The Rectification of Names: Fascism

Scene outside Madison Square Garden, before the big political rally, as reported dramatically by Candace Fleming in Salon:

A couple of Firsters stepped assertively toward a reporter. Would the media cover the rally fairly this time? they wanted to know. Or would the newspapers be biased and inaccurate, as usual? Many rallygoers believed the press couldn't be trusted. Their hero, the face of America First and the man they'd come to hear speak, had told them so. "Contemptible," he'd called the press. "Dishonest parasites." In a recent speech he'd even told supporters that "dangerous elements" controlled the media, men who placed their own interests above America's. That's why he had to keep holding rallies, he'd explained. Someone had to tell it like it was. Someone had to speak the impolite truth about the foreigners who threatened the nation. It was time to build walls — "ramparts," he called them — to hold back the infiltration of "alien blood." It was time for America to close off its borders, isolate itself from the rest of the world, and focus solely on its own interests. It was the only way, he claimed, "to preserve our American way of life."

No, not last night. The Salon article was posted March 9 2020, and the occasion they were reporting was a lot earlier than that. Almost 80 years earlier, in fact, and it wasn't the open Nazis of the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the "Pro-America" rally that we've been hearing so much about in the last week or so; it was the American First Committee led by heroic pilot Charles A. Lindbergh, perhaps on October 31 1941, barely two months before Pearl Harbor; or, perhaps more likely, the Garden rally of May 23 that year (Fleming doesn't give us enough clues to say, unfortunately), where a nonpartisan group joined him on the dais—Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) and the popular novelist Kathleen Norris, as well as the Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas (a genuine pacifist, not a mere anti-anti-fascist like the others). Either way, Lindbergh in New York was not using the "racially charged" language that got him into trouble in Des Moines in September:

Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastations. A few far-sighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not.

Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.

I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

We cannot blame them for looking out for what they believe to be their own interests, but we also must look out for ours. We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

But at the May rally, he and Wheeler and Norris (I hope that's not Thomas's arm behind Norris's head) had allowed themselves to be photographed in a half-assed emulation of the Sieg Heil salute:

Bot Not For Me

I'm still doing the daily Wordle, partly animated by my hatred of The Times's Wordle Bot and its critique of my performance, even when it praises me:

Who is it talking to? I didn't have this kind of strategic vision at this point. I was just looking to see if the answer contains any more of the commoner letters, and hit two of the letters. That was a good Turn 2 result!

I had no idea at this point that there were only two remaining words, of course, let alone what words they were. The Bot knows, because it only takes seconds to run through all the mathematical possibilities. (If I thought of "beaut" I wouldn't like it, I don't think Wordle's list is the same as the bot's, and that's the kind of word it would recognize but not deploy; on the other hand I have this feeling they've already used it, just a few weeks ago—if I'd thought of "gamut", on the other hand, I certainly would have tried it.) 

My own puzzle going into turn 3 is where do the A and U go? How many English words end in "-UT"? I don't have a list in my head, I have to game it out.

The Principle of Explosion

 

Classic XKCD.

A weird little detail on BBC this morning from their Moscow correspondent doing what Moscow correspondents need to do a lot of nowadays, watching TV: In re the sinking of the Moskva, state television is denying, as you'd expect, that Ukraine had anything to do with it (yes, there was an explosion of ammunition on board that damaged the ship's hull but more or less no attempt to explain what could have caused the explosion, and the ship sank after "losing its balance" as they were towing it back into port), but in the middle of this discussion some talking-head military expert says that this is an act of war for which Ukraine will have to be severely punished—not if this is Ukraine's responsibility, but making the unspoken presupposition that it is, sitting inside a conversation in which everybody agrees it isn't.

