In “I Alone Can Fix It,” Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker write about a phone call between [Liz] Cheney and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which the Wyoming Republican describes a confrontation she had with Jordan during the riot, CNN reported. 

“That f—— guy Jim Jordan. That son of a bitch. … While these maniacs are going through the place, I’m standing in the aisle and he said, ‘We need to get the ladies away from the aisle. Let me help you.’ I smacked his hand away and told him, ‘Get away from me. You f—— did this,’” Cheney reportedly told the general.

Must make Jordan nostalgic for his all-male wrestling days.

Or maybe not.

… in UD‘s Bethesda, but at least in her own wooded half acre we do get tree falls, like the big one that startled her last night as she sat in bed with her laptop. It was a still-light summer night, and she looked up when she heard the strange groan she’s come to recognize as limbs and bark suddenly shearing off.

And there it crashed, right there in the middle of her forest, with a house-jolting thud, followed by the rustle of leaves and small branches. Not the whole stable world at once shatteringly kinetic, as in avalanches and earthquakes, but a small stability in an instant unstabled, with all the strangeness and mild alarm (could have fallen on the house) of such moments.

At once UD sprayed herself with insect repellent, grabbed her pruning saw, and got to work clearing her paths of it all. The picture I took shows two large neat woodpecker holes in one of the limbs I rolled aside.

Wyoming, with the most guns and the highest suicide (overwhelmingly by gun) rate in the country, wants the National Rifle Association to relocate to the state.

This idea would create a brilliant synergy, sure to sweep up any suicide-hesitant gun owners into the general NRA-infused enthusiasm for La Vie (or in this case La Mort) Militaire. Just as locating the makers of oxycontin smack dab in the middle of the most addicted part of the US represents an obviously robust business plan, so placing the national headquarters of the NRA, which features a gun museum, a gun cafe, a gun bookstore, a gun movie theater, and just everything gun, in the very center of America’s suicide by gun epidemic, promises to take a real rifle blast to the head of the Depressed Cowboy State.

UD always wonders, when these recruitment catastrophes happen, why the firm hired (at great cost) to find the catastrophic applicant never seems to suffer consequences.

College Park, where lies Mr UD‘s University of Maryland, hired, thanks to Baker Tilly, a woman whose easily accessible personal website ought at the very least to have provoked Baker Tilly to wonder whether the person they promoted for city manager would prove an embarrassment. As it is, College Park hired with great huzzahs and then fired – with what will probably be a good deal of legal/financial trouble – Natasha Hampton, only days before she was due to take the job.

[P]rior to her start date of June 1, 2021, the Mayor and City Council were made aware of certain discrepancies in the information Ms. Hampton had provided to the City.

The hyper-vainglorious nature of Hampton’s website suggests that indeed she may be exaggerating this or that achievement a tad… And how hard would it have been for Baker Tilly to determine that her college is close to losing its accreditation? Etc. You hire firms like this in order to avoid this sort of outcome.

I’ve conservativized somewhat as I’ve aged, the way a lot of people do, but hear me out.

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I was a heedless, footloose cosmopolitan, living in Paris.

Having discovered (who knew?) that a flight to Israel took only four hours, I decided, suddenly and randomly, to fly there. Randomly because I’d never been much of a Jew, nor anything like a Zionist, so my motive was curiosity, not conviction or emotion. Being a Jew meant something non-trivial to me; the identity had virtually no religious component (I was and remain pretty ignorant of Jewish texts and rituals); but, steeped in Holocaust history and art from childhood, I was enough of a member of the tribe to recognize and feel myself as part of a supremely suffering contingent.

My own story was the safer, more conventional one of grandparents who fled pogroms at the turn of the century to settle in large American cities and spawn doctors and lawyers. I had no relatives who died in concentration camps. I mean, probably I did, but I didn’t know about them. [The dead in the gas chambers] flow out in smoke from the extermination chimneys, writes Moses Herzog; and leave you in the clear light of historical success of the West. A heedless, footloose cosmopolitan with the money to live in Paris, I was that historical success.

