There is an obvious irony in someone like [Senator Josh] Hawley, who has built his career on decrying the cultural corruption and moral emptiness of his Democratic opponents, embracing nihilism. Hawley has previously argued that the country needs to return to the virtuous roots of the early republic. His evident disdain for the basic principles of democracy means that nobody should have to take his arguments on that score seriously.
Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic
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UPDATE: But hey look at this! Hawley turns out to be the true Trump heir; as they say in the song, Tomorrow Belongs to Me! A spectacular liar and coward and hypocrite, just like his political daddy, Hawley goes after “scumbags” who massed in front of his house and “threatened” his “infant daughter” and in this way whips up the forces of righteousness… Only it was all bullshit:
Police Slap Down Josh Hawley’s Claim Antifa Terrorized His Family
There was video. It shows a tiny group in front of his house making noise about Hawley’s now-notorious attack on democracy. A few of them went up to the house and tried to deliver a copy of the Constitution, but it was (not surprisingly) refused. Then they dispersed.
So here’s the deal. You don’t get to lead a revolution against American democracy without running the risk of experiencing a bit of static. We feel quite strongly about our democratic traditions here, see, and you’ve seriously upset us. So anyway okay be a revolutionary! Tear down the whole fuckin republic, lad! No one’s stopping you! But assume the burden of your radical subversion. As Esther Wang writes: “Man, if you’re going to try to pull some authoritarian, anti-democratic bullshit, at least don’t be a weenie about it.” IOW: You hate democracy! We get it! But you have to own your hatred. There will be sacrifices – for you and for your fellow plotters against America. Surely you understand that. And it starts now.
You gotta figure Kelly’s gonna do the Trump thing and insist she won by a landslide or something. It will be fun to watch. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s race remains a nail-biter.
That is the sort of fire these people are playing with. Of course, they know it — which makes the efforts of Hawley, Cruz, Johnson and their ilk even more despicable.
Thomas Friedman, NYT.
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I think the coup-plotters find the prospect of the national violence they are trying to trigger exciting. Clearly many Trump voters find the prospect of national violence exciting. Kill and be killed. Let your hair down. “It’s the fantasy of violence that has captured the GOP,” writes Jeff Sharlet. ‘“If you don’t fight to save your country with everything you have, you’re not gonna have a country left,” [Trump said at a recent rally]. He appeared to be past caring whether anyone listening heard that as a call to violence.”
Cuz there’s nothing duller than domestic tranquillity.
When he looks out from the White House’s north windows, Trump can see the layers of fencing that have sealed him in his temporary home. But he can also see the steady progress that workers have been making on the inaugural viewing stand rising up on Pennsylvania Avenue. Fixed to its front is a huge American flag. The edifice is a visual reminder that in a healthy democracy, power is impermanent. Self-government depends on the Constitution, but also on acts of courage by people such as Raffensperger.
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What? You want me to put Raffensperger’s first name in brackets up there? No need. He’s like Cher, like Liberace, like Sting, like Pink, like Charo, like (this one’s for my sister) Morrissey. Raffensperger is so famous, so beloved, that everyone knows him by just one name.
The suicide, at 25, of Jamie Raskin’s son Tommy (I’ve met Raskin a few times – he’s my district’s member of congress) prompts a beautiful remembrance essay by his parents.
What to say? UD‘s longtime readers know that her father – an eminent immunologist at NIH who had a good marriage and friends and four healthy kids – committed suicide when he was 58. Ever since that happened, she’s done a lot of thinking and reading and writing about the act, and these words by Elaine Ellis Thomas (her son Seth killed himself) convey a good deal of what UD has concluded about it.
Suicide brings on a very particular and peculiar kind of grief. The guilt and second-guessing and pure horror that someone could end one’s own life cause excruciating pain for family and friends. I have learned more about this than I care to know in the time since Seth died. Although we still know very little about John Miller’s tragic passing [Miller was a music instructor at Yale], I thought it might be helpful to share some of that hard-earned knowledge.
You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.
If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.
If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.
I think a lot of people sensed these truths very strongly a couple of years ago when one of the goldenest of golden boys, Alan Krueger, killed himself at the age of 58 (same age as my father). Brilliant, handsome, courtly and kind, at the very top of his game, Krueger had it all – an Ivy League professorship, high-level positions in the federal government, a seemingly happy personal life, etc. Yet off he went, with not one of his many friends having had an inkling, as they tell it, that something was disastrously wrong inside his head.
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Another thing UD has come to understand about suicide – there are several pretty clearly distinct kinds. We have already referred to two here – suicide among the young (Tommy Raskin), and suicide among the middle-aged (Krueger; my father). A third kind – suicide among the elderly – is the easiest to understand, it seems to me. Consider one such that I wrote about not long ago – my Northwestern University professor, Erich Heller. I gather, from reading about it, that Heller’s life sort of tapered to an end and he just got bored and lonely and sad. His younger life had been pretty heady, conducted among the literary and philosophical elite of Europe and America; in old age, with most of his friends dead and Heller frail, unwell, and pretty much alone, the whole existence thing must not have seemed much of a bargain. When things come to an end but you’re still sort of pointlessly hanging around, it can seem a little de trop to keep going through the (increasingly excruciating) motions.
I’ve written a lot, on this blog about universities, about student suicides. These may seem spontaneous, some sort of psychotic break, and can be dramatically – athletically! – enacted, reflecting in a final dark inversion the vitality and impulsivity of the young. But despite their seeming suddenness, most acts of suicide among the young are, as Camus wrote of all suicides, “prepared within the silence of the heart.” Many youthful suicides are carefully planned, and may feature rational, and very apologetic, suicide notes. Once people become, in Thomas’s words, “driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality,” their life becomes intense daily warfare between psychic pain that wants to kill them and doctors/pills/therapists/loved ones who want to save them. In notes like Raskin’s, which his parents released, the writer acknowledges, with what is left of his rational mind, that the war has been lost:
“He left us this farewell note on New Year’s Eve day: ‘Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.’”
