America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!
Words for our time, from a simple, beautiful song.
… are ticking away as we speak, so UD will be quick about this: She knew him rather well at Northwestern University in the ‘seventies. He thought highly of wee UD‘s writing, and indeed was so insistent that she launch a career just like his — freelance person of letters – that he became quite annoyed when UD decided to go to graduate school in English. He seems to have felt betrayed.
I mean, it was all a kind of compliment, and I remember genially taking it as such, even though Epstein was ungenial in his interactions with my twentyish self.
He condescended. I didn’t take it personally, since he (along with his buddy Erich Heller) was, with virtually everyone, snippy and snobby.
Huge numbers of years on, Epstein has gone and been snobby with Jill Biden — though, curiously, back in 2016, he attacked other snobs for being snobby in regard to Sarah Palin, whose cultural superiority he indignantly defended. Same unfortunate background as Biden – public universities, degrees in girl fields – but as the running mate of Epstein’s presidential choice, Palin would somehow have to be pedigreed; whereas, given Biden’s political connections, she’d need to be a mutt. Sarah Palin abundantly deserved the title Vice President, but Jill Biden doesn’t even deserve “Dr.,” and would do better to content herself with There There Little First Lady.
Not much to see here, in other words. By the time they’re in their eighties, most people – especially if they’re cranks – have long been ignored by the world. Joseph Epstein is to be commended for having kept his name on the page, even unto the final petulance. Good boy.
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UPDATE: OOCH. OUCH. EECH.
The [NU] Department [of English] is aware that a former adjunct lecturer who has not taught here in nearly 20 years has published an opinion piece…
They don’t even name him. (For good measure, his faculty page has been removed from the university’s website.) For a person who cares about status as much as Epstein does, and for a person who believes that he’s famous, this brief no-name dismissal must hurt as much as Trump’s brief no-name Supreme Court dismissal.
Knowing Epstein (having known him long ago), UD anticipates that he is working already on a vindictive short story featuring easily identifiable actors in this Biden episode. After Saul Bellow ended their friendship, Epstein wrote one such story about Bellow; he wrote several vindictive stories about lesser-known people.
Which is fine – one of the venerable motives for writing is the destruction of people who have hurt you and/or people you have come to hate. Nothing wrong with it. Give it your best shot, kiddo.
You get there by walking to the end of UD‘s property. From the edge, and down the ravine, the land is owned by CSX.
V. DIS!!appointed in Jesus. Would have thought BETTER of Him had our prayer on behalf of our fraud claims worked. WE HAVE PLENTY OF OTHER OPTIONS.
[NOTE: I’ve added a lot of material over the last few hours to this post, and will continue to do so as commentary on the president’s failure at the Supreme Court grows. Scroll down.]
Man oh man oh Manischewitz. I really sweated this one. I LOVE MY COUNTRY.
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From Georgia’s response to this thoroughly rejected grotesquerie:
This election cycle, Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do: it implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and certified the election results — again and again and again. Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway.
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Ben Sasse: “Every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court — including all three of President Trump’s picks — closed the book on the nonsense.”
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‘You saw it coming this summer — the astounding moment when the Republican platform became nothing more than a loyalty oath to Donald Trump — an oath of obedience, complete obedience, to Trump. Not even a pretense of policy ideas in it…
So today’s an historic day… [We] can [sometimes] overstate the importance of an event, [but] today was a before and after moment in the life of the nation: 106 members of Congress broke faith with American democracy today. They did something the fascists, the Nazis, the Confederate army, were unable to do. They broke faith with the idea that the people are sovereign.
Democracy definitionally requires one side be willing to lose an election… What we saw today [was a] breaking of faith which followed the poisoning of faith and belief in the system — the American system, the American republic, which has endured since 1776. It was poisoned this month, … and we’re going to live with this now for all the balance of our lives. Because the competition in American politics is now between a democratic party, meaning a party that believes in democracy, versus an autocratic party. And we’ve never seen that.
When you see that many members of Congress breaking faith with their oath [in order to] overturn an election because they don’t like the result, we’re off the reservation to a place that we might not be able to get back on it from. … We’re one election away from losing the country to people who no longer believe in democracy.’
