Lance Mannion

By the time I finish reading, they'll have published another half a million strong

Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday August 20, 2019. Posted Monday morning, August 26.

Books on display greeting customers just inside the door of our local B&N put there in the corporate hope that anyone inclined to feeling nostalgic over the 50th anniversary of Woodstock will be inspired to make an impulse buy. Photo taken by yours truly August 15, 2019.

Nothing on this table I want to read. Nothing I’m even remotely tempted to read. There is one book I tried to read, once upon a time. “Small Town Talk.” by Barney Hoskyns, subtitled: “ Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock”. It came out three years ago when, as it happened, I was spending the good part of several days running in Woodstock. Oliver was working as a counselor at a at a week-long summer day camp up there and rather than make the two-hour drive up and back twice a day, I hung around at the library after dropping Oliver off and read and wrote and noodled on the net until he was done for the day. When I got hungry or bored, I’d take strolls through the village, which, as you know, was not the site of the festival and not even all that close to Yasgur’s farm. What Woodstock was---and still is, although my sense is it’s less so since Levon Helm died---was a haven for artists and musicians who needed a cheap place to escape the heat of New York City in the summer and place to enjoy the company, comaraderie and collaboration of other artists and musicians. It’s not cheap anymore, partly thanks to the vicarious glamour of being able to claim those artists and musicians as neighbors and borrowed fame from the festival making it attractive to rich New Yorkers with artistic pretensions with money to burn and driving up the cost of living, partly due to the area’s just being gorgeous. There was a pretty good Mexican lunch counter, so I ate well, but I didn’t see many signs of that side of Woodstock---the working artist side---when I walked around. What I saw was a pretty and quaint tourist trap that sold expensive souvenirs in the form of handcrafted jewelry and artisanal homeware and Sixties-vintage-looking women’s clothing to well-off weekenders. A bakery where I used to stop in for coffee had photos on the walls of some of the musicians at work and at play, including the photo of Dylan on his motorcycle on the cover of “Small Town Talk”. That made me think that since I couldn’t visit Dylan and his friends’ Woodstock first-hand, I could try to go there in the second-hand fashion I visit the real side of any place I spend time as a tourist, and read my way there. I picked up “Small Town Talk” with the same sort of expectations as I had when I started “The Earl of Louisiana” when I was in New Orleans and when I read the poems of Mary Oliver when I’m on Cape Cod---I thought it would help me see the place more clearly. That didn’t happen.

“Small Town Talk” turned out to be what its title suggests. Gossip. A higher gossip. But gossip nonetheless. And gossip about people who were interesting for the music they created rather than for their not very scandalous scandalous lives. The wild years of Woodstock were not unusually wild for the time. And the music is readily available and maybe too familiar, and Hoskyns doesn’t make the music more accessible or make you hear it in a new way, at least not in the few chapters I read. So I gave it up as not for me.

The other books on the table are about Woodstock the festival---except for the oddly included “Hudson River State Hospital”. Am I missing something?---and they look to be appeals to the nostalgia of people who weren’t there or who wish they were, and I’m not one of them. I was too young then, and everything I’ve seen and read since has convinced me it was my idea of a circle of hell. And...it was unimportant. To me personally. And to the nation historically.

Woodstock was emblematic of an era that I didn’t live through. The Sixties. Well, I was alive. But I wasn’t really aware of it as an era. I spent those years in Cub Scouts, playing little league, and building model airplanes in my parents’ basement. (Sniffing glue was an occupational hazard not a recreational pursuit.) The nation at large was busy with other things. Considered as history, the Sixties were an aside to the 1960s. It’s where a lot of people went to escape the 1960s. The art and the music that came out of the Sixties were intrinsic to the culture and the politics of the 1960s. They informed the anti-war movement and were informed by it. But Woodstock as the subject of nostalgia was just an event---thousands of pretty children stoned out of their minds playing in the mud while half-paying attention to some of their favorite pop musicians if they were close enough to see and hear them. Woodstock was culturally significant for its being a showcase for the music that had already defined the time. More culturally significant than the festival itself was the album, which, you might have noticed, isn’t on the table. Neither is the documentary. Maybe they sold out.