Reinforced by the subsequent news of the Russian bombing of the Vizar plant near Kyiv where the Neptune missiles, which as we understand actually sunk the Moskva, are made, which we're clearly meant to read as a very precisely targeted response to the sinking, but the Defense Ministry issues a very precisely targeted assertion that it is something else:

Triliteral Commission

Today, President Trump nominated Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court — a jurist with a written track record of disagreeing with the Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

Vote like your health care is on the ballot — because it is. https://t.co/TDBQOVLP4K

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 26, 2020

If there was an intersection between students of linguistics and conspiracy theorists, one of the things they could fantasize about would be a Triliteral Commission of people trying to dominate the world by spreading the use of three-letter short names for famous people like GBS, BHL, JFK and LBJ, and so on, which would account for Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who's out today ("The Meaning of Amy Coney Barrett") rejoicing in advent of justice-to-be Amy Coney Barrett not as human being but as cultural symbol replacing the Notorious RBG—

if elevated to the Supreme Court, she will probably enjoy more celebrity than the typical justice. She’ll be more of an R.B.G.-style cultural symbol — as A.C.B., Glorious or Notorious — with her own distinctive, if considerably smaller fan base, plus a certain type of critic who regards her fecundity as threatening or irresponsible, her claim to any kind of feminism a cheat. (Obviously if she plays a role in changing the court’s abortion jurisprudence, the latter antagonism will be sharpened.)

And what she's going to be a symbol of is "conservative feminism":

What did you do in the war against reality, Daddy?

George W. Bush in Texas with chainsaw. From Erynn's Pinterest.

I've been reading and digesting and rereading this essay, "Normalnost", in the current LA Review of Books, by Peter Pomerantsev and in conjunction with the marketing of his new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which brings together the Russia theme and the Trump and Brexit themes across some unexpected parameters: not that Pomerantsev discounts the thing we've come to expect about "them" doing something horrible to "us", but that he sees the horrible thing that's happened to us as something that also happened to them, first, and something you could notice at first in the world of the arts, at the time of the breakup of the USSR, in the collapse of "a system of making sense of the world":

In History Becomes Form, the Russian art historian Boris Groys describes this process as the “Big Tsimtsum,” a term he borrows from the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, an alternative version of creation where God first brings the word into being and then retreats from it. “[T]he withdrawal of Soviet power, or the Tsimtsum of Communism, created the infinite space of signs emptied of sense,” writes Groys. “Soviet ideology knew nothing of chance. […] It saw itself as the necessary product of historical development as understood by dialectical materialism. […] In the early 1990s this ideology was suddenly gone — and the world became devoid of meaning[, leaving Soviets] in a sea of empty signifiers.”

Which led to the Russian avant-garde of conceptualists and performance artists becoming increasingly fixated on the panic of meaninglessness, depicting meaning as disposable or abandoning language altogether or contrariwise trying to rebuild meaning as a kind of group-therapy activity, when

For the record: Semiotics of Outrage Calumny

So Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), of Palestinian origin, was telling some podcast listeners about how she finds her Palestinian anger dissipating when she contemplates the horror of the Holocaust: her ancestral lands may have been lost and her people driven into exile, but it was incalculable suffering, not hers but the suffering of Jews, that "started it", and people whose only thought was really reparation of that:

TLAIB: “There’s, you know, there’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out. . . . I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time."

It goes into the noise machine to get its meaning turned upside down, and Dinesh D'Souza picks it up to offer new evidence for his contention that Democrats are Nazis but not really but yes really:

There's something so strange and interesting about this new product from the outrage factory. https://t.co/8nM6PSjFck

— Great Patriot Farmers (@Yastreblyansky) May 14, 2019

For the Record: The Rhetoric of Emergency

Screenshot by BBC, May 2018.

This is linguistically interesting. I believe Trump thinks he has created an emergency the way the officiant creates a marriage by saying "I now declare you man and wife." https://t.co/yHVLr9J6gL

— Yastringent (@Yastreblyansky) February 15, 2019

Except "I don't need to." Probably advisors have told him he can move money around without the declaration, in the hopes of stopping him from doing it. But he likes it. The emergency makes everything so special.

— Yastringent (@Yastreblyansky) February 15, 2019

Because We're So Stupid: Mystery Maybe Solved

"Whaddaya mean they make cars in Canada? Where, for Christ's sake?" Image via Greenpeace.

