Libertine University has zero tolerance for its spiritual leader’s fucking and cucking going public. Now that everyone knows what Jerry Falwell’s boy’s been up to (Saint Christopher! I know that you are smiling down from heaven!), the man must be tossed out on his tushy, even though the real villain twere that jezebel wife o’ hisn whose satanic wiles done led him astray.

O Liberty! O Libertine! Established and led by Jerry Sr; burnished after his death by Jerry Jr. With Becki, he lifted his voice in sacred Handelian song: “Come, ever-smiling Liberty… For thee we pant….”

Now – who’s next?

Ain’t it obvious? Donald Trump didn’t hold that Bible up in front of that church across from the White House for nothing. He too sits at the right hand of God and will soon be pastoring this great American institution.

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And as for the intellectual future of this university: UD suggests a required course in not exchanging extensive texts with your secret fuck/cuck boy.

At its core [the Republican party] is now ethnonationalist and populist, meaning that in its anti-establishment fervor it incites rather than refines public passions; it is increasingly antagonistic toward free markets, inward-looking and reactionary, hostile to diversity, pessimistic rather than optimistic, encased in cultural grievances, more interested in looking backward than forward…

[The party] has jettisoned [its family values orientation], defending a rogue who paid hush money to a porn star while cheating on his third wife…

[L]arge segments of the party are anti-intellectual, anti-science and dismissive of medical experts, to the point that it has turned wearing masks during a pandemic that’s spread by respiratory droplets into a “culture war” issue.

The party of law and order aggressively defends a president who is lawless. A party that for many years positioned itself as the defender of objective truth, a bulwark against subjectivism and ethical relativism, has as its leader a serially dishonest man who is engaged in a daily assault on reality.

During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump praised the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who spread the false narrative that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — and just last week the president praised QAnon, which Kevin Roose of The Times describes as “a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.” The lunacy and paranoia that was once on the fringe is now becoming more and more mainstream…

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Qua the sex thing (porn stars, sex-trafficking rings…) — far as UD can tell, the only Trump balls left to drop, now that The Crook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover have splattered all over Libertine University (“Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room.”), are those belonging to our vice-president. Talk about enjoying watching… Mr and Mrs VP have had front row seats all this time for all the kink, and UD for one is not fooled by their whey-faced wholesome waaaaal put er there friend pose. UD ain’t buying the Modesto Manifesto, the Mike Pence Rule, the squeezy-eye glorytime

on display here inches from the fuck-friendly Falwells… No, the devil will drag you under by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat and don’t think you’re any better than anyone else, Pences! Your story will emerge, and I’m thinking it will be even farther out than the Falwells.

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[Photo: Reuters, Jonathan Drake.]

NYC to Florida: Drop dead.

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(UD thanks Jon.)

Sing it.

Tis of a thieving highwayman this story I will tell
His name is Steven Bannon and on superyachts he dwells
Twas as an avid Trumper he commenced his wild career
And many a fellow countryman before him shook with fear

And it’s Bannon on the Wall, Bannon on the Wall
Bold, brave and bail-bonded is Steve Bannon on the Wall

One day in Mar-A-Lago as Stevie he went down
He met the biggest grifter, the one of world renown
The grifter knew his features and he said, Young Steve, said he
Your name is Steven Bannon, come get rich along with me

And it’s Bannon on the Wall, Bannon on the Wall
Bold, brave and bail-bonded is Steve Bannon on the Wall

When Bannon got a Fund Me page his dollars rose and rose
They all poured in from suckers who demand the borders close
He said, Hand me your tenpenny, I swear I’ll keep them out
Then stood aside and marveled as he watched the money spout

And it’s Bannon on the Wall, Bannon on the Wall
Bold, brave and bail-bonded is Steve Bannon on the Wall

But now this loaded blunderbuss – the truth I will unfold –
Has blundered into Audrey Strauss, who robbed him of his gold
The Coast Guard and the fed’rals they seized him on the seas
To grant us yet another garish spectacle of sleaze

And it’s Bannon on the Wall, Bannon on the Wall
Bold, brave and bail-bonded is Steve Bannon on the Wall

When Clinton said that she wished Trump could have been presidential, I thought: I wish he could have been human.

