Why I Hate The New York Times, part 4,427

The rest of America thinks the best thing for your dog's self-esteem is meaningful work. Image via True American Dog.

Peter Haldeman in The New York Times ("The Secret Price of Pets") reports that you can now have your ex-male dog furnished with surgically implanted silicon nuts, known by the trademark "Neuticles", like Kim Kardashian's boxer and Larry Flynt's dobermans:

“Some people throw the dog in the car and have him turned into a eunuch because they don’t care,” [their inventor Gregg A.] Miller said recently. “But there’s a certain segment of pet owners that do care, and that’s where Neuticles come in. And it’s not only canines and felines. We’ve done an elephant, we’ve done prairie dogs. I Neuticled a monkey in Pocahontas, Ark., and a colony of rats for the University of Louisiana.”

But the majority of his clients, Mr. Miller said, are “everyday pet owners who opt for Neuticles so their pet will maintain its dignity and self-esteem.”

I think this is a mistake, as far as the self-esteem part goes. It's more important to your dog to smell like he has balls than to look like he has balls.

The whole article is not the worst Times Style article you've ever seen—it's pretty funny throughout, and covers all sorts of interesting developments, from plastic surgery (now going beyond tummy tucks and eyebrow lifts to gender reassignment, generally for what sound like legitimate medical reasons) to cannabis-based lip balm and psychopharmacology, and its celebrity names extend to Oprah Winfrey and Jon Stewart (whose French bulldog has received some motivational life coaching to help him on the path "from impulse-based behavior to the way of higher consciousness"), but honestly, this is not The Way We Live Now.

“Right now ‘Asian fusion’ is trending,” said Jorge Bendersky, a New York dog groomer, of a cut that was developed in Japan. Mr. Bendersky charges up to $300 an hour to style clients like Rita, Gisele Bündchen’s Yorkshire terrier, and Sophie, P. Diddy’s miniature Maltese. “That’s very short on the body and very long on the legs, like big bell bottoms, which gives them the opportunity to <b>wear a dress or a sweater and necklace without messing up the hairstyle</b>.”

The only positive outcome for me is a plausible new nickname for former Speaker of the House Newticles Gingrich, which I hope to start using in the near future.

Dream piece

Statue of Wilson in Tirana, Albania, via wikimpia.

Upstate, kept waking up before dawn to some extraordinary bird call, and then ended up sleeping until 8:00. Dreamed Trump decided to name Woodrow Wilson to the Supreme Court.

I was on 84th Street, at PS 9, only in the middle of a vast and empty parking lot with a statue of Wilson—you couldn't see anything else, not even the school itself, it was as big as Kansas—waiting for my wife, who was in there applying for a job, which is in itself bizarre, if she were looking for a job it wouldn't be at an elementary school. I had my phone and was looking at Twitter and gradually began to realize it was trending that Trump had picked Wilson.

My first thought was spitefully noting that he'd gone back on his pledge to stick to the Federalist Society list. The man never keeps his promises! Only then did I realize it was much worse than that. "But he's been dead since 1919!"

It may have been making this error or realizing it was an error—his stroke was in 1919 but he stayed alive till 1924—that woke me up. Happy Independence Day.

Brooks on the Gender War

La Dixième Symphonie, Abel Gance, 1918.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Gender War Is On! And Fake", New York Times, 3 July 2018:

Of course it's silly to say gender equality will lead to men and women being equal, for instance the Nordic countries have more gender equality than anywhere else but fewer women in top management positions than Estonia and Latvia, not to mention the United States, Mongolia, Belarus, Colombia, Saint Lucia, and Jamaica, which proves that this method of counting how many women are in top management is an infallible statistical tool. In America, gender equality is advanced, as all millennials agree that the best system is to have feminism in the workplace and neotraditionalism at home. Nevertheless young women insist on mobilizing in America, insisting they are economically worse off then men, which ironically forces young men to follow Jordan Peterson and complain that they are the real victims. Yes, women are to blame for Jordan Peterson, who I used to like but it turns out he's not as fashionable as I was expecting. And Donald Trump's cartoonish masculinity is clearly a response to women cartoonishly asking "Why can't we hate men?" But anyway not to worry, they'll calm down when they settle down and have kids, thank you all.

