… hope.

Sing it.

Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money
Maybe we're ragged and funny
But we'll travel along singing a song
Side by side!

We don't know what's coming tomorrow
Maybe it's trouble and sorrow
But we'll travel the road sharing our load
Side by side!

When my deep depression
Makes me wish I were dead
I'll just grab my little buddy
Point you right at my head

When the booze and divorces undo me
When the cold lonely winters cut through me
I'll just go and unlock one of my Glocks:
Suicide!

Declaring himself “humiliated” by the national and international disgust he has evoked by releasing an ad depicting him killing Republicans insufficiently supportive of Donald Trump, Missouri Senate candidate Eric Greitens has released a new, final ad.

Speaking directly to the camera and wearing ritual seppuku garb, Greitens announces that because he has inadvertently brought dishonor to Trump there is nothing left but for him to disembowel himself.

“To make absolutely sure that my sacrifice succeeds,” Greitens says in a steely voice, “I have also employed a henchman to decapitate me.”

The ad was immediately taken down by all social media outlets, but can be accessed on his website. (Click on the link titled A FAREWELL.)

Here it is.

Both places from UD‘s outing today — a very beautiful day.

Epstein’s famous for a WSJ column pouring contempt on Jill Biden, a Ph.D. holder, for using the title “Dr.” He directly entreated her, an Ed degree grad from a state school, to cut out the pathetic vainglory. He directly entreated his readers also to drop her doodoo, stupo, pseudo, honorific, and admit her degree’s embarrassing worthlessness.

The column went over like a lead balloon. A really big, international, lead balloon. The WSJ was forced to issue – not a retraction, no sir. An editor there felt compelled, given all the hoohah, to double defensively down, endorsing Epstein’s titular rigor. (Here are all my Epstein/Biden posts.)

But Joe. Have you watched any of the January 6 hearings? Have you noticed how scrupulous the committee is in referring to John Eastman as Dr. Eastman? He is, like Jill, a Ph.D. holder. He is, unlike Jill, a traitor. But in this generous country, we not only refer to graduates of the University of Delaware grad school, like Jill Biden, as Dr. We even extend the courtesy to traitors. Here in the US, if you have a doctorate, even if you have conspired to destroy the country, we will respect your title. Think about that, Joe.

Great News! He Only Had a Knife.

If only it really were the end.

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From Andrew Sullivan’s newsletter (no link).

I’ve told you a million times that no one’s a onetime plagiarist. Find one instance of plagiarism in someone’s work, and I promise, there’s tons more where that came from.

We recently covered the case of the Australian novelist who plagiarized – a lot – from Nobelist Svetlana Alexievich in his latest novel. This discovery inspired a yet closer look at the work, and gevalt.

[The novel has been found] to contain sections that were nearly identical to extracts from the Great Gatsby [and] Anna Karenina, [as well as the] Nobel laureate’s nonfiction work.

The guy’s still lying about it, which is unusual. All plagiarists begin by denying it, and then, in a day or two, they say ah fuck yeah I did it. This guy continues lying through his teeth.

It’s a Proustian moment for ol’ UD, as another obscenely compensated non-profit leader explains that he didn’t do his obscene compensation; it was forced on him by the organization’s board.

Proustian because little piggies squealing about their non-profit purity have for lo these many years been a mainstay of this blog, which loves to slop around in greed and hypocrisy; and the non-profit swine who blames his personal greed on a board whose absolute command he/she simply cannot disobey represents a spectacular distillation of greed and hypocrisy …

UD first encountered the board made me do it at her own institution, GWU, one of whose presidents assembled a compensation package so huge that the national media noticed, and it became quite uncomfortable for the school. His defense? I had nothing to do with it; the board forced it on me.

Yes, as the president of a university I am constantly making speeches to our students about the importance of independent thought and action… How many times have I recited Frost’s The Road Not Taken to the little buggers… Yet when it comes to something as important as the amount of money I personally drain from this non-profit, I shrink to a little Oblomov, unable to lift a finger on behalf of any recognizable set of moral values…

UD‘s also reminded of the Bremer Foundation’s board:

In 2004, the three trustees together received nearly $125,000. That figure has increased by nearly 10 times in 10 years… “These institutions get tremendously preferential tax treatment,” [Aaron Dorfman] said. “And because of the tax-exempt status they enjoy, the rest of us pay higher taxes and in effect subsidize nonprofit tax-exempt charitable foundations.”

Take a look.

Fun, huh?

So this latest dude, who just, you know, drained the money from an organization established to help appallingly underserved American populations, is running for Chicago’s mayor on this record, and given the raucous criminality of that city he’ll probably win.

  Sing it.

