Tell me a national story, Daddy!

It's not only Election Day, and the day after Guy Fawkes, but also, as it happens, Diwali, the Hindu darkest new-moon night of the year, and a festival of liminality, where doorways are fantastically decorated with colored rice powder and lit up with candles. In Singapore,where it is known after the Tamil name as Deepavali, the government policy of strenuous ethnic integration has meant that all the different kinds of Chinese, Malay, and other citizens have Indian neighbors if they live in a Housing Development Board estate, as most do, somewhere up or down the common corridor, and walk past one of these doorways as they get home. Image via. 

David F. Brooks confronts "The Central Challenge of the Age": Write an entire paragraph with only one "e":

What is the Democratic national story? A void.

Well, admittedly it's a short paragraph. It's only voids, and voids are all I have to take your heart away.

No, seriously, he's got to get out his "why Democrats have failed" piece before its sell-by date, which is coincidentally today, November 6, and the central challenge of the age is, obviously, the one he's most confident Democrats have failed to meet:

New York note: Flip your ballot!

Just 20 Seconds on Unifying People pic.twitter.com/JfBVqccNkv

— John C. Liu (@LiuNewYork) October 29, 2018

All Pastrami to the Oppressed People! This deeply Queensian picture is so happy.

Hi New York City residents! Don't forget to vote tomorrow, and don't forget to turn your ballot over and vote on the the revision proposals to the New York City Charter, and vote yes on all of them:

1. Campaign finance limits for city elections (reducing the maximum contribution in top citywide races from $5200 to $2000) and increase in the matching funds provided by the city (from $6 for every dollar in matchable contributions to $8), which is supposed to be a step toward complete public financing while, in the meantime, encouraging more small donors.
2. A commission to develop a participatory budgeting process, bringing citizens into the decision-making process. A lot of city councilpersons are doing a modest and perhaps mostly theatrical experimental version of this already—my Helen Rosenthal being one of them, staging events outside the subway stop at 72nd and Broadway where passersby are invited to put ideas into the suggestion box—and it's hoped that the commission will come up with something more formalized and effective than that.
3. Term limits for the unpaid and unelected members of the city's 59 community boards, who are appointed to two-year terms by city council members and borough presidents and give mainly advice on land use and zoning. These will be staggered so that when some members leave the institutional memory won't be wiped out, and indeed old members will be continue to be involved if they want and permitted be reappointed after some specific period out of office; the idea isn't to get rid of them but to bring in new, younger, blood.

There's only one race I really want to call attention to, the state senate contest in the 11th District, Queens (Bayside) where Tony Avella, the last holdout of the old "Independent Democratic Caucus", continues to fight the progressive candidate who defeated him in the September primary, on Independence Party and Women's Equality Party lines (the Women's Equality Party is a paper organization invented by Governor Cuomo in 2014 without, as far as I know, the benefit of any women), possibly with the intention of throwing the thing to the Republicans. Liu is a real Democrat and a good one. Across the board, just think Democrats Democrats Democrats.

And look especially at the state legislatures, which is where my tweep Dick Nixon (possibly the best, and most generous, of these parody things on the whole platform) thinks the biggest story is. What Republicans did to us over the past 20-odd years looks like it may be about to repeat in single cycle:

The real Democrat success will be at state level and that will continue to be undersold.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) November 5, 2018

Lucky Ducky Democrats

Q: Why is the Trump-Putin relationship like the Rapanui heads? A: Nobody's been able to figure out how it was done! Image news.com.au.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has a take with an insight-producing wrinkle ("The Luck of the Democrats"):

One of the interesting features of this election cycle has been the gulf, often vast, between the hysteria of liberals who write about politics for a living and the relative calm of Democrats who practice it.

In the leftward reaches of my Twitter feed the hour is late, the end of democracy nigh, the Senate and the Supreme Court illegitimate, and every Trump provocation a potential Reichstag fire. But on the campaign trail, with some exceptions and variations, Democrats are being upbeat and talking about health care and taxes and various ambitious policy ideas, as though this is still America and not Weimar, a normal time and not a terrifying one.

Weimar was an abnormal time, but not necessarily terrifying. It was a thrilling time, after the end of the sclerotic Second Reich, full of possibilities. Nobody knew enough to be terrified about the political situation, when it was the economics that seemed to be the problem. Angry, no doubt, but terrified? What's frightening so many of us at the moment is that unlike the Germans of 90 years ago we do know what happened to them. To me it still looks very much like a second-time-as-farce case, in that our American would-be fascists are really too inept to do the worst, and the legal dispensations too strong to allow them—as we've seen with the failure to dissolve Obamacare or halt the Paris Accord and now with the crazed but fortunately impotent response to the migrant caravan. They can do a lot of harm, I mean, but it's on a much smaller scale than Nazis.