I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.

But he never did. For close to four years now, he has shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.

Team Trump’s ticket to succeed his administration. He’ll have to grant Katie American native-born citizenship first, but I’m sure he can do that.

… that under the grotesquerie of Trump lay the ordinariness and decency of the American majority. She didn’t need the roll call video (start at 7:37) to tell her that. But it’s fun to watch.

My reacquaintance with Erich Heller, my undergraduate mentor (not that he knew he was), via a memoir by his niece Caroline (who after several email exchanges I now consider a friend), took place over weeks of summer storms. Every hot afternoon burst out at around four with torrents that ran down Rokeby Avenue and made a real river of it. Branches and hydrangea blossoms from the town’s gardens rode the rapids, and Garrett Parkers knew they’d spend the evening, once the water receded, picking among plant matter for pieces liable to trip up bicycles.

I watched the river while re-reading Heller on Hamlet, with particular attention – because of her rivery death – to his evocation of Ophelia:

In Hamlet it so happens that a rose is taken from the fair forehead of an innocent love and a blister put in its place; that sexual love is sickened by the germ of corruption that, waiting for its occasion, always dwells in it; and that the thought of the marriage bed becomes unendurable to a prince of the mind because it is the couch of the mésalliance between the inner truth and the outer act…

Dead Ophelia drifted down Rokeby while I ruminated on temperament and metaphysics, on Heller himself as a prince of the mind for whom the thought of the marriage bed was unendurable.

I flashed too, gazing at the high water, on a scene in Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook, where her main character, Anna, overhears her homosexual tenants talking about women:

She heard: ‘Fat buttocky cows…’ That was Ivor’s voice, and he added an obscene noise. Then Ronnie’s voice: ‘Sagging sweaty breasts…’

I thought of that scene because I was aware, even as a clueless nineteen year old Northwestern University undergraduate, of Erich Heller’s disesteem for women. As I understood more about his life, I grasped that its pinnacle was his participation in Cantab tutorials attended largely, I guess, by closeted savants. And I began to grasp – vaguely – that Heller’s revulsion at the physical world was metaphysical, that “neither the premeditated act of love nor the premeditated act of murder [we’re back at his Hamlet essay] can in its poor simple-mindedness express the complexities of the inner spirit… [Hamlet narrates] a noble insurrection of the purest inner spirit against all the crudities, awkwardnesses, and futilities of the material medium.”

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Now, wee UD had infinite respect for this mésalliance business; she thrilled each time Heller quoted Nietzsche’s version of it:

Modern man … drags a huge crowd of indigestible rocks of knowledge around inside him, which then occasionally audibly bang around in his body, as it says in fairy tales. Through this noise the most characteristic property of this modern man reveals itself: the remarkable conflict on the inside, to which nothing on the outside corresponds, and an outside to which nothing inside corresponds, a conflict of which ancient peoples were ignorant. Knowledge, taken up to excess without hunger, even in opposition to any need, now works no longer as something which reorganizes, a motivation driving outwards. It stays hidden in a certain chaotic inner world, which that modern man describes with a strange pride as an “Inwardness” peculiar to him.

Hence Heller’s high esteem for poets like Rilke, who traced the dissolution of the outer world, and the cultivation – for the poetic few – of a rich, non-rocky, inner world. “Nowhere, beloved, will world be, but within,” wrote Rilke, and Heller in class quoted this too, all the time, and it was clear that the embodied world – not merely in its most embodied, female, form – was disgusting (indeed, in Heller’s traumatic personal history, external social reality was little more than recurrent scenes of atrocities), and that in any case the business of being modern – which is to say secular, lacking the shared spiritual community that, as Nietzsche says, “ancient peoples” took for granted – landed one hopelessly in Hamlet’s bitter paralytic conflict between a rich inner life and an outer world that utterly failed to jibe with it.

