No Kings

A few scenes from today's well-attended and upbeat demonstration in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which merged amicably with a scheduled street fair. I heard only one or two hecklers; the town was ours.

There was even music, courtesy of the Leftist Marching Band.

Harris for President

Since I have no billion-dollar media empire to protect, and since hardly anyone listens to me anyway, I have no hesitation in endorsing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for president and vice-president in the 2024 election. That many millions of my fellow citizens see things differently speaks volumes about the current state of American political culture (bad) and about the open wounds of American history (unhealed, and probably unhealable), but doesn't alter my opinion. A lie is a lie, no matter how often repeated and spread about, and, bluntly put, everything that comes out of the mouth of the Republican candidates is a lie. I find little point in arguing with those who still refuse, or are unable, to understand the danger. There is no grey area; to quote Peter Case, this is "the fork in the road where we all have to choose."

We have a long, sad history in the United States of failing to do the right thing; somehow we have muddled through, more or less. A similar failure now may be more difficult to overcome. We can only hope that historians of the future — if the honest study of history survives — will not find in our actions rich cause for condemnation.

Don't mess with the cat ladies

Perhaps someone should have given the Republican vice-presidential candidate a history lesson:

Even a powerful park commissioner found the housewives and their perambulators blocking his way when he tried to rent out a bit of the green as a parking lot for a private restaurant he favored; and wild painters and cat-keeping spinsters united to keep him from forcing a driveway through lovely Washington Square.

Paul and Percival Goodman, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life

The "powerful park commissioner" was of course Robert Moses.

Stepping up to the plate

Two forceful and anguished statements in the wake of yet another mass shooting indicate that the stereotypical image of the American professional baseball player is seriously out of date or simply wrong. First, Nationals pitcher Sean Doolittle:

It just feels like we’ve reached a point where if not now, when? We should have done something after Sandy Hook; we should have done something after Vegas; we should have done something after Pittsburgh; I mean, you can go down the list. We should have done something after Virginia Tech. How far back do you want to go? And then the conversation inevitably always changes to mental health or bulletproof backpacks. We’re talking about ballistic blankets. We’re talking about renovating schools so there is only one entrance and one exit. We’re talking about arming teachers.

You’re describing a prison, and you’re bargaining and negotiating with people’s lives instead of just addressing the common denominator in every single one of these issues. It’s really frustrating, and I would like to think that in this country we’re capable of some common-sense reforms that a majority of Americans support that don’t infringe on your Second Amendment rights ... Who am I? I’m on the injured list. I’m a middle reliever on a team that unfortunately is in last place right now ... But we’re still members of societies and our communities, and there are people who look up to us as athletes, who listen to what we have to say as athletes.

And I think if you could start some of these conversations, or you can participate in some of these conversations and maybe get people to listen or put pressure on elected officials to do something, the reality is that you have a little bit more sway than the average person. And when it comes to making changes in your community, you can help move the needle on any number of issues that are important to you.

Source

Perhaps even more remarkably, San Francisco Giants manager (and former player) Gabe Kapler, on why he won't be coming out of the dugout during the playing of the national anthem:

I’m often struck before our games by the lack of delivery of the promise of what our national anthem represents ... We stand in honor of a country where we elect representatives to serve us, to thoughtfully consider and enact legislation that protects the interests of all the people in this country and to move this country forward towards the vision of the "shining city on the hill." But instead, we thoughtlessly link our moment of silence and grief with the equally thoughtless display of celebration for a country that refuses to take up the concept of controlling the sale of weapons used nearly exclusively for the mass slaughter of human beings.

We have our moment (over and over), and then we move on without demanding real change from the people we empower to make these changes. We stand, we bow our heads, and the people in power leave on recess, celebrating their own patriotism at every turn.

Source

Nobody's business

That the Supreme Court is poised to overturn settled law and reverse the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade should surprise no one, given the steady rightward drift of the court, but it should appall anyone who cares about fundamental human rights.

I'll state my bias: human beings don't procreate spiritually, we procreate as bodies. We are no different in this regard from other animals, and anyone who thinks differently has a lot of special pleading to do. There is, therefore, no more basic level of individual rights than that which pertains to the body and to reproduction. The recognition of those rights, in the face of determined opposition, has been one of the most important advances of modern society. It is, paradoxically, the defense of the fundamental dignity of the physical, of our nature as animals, that defines us as modern human beings.

