got me thinking about late style. He got pressed into the service of a country music that had little to offer him, he moved over to a more rocking, outlaw style, then got popular and somewhat stupid about politics, and with the country blues he is putting out music that has feeling.
Speaking of Waylon, this just came across the speakers from an old live song, something I used to think was corny and now sounds like a better view of America than is coming to me today.
The sheriff called the other day, wanting to do an interview as the DOC has implemented some new rules. I have no idea what the rules are. So, tomorrow I go out there, taking a break from work to satisfy some bureaucratic fears about my existence. Your tax dollars at work.
The writer's group meets today, and I intend to be there. Also, I need to hit a grocery. And deposit my Indiana tax refund. I probably should take time for my mail rather than my email.
I am supposed to be working on "Agnes" - maybe I can get to it this afternoon. It will let me get a grip on this research project to not be working on it all day today.
And that is pretty much life as it is here in Muncie. The sun is up now, two hours after I came back from the convenience store and started cleaning up this post. I suspect a few more will come out that will be more political,
And it could be time for breakfast.
Maybe I did get to you, I do know I got where I am going.
I understand Kundera's star has faded somewhat. Maybe that is for the best, instead of the fame we are paying attention to what he says. I have been spending time away from fiction and digging into 1850 Indiana, and I have spent time listening to Gore Vidal on YouTube. Historical amnesia is on my mind. Do we forget to cover our pains? Is there a glimpse at tyranny through the rewriting of history? Yes, probably a bit of Orwell hiding in there, too. There is a problem with the exceptions to a rule, a beauty to a simple narrative. People will latch onto x because if it is too confusing, perhaps frightening, about the truth being x + m + e + a times 33.
Charles Dickens sits at the head of a long oak table, peering over
his spectacles. Jane Austen raises an eyebrow. George Orwell taps a pen
thoughtfully. Margaret Atwood in her low, ironic, monotone, tells me to
sit. My application lies before them, thin and unconvincing. I mumble
almost incoherently about my professional identity issues.
“Has he suffered enough?” Dickens asks the panel as though it was a prerequisite. No answer.
“Has he observed society with sufficient wit?” Austen enquires demurely. No answer.
“Has
he told the truth?” grunts George Orwell almost absentmindedly while
scrutinizing the Burmese tattoos on his knuckles. No answer.
I am jittery, a bundle of nerves, and attempt a response, apologizing for the quality of my work.
“Nobody
is making you write. So don’t whine,” Atwood says, looking me straight
in the eye, her soft Canadian accent cutting through the tension in the
room. “And oh, by the way, you might write from the heart, but you’d
better polish with your brain.”
At which point I am advised to try again in a few decades and summarily dismissed.
***
And perhaps that is where the unease originates. The expectation that
writing should feel certain, when in fact it rarely does. When writing
is not mastery, but a disciplined form of uncertainty. And the more I
read about writers, the more I suspect that feeling like a fraud is not a
disqualifying condition—it may, in fact, be a prerequisite. A sort of
secret handshake. Perhaps if you’re certain of your brilliance, you may
have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Personally, Kurt Vonegut’s words
playing in my head like a mantra, keep me grounded: “When I write,” he
says, “I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
***
And maybe I am a fraud. That thought doesn’t quite go away. But neither
does this quiet pull back to the page, this small, persistent hope that
if I keep showing up, something honest will eventually meet me there.
Along with Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, I found Mario Vargas Llosa on YouTube. I read his book on writing while in prison and have read several of his novels (including Feast of the Goat). I found reading him more than worthwhile.
In many ways, mythic fiction is more popular than ever. Even as the Hero’s Journey
has arguably lost some of the obsessive luster from decades past,
storytellers and audiences alike are more entranced than ever by myth,
fairy tale, cultural symbolism, and psychological archetypes. Yet in
some ways, I feel like we’re also in a time in which we have somewhat
lost touch with the underlying touchstones of why these forms are
meaningful.
For the most part, we understand the idea of mythic fiction through a
few specific lenses. On the one hand, we might think of the old
stories—fairy and folk tales (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard’s
Wives, the Girl With No Hands, Vasilisa the Beautiful, etc.) or
mythological stories that largely arose from interpretations of the
supernatural (e.g., Kronos and the Titans; Isis, Osiris, and Horus;
Eros, Psyche, and Aphrodite; Thor and Odin, etc.).
We also experience all these stories through the more anthropological
perspective found in the works of Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola
Estes, and others like them—who not only collected the old stories, but
studied their underlying similarities, patterns, and symbolic messages.
From here, we might also think of the influence of archetypal
psychological approaches, such as Carl Jung’s, in which the symbolism
becomes increasingly internalized. These explorations are what gave
birth to the fascination for modernizing such (arguably) ancient forms
as the Hero’s Journey.
Increasingly, contemporary storytellers and audiences also understand
myth and archetype specifically through popular culture’s
reinterpreation of these myths and their underlying structures—most
famously with Star Wars, but since then through an
ever-increasing number of stories that seek to understand and tap the
deep power and resonance of these old storyforms.