  I dream of Ginni in the witness chair
  Borne, like a traitor, on the summer air
  I see her bow her head and start to pray
  "Lord please tell me all that I should pr'haps not say."

 Many are the wild lies her merry voice would pour
All about the vile texts exchanged with cohorts
I dream of Ginni in the witness chair
Talkin 'bout John Eastman and the fond hopes they share

And so much more.

Watch the January 6 hearings.

They’re on now.

Watch them now if you can.

Or after work.

You won’t be disappointed.

****************************

And not to drop names, but UD is super-excited to say that the solemn bespectacled young woman on the right of your screen (she’s at the right of Judge Luttig), is her friend Alice!!

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MOLLITUDE

Yes, it’s a word. An old, rare word for sure — from the Latin for “soft” — but mollitude is still out there, still kicking. 

Also still kicking is the only novel great enough to have its own annual, global celebration – James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose centennial we mark this year.  It’s a book full of invigorating wordplay, as in the wordplay of my title, which not only takes off on another great novel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), but puns on the name of one of Joyce’s most important characters, Molly Bloom. 

Bloomsday, today, gathers Ulysses lovers from all over the world to reread portions of the book while nursing a Guinness and singing along to songs like, well, My Irish Molly.  Molly Malone.

Molly’s famous stream of consciousness closes out Joyce’s book on a note of life-loving human resilience.  Her monologue always makes me think of yet another Molly – the real-life Unsinkable Molly Brown, famous for helping save passengers on the Titanic, and for rallying her terrified fellow survivors in the lifeboats.

Its inventive use of language, its theme of unsinkability despite the sorrows and perils of life – this only begins to get at the ultimately unaccountable power of Joyce’s novel.   Read with an open heart and an open mind, the book clearly transports many of us to a place of exhilarating aesthetic freedom, where we ourselves, our language, and even our world can somehow be renewed. 

It’s true that Joyce’s two main characters – Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus – seem stuck in a depressive paralysis; but even they, once their paths cross and they find fellowship with one another, demonstrate a capacity for regeneration. 

***********************

Everything in Ulysses draws us away from deadly, mendacious people and language, and toward the pulsing authentic generous words and personalities of particular, vulnerable, human beings.  The novelist/hero of Don De Lillo’s novel Mao II says of such language that

it made his heart shake to hear these things in the street or bus or dime store, the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say.

Ulysses conveys – with deep conviction and persuasion – its belief in the recuperability of a kind and even beautiful world, founded on our recognition of one another’s complexity and uniqueness.   And how else to convey this humanity but through our words, our songs, our sympathetic encounters with one another?

************************

One can also convey authentic humanity through its negation, through language whose paranoid mechanical quality (as in the novel 1984) makes us aware, as we mark authenticity’s appalling absence, of our instinctual human connection. 

This Bloomsday, if you want to know how far we have fallen from Joyce’s vision of empowering human mutuality, read our last president’s twelve-page response to the January 6 committee.  See how far you can get with his dead bleats of dead cliches until you can’t take it anymore.   And then laugh at it.  Laugh at it with all the strength that a conviction of the greatness of humanity can give.

I don’t want to seem critical, but how well-developed, really?

From our walk today at Patapsco State Park.

How far can the rich and talentless go to stage their own art? Recall legendary, tone deaf Florence Foster Jenkins, who paid to fill up concert venues for her hapless performances.

And now consider Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld, benefactor of CSULB’s Kleefeld Museum, and its Kleefeld Gallery, and – most recently – the Kleefeld Exhibit in the Kleefeld Gallery at the Kleefeld Museum. The LA Times art critic, having paid a visit to her show, does not hold back. Why is a public university featuring the worthless montages of its moneybags?

[T]he art is frankly terrible — by far the worst I’ve seen on display in a serious exhibition venue, public or private, for profit or nonprofit, in years… A CSULB professor, who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, said of the exhibition, “If that was a student applicant’s portfolio, they wouldn’t get admitted to the program.” … A gift deal that includes permanent maintenance of a big collection and an archive of the donor’s bad art, plus a gallery dedicated to its display, all in exchange for millions of dollars, makes it impossible not to think “pay to play.” … A permanent chunk of a public university’s tax-subsidized museum facility and artistic program has been effectively privatized to advance the personal interests of a wealthy patron.

Ahem. What now? As Lenin asked: What is to be done?

Oh, I think we can anticipate an entire tarring and feathering for the snobby sexist judgmental LA Times critic. We can anticipate some slave-scribe at the school writing an angry point by point rebuttal of this haughty disdainful pig whose blatant envy of a person who can actually create art poisons his pen. How dare he call this painting bad art?