Literary Corner: Who Is Your Retribution?

Yoon Lee, "Retribution (Bud)", 2014, from a 2015 show at Pierogi Gallery, New York. 

You Remember It Just Like I Do

By Donald J. Trump, President of the United States (Semi-Retired), with Stephen Miller

This is Political Persecution
and Election Interference
at the highest level in history. From the time
I came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower,
and even before I was sworn in as your President
of the United States, the Radical Left Democrats -
the enemy of the hard-working Men and Women of this Country -
have been engaged in a Witch-Hunt to destroy
the Make America Great Again movement.

You remember it just like I do:
Russia, Russia, Russia;
the Mueller Hoax; Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine;
Impeachment Hoax 1; Impeachment Hoax 2;
the illegal and unconstitutional
Mar-a-Lago raid; and now this.

The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen
in their obsession with trying to "Get Trump,"
but now they've done the unthinkable -
indicting a completely innocent person
in an act of blatant Election Interference.

Never before in our Nation's history
has this been done. The Democrats
have cheated countless times over the decades,
including spying on my campaign,
but weaponizing our justice system
to punish a political opponent,
who just so happens to be a President
of the United States and by far
the leading Republican candidate
for President, has never happened before.
Ever.

Let's just say for starters he doesn't "just so happen" to be a President of the United States. 

Going For Woke

Via Vox.

I'm always pleased to see somebody I admire catching up with some ideas I've been cherishing for a while, even more so when they're using words I might well have used myself, as in this from Washington Post's Greg Sargent on dated concepts of the US working class:

In the emerging Democratic reading, the old vision of a White, male, breadwinning working class concentrated in burly jobs shapes much political analysis, but it’s a pundit fiction. With service, retail and health-care sectors growing as manufacturing and mining jobs dwindle, the new working class is far more ethnically and culturally diverse — and more socially liberal — than commonly supposed.

What he's commenting on is the remarkable string of progressive legislation that's been coming out of Michigan all year since Democrats captured the state legislature in spite of its gerrymandering, most recently when they repealed the state's "right-to-work" law, enacted in 2012 to combat unions by disallowing closed shops so that workers could benefit from union contracts without paying union dues. 

For the Record: Costa Bravo

 Getting updated occasionally.

The leaks are coming from inside the pipe. Via.

When Costa's sources are getting interrogated we're getting to the end https://t.co/4fySdOjr0l

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 27, 2023

War Between the Orthodoxies

 

This tanky website

Zelensky's war on Orthodoxy continues, as a priest is apprehended during a service in Chernivtsi, far West Ukraine.

Are these "Western values"? pic.twitter.com/GSbVWQnJs1

— Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil (@ivan_8848) March 24, 2023

(where by "tanky", I mean "person who sees Putin as the heir to Stalin and thinks that's a good thing" for the world proletarian revolution, even if thinking so involves trying to think that a good Marxist is obliged to give deference to the Russian Orthodox church because "Western values") is engaging in some especially vicious propaganda, obviously not as bad as the continuing claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis, but in the same family. I think I've touched on this before, but I need to go through it in some detail, because it's just too wrong to be borne.

For the Record: Parental Rights

 

From New Adventures of Superboy #1 (January 1980). Art by Kurt Schaffenberger, via Wikipedia.

When Republicans talk about "parents' rights", they don't mean parents' rights to support their kids in growing up--they mean parents' rights *against* their kids, rights of an owner over a possession.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 24, 2023

Pretty sure I really mean that. People affecting to believe in a big sociocultural wokery conspiracy trying to change "our society" (the society those gents thought they owned) are at bottom angry with their kids or grandkids or nieces and nephews, for being smarter and stronger and better looking and eventually getting more sex no doubt (that's the human condition all parents must live with), but more particularly for challenging their authority—not just for being irreligious or sexually different, though those obviously matter when they happen, but especially for being broad-minded, not narrow, liberal for want of a better word, going beyond what the previous generation wanted to allow. I'm not saying all conservative parents are like this, either, or that only conservative parents have conflicts with their kids, but that this particular kind of conflict is directly connected to this particular kind of political conservatism.