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Only a few days after touching down in Israel (the security – this was 1982 – was insane: a phone call the day before telling me to show up at DeGaulle at 3 AM rather than noon; an extensive interview when I got to Ben Gurion), I had my coming-out moment when two things happened at once. I was sitting at an outside table on a university campus (Hebrew U? Don’t remember.), reading a book I’d picked up at the airport when I arrived: Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic. UD recognized immediately that the author was a terrific prose stylist who put across a difficult argument eloquently, craftily, seductively, and she read each page with great interest.

As she read, she became aware of a nearby table where three women were giggling and talking loudly among themselves. Looking more closely, she took in their absolute ease in their very specific being as out-loud Jewish — deeply, rootedly, unself-consciously, un-nervously Jewish in their Jewish country. And just as the powerful polemic in favor of Zionism she was reading prompted … resistance in UD, so those women, with their enviable being-there-ness, disconcerted her, alienated her.

The promise of countries like Israel, it seemed to UD, was this tribal warmth and clarity. Belonging. But it was much more than that. Hillel Halkin, the author of the polemic, insisted that in living here, in Israel, you as a Jew were doing no less than saving the Jewish people; he spent many pages reviewing the assimilation/disappearance of Jews all over the world. Like koalas, he argued, Jews are a peculiar, specific, breed who will die out if you deprive them of the specific and quite restricted conditions they need to survive. Indeed his entire argument rested on his prediction that Diaspora Judaism will soon die out. In a 1977 review of the book, Robert Alter notes: “Halkin projects that the current American Jewish population of five million plus will be reduced by the end of the century to at most three million.”

Yet the current population of American Jews is well over six million. Some sources put it at seven million plus.

One hopes that anyone who moved to Israel on the basis of Halkin’s predictive abilities has, by 2021, evolved lots of other reasons for having done so. For there’s this, too, as Alter writes: “For [Halkin,] Orthodoxy alone has authenticity, but it is the authenticity of an anachronism, preserving itself only by averting its vision from the most imperative aspects of modernity, and so its historical fate will be gradually to fade away in the slow dawning of the Jewish secular future.” In the event, what Alter rightly calls secular Israel’s “anemic” birthrate has meant the shrinking of that population and the demographic explosion of the orthodox and ultraorthodox.

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Most tellingly, perhaps, Halkin at one point chides American Jews because they “lack the passion to live without contradiction,” which is to say that they seem not to want to be koalas, Jewish creatures who just like being Jewish and want to live in the one place they can chew eucalyptus leaves and be fully Jewish and nothing else. It wasn’t exactly an inspiring image to UD then, and it still fails to rock her world. She’s Blakeian; she’s Whitmanian; she’s a contradiction-maven. Cuz she was raised in a liberal democracy! She’s a … [we’re back in Israel here, at UD‘s moment of truth] liberal! Alter: “In liberal democracies … Jews are naturally drawn from their Jewish parishes to the freedom [and manifold contradictions] of the larger environment…”

In a recent interview, Adam Gopnik, who wrote a book defending liberalism from left and right attacks on it, observes that

[O]ur hunger for [collective] identity, our need for connection, is overwhelming and … liberalism [some argue] impedes it. Liberalism acts as a stopper on it. [This is Charles] Taylor’s point: We [have a] need to ask, “Where am I?” and liberalism [which is much better at giving us time and space to ask “Who am I?’] doesn’t seem to give a good answer to that.

But, Gopnik continues:

What liberals, I think, would say in response, what my liberalism would say in response, is first of all, liberalism has actually been very good at the project of making community. It’s why we live in New York. You know, I never get over the miracle of New York… A tolerant community is another kind of community. A pluralistic community is another kind of community. I delight exactly in the variety of kinds that I can find every time in New York. That’s not an absence of community. It’s a particular kind of community that we relish.

Is it, though, a community without roots, without stable collective identity, without inherited meanings, symbols, rituals?

Damn right it is.

“Is a lack of meaning really worse than a lack of freedom? … What liberalism’s critics appear unable, or unwilling, to address is whether a lack of meaning is a worse problem to have than a lack of freedom.”

