Which is fitting, because he might be getting arrestoed.

Samantha Bee does a typically hilarious take on the dumbshits who are killing us because they won’t vaccinate their children. (Her visit to Kurdish women soldiers is even funnier.) But with some yeshivas lying about compliance and spreading measles wider and wider, the New York Department of Health isn’t laughing: It has now threatened to close noncompliant yeshivas.

This is a real win-win. Closing yeshivas that lie about their sick students makes children everywhere safer. And simply by virtue of being free of New York’s many substandard ultraorthodox yeshivas, students will almost certainly be able to set out on an actual education. Indeed the shameful noncompliance of some of these schools is shining a much-needed light on their scandalously low standards. Good.

Whoever among Ireland’s playwrights has inherited a gift closest to Samuel Beckett’s will find spectacular dialogue for her own Worstward Ho in a recent interview with an Irishwoman who joined ISIS in order to “fulfill her dream of living under Sharia law.” Read the following, if you can, with an artist’s eye.

We were in the taxi, he [her new husband] said, “When you go up here at the roundabout, close your eyes. There’s a man like this on the cross on the roundabout and his eyes are gouged out and he’s wearing a red suit and you don’t want to see it.” …

Life was like back home [in Ireland]. Just like back home. You get up in the morning, go shopping, get your stuff, come home, cook your dinner, clean your house. It’s just like my everyday life. Go visit a friend, drink some coffee.

This is what we came for, you know. We came for, like, no alcohol… no prostitution, no gays, no anything… And, for me, I really liked to live in the Islamic State because I never got to see any of this. I just had to experience a lot of bombing and this, that and the other, and hearing someone died and hearing this and hearing that but I didn’t have to see any of that.

You’re not gonna tell ol’ UD that this is not pure theatrical gold.

Rhino Poacher Trampled by Elephant and Eaten by Lions in South Africa

Snapshots from a country.

Philip Esformes, a man incapable, as a matter, it seems, of principle, of obeying virtually any law, has been found guilty of this country’s largest health care fraud ever.

Much of the Esformes tale, which features his self-presentation as a seriously religious person, is scripted by Woody Allen. (‘The witnesses described how Esformes would direct them to pay doctors in cash, using code words like “fettuccine.”‘)

With his corporate and personal assets frozen, Esformes’ father, Morris, paid for the son’s costly defense, which has included lawyers from Black’s high-profile law firm and other attorneys. The father, with his son’s assistance, had amassed a fortune in the healthcare field in Chicago before they set their sights on Miami, where they got into trouble with the law for the first time in 2006. Back then, the Esformes family and the owners of Larkin Hospital paid $15.4 million to the U.S. government in a Justice Department settlement to resolve a civil violation of recycling patients between the hospital and the family’s nursing-home facilities and ALFs — a precursor to the current criminal case.

And Morris… well, about Morris you don’t wanna know… Very highly esteemed at Rogue Central, University of Miami medical school.

All this malfeasance has led to the creation of a 200-page affidavit, and a bevy of other court documents, that can best be described as a kind of posthumous Tom Wolfe novella, one with a wide cast of very rich people behaving in such despicable ways that it makes The Bonfire of the Vanities look like The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The whole article’s good, and the last few paragraphs are very explicitly Wolfe-ish, in style and content. Here’s one:

All she wanted was an even playing field for her rich, white daughter! All she wanted was a few hundred SAT points so the girl didn’t get lost in the madness that has made college admissions so stressful, so insane, so broken, so unfair. “We’re talking about Georgetown,” Macy informed Singer about their hopes for their younger daughter. Fortunately for them, and for the younger daughter—and possibly for Georgetown itself—they had not employed him to work on this goal before the indictments were handed down. Fortunately for Macy (who seems to have taken a modified Parent B position), only Huffman has been indicted in the scheme.

Should come as no surprise that many of us are thinking of Wolfe, “the sage of status anxiety.”

How could Harvard not be part of the buy your kid into college story? The first story out of Harvard (expect more) is definitely classier, and un petit peu more convoluted, than the fork over money to the guy pretending to be a college admissions consultant dealie we’ve been reading about. This one’s about fencing, a sport which boasts lots of French words and is featured in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice. But it has in common with many other admissions scandal stories what I’ll call the sports vector. You get the kid in by greasing the already sweaty palm of an Ivy coach in some sport or other: soccer, tennis, water polo, basketball, and now fencing. Once he or she has collected enough money from you, the coach puts your kid’s name on a short list of desired athletes, which the admit office rubber stamps.