Hi, it's Stupid: Election Edition

Haruspex examining the entrails of a sacrificed bull, after a drawing by the painter (Pierre?) Vauthier. Via.

Hi, it's Stupid to say the Democrats could win the Senate contest. Ask anybody!

But somebody's got to do it. I'm not saying they will win, or are likely to (I'm no good at handicapping anyway, but if I were to place a bet it would be for a 50-50 split), but in fact we know it's not impossible, Nate Silver is saying a 15% chance, and what I want to say here is that in the unlikely event that it does happen, I'm going to know why.

What Silver is saying now in prose, as opposed to the charts, is that if it does happen it will mean there's a "systematic error in the polling" he's working with:

By a systematic polling error, I mean one that occurs in a correlated way across every race, or in certain groups of races — not merely errors that happen on a one-off basis. Our models account for the possibility of several different types of systematic errors, but in this article, I’m going to focus on the simplest type of systematic error, which is a uniform swing that applies to every race.

For the Record: Tricks and Treats

The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, original stage production, 1928, via Wikipedia.

I was kind of annoyed to see this glib comment from Jon Stewart:

Narcissism? Stewart doesn't think there's legitimate fear when Trump's rousing his rally crowds against them? "Enemy of the people"?

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 31, 2018

I understand the broad set of points here, that Trump doesn't really hate the press but adores and feeds on it, and his attacks and threats on Twitter and at rallies are all merely WWE pro wrestling trash talk. Indeed, everything he does is theater in his mind, or he doesn't make a distinction between reality and show at all, and it's hard to say he has a serious intention of anything, ever. When he joined the club of nuts claiming that Mr. Soros was the mastermind of a conspiracy to send an army to invade the United States from the south I don't think he meant anything by that either, but it really did inspire a guy to slaughter a lot of people at prayer. People who listen to Trump aren't as cute and silly as he is.

Spreading Derangement

Calling Dr. Laing! Image from Wikimedia Commons via IRETA.

The good news coming from last week's attempted murder by USPS package delivery of everybody Trump denounces in his rallies, from George Soros through Hillary Clinton to Maxine Waters, and the actual gun murders of Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Kroger's where the gunman looking for black people to kill resorted after he was frustrated in his efforts to shoot up the nearby First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown, Kentucky, and of the 11 congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I can't name them all but their memory is a blessing...

The good news, I was saying, for David Brooks ("The New Cold War"), is that we don't have to worry so much about racism or anti-Semitism or guns or the president's poisonous language, or any other problems that a community might set about trying to solve in a practical effort:

These mass killings are about many things — guns, demagogy, etc. — but they are also about social isolation and the spreading derangement of the American mind.

Killing sprees are just one manifestation of the fact that millions of Americans find themselves isolated and alone. But there are other manifestations of this isolation, which involve far more carnage.

The bad news is that that violence is nothing compared to self-murder, quickly by gun or slowly by hypodermic, and as far as I would know the numbers he offers are correct:

Baby

I got this screenshot after the tweet itself had been deleted, for obvious reasons: the doctor hadn't really meant to argue that fabricating quotations is OK as long as one's intentions are genuine. So I don't actually know what it's referring back to. But I think it's such a precise representation of the intellectual spirit of the Trumpery, in which Anthony Scaramucci can tell us that Trump deserves special regard because he's not an ordinary liar but lies "intentionally", to troll the left. 

It was the Hebrew Immigrants Aid Society, I realize, that met up with Aleksey Yastreblyansky, may his memory be a blessing, in Galveston early in the 20th century, a couple of years after he survived the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, and suggested that he might want to call himself Alec Bloom instead, to make himself a little more digestible for American society. In family mythology in the second and third generations, we just called them "German Jews", that is representatives of an earlier wave of immigration, with a slightly resentful sense of how they didn't trust their eastern European brethren to be wholly civilized ("My zeydi spoke more languages than your zeydi!"), but it was definitely HIAS, and I'm making peace with them, with effect from right now. They were right about Yastreblyansky, how would anybody even have spelled it? And they were right 20 or 30 years ago when they began broadening the scope of their work to include distressed and abandoned and persecuted people from everywhere, of every religion, putting the Passover commandments into the most powerful possible effect. They are the best.