I think I may have a fix on what happened (as discussed in yesterday's post, and thanks to a comment from Professor Fate) when Trump was enjoying himself telling the Missouri Republicans how he makes shit up the other day, if you bear with me for a minute here, starting with the fact that he's told the story about his brilliant defeat of Prime Minister Trudeau before, notably at the Pensacola rally in support of Roy Moore, December 8, via Toronto Globe and Mail:

"I like the prime minister very much. Prime Minister Trudeau. Nice guy. Good guy. No, I like him. But we had a meeting... He said, 'No, no, you have a trade surplus.' I said, 'No we don't.' He said, 'No, no you have a trade surplus,"' Trump told the Florida crowd.

"(Trudeau) said, 'I'm telling you that Canada has a deficit with the United States.' I told my people – in front of a lot of people – I said, 'Go out and check'."

He said his staff found Trudeau left out some key details, pertaining to trade in goods: "(Trudeau) was right. Except he forgot two categories: Lumber timber; and energy. Other than that, he was right. When you add them all together, we actually have a $17-billion deficit with Canada."

More Veselnitskaya

Maat, goddess of truth, via Stillness in the Storm.

Is this story from NBC News on the true side?

Donald Trump Jr. asked a Russian lawyer at the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting whether she had evidence of illegal donations to the Clinton Foundation, the lawyer told the Senate Judiciary Committee in answers to written questions obtained exclusively by NBC News.

The lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, told the committee that she didn't have any such evidence, and that she believes Trump misunderstood the nature of the meeting after receiving emails from a music promoter promising incriminating information on Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump's Democratic opponent.

It's not exactly what she herself told NBC in July 2017. In fact it's totally different—in that story Junior wasn't interested in the Clinton Foundation but the Democratic National Committee:

Time's not on my side.

Fake Liechtenstein via entrepreneur.

Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named “Man (Person) of the Year,” like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 24, 2017

I worked at Time mag for 15 years. Doesn’t work this way.
1. Time tries to interview/shoot several possibilities
2. Agreeing to shoot/interview not a condition of being picked
DJT probably angling to set up “I didn’t want it” when he doesn’t get picked (2x/row would be unusual) https://t.co/3Vh43BdKD5

— James Poniewozik (@poniewozik) November 24, 2017

Well, that explains that. Trump called Time to ask why they hadn't reached out yet to schedule the interview/shoot, and they told him, nicely, that it PROBABLY wouldn't happen twice in a row.

It's a tidy example of my semiotic theory of lying, according to which the function of a lie is to hide some particular truth by occupying its proper semiotic space. Here, with some elementary transformations: he called Time, so in the lie Time called him, and they were forced to acknowledge that he PROBABLY wouldn't receive the honor, so he said he PROBABLY would.





I can't get over the instrumentation on this, which I just learned about recently, with Keith Richards on piano, Bill Wyman on cello, and poor Brian Jones, the composer of the song, in his ridiculous hat, on alto recorder (treble recorder, they say in England).

Scout's Dishonor

Image from Outside Online, and an article by Wes Siler on the ways Donald Trump violated the Scout Law in his jamboree speech (all of 'em, Katie). 

TPM:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump said the Boy Scouts called him after his highly criticized speech at the National Jamboree and told him it was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.”...

During The Wall Street Journal interview, the President claimed the Scouts called him after the speech thanking him for his address. He said the crowd “loved” his speech and there was a “standing ovation” from the time he walked on the stage to the time he left, according to the interview transcript which Politico obtained and released Tuesday.

But it didn't happen, according to the Boy Scouts. The organization's only response was Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh apologizing to the attending Scouts for the “political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree.”

“...There was no mix,” Trump said, responding to the reporter’s assertions that there were mixed reactions to his speech. He also claimed it was the “biggest crowd they’ve ever had” at a National Jamboree.

The Boy Scouts told BuzzFeed that the largest crowd ever at a National Jamboree was in 1960, when 56,000 attended and there was an address by President Eisenhower. Eisenhower also did not boast about his Electoral College margin over Adlai Stevenson, retail stories of meeting elderly real estate developers at cocktail parties, or promise Scouts that "You'll be saying 'Merry Christmas' again when you go shopping." There were altogether 40,000 at last week's jamboree (not 45,000, as Trump claimed).