The complicated money-delivery angle here is that the palm-greaser bought the coach’s house for twice its value:

The house at 212 Forest Street in Needham, Massachusetts looked nearly identical to every other upper-middle-class colonial in the Boston suburbs. So when it sold in May 2016 at nearly a million dollars – well above the three-bedroom’s assessed value of $549,300 – the town assessor was so confused that he wrote in his official notes: “makes no sense.”

Reporting from the Boston Globe now provides a little more clarity into the not-so-rational purchase. According to the paper, the buyer, Jie Zhao – who “never lived a day in the Needham house” – had a son who was interested in applying to Harvard and fencing for the school team. Zhao purchased the home at a several hundred-thousand-dollar markup from Harvard’s fencing coach, Peter Brand. Zhao’s son got into Harvard, and joined the fencing team, and 17 months after his initial purchase, Zhao sold the house at a $324,500 loss.

A true Composé Attack, incorporating many elegant feints.

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

UPDATE: And there’s a local angle! Looks as though the world’s most nonsensical real estate investor lives just a hop skip and a parry from UD, in Potomac, Md.

Get to know the inside of Waco Texas, the reason its rapists and illegal-weapon-brandishing killers get off scot-free, where everyone’s a Baylor University graduate.

Baylor – whose mix of ostentatious Christianity and de Sadeian degeneracy gives the Catholic priesthood a run for its money – generates the judges and DAs who ensure that good ol’ boys don’t get convicted of their crimes, while … uh … others…

Branch Davidians, Breastaurants, Bikers, and a bevy of weapons you will not believe: What better place for your college education?

Who can say why countries are reluctant to have them back?

[McLennan Texas] County District Attorney Barry Johnson released a statement on Tuesday in which he said keeping on with the case would be “waste of time, effort and resources. … In my opinion [the nine killings] would have, and should have, resulted in numerous convictions and prison sentences against many of those who participated in the Twin Peaks brawl … Over the next three years the prior district attorney failed to take that action, for reasons that I do not know to this day.”

It’s Texas, baby. If Good Old Boys With Guns don’t thrill you, move on up here to Maryland with UD.

Far out.

And it ROCKS!

A hilariously smug Christian poses this question to Jack Gladney in White Noise, as they contemplate the aftermath of what everyone’s euphemistically calling the ‘airborne toxic event.’ In its end-time confidence, it’s sort of the ultimate anti-poetic question. Poets – poets of our time – tend to be present-moment mavens, anxiously, ecstatically, completely committed to intensity of earthbound experience. Linda Gregg, who died this week, was prominent among them.

For years she lived on Greek islands with Jack Gilbert (she dedicated one of her books to him, with the epigraph It was like being alive twice.), himself a quintessential greed of being poet:

Using up what
little time we have, relishing our mortality,
waltzing slowly without purpose. Neglecting
the future. Content to let the garden fail
and the house continue on in its usual disorder […]
Hesitant occasions of pride, feeling himself feeling.
Waking in the night and lying there. Discovering
the past in wonderful stillness. […] Above all,
his greed. Greed of time, of being. 

A friend once mentioned to Gregg the name of a painting by Paul Thek – While there’s still time, let’s go out and feel everything – and she loved it and said Jack would have loved it.

One form of poetry you get with this disposition – and both Gilbert and Gregg wrote this way – is a seemingly dashed-off-from-this-moment’s-feelings, impressionistic set of tenuously connected statements and images, inside of which lies the somewhat hidden, somewhat obliquely referenced, tragic nature of life. Because there’s obviously a price to be paid for this seriously committed ecstatically open presentness – Gilbert talks about the price explicitly in this poem – and because, as some sage put it, Wherever you go, there you are. Which is to say, let’s not pretend that while you’re getting a major bang out of a Milos sunset, you’re not a neurotic like everyone else, with an inescapable personal history.

So… a poem of Gregg’s to remember her by. I’ll interrupt it with commentary. Go here for the uninterrupted poem.

Looking for Each of Us

[The title I think contains a double meaning: She’s looking for the meaning of her past, and the past of her now-departed lover Gilbert, in a bunch of postcards she saved from those years. She’s also doing the work of looking for both of them, in the sense of her having taken on an obligation.]

