For the Record: Ginsburg

Photo by AP.

Some reaction to the inevitable, but almost unbearably sad, loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, degenerating mostly into politics:

Oh my. I'm so sorry for our loss. https://t.co/dUrTIzAae7

— Amazing Life (@Yastreblyansky) September 19, 2020

But I know you want to talk about the other thing. First, hypocrite McConnell: If you feel bad about suddenly seeing the logic of his 2016 position, don't. It actually applies this time. In 2016 there seemed to be no possibility of change in Democratic control of White House...

— Amazing Life (@Yastreblyansky) September 19, 2020

For the Record

This seems so much worse, and somehow sadder, than anything we're screaming at Maggie Haberman for doing:

This story is a truly remarkable effort to demonstrate that Trump has "empathy" and may intend to "do something" about the opioid crisis. https://t.co/ww9troaLEl

— Amazing!o (@Yastreblyansky) August 8, 2019

The president hardly seems involved in the story at all pic.twitter.com/OdsH5y0JZv

— Amazing!o (@Yastreblyansky) August 8, 2019

So that it reads like a specific assignment--"Demonstrate how Donald came by his passionate commitment to combat drug abuse"--for which the reporter was basically unable to find any material, though there are thousands of very interesting words.

— Amazing!o (@Yastreblyansky) August 8, 2019

Literary Corner: Supreme Court Nominations

 

Song of Barbara Lagoa, Whom I Might Nominate to the Supreme Court

by Donald J. Trump

She's excellent.
She's Hispanic.
She's a terrific woman
from everything I know.
I don't know her.
Florida. We love Florida.

Again the way he has no idea that you're supposed to pretend, when nominating somebody who might serve on the Court until 2055 (that's when Lagoa turns 87), that you have some reason other than swaying some votes in a key state in an election six weeks away. Text via Daniel Dale.

Earlier, ex-NeverTrumper Rich Lowry, heir to William F. Buckley, Jr., as editor-in-chief of the National Review, also known as "Ol' Starbursts", after his erotic attachment to ex-governor Sarah Palin, whose stupidity is as shameless as any Republican senator you might want to mention, really enraged me with this example of conservative priorities:

Civilization and its Malcontents

This dude in the illustration run at the top of yesterday's David Brooks column ("The Crisis of Western Civ") is a Giant—extremely strong, in the ancient Greek cosmology, and maybe violent, but not huge in stature like Germanic giants—getting roughed up by a goddess, Doris, the consort of the sea god Nereus, in the colossal mythological battle of the Giants against the Olympian gods, the Gigantomachy, depicted in the frieze from the altar of Zeus of the Anatolian city of Pergamon, 2nd c. B.C.E., now at the Pergamon-Museum in Berlin, which was closed down when I was there a couple of years ago—I really wanted to go not so much because I knew what was there as because I love the sound of the name, and its hum of German classicalism. It's a huge moment in art history, though, of the transition between the calm majesty of the high Athenian moment and the violence and spectacularity of later Hellenism, like that from Mannerism to the Baroque in the 16h century.

The context in which the face is set can be seen below, from a somewhat different angle, where you can recognize the extent to which Doris (whose head has been lost over the millennia) is not simply pulling the unnamed Giant's hair, but has yanked his head back hard enough, maybe, to break his neck, and you can see the intensity of his pain in the way his eyes are rolled back into his skull as he tries desperately to pull her hand away:

The Brooksy awards 2015. I

Walter Pitts, via La Settimana Anacronistica.

The only slightly amusing thing at first glance in part 1 of David Brooks's annual survey of magazine articles he sort of enjoyed reading, or "Sidney Awards", isn't really amusing at all: a summary of the tale of the cognitive scientists Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, as reported by Amanda Gefter in "The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic":

These two geniuses fit together perfectly. They performed amazing intellectual feats, the first of which was coming up with a working model for how the brain works and laying the groundwork for artificial intelligence.

They also developed an amazing friendship. At one point when they were apart, Pitts wrote McCulloch, “About once a week now I become violently homesick to talk all evening and all night to you.”

Only one person was unhappy with this arrangement: the wife of a third colleague who was jealous of her husband’s academic relationships. She told her husband, falsely, that their daughter had been seduced by his colleagues. That ruptured the whole network of ties.