And then on Monday Trump was introducing his new chief of staff, General Kelly, to his cabinet, with an enthusiastic review of Kelly's performance as secretary of homeland security, as reported by CBS News:

Hi, it's Stupid

Drawing by wes and tony of amazingsuperpowers.

Hi, it's Stupid to say we understand with complete clarity why James Comey was fired as FBI director. So hold my beer, as the saying goes.

First:

And, yes: The bizarre, petty narcissism even extends to a letter publicly humiliating and firing an FBI director. pic.twitter.com/qruYGjh59D

— Dan Murphy (@bungdan) May 9, 2017

That's not narcissism. I mean, obviously it's narcissism, in the same way as obviously it's English—I mean it's in the only language Trump speaks—but it has a specific argumentative purpose, which is to tell a lie.

Outmatch them at every pass

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

It's just amazing, really, how willing people are to try to make an interpretation of the daily Trumpism, as if it were an oracle from the lips of the Pythoness high on laurel fumes or the Cumaean Sibyl, how they keep guessing how you could translate his gnomic utterance into their own technical language, looking for a clue as to what he might have in mind to do as president:

Kellyanne Jazz

Also an extraordinary actor, as in this face, where she manages to convey with that lift of the head and the ghost of her murdered smile that she's deeply pained by Bill Maher's discourtesy, but too brave to let it show, even as she's in fact letting it show. Screenshot via.

Kellyanne Conway, then:

he says he's for the little guy, but he's actually built a lot of his businesses on the backs of the little guy and he's—a lot of little guys through eminent domain, or through not paying contractors after you’ve built something. The little guys have suffered.

That's of course when she was working for a Cruz superPAC. Now she's working for the president-elect. Not worried whether she'll get paid or not. I guess she's not one of the little guys.

Or in the weird little montage (you can see it here) of her bullshitting even when she's speaking the truth, with which Stephanopoulos confronted her after she switched jobs in August:

First Feminist

Photo via the Politics and Elections Portal.

Watching the proceedings on MSNBC last night, and after the Big Dog spoke I was interested and puzzled by the way the station's Tough Babes, Rachel and Republican Nicole, dismissed him for that long lingering nostalgic wedding-toast intro taking the audience in some detail from his first cute meet with the candidate to their dumping of Chelsea in the dorm 20-odd years later (he stood at the window concealing his tears while Hillary worked to perfect the environment). "Weak" and "meandering", they thought, though the audience plainly mostly loved it.

It was a remarkably limited view, it seemed to me, as if there's only one thing a speech can do—to overwhelm everybody and be the winner—and a kind of unfeminist view, too, with its assumption that if Bill wasn't the powerful winner of the evening then he was a failure.

a note of sub-Lakoffian semiotics here: Bill's speech had a particular rhetorical purpose that isn't maybe appreciated. (By @maddow...)

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) July 27, 2016

Float

Mme. de Saint-Exupéry, 1937, by Man Ray, apparently sitting on the floor, or at a bizarrely tall table. Everything about her from the African hat to the enormous cup seems to be a symbol of something, but what?

Saw a terrific example of a floating signifier the other morning: an advertising billboard reading "It's not a phone—it's a Galaxy".

By "signifier" we mean, in this case, the string of letters, or the sounds you hear in your head when you read them, the physical stuff that does the work of communicating. The other side of the sign, that which is communicated, the "signified", is in this case missing altogether; the expression wipes out its own meaning, by the overwhelming character of its falsity.

That is, not only do we know the Galaxy is a phone, but we know they're not even trying to fool us; they don't in any way expect us to think it's not a phone. In fact if we bought one and it somehow turned out not to be a phone we would be justly enraged. "Mr. Samsung, I am sorry to say that my new phone has turned out to be a European Ford minivan, or a vast cluster of stars, I am sending it back."