Not that I think it is possible to write an epic about Indiana, albeit Raintree County made a damn good stab at the epic. I do not have the time left me to write a book like that, even if I had the talent.
Here are four reasons I think the writing of mythic fiction is particularly important right now:
1. Our Relationship to the Old Stories Has Grown Thin
2. Mythic Fiction Requires the Partnership of Intuition and Intellect
3. Mythic Fiction Reconnects Writers to the Deep Source of Story
4. The Need for New Myths in a Changing World
And my critique of my writing:
Reading We Could’ve Been Happy Here made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in
my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was
not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the
economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is
not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we
have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no
longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We
have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I
could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I
want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the
emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The
Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had
to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but
there is little I see in some published stories that concern
political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some
of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think
I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After
all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a
world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury
of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but
there is the humanity, isn't it?
Reading Petrarch on Cities, Time, and Heraclitus by Iván Parga Ornelas Antigone made me think of Thoreau. There is a difference between being alone and solitude. The former can be imposed and resented; the other is a peace and a joy.
The idea of a solitary life in some field or forest has probably appealed to many of us. But Petrarch’s solitudo is demanding. One must not only abandon the city, but everything it represents: ambitions, desires and appetites, and the wish for recognition and personal gain through others. Petrarch, in other words, would not approve of the digital nomad, nor of your plan to retire into a cabin in the woods and spend the day reading and writing for Antigone, if your motivation was to gain recognition and applause.
PO visited yesterday. I asked what he meant by treatment. I got a lot of talk about all the meanings treatment could have, which was not a good thing since the pain from the hernias is not helpful with my patience. It came down to the sentencing order siad I was to have psychosexual counseling. Pretty sure the government does not understand the nature of the programs to which they are sending people. I remain amused by this. The only psychiatric diagnoses I have had are that I have depression. Nothing else. Bureaucracy does not care if the treatment fits a problem; bureaucracy needs a treatment that they can check off as being assigned.
The heat set in. I worked on my research project. Then I watched Netflix.
Today, I woke late, had some problems with my bowels, and did not go to the writer's group. More work on the research project. I got a date for my surgery.
I thought to change the sleeping schedule around, but I could not get to sleep since lawn care erupted outside my window. Off to Walmart. I really dislike Walmart, too many people and the worst people working with the public. The cashier wanted to sell me green Lucky Strikes when I asked for reds. I did not even know they had green Luckies.
Back here, my hair soaked with sweat; putting off heating up the leftovers. The last thing this apartment needs is more heat. The clouds are dissipating and I have direct sunlight.
I need to bite the bullet and start up the air conditioner.
In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any
literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in
Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers.
Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a
tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob
Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that
slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest.
***
The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than
rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable
embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t
learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The
internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the
detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie
National Monument no longer has information related to rising sea
levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and
materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and
other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.
My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort
Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in
the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book
tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American
flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the
military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would
have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition
of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S.
Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear
that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor
alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National,
the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.
***
The irony was that the South’s preferred message about “happy and
contented slaves” was all a lie. Instead of being proved on the ground
of open debate and inquiry, it had to be proved in the Civil War when
the enslaved people bolted toward the Union Army at the first possible
opportunity, to the astonishment of the slaveholding class which had
believed its own cheerful propaganda
How easily scared and manipulated are Americans! Has it always been this way? I never read Richard Hofstadter's book on American paranoia, so all I can see is from my own perspective. There was the Red Scare after WWI, and that continued through HUAC and then started rising under Nixon and Dies until the fever of McCarthyism broke out. Has the time come for America to go under? That Lincoln's last best hope was all just an illusion?
But this obscures the asymmetry doing the real work. To approve access to medication abortion the FDA required drug companies to meet normal evidentiary standards demonstrating that the potential harm to patients taking mifepristone is marginal. The court, however, intervened, stating that this normal process was insufficient. Why? Because there could be some uncertainty about the applicability of these findings, given there was no longer an in-person requirement.
Doubt, in other words, undermined the conclusions of the FDA’s own rulemaking processes. In contrast, doubt played no role in undercutting Louisiana’s unfounded claims of risk and potential for “sovereign injury” — that is, the potential the state itself would suffer a kind of harm to its power as a state.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nothing scares those unworthy of power like its loss.
People who blame others for their failings, the kind of men who suck their thumbs and whine until they get attention. The traditional family, what they call the nuclear family, is a fiction, These kinds of people needing to put down others only show off their inadequacies.
Douglas Wilson has
a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the
Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system,
“we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church
structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”
Wilson
is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches,
based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small
empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the
United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and
a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170
affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member,
and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in
February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of
America, people listen.
***
The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black
president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial
appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority
men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is
furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds,
describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I
think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss
of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made
that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that
it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”
Maybe I have spent too much time reading from 1850 with no little disgust at the racism of our ancestors.
