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.

… is always a drag. We will be back, for two weeks, in May/June.

A seventh Russian general

A seventh Russian general

Was dealt with yesterday.

Much excitement this morning as a huge whale circled in front of the beach, accompanied by dolphins and spouting like mad. Faithful readers know UD a few years ago practically walked into a seal relaxing on this shore. That was more than enough excitement; but now there’s her first whale-sighting. Gevalt.

But since Meadows and Thomas did it all under orders from Jesus (their texts are shot through with Good v Evil), we can only join the editorial board of Compact (see post below) and applaud these servants of the Lord. Satan stole the election, but they fought the good fight and will be granted sainthood by President Waldstein in the Cathophate to come.

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Meanwhile, Justice Thomas has been hospitalized with Lying Low Syndrome.

Ben Burgis:

Compact’s founders seem to believe that the ruling class is imposing social liberalism on an unwilling majority. But the majority of our society is wildly socially liberal by historical and global standards — or even by recent American ones.

According to a recent Pew poll, fewer than 10 percent of Americans think that marijuana should be illegal, for example. Almost three quarters agree with the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage assailed by [Compact writers]. Two-thirds oppose laws that limit trans rights. As young conservative Nate Hochman recently acknowledged, polling shows that even young Republicans are “more liberal than their older counterparts on everything from diversity to LGBT rights to immigration to climate change.”

Few European countries have been as historically friendly to the kind of laws [Compact‘s editors] might support to defend “familial and religious” communities against “libertine” encroachments as the Republic of Ireland — and within the last decade, abortion and same-sex marriage were both legalized there by popular referendum. And they were playing catch-up. At least until some unforeseen cultural shift dramatically realigns public attitudes, any scenario by which neo-medieval traditionalists succeed in wielding state power to smite gay people who want to get married and women who want to control their own bodies and drag queens who want to read to children at the library is a scenario by which social conservatism is imposed against the will of a large majority of the American populace.

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In the words of Eric Levitz, Compact‘s editors share “the delusion that their own esoteric misgivings about liberalism reflect those of a silent (or latent) majority.”

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Compact calls itself “radical,” and UD‘s heart goes out to it. She knows radical – the smell of it, the sweat of it, the aching sweetness of it. Her radical lover, David Kosofsky (brother of radical Eve), massaged her feet after their long march together on the Pentagon and it all went directly from UD‘s feet to her head. Started feety, ended heady. She was swept up in the edgy epater les bourgeois truth of existence, and her sense of excitement, clarity, and superiority was … she could taste it, man. UD remembers attending a John Cage concert around thirty years ago at Harvard – it was put on by a group of undergraduates – and, you know, some affectless madwoman drags herself forward onstage and begins chewing her violin – and, bored out of her gourd, UD began glancing around, and there entwined on the floor behind her were two students involved in the staging of the show, and the way they looked at each other! The certainty, the arrogance, the excitement! Tell me about it, babes, thought UD, smiling at them. Tell me about it.

Right rads got the same thing going, only they’re clenching in the back row of a heretic getting burned at the stake. As I say, my heart goes out to them.

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Update: Thanks go to my friend Rita for telling me about the phrase RAD TRADS — “young Catholics who prefer traditional liturgy, including the Latin Mass, and subscribe to more conservative political beliefs and religious practices.” UD was reaching for this when she wrote “Right rads,” but Rad trads is double-plus-good! Rad trads are like the Rad rois Lucien Goldman recalls encountering when he first arrived in France in 1934:

There was a very strong royalist movement among the students and suddenly a group appeared which was equally in defense of royalism, but which demanded a real Merovingian king!

By Д. Хеллер.

‘Two Russian soldiers have been caught venting about Putin’s “bullshit” war against Ukraine in an intercepted phone call as devastating losses reportedly led one soldier to drive over his colonel with a tank.

“Basically, it’s a shitshow here, I’ll put it that way,” an unnamed soldier near Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine can be heard telling a colleague in a recording released by Ukraine’s Security Service late Tuesday.

After telling his friend that Ukrainian forces “tore apart” a column of Russian forces sent along with his own unit, he described complete disarray among the Russian military, with 50 percent of the unit suffering from frostbite on their feet…

“It’s such trash here… our own plane dropped a bomb on us,” he said.

“They couldn’t even send off the 200s here,” he said, using a Russian military term for dead bodies. “They rode with us for five days.”

“Even in Chechnya, there was nothing like this,” he said, describing the situation as a “madhouse.”…

[T]wo tactical groups of Russian soldiers in Makarov, in the Kyiv region, lost at least half of their men in battles against Ukrainian forces.

One of the Russian soldiers “blamed the commander of the group, Col. Yury Medvedev, for the deaths of his friends,” [a Ukrainian journalist] wrote on Facebook.

“Having waited for the right moment, during battle, he ran over the commander with a tank as he stood next to him, injuring both his legs.”‘

A long overdue reckoning with this country’s shameful history of miscegenation has been inaugurated by Indiana Republican Mike Braun. Indiana will apparently be the first in the nation to introduce a Population Registration Act, in which all Hoosiers will be classified as one of the following

1.native

2.colored

3.Asian

4.white

They are hysterics. Their emotions overwhelm their ability to make sense of things.

This scene – from the American Senate – is a real embarrassment for the country.

And as for Ted Cruz…

She thought … of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.