The Great Awokening

Drawing by Carl Newman (1858-1932), Smithsonian Museum of American Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Headline courtesy of Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who has decided to take on the job of defining "woke" ("What It Means to be Woke") in a style that really looks intended in a kind of admirable way, attempting to get inside the viewpoint of people who might be called "woke" themselves, of "the left" with its traditional aims of transforming the ideals of liberty and equality into "lived realities", and with a certain amount of initial respect. It's just a fantasy, of course, he isn't asking any members of the "woke left" to tell him what they think, he's just making it up out of his own expert punditry, but does sound as if he means to understand it: 

For the Record: What Was That Civil War About, Anyway?

 

Blacks in the Civil War. Until very recently, the list of Civil War casualties stopped about about 620,000 dead. but this was missing something like 130,000 Black combatants killed by Confederate and in some cases Union troops, and mostly by the same enemies that killed most of the white troops: pneumonia, yellow fever, and smallpox.

Some Lost Cause buffoon defending the original (1865) Ku Klux Klan in the course of yet another version of the beloved claim that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery: 

"the southern people" meaning the white citizens, of course; the formerly enslaved being not people, or not southern, or both?

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 20, 2023

New Light on a Familiar Conspiracy

"October surprise" via Merriam-Webster website.

I hate the American "paranoid style" in its usual rightwing form and in the leftwing form too, but there are some conspiracy theories that are just the right size and weight, and of these my favorite, possibly, is that of the 1980 October surprise, when somebody in the Reagan presidential campaign, most probably the old spymaster and future CIA director Bill Casey, is said to have worked to torpedo the Carter administration's negotiations with the revolutionary government of Iran and get the Iranians to delay the release of their American hostages until after the election, to stop the Carter campaign from benefiting from it, promising them that a Reagan administration would give them a better deal than Carter. 

The theory didn't in the end work in the most explicit form, that developed by journalist Robert Parry—Casey hadn't been visiting the places he was said to be—but that didn't mean it was wrong, just that the narratology wasn't adequately developed, and a lot of people continued to think there was something to it, including expert Gary Sick, and by at least some reports President Carter himself, and now there's something else, reported in today's Times by Peter Baker of all people: a story of how Casey may have planned the operation but the go-between was somebody else, former Texas governor John Connally, on a somewhat mysterious series of trips to the Middle East in summer 1980 on which he was accompanied by a rising young Texas Republican called Ben Barnes.

It's Barnes, now 85, who is telling the story, apparently struck by remorse at having kept it quiet for so long and moved by the condition of the former president, now in hospice care:

The Emperor's New Dog-Whistle

Yesterday's discussion has gotten very "interesting" from the standpoint of our pugnacious new friend Alfredo, but my understanding of what's interesting is different from his, and I'm bowing out of it after one last word, suggested this morning at Roy's place: the last word being "n****r-lover".

The progress from “n****r-lover” to “woke” as the favored pejorative of bigots could make for a book-length study; but I will say the earlier, cruder version had this much going for it: It didn’t come with a bunch of alleged intellectuals trying to explain it.

Except I don't think it needs a book. Rather, the progress involved is pretty simple: "woke" means "n****r-lover" with deniability. That is, it is "n****r-lover" for those who would like to deny that they're the kind of person who uses "n****r-lover". With the scent of Black English Vernacular (as I noted somewhere in the comments) giving it a Trumpy kind of pungency (like Trump's use of "nationalist"—"but I'm not supposed to use that word"—when he wants to confess, with deniability, that he's a Nazi). Much more satisfyingly vulgar than the whiny old standby "politically correct".

What Woke Means

 

No, she's not an "idiot". What the clip reveals is something else.

It's that use of the words "woke" or "wokeness" by people like her has no publicly acceptable content. It's pure nastiness and spite. She can't define it without displaying how cruel her mind is.