Quickly and Violently

Trump warned there will be "violence" if the Republicans lose their majority in Congress as a result of the 2018 midterms, in a recording now heard by CNN.https://t.co/vIJqfMJWR5

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) October 27, 2018

This was at a private White House dinner with evangelical leaders last Monday, where somebody made a tape that was revealed over the weekend. He didn't warn, as you might imagine from the headline, that disappointed rightwingers will rise in violence, with their belief that US elections are manipulated by "illegal" immigrants and their belief that Democrats want to turn the nation into Venezuela and their belief that the Second Amendment overrides the rest of the Constitution and licenses revolution. He was saying that the victorious Democrats would be violent:

I guess antifa will be in charge of restoring health insurance coverage to the people deprived of it by the Trump administration's sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, in their black balaclavas and wielding sticks? Maybe they'll cruelly whip the legislation through Congress.

Sunday morning

Tree of Life Holocaust memorial at the Great Synagogue in Budapest, via.

Donald just found out about Dinesh D'Souza and his theory that Donald is basically the same as Abraham Lincoln, and he's intrigued:

Very interesting! https://t.co/ZmSA4v5fKi

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2018

Interesting! He's got that way of watching his own TV show from the real outside. He's a student of himself, but he always retains the ability to be surprised by the remarkable things he does, when an eminent critic points it out.

Dinesh is kind of like the Frederick Douglass of our time, in the sense that he's doing an amazing job and getting recognized more and more, and has understood that Lincoln is just like Trump because he owned the libs and drove them nuts.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 28, 2018

But does it enchant in your mind?

Unboxing the Statue of Liberty, 1885, via Rare Historical Photos.

Shorter David Brooks, "Yes, I'm an American Nationalist", New York Times, 26 October 2018:

I'm magically attached to New York but I'm romantically attached to the United States, Rockies, Declaration of Independence, World War II, Silicon Valley, madness, diversity. I'm an American nationalist, and this proves that Donald Trump isn't one, because I'm a nice guy and he isn't.

Quotes from the six-paragraph peroration of Ernest Renan's 1882 Sorbonne lecture, "What is a nation?", with no indication of where he got it from, likely Dr. Google and www.nationalismproject.org, which runs it without the rest of the text:

The 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan argued that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle”: “These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices that one has committed and the troubles that one has suffered.”

That's not really what Renan (a great rationalist, though also I'm sorry to say an anti-Semite, who is remembered best for his 1863 Vie de Jésus, depicting the life of Jesus with no miracles, as somebody who is not the son of God) "argues". By ignoring the rest of the piece—he may not even realize it exists—Brooks misses all the argumentation, which is a shame, because some of it is pretty funny, anticipating the great Benedict Anderson:

For the Record: A Little Joke

Via somebody's Pinterest.

Gunga Dinesh leapt to the defense of Emperor Trump for calling himself a nationalist:

You can't say he's using the word the way Ho Chi Minh used it. Ho demanded colonial powers let the Vietnamese govern themselves. Trump invites Russian, Israeli, and Saudi regimes to tell him what to do.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 23, 2018

It's a question, I guess, of "nationalist" as opposed to what? Ho was a nationalist for Vietnam as opposed to imperialist water-carrier for the French or the Americans, or the Chinese for that matter (who had fought to control Vietnam for a thousand years, from the Han dynasty through the Song, before they finally conceded defeat). Gunga Dinesh is an imperialist water-carrier for the British, that's why I like to call him that, when he talks about the Raj or East Africa. Dinesh isn't a nationalist with respect to India, though he may be a nationalist with respect to his adopted USA.

Ho, and Castro, also sometimes called themselves "nationalists" in opposition to "communists", when they were explaining their positions to a certain type of friendly Westerner at certain points in their careers. "No, no, he's just a nationalist. Go away, Mr. Quiet American." In this, I'm sorry to say, they were lying, though not without some justification.

It Was Good For the Hebrew Children

Hebrew Children in the Fiery Furnace, from Robin's Great Coloring Pages.

I've been neglecting David Brooks since he came back from his recent book-generating aestivation (an aestivation or estivation is like a hibernation only in summer), for reasons akin to those cited by blogfriend Andrew Johnston; he's really not giving me enough material that I haven't already dealt with (Drew shows convincingly that you could write a really thorough review of the new book before it's even published, so that it's impossible to see why you'd want to even look at it, let alone slaving over an analysis of the text).

There's a moderately funny bit in today's column, though, a pre-election whine about Democrats failing to make a serious attempt to get his vote by offering a spiritual program ("The Materialist Party"), instead of talking about health care, health care, health care, or

“The top three issues this year are health care, health care and health care,” J.B. Poersch, of the Democratic-aligned Senate Majority PAC, told CNN....

Restless Natives

Poster for the 1985 film by Michael Hoffman.