Violently jealous wife disturbs intensely beautiful intellectual collaboration, which, knowing what we know and what we think we know about Brooks's recent intellectual collaborations and his personal life sounds a lot like projection. An amazing lot, if you know what I mean.

Maybe I'm amazed

Buster Keaton in The General (1926)? [corrections welcome], from the Tumblr of yet another idiot who can't understand the concept of crediting an image, so screw them.

Shorter David Brooks, "Livin' Bernie Sanders's Danish Dream", New York Times, February 12 2016:

If Bernie Sanders becomes president, government spending will go through the roof! There will be centralized economic planning and the Washington establishment will control American life! Taxes will be so high you won't be able to choose your own lifestyle! Entrepreneurs will have no incentive to entreprenate! American colleges and universities will become tawdry nests of hippies like Cambridge and Uppsala instead of forward-looking profit centers like the University of Phoenix! You'll have to wait in line for your rationed health care! Not that there's anything wrong with that, I've lived in northern Europe myself, but it's not Tocqueville's America, and I find it amazing—amazing—that our young people should think of it as a good idea.

(Is he trolling me today, doubling down on "amazing"? 141st and 142nd career uses of the adjective and its corresponding adverb in the Times column.)

People who are enchanted are the real tough cookies

 Enchanted (Walt Disney, 2007), via Decider.

David Brooks is interested in "Making Modern Toughness". I guess he figures the world needs toughness, but the toughness they used to have back in the day lacks the lightness and sophistication of the kind of toughness we would want for the current era. It was thickened with cream and egg yolks and people didn't value the natural character of the ingredients. We're looking for a toughness that makes more use of infused oils and techniques like steaming and sous-vide cooking and a sense of terroir.

When I ask veteran college teachers and administrators to describe how college students have changed over the years, I often get an answer like this: “Today’s students are more accomplished than past generations, but they are also more emotionally fragile.”

That rings true to me.

Pause to note how David Brooks apparently has a standard operating procedure for dealing with veteran college teachers and administrators. "Can you describe for me, please, how college students have changed over the years?" How many has he interrogated, one wonders, and do they constitute a random sample? What percentage of the responses is "often", and how does this frequent answer differ from others?

Brooks tackles Frederick Douglass, Supermodel

From a daguerreotype of 1847, National Portrait Gallery, from Wikimedia Commons.

It's David Brooks, the world-famous photography critic —"How Artists Change the World", apparently not by going to Philadelphia this summer.

As usual, there were a ton of artists and musicians at the political conventions this year.

What, they only had two thousand pounds of artists and musicians? Somewhere between ten and twenty individuals, depending on the gender mix? At both of them put together? That seems low. (I realize Brooks, being a literary man, is using some fancy rhetorical technique here, probably the figure of litotes, or understatement, and what he actually means is "rather a lot".)

And that raises some questions. How much should artists get involved in politics? How can artists best promote social change?

Andrew Jackson has done an amazing job that is being recognized more and more

Grave of Rachel Jackson (1767-1828) at The Hermitage near Nashville. It's not surprising that President Jackson should have visited it every day (probably, like Trump, only when he was in Tennessee), since it was in his back yard. He himself was also buried there, after his death in 1845, so that people nowadays often think of it as his grave too. Photograph via Trip Advisor.

Had Andrew Jackson Been a Little Later

by Donald J. Trump

Poem: Honoring it more and more

President Trump cherishing the bust of Dr. King. "Nice Reverend! Doesn't bite, does he?" Via BizPac Review.

Some time after 7:20 PM on January 20 in the Oval Office, during the inauguration festivities for President Donald J. Trump, Zeke Miller of Time Magazine noted that a bust of Winston Churchill by Jason Epstein seemed to have replaced the Charles Alston bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. that President Obama placed to the left of the fireplace in 2009, and sent a couple of tweets to that effect, but realized half an hour or so later that both busts were actually there, deleted the erroneous tweet, and sent a correction at 8:14. It was a "story" for less than an hour. It was never published.

The bust is still there, too, though the rather fine Norman Rockwell picture that hung on the wall above it at the end of Obama's term—of workers, some of them black, restoring the flame of Liberty high above New York Harbor—is gone, and that space is now occupied by a portrait of slaveholder "populist" president Andrew Jackson looming with his fierce Trumpical frown over Dr. King's head, as if he were wielding a whip.