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 15, 2023

Though she adds that she devoted a whole chapter in her book to defining "wokeness", so she must have an idea of some sort, and I thought of checking it out. The book being Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, by Bethany Mandel and Karol Markowicz and published by Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire Books. There's no online preview, but the authors' promo op-ed in the New York Post did in fact offer a bit of an effort at unpacking the meaning as the authors use the term, as an "ideology" to which they are apparently opposed. Only I'm sorry to say it quickly fell into a pit of circularity and never really re-emerged:

Literary Corner: Nicely, Nicely

As you know, former vice president and reputed presidential candidate Michael Pence boldly confided to the attendees of the Gridiron Dinner on Saturday (no cameras), that the Former Guy's launch of his irregulars' attack on the Capitol was constitutionally ill-founded, and also insensitive to Pence's personal needs: 

“President Trump was wrong; I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence told the gathering of reporters and politicians on Saturday. “And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day. And I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

I'm sure he's right and January 6 will live in infamy as Pence Family Endangerment Day. 

Meanwhile,  the Former was quick to respond, basically, that Pence had endangered himself:

The Cancel Culture Was Calling From Inside the House

 

From the farewell column kissing all us Mongoloids goodbye.

This is from behind a paywall at Vanity Fair, but I'm reading it at Alternet: Rod Dreher, writer at The American Conservative now living as an expatriate in Hungary, has been fired as a columnist at the instance of the donor who has paid his 6-figure salary for the last 12 years, banking heir Howard Ahmanson, Jr., who felt Dreher's columns (published by special arrangement directly to TAC's website "without any revisions or legal oversight," we're told) "had simply gotten too weird."

He has warned that so-called sissy hypnosis porn is 'profoundly evil;' detailed the 'formal' Catholic exorcism of a friend's suicidal wife; and recalled—in unsettling detail—the time he witnessed a Black classmate's uncircumcised penis.

The last was the memorable reference to the "primitive root wiener" in October 2021, which may be what Ahmanson regarded as the coup de gross. Rod will continue to function as an editor at large, but has taken his writings to Substack.

I don't have anything particular to say about it, except to note once again, for the record, that when cancel culture really strikes it tends to attack from the right.

Today in Conservatives Are Too Emotional

 

Image by Ben Allan/Political Quarterly UK.

Listen, I know it's a huge challenge to ask a conservative to think mathematically, but just make an effort for once. The reason it's called "affirmative action" is that it's not negative. It doesn't take anything away from anybody. https://t.co/w4mRTykC7Q

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 8, 2023

A Little Hopy-Changier

Palestinian farmer in Tubas, West Bank, after planting an olive tree, 2014. And in 2023...

BBC yesterday morning ran an interview on the Israel situation with retired general Dan Halutz, who was chief of staff of the IDF in 2005-07, and who said something that surprised me: that the reason Prime Minister Netanyahu is pushing so hard on these constitutional changes (they're kind of a national version of the Independent Legislature theory, taking away the Supreme Court's ability to practice judicial review and giving the Knesset power to override Supreme Court rulings, and also to put the nomination of judges wholly in the power of the government, i.e. of the prime minister and cabinet) is to increase his chances of staying out of prison. Period.

The interviewer (the great Rasia Iqbal) was surprised too, and made him repeat it—to the effect of (as I remember it, I don't have a transcript): "You're really saying that the prime minister wants to change the Basic Law to keep himself out of prison?" "Of course!" Halutz said. "Well, for one thing."

Pandemic lies

 Nate Silver, on venues where he's frightened of catching COVID-19:

LOL the Louvre's only crowded in the one spot pic.twitter.com/tGfkE9tRcP

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

While just across the room... pic.twitter.com/UuYQCm7AOx

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 7, 2023

I don't know how commonplace this knowledge is, but in my younger years, when I had a number of opportunities to visit the Louvre, I learned that you shouldn't bother to try to look at the Mona Lisa, because you won't be able to. There are too many bourgeois there with their checklists of things you have to do in Paris, and looking at the Mona Lisa, the all-time no. 1 greatest painting ever, is the thing they need to do, and be photographed doing, when they go to the Louvre, and they've always got it surrounded, whenever you can get into the museum. The biggest and most ironical thing being that right there in the same space was a spectacularly complicated and gorgeous Leonardo that nobody was looking at, depicting a Virgin sitting on her mother's lap as the baby Jesus plays with a baby lamb, and these fantastical landscape configurations, that you can stare at forever.

And Moar Yellow Peril

 

Via Wikipedia.