There was a table like this at Barnes & Noble back in July. Then the books on display were all about the moon landing. The appeal of the coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Eagle’s landing was primarily to nostalgia---”Where were you when…?”---but its historical significance couldn’t be and wasn’t ignored. The landing’s historical moment hasn’t even passed. We’re still living in it: scientifically, technologically, and politically it’s ongoing, with no end---if we’re lucky---in sight. The 100th anniversary will be celebrated on the moon as well as on Earth and Mars. Unless a great movie or book or an album by great musicians comes along to reintegrate it into the cultural mainstream, there’ll be no 100th anniversary celebration for Woodstock. Probably there’ll be no 75th. Its moment has already passed. Its cultural significance lies in its being remembered and keeping a place for itself in the popular memory. The music might last. But looking over the acts that performed at the festival, it’s hard to make the case. An awful lot of them have already been forgotten. At best their names elicit a set of Oh yeah, hims! Oh yeah hers! Oh yeah thems! Some of those hims, hers, and thems are good candidates for revivals. But for the most part they have little or nothing to say to us living in the here and now, unless it’s to say “You’ve come a long way, babies” or, and sadly is more the case, “You haven’t gone as far as you need to”.

But, as usual, like I would know

This is just what I was thinking grumpily about as Mrs M and I sat in the cafe having our coffee and Mrs M perused a couple of books she'd picked up off that table by the door on our way in. She was just curious. Mrs M is five years younger than me and has less memory of the Sixties than I do. 

And a good reason not to take seriously anything I write about pop culture is how ignorant I am about any form of music. 

And speaking to the moment isn’t what art is for anyway. 

It’s for helping us survive the moment with our souls and sanity intact and our hearts beating with joy.

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When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one Right Wing partisan hack to lie about the Founders' original intent

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Sunday, May 26, 2019. Posted Tuesday morning, May 28.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Do I have to read Mike Lee 's book to know he's trying to turn the Declaration of Independence into a Right Wing Authoritarian religious tract?

It's almost funny how these Right Wingers who profess to revere the Founders miss how they're the type of half-educated, anti-intellectual, religious bigots the Founders looked down on and did their best to see wouldn't control the governing of the nation

These blockheads believe they know what the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams thought even though they wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes and have been left stammering and red-faced, staring down sheepishly into their wine glasses in a casual after-dinner argument with any of them.

Fundamental to the “orginalist”-“textualist”-Federalist argument is that the Founders anticipated the 21st Century and would have hated every minute of it.

The irony is that Adams, Franklin, and especially Jefferson would have despised Lee not least because he’s a Trump apologist and enabler and Trump is the kind of demagogue the Founders feared would bring about the end of the Republic

Lee is another one of those brave Republicans who initially thought Trump was unfit to be the nominee but fell into line once he was elected for the sake of the enacting the Right Wing agenda.

Lee and other Republicans like him found Trump personally distasteful, but what actually appalled them is that he was on his way to losing and bringing down a whole bunch of them with him. They were also afraid he was actually a populist, possibly even a liberal, at least on some issues, like health care, protecting Social Security and Medicare, and ending the forever war. Once they realized that he was just as big a liar and hypocrite as they were, just cruder and more brazen about it, and as cold-hearted and cruel as they were, they breathed a collective sigh of relief then went to work propping him up and using his popularity with the base as a shield and an asset.

To their way of thinking, which is always self-seeking an self-serving, better a criminal lunatic occupy the Oval Office than an honorable woman who'd see that other women of any and all colors, black and brown men, LGBT people, poor people, and sick people get a fair shake and a say in how the country's run.

Mike Lee and his Right Wing Republican ilk revere everything in the Declaration except for that troublesome line about how all men are created equal.

Idealism vs. Pragmatism

Thursday, February 21, 2019.

Photo courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

[Editor's note: I have no idea what inspired this notebook entry. Given the date, which was around the time Buttigieg and Kobluchar entered the race while Bernie was being touted as the irresistible front-runner, I'm guessing it had something to do with the pundits swooning over Kobluchar and Mayor Pete as the pragmatic centrists who know how to get things done---that is, compromise with conservatives---and Bernie's and Warren's online supporters pushback against that.]

Idealism & pragmatism aren’t opposites, even though they’re sometimes at odds.

Pundits and progressives like to natter on about the Democratic Party getting back to its roots. They mean it needs to do a better job appealing to the white working class. When the pundits do it, they tend to slight idealism. They see it as unrealistic or as a form of extremism. Idealists won't compromise and as result can't get anything done. When progressives do it, they tend to scorn pragmatism. They see it as a lack of principle and a sign of corruption. Pragmatists are too ready to compromise their supposed principles. The things they get done are tainted, inadequate, and serve the powerful and not the People. Both leave out the part where the Democrats became the problem-solvers. Their idealism included problem solving. Their commitment to problem solving began with with their idealism.

Our most pragmatic president was the most idealistic. He was also possibly the most ruthless.