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“His whole life has been transactions and expectations [of a] degree of loyalty, and that’s a total misunderstanding of what to expect from the three justices he appointed, as well as a misunderstanding of [Justices] Alito, Thomas and Roberts. They’re not going to burn down their court to rescue Donald Trump… they’re neither stupid nor crazy. And for them to do what Trump’s asking them to do, they would have to be both stupid and crazy.”
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‘When the case was dismissed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the lawmakers who signed onto the lawsuit “brought dishonor to the House” and chastised them for choosing “to subvert the Constitution and undermine public trust in our sacred democratic institutions.”’
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‘“With each loss we get to celebrate the Biden/Harris victory all over again,” Ken Martin, a vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the state party chair in Minnesota, said. “It’s like the gift that keeps on giving.”’
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“[O]ne of our political parties is openly hostile to our entire political system…
Too many Republicans have gone from being anti-Democratic — that is to say, hostile to the liberal political party — to being anti-democratic — that is to say, hostile to the liberal political system and antagonistic to the idea that the will of the people should prevail — and unwilling to accept political defeat.
This trend represents an existential threat to our system.
… Since the election, the party has only more fully warmed to Trump’s demagogy, moving from the uncomfortable passivity that Republicans used to adopt in the face of his provocations to downright enthusiasm for overturning a free and fair election…
[The Republican party] no longer respects the fundamental basics of our democratic process — voting and the peaceful transfer of political power — let alone good governance.”
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“This embrace of the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election is both shocking and horrifying. As Trump’s fraud claims and legal cases have steadily failed, the arguments he has pursued have become more outlandish and absurd, and they have also become more disturbing. Many Republican voters agree, and in refusing to stand up to him and them, Republican officials have gone from coddling a sore loser to effectively abandoning democracy…
[T]hese Republicans have set a course of being willing to oppose the results of elections simply because they don’t like them. That is by definition antidemocratic…
Republican officials aren’t afraid of Trump so much as they are afraid of Republican voters. And Republican voters appear to be afraid of democracy.”
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“Sedition is a serious charge, but it’s the right word. Most House Republicans and 17 state attorneys general are standing against the right of Americans to choose their own leaders. As elected officials, they are using the power granted to them by the people to declare that the people should not have such power. Even if they lose this case, this time around, the fact that so many traitors hold elected office in America is a major crisis all by itself.”
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“The health of a democracy rests on public confidence that elections are free and fair. Questioning the integrity of an election is a matter of the utmost seriousness. By doing so without offering any evidence, [the Texas Attorney General] and his collaborators have disgraced themselves.
… This new policy of election denialism … is the latest manifestation of the Republican Party’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies.
… This isn’t really about Mr. Trump anymore. He lost, and his ruinous tenure will soon be over. This is now about the corruption of a political party whose leaders are guided by the fear of Mr. Trump rather than the love of this country — and who are falling into dangerous habits.
… [W]here does a party that rejects democracy go from here?”
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David Frum, in 2018:
“Maybe you do not much care about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.
…
Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse. Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.
Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency.”
Both architects had a lifelong connection to the Harvard Graduate School of Design and must have had quite a number of encounters. Yet think of it:
1.) Jerzy fought with the Polish army against the Nazis and barely survived the battle; then he barely survived six years of prisoner of war camp.
2.) Philip was a fucking NAZI! A real live Nazi who tried to start an American fascist party and loved him some Hitler! He celebrated the destruction of Warsaw! He attended Nuremberg rallies and it’s clear from his descriptions of his response to them that they made him come! Come, reader. Like have an orgasm.
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UD actually kind of finds it hard to imagine a universe in which these two men exist together; she totally can’t create a clear picture in her head of Cambridge only fifteen or twenty years after the war and ANYTHING civilized being exchanged between these two. Did Jerzy know about Philip’s profound commitment to and delight in the violent destruction of everything Jerzy not only held dear but for which he practically gave his life? “We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed,” [Johnson wrote in a letter during the war]. “It was a stirring spectacle.”
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I mean, Jerzy already disliked Johnson because of Johnson’s commitment to postmodernism, to be sure; but can he also have known he was talking to a degenerate, seemingly unregenerate, Hitlerian?? If so, how can he have agreed to be in the same room with him? I’m thinking he must not have known.
