This guy, and a lot of other commentators, are really upset about Bulgarian behavior against England the other night. People are screaming so hard about what looks to ol’ UD like routine racism and fascism in the stands that the head of Bulgarian soccer – who saw and heard nothing during the game and is offended by derogatory remarks from various quarters about Bulgarian fascists – has been forced to resign.

Everyone’s droning on about how it’s happening onaccounta resurgent right-wing nationalism in Europe – which assumes that if you can liberalize a government you can debestialize soccer fans. Me no think so. Me think there’s really nothing political about these people. Me think if you asked them basic political questions they wouldn’t understand what you were saying.

Read any intelligent person on ISIS. ISIS is about nihilism and love of beheadings and enslaving; it ain’t very Islamic and it certainly ain’t political. Hate to get all Jonathan Swift on you, but a lot of people – er, young men – are real animals. (Most soccer stadium audiences around the world are currently almost one hundred percent young and male. Everyone else is too afraid for their and their childrens’ lives.) Countries that let them attend public competitive events get what they deserve.

Yet, as Mike Meehall Wood points out, Bulgaria (and other countries) ain’t got much choice:

[D]omestic games are played out to low crowds, where the only people who show up are those who really, really care, which is to say, the hooligans. The idea that the Bulgarian authorities can root out the boneheads is laughable: the stadiums would be empty afterward, so congratulations on not only becoming the guy who bankrupted the club, but also the one who incurred the wrath of the most aggressive and dangerous thugs in town in the process.

The hooligans know this, and thus act with near impunity.

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But UD! You’re talking about closing down soccer altogether!

Look. Countries already have shitlists of people they won’t allow into the games. Make the shitlists long enough and non-barbarians might start buying tickets. And anyway what are you talking about? Don’t you know that increasing numbers of games are played in closed-to-the-public stadiums because audiences are simply becoming unacceptably dangerous? I ain’t the one shutting down the show – that’s the soccer federation.

It don’t get no more scathing than his instantly famous Washington Post column about you know who, post-Putin.

Let us consider why, amid two years of howling verbal shitstorms, it is Will and Will alone who has captured the attention of the world. What’s he got?

A strong, funny, opening sentence featuring an apt extended metaphor with alliteration and assonance (I’ve bolded the Ps and the long As):

America’s child president had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day care…

More put-down comedy:

Precision is not part of Trump’s repertoire. He speaks English as though it is a second language that he learned from someone who learned English last week.

You may recall this from the similar technique of Paul Krugman on the subject of Newt Gingrich:

A stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.

Merciless no-muss no-fuss direct statement:

Trump has a weak man’s banal fascination with strong men whose disdain for him is evidently unimaginable to him.

The winner-word here is banal – really cuts the dude down to size, as in Arendt’s unsparing banality of evil.

Even more — and bear with me here – when you couple a word dominated by the word anal with Uranus – a word NO ONE can read or speak without translating it into your anus – I think you also begin to… infer… Will having some real fun with the anomalous ass in the White House:

[J]ust as astronomers infer from anomalies in the orbit of the planet Uranus the existence of Neptune before actually seeing it, Mueller might infer and then find still hidden sources of the behavior of this sad embarrassing wreck of a man.

Even as[s]tronomers works for Will here as he uh bends over backwards NOT to say that the hidden source of Trump’s anxious Russophilia is long-rumored twisted sex play in a Moscow hotel, about which Putin knows…

Finally, Will knows how powerful iambic pentameter can be. As in:

this sad embarrassing wreck of a man.

The finely controlled language of his whole piece implicitly juxtaposes Will’s (and his assumed reader’s) calm Shakespearean maturity and Trump’s mad-hatter hauteur, and this final poetic line (still the well-deployed assonance: sad/embarrassing/man) is the quintessence of the basic move: crude content/elegant style. You recall how it works for Shakespeare:

Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen

A poor, bare, forked animal as thou art

Like most really good writers, Will has learned from him.

As in all of the tragedies, the elevated language invokes a noble past and promises a noble future; but for now, words of contempt and hopeless pathos must in our phrases be enseamèd.

… we find one of their specialized coaches – he’s solely about conditioning and strengthening the lads – paid the sixth highest such coaching salary in the country. With contract extensions and all, he’s well on his way to half a million dollars a year. (His most recent salary is a “126.25 percent increase from his initial [2010] $160,000 salary with the Seminoles.”)