Eleven days later, in any case, at the White House commemoration of African American History Month (also known as Black History Month, but President Trump doesn't use that, because as people in truly American places like Staten Island often suggest, "Black History Month, doesn't that sound a little racist?"—though it is not true that he has officially changed the observance's name), instead of the usual informal remarks, he read an intensely felt and personal poem, in which his pain at the unjust suspicions to which he was almost subjected for half an hour brings him into deeper connection with the African American experience:

Amazing space

Update: Thanks, Steve and Tengrain, for the shout-outs, and a warm welcome to visitors. And hey, stick around for a minute, because today's a very special day!

From that store that I will never be able to visit because of Justice Alito and the 1993 RFRA.

So David Brooks is out with his 112th career use of the word "amazing" in today's Times, on behalf of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not the one just passed into law by the Indiana state government, but the old 1993 federal one:

This moderate, grounded, incremental strategy has produced amazing results. Fewer people have to face the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization and prejudice.

Something tells me Brooksy isn't at all clear what the original RFRA did and didn't do.

I'm personally very glad that the right of Native American Church members to perform their traditional peyote ceremonies is established and the sacred character of Native American burial grounds in general protected. I'm also not sorry that it didn't protect the children of John W. and Faythe A. Miller of Sugar Land, TX, from having Social Security numbers, even though the Millers' religious belief held that such numbers would burden the kids with the Mark of the Beast as prophesied in Revelation 13:16-17. But I don't quite see where the horror of bigotry, isolation, marginalization, and prejudice (all of 'em, Katie!) come into it.

#JeSuisRwandais? Maybe not exactly.

Thanks for the shoutouts, Drifty and Constant Weader!

Clemantine Wamariya. Photo by Andrew White.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Courage of Small Things", New York Times, July 7 2015:

We're all just like refugees from the Rwandan genocide. At least I am.

No, seriously. Verbatim,

Abstract celebrations and concrete hungers

Drawing by Jim Benton.

Stats:

David Brooks ("The Self-Reliant Generation", January 8 2016) hits his 139th career use of "amazing/amazingly":

Last month Fox News released a poll showing Hillary Clinton leading Bernie Sanders in Iowa by 14 points. But the amazing part of the poll was the generation gap. Among likely caucusgoers under 45, Sanders was crushing Clinton 56 to 34 percent. Among the older voters, Clinton was leading 59 to 24.

Shorter:

Millennials overwhelmingly want a Democrat to win the White House in 2016, but that doesn't mean they're liberals. There are no signs of a progressive counterculture as there were in earlier generations, with their tie-dye, patchouli, and Donovan records. Millennials have lived through financial crisis, family instability, and government dysfunction, so they cling to their jobs and don't move or get married or even have sex very often. An abstract celebration of creative transformation and a concrete hunger for order. They don't belong to religions. Only 32% say America is the greatest country on earth. They will all have midlife crises.

Product placement:

Never mind

Separated at baking? Trumpkin pie, via Pinterest.

Seems like just days ago old David Brooks was fearful and gloomy about the direction our country was taking, our inveterate materialism and selfishness and focus on the achievement of affluence, our drive to occupy increasingly vast spaces, our inability to submerge our individuality in the plasma of community,

the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.... According to the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression by as much as eight times the rate as people in poor countries.

In fact it was just days ago, ten days to be exact, but now he's as peppy as Tom Friedman:

Is Our Country as Good as Our Athletes Are?

Spoiler: You bet!

The athletes are great on a Trumpian scale, with a Trumpian exclamation point:

If anything, the coverage gets a little boring because we’re always winning!

Calling forth, as you won't be surprised to hear, Brooks's 147th and 148th career uses of "amazing/amazingly", with a bonus "astoundingly":

Carry On Continentals

David Brooks is off today, so we're kind of on our own.

The late Sid James as (I'm pretty sure) highwayman Dick Turpin in Carry on Dick (1974). Via My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning.

David Brooks writes ("The Declaration Dilemma", New-York Times, July 3 1776):

All eyes seem to be fixed on the so-called Continental Congress, which has been hunkered down in Philadelphia for a little over a year now, ever since last year's unfortunate disturbances in Massachusetts, where rebel rioters managed to force the royal peacekeeping troops to pull back to Boston from Lexington and Concord.

