… and therefore a popular early theory about the U Idaho students knifed to death in their beds seems plausible: It was a random ugly encounter, during a night of barhopping, with someone who turned out to be a vicious asshole, who followed them home and killed them.

PhD student, criminology, Washington State University.

Whether common good constitutionalism supplants originalism remains to be seen. But the idea that it can impose the society it wants through its own interpretation of “the common good” is a sign of just how far the right has moved toward authoritarianism. 

That’s his bald head. Video taken by La Kid. UD stayed home with bronchitis.

Be Anything.

Trump’s [current] struggle is simple because he is simple: All he is is appetite – for fame, power, sex, admiration – shorn of any interior life and unencumbered by exterior attachments.

More here. And here. And here.

I mean. You know. Sing it.

She’s come undone
She didn’t know what she was headed for
And when I found what she was headed for
It was too late

NO. Oh dear God, NOOOOOooooooo….

Lake of Kari:  After Wordsworth

Like a breeze,
Or sunbeam, over your archive I passed
To a sanctions motion without pause; for ye have left
Your screenshot with me, an insane accord
Of paranoias - massive, and endowed
In their mad viciousness with power as will allow
A gracious, almost might I dare to say,
Virtuous, and profitable, victory.

… Alcock.

A tumultuous to-do rages at Leiden University over a painting depicting six male former trustees huddled together smoking cigars. A few weeks ago, one wag – a professor attending a meeting in the faculty conference room where the whimsical, perhaps somewhat annoying, portrait hangs – suddenly got up and turned it around on the wall. Everyone in the room had a good laugh … and … cut!

But … no cigar. Anti-cancel-culturists called the joke a vicious gesture, while anti-puffing-patriarch forces said hey good idea bury the fuckers.

And so it as Kurt Vonnegut put it goes.

The president of the university (see my headline) decided the whole thing was a fine community-discussion opportunity plus let’s put it in context.

UD has a suggestion about the latter, which is why not hang a counterfactual in the same room depicting abstemious female trustees in a quilting circle.

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

UPDATE: A different version, with hilarious faculty comments.

Monsieur Sostrumpis, famous clairvoyant,

Has a mad mind, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest man in Mar-A-Lago

With a wicked head of hair.  Here, said he,

Are your votes, the stolen eleven thousand.

(Those are nays that were my ayes. Look!)

Here is Giuliani, the Lady on the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with many pillows, and here the Stone,

And here is dead-eyed Bannon, and this card,

Which is classified, is something I carried to Mar-A-Lago

Which I am forbidden to do. I do not find

My favorite daughter. Fear death by treason.

GANSEVOORT STREET

I wander the verse of my betters

Nihilistic priests heartbroken lesbians

Alcoholics from Knoxville and points south

I ask each of them to put their words in my mouth

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

Brilliant depressives of letters

Nihilistic post-soviet chain-smokers

You run smoke-circles around me when I try

Keeping up with you on the streets around Gansevoort

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

I wander the streets around Gansevoort 

The meat packers, the High Line, the Whitney

In the same metaphysical melancholy

The same muddled melancholy…  I mean 

Muddled up with so much and yet sayable.

Or at least you say it.  Give me your words and let me say it.

Taliban Use Water Cannon

On Women Protesting Education Order

in Afghanistan

‘It’s not there. In this business, you can have it and have it so hot and it can go overnight and it’s gone and you can’t get it back. I think we’re just seeing it’s gone. The magic is gone,’ the [Trump] adviser explained, adding that only daughter-in-law Lara Trump wanted him to run.

‘There’s nobody around him who wants him to do it. Forget Jared and Ivanka — Don Jr. doesn’t want him to do it! The only person who wants him to do it is Eric’s wife, Lara, because she’s so ambitious.’ 

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

Not just because she’s so ambitious. This blog follows Lara Trump closely because she really is the embodiment of the Trumpian true believer, particularly in her unhideable passion for the cruelty he expresses, embodies, and of course excites. A cursory look at the excited comments she has long made about his vicious followers and their glorious culmination on January 6 reveals Sadean levels of pleasure at the spectacle of pain.

Like Trump, Lara T. is a nut case, and like Trump we all of us have ringside seats for her upcoming Grand Guignol implosion as Trump ages out of whip-cracking. Most people will look away, but UD likes to watch bullies implode.

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

We should watch not only because like most people UD has her own little serving of sadism.

There’s much more at stake here than the identification and neutralization of Mean Girlism — though LT is most definitely the template for that. Clearly we must learn again and again the lesson of tyranny – grand and petty. Whether it’s Louie Gohmert going after Air Force One, or Lara dispensing her queenly smile to the rabble she detests, we help ourselves out of our recent political horrors by sensitivity to tyranny – its pathologies and personalities.

Afghan Taliban Use Barbed Wire Fence

and Armed Guards to Keep Women Out of Universities

… wins the Don DeLillo Death Contest.