Now I want you to put aside petty distractions about FSU that are all in the past: the rapes, the thefts, punching women in bars, animal abuse, the conniving local police force, blahblahblah… I want you to think about this hagiographic Showtime special on this great team, this great school, this great community.

Watch the trailer – it features this guy, this strength and conditioning coach. One of FSU’s heroes.

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

So – the nexus? The very crux of what makes a great academic institution?

Well, you’ve got the coach, and you’ve got the Showtime special. Now you need that ineffable combination of elements that makes for scholarly excellence. Let us put these elements together.

Let’s have this coach get stinking drunk in his campus office with the Showtime crew and then pile into his car and crash into a stop sign.

AND let’s let this class operation give him a slap on the wrists and insinuate in its public statement that it was all the evil Showtime crew’s fault for forcing whiskey into the hands of this great good and innocent man.

Now you’ve got it. The life of the mind, Florida State University.

At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”

[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.

Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.

Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.

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

What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.

But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.

It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…

But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.

Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.

Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.

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

Some like it hot.

Hot and bloody.

It’s the Baylor way.

If you want to read an example of a really good essay, go here, to Jay Michaelson’s piece on the ongoing death of Israeli democracy. Let me tell you why it’s a terrific essay.

First of all, it’s very short, but within that concision Michaelson brilliantly, elegantly, and with dramatic – even poetic – flair, conveys his argument. An essay is “a short piece of writing on a particular subject,” says the first dictionary definition I get when I Google “meaning of the word ‘essay.'” The best essayists know how to pack their meaning into very few words, and this brevity often packs quite a punch… It is, if you like, a punch – a quick feint to the brain which suddenly distracts the mind from its customary thoughts and makes it pay attention. Think Joan Didion – that weird evocative minimalism which somehow by picking out only a few powerful words (and these are often repeated words) hooks onto you and holds you.

Second, Michaelson’s tone is neutral, controlled, calm, observant… And at the same time it manages to convey intense underlying emotions. Didion’s great at this too: On the surface, in her essays about her husband and her daughter, for instance, she’s so much about dry perceptive intellect directed to the world, careful precise language brought to the description of her experience, that you only gradually realize the almost unbearable melancholy that she’s really feeling, the bafflement and despair that’s in fact motivating the writing as a way of understanding and assimilating the tragic nature of life.

Third, Michaelson gives his essay a narrative frame. The obnoxious Hasid on Michaelson’s flight from Israel begins and ends the essay, giving the author’s abstractions about “a minority group … that pays those who are destroying it” (he has in mind Israeli and American Jewish subsidies of the most reactionary sects within the faith) a grounding in the immediacy of the real world… Or perhaps SOS should say a floating in the immediacy of the in-flight world, where women are angered by the Hasid’s refusal to sit next to them, and where women and men are made anxious by the man’s bizarre rule-flouting behavior throughout the flight.

Finally, Michaelson’s not got much space so he’s not going to fart around. He’s not going to mince words. He’s going to tell you – calmly, precisely – what’s in the mind of the Hasid, what has been put in the Hasid’s mind by the education that the larger Jewish community continues to subsidize.

Most likely, he has learned in religious schools – paid for mainly by government largesse, thanks to “faith-based initiatives” and the erosion of the garden wall between church and state – that goyim have no souls, or are like animals, or worse… . Taught that the customs of the goyim – that includes non-Orthodox Jews, of course – are filthy, stupid and nonbinding, Haredim are unruly passengers on airplanes. “Fasten seatbelts?” – goyishe toireh. “Don’t gather in the aisles?” – narishkeit.

But no – he can’t really know exactly what the Hasid is thinking.

Really, I have no idea what the Hasid is thinking, what the flight attendants are thinking or what my fellow passengers are thinking.

I can report only what I am thinking. And that is that this moment of obstinacy and disrespect is one that we Jews have created. Our cousins in Israel have given the Haredim everything they’ve asked for in exchange for their political support – just watch as the new government undoes all the progress of the previous one – at tremendous cost to society as a whole. And our institutions here in America continue to dole out benefits to fundamentalists opposed to the very institutions that are feeding them.

The last two sentences of Michaelson’s essay wonderfully meld the particular, the immediate narrative of the obnoxious Hasid, with the general:

An obstreperous man on an airplane is not so bad; after a few hours, we made it to JFK, safe and sound. Reversing course on Jewish fundamentalism will be a lot harder.

… Christopher Hitchens, who has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Hitchens is one of our best stylists. He learned much of what he knows about writing from one of his heroes, George Orwell.