Depression, to state what I guess is the obvious, kills most suicides. My father, diagnosed bipolar, died with a full load of anti-depressant medication in him, prescribed by a sympathetic and highly qualified psychiatrist. But the depression won that day. The symbolism of the end of the year spoke – insidiously whispered – to Tommy Raskin on his final day. Enough already. You’ve come to the very end.
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The pathos of early life suicides lies in the irresistable thought that if somehow the lost could have just been – magically? – carried over the worst, if they could have been somehow sustained through the shocks to their sense of life as ongoing that they had to endure, they would have recovered and lived long lives. Heller we pity and understand; Krueger, like my father, presents as someone who was probably lucky to get 58 years, given what might well have been deep-lying, decades-long struggle against an immovably depressive disposition. But in the case of the young, like Tommy Raskin, I can’t help envisioning … I dunno… an Angels in America intervention that shields them until the storms abate.
Anyway. He was wise. See my headline. Hard to be a human. Ain’t it the truth.
Everyone’s got what to say about the country’s shift toward authoritarianism, but Jonathan Chait’s brief piece in New York, where he locates Republican rejection of democracy in the emergence of Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr, is a must-read.
To support Trump’s reelection was always to endorse an attack on democracy. The chief divide [within] the party was between those Republicans who denied Trump’s clearly signaled intent to attack the democratic system, and those who reveled in it.
Thousands of people are dying every day now from the pandemic. What is Donald doing? He’s giving rallies with people crammed in together, not wearing masks. It’s almost like Donald is saying, “See. Fuck you. You rejected me. Fine, I’m going to kill all of you.” What is weird is that he is killing his own supporters. It is almost a type of performative omnipotence.
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I’ve already, on this blog, cited Ubu the King, Trump’s closest precursor, who announces that as monarch his aim is to make his fortune, after which “I’ll kill everybody and go away.”
Written at breakneck speed in response to dramatic political events, Beckett’s En Attendant Mon-Vote was originally composed in French and subsequently translated into English by the author. We have signaled that unusual creative history by retaining the French title for this translated edition.
Notorious for the absurdity and nihilism at its core, En Attendant introduces the world to the bitter bickering, the pointless game-playing, the shameless histrionics, the conspiracy-theory paranoia, and the sheer human pathos of its central characters, Trumpimir and Giulagon — two men whose desperation to remain “center-stage” in their own lives is continually undone by their sense of the almost comic futility of existence.
Thus burdened, both men alternate grandiose aggressive activity with long stretches of withdrawn enigmatic silence, a silence broken, for Trumpimir, by repeated rounds of golf (see the character Luckleigh’s famous speech about golf, as well as tennis, late in the play), and, for both men, by farting in public. Indeed it is the combination of meaningless trivial activity (golf) and the reduction of the human, with all its metaphysical striving, to the lowest animal forms of expression, which gives En Attendant its peculiar tragic/comic power.
We offer an excerpt from the play here.
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Characters
Trumpomir Giulagon Luckleigh Pozzeo
ACT I
A country road. A tree. A derelict landscaping company with a sign in front reading Four Seasons.
Evening.
Trumpomir, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take apart a voting machine. He pulls at it with both hands, panting. He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again. As before. Enter Giulagon.
TRUMPOMIR: (Giving up again). Nothing to be done.
GIULAGON: (Advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart) I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Giulagon, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Trumpomir.) So there you are again.
TRUMPOMIR: Am I?
GIULAGON: I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone to Mar-A-Lago forever.
TRUMPOMIR: Me too.
GIULAGON: Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.
TRUMPOMIR: (irritably). Not now, not now.
GIULAGON: (hurt, coldly) May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?
ESTRAGON: On the phone.
GIULAGON: (admiringly) The phone! With who?
TRUMPOMIR:(miserably) Raffensperger.
GIULAGON: And he didn’t back you?
TRUMPOMIR: BACK me? (Lets out an enormous fart.) Certainly he didn’t back me. Refused to pick up the phone eighteen times before he finally answered and then he mocked me and then he released a recording of the call! … I’m still waiting… for my vote…
Where’s my state? Raffensperger where’s my state? Love me: Georgia was supposed to love me.
[Chorus: You’ve been nuts you’ve been mean And gettin’ fatter all the time We put up with you for much too long We have put up with selfish
And all your screaming too You’re always thinking of you All you can do is rant and rave Now we’re telling you it’s all over]
And I am telling you I’m not going
I’m staying I’m staying AND YOU’RE GONNA FIND MY VOTES
ARIA
The people of Georgia are angry The people in the country are angry.
And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um That you’ve recalculated.
So look. All I want to do is this.
I just want to find 11,780 votes
One more than we have!
Because we won the state.
There’s no way I lost Georgia.
There’s no way.
We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.
And I am telling you I ain’t leaving!
Look what you’ve done to the president —
Look what you’ve done to the president
People hate what you did to the president.
So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do?
We won the election, and it’s not fair And I am telling you I’m not going I’m the best man I’ll ever know There’s no way I can ever go No, no, there’s no way No, no, no, no way I’m leaving the White House I wanna be president I don’t wanna be free I’m staying, I’m staying And you, and you You’re all gonna love me
And I am telling you I’m not going Even though the rough times are showing There’s just no way, there’s no way