Yesterday the Congress voted to declare that all the crown colonies south of the Canadas are independent countries, so that they can start negotiating with the French for financial support. A committee chaired by Dr. Benjamin Franklin is said to be drafting a document explaining this weird theory, and it could be published as early as tomorrow.

When you come to a fork in the road, take the middle

Pola Negri in Mal St. Clair's A Woman of the World (1925). Image via Fritzi, who has her own review.

David Brooks, still incredibly unfired ("Hillary, This Is Why Democrats Are Still Struggling", July 26 2016), may think the candidate is "squirrelly" and "willing to blatantly lie to preserve her career", but that doesn't mean he wouldn't offer her some heartfelt advice:

PHILADELPHIA — Dear Hillary,

Donald Trump has presented you with an amazing opportunity to become a world historical figure! If you crush him in this election, you could create a new Democratic majority and reduce the G.O.P. to an ever-declining rump of ethnic nationalism. On the other hand, if you fail to beat Trump, you will go down as America’s most hapless political loser and be vilified forever for enabling an era of American Putinism.

No pressure! Have fun in Philadelphia!

(There's the 145th career use of "amazing/amazingly".)

No, I don't see any concern trolls. Do you see a concern troll? Really? You mean you think Brooks doesn't sincerely want Clinton to create a new Democratic majority and reduce the GOP to an ever-declining rump of etc.? You cynic you.

Cheap shot

Image vis Midtown Miscreant.

It's easy to dump on Dennis Rodman kvelling over his new little friend Kim Jong-eun, but what the hell.

– “I hate the fact that he’s doing that [human rights violations], but the fact is that, you know what, that’s a human being, though. He let his guard down one day to me, a friend.”

"I hate it too, man," said Jong-eun confidentially. "Violating human rights is like so not what I'm about. But you got to cut me some slack. Like I'm only human myself, after all? Like people can constantly be stomping on my feelings and I'm not even supposed to say anything, or send them to labor camp, or have them shot?"

Exactly. And that's just not the man I know, the kind of guy who'd help a homie out with his $808,000 in back child support. And you wouldn't believe the shit people say about the guy:

(a) Violation of the right to food, in particular the effect of State-controlled food distribution policies on the nutritional status and health of the population and the restricted entry of international humanitarian aid to deal with the endemic food crisis;
(b) Torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, including inhuman conditions of detention;
(c) Arbitrary detention, as a form of persecution and the criminalization of any behaviour deemed threatening or contrary to the official ideology of the Government, the lack of rule of law and the absence of due process or an independent judiciary;
(d) Violations of human rights associated with prison camps;

(e) Discrimination and the disproportionate or specific effect of human rights violations on vulnerable groups, in particular women, children, people living with disabilities and returnees. Of particular concern is the fact that society is divided into three distinct groups classified according to their political allegiance to the Government. A person‟s place in this hierarchy determines the level of access that he or she will have to basic human rights, including access to food, health, education and freedom of movement;

(f) Extensive violation of freedom of expression and other related freedoms;
(g) Violation of the right to life, in particular the abusive application of the death penalty and the use of public executions;
(h) Restrictions on freedom of movement and abusive treatment of citizens forcibly returned;
(i) Enforced disappearances, including in the form of abductions of foreign nationals.

This is a little guy who just loves basketball more than anything else, people. And you know how old he is? I'm like who do you know who wasn't in trouble once in a while when he was a kid? You know what I was up to when I was his age? I'll tell you, I was pimping sneakers.

– “It’s a different story because guess what, the kid is only 28 years old, 28. He’s not his dad, not his grandpa. He’s 28 years old.”

– “It’s just like we do over here in America, right? It’s amazing that we have presidents over here do the same thing, right? It’s amazing that Bill Clinton could do one thing and have sex with his secretary and really get away with it and still be powerful.”

And I was like shut up because I never even heard that one before. You mean like Albright? Eww! Politicians, they're all the same.

Brooks Endorses Cruz

Love before it went sour. Congressional Quarterly via Esquire.