Let’s be precise about what he learned by starting our salute with the first three paragraphs of one of Orwell’s typically intense and brilliant essays, “How the Poor Die.”

Note first the title itself — Blunt, brisk, short, monosyllabic, pragmatic… And yet hardly a simple pragmatism. The very cut and dried feel of the language, applied to vulnerable human beings, already hints at the horror and indignation Orwell feels. I mean to say that the title is as much as a conclusion as it is a beginning; the essay will after all narrate Orwell’s education in how the poor die, how the Parisian poor are so obscenely mistreated in welfare hospitals that they are killed en masse and in the same ways by the doctors and nurses there (the essay was written in 1946). The title signals Orwell’s achieved emotional education – from naivety to shock to horror to rage to something beyond rage, a hard-won detachment that allows him to write about what he has experienced and learned in a way that gives the unanswerable physical and moral reality of the atrocity he’s describing full verbal expression.

The emotion, I mean, is still there; but it is intricately leashed. We pick up on that suppressed intensity; we sense that it might spring out with violence at any moment, and this makes reading Orwell exciting, tense…

This will be one of the tricks Hitchens learns: Understatement is almost always the way to go, especially when you are describing extremities of suffering, of injustice. Also when you are describing extremities of passion, of joy. Dial it back, make your language, not your feelings, powerful, and let the reader find her own way through your sentences to the emotion you want her to feel.

This will of course only work if your writing voice, your social approach to the reader, has been so welcoming as to create in the reader a strong identification with you.  Once you’ve locked on to your target, as it were, once the reader is with you — I really want to say once the reader is you — you’re free and clear.  If you can sustain that fellow feeling, your essay is liable to work brilliantly.

Mainly what you want to do is describe, with acute precision, the aspect of the world you want your reader to see, feel, and understand. Artfully you will thread, throughout that description, little words and phrases that intimate how strongly you feel; but you will never bluntly, emotionally, manipulatively, tell your reader how you feel. Basically your tone throughout should be stoic, rational, observant, perhaps philosophically amused. When you do decide to break that even tone, you will do it sparingly, and it will likely have immense impact on the reader.

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

Here’s the beginning of George Orwell’s essay, “How the Poor Die.” My bracketed comments are in blue.

In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. [No emotion at all.  Mere reportage.  The point is to work slowly up to emotion, as occurred in the actual course of events Orwell narrates.] The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean. For some days past I had been unequal to translating Reaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.  [Note that the tone is casual, friendly, confiding, conversational.  He addresses you directly:  You will know the kind of questions… Clashing, though, with this ordinary speech is the already extraordinary circumstance of the writer’s ill-treatment at the hand of the clerk.]  [Note too the careful choice of figurative language, here stressing already the dehumanized aspect of the other patients:  The line behind Orwell is described as a knot, and then immediately their bundles – knotted handkerchiefs – are described.  Of course the reader doesn’t consciously register the implied equivalence here between bundles and people, but a hint of their objectification has been planted.]

After the questioning came the bath — a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.  [Apparently carries the semi-amused observing consciousness here, the Brit surveying with mild astonished disdain French ways.] My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown — no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said — and led out into the open air. [Very, very precise description, this.   Orwell identifies no specific people interacting with him — were taken away, was given, led out — because the nurses are interchangeable indifferent automata…  One could certainly miss, in visualizing all of this, Orwell’s elegant assonance, his repeated use of one particular sound:  shivering, minutes, inches, given, slipper, big…. Just a dull bland almost soundless sound in that deeply hidden letter I, but it somehow conveys the total drabness, the deadness, the claustrophobia, of his setting.  This writing doesn’t exactly sing.] This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia.  [Note how long he waited to tell us this dramatic fact, to explain why he’s in the hospital.  Stoic, selfless, hits you up with it at the end of the sentence and shocks you.] The ward we were going to was 200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital grounds. [Seemed.  Does the same job as apparently.  I was in a crazy, mad, world, slowly attempting to assimilate the madness… It was like a bad dream — this seemed to be the case; that apparently was the case… Orwell is dramatizing not his emotions, but the minute by minute actuality of his efforts to make sense of what is gradually revealing itself to be a nightmare. He brings the reader along with him in that immediacy.]  Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. [Strange, ill-lit… Our sense of nightmare, of the terror of the half-known, grows.  What’s the smell?  What’s the origin of the feeling? And don’t forget how controlled, how oddly beautiful, Orwell’s prose remains, with his lilting repeated L’s:  long, rather low, ill-lit room, full… This stylish self-consciousness may seem a small thing, but it’s conveying something very important amid this manifestly out of control experience.  It is conveying control.  So even as we follow the writer into this helpless fear, we sense, in his masterful prose, a kind of eventual triumph over it…  Maybe prose for Orwell – and Hitchens – ultimately comes to convey what we have to fall back on in our efforts to retain our dignity and lucidity in a difficult life.  In this sense, writing – language – really, really matters.]  As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man’s back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