Maybe liberalism – “the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy” – issues in some degree of conceptual confusion, and maybe even in a difficulty or refusal to commit oneself to clear philosophical/theological convictions and collectivities – but is this really so unbearable a position to be in that one’s only option is, for instance, rule by monks who think burning heretics at the stake is key to good governance?

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So this is the first in a series of posts attempting to clarify liberalism, the nature of my affiliation with it, the nature of the manifold attacks on it, etc. All of this has been catalyzed by the latest radical dumping on liberalism: critical race theory. Having spent years in theory-oriented English departments, UD is familiar with Foucauldian anti-liberalism, and as a strong Rortyian she has always been appalled by it. Yet she is at the same time guilty of a certain passive unreflective enjoyment/acceptance of her liberal-culture advantages, as in of course she’s not a desperate Afghan woman brandishing a gun in Ghor province hey that’s nuts it’s not even worth thinking about let’s just relax and enjoy our freedom… But always-imperiled liberal virtues must always be thought about, defended…

I suppose it’s sad to spend the morning after the final writing about racism and violence and intolerance, rather than Luke Shaw’s brilliant strike or the courage of young Saka to stand up and take that penalty. But what did you expect? Have you not been watching these past few years?

… this? Shouldn’t the government guarantee that Andrew Saul remain socially secure?

Ms. Perez told [her son] to re-buckle, but he refused to listen and climbed into the driver’s seat of the vehicle. Then as she turned her head to look out the window towards the gas station (opposite of the location), she heard a loud boom. Ms. Perez looked back at [her son] and noticed his eyes were looking in opposite directions.

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Kids and guns! What are ya gonna do?

UD predicts that in a few years, along with adorable Dog and Baby videos, we’ll have our choice of Gun and Baby videos, where four year olds play Find the Hidden Glock and blow their heads off. Only in America, land of 390 million guns.

Most of its words come from here.

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Lit only by the dim background of stars,

Rogue planets, adrift in the Milky Way,

Are bullied children shoved from a schoolyard,

Alone, at the heart of the galaxy.

[Israeli] Finance Minister and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman revoked on Wednesday the eligibility of fathers studying full time in yeshiva for childcare subsidies, enraging ultra-Orthodox political leaders. 

In order to be eligible for such subsidies, fathers will need to work or study in a non-religious educational institute for at least 24 hours a week, something which would preclude full-time yeshiva study. 

Or not. Apparently Sermon Stealing is worth noticing (by the New York Times!) on a sort of high-season basis, when one instance of it goes viral and prompts urgent discussion about the morality of getting emotional in front of the flock and testifying to someone else’s love of Jesus as if it were your own.

This latest shock and awe that ill-educated inspirationalists copy their betters will blow over in a sec, and the Bible Belt Industrial Complex will resume operations.

… tops that one by denying tenure to a scholar whose qualifications outshine almost everyone on the Chapel Hill faculty.

Not at all surprisingly, Nikole Hannah-Jones, having ultimately dragged tenure out of these dummies, immediately dumped the place for another institution. That was exactly the right thing to do: Make your point, embarrass UNC, and leave its sports-mad ickiness behind you in a cloud of dust.

Not that Howard, where Hannah-Jones has accepted a position, is a paragon. I’ve followed Howard University on this blog for years, and it’s got a pile of problems. But at least it’s trying to solve them.

… stands enthralled on a DC rooftop, watching last night’s fireworks.

[R]eplacing an expression with negative connotations is like swatting away gnats, because those same connotations regularly coalesce on the new term as well. Crippled was changed to handicapped; after a while, this needed replacing, and thus came disabled; today terms such as differently abled attempt yet again to elude the negative associations some assign to physical disability. This is an old story, one that the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls a “euphemism treadmill.”

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Hedonic treadmill definition here.

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And can this be true? No way does UD have the grit to read the actual document.

Do [the Brandeis Language Police] really intend to stigmatize the singing or playing of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”? Or to banish the expression rule of thumb because of an obscure and probably false folk etymology — namely, an antique British law that allowed men to beat their wife as long as the instrument used was no wider than a thumb?