… 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.

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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

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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

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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.’ 

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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.

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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.

at Tea and Sympathy.

Of all our political pantos

The strangest by far is George Santos.

Not one claim is true;

Even says he’s a Jew!

“Oh and plus I made up Esperanto.”

… or “Spirit of Santos” refers to sightings of the ghostly presence of newly elected congressperson George Santos, a man only able to be perceived by people of faith as he has made his … putative … way from Baruch College to Goldman Sachs to Citigroup and beyond. No school or workplace he lists on his resume has any record of him; nor do his ‘friends’ killed at Pulse Nightclub seem to have any connection to him; nor does the animal shelter he claims to have established quite exist.

The spirited Santos refuses to take up any of these lies; instead, like his treasured Trump, he lashes out at the evil left trying to kill him.

Stirringly, he concludes his self-defense with a famous quotation from Churchill that Churchill never said.

Unlike deep south football factories, which routinely keep their sports hero bio pages up even when the hero is, for instance, a mass murderer, fancy schmancy schools like Yale erase the bio pages of criminals, frauds, plagiarists, and other embarrassments toot sweet.

And yet in the case of this woman, handcuffed in a New York courtroom because she appears to have stolen 3.5 million from her last employer, NYU, Yale remains a fan.

(By the way: On greed, recall Christopher Hitchens on Ayn Rand: “I don’t think there’s any need to have essays advocating selfishness among human beings.  I don’t know what your impression has been, but some things require no further reinforcement.”)

You never see Harvard drop the ball like this. That’s the difference between a school with a 55 billion dollar endowment, and one trying to manage on 41.4 billion.

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On a trickier, far more disgusting matter, the University of Colorado has found the right solution. They were unlucky enough to be housing John Eastman as a visiting scholar when he was actively trying to destroy American democracy. They kicked his ass out, and solved the bio page problem by marking the historical fact that he was there (it’s wrong to be Orwellian about it and pretend – à la Yeshiva University/Bernard Madoff – he wasn’t), while removing everything about him except the undeniable factual point of his having, yes, admittedly, been in residence.

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Huzzah! They finally got around to 404ing her.

Michel Clain: “We [Belgians] are in a corrupt country. Either the politicians do not understand, or they themselves are corrupt.”

The Belgian Prime Minister [asked to comment on Clain’s statement]: “If someone believes there is corruption, they have to prove it. You can’t say that, in such a way, lightly,”

Michel Clain [six months later]: “The latest report from the Financial Intelligence Unit reports astronomical sums laundered by criminal organisations. It is a state institution. You have 25 open cases of police corruption and the investigation is ongoing. So we are now six months after [the PM’s] statement. I wonder if we really still need to prove it to him?”

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[Clain] cites French revolutionary humanist values as his guiding principles. For him, financial crime has destroyed fundamental aspects of society. “White-collar crime is the cancer of democracy,” Claise wrote in one of his books, “Le Forain” (The Showman)…

Claise’s dramatic [Qatargate] intervention has left the European institutions headquartered in Brussels scrambling to explain why it took a Belgian official to uncover corruption at the core of European democracy.

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‘Course now that Clain has uncovered Qatargate, the PM’s boasting about him. “Belgian justice is doing what … the European Parliament hasn’t done.”

Politico writes:

[T]hat peacocking would be ironic to Claise, who complained in October that Belgium’s police are under-resourced, fighting a war against modern, high-tech corruption using “catapults.” Earlier in the year, he said the Belgian government was “on Xanax rather than Viagra.” 

… Go BIIIIIIGGGGG.

Throughout the hearings, the promised rapid response from Republicans has been lacking. At one point, Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 Republican in the House, was expected to oversee the effort to discredit the committee’s findings, coordinating with Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee. But there has been little real-time pushback throughout the high-profile hearings…

As I peruse my inbox for any rapid response to this final session, I have just a Happy Hanukkah message from Rudy Giuliani…