Humiliated, disgusted, and frightened — When the visceral emotion comes out, it really comes out. But having held it back, leashed it for so long, slowly created the conditions for its release, Orwell now produces an especially intense result …

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

I don’t say Hitchens is as a great a prose stylist as Orwell. But he is quite, quite good. Even people who detest particular positions of his often delight in his writing. He has that same gift Orwell had, that ability to draw you in, to make you be like him, or want to be like him, or feel you are him, for the duration of your lodging in his prose.

Part of what draws you into Orwell and Hitchens is, strangely, their insolence. They speak bluntly and don’t particularly care who they hurt. When we read naughty insouciant people – add Oscar Wilde and Gore Vidal — we intuit a wildly attractive world of looseness, relaxation, wit, and laughter; we intuit a subversive, seductive, knowledge.

On one level this knowledge is the knowledge of brats, and we connect with it because many of us were to one extent or another brats, and that was fun. Yet the childish, I’ll-say-anything aspect of all of these writers is wedded to a very mature erudition. Orwell, Wilde, Vidal, Hitchens — all are or were first-class literary scholars, deeply informed and sensitive readers of the western aesthetic tradition. This immature/mature combination gives their prose a high burnish and a low scrawl. Both at the same time. Which keeps you guessing. Keeps you off balance. Makes you burst out with laughter.

I’ll post this much now. More on Hitchens in a moment.

A recent Columbia University grad is confused:

… In [Columbia University] student housing, where I lived for four years, the water in the showers was either scorching or glacial but rarely tolerable. Infestations might be part of New York’s charm, but our cockroach and mice roommates were amazingly abundant. I sometimes awoke at 4 a.m. to find my roommate chasing mice. He was more successful than our traps at catching the little guys.

At the library, I might wait 20 minutes to print something out. During finals time, it might be an hour to get a nook at a desk in which to study.

I’m not sure where the money is going…

Hint: Check out your president’s salary.

… and now the University of Connecticut has its own art controversy.

The Bowling Green thing, you recall, involved high ranking administrators sneaking into the campus gallery and removing a sculpture (High school teacher, male; high school student female; BJ.) they found offensive.

In the U Conn case, students have voted for the show to be moved out of the library and into the campus art museum (everyone has to use the library; few students, I guess, go to the museum).

The offensive material here is not sexual but animal.

The artist specializes in dead birds. One piece features “a dead brown sparrow on a noose with the phrase ‘The bird got what it deserved’ etched in glass.”

The artist complains that he is misunderstood.

Nelson says the title of the bird piece, “The Birdwatcher’s Verdict,” should indicate that it is about the preferences of birders for “good birds” like cardinals and bluebirds over invasive species like sparrows or starlings.

More broadly, the artist says that the exhibit’s title, Connecticut Wilderness, “is an oxymoron that refers to the sense of confusion and ambiguity that prevails in our lives, and that I try to portray in my artwork through multi-layered meanings and unusual visual imagery.”

Birders hate sparrows so much that they think they deserve lynching.

I’m not picking up on the ambiguity.

Anyway. Students are grossed out, don’t want to have to look at dead birds in the library, want the thing out of there now.

UD says more power to them. This controversy is really about the preferences of students for “good artists.”

My dog killed and semi-ate a baby squirrel this afternoon.

I heard the baby’s muffled shrieks quite clearly, since I was in my bedroom (reading James Agee: Selected Poems, sent to me by its editor, Andrew Hudgins, an old friend of this blog who read of my enthusiasm for Agee here) and the dog was in his fenced-in yard just outside the bedroom’s sliding doors.

I didn’t know I was hearing my dog killing a squirrel. My house sits in the middle of a wide, long, heavily wooded lot, and from my bedroom I often hear, late at night, animals tormenting and killing other animals. My vague assumption is that I’m hearing foxes killing rabbits. Along with coyote and deer and owls and raccoons and hawks and opossums and turtles and crows and mice and mourning doves and cats and bats and rats and minks, many foxes and rabbits live on our half-acre. I assumed this was a late afternoon version of the fox/rabbit scenario.