To deny a woman the right to control her reproduction is as outrageous an affront to human dignity as can be imagined. We pride ourselves — rightly — on the declared principles of freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion, but what is more intrusive, forcing others to keep their thoughts and beliefs to themselves, or telling a woman that even her own body is not hers to control? Defenders of abortion rights often point out — rightly — that it would be unthinkable and cruel to force a rape victim to carry her rapist's child to term, but that argument, legitimate as it is, is ultimately superfluous. It is for women to decide under what circumstances they are willing to bear a child. And it's no one else's business.

Roe v. Wade established a reasoned balance, informed by medical science, between the interests of society and a woman's rights. That balance has been steadily undermined by legislation and previous court decisions, but the essential principle underlying it has been preserved — until now. There is little short-term prospect, given the nature and dire condition of or political system, that the overturning of Roe can itself be undone. The damage will be profound, both to women and to American democracy.

It has to be understood that those who would deny a women's right to decide when or whether to have a child, and who more generally reject the whole idea of a right to privacy, don't really believe that human beings have inherent, independent rights at all. They recognize only power and its privilege to compel those who are subject to it. The fact that the right to abortion has long been acknowledged and supported by a majority of Americans will count for little. I have no doubt that reversal will be robustly cheered in the states that will be lining up to enact restricive legislation and competing to see how extreme that legislation can be made.

This country has been morally problematic from its inception, but it's hard to see how it will survive in any real sense. Even before this decision, we have come as close to fascism as we have ever been, and the danger has in no way receded.

Nobody Should Be Surprised

If anyone in this country is still harboring illusions about the man in the White House and his core of thugs, it's about time they asked themselves why — or how. Defeated at the polls, trounced in the courts (often by judges he put in their posts), repudiated by much of his own party, defied now by the (Republican) Senate majority leader and his own hand-picked vice-president, the sociopath has no avenues left but an appeal to violence, and violence, directly provoked by his own words, is exactly what we have. Is there really anyone left who can look at the scene in Washington today and not realize that the whole Trump cult has been nothing but a lie? It didn't "get a little out of hand"; it was rotten to the core from the very start, and every opportunist who thought it was possible to make common cause with MAGA cap-wearing, gun-waving fascist lunatics and somehow keep their hands clean has a lot to answer for today. How could anyone think that it was possible to make common cause with an unscrupulous monster who was willing to put his own ego ahead of the very principles of democratic government and the rule of law, and who was willing to unleash armed goons to achieve his ends? Does American democracy no longer matter? Was it really all worth selling out for a bit of partisan advantage, the chance to make an extra buck and bruise a few liberals?

Make no mistake; Trump is doomed. It's a lot easier to provoke a riot than it is to run a country when you've lost your last shred of legitimacy. The country's battered institutions will re-group, preserve what's left of their integrity, and move on to other crises. But the damage is done, literally and figuratively. Elections, as they like to say, have consequences; no one has any right to be surprised at the consequences of the presidential election of 2016. Learn the lesson. Next time it may be worse.

Joy

Today was a beautiful day and I'm not just thinking of the blue skies and unseasonably mild weather here in New York State. I'm a skeptical person by nature; I have no illusions about the obstacles that lie ahead for both the country and the Biden-Harris administration. Nor should anyone underestimate the tenacity of the paranoia and corruption that are rooted in our public life. But with all that it comes as a deep relief that in the middle of a terrible pandemic Americans in unprecedented numbers not only managed to find a way to cast their ballots but saw through all the dishonesty and bigotry and found the moral clarity to do the right thing. The pall that has hung over us for four years has been driven off. A celebration is indeed in order.

Turning out

Saturday was the first day of early voting where I live. My wife and I have already voted by absentee ballot, but yesterday I happened to walk by the local early voting site, which is in pool complex in our village park, and was surprised by how many people were lined up to vote -- wearing masks -- with a steady stream of cars discharging more. I live in a reliably blue district in a safely blue state, but it was heartening to see so many people taking this election seriously, even if one party doesn't think that "rank democracy" is as important as property rights and in fact has based its entire strategy on an anti-democratic electoral college and on erecting as many hoops as possible to make it difficult for people to vote.