A slightly fresher version of the thesis about how "we" cosmopolitans, I guess, need to listen to "them" rednecks, or whoever the enemy is supposed to be, as long as you understand they're not supposed to be the enemy, came on my radio yesterday morning, at 6:00, and I found myself not going back to sleep. It was an interview with the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, a clearly better qualified person to defend any thesis than David Brooks or Bari Weiss in the New York Times, but I still got irritable right away.

Hochschild, a Berkeley professor emerita who has been hanging out ethnographically with people from southwestern Louisiana since 2011, whose "deep story" she elicited and wrote up in her Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which came out last January and has been praised as "humble" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande:

The metaphor for the right-wing deep story that I describe in Strangers is that you’re waiting in line for the American dream that you feel you very much deserve. It’s like waiting in a pilgrimage, and the line isn’t moving. Your feet are tired. You feel you are properly deserving of this reward that’s ahead. And the idea is, you don’t begrudge anyone in this right deep story. You’re not a hateful person. But then you see — the second moment of the right-wing deep story — somebody cutting ahead of you. Why are they getting special treatment?

Then, in another moment, the president of the country, Barack Obama, who should be tending fairly to all waiters-in-line, seems to be waving to the line cutters. In fact, “Is he a line cutter?” — the idea is. How did his mother — she was a single mother, not a rich woman — afford a Harvard education, a Columbia education? Something fishy happened. That was the thought there.

Trust me, Clinton wouldn't have done this

MBS couldn't stop himself from cracking up during his March visit as Trump bragged on the "deal" he'd made with the cheesy visual aids his staff prepares for him. "Look! Airplanes!" Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP. Don't believe Saudi Arabia is America's generous pal. And his claim that MBS is giving the United States $110 billion worth of business is bullshit, as you probably know by now. As Yglesias writes today, Saudis are far more dependent on the US than the other way around; this special relationship has been out of date for many years.

A couple of years ago, during the presidential campaign, America was all exercised about the fact that the Saudi Arabian government seemed to have made donations, some of them possibly while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state, totaling over $10 million, conceivably as much as $25 million, to the charitable organization run by Clinton's husband and daughter, where the money would be used for things like buying AIDS drugs for patients in impoverished countries, microcredit for poor business owners, and programs to empower women and girls, which never seemed to get a mention in the news stories, along with the fact that Norway had put in approximately the same amount, and other countries donating smaller but still big sums included not just the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Qatar and Morocco and Algeria but also Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, and Germany.

They did sometimes mention that Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, was also vaguely rumored to have some funky business relationships with some other countries, as in this 20 August 2016 story by Amy Chozick (remember her?) and Steve Eder:

Literary Corner: The Whirlwind Out of the Voice

Uncredited image from the website named in lower left. 

You Can't Fake It

by Donald J. Trump

Let me tell you: your Senator is disgraceful what he did. This election, you will decide which party is in control of Congress, that's true, and if they win, even if they win the House, it's going to be just fighting, fighting, fighting, it's going to be—will be—

You love my hair. Thank you. She knows what to say. She knows how to make me happy. "I love your hair." Well the one thing that has been really great about this whole endeavor, I used to say— "He wears a hairpiece, he wears a hair—" They don't say that anymore. They—these people have seen me under every condition known to man. I haven't heard that one in over a year. You know when you're walking around and the wind is going crazy and you're inspecting, like I did the other day. The incredible hurricane, this horrible hurricane, Michael, that devastated Florida and Georgia and Alabama got hit hard and then a couple of weeks before—and Michael got a piece of them too—but a couple of weeks before̦ I went to North Carolina, South Carolina, you look at what happened in a little piece of Virginia and you walk around in those conditions. You can't fake it, can't fake it. So that's one good thing: nobody ever says that anymore. That's one of the—might be one of the best things that's happened to me a long time, because my whole life they said, "Is it or isn't it?" Barbara Walters interviewed me: "Do you mind if I play with your hair?" Remember that? And then numerous people have done that, but that's OK

—but the choice could not be more clear: Democrats produce mobs, Republicans produce jobs. True.

(Missoula rally 18 October 2018, 26:27-28:17)

David Choi/Business Insider believes Trump was directly claiming that his experience with hurricanes proves his hair is real, if anybody is still doubting. I just wanted to point out the masterful control exhibited in this interrupted intermezzo wrapping a hurricane inside a hair story inside a campaign slogan without—I won't say without skipping a beat, because there isn't any beat as such, just an enormous pulsation—but without allowing the hurricane to escape.

Warren again

Undated map, via..

Jordan wrote, in comments (read the whole thing).