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But, well, fascinating fascism and all that. Most people who know about architecture have long known that Johnson was a brownshirted jackbooted antisemite… which is like SOOOO fascinating… SOOOO offbeat and edgy and out there… Oh, Philip, stop it!! (Giggle.)
[L]et us not forget his playbook (or his witticisms), so that we can recognize future versions when they arise: the nihilism and casual dismissal of the human that inspired his dark grids and glass-clad castles. I see traces of those qualities in certain architects who claim to be humanists, but whose work instead celebrates their own grandeur. Philip Johnson wasn’t just a racist and fascist: He was a cultured, rich cad who made us forget our own failings as a country and as a profession.
And it is fascinating to old UD, the way we extend a weird sort of – what’s the phrase everyone’s using these days? – preemptive pardon to people like Gore Vidal (UD loves Vidal and even made a pilgrimage to his DC gravesite, but there’s no denying his Johnsonian ugliness in old age) and Kingsley Amis. And maybe we should extend a pardon. But Philip Johnson was no garden variety bigot; he was a brilliant and principled Hitlerian. He laughed it all away years later and people let him. Look how long it’s taken for the civilized world to start erasing monuments to the fucker.
A spec megamansion listed for $55 million, currently in bankruptcy, boasts this original feature.
UD read its description aloud to Mr UD. He was lying in bed gazing at the beautiful early morning sunlight on the garden. He did not respond.
“Thoughts?” UD prompted.
“Trying to picture it,” he said.
“Yes. Also took me a moment.”
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“No.”
“No what?”
“No I don’t want it,” said Mr UD. “Why would I want to look up at people swimming above me?”
“What if they were naked? We’re probably talking skinny dipping here.”
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“No.”
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But UD’s thoughts had moved on. A Simon and Garfunkel tune, slightly altered, wafted through her mind.
And the dangling genitalia
And the superficial sighs
The borders of our lives…
Must-read opinion piece in the NYT. Here’s the heart of it:
Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
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But should this all be put in the past tense? The shits are still trying to kill us.
A duly constituted state of these United States appoints to a position of responsibility for health-related measures during a pandemic a person who dismisses what he calls “the so-called pandemic” as a vast communist plot AND IF ANYONE AGREES TO BE VACCINATED FOR SO-CALLED COVID THEIR DNA WILL BE REPROGRAMMED TO MAKE THEM A ROBOT OF THEIR CHINESE AND RUSSIAN MASTERS.
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Is Igor Shepherd a doctor? No evidence of that online. He says he picked up something he’s calling a medical degree during his young dark evil days in the Russki military but did anyone in Wyoming check on that? Did anyone in Wyoming check on whether Igor is insane?
Igor is Donald Trump’s Little Edie Beale, a strumpette on the psycho circuit who barks about global conspiracies to debrain your immune system. And someone in our sickest state (in 2016: second highest suicide rate; first in gun deaths; worst traffic fatality rate; highest divorce rate) decided to appoint Igor to an important covid-related committee. They decided to put Typhoid Mary in charge of typhoid-relief activities.
Wyoming has hurriedly shoved Igor under the buffalo chips and won’t talk about it. The End.
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Which makes Igor a very small story amid the much larger story of Big Edie, currently spraying territorial urine all over the faces of our Supreme Court Justices.
But UD thinks Little Edie is a sort of wedge into the Big Edie story. UD thinks the restless mental emptiness of America’s wide open spaces, the rageful giveashittery of portions of our hinterlands, takes you in one of two directions, both utterly captured by Trump. One we know from the Sybil, via TS Eliot’s epigraph to The Waste Land: apothanein thelo. I want to die. Suicide, guns, alcohol amid snowdrifts late at night, helmetless motorcycling… There’s no easier place to off yourself than the heart of the heart of Trump country, and they like it that way because quite a few of them want to die. Donald Trump’s maskless droplets-languishing is fuck yeah.
The other direction? Instead of killing yourself, you kill other people. Like Wyoming’s Igor, you’re a rock-hard paranoid who knows that sooner or later the communists led by Kamala Harris (Trump: “She’s a monster.”) are going to attach your negative posilator to your positive negalator and deactivate your synaptic narcoscopies and all hell will break loose. Get them before they get you.