I open the box of my favorite postcards   
and turn them over looking for de Chirico   
because I remember seeing you standing   
facing a wall no wider than a column where   
to your left was a hall going straight back
into darkness, the floor a ramp sloping down  

[de Chirico because his surrealistic paintings often feature weird mysterious interiors/architectures with lots of open spaces and ancient statuary – all of this richly suggestive material for a woman trying to fill in the gaps of her romantic past in Greece.]

to where you stood alone and where the room   
opened out on your right to an auditorium   
full of people who had just heard you read   
and were now listening to the other poet.   

[She recalls maybe their first encounter at one of his readings; his partial emergence behind partial walls, columns, in the dark… A figure for her never quite getting him, or never quite getting his vacant, open, shadowy, setting – his existential location – clearly looked at.]

I was looking for the de Chirico because of   
the places, the empty places. The word   
“boulevard” came to mind.

[Came to mind, perhaps, because the world she’s remembering was broadly open – as broad as a Parisian boulevard … And while all that openness was then, let’s say, beckoning and sexy, in retrospect, having been in various ways wounded in their relationship, it now has a more de Chirico feel – ominous, even threatening.]

Standing on the side   
of the fountains in Paris where the water   
blew onto me when I was fifteen. It was night.   

[Again an image of her peripherality to, partial understanding of, a scene – as she was peripheral to Gilbert at the reading. She recalls being at the “side” of the fountain, aware of it mainly because of the water it blew onto her, and of her being in the dark. There’s visceral experience when you’re young – the water – and there’s detached retrospection when you’re older.]

It was dark then too and I was alone.   
Why didn’t you find me? Why didn’t   
somebody find me all those years?

[Here I think she’s back to the scene at the poetry reading – another dark shadowy setting of insufficient knowledge. She recalls her lonely youth, as she went “undiscovered” for so long by people like Gilbert, who should have recognized right away the love she had to give.]

The form  of love was purity. An art. An architecture.   
Maybe a train. Maybe the shadow of a statue   
and the statue with its front turned away   
from me. Maybe one young girl playing alone,   
hearing even small sounds ring off cobblestones   
and the stone walls.

[Her engagement with de Chirico’s visual world continues as she recalls her pre-sexual world of aesthetic feeling. Each of her maybes describes an image in a de Chirico painting, with the sense of her own peripherality and insufficient understanding implicit in his scenes: the statue’s front is turned away from her; the avidly sensitive, avidly feeling, young girl is desperate to hear even the smallest meaningful sounds from the world around her… In a way she’s returned to that world now.]

I turn the cards looking   
for the one and come to Giacometti’s eyes   
full of caring and something remote.
His eyes are loving and empty, but not with   
nothingness, not for the usual reasons, but because   
he is working.

[Still not finding the de Chirico, the poet finds a photograph of another artist, Giacometti, whose love, like her earlier, pre-sexual love, expresses something purely aesthetic and has nothing for her emotionally – and the implicit comparison here is with her poet/lover, whose love for her similarly turned out to be, let’s say, more about being engrossed in aesthetic “work” than about human caring.]

The Rothko Chapel empty. A cheap   
statue of Sappho in the modern city of Mytilene   
and ancient sunlight. David Park’s four men   
with smudges for mouths, backed by water,   
each held still by the impossibility of what   
art can accomplish. A broken river god,
only the body. A girl playing with her rabbit in bed.   
The postcard of a summer lightning storm over Iowa.

The poem concludes with a cascade of images – one postcard after another glanced at on the way to the de Chirico she’s still after and won’t find – so she won’t find the clarity she seeks. She finds instead art’s oblique truths, with plenty of emptiness: Giacometti’s empty eyes; the empty Rothko Chapel; vast ancient sunlight in a cheapened world. And then there’s a precise description of the Park painting, a painting which accomplishes perhaps exactly what Gilbert and Gregg were ultimately, with all their intensity of movement, after: being “held” in the moment of fullness and intensity forever. Which is what powerful poems do: They elaborate such moments so strongly as to arrest them.

But now? The men’s godlike reality in their generative hyper-present moment, captured by the artist, is only painted body now – cheapened, broken. And the next image – the girl playing with the rabbit on her bed – is not I think a postcard, but a personal memory stirred by all of the images she has seen. It’s a kind of sudden reversion to the real – not passion, not art, but plain old autobiography — her own inescapable personal history.

By the time we get to her final postcard, we’ve transcended even personal history: The summer lightning storm over Iowa zooms everything out to nature as its blind tragic force crashes over the best-laid passionate intensities and geographical exoticisms. We end in Iowa.

Another thoughtful argument for trying them over there.