This whole thing confounds me terribly, because the only operative question, the only one that means anything at all, is Should Warren have done this, and as far as I'm concerned the answer is a blindingly obvious Yes, but according to nearly everyone on the Left and the Right, the answer is No....

In terms of political expediency I don't even know where to start. She got Trump on the defensive, rocking back and sputtering, and I don't understand why people still don't understand how difficult and important that is.

I wonder. My first response was delight, and then I got perturbed by the Cherokee Nation statement, and more of that on NPR in the morning, and then I started working through it, as reported on Tuesday, and got a kind of sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing, and that exhaustion that gets at us all lately all the time, like what's the point. I agree that she absolutely did the right thing, and it's great that the test came out with dispositive evidence, but for one thing it's not going to stop them, the smarter ones have just been moving the goalposts all week.

The latest (a scandal that was raised by Boston radio personality Howie Carr in 2012, so "latest" is likely not the right word—my version, Britlaundered from Breitbart, is that of the Daily Mail, but wingnuts have been trotting it out for a revival all week) is that a couple of the recipes published under Warren's name in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook in 1984 turned out to have been lifted, from old Pierre Franey's New York Times column in 1979, credited to Henri Soule of Le Pavillon, which makes a lot of sense, given that they're both rather elegant recipes featuring crab, and the Cherokee, whose ancestral homeland was the Great Smoky Mountains before they were driven west, can't have had a big cultural affinity with crab, which comes, you know, from the sea.

Literary Corner: Nobodaddy

Eric Bakke, Nobodaddy, oil, ca. 2013.

Trump tells AP he won’t accept blame if GOP loses House

AP headline was very different from my quote and meaning in the story. They just can’t help themselves. FAKE NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2018

Evidence:

AP: So my question is, if Republicans were to lose control of the House on November 6th — or a couple of days later depending on how long it takes to count the votes — do you believe you bear some responsibility for that?

Trump: No

Or as AP put it in the story under that headline,

“No, I think I’m helping people,” Trump said. “I don’t believe anybody’s ever had this kind of an impact.”

That is, far from being to blame if the Republicans lose, he'll be convinced that they would have done even worse without him; in fact, his value to the campaign is unparalleled in the history of electoral democracy, and this will be true no matter how the results turn out. It's like if Joshua ended up losing the battle of Jericho in spite of the Lord halting the solar system for an hour to give him an assist, you wouldn't say that was old JHWH's fault, would you?

I'm afraid I have to rule in Trump's favor on this, though.

For the Record: Warren

I was a little perplexed and saddened by this, from the Cherokee Nation to the world, on the subject of Senator Warren's response to the Trumpian challenge ("If a DNA test shows you're an Indian I'll give a million dollars to the charity of your choice), but I figured it couldn't be helped.

It's a valid point the tribal leadership is entitled to make, but it's not helpful, as you say. She was more or less forced to do something like this by Republican ratfucking. The way Obama was forced to indignity of showing the birth certificate as if Trump questions were legit.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 15, 2018

Though not everyone agreed, and that made me kind of sad for a while:

Laboratories Against Democracy

Drawing by Steve Benson/Arizona Republic, February 2010, via.

Our nation's laboratories of democracy, as Justice Brandeis called them, the state legislatures, don't seem very excited about democracy at the moment: downright hostile, in fact, according to some cool new reporting by Timothy Williams/NYTimes*: reacting to popular referendums by tossing them out, like South Dakotans' attempt to put some breaks on their legislators' socializing with lobbyists, which could have threatened the ALEC wine and cheese party:

The gatherings — 107 events in all during the Legislature’s 38-day session— are popular with lawmakers, but less so with the public.

South Dakota voters were sufficiently fed up in 2016 to pass a statewide ethics initiative that was meant to diminish the influence of lobbyists. But the Legislature in Pierre, the state capital, swiftly struck back: It repealed the referendum and replaced it with its own slate of bills, which critics denounced as a watered-down substitute — and a slap in the face to voters.

Literary Corner: Mob Rule

Painting by Lennon Michalski.

Songs for Kentucky

by Donald J. Trump

I. The Democrats

The Democrats have become
totally consumed by their
chilling lust for power.

You can either vote for
Democrat mob rule or you can vote
for a Republican party that stands
proudly for law and order, fairness,
freedom and justice. Simple as that.

They want to get rid of ICE.
They think ICE
isn't nice.

II. Xi Jinping

The absolute head.
This is an absolute
head of China.

III. The Space Force

You know it's all about space.
It's all about space. Defense,
offense, everything is going to
soon be all about space.

Rally, Richmond, Kentucky, 13 October 2018. Text via Daniel Dale.