The other thing I wanted to say about the lab leak hypothesis goes more or less like this: 

We don't know anything with "high confidence" about whether the SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory or not, but we do know with a good deal of certainty that if it did, it's the first pandemic virus to have originated that way.

While there is quite a long history of pandemics and epidemics that got started with what's called a zoonotic transfer of some infectious agent, virus or bacteria or fungus or parasite, to a human population: Ebola and HIV, bird flu and swine flu, measles and smallpox, hantoviruses and cold-causing coronaviruses, not to mention SARS-CoV-1 and MERS and RSV, and of course bubonic plague, the king of them all. 

Of course it's also true that the kind of research the lab leak partisans are most interested in hinting at, in which scientists might have, say, taken some coronavirus found in bats and purposely made it more capable of jumping to humans, has only been possible in the last ten or twelve years in the advent of the CRISPR technique, so it wouldn't have happened very often, at least not yet. On the other hand, however, the other scenario, of a virus or other pathogen leaping from its normal animal host to a human, happens literally all the time. Most pathogens new to the human race are the results of such a spillover. While scientists believed for a long time that the spillover event is pretty rare, I learned from a recent NPR report that it actually isn't rare at all; it just usually isn't possible to say how it happened:

Housekeeping

 

From the Cerrahiyetü'l Haniyye (Imperial Surgery) of Serafeddin Sabuncuoglu (1385–1470), the first illustrated atlas on surgery, and the last major medical treatise from an Islamic source, composed in Turkish in 1465; from the collections of the Millet Library in İstanbul-Fatih.

Surgery yesterday went extremely well, by the way. Looks like I may not have to do the other eye, I've gained so much function already. I was surprised and initially a bit freaked out to learn that they don't knock you out—my GP kind of lied to me about that, or seriously didn't know. They give you an extremely relaxing medication with IV, but you're conscious, and your eye is obviously open. But the thing they could have explained to me, which I am going to explain to you, is that your fear is based on a childish misunderstanding: I was assuming, unconsciously, that my open eye would be watching what was being done to it, and that's not true. You're not in fact seeing anything, at first because there's nothing visible going on, because it's lasers, not tiny scalpels or scrapers, that are going the work of scrubbing away the cataract, and soon enough because your eye is completely disabled—there's no lens enabling you to "see" anything at all. Your optic nerve does what it can with the light signals it's getting, but they don't add up to anything like an image, and as they're installing the new lens, that turns into a real psychedelic light show, too bright to be quite comfortable, but kind of beautiful all the same; I was looking at three lumpy objects in the lower part of a field, swelling and changing colors, from a pale lemon to a vibrant purple, to some kind of electronica soundtrack, too, of the machinery's noises, some of them pitched including one that sounded a lot like a good old Hammond organ, a real (though abstract and inconclusive) fragment of melody. It was spectacular. Then they tell you it's time to close the eye, and when you open it again, under the transparent plastic shield they've taped over it, you just see the room, already a little sharper than it was when you came in.

Meanwhile

I won't give names or photos or links to the press coverage, but I have to say my Israeli nephew and his partner were at Saturday's giant demonstration in Tel Aviv against the Netanyahu plot to keep himself out of prison by taking away the independence of the judiciary, and she was among the arrested, for allegedly biting an officer's finger; "You have to ask," she commented afterwards, "what his finger was doing inside my mouth in the first place." She lost two teeth in the scuffle, and was eventually released from custody.

Yellow Peril Redux

 

Udo J. Keppler, "The Yellow Peril", Puck, 1905. Via Wikipedia.

Here we go again with the "lab leak" story attempting to convey the idea that the Communist Party of China was somehow responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed almost 7 million people around the world in its four years and infected close to 700 million, because the virus that causes the disease might have started out by infecting workers at a research facility, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, instead of as it's generally believed to have done, by leaping from an animal (maybe one bought at a market where exotic meats like bat are sold) to a human, and the lab is thought to be more under the control of the Communist Party of China than the markets are, which is probably true in a sense, as far as the way the funding works.