Klobuchar as media foil

Thursday, February 21, 2019.

“Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar addresses a snowy rally where she announced she is entering the race for president Sunday, Feb. 10, 2019, at Boom Island Park in Minneapolis.”  Photo by Jim Mone, AP via USA Today.

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

[Editor’s note: This notebook entry is the beginning of a tangent I decided not to go off on in what became my post “Even Bernie”. That post was in response to a Twitter challenge to say something nice about one of the Democratic candidates who wasn't your favorite, which I managed to do. It looks like I was on my way to saying something less than nice about Klobuchar. Probably why I left it out]

I don’t know enough about Klobuchar yet. She’s probably more than what the political media seem to like her for at the moment and seem poised to use her for throughout the campaign---as a foil to to the more progressive women running.

This IS who we are

Saturday, October 6, 2018.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post, inspired by late night reading of “Young Benjamin Franklin” by Nick Bunker…

Again. The reason for pointing out the country has been through worse isn’t to say “If we survived that, we can survive this.” It’s to point out that luck played a large part in our survival and to drive it into our collective heads that Americans have done stupid and unspeakable things that should have led to our failure to survive as a nation. We can do stupid and vicious things, as a nation, as a People, as people, as individuals. Trump is President in no small part because not enough people believed he was as bad as he is. Not enough people believed the GOP is what it is, a party of racist, radical reactionaries. Not enough people believed Americans would vote for such a character. Not enough people believed Americans could be what Republicans are. Which is to say that not enough of us believed that we as Americans could be as bad as we too often are.

And the reason for holding up Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin as exemplary men is to remind ourselves what real virtue in a political leader looks like and admit we fall far short of their example and never mistake ourselves for their equals and also to remind ourselves how far and how often they fell short.  And we shouldn’t see this in a general "They were only human" or "Nobody's a saint" way, but in the very specific ways they did and then realize how their failures then are contributing to our failures now. Their lives are cautionary as well as exemplary tales.

Paragon of virtue

Posted Thursday night, September 27, 2018.

How dare you insinuate I was ever a teenage boy!: Brett Kavanaugh displaying his vanity, sense of entitlement, and guilty conscience at today’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Photo by Win McNamee courtesy of USA Today.

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

To put it another way, we’re all as good or bad, smart or stupid as the friends we hang out with. This is even more the case when we’re young. Brett Kavanaugh spent his high school and college days in the company of all too typical preppie and frat boy jerks. But now he expects people to believe he was always the paragon of virtue he flatters himself he is today and it infuriates him that many people don’t. His attitude is “How dare you imply I was anything other than the saint you see before you now!” That bespeaks incredible vanity, an astounding sense of entitlement, and quite likely a very guilty conscience.

And Merrick Garland disappears down the memory hole

Posted Wednesday night, September 26, 2018.

Is there any point to pointing out that Merrick Garland didn’t just not get a vote, didn’t just not get a hearing, Republican Senators wouldn’t even meet with him?

Barack Obama, the first one and three-quarters term President of the United States in history with his effectively vaporized Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Uncredited AP photo via Politico. March 17, 2016.

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

While in prison both Winston and Julia are broken by torture and forced to inform on each other. Winston’s lead torturer...O’Brien tells Winston, a bit contemptuously, “You believe reality is something objective, eternal, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident...But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external...whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. --- Thomas Ricks summarizing a key passage from George Orwell’s “1984” in “Churchill & Orwell”.

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“The president wants this process to come to a vote because that’s what’s supposed to happen in every single one of these instances where someone is nominated, they go before, they have a hearing, and then the senators vote on it.” ---Trump’s Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Fox and Friends, explaining why her boss won’t withdraw Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

They’re not talking to us. They don’t care if we believe them. We can believe in an objective, external, self-evident reality. What’s it to them? What’s important and imperative is that they believe themselves. Having decided that they must hold onto power at all costs and the only way they can do that is to get every single Right Wing vote there is to get, they set themselves on a course of constant and perpetual self-deception. To keep the suckers bamboozled they have to believe in the con themselves. They have to believe the Party’s version of reality in order to sell it. It’s Orwellian, but the situation isn’t exactly that satirized in “1984”.

The object isn’t to control thought. It’s to give the rubes something else to think about while the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Party pick their pockets. It’s to give them something to rant and rave about so they don’t hear the rest of us shouting “Stop! Thief!”

The Party and the State aren’t one. Not yet. The object is to hold the Party together so that the Party leaders can hold onto their jobs and those jobs aren’t to govern but to steal. Their jobs are to hand over as much of the country’s wealth to the rich greedy bastards who hired them as they can get away with. Orwell imagined a totalitarian state that simply wants power for power’s sake. He didn’t imagine an aristocracy of pirates dedicated to plunder.