But how could that be? I looked up from my book. In the fox/rabbit scenario, the shrieks aren’t muffled. They’re piercing.

From my bed I saw my dog leap about in an unfamiliar way. Something flapped in his mouth.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

As I dealt with this problem, I began a mental reckoning of the whole animal thing around here, a green corner of urban Bethesda, Maryland.

Around here. Just on our property.

There are the massive holes in a neat straight line down the sides of our wood house, put there by generations of woodpeckers. There are the slightly less massive holes, in no particular pattern, behind our house, above the sliding doors to the deck — the work of generations of carpenter bees.

I’m always batting away spider webs on my way out of the house.  Dead snakes make concentric circles in the street.  Beetles and potato bugs and worms swarm when you shift a particle of dirt.  Don’t get me started on mosquitoes.

When you turn on the basement light on your way to the washing machine, teams of crickets hop up your legs.

Birds are always hurling themselves against our sliding glass doors.  Sometimes they die.

Sometimes hundreds of crows come to town and caw for days.

Faithful readers will recall that last summer, returning from a week in Upstate, New York, Les UDs discovered a dead deer a few feet from their back steps.

There’s almost always something living in the attic, making housekeeping sounds.  Last time Mr UD was up there, he called down to UD.

“Know those snorkel fins?  Something ate them.”

Something very big is up there at the moment.  Gotta call animal control again.

And yes.  Every time they come they nail shut more entry points.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Sure, there’s an upside.  During the summer, on very dark nights, when you walk out back, you drift into a golden field of fireflies.  Butterflies and hummingbirds buzz the plants out front.

A few years ago, a charming toad took up such long residence beside our front door that I named her —  Elpheba.

When you sit on our green Adirondack chairs, cats appear out of nowhere and kiss your knees.

Portions of the property are well-established settlements.  The mourning doves gather to cluck and coo in a clearing a few steps up the hill behind the house.  The foxes have their dens on the other side of the fence at the top of the property, in the narrow strip of wood before the land drops down to the train tracks.  The rabbits inhabit a stand of honeysuckle halfway to the hilltop.  The deer can be found lying at leisure in groups of four or five way up the hill, in a thick copse.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

To some extent, the animals have succeeded in keeping me off my own property.  Since my dog goes apeshit when he sees deer, I have to retreat when I’m walking him out back and deer appear.  Which is often.  This afternoon, a large rabbit insisted on staying put close to us, and I had to place my body between the rabbit and the dog to keep the dog from rushing the rabbit.  The noisy carnage out there in the evenings discourages me from night walks.

An Arizona goat farmer who asked not to be named for fear of being embroiled in partisan politics said Noem’s decision to use a weapon on the goat that required more than one shot was tougher on the animal than it was on her.

“The goat gets shot… but the brain’s intact, it’s aware of what’s going on,” the farmer said. “And then she has to go and futz around and get another shell and then come back and do the same thing and it finally expires.”

The farmer suggested that Noem’s account “reveals not just callousness toward life and poor political acumen, but also a limited understanding of the basics of farm life.”

Fine list of schools there, and who knew they all house mouse-killing factories? Who knew all of these fine schools host entire departments that acquire animals, give them cancer, write pretend articles about them, and then kill them? Cue Lenny, Of Mice and Men …

It seems a demoralizing sort of thing to do with the tax money you and I fork over… Makes us feel like idiots to know that for sixteen years we’ve been subsidizing bigtime a pointless bloody charade, a riot of animal torture in the name of careerism.

But at least the research fraud at Columbia University has seriously set back progress toward a cure for cancer! That much at least we can take pride in!

Even if you haven’t read the novel, you’ve learned a lot about it, and DeLillo’s world view, just from reading this blog, which after all has a whole category devoted to DeLillo. The Noah Baumbach production opens August 31 at the Venice Film Festival.

A Bronx-born son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo is an entirely urban animal, yet he knowledgeably sets his novel in a small midwestern “village” (I’ll explain the quotation marks in a moment); a writer who has never had children, he sensitively places at the heart of the book the character and fate of many children in a blended family (their parents are much-divorced). As with many of my posts on the postmodern way of death, the novel first establishes the enviably, pleasantly, eventlessly “immune” life of affluent Americans, and then throws a lethal environmental catastrophe (“the airborne toxic event”) right in their faces. And lungs.