In ordinary times a president who has lied and blustered his way through four terrible years, who continues to downplay a pandemic that has killed more than 230,000 Americans and done long-term damage to the economy, who can't even pretend to feel empathy, who has contempt for science, and who has thrown in his lot with violent militias and bonkers conspiracy theorists, would have no chance of re-election. And, if the polls are correct*, he doesn't. Ojalá.

I refer anyone who is stil wavering to the endorsements -- all of them unprecedented -- from Scientific American, Nature, and USA Today.

* The polling wasn't all that accurate, frankly, but the prediction of the final result was correct.

Quote of the day

Robert Hendrickson, Rector at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Tucson, Arizona (via Daughter Number Three):

This is an awful man, waving a book he hasn’t read, in front of a church he doesn’t attend, invoking laws he doesn’t understand, against fellow Americans he sees as enemies, wielding a military he dodged serving, to protect power he gained via accepting foreign interference, exploiting fear and anger he loves to stoke, after failing to address a pandemic he was warned about, and building it all on a bed of constant lies and childish inanity.

I can't even bear to look at the photo in question. It turns out that the last refuge of a scoundrel isn't patriotism after all. I'm not religious and I'm not sure I know what "the soul" means, but I know when someone doesn't have one.

From the Guardian

This brings us back to impeachment. The question it poses is not whether it will be the thing that drives Donald Trump from office or whether it will be an unalloyed political boon for Democrats or other progressive forces in the country. It won’t be any of these things. Instead, the issue raised by impeachment is whether America, at this stage in its history, has what it takes to stand up against the forces of tyranny – whether there is still a passion among its people, and enough vitality in its institutions, to defend the American ideal against an unprecedented assault.

Andrew Gawthorpe, "Impeachment won't force Trump out of office. But it matters for our republic." Guardian.

(Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA)

Notes Against a Manifesto

What is to be done? Is there anything more exasperating than the cycle of analysis regarding our political situation? How did we get here? Whose fault is it? The implicit argument too often seems to be that there is no dilemma, no reason to trade off one thing for another and not have it both ways, as long as you listen to me. I'm neither a prophet nor a political scientist — and no one listens to me (nor would I expect them to) — but at a fundamental level all of this profound wisdom seems to me to miss the point.

The manipulation, the lies, the social and economic and cultural anxieties, to which we all have been subjected are amply documented, and all of it takes its toll, warps our understanding and our better natures, makes us putty in the hands of demagogues. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, wrote Tolstoi, and that is true for the novelist but not satisfactory to the moral philosopher. If we're nothing more than the sum of our influences — and perhaps we're not, we can't prove the contrary — then we're not moral agents at all.

The social sciences are concerned with the study of causes; literature (of the best kind, something I insist on the existence of, Literature-with-a-capital L) is about freedom. Not freedom as the absence of chains or bars (not all of us have that luxury), but freedom as the consciousness of the ability to be a moral agent, in whatever sphere, even in the most constrained of circumstances.

Stalin supposedly commanded writers to be "engineers of human souls," but no writer worthy of the name is capable of doing any such thing. (Milan Kundera, among others, has said all of this better in his writings on the novel.) Engineers of the soul are, in any case, a dime a dozen. Nevertheless, writers can, and do, interrogate the world, and no sphere can be barred to them, politics least of all. Writers have (or don't have) responsibility because we all do (or don't).

The symbol of moral freedom is not, in my view, the broken chain but the absence of a net, the high-wire act with nothing to fall back on. A single false step will be relentlessly exposed. Anything else, all the deadly sins, can, in time, perhaps be forgiven, but not bad faith.

For the pious of various stripes there is rarely any dilemma; their convictions will always protect them from the pitfalls of freedom. But such security is itself highly contingent, for if the net that protects them is whisked away where are they then? (The argument that the net must necessarily exist because we need it is pure sleight-of-hand.) Some, it is true, manage to maintain something that amounts to faith without believing there is a net beneath them, and with them I have no quarrel. I'm not really interested in how people get to virtuous action, or what flags they wrap themselves in to justify its opposite. But at some point you need to be able to look in the mirror and recognize what you see.

