I’m about to tell another lie, Lord. Please do not rain brimstone on my head.

“I am Bruce Castor, prosecutor for the former president…”

LOL. The very first words of Trump’s impeachment defense attorney have him identifying himself as his prosecutor. He quickly corrected himself, but really mes petites – you don’t have to read The Psychopathology of Everyday Life to figure out what’s going on there.

I’m surprised he didn’t open up his formal remarks by saying I am Bruce Castor, prostitute for the former president…

His defense lawyers dismiss the impeachment trial as “political theater,” but their own 78-page brief practically plagiarizes from The Importance of Being Earnest:

Were I fortunate enough to be Miss Prism’s pupil, I would hang upon her lips. [MISS PRISM glares.] I spoke metaphorically. – My metaphor was drawn from bees.

You could live a whole life inside a dream, inside a small, every-moment-busied world where everyone looks and acts alike and you never have to think for yourself or imagine a free identity for yourself. You could live in a cult.

Imagine it: An entire life dictated by other people, by unquestionable holy writ embodied in an authoritarian figure, by – above all – the imperative to breed new adherents. Your entire adulthood could be engrossed in the production and maintenance of ten or thirteen children.

It seems a strange brew to those of us outside the haredi dreamlife; but if, for instance, you attend an ultraorthodox school “where the only history taught [is] Jewish history” — wrap your head around that: the only history — your bizarre ignorance and withdrawal, your almost comical hyper-provinciality, doesn’t seem bizarre. It constitutes an ordered, heavily populated world. It is the only world you’ve ever known.

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Henry James put it best: “[T]he world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” The most successful cults must labor every moment to tamp down the world as it is; they must illude and stupefy and above all keep their members very very busy every moment, so that these benighted people can, against all odds, forget, deny, and dispense with the world. Rabbis must keep alive among sect members the delusion that they are special, anointed, in exclusive possession of the truth. (“I grew up with a sense of the Haredim being special and different. …I discovered I’m not so special or different, that there are millions like me. That’s what suddenly made me say ‘That’s it, I’m leaving.'”) They must even include regular violence in that busy-making mix, as we see in constantly rioting haredim in Israel, and in the national shame here of ultraorthodox Jews having been part of the Capitol insurrection.

Anyone could have predicted that the current pandemic would shake a lot of haredim awake; its own authoritarian rabbis predicted it, which is why many of them defied – continue to defy – the lockdown and other covid-related laws of Israel. If you don’t keep your people very busy and very inside a dream, they are going to begin to perk up.

By definition, pandemics are global, unignorable, penetrative, realities; surviving them depends on a respect for and understanding of science — the great enemy of any cult. The despicable way in which panicky rabbis have endangered the lives of their followers by attempting to disallow simple health measures among them has certainly attracted the attention of the secular world; but it has also nudged awake the moral conscience of elements of their own sects.

“When I had a lot of time to think [under lockdown], the questions flooded up again,” [one ex-ultraorthodox woman said]. “Suddenly, the rabbis didn’t know what to do. They aren’t doctors.”

And now, as this New York Times piece notes, an already discernible drift away from ultraorthodoxy has become outright flight, so that Israel faces a strange and terrible social problem: The sudden emergence into its secular world of significant numbers of isolated, traumatized, and ignorant people. People who cannot do simple math, may speak only Yiddish, and have never used a computer.

[D]eserters often find themselves in a netherworld, estranged from their families, community and the only way of life they knew and, lacking a secular education, ill-equipped to deal with the outside world.

Most Haredi boys’ schools teach little or no secular subject matter like math, English or science.

Out of one netherworld, into another: An exquisitely horrible fate. But the Israeli state holds the blame: They let – continue to let – the haredi sect remain etherized. They have not been willing to awaken it, and now it’s nightmare time.

A just-engaged Yale grad student, a committed environmentalist, an Army veteran, a man of heart and soul, is gunned down on the streets of New Haven.

There’s been a “spate of gun violence” in the city.

One of Sidney Powell’s helpers is about to be disbarred. He pleads his case.

Citing a long history of “erratic behavior” (that’s putting it nicely), the president denies America’s Genius of the Carpathians access to intelligence reports.

Ever since the largest landslide in the history of the world was stolen from him by the forces of George Soros, DJT has been motivated by a bitter determination to bring down the government of the United States. Which seemeth to UD not the perfect profile of an intelligence-receiver.

Joe Biden Makes Shocking Announcement: None of His Children or Grandchildren Will Be Named Senior Advisers to the President

What a diplomatic way of saying that (using the descriptor of his hometown newspaper) Tommy Tuberville is a real “dumbass.”

The House of Representatives has successfully ousted would-be assassin, The QAnon Lady (no one seems to want to lower him or herself to utter her name, so I’ll go along with that), from both of the committees to which this mental and moral defective had been assigned.

