People have started noticing a change in the president’s hair color.

A song by John Dowland (1563-1626). Revised version.

Sing it.

What if I never leave?
Shall I still yield to despair,
And still on sorrow feed
That I can’t my loss repair?
Or shall I change the vote?
For tis disgrace and fraud.
Since, as good Rudy notes,
The love for me is broad.
Will thou let me stay
President For Life?
Then ever should I serve you all my days.

Come, come, come, for I want the thing so bad
Come, come, come, for I fear that I’ll go mad

Not only did God immediately forgive Paul Ewell for writing that post; no less than the President of the United States enthusiastically tweeted said post. Despite these votes of confidence, Dean Ewell finds himself out on his ass because Jesus Saves, Moses Invests, and Virginia Wesleyan University Fires. It’s a university, see. Totally close-minded punitive fanatics are not really what most universities have in mind. As such.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.

I don’t agree with Christopher Hitchens that religion and stupidity are hateful; I do agree that some human extremes of behavior deserve hatred, or, if you like, naturally prompt hatred, and that there’s nothing all that wrong with feeling this emotion if it’s truly warranted.

Peter Wehner, anticipating the departure of Donald Trump, urges that we avoid getting “sucked into a vortex of hate” in regard to him; he quotes from a King sermon: “Let no man pull you so low as to hate him.”

Indeed Wehner’s is altogether a religious column; he begins with Bonhoeffer and ends with Isaiah. Yet for people like UD and Hitchens, no purely religious appeal not to hate will persuade; after all, the religious/racial bigotry of some evangelicals and other religious has had a lot to do with making Trump possible. Religion’s legacy, in other words, ain’t exactly hateless, no matter how pretty its rhetoric of love and forgiveness. Wehner is free to choose among big-hearted Christians for the purpose of the column he’s writing, but he could have chosen among an equally generous basket of Christian hate-mongers if he wanted to argue the opposite of what he has chosen to argue.

So let’s decouple this from religion, and simply suggest that there are at least a couple of kinds of hate. Wehner has in mind hot hate, the kind that steams you every day and generates rage and self-righteousness and rejection of the humanity of, in this case, anyone enthusiastic about Trump. This hate – drawing on the language Wehner has used – is low; it is a vortex. It controls you.

But think of what James Joyce calls his inner “refrigerating apparatus,” his capacity to contain strong emotions while remaining emotionally controlled, and even cold. Surely our “disgust” and “moral revulsion” (to use a couple of commonly used descriptions of widely shared feelings about Trump) need not overtake and distort us; we can hold them thoughtfully and intensely; and we can certainly agree that they ought not extend to Trump voters. Every Trump voter I’ve encountered, talked to, and known (one of my neighbors – a dear friend since elementary school – is a Trump guy) seems to me a perfectly decent person. I don’t even hate white power Trumpians, having seen enough documentaries about them to feel mainly pity – for these are the true hot-haters, and they are eating themselves up alive.

Far from wanting to keep hating – hot or cold – on Trump, UD cannot wait to see the back of him, and indeed cannot wait to stop having his perversity dominate the news in a way that again and again generates intensely negative emotions in her. I have nothing good to say about Scientology; but I have always liked their phrase going clear. Someday soon, inshallah, UD will be able to go clear of a pernicious character who has commanded the attention of Americans.

In the meantime, what I’m okay with our calling hate focuses and organizes my otherwise rather scattered responses to our current president.

Above all, I hate this man’s cruelty. Liberals, argue Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty, are people who believe that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.” The worst – worthy of hatred.

What a bizarre – almost unbelieveable – fact it is that America has had as its president the very embodiment of extreme cruelty. We need to do a lot of thinking about how that came about. Think of Charles Koch suddenly deciding that his massively funding the vicious tea party was a big mistake. What was your first hint, man? But better late than never.

Life is an emotional roller coaster for Virginia Wesleyan’s global campus dean. First he burst out of the facebook gate aflame with rage over the defeat of his fellow fervent Christian, Donald Trump. He condemned anyone who voted for the Catholic antiChrist as unChristian and ignorant and anti-American and declared he’d never have anything to do again with such sinners.

Dean Ewell ain’t real bright (his academic specialty appears to be fishing) and despite his high-profile position at a reasonably respectable (or it used to be) university, he went ahead and wrote all this down in an easily accessible place. His – er – enthusiasm for the beloved leader alarmed many people at VWU, some of whom made sure his post went viral. And now Ewell’s apologizing as only a mindless fanatic panicked about losing his job can apologize. Let’s take a peek!