Another way of thinking about the mismatch would be to say that, although secular, we remain religious souls, fitted for, designed to believe innately in, a world of transcendent meanings and the “preconceived objectivities” (temples, monuments) that express them. We even retain religious guilt – but with no clear object prompting or giving meaning to it. This is the great Franz Kafka theme (Heller was a great scholar of Kafka), most dramatically embodied in poor Georg Bendemann in the short story “The Judgment.”

The only route out of this corrosive disappointment amounting at times to terror lies in Rilkean aestheticism, in the working out of a “pure spirit, taking within [it] into [its] disembodied condition ‘all torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement’ that inhabit ‘this fearful country’ of the senses.” (His quotations are from The Tempest.) It’s a modern version of Keep your mind in hell and do not despair – have the courage and clarity to acknowledge just how hideous modern? fallen? take your pick – life is. Internalize that vileness and still fail to despair – fail to be Hamlet. Find within your personal faith, your personal metaphysics, your personal aesthetics, a way not to be drowned in this monstrous torrent.

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And yet, and yet, and yet (Heller loved this formulation and began lots of his comments with it) we are free to fail to recognize ourselves in this radically individuated, crisis-ridden picture. Temperament, metaphysics… How much of Heller’s take on, preference for, obsession with, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Kafka (rather than with, say, deleriously down and dirty Henry Miller, or unproblematically socially engaged Bernard Shaw) reflects his native aloofness (which seems to have transmuted over the course of his life to loneliness, attested to by his solitary suicide) and introspection?

If you want to be non-negotiably disgusted by the world, the world will always oblige, after all. Out here, never rains but it pours.

UD‘s totally getting into the burgeoning new American phenom of firing at helicopters that annoy you. There was this story, last week, about a shooter somewhere on the ground who injured an Air Force crew member and forced the copter to emergency land in Manassas Virginia. They haven’t caught that guy yet (as you know, UD‘s prediction is that two bored fourteen year old lads did it with their dads’ extensive weaponry), but they did get the guy quoted in my headline, Ted Kaczynski Redux, and took his picture and all.

Mountain Man got fifteen years, but I’m thinking he’ll get out in two. Helicopters really can be irritating.

UD also predicts that shooting down aircraft will become a widely popular American sport, a pastime, something to do in fun competitive groupings, the way British aristocrats used to gather of an afternoon to shoot pheasant. Two points for dangling bodies; five for explosions.

… maybe there’s hope for us to get rid of Donald Trump.

Dare you to watch this without crying.

For unto us a child is born! Folks in Luray, Virginia, where at exactly this time last year UD celebrated her birthday, do tend to be a bit old-fashioned… Here you’ve got their good ol’ boy mayor Barry Presgraves not only using a way-Biblical verbal formulation, but also chuckling online about how Joe Biden’s VP is gonna be “Aunt Jemima .” HAW!

Well people all over noticed and afirst he jest chuckled more and said he thought twas funny and ain’t racist onaccounta he ate them pancakes all time grow’n up. Then MORE people noticed and the town of Luray started to worry it’d get all shit-listed and it’s a tourist town, see (gateway to Shenandoah National Park, Luray Caverns… ) so a lot of locals said they’d appreciate it if ol’ Barry resigned but hell no he said I ain’t gonna resign nothin wrong with calling all black women Aunt Jemima hell I wouldn’t mind if yall called me Mr Deliverance...

But well now see now Barry begins to understand that he’s fucked up the town real good by making all of us think it’s racist because of what its highest profile citizen said, plus pressure is really growing on him to get his ass out of the municipal building, so now he’s doing the lord I’m really sorry I mean it I’m sorry and I’ve grown and learned from this experience thing.