In the end the overriding issue at the moment is comfortingly binary: Fascism, yes or no?

The Age of Ubu

"A painting by Jean-Martin Bontoux of King Ubu in Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi, late twentieth century," via The New York Review of Books. The image accompanied an article by Charles Simic, who wrote in part:

One only had to watch the confirmation hearings for Trump's cabinet to fully grasp the sort of men and women who are now in charge in all spheres of life in this country. Lacking any feeling of empathy for their fellow Americans and their problems, convinced in their minds of their superiority because of their immense wealth, eager to pillage this country even more, they are bound to do evil because that's the kind of people they are. In the meantime, the crimes and injustices that are bound to multiply in the months and years ahead is what we have to look forward to. Ubu Roi may not be a great play, but we don't deserve Shakespeare.

"Year One: Our President Ubu"

Two years on, the situation has only grown more grotesque.

Lèse-majesté?

"Cartoonist loses job after image depicting Trump ignoring dead migrants to play golf" (The Independent).

Image by Michael de Adder.

Responsibility

Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic:

Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man as “very passionate.” Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend neo-Nazi rioters as “fine people.” They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surge in anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party. For the past few decades, most American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, have been careful not to urge their supporters to take matters into their own hands. Trump did everything he could to fan the flames, and nothing to restrain those who might take him at his word.

"Trump's Caravan Hysteria Led to This," October 28, 2018

Betrayal

These are not normal circumstances. Nancy LeTourneau:

What we are watching is a complete reorienting of the foreign policy of the United States, and most Republicans are going along because they're too afraid of blow-back from their base. It just so happens that this reorientation is exactly what Vladimir Putin has always wanted. It not only weakens our allies, it weakens us and turns Russia into a player on the global stage. At some point, we all are going to have to recognize that either Trump is a madman swinging wildly in a way that could destroy this country, or he is, as Hillary Clinton once pointed out, a puppet of Putin's. Perhaps some of both.

Our founders attempted to provide us with tools to deal with a situation like this. What they didn't count on was that an entire media apparatus would be developed to enable this kind of madness and that a political party would sit back and watch it happen because they were too drunk with power and/or too cowardly to do anything about it.

"Why Would Trump So Viciously Attack Angela Merkel?," from Washington Monthly.

It's now sadly impossible to avoid the conclusion that the US president has become, for motives that can be speculated on if not known with certainty, the instrument if not the engineer of a conspiracy designed to destroy liberal democracy. One doesn't need to be a particular admirer of Angela Merkel — or Hillary Clinton, for that matter — to understand that everything we ought to value in common — government by consent of the people, human rights, equal treatment under the law, compassion, reason, our own future — is being betrayed. And the right wing in this country is cheering it on. Stay alert.

Liu Xiaobo

The Chinese critic and activist Liu Xiaobo has died. A related New York Times article by Chris Buckley reflects on the bleak prospects for democracy and free expression in China. With authoritarianism of various stripes firmly entrenched in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and the lack of interest in human rights issues shown by our own current administration, the optimistic days of 1989 now seem very distant. Never forget.

Here is the full text of Charter 08. A related New York Times article examines the grim prospects for China's human rights lawyers.

Also in today's obituaries is one for Irina Ratushinskaya, former Soviet-era political prisoner and author of a fine memoir, Grey Is the Color of Hope.

Philip Roth: Presidents, real and imagined

From a New Yorker interview with Judith Thurman, Philip Roth on comparisons between his novel The Plot Against America, which imagined a Charles Lindbergh defeat of FDR, and our present situation:

It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist. The relevant book about Trump's American forebear is Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel—Melville's last—that could just as well have been called The Art of the Scam.

From the same interview:

I was born in 1933, the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I've been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish* than English.

On the present condition and role of the writer:

Unlike writers in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-seventies, American writers haven't had their driver's licenses confiscated and their children forbidden to matriculate in academic schools. Writers here don't live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did, unless—or until—there is a genuine assault on our rights and the country is drowning in Trump's river of lies. In the meantime, I imagine writers will continue robustly to exploit the enormous American freedom that exists to write what they please, to speak out about the political situation, or to organize as they see fit.

