Prohibiting use of the burqa in schools reflects a “mindset of the past,” the Council of the Islamic Community wrote in a statement on Friday.

A witty, erudite writer in the mode of James Merrill, he was 92.

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May 26 1969: The Grievance

No one dies. That is all we can say for certain.

Something dies us,

As it lived us. We are lived. And died.

A personal pronoun is superfluous here.

It is simple;

Our grammar of death must be revised.

And we are not reduced to tears, not reduced. The thing

Our tears are for

Extends us: we are widened to the term

Which lies beyond our tears. We are not reduced.

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Fellow Philip Larkin fans might be reminded, on reading this poem, of these lines:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,   
And age, and then the only end of age.

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More tersely, fellow Adam Phillips fans might simply quote this remark:

When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks.

It’s been a long sit-down, but an appeals court has topped off the college v. bakery court case with a flourish: Gibson’s will indeed be served an abundant money feast from Oberlin (background here). So: bitter for Oberlin, sweet for Gibson’s.

The main miscreant in the matter, a VP at the school who sicced a student mob on an innocent local bakery (screamed all over town it was racist, organized a boycott, when all it did was confront a shoplifting Oberlin student), has moved on to generate her own particular form of magic at Oglethorpe. No doubt she is as we speak scanning commercial life in Atlanta to find a cafe against which she can organize a student mob. The obscenity she staged at Oberlin will cost the school thirty mill; here’s hoping Oglethorpe has a large legal payout fund.

It’s all about defending the dignity of the unborn.

‘Everyone was citing a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic.‘

Results like these are kinda funny, if you ask ol’ UD. I mean, at the gathering of French Muslim intellectuals and secular French intellectuals described in this NYT essay (the essay is about the increasingly popular French political right), somebody cites this numerical result, and quite a few Muslim attendees get all huffy. One of them walks out.

Yet how big a deal, really, is the result? After you draw a shocked breath, do you pause to ask how this belief is liable, in most cases, to play out in actual civic life? A lot of religious people, if you asked them pointblank, would probably say they feel like this – that divine trumps secular law. Why do you assume this means that they would fail to obey secular law if they live in a secular state? How often are they compelled to choose between the two? To take an example I’ve talked to death on this blog – The French have with remarkable success, far as I can tell, imposed a burqa ban. Nobody seems too bent out of shape about it. Most even marginally rational people know that they will have to make some concessions when their religious enthusiasms hit hard against the rule of law in a non-theocracy.

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I’ve drawn the comment in my headline from the same essay.

…. currently talking about Ukraine here.

… headlines the National Review; and when she read the headline UD thought Hm not bad. Be pretty cool if my little home state, Maryland, were declared America’s Switzerland…

But no. NR is keening over Oregon’s Swissification, cuz it’s now an assisted suicide state for anyone – including out of staters – nearing death and wanting to die. (The Swiss have been fierce defenders of the right to die for almost a century. Hence NR’s nod to the moral and spiritual cesspool which that blighted country has become as a result of this godless policy.)

Chacun à son goût for damn sure, but UD doesn’t mind sharing that she keeps an updated mental tab of convenient lethal locales in case whatever does her in does it slowly and painfully. She’s eager not to beat around that bush, eager not to lie moribund in morphine, or in unmanageable agony, for months on end. For UD, there’s a rather off-putting good-girlism about achieving a perfect attendance record for one’s own disintegration. Better to skip.

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Another reason NR should relax about Oregon becoming the suicide capital of America: That distinction has long belonged to Wyoming, where per blown-off capita the numbers are, and always will be, MUCH higher than anything Oregon’s assisted suicide program could reach. A few carefully controlled barbiturates here and there can never hope to compete with twenty loaded Berettas per household.

SPEED, WEED, AND GUNS:

JUST ANOTHER I-77 TRAFFIC STOP

Cleveland.com

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As you know, UD anticipates that in five or so years no gun-related event in the United States will be significant enough to be covered as news, unless it involves terrorists and/or at least fifty fatalities.

… he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community…

Smith’s slap was… a slap to women. If Rock had physically attacked Pinkett Smith, Smith’s intervention would have been welcome. Or if he’d remained in his seat and yelled his post-slap threat, that would have been unnecessary, but understandable. But by hitting Rock, he announced that his wife was incapable of defending herself—against words…

This patronizing, paternal attitude infantilizes women and reduces them to helpless damsels needing a Big Strong Man to defend their honor least they swoon from the vapors. If he was really doing it for his wife, and not his own need to prove himself, he might have thought about the negative attention this brought on them, much harsher than the benign joke. That would have been truly defending and respecting her. This “women need men to defend them” is the same justification currently being proclaimed by conservatives passing laws to restrict abortion and the LGBTQ+ community.

[His acceptance speech] was about justifying his violence… Young boys—especially Black boys—watching their movie idol not just hit another man over a joke, but then justify it as him being a superhero-like protector, are now much more prone to follow in his childish footsteps.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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Next year’s Oscars: Another attack, this time with a gun.

It’s like Moses Herzog’s lawyer friend talking about one of his divorce cases:

First she said she didn’t want children, then she did, didn’t, did. Finally, she threw her diaphragm in his face.