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Nice summary of a recent town council meeting here, where some of the locals explained that calling people racist is just the sort of thing evil fascist socialists do, while some of the locals called for ol’ Barry to resign. “Luray has a black eye right now. You did that. TKO, boom, you knocked us out. You put us on the map,” said one woman, with absolute accuracy.

I mean, take Les UDs. We find ourselves in Luray couple times a year because it’s one of the only places with good restaurants down the hill from the national park, where we like to hike in the day and sit out under the perseids at night. Now that we know the mayor of the town’s a nasty racist, we’re liable to go elsewhere for our meals.

Will he resign? UD thinks eventually he will. It’ll just take more time cuz ol’ Barry’s real, real, slow.

… née Aaliyah Jinnah according to my sources (see post directly below this one), are so fervent about Donald Trump and so vicious about his opponents. For her, what matters most is establishing the kingdom of Christ on earth (“[T]he only Rights that exist come from God and are therefore dependent on consistency with God’s law.”), and she has identified Trump as embodying all the virtues and statecraft that will get us there.

Trump’s closest associate for many years, Michael Cohen, has, in his forthcoming book, set out Ellis’s idol’s character more knowledgeably, thoroughly, and explicitly than anyone else has been able to – since he alone had such special access to Trump over so long a time – and the word “Christlike” absolutely jumps to mind as one reads Cohen’s appraisal.

I bore witness to the real man, in strip clubs, shady business meetings, and in the unguarded moments when he revealed who he really was: a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man… I stiffed contractors on his behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power… From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise—I was an active and eager participant…

Cohen is “convinced that Trump knows he will follow [Cohen] to prison, calling it ‘the inevitable cold Karma to the notorious chants of “Lock Her Up!”‘  In fact, he says, he believes Trump wants to avoid jail by becoming leader for life.”

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Okay, so we clearly have a problem here. As we all knew well before Cohen spilled the beans, Trump is the anti-Christ. It is not in fact easy to explain why fanatics of the faith (this woman makes Cathophatist A. Vermeule look mild) like Ellis (if that’s her name) follow him.

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I think maybe she does it because it sexually excites her. Pious flagellants sexually excited themselves. Libertine popes sexually excited themselves and others.

Saint Teresa of Avila didn’t, uh, beat around the bush about it.

So I put forth the following suggestion: Trump is to Ellis as the holy spirit was to Teresa.

After all, this is a woman who spent her mornings, if you will, with Jerry Falwell Jr (she’s a Liberty University person who never said a peep about that school’s long-notorious president) and her afternoons with Donald Trump. She has surrounded herself with real bad boys – I mean, real, real, bad boys – even as she thinks she’s being consistent with God’s law.

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But you don’t have to spiritualize it. Easier, perhaps, to recall Sylvia Plath.

Every woman adores a Fascist,   
The boot in the face, the brute   
Brute heart of a brute like you.

Reports are coming in that Trump advisor “Jenna Ellis,” whose birther tweet about Kamala Harris is the talk of the town, is herself none other than the great-granddaughter of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and was born in the beautiful Birir Valley.

Though proud of her forebears, Aaliyah (عالية  جناح) sought a better life for herself in the United States, where she quickly Americanized her name.

So far none of these reports has been confirmed; we will keep you updated on this swiftly moving story.

… in order to obtain Vice President Mike Pence’s permission to stand alone with him on debate stages.

Along with baptism and prayer, the ceremony apparently will involve temporary assumption of male elements/characteristics (wig, morning suit, beard, dildo), along with Harris’s pledge that she will lower her already low voice to “at least” baritone register.

Rumors have it that in line with Trump covid policy she was also asked to undergo anal disinfection, but the Harris camp has drawn the line at this.

Other details of upcoming debates are beginning to leak out. Pence is said to have doubled down on his insistence that suspended Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr moderate the first event. “Everyone deserves a second chance,” the vice president has reportedly said.