There doesn’t need to be a Ministry of Truth. The Party and the Party members are pulling the wool over their own and each other’s eyes. The deceivers and the deceived are in cahoots to rewrite history and send facts, truths, events, people, and their own previously held opinions and beliefs down the memory hole, making it up as they go, with no direction and as they need to in order to maintain their high opinion of themselves while they pursue whatever serves their vain and morally degraded self-interest.

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“Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom” by Thomas E. Ricks is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

What friends are for

Posted Monday morning, September 25, 2018.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, almost looking as though he has a conscience to oppress him. Undated and uncredited AP photo via the Boston Herald-American.

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Just because a friend never did a bad thing in front of you or to you doesn’t me he didn’t do it when he was with other friends, the stupid pals, buddies, amigos, jerks, dopes,assholes, and other bad influences he should have known to steer clear of but for some reason didn’t.

One of the ways we get in trouble is to put ourselves in the company of bad company, out of sight of our true friends who care about us. This happens to us all our lives, not just when we’re seventeen. It gets worse as we get older, in fact, and the bad company doesn’t include just false friends but neighbors, coworkers, and bosses. We’re always tempted to go along to get along and hide the fact that we’re tempted from the friends who could help us resist the temptation.

When you are seventeen

Posted Wednesday morning, September 19, 2018.

A stageful of seventeen year old young adult men, including the author (far right), in our high school production of “Taming of the Shrew” back in the day. [Act II, Scene I. I played Biondello, in case you want to look it up.]

More from the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

At seventeen you’re not legally a full-fledged adult. The law doesn’t grant you all the rights, privileges, and liberties granted as a matter of course to adults over the age of twenty-one. But you can still do just about everything legal adults can do, either as a matter of course or under certain circumstances.

You can’t vote. You can’t buy booze, beer, cigarettes, or lottery tickets. But if your parents or guardians permit it you can have a glass of wine or a smoke on their property. You can drive a car. You can own a car. You can work full-time. You can have and manage your own money. You can live on your own. If you were responsible, hardworking, and smart enough, that is, if you were adult about going about your studies and extracurriculars, you can go away to college. In some states you can get married without your parents’ or guardians’ permission. You can join the military if you have their permission.

But in doing all these things you are expected to behave as an adult. You are expected to have an adult understanding of right and wrong and make decisions accordingly. You can be forgiven if sometimes you don’t. You are, after all, still a kid. But not automatically, and not in all cases, and only if you ask for forgiveness and make amends, and sometimes not even then. Most anything is excusable. Not everything is forgivable. There are things you can do that will and should cost you for the rest of your life and you are expected to know that and understand why. You are expected to take responsibility for your actions and accept and bear the consequences.

Above it all, through it all, with it all, as the foundation of it all, you are expected---required----to treat other people as fellow human beings and not as things you’re entitled to use for your own advantage and pleasure.

Wrong question

Posted Tuesday morning, September 18, 2018.

Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearing. Photo by T.J. Kirkpatrick, courtesy of the New York Times.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Should a stupid thing you did when you were seventeen cost you a job when you’re fifty-three?

Many people reflexively answer that one with, “No. Doing at least one stupid thing is part of your daily routine when you’re seventeen.”

That’s why Kavanaugh’s excuse-makers want that to be the question.

But that question fudges the real question.

What if the job is Supreme Court Justice and the stupid thing you did was commit a serious, violent crime?

To be even more specific, should attempting to rape a classmate when you were in high school cost you a seat on the United States Supreme Court?

You bet it should…

Republicans don't vote against their own interests. They vote against YOURS!

Mined from the notebooks Wednesday, June 27, 2018. Posted Wednesday, July 25.

Click on the image or follow the link to Erica Warner’s story, House GOP plan would cut Medicare, Medicaid to balance budget, at the Washington Post.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Most Republicans aren’t rich. The GOP is the party of the rich. The rich own it after all. But still most Republicans aren’t rich, for the same reason most Democrats aren’t rich. There just aren’t that many rich people to go around. The relatively few there are---they’re not called the 1% because it’s catchy---hold all the money and they don’t want to share. Republicans---the not rich ones---don’t vote against their interests when they vote with the rich. They vote against advancing their own interests. But that’s collateral damage. What they’re voting against is anyone else advancing their interests at their---these not rich Republicans’---expense. The Republicans’ motto is: I may not be getting ahead, but I’ll be damned if anyone else gets ahead without me.