I spoke out of anger which I should not have done. Second, I don’t believe what I said. I have friends and family who are Democrats and I love them dearly. I have apologized on both accounts profusely. I set a poor example in that post of what a Christian should be. I know that God has forgiven me and already died for my sins. I hope others will forgive me as well.

Well, now! That’s done, and how easily and neatly! It’s been just a few hours but I know God has already forgiven me. This is America, Land of InstaCart and InstaTransgressionRelease.

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

But wait! Now the beloved leader himself has singled Paul Ewell’s post out for praise! This support tweet from Trump is no doubt the highlight of Paul’s life, but he’s already on record having written (in haste again?) a total self-denunciation for exactly that which Trump is praising on high!

What to do??? You see what I mean by emotional roller coaster.

And meanwhile, as if that weren’t enough, VWU officials are reviewing the entire… situation (students, faculty, and alumni are embarrassed and pissed), so Ewell has to deal with that as well. His next public statement will definitely compare himself to the crucified Christ.

What holds [evangelicals] together is not any centralized command structure, but a radical political ideology that is profoundly hostile to democracy and pluralism, and a certain political style that seeks to provoke moral panic, rewards the paranoid and views every partisan conflict as a conflagration, the end of the world… The point of conspiratorial narratives and apocalyptic rhetoric is to lay the groundwork for a politics of total obstruction, in preparation for the return of a “legitimate” ruler. The best guess is that religious authoritarianism of the next four years will look a lot like it did in the last four years. We ignore the political implications for our democracy at our peril.

What bothers me most of all … is Trump’s serial trashing of political norms, which wasn’t so much a moment as it was a constant. He’ll be remembered as the president who treated every civil servant as a personal servant, every cabinet secretary as a toady, every critic as an enemy, every enemy as a role model and every supporter as a fool…

I have a hard time imagining that anything Biden will ever do as president will fill me with the kind of visceral loathing I feel for Trump. There’s a difference between disagreement and disgust; between thinking a politician is taking the wrong route to the right destination and thinking he’s taking an insane route to a horrible destination.

Bret Stephens does some pre/post thinking about Trubu.

An old friend of the Soltan family, he was a significant but not immensely significant artist until his last decade, when Les UDs began to panic as their six Fangor paintings became so valuable we had to make a decision: Handle and secure them properly or sell most of them. We kept this one

… looking fetching. And wearing, of course, a Rehoboth Beach sweatshirt.

Sing it!

The last time I saw Gorka

My limerick flowed free;

A bearded Trumper with a past

That some might call Nazi.

Just yesterday he surfaced

A Duce in the sun:

“Attend to me, my Proud Boys all!

We won! We won! We won!”

A Fox News anchor briefly paused mid-segment on Saturday after a sign carried by a demonstrator at the so-called “Million MAGA March” in Washington, D.C. appeared on the screen bearing a racist threat. Fox anchor Eric Shawn broke from his conversation with a Republican strategist to say, “We’ve just seen a very disturbing sign. It said, ‘Coming for Blacks and Indians first welcome to the New World Order.’”

Makes perfect sense when your base detests anything that even remotely suggests a government.

Because each vote still counts, because no state has seceded yet, because a “gunned-up” population has not taken up those guns, the country I love appears to be emerging from the Trump nightmare. It is not yet free of the tentacles of his derangement. To beat back the defeated president’s ongoing assault on truth, the rule of law, and the institutions of democracy has been the absolute moral imperative of our times.

[T]yrants always die. The empty heterosexual posturing, the shirtless photo ops, the misogyny and indifference to the female experience, the anti-gay campaigns, are designed to hide one basic fact: A cult of personality is sterile. It cannot reproduce itself. The cult of personality is the worship of something temporary. It is thus confusion and, at bottom, cowardice: The leader cannot contemplate the fact that he will die and be replaced…

This is how UD accounts for Trump’s otherwise unaccountable ignoring/indifference/magical thinking in regard to the most appalling pandemic of our time. The phenomenon involves death. Soldiers who die in battle, Trump says, are “suckers.” You get the drift.

“A cult of personality says that one person is always right; so after his death comes chaos.” Ah, but Trump believes himself to be deathless. Death is for suckers. He operates on an unimaginably higher plane.

Which is why it’s so easy for Bill Maher to make us laugh right now. All he has to do – as Aristotle counseled – is bring the Immortal down fast, and with a big bump.

If this presidency is a bar, it is way past closing time. We need that guy who goes “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.“

“[A]ll he’s got now is breaking stuff, and he’s going to do that with a vengeance.”