The Mackenzie Fierceton story is a mess. From the word go, no one knows who did what. Did a teenager flee her physically abusive mother and spend years in a world of foster care pain? Did her mother’s boyfriend sexually abuse her? If these things happened, her escape from her family and eventual enrollment at an Ivy League school is inspiring, and she’s worth all the rewards (a Rhodes!) she got before various institutions decided she lied about her background, and demanded that she return said rewards.

A New Yorker writer seems to want to leap to her defense, but woe betide the scribe who ventures into this forest of thorns cuz, editorially speaking, she ain’t coming out alive.

The writer tries to make her accusatory headline do all the Boo, U Penn! work – HOW AN IVY LEAGUE SCHOOL TURNED AGAINST A STUDENT – but anyone willing to read all the way through her absurdly convoluted account of liars, fabulators, fantasists, and truth-stretchers is liable to end up in that Woody Alleny space where you’re scratching your head and wondering why everyone in the story seems utterly on the loose wig.

Like if you ask UD one plausible account of things features a hyper-self-dramatizing mother and daughter – two extremely strong, intense personalities having their own super-titanic, uber-Wagnerian version of ye olde crisis of adolescence. These would not be haha/poignant interactions, as in Lady Bird, but truly vile and indeed sometimes physical fights and vengeful aftermaths. (Her mother’s sister claims that Fierceton “deliberately tried to frame [her mother] and planted ‘evidence’ around the house, including her own blood.”) Eventually an angry Fierceton left home in such a way as to inflict maximum legal/reputational damage on her mother.

Even if this rendering is insufficiently sympathetic to Fierceton, it’s beyond question that she went on, in her college life, to lie about her background and circumstances in ways tailored to appeal to institutions seeking out poor (Fierceton came from a very wealthy home) and traumatized students.

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See how the NY’er writer dances around not one but two Fierceton problems: 1. Lying. 2. Lying strategically for personal profit.

If trauma creates a kind of narrative void, Mackenzie seemed to respond by leaning into a narrative that made her life feel more coherent, fitting into boxes that people want to reward. Perhaps her access to privilege helped her understand, in a way that other disadvantaged students might not, the ways that élite institutions valorize certain kinds of identities. There is currency to a story about a person who comes from nothing and thrives in a prestigious setting. These stories attract attention, in part because they offer comfort that, at least on occasion, such things happen…

Um, ok. So first we need to agree that Fierceton is a traumatized person. Ok, let’s agree with that. Let’s also agree that people with shattered traumatic lives will try to make sense of them, make them cohere, overcome them, by superimposing some kind of meaningful narrative on all the shattered bits. Think of Blanche DuBois and her desperate grasping at variants on Death of the Old South narratives to account for her catastrophe (think also of the mother in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”). But where does that fitting into boxes bit come from? That search for valorized identities? Now we’ve left the human pathos of Blanche and entered the cold world of Zelig and Catch Me If You Can, right?

Penn had once celebrated her story, but, when it proved more complex than institutional categories for disadvantage could capture, it seemed to quickly disown her…

Not really complex, though. I’m thinking that much of the Rashomon problem here derives from self-aggrandizing embroidering. The obscurity of the originary mother/daughter scene has made plenty of room for attention-getting made up stuff; and indeed we can almost certainly expect, from Fierceton, yet another nightmarish personal trauma memoir which dishes out so much horror that by page 127 we start wondering how much of it is true, and how much of it is simply the sort of thing we like to lap up.

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Amy Hillier, a faculty member at the social-work school, took a sabbatical from Penn because she was so disillusioned by Mackenzie’s treatment.

UD adds this sentence from the article to illustrate the little burlesque subplots that attach themselves to narratives that spin out of control. A disillusionment sabbatical?

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UD thanks David.

Their obnoxious interruption of a debate on campus warranted immediate condemnation. But these are timid times. At least she came out with it.

Ted Cruz retweeted a video comparing a U.S. Army recruiting video with footage of a Russian paratrooper with a shaved head and declared that a “woke, emasculated military” might not be a good idea.

It would be interesting to know what has happened to that paratrooper since Putin invaded Ukraine.

This is the first sentence of a 2015 UD post about super-perverted Nebraska, a state routinely forgotten until its university’s football team (see Lawrence Phillips, Richie Incognito, etc., etc.) drills its way into the nation’s head…

Speaking more broadly, you don’t want to inquire too closely into the, uh, political unconscious of Nebraskans, out there on the starry plains all night spinning fantasies…

Frinstance. State Sen. Bruce Bostelman, representing the misnamed Brainard, shared his kitten-with-a-whip scenario with all of Nebraska, and the larger country, during an election debate the other day. The way he sees it, nubile high school students “meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion. And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?”

Oooh Little Miss Coed Filthy Kittikens Baring Your Rear Golden Showers Daddy Punish You

… a bird (probably a wren or a cardinal) decided to start its nest in our just-bought, obviously too natural, front door wreath. Really hoping our return will decide it against continuing the construction, or we will have to use our back doors to avoid disturbing things.