Republicans distracting themselves from distracting themselves

Mined from the notebooks, Friday, July 20, 2018. Posted Wednesday morning, July 25.

You can hardly see his lips move: Vladimir Putin (right) and his ventriloquist’s dummy at the Helsinki summit, supposed President of the United States and leader of the free world, Donald Trump. Photo by Kevin Lemarque/Reuters via the Nation.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

Polls are showing that Republicans are accepting Trump’s “I meant wouldn’t, honest” explanation and view the whole Russia mess---the Russians’ meddling, the Trump campaign’s eager acceptance of the help, Robert Mueller’s investigation, the increasing evidence of a conspiracy if not of “collusion”, Trump’s selling out our allies, Trump’s selling out our intelligence agencies, Trump’s selling out us; his toadying to Putin, Putin’s self-satisfaction---as a “distraction”. They mean it’s distracting them from whatever mental gymnastics they’re doing to avoid admitting to themselves that voting for Trump was a horrific mistake they should have known better than to make or, in the case of too many---avoid admitting they wittingly and deliberately voted for a racist lunatic who has no idea what he’s doing and no serious plans or policies beyond aggrandizing and enriching himself because he promised he’d give them what they wanted---an America made great again by being made whiter, meaner, stingier, and more about making them feel good about themselves and a whole less about making life better from anyone other than themselves.

No wonder they don’t want to be distracted from distracting themselves. They’d have to face the fact that either they were mean-spirited and vicious or just plain dumb or they got played for chumps. They should all go with being played for chumps. Being played for chumps isn’t so bad. Who hasn’t been conned in one way or another at some point in their lives? Most of the elite political media was. They conned themselves, really, but that’s how cons work. The con artists get the suckers to sucker themselves.

Partisans don’t like to admit there’s a flaw in one of their political heroes because it’s an opening for the other side to exploit. One flaw equals fatally flawed. Trump voters won’t admit he is what he is because they suspect one admission will lead to the next: If he is what he is, then they are what they are.

The same phenomenon was at work back in the day with Nixon and Watergate. People knew. But they didn’t want it to be true. So they used every mental trick to make it not true.

Republicans want a President who doesn’t president

Posted Tuesday morning, July 24, 2018.

Silent Cal liked to go fishing more than he liked to president, which is why he’s the ideal Republican president even if Republicans don’t know it. President Calvin Coolidge with his catch of the day, courtesy of the American Museum of Fly Fishing. 

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

The federal government is designed to function without a President. It’s designed to function in spite of the President. This is a good thing because at the moment, effectively, don’t have a President. We have somebody who holds the office but doesn’t know how to do the job or even want to do the job. He wants to play at doing the job while being wildly cheered for it. He makes use of the powers he only minimally understands to hurt the people his mobs want hurt to gratify his own sadistic ego and his mob’s lust for vengeance against whatever THEM they think is responsible for whatever troubles they think they have. Regular Republicans, the ones not caught up in his cult of resentment, are fine with this because they don’t want a President. At least they don’t want one who actually governs. They’re Republicans. They hate the federal government. It has a bad history of expecting them to pay taxes and obey the law. They hate paying takes and think laws are for other people. Laws are intended to keep THEM in line and in their place. Which is, as I said, pretty much all Donald Trump wants to do as President.

So Republicans are ok with a figurehead President and don’t mind if he causes trouble, no matter how much trouble he causes, as long as in the process he causes the most trouble for THEM. They don’t mind his selling us our allies and siding with the Russians against them because they don’t see it as affecting themselves. It’s Europe’s problem. And what has Europe ever done for us beside cost us money and blood? They’re not just uninterested in foreign affairs, they think we shouldn’t have any. They’re as isolationist as their great-grandparents and as xenophobic. As far as they’re concerned, the United States can and should operate as an island unto itself and as if the the final three quarters of the 20th Century never happened. It’s how they wish their towns and suburbs could operate. It’s how they pretend their towns and suburbs do operate until the media, a passing brown-skinned stranger, or that instruction comes on the voice mail to press one for English or two for Spanish reminds them that most other Americans aren’t like them and are fine with not being like them. Donald Trump isn’t their ideal President. They know what he is. He’ll just do until somebody better comes along. Their ideal President is Calvin Coolidge. They may not know it or even know his name. But what they want is a President who minds his own business and leaves them alone.

Trump seemed to be doing that, until he started his trade wars. But they figure like all Trump’s enthusiasms this one will pass without lasting damage...for them.