The actual current news story is about the US Department of Energy, which has belatedly responded to a call from the Biden administration in May 2021 to the intelligence community to resolve this question in the next 90 days. All the other agencies involved had finished work on it in somewhat more than 90 days, by that October, concluding "with low confidence" that the virus had a natural origin (there was a lot of disagreement inside the community, though, with the FBI in particular assessing with "moderate confidence" that it had originated in the lab. Now, 15 months later, DOE has shown up with its own conclusion with "low confidence".that it happened in the lab, making the final score Community Spread 5, Laboratory 2 and Undecided 1.

Or, as Michael Gordon (remember him? Judith Miller's partner in a large number of NYTimes stories denouncing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to not exist?) and Warren Strobel reported in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday,

Annals of Artificial Intelligence

 

Friendly robots via Vector Stock.

If you can't think of anything nice to say, ask ChatGPT:

Me: Please summarize Jeff Gerth's article on "The Press Versus the President" in Columbia Journalism Review.

Bot: Jeff Gerth's article "The Press Versus the President" in Columbia Journalism Review examines the strained relationship between the media and former President Donald Trump. Gerth argues that Trump's presidency has highlighted the need for journalists to be persistent, vigilant, and independent in their reporting.

Gerth notes that Trump's attacks on the media have been a constant feature of his presidency, with the president regularly referring to the press as "fake news" and "the enemy of the people." Gerth argues that these attacks are part of a broader strategy to undermine the credibility of the media and to control the narrative of his presidency.

Despite these attacks, Gerth contends that the media has largely risen to the challenge of covering Trump's presidency, producing a steady stream of investigative reporting that has uncovered numerous scandals and abuses of power. Gerth argues that this reporting has been essential in holding Trump accountable and in ensuring that the public is informed about the actions of their government.

Gerth also notes that the media has faced significant challenges in covering Trump's presidency, including the president's tendency to lie and to manipulate the truth. Gerth argues that journalists must be vigilant in fact-checking Trump's statements and in holding him accountable when he makes false or misleading claims.

Overall, Gerth's article emphasizes the important role that the media plays in a democratic society, particularly in holding those in power accountable. While Trump's attacks on the media have been a significant challenge, Gerth argues that the media has largely risen to the occasion, producing reporting that is essential for a well-informed citizenry.

Actually Gerth does not argue that Trump's attacks on "fake news" and the "enemy of the people" are part of a strategy to accomplish anything: he argues that Trump is justified by the misconduct of the journalists, who, far from blaming Trump, have no one to blame but themselves for the public's mistrust:

Housekeeping: On his blindness

John Milton dictating Samson Agonistes.

 

Posting at Rectification Central has really slowed in the last few months, for what may be a couple of reasons, one of which is that my eyes are in really terrible shape—old people's cataracts, in both of them—and it's taken a ridiculous amount of time, since early last October, to make an appointment to fix them. You know how they told us if we had socialized medicine everybody would have to wait months and months for urgent medical care like all those poor people in Canada? Well, it turns out not only, as you all know, that that doesn't actually happen in Canada, but it has happened here without any socialism.

The symptoms for me are very different than the myopic blur I've had especially in the left eye for practically all of my life, and aren't corrected by glasses; it feels as if the field I'm looking at is divided into dozens of transparent planes parallel to my face of which I can only focus on one at a time. Going down stairs is scary, because I'm not sure if the next step is exactly where it seems to be, and I find myself  clutching the bannister like Trump; and when I'm reading, online or off, type keeps disappearing from the plane I'm looking at to the one behind it, especially if it's small, or in an alphabet or writing system other than the roman alphabet, which is hellish at my job, where I have to look at quite a lot of Chinese and Japanese in addition to the occasional bit of Bulgarian or Greek or what have you; and worse if the light is not quite right, too bright, too dark, or too contrasty, which is most of the time. Researching the blog posts out of my 40 open tabs, with all their different fonts and degrees of brightness, is the hardest part, and slows me down so much that I get bored with a topic long before I've finished, or get scooped and there's no point in finishing. And the corollary thing is that the more aware I've been of it since the diagnosis in October, the blinder I feel, 

Long story short, I'm getting the left eye done on Monday, at last, the right eye at some undetermined point soon after, and supposedly will see some immediate improvement, and maybe we can get back to normal. But I'm thinking of myself as taking a break from now (and still on Twitter, unwilling to surrender to Noel Skum—dark mode makes a serious difference in what I can take anyway).