That assertion about how young folk prefer an egalitarian office and an authoritarian home—

Bafflement, Odium, and Blood

I dunno, in some Yellow families Dad's always around.

The secret masters who run the Deep Times, the esoteric newspaper in the subtext of the New York Times of which the profane catch a glimpse whenever Jeremy Peters is sent to eat breakfast with the Trump voters in an off-the-Interstate diner, had a job for the Op-Ed page for which David Brooks, remarkably enough, wasn't stupid enough.

A guest piece by somebody called Matthew Schmitz explaining to sophisticated Times readers why it is that white Christian Pennsylvanians and Michiganders think of President Trump as a moral role model, "Trump's 'Purple' Family Values". You may have seen the money sentence on the Internet somewhere in the last hours:

Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values.

Schmitz is a senior editor diplomatically representing the Roman Catholic faith at the evangelical theoblog-magazine First Things, where his most recent outing on his home turf was a heliotrope- and candle wax–scented review of Alfred Hitchcock's great Catholic film, maybe you weren't aware that's what it was, Vertigo (1958):

For the Record: Fart Act and Other Disasters

Trump had to double down, of course, and say it was done on purpose, a message to the Fake Media, though he obviously couldn't say clearly what the message was ("Melania has learned how dishonest they are, and she truly no longer cares"), or explain why her communications director had said there was no message and her stylist was completely unfamiliar with the jacket. He's really trying to convince us that he was in control of whatever it was. I believe Trump would rather be accused of almost anything, no matter how gross, than admit that a woman got out ahead of him. 

Trump is about to blow up the global trading regime with an unsettling FART Act. https://t.co/tgDZxQSE2V

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 1, 2018

When I was first working in Singapore, the National University moved from the ancient hill of Bukit Timah to a new campus in the south of the island, everything very shiny and new, and in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences every office door was equipped with a bright brass plaque displaying the room number, ASS 1, ASS 2, etc. As a representative American, I quietly let the Dean know he had a problem, and the faulty acronym was replaced with something else, with Singaporean efficiency, basically overnight, before we moved in.

This kind of thing can happen in a densely multilingual society, where people up and down the hierarchy share enough languages to give and receive orders but not necessarily the ones they need to get the job done. In my later career as a magazine editor I found that the art direction staff were always graduates of Chinese-language schools, while the editorial were inevitably from English-language ones, and crucial miscommunications could take place, though none quite that funny.

Well Said, Mr. POTUS

John William Waterhouse (1845-1917), The remorse of Nero after the murder of his mother, pen and ink, via Artnet.

Do I detect—this is going to sound weird—a note of remorse in our poet-president's response to the newspaper office slaughter in Annapolis on Thursday? Because what does he mean, otherwise, with "shocked the conscience of our nation"? What "shocks the conscience" other than the awareness of guilt?

I'd Like to Address

By Donald J. Trump

I’d like to address the horrific shooting
that took place yesterday at Capital Gazette
newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland.
This attack shocked the conscience of our nation
and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists,
like all Americans, should be free from the fear
of being violently attacked while doing their job.

Horrible, horrible event, horrible thing happened.
In your suffering, we pledge our eternal support.
The suffering is so great... My government will not
rest until we have done everything in our power
to reduce violent crime and to protect innocent life.

I always feel the formula "I'd like to address" is apologetic in its own right, in the sense of if you'd like to, why don't you just do it? But yes, I'm thinking about the intemperate violence of the president's language toward journalists, the way he keeps them caged at his rallies and mocks them for the delectation of the fans, and the failure of society at large to recognize the signs, especially in the murderer's Twitter feed, as reported in the Baltimore Sun:

We-ness Envy

Lillian Gish in D.W. Griffith's A Romance of Happy Valley, 1919, via Giphy.