Nailed it: In comments yesterday over at Alicublog, I predicted:

There's the narrative of Cruz as heroic resister, coming not just from the NRO right (e.g. Jonah) but young Master David Frum, who was kvelling non-ideologically over Cruz's bravery on the radio this morning. I expect it to be the subject of David Brooks's column tomorrow.

Sure enough, he's back in the saddle this morning (after his week in Cleveland helping with the color commentary on PBS, leaving the Tuesday column to be cranked out by a possibly snarky research assistant, I wasn't sure he'd actually show up), with a piece under the GÖPperdämmerung title "The Death of the Republican Party" singling out the repellent Texas senator:

I’m not a Cruz fan, but his naked ambition does fuel amazing courage. As the Republican Party is slouching off on a suicide march, at least Cruz is standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” When the Trump train implodes, the docile followers who are now booing and denouncing Ted Cruz will claim they were on his side all along.

(I think that's his 144th career use of "amazing/amazingly" in his time as a Times columnist. He's been slowing down; nos. 141 and 142 were back in February, and I seem to have missed no. 143. In contrast, it's just the fourth time he's used "athwart" in an echo or direct quotation of old Mr. Buckley's famous definition of "conservatism".)

It's the beginning of the next narrative, of how conservatism can never fail but only be failed, as we'll hear it over the next four years. The "courage" it took Cruz to risk, ah, what exactly? To risk looking obnoxious to the person who called him a liar several times a day for months and who is on his way to what Brooks himself predicts will

end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained.

Cruz is positioning himself, as he always does, for the next act, that's all.

Preach, Brother Leitch, Preach!

Mr. Disqus keeps inviting me to share things I read in awkward ways and sometimes I give it a click. Today seems to be religion day anyway. But all I had was a comment, not a damn essay.

Will Leitch, via Mollie at GetReligion:

When Josh Hamilton electrified Yankee Stadium in the Home Run Derby in 2008, here's what he said afterward: "It's amazing, the last few years, what God's done in my life, and how quickly he's done it."

Now, here's what non-believers hear when he says that:

God decided that I would start hitting a ton of home runs. He likes me more than He likes anyone else in this competition. Therefore, He helped me launch those blasts. I am so close to God that He has decided I should be great in this Home Run Derby. A couple of those balls I hit, God picked them up and carried them extra feet so they would get over the fence. God cares, specifically, about this Home Run Derby, more than He cares about poverty, starvation and disease. If God liked you as much as He liked me, you might hit home runs too. But He doesn't.

But this is absolutely not what he is saying. What Hamilton is saying when he thanks God is not that God somehow chose him over others. He is in fact saying the opposite: It is a humble acknowledgment that nothing any person does can ever be attributable to themselves. It's a guard against pride.

Christianity isn't some peripheral notion of Hamilton's life; it is his life. When you live a Christian life, everything you do, from showing up to church on Sunday, to going to the grocery store, to pumping gas, to hitting a home run, to striking out, is done for the glory of Christ. Hamilton isn't thanking Jesus for helping him hit a homer; he is thanking Jesus for everything. From the homers to the strikeouts to the millions of dollars to all the boos.

Sorry, I don't get it. Leitch's account of what the non-believer hears is from this non-believer's point of view spot on. But the alternative interpretation not so much. It's amazing, the last few years, how much time God has given me at the grocery store, and how many boos He has permitted me to hear? That was not what Hamilton meant.

Don't believe I ever saw any pictures of Tim Tebow kneeling in the gas station either.

It's always nice to be beating the governor

Rollender Kopf (Rolling Head, 1982), by the German artist Ernst Kolb. Image via www.aussenseiterkunst.ch.

I Love the Poorly Educated

a poem

by Donald F. Trump

I

You know we weren’t expecting—
a couple of months ago,
we weren’t expecting to win this one,
you know that, right?
We weren’t.
Of course if you listen to the pundits,
we weren’t expected to win too much,
and now we’re winning, winning, winning the country.
And soon the country’s going to start winning, winning, winning.

So I want to thank the volunteers.
They’ve been unbelievable.
These people, they work like endlessly, endlessly.
We’re not going to forget it.

And we’ve had some great numbers coming out of Texas,
and amazing numbers coming out of Tennessee and Georgia and Arkansas
and then in a couple of weeks later Florida.
We love Florida so.
We’re going to do very well in Ohio.
We’re beating the governor.
It’s always nice to be beating the governor.