They do like it that Trump isn’t as silent as Silent Cal. They like it that he mouths off to everybody who pisses him off because it’s pretty much everybody who pisses them off. In the process, he makes them feel good about themselves. He assures them all the time that they are better in every way than THEM. And he’s entertaining. He lets them enjoy their anger and resentment, self-pity, and sense of grievance like those are the same as their feelings about the visiting team at a football game. He encourages them to get a kick out of feeling hurt and put-upon. He lets them take satisfaction in being mean, even at their own expense.

A nation always in crisis

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday, July 4, 2018. Posted Monday, July 16, 2018.

“The Battle of Concord: Engagement at North Bridge”. Essentially a wall-sized .gif based on a 1775 engraving by Amos Doolittle at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia. Sorry I can’t show it to you inaction. The gun smoke rises from the muskets. The sky lights up with reflected musket fire. The soldiers on both sides march back and forth across the bridge. It’s really cool. Photo by Oliver Mannion. Taken December 27, 2017.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

We’re always in crisis. The Republic’s always in danger. Franklin warned us but he was doubtful. He’d be amazed we’ve been able to keep it so long. We’ve been in fierce argument with each other from the first over the same questions: Can individuals govern themselves? Are we really all created equal? Are some pigs more equal than others? Which ones? Why and why them? What do we do about it? Raise them up or bring them down to our level? We are and have been right from the start divided between those who believe freedom is for everyone and those who believe it's reserved for a privileged few. Those wounds are complicated and compounded by it’s not always being a left-right debate and by frequent appearances of aristocrats on the side of general freedom and members of the rabble one the side of the divine right of would-be kings and other tyrants to lord it over themselves and the rest of us.

We’re in a time of real crisis. But there have been times that were worse. But just because the nation’s survived worse crises in the past doesn’t guarantee we’ll survive this one. People survive open-heart surgery only to be killed by an infection.

Trump is an infection. A germ who saw opportunity in our permanently open wounds.

Scott Pruitt in the American grain

Mined from the notebooks Tuesday, July 3, 2018. Posted Monday, July 16.

Photo of now former EPA Chief Scott Pruitt by Jonathan Ernst courtesy of Reuters via the Atlantic.

From the Department of Ideas in Search of a Post:

There’s not much that separates Main Street from Wall Street except the limits of criminal opportunity. Who’s the more American type? The Wall Street bankster or hedge fund manager making millions off his clients’ losses or the guy in the suit from Men’s Warehouse on the phone at his rented desk in the office park boiler room? Scott Pruitt is an American type. Fully in the American grain. But more Main Street than Wall Street. He has more in common with the boiler room types than with the sharpers on Wall Street. He wanted easy money he didn’t have the talent, intelligence, or competence to earn---or steal---through his own merit and effort.

What’s more American than that?

We despise him because the meanness of his ambition is so familiar. He’s even more contemptible because his dreams are so paltry. He’s dreamed and schemed like a small town small timer. Given the opportunity to rake in millions, either immediately by taking bribes from the corporate polluters he was supposed to regulate or by delaying his gratification until he left the EPA and went to work as a lobbyist for one of those corporate polluters, he chose to become a mere skimmer.

A fancy office door?

A Chick-fil-A franchise?

Seriously?

This would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. And cheesy. His idea of living like the rich and powerful is that of a small-minded, unimaginative, suburban snob who expects his neighbors to be impressed by---and envy, and covet---the trappings, toys, and status symbols of the lifestyles of the rich and famous because he saw them on TV. People like Donald Trump.

Pruitt wanted to be like Donald Trump without doing the hard work of devising and running a lifelong con game.

Hero to himself

Posted first thing Wednesday morning, February 28, 2018.

Peter O’Toole as the title character in the 1965 film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim”.

I’m sure he would’ve, just like he charged all those machine gun nests in Viet…oh…yeah…

President Trump claimed Monday that he would have rushed into the Florida high school during the mass shooting earlier this month there that killed 17 people, and he called it “disgusting” that an officer assigned to the school didn’t enter the building while the attack was underway.

“I really believe I'd run in, even if I didn't have a weapon,” Trump said during a White House meeting with governors from across the country…---from the Washington Post, Monday, February 26, 2018.

Trump is soulmates with his voters. All over America grown men are saying the same thing to themselves. “If I’d a been there…” And these child-men are allowed to vote, drive cars, get married, and own guns.

Once upon a time, any blowhard who said something this stupid in public would have been laughed off his bar stool by his fellow regulars. Now he goes online to connect with his fellow blowhards and they exchange boasts and egg and cheer each other on.