So DeLillo locates the Gladney family (glad; bland) in the cute village of Blacksmith, with its preserved nineteenth century main street and vernacular library and town hall and churches…

From its sweet pre-industrial name to its charming brick storefronts, Blacksmith could convince you you really are living a pre-modern life, before advanced technology, massive shopping malls, and endless ubiquitous streaming media; but, as White Noise makes hilariously clear, it’s all a simulacrum, a Truman-show facade behind which lies, like it or not, the late twentieth century.

When the disaster hits, Gladney’s first response is total denial:

“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornadoes. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”

The filmmakers chose Wellington, Ohio for their Blacksmith – a heartland town whose preserved main street has won national awards.

The cast?

Hours spent reading reflections on America and the latest elementary school massacre have led me back to Christopher Hitchens writing about George Orwell. I very much want to believe – I plan to act in various ways in accordance with the belief – that there are enough clear-eyed and ethical Americans to start nudging us away from the nightmare the country begins to resemble.

From the simple, psycho, devotees of violence gathered in Idaho militias, to the less organized, more complex population of assault weapon adherents, we have a problem from hell, and must think calmly about how to solve it.

We must start at ground zero: NMAA.

No Motive At All. The older man who killed 58 and injured 1,000 in Vegas had absolutely no discernible reason for doing it, which serves to remind us that some people from vicious parentage/upbringing do what they do (Bernie Madoff, son of two financial criminals, had no discernible motive – he was already legitimately vastly wealthy) for deep-lying atavistic reasons.

The Vegas killer was the son of a big-time crook. Say he had it in his DNA; say he was one of those rare human animals living in a state of bestiality which he kept more or less under control for fifty years or so, but decided to let rip as he reached the end of his life. Although rare, such people really hit the jackpot when they’re born into a culture that begs them to collect massive assault arsenals.

We think Paddock killed a lot of people, but be assured that eventually two friends will do the same thing, shooting out of adjacent windows, and they will have learned a lot from Paddock’s errors.

I suspect for people like this, as with the two notorious Los Angeles bank robbers in the 1997 North Hollywood Shootout, the real satisfaction lies in the long, elaborate preparation — these people took painstaking years to prepare their climaxes.

In terms of sheer body count, NMAAs are our biggest challenge. I think serious intelligence organizations rather than local police forces/the FBI, should be involved in the identification/tracking/detention of these supremely dangerous people. At least until we figure out a way to stop arming them like high-functioning terrorists.

“… Fewer people own guns, but the people who own them own more of them—a lot more—and the reason they most often cite for owning them is no longer hunting (56 percent) or even target shooting (70 percent), both activities one can imagine normal people engaging in, but “protection against crime” (88 percent). For all but a small subset of people, owning guns for protection against crime is not normal. I’m sorry, but it isn’t. It’s paranoid and unhealthy and very, very dangerous.

People used to own guns to kill animals. Now they own guns to kill people. And enough of them are emotionally unbalanced enough to cause serious trouble…

Everything unkind that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama ever said about this group (“basket of deplorables,” “cling to guns or religion”) is true, easily confirmed by even the most cursory review of polling data. Because of the unrepresentative nature of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, this minority’s opposition to gun control is sufficient to block any and all legislation intended to address the problem…

A majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws, but 80 percent of Republicans and Republican leaners do not, and that’s enough to prevent anything from happening…

How many more children will die before things change? It’s my duty to inform you, future victims, that 185 isn’t going to be enough. Your blood will have to be spilled as well. You probably won’t have to wait very long. The next school massacre is likely only a month or two away.”

… its honoring of a person who attacks the chief justice of the US Supreme Court as a pedophile, and the last vice-president of the US as a traitor who needs to be hauled up in front of a firing squad and shot to death, you can go one of two ways in response. You can say Hey, that’s who we are, too; ol’ Lin is right that God anointed Trump president for life and the election results must be overturned in Jesus’ name. Or you can take one look at Lin’s one million dollar gift to your school and give it the hell back. As long as a madman’s name is plastered all over your moot courtroom, that’s the only thing anyone outside Macon is ever going to know about you.

Now a course there’ll be hell to pay. Ol’ Lin probably up and sue you and make a lot of noise about the whole thing. His followers will put on their Capitol-Trasher animal skins and protest real loud on your campus and Josh Hawley and Don Jr will be there in coonskin caps raising their fists and getting everybody all whomped up. That won’t be pleasant. But students transferring out/not applying because your law school’s Fuckhead Central won’t be pleasant either.