The … uh … people in Georgia who elected her to Congress are free, of course, to do that again and again, although without any committee assignments her function in that body will be largely symbolic. She will symbolize the very worst of America.

Or – I mean – I know it gets even worse than The QAnon Lady, but she’s in Congress and all.

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Can’t help wondering what this gun-toting madwoman will encounter in terms of, you know, daily social interaction at the Capitol. Republican members will be fine with her – they seem to love her, or at least pity her or something – but Democrats might be hard-pressed to be pleasant. I’m thinking social distancing will be the key, long after covid.

We all know what it’s like, in work settings, to avoid Mr or Ms Mount Vesuvius, the person liable to erupt at any moment from out of the depths of their obscure rage. I think it will be like that – people will be giving The QAnon Lady a very, very wide berth. When she feels in need of human contact, there’s always Mar-A-Lago.

Without all that burdensome, time-consuming committee work, you’ll be free to work out in detail how to get close enough to Nancy Pelosi to put a bullet through her brain!

One of the biggest defamation suits ever filed. Special suits for special people.

If you’re like me, the letter Q is powerfully associated with the word/world “queer” – Duke University Press even had for many years a Series Q, which brought “a theoretical and interdisciplinary lens to gay and lesbian studies, approaching questions of sexuality from a queer angle.” (One of the Series Q books, Unbecoming, had a humongous impact on UD.)

Now that Nancy Pelosi has cleverly QAnoned Kevin McCarthy by referring to him as “McCarthy (Q-CA),” the letter Q transposes into something very… other.

Edith Pretty says this to the hilariously uppity archeologist, who disdains self-taught Basil Brown, in the film The Dig — and I gotta tell you, this film was MADE for UD. She has watched it three times already, and it’s clear she’s not done with it. A fictionalized account of the staggering Sutton Hoo discovery, it’s got everything UD: archeology, architecture, reading, philosophy, music, British accents (UD loves British accents), moody landscapes, true dark skies (Brown brings his telescope to Pretty’s rural firmament)… And UD ain’t alone! A just-released film she figured would attract an audience of a few dozen already ranks third on Netflix.

UD’s preferences here are exactly those of UD‘s mother – the trowel doesn’t fall far from the tree. A student of Wilhelmina Jashemski’s at the University of Maryland, UD‘s mother accompanied Jashemski on several digs at Pompeii … And UD‘s mother dragged wee UD herself, one hot summer, through all that site’s ins and outs (her mother’s association with Jashemski meant we got access to off-limits human casts and villas), which was wonderful but exhausting.

All those moment-of-death human bodies, all that vast charred living landscape – it was a morbid treat, in the way powerful unburied ruinous settings tend to be; and The Dig is exactly the sort of extended memento mori one would like, with Pretty’s impending death – and the possible death of Europe itself in the impending war – haunting the narrative. “What’s left of us?” “We die. We rot.” The film’s characters, gazing into the faint outline of a submerged sixth-century ship in the Sussex dirt, fall into this grubby nihilism all the time in the film; but they are always lifted out by friends and lovers, who voice a soulful faith in the human story of which we are imperishably a part.

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But snobbery, now. What got me going on that?

Easy. The letter Christopher Hitchens’ widow and agent just sent to his friends and associates commanding them not to cooperate with a biography of him that’s in the works. So at odds, rhetorically, with Hitchens’ own relaxed and democratic voice, the letter was jarring to UD, a huge Hitchens fan.

We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton. In solidarity…

I found the “in solidarity” particularly jarring, drawing as it does on a political tradition dear to Hitchens – that of the social justice left, as in his oft-expressed solidarity with democratic forces like the Kurds. It seems cheap of these authors to assume that mantle when the rest of the note locates them clearly in the trivial and off-putting realm (“dismayed,” “one,” “self-appointed”) of the literary mandarin.

They make no effort, for instance, to explain what in the manuscript is likely to be coarse and reductive; they simply high-handedly invoke these terms and let it go at that. Coarse is particularly problematic, since anyone who has read gobs of Hitchens and watched virtually all of the Hitch YouTubes knows he had no problem with coarseness – he exhibited it often, and made its relative absence in women one of the main bases of their inability (most of them) to be funny. Was it coarse for Hitch and Martin Amis to go trolling whores in New York City? I guess so. I mean, Hitch thought it was. Is his biographer supposed to overlook it, or somehow snob it up?

As David Nasaw writes:

Blue-Hitchens and [Steve] Wasserman are well within their rights to refuse to cooperate with this particular biographer, but by reaching out, as they have done, to so wide a universe of individuals who might have something to say on the subject, they are engaging in a sort of preemptive censorship, intended to frighten away not just this one writer but any others who might not, for one reason or another, pass muster with them.