One of the appalling things about Trump---and I mean Trump the phenomenon and totemistic figure here, the central idol in a cult of self-worship, and that’s what many of Trump’s most ardent idolaters are engaged in, worship of an idealized, glorified self. Through their identification with him they’re aggrandizing themselves, telling themselves they aren’t the losers they’re afraid they truly are---one of the appalling things, I say again, is the way he’s swooningly admired as if there have been no other presidents to measure him against.

The notion of Five Deferment Don, “Cadet Bone Spurs” as Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient Senator Tammy Duckworth calls him, running headlong into a hail of bullets is laughable on the face of it. The notion of Trump running at all, toward, away, any direction, is side-splittingly funny. But we have had Presidents who did run into hails of bullets or at least put themselves in harm’s way. War veterans and actual war heroes. Working backwards: George Herbert Walker Bush, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Theodore Roosevelt, William McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, Rutheford B. Hayes, Ulysses Grant, Zachary Taylor, William Henry Harrison, Andrew Jackson---supposedly Trump's model president. I think he was really Steve Bannon's---James Monroe, and that first guy, I forget his name.

James Garfield was killed by a bullet---well, actually by the doctor's repeated attempts to remove the bullet. That story is well-told in Candice Milliard's great "Destiny of the Republic". But as reader John reminded me in a comment [Editor's note: Psst. This is an update to the post. I left Garfield out of the above list, intending to give him his own paragraph, like this paragraph, then forgot. Thanks for the reminder John.], Garfield was a genuine hero of the Civil War. He was an abolitionist too and a strict Reconstructionist. And he was a highly intelligent, capable, and decent human being. In many ways, he was his era's Barack Obama. He was the worthiest heir to Lincoln, and his assassination was a terrible injury to the Republic. That story is also well-told in Milliard's book, which you should do yourself the favor of reading, if you haven't already.

John also reminded me that Franklin Pierce was a veteran of the Mexican War. I'd completely forgotten about him. I don't mean his military service, I mean him. Pierce was a pretty poor specimen, as a man and even more so as a President. He's one of the very few Presidents next to whom Trump appears, not good, but a little less awful. He's still the worst by far, as a man. As a President, he's working hard on that. Only thing he does work hard on. Historians will have to decide, though, if the Muslim ban, the mass deportations, his betrayal of the Dreamers, and the encouragement he gives to white supremacists and neo-Nazis outweigh Pierce's signing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law in destructiveness and evil.

Richard Nixon was in the Navy during World War II. It’s said, sneeringly, that he spent the war safe and comfortable behind the lines, playing and winning at poker, but he contributed to that image himself, jokingly downplaying his service in speeches and interviews, trying to appear modest and unassuming while still making the point he was a veteran. Like all Nixon’s attempts to be funny, people missed the joke. But although he was stationed on land and not aboard ship—his first assignment was in Iowa!---like Mr Roberts he angled to get himself assigned to a seat of more action and was sent to the South Pacific, where he was technically in a combat zone, and, again like Mr Roberts, what he did was critical to the war effort even if it didn’t appear heroic or adventurous---he was the officer in charge of Combat Air Transport Command for Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands and appears to have been pretty good at the job.

Jimmy Carter is a Navy veteran of the Korean War era but he didn’t see combat. He did serve in the submarine service, not the safest or cushiest of assignments back then, and twice put his life on the line---once accidentally but the incident demonstrated his courage and steel. You could even call him a World War II veteran too. He entered Annapolis in 1943 but the war ended before he graduated. And Abraham Lincoln was a volunteer captain in the militia and led his men off to fight in the Black Hawk War. He didn’t fight any Indians but he did have, as he famously said, “a good many bloody struggles with the mosquitoes.”

And here are the war heroes who ran for President just in Trump’s adult lifetime: John McCain, John Kerry, Bob Dole, and George McGovern. Kerry literally did run into a hail of bullets. Not unarmed but with just a pistol. Probably like he prefers heroes who weren’t captured, Trump prefers heroes who couldn’t shoot back as well as heroes who weren’t grievously wounded and crippled for life and heroes who didn’t win their medals for crashlanding their flak-damaged bombers on too short runways and saving their crew with their superior piloting skills.