America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. No number from Trump’s years in power will be more lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens of millions of people. Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the atmosphere like radioactive dust…
[His lies] belonged to the postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that fact, but reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private life, clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air, dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the public...
Trump spoke them openly, not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but intentionally, even systematically, in order to demolish the norms that would otherwise have constrained his power...
Trump’s purpose [was] to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy...
Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists…
He leaves behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends…
The election didn’t end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump.
As Trump mentally deteriorates, this 1999 article prepares us for what to expect. For Trump, it’s pardons; for John Paul II it was blessings.
“We are, of course, very concerned for His Holiness’ mental condition,” said chief papal physician Giuseppe Clementi, standing by the pope’s bedside, surrounded by dozens of newly consecrated pill bottles, urine-specimen cups and orthopedic slippers. “Pretty much anything you hold up in front of his face these days, he blesses.” [At an airport recently,] the pope broke free of his handlers and blessed a luggage cart, a podium, a Life photographer’s camera, the plane’s left-side landing gear, three TWA flight attendants, and two of the Swiss Guard who were attempting to release his grip on the landing struts and subdue him. Upon realizing that he was being physically restrained, the pope worked his papal-signet-ring-bearing right hand free and blessed the entire aircraft, which now resides in its own special five-story grotto under St. Peter’s Basilica.
The pope’s blessing rampage also necessitated the construction of a 40,000-square-foot reliquary for the storage of thousands of now-holy items. Housed in the structure are such hallowed objects as the Blessed Vacuum Cleaner Of St. Matthew, the Consecrated Ball Of Crumpled-Up Paper, and the Sacred Zagnut Bar Of Christ, which the pope discovered and blessed during his recent U.S. visit.
Along with handing out pardons to everyone he encounters, Trump can be expected to offer to grab the pussy of any woman he meets, and to ask random Americans if they will let him spray hydroxychloroquine into their ass.
Moody and by accounts of his advisers sometimes depressed, the president barely shows up to work… “If there are these analogies between classic literature and society as it’s operating right now, then that should give us some big cause for concern this December,” said [a literature] scholar. “We’re approaching the end of the play here and that’s where catastrophe always comes.”
Okay, so what’s the catastrophe? Certainly we’ve all allowed ourselves to think of geopolitical disaster as a paranoid depressive conjuring revenge pads about the White House … But – to alter one of George’s famous remarks to Martha – “In reality it usually works out that the nature of the calamity is more private.”
Which is to say, we’re back at UD‘s Trump-may-commit-suicide theory.
I mean, if you want to talk about Shakespeare as a Trump template, which the NYT writer does, suicide is all over the place, ain’t it? There’s a serious effort at suicide in Lear; Hamlet famously goes on and on about whether he should bother existing, and of course Ophelia does the deed; Lady Macbeth apparently offs herself. Ditto Othello…. Go here for the full, long, list. Why offer an analysis of the Last Days of Trump featuring Shakespearean tragedy and unnamed “catastrophe” and not go there? THE Shakespearean catastrophe is suicide.
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Yes, UD still puts the likelihood of Trump doing (or attempting) it at maybe ten percent.
But if he does do it, it will be – in line with his whole life as a showman – a lollapalooza.
Rumor has it he plans to “leave the White House on January 20 in Marine One, then take Air Force One to Florida, where he would address supporters at a rally timed to coincide with Biden’s socially distanced inauguration outside the US Capitol.“
At this rally, he will ascend a massive golden escalator — larger and more glittering than the one he descended on the day he announced his presidential run. As he gradually rises, flames will begin to shoot out from the sides of the moving stairway, and the crowd will go wild as screaming fireworks also appear. But instead of the national anthem they expect to hear, it’s… the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde?
And here at the very top of the escalator appears La Pasionaria, Trump’s true spiritual mate all along, Lara Trump, halo’d in gold. She sings:
In the wafting universe of the World-Breath
Drown, be engulfed…
As they clasp, they expire.
Laid low by covid, Giuliani (with the president’s blessing) has designated “Mr 7-7-7” as the new head of the president’s election fraud team.