* Jerkish: A term popularized by the Czech writer Ivan Klíma in his novel Love and Garbage. Said to have been developed for communication with chimpanzees, Jerkish has a vocabulary of only 225 words. Klíma characterized it as the standard dialect of Czechoslovakia's Stalinist-era politicians.

Rising Voices

Today, the New York Times has an astonishing series of photos from the nationwide worldwide women's marches of January 21, 2017.

Hour of lead (2)

Citing no evidence, our president-elect — and how ashamed, how defiled one feels, personally and as a citizen, having to call him that — has proclaimed himself the legitimate winner of the 2016 popular vote, alleging that millions of votes for his opponent were fraudulently cast. That no one worthy of respect takes his claim seriously makes no difference; we're in a post-truth condition and it suffices to merely make an assertion, no matter how implausible. Those who believe him can fall back on a simple syllogism: America is a country of and for white Christians, the Republican candidate positioned himself as the candidate of that country, therefore he must have won the popular vote. Being non-white, or non-Christian, and calling oneself an American, is, so the logic goes, itself fraudulent, so the technicalities of whether there was actually any significant voter fraud (there wasn't) are quite beside the point. Those with a vested interest in believing this argument — or pretending to — will be untroubled by doubt.

It's going to be a long four years.

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Hour of lead

Image: Jasper Johns.

On Horned Beasts, and Dilemmas

Teju Cole:

Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.

"A Time for Refusal," The New York Times, November 11, 2016

1.

Teju Cole's essay on the recent election, Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros, and the dangers of accommodating oneself to evil seems to me both brilliantly framed and right on the money, but if the new president-elect has even heard of the late Romanian-born French playwright he certainly doesn't care about him (or about Teju Cole), and the same is undoubtedly true of the bulk of his supporters. So in a sense this will no doubt be viewed as just one more laughable example of the cluelessness of the intellectual elite, who amuse themselves with literary allusions while middle-class Americans seek to lift the stone off their backs (or at least, shift it to the other side).

It raises, though, the more general question of what the response of artists and intellectuals should be to these events, and how we need to "frame our discourse" (to fall once more into the alienating jargon) to reach beyond our own rarefied sphere. What is our responsibility in the face of a state of emergency? Do we politicize art and inquiry, perhaps channel it into digestible mass-propaganda, or do we insist on the inviolability of our domains, on the pursuit of art for art's sake? (And let's not forget that those who are likely to be seizing the reins in Washington have little use for art or education at all, except of the most banal kind.)

It seems inescapable to me that we are going to have to live with the tension between the two impulses. We cannot blind ourselves to what is happening and to our responsibilities, but neither can we debase our work. We shouldn't be arrogant about what we've studied or created, but we also shouldn't be apologetic for it. (Nor should we make the all-too-frequent mistake of assuming that blue-collar Americans, or people who don't have college diplomas, are necessarily unsophisticated or incapable of originality and insight.) We will need new energies and new ideas; we can't afford to be complacent.

2.

Attempting to maintain that this past election wasn't in part about race and other cultural issues strikes me as inadequate as attempting to maintain that it was only about those factors. History doesn't come packaged in neat little narratives to suit our need for self-justification. Political scientists will and should, of course, sift through the results to try to determine what really happened and why, but public life isn't a controlled experiment, nor is there any way to easily disentangle the complex influences of the past on our present ideologies and behavior. It seems to me, nevertheless, entirely defensible to reserve some of the focus for what might be called either the moral or the individual level, that is, to examine the ways in which individuals both prominent and ordinary have spoken and acted in bad faith (not just in one party or faction, to be sure). Given that the president-elect largely owes his entry into politics to a lie — the suggestion, eagerly embraced by those who view America as a country fundamentally for and of white people, that Barack Obama wasn't eligible to serve as president at all — there seems to be much to consider in this light. Since I'm neither an organizer nor a street-fighter it's an avenue of particular interest to me.

3.

Also from the Times this week is an article by Kirk Semple, entitled "Fleeing Gangs, Central American Families Surge Toward U.S.," about the reasons that have led not just individuals but entire families to leave their native countries and head north. One wonders if those — and they are many — who will show little sympathy for the plight of these refugees would have been equally indifferent to those who fled for their lives from Russian pogroms or famine in Ireland in the past. But no, one doesn't wonder; of course they would have.