So world-famous moral philosopher David Brooks is really pissed off with Anthony Kennedy: not, of course, because Kennedy suddenly decided to retire from the Supreme Court last week, giving Trump a second opportunity to name a Supreme Court justice and reshape the court in the Federalist Society image for the next 30 or 40 years, but for something Kennedy did 26 years ago ("Almira Gulch, for 26 years I've been dying to tell you what I think of you!"), when he single-handedly turned the philosophical collectivism of our Founding Fathers into the amoral, dog-eat-dog philosophical jungle we've been living in ever since, which you may not have noticed but it looks pretty serious ("Anthony Kennedy and the Privatization of Meaning"):

America’s founders certainly believed in individual liberty, but they believed that liberty happens within a shared community. They began the Constitution with the phrase, “We the People.” We are all one thing — a people, a nation, a collective.

Yes, instead of starting off the Preamble with "I James Madison, I Alexander Hamilton, I William Samuel Johnson, I Rufus King..." as you would have expected, though it would have made the Preamble kind of long, they just used the plural, quietly inventing the great American concept of corporate speech.

Literary Corner: Dactyls

Suprematism  no. 5B, by Konstantin Malevich, 1916, via Arina Anoschenko. 

Trump's lyrical tribute to himself for getting the DPRK government to release the remains of the US's Korean War dead in his conversation with the supreme leader Kim Jong-un, has a springy, remarkably consistent, dactylic rhythm:

The Last Thing I Asked

by Donald J. Trump

It was the last thing I asked,
I said, ‘Do you mind?

would I be able to
get the remains back
of all those great heroes
     from so many years ago?’

And he said, ‘I will do that.’
And you probably read,
they have already done
     200 people. Which is so great.

Well, which might be so great if it was true, and all the parents of the fallen heroes, who would themselves be octogenarians if they were alive, Trump said there were thousands of them imploring him to take care of this, were now taking their children's bodies home, or somewhere. You probably haven't read it, because it didn't happen —can't remember where I originally got this from, thought it was Digby but it's not) :

It's in whose court?

Harriet Miers, by Mike Keefe, October 2005.

Stop arguing that stupid sauce-for-the-goose line about what McConnell did. Only one argument -- the president* is under investigation and not altogether sane.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) June 27, 2018

I think Mr. P. is absolutely right on this one. There's nothing dumber or more self-defeating than "Well it was totally wrong and illegitimate when McConnell refused to allow a vote or even a hearing on Merrick Garland so now I want to do the same thing." There's nothing better, or at least nothing better available, than explaining in detail that Trump can't be trusted, and I mean seriously: I mean he will try to get a nominee who will be personally loyal to him, the way he tried to work Comey (and fired him when it didn't work out).

If you've been wondering

Trump Doonbeg from the air.

First information on something I've been wondering about for a long time, but nowhere near the end of the story.

ProPublica has tried to get a fix on how much money Emperor Trump has pocketed from the use of his hotels, golf courses, and restaurants by his own campaign, the Republican Party, and federal and state governments since he declared his candidacy: at least $16.1 million.

For instance, in April 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and two aides stayed at Mar-a-Lago during the visit of Chinese president Xi Jinping, and the state department shelled $546 per night for each of them, since the stay was "to meet with POTUS for a high level meeting." I love that: my president went to Florida and all I got was this lousy meeting. In March 2017, the Secret Service spent $27,724.32 at the golf course at Doonbeg, Ireland, "to support E. Trump Visit" the following month, when Eric Trump was there for a couple of days of business meetings. The State Department spent a total of $24,298.30 at Doonbeg at some points in time, but ProPublica wasn't able to find out when.

The vast majority of the money — at least $13.5 million, or more than 84 percent of what we tracked — was spent by Trump’s presidential campaign (including on Tag Air, the entity that operates Trump’s personal airplane). Republican Senate and House political committees and campaigns have shelled out at least another $2.1 million at Trump properties. At least $400,000 has been spent by federal, state and local agencies. (For example, the Florida Police Chiefs Association held its summer conference last year at the Trump National Doral Miami.) The state and local tally appears to be a gross undercount because of the agencies’ spotty disclosures and reporting.