Special interest

Proposed design for the Harriet Tubman sawbuck via Kos.

Zandar points out the irony of Carly Fiorina using a "feminist" argument to weigh in against putting a woman's portrait on the ten-dollar bill:

Each candidate was asked who he or she would put on the $10 bill. President Obama's administration announced that a woman would appear on the $10 bill, currently the note of Alexander Hamilton. 

"I wouldn't change the $10 bill or the $20 bill. I think honestly it's a gesture. Don't think it helps to change our history. What I would think is we ought to recognize that women are not a special interest group," Fiorina said. "Women are the majority of this nation. We are half the potential of this nation. And this nation will be better off when every woman has the opportunity to live the life she chooses."

That's a nice sentiment.  Too bad that Fiorina wants to take a number of choices away from women involving their own bodies, their careers, and their families, and has to lie about it in order to try to get there, as Vox's Sarah Kliff points out.

In a comment, I added that it was worse than just ironic:

Nobody to the left of Mitt Romney ever referred to women as a "special interest group". Or nonmajorities such as black people, or union members, or people with school-age children either. A special interest group is a tiny bunch of people who want something that conflicts with the needs of the people as a whole: from sugar barons in the 1890s calling for a rise in the sugar tariff, to raise their profits at the price of making people pay more for sugar; to pure wealth barons right now calling for a permanent end to the inheritance tax, at the price of cutting government's ability to serve the population as a whole or else getting more revenue from the huge majority who have to earn their living. The point of putting the face of a woman on the $10-dollar bill is specifically to emphasize that women are not a special interest group but an integral part of society, whose interests coincide with those of society as a whole. This is why people of color should be represented on the currency as well. So people don't think that (white male) bankers like Hamilton and (white male) slavers like Jackson are the real nation and everybody else is a parasite.

Movement conservatives turn that around, referring to ordinary people as "special interests" and then whining that you shouldn't talk at all about bankers or slavers, or you're fomenting class war. People like Fiorina add another twist when they argue that asking to see the face of Sojourner Truth or Jeannette Rankin on the ten is creating and reinforcing the "special interest group" they're complaining about.

A little less meaning: Postscript

Luis Buñuel, L'Age d'Or (1930).

Brooks actually had a point to make in that excursus on the inadequacy of meaningfulness this morning, though he doesn't understand it well enough to make it and would of course have been wrong if he did. It's a left-right point, too, and I'd like to go over it just briefly.

If somebody wants you to tell them what is the meaning of life, the correct answer is that they should rephrase the question: it's a category error. That which has meaning is a sign, and life is not a sign. The word "life" is a sign, so you could ask,  e.g.,

A little less meaning here!

Verbatim David Brooks, "The Problem with Meaning", January 5 2015:

The ultimate authority of meaningful is the warm tingling we get when we feel significant and meaningful.

It's the world-famous Dada semanticist David Brooks on the idea that a kind or brave action could give "meaning" to a life, crusading against all that modern promiscuity of meaningfulness: while the rest of us postmodern chumps worry about getting buzzed by those floating signifiers, Brooks is dodging the signified; where we choke on sound pollution, he sees a surfeit of sense. Stop making sense and start making structure!

Meaningfulness tries to replace structures, standards and disciplines with self-regarding emotion. 

No way, really? Could you repeat that?

New York notes: Performativity

"Mr. Mayor, you may now kiss the candidate." Photo by Chang W. Lee, New York Times.

Woke up this morning to the alarming sound of Mayor Bill De Blasio endorsing the unspeakable immigrant-hating Kathy Hochul in New York's lieutenant governor primary over her rival candidate Tim Wu, who unlike Hochul is known to believe many of the same things as the mayor:

on Wednesday she received her biggest and most unlikely endorsement yet: from Mayor Bill de Blasio, the liberal leader of New York City, who pronounced her “a true progressive.”

“I’m proud to support Kathy,” Mr. de Blasio said, as Ms. Hochul stood by his side.

I was really taken aback for a moment, and then I realized, "Oh! He's only lying," and went back to sleep, completely reassured.