Closing Out Sunday

I walked over to the laundromat around 6:30 and came home close to 8 PM. Well, I have clean clothes for work, for all I have no enthusiasm for anything but staying here and writing tomorrow.

Some notes from my reading this evening. 

Long time to wait for Packers season tickets - The 4,500-year-old Wisconsin canoe was built around the same time that Stonehenge was being constructed.

I still like Cyndi Lauper and Pitchfork reviewed Cyndi Lauper's  She’s So Unusual.

When Lauper performed on The Tonight Show, after bantering with Carson about her alternate career options, she broke the fourth wall and addressed the crowd directly: “You guys don’t know, but he’s got this whole thing back here,” she said in her over-the-top New York accent. She gestured at Carson’s elaborate set design, apparently fascinated with the artifice of it all, and wanting to bring the audience with her on her journey. She wasn’t some slick industry creation, just a strange kid from Queens, more like the people in the crowd than she was like Carson. She made pop music for outcasts and oddballs: the kind of artist who entered the homes of Americans watching MTV by dancing through the streets of New York and inviting every passerby to join in. Years later, she would win a Tony for her songwriting for Kinky Boots, the unlikely hit musical she wrote with “Time After Time” collaborator Hyman about drag queens and shoe cobblers, applying her career-long belief in the universal appeal of the particular. Lauper succeeded by harnessing the power of the underdog, a quiet majority that she knew was desperate for a voice. As she told Creem in 1984, “There’s a lot of us, aren’t there?”

She was, is, and always will be admirable.

Pitchfork also did The 200 Best Songs of the 1980s. I did not recognize an artist until #191, and did not recognize a song until #186, The Clash: “Rock the Casbah”. Then I gave up.

KH suggested I watch Sissy-Boy Slap-Party. As I told him, I lost patience because I was trying to work on posts and email and get through the reading list. YMMV.

One philosopher I never quite came to grips with was Spinoza (Sarte was another), but I keep flirting with him. So I read The Uses and Misuses of Spinoza, a book review by FT and published by The Nation. It is enough to keep me curious about Spinoza and more than enough to keep me away from the book being reviewed. I do not even flirt with Sarte nowadays.

Over at The Guardian, through its review Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War by Jonathan Dimbleby review – the Red army’s advance into history, I learned something new about World War II.

At the core of Dimbleby’s book is Operation Bagration, on the war’s eastern front. It was named after the famous Russian general who died of wounds in 1812, resisting the French invaders at the Battle of Borodino. In 1944, Bagration was the name given to “the mightiest onslaught of the second world war”, the offensive by five “fronts”, four Soviet armies and one Polish, numbering well over a million men who set off across a line stretching almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It began in June, timed to take advantage of the Normandy landings in the first week of that month, and by August the Red army had halted on the outskirts of Warsaw. The advance, in some places by as much as 600km, had driven the Nazi armies out of much of the Baltic lands, Belarus, all of eastern Poland, western Ukraine and the border regions of Romania and Hungary. It was no walkover. The Soviet armies suffered horrifying casualties. But in “the five months since the start of Operations Overlord [Normandy] and Bagration, a total of 1,460,000 [German] men had been killed, wounded or captured, 900,000 of these on the eastern front”. That and the devastating losses of German armour and equipment were unsustainable.

I have known for a long time the Soviets suffered more casualties than we did. That fact kind of got lost in The Cold War. Until this review, I had not heard of Operation Bagration.

I knew generally of Hitler's ineptness as a military leader, but the details of the following make it even clearer. I did not know that Stalin was not as inept.

Next to Konstantin Rokossovsky, a commander of Bagration, the Germans’ worst enemy was Adolf Hitler. Again and again, the Führer would declare towns feste Plätze (strongholds) and forbid timely retreat until whole divisions and even armies had been surrounded in a pocket. A lethal pattern kept recurring: the general flying to confront Hitler and plead with him, only to be accused of weakness; the decimation of the trapped forces; finally a doomed breakout ending in massacre. In contrast, Stalin kept in close contact with his field commanders but seldom interfered with their decisions. Rokossovsky even survived a stand-up row with Stalin over Bagration’s attack plan, and got his way.

 I think we will need to a fight long fight to clean up from the mess of Trumpism. First and foremost, we need to make the election deniers admit they were the ones trying to steal the election. I thought before reading What you didn’t know about the Jenna Ellis case, and what it means.

Ellis is partly to blame for this, and history will remember her grave misdeeds. Her remorse might be insincere, the outcome of forced-hand calculations, and the scale of her misconduct seemed to warrant, at least, disbarment.

But in comparison to her former colleagues, she has returned from election-lie derangement. Think of how different the national conversion would be if other election deniers had taken — or were coerced down — a similar path, not just lawyers like Giuliani and Eastman, but also big-lie all stars like Mike Lindell, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and their ilk. A broad repudiation of Trump by former enablers could have sunk his political aspirations.

But all we have is Ellis.

And how did MAGA repay her? She tells us in court documents: “I have received death threats and other threats of a disgusting, obscene nature, so my reputation with that group is not so positive.”

Otherwise, we let a death cult lie too close to political power for our good.

There I will leave you. I should be in bed, but I have one more email to read and I will finally have that problem under control. It is 10:19 PM

I also have some Delbert McClinton to hear.

sch