A worker in the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado who went to Washington for training in April 2017 was reimbursed $2,740 for five days at the Trump International, including room service and valet parking, since he rented a car even though he said he was staying there to be within walking distance of his conference so he wouldn't have to rent one.

When asked about cheaper nearby hotels and the parking costs, Snyder wrote in an email: “I could offer clarity, but I choose not to.”

That's an intriguing statement. The judge in the lawsuit conducted by the District of Columbia and Maryland against Trump's violations of the domestic emoluments clause (Article II, section 1, clause 7), Peter Messtite, has suggested that the parties "may very well" feel they're being shaken down to benefit the Trump properties. The data on the taxpayer dollars finding their way to Trump's pockets is incomplete because the 15 agencies they're investigating "are fighting disclosure," ProPublica says, but they're still working, so stay tuned.

Who Failed Conservatism This Time?

Image via TheNewsBuzz.

Longer™ David Brooks ("Republican or Conservative, You Have to Choose"):

You see, a while back we were walking along the yellow brick road, and—no, wait, it was other people, George Will and Steve Schmidt, who said it is time to leave the Republican party now that it's rotten to the core, and Dr. William Kristol, who says it's not, which is a good sign it is, given his record as the only New York Times columnist in history so consistently wrong about everything that the paper had to let him go, and when you recognize that I've still got my job, you'll understand that's saying a lot. But while I've posed this interesting question of whether it's time to leave the Republican party yet, I think it will be much more valuable to discuss something else, namely, since everybody in this discussion is a conservative, what is a conservative? Or, putting it more precisely, how can I bend the discussion into a book promo for Roger Scruton?

You see, as Roger Scruton reminds us, conservatism was invented during the Enlightenment, when thinkers in England, France, and North America were thinking about eliminating the monarchy. Since society was created by a social contract, these Enlightenment thinkers reasoned, in which free individuals came together to negotiate a sociopolitical order, therefore they should build an order based on reason, and the consent of the governed. Conservatives said, "We agree with this general effort, but it is based on a misunderstanding of human nature." There are no literally free individuals who can come together to build an order, they explained, so you must have the order first, and the freedom can come afterwards.

Literary Corner: Be a Man Jimmy!

Image by thevodkaboy/DeviantArt.

Sonnet: He Seriously Messed Up My Hair!

by Donald J. Trump

Jimmy Fallon is now whimpering to all
that he did the famous “hair show” with me
(where he seriously messed up my hair),
& that he would have now done it differently
because it is said to have “humanized” me--
he is taking heat. He called & said
“monster ratings.” Be a man Jimmy!
House Republicans could easily pass 

a Bill on Strong Border Security but remember,
it still has to pass in the Senate,
and for that we need 10 Democrat votes,
and all they do is RESIST. They want
Open Borders and don’t care about Crime!
Need more Republicans to WIN in November!

A sequence of two tweets broke into just 14 lines, so that by moving the first line of the second to the end of the first I was able to create a blank sonnet, communicating the urgent complexity of our emperor's life, wherein at one moment he's concerned with the remorses of a television comedian who was permitted to touch the imperial coiffure in public and now seems completely devoid of gratitude, to say nothing of sorry for the damage he did the coiffure, which probably had to be expensively repaired after the taping, and at the next moment with telling lies about the ability of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives to pass an immigration bill—they can't, though Ohio representative Jim Jordan was on the radio this morning to say, "We were only 19 votes short, and it wasn't even whipped!" No cigar, Jim.

For the Record: The Race Card

Action figure by FCTRY of Brooklyn, via popsugar.com.

This Dinesh-inspired thread touched what I think is an important point:

If you wanted to know what Republicans mean by "playing the race card", Dinesh helpfully illustrates: responding to an article about his shameless grifting that never mentions his race https://t.co/8abXf5by6a

— ParticularVernacular (@Yastreblyansky) June 24, 2018

Sarah Jones's argument is about how the noise machine deals with discredited "intellectuals" like D'Souza, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson, or Ann Coulter:

For the Record: Little Red Hen

The Red Hen.

There's been an awful lot of remarkable derp on the Twitter today, starting with the horrors unleashed on Sarah Huckabee Sanders by the 26-seat Red Hen farm-to-table restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, which sent her party away after consultations between the owner, Stephanie Wilkinson, and the staff:

“They had cheese boards in front of them,” Wilkinson said. Like any other family. The kitchen was already preparing the party’s main course. Wilkinson interrupted to huddle with her workers.

Several Red Hen employees are gay, she said. They knew Sanders had defended Trump’s desire to bar transgender people from the military. This month, they had all watched her evade questions and defend a Trump policy that caused migrant children to be separated from their parents.

“Tell me what you want me to do. I can ask her to leave,” Wilkinson told her staff, she said. “They said ‘yes.’ ”

Which, naturally, brought out the 101st Keyboard Incivility Combat Troops:

For the Record: Just in case they delete the OP

Just to be clear, I am not opposed to the safety and security of US borders. I just think we've got that, and have had it since 1815. This is not a security issue. No terrorist has ever made it into our territory from Mexico (McCain kept insisting 9/11 hijackers entered from Canada, but he was wrong). They've all come by plane. Dangerous drugs, which often used to be snuck across in the desert or sent across wall barriers by catapult, now pass mostly through designated border control posts in legitimate-looking cars or arrive via the postal service. It might help our national security to have more immigrants to preserve our vital fruit and vegetable crops before we start having to import all our tomatoes and cucumbers, and ensure the avocado toast supply. It would help our national security to have more immigrants, period. Who's going to pay the payroll tax to keep us all alive when we're really too old to work? Don't talk to me about a few thousand people running away from gang violence in El Salvador, tell me about social security!

What Trump wants isn't for "the citizens of our country" or he'd pay some attention to the security of the thousands whose jobs depend on imported steel. All he wants ("We wants it!") is more excitement.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Getting Old

Via me.me.

"He’s not a perfect guy; he does some stupid stuff. But when they’re hounding him all the time it just gets old." Defending their support for President Trump has become somewhat of a bonding experience for Republicans. https://t.co/1Mwompb2OZ

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) June 23, 2018

Kind of like the old bowling league. In these days of crumbling social institutions, emptying churches, declining volunteer fire departments and reading groups, when things start to fall quiet among the breakfast crowd at the Sweet Pie 'n' Bye, you can sense the 2016 nostalgia, and somebody's bound to say, "Say, why don't we call up the New York Times and tell them we're still Republicans? Maybe they'll send down that nice young Jeremy Peters!"

Brooklets Babbling

Rafaello Sanzio, "The Disputà over the Blessed Sacrament" (so called after the scholars around the center altar, debating the mystery of Transubstantiation), west wall of the Stanza della Signatura, Vatican, via Wikipedia.

Oh, Brooksie (The Fourth Great Awakening)!

There are certain melodies that waft through history.

It's Bad Poetry Day?

by Norris Clarion Sprigg, 1907.

I didn't bring my cymbols, though, or cymbals, or symbols. Just kidding, I've always got a symbol or two at hand. What else you got?

There are certain melodies that waft through history. One is the cultural contrast between Athens and Jerusalem. This contrast has many meanings, but the most germane one for our day is the contrast between the competitive virtues and the compassionate virtues.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is the cultural contrast between Athens and Jerusalem a melody that wafts through history?

Surrounded by the Pale

Via American Civil Liberties Association.

I'm obsessed with this map (h/t emptywheel), which is being promoted by the ACLU, to make an important point: There are parts of the United States where the Fourth Amendment doesn't fully apply, where the Customs and Border Patrol is authorized to establish checkpoints where they can stop and search anybody without a warrant, on "reasonable suspicion" of an immigration violation or crime, and of course in practice

Border Patrol agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse.

It's just what sounds like a very small part of our enormous country, everyplace that's less than 100 miles from an external border, but it turns out that, as the map illustrates, that covers almost two thirds of the population. Thus the Constitution fails to protect most Americans, a pretty large majority, from these kinds of abuse.

But the map also dramatically corroborates all your suspicions about the craziness of American political geography, as you recognize what's in that 100-mile band: all of Michigan, New England (except a fragment of Vermont), New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, Florida, and nearly all of Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, California, and Washington; and how little there is in the vast interior. That "Flyover Country" they tell us about really is flyover country, in that nobody wants to go there, or has any reason to go there, with the exception of a dozen or so urban areas (themselves probably mostly in a 250-mile band, like Phoenix, Atlanta, Raleigh, Pittsburgh, I think Minneapolis, though not Denver or Dallas or Kansas City). Otherwise it's truly a kind of nowhere, dotted with tiny white-people shtetls, surrounded by the pale of settlement.

You could feel sorry for them, as the judicious newspapers are always begging us to do, with their isolation and lack of economic opportunity and increasing sense of representing a community in decay, but the thing is, the states with, say,  more than 1.75 representatives in Congress for every million people wield ridiculous amounts of political power! Maybe that's what's the matter with Kansas.

Via.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Zen and the Art of the Deal

Does a deal have the Buddha-nature?

Image via Food & Wine.

Peter Baker in the New York Times:

His 17 months in office have in fact been an exercise in futility for the art-of-the-deal president. No deal on immigration. No deal on health care. No deal on gun control. No deal on spending cuts. No deal on Nafta. No deal on China trade. No deal on steel and aluminum imports. No deal on Middle East peace. No deal on the Qatar blockade. No deal on Syria. No deal on Russia. No deal on Iran. No deal on climate change. No deal on Pacific trade.

Even routine deals sometimes elude Mr. Trump, or he chooses to blow them up. After a Group of 7 summit meeting this month with the world’s leading economic powers, Mr. Trump, expressing pique at Canada’s prime minister, refused to sign the carefully negotiated communiqué that his own team had agreed to. It was the sort of boilerplate agreement that every previous president had made over four decades.

It's really remarkable when you think about it. He's literally in negative territory (having left the Paris climate accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the Iran nuclear agreement, with the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA likely to topple next). We'd have gotten more of those precious deals, mathematically speaking, if we'd elected a can of Spam instead.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Lenny and the Wolfe

While you all were starting to attach the monstrous comment thread to yesterday's post, I found myself watching a video I'd never seen, or I think even heard of, a documentary thing, from 1967, extraordinarily awkward and even painful for me, starting off kind of randomly with what looks like outtakes of the composer, conductor, teacher, and all-round showman Leonard Bernstein of the New York Philharmonic trying to have something like an interview with the composer, producer, and singer Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys (I'm pretty sure, but I could be wrong, he's not identified), scowling at each other. Brian, of course, never could talk even before his famous breakdown, and Lenny couldn't stop talking, no matter how awkward it got, to the point where it seriously interfered with his work.

The Wilson episode breaks off and the show proper begins with the thing I was looking for, the spectacle of Bernstein sitting at the piano explaining in terms appropriate to an audience of people his own age, roughly my parents' age, a public TV audience, why he loves the Beatles, in the context of a broader discussion of why rock music at that Summer-of-Love moment is important, artistically and politically, addressed to people who think it's disgusting and frightening. It's everything I remember about Bernstein, the fluency in an academic language making him sound as if he isn't very familiar with colloquial English, the fluency at the piano illustrating his points effortlessly, the ridiculous barking conductor's singing voice, and the way he brings his immense technical understanding into the explanation with a deep trust that the listeners will be able to understand stuff they don't know, refusal to imagine they aren't after all just as smart as he is, the generous and democratic certainty that we'll get what he's saying even if we don't know all the words, and we do get it, precisely because he trusts us so much.