Unfit as he is, Trump stands in their company. He holds the office they held or might have held. You’d think he’d have sense enough not to invite comparisons. You’d think he’d have sense enough not to invite comparisons to almost any president, seeing, as he is, the most miserable specimen of human being ever to hold the office, Andrew Johnson being possibly the only exception. Every other President had some virtues. But Trump has no shame, and besides which, along with being a liar and a conman, hand in hand with those qualities, in fact, he’s a fantasist. He routinely talks about himself as if he believes he’s the greatest President ever, the way a crooked salsesman will talk as if he believes the lemon he’s trying to sucker a credulous high school kid buying his first car into springing for is the greatest piece of automotive engineering since the ‘63 Corvette. It’s a key to his success as a conman, suckering the credulous and the greedy into buying his lemons---his get rich schemes. Which is what his campaign was and his presidency is, really. Vote for me and I’ll make you rich! Stick with me and I’ll make you rich! The reason his voters don’t see the ridiculousness of Trump’s placing himself in those other president’s company is they don’t see those presidents. All they see is Trump. Actually, all they see is themselves as Trump.

They see themselves rich without effort, successful without merit, celebrated without deserving, a boss without any special talent or brains or proven ability, having achieved all that despite all that, idolized by crowds, envied and feared by other, better men, with beautiful women at their beck and call. He’s the them they’ve always fantasized themselves as being, given the chance. And now that he’s declared himself a hero invulnerable to bullets, they’re free to indulge that fantasy too.

Like I said, this country is full of childish men convinced they’re heroes in waiting. They expect their big moment will come at any time and, I’ll add, they resent anyone and anything they think’s blocking that moment’s arrival.

We don’t necessarily imagine ourselves literally rushing into burning buildings, diving into the water to save a child from drowning, or rushing down a school hallway unarmed to take down a determined mass murderer with a semi-automatic assault rifle who can empty his magazine in less than the time it takes us to take even one step in his direction. But we take it for granted that when the critical moment comes we’ll do the decent thing, the moral thing, the courageous thing, because, after all, aren’t we decent, aren’t we moral, aren’t we courageous?

One of my favorite grace notes---those small touches in a movie that help illuminate a theme or reveal something about a character without calling attention to themselves so that we take them in and understand them almost unconsciously---in “Captain America: First Avenger”---Yes. Superhero movies can have grace notes.---is when Steve Rogers, still short and scrawny, unpacks after his arrival at the training camp for would-be Super Soldiers and we see that his small trunk is full of the boy’s adventure stories with moralizing titles he read as a kid and from which, an orphan, he taught himself what it means to be a good man. Steve is already Captain America. That’s why the serum works on him. He’s small but he has an extra large heart. The serum doesn’t turn him into Cap. It gives him the strength to carry on as the hero he is in but on a larger stage with a greater purpose. He hasn’t been a hero in his own mind. We’ve seen him at work, taking on bullies who bully others not himself, and we know how much more he’s trying to do by attempting to enlist again and again even though he keeps being rejected as 4F.

Steve---Cap---is the childhood ideal. Jim, the title character of Conrad’s “Lord Jim”, is the adult reality.

Conrad introduces Jim as being a shade under six feet, that is, a shade under the stereotypically heroic height, a powerfully built young merchant seaman, barely out of his teens, with “Ability”, looking down from his station in the fore-top on people below with the contempt of a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers”.  Like Steve Rogers, Jim raised himself on boy’s adventure stories. Unlike Steve Rogers, his ambitions and ideals are tinged with vanity. He goes to sea to give himself the chance to show to the world, and to himself, he’s the hero he’s meant to be.

On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.

Jim starts out well. He rises rapidly. He gets a berth as chief mate “aboard a very fine ship”, but…

…without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.

A minor injury to his leg forces him to give up the berth while he recovers. When his leg heals, he’s impatient to get back to sea and, with no other immediate prospects for employment, he signs on as chief mate aboard an old steamer sailing out of Singapore with a “cargo” of Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca. One night, far out to sea, the steamer collides with something floating just below the surface and starts to take on water. The cowardly captain and some of the crew abandon ship. Jim intends to do his duty and stay with the ship and its passengers even if it sinks. But at the last moment he reflexively jumps from the deck into the lifeboat and rows away. It turns out, that the steamer doesn’t sink and another ship comes to its rescue. Jim is disgraced. He spends the rest of the book both hiding from his past and looking for a chance to show he’s a hero and resolved that this time he won’t jump.

You know the rest.

None of us know ahead of time what we would do in a crisis, physical or moral. We can only go by how we’ve handled things in the past. But battle-hardened veterans have admitted that in the same firefight in which they’d acted heroically at the outset they had a sudden moment of fear in which they froze and survived the next hail of bullets either through blind luck or because someone else unexpectedly came to their rescue, often with tragic results for that someone else.

We can make plans in our heads. We can rehearse it in our imaginations. We can resolve that when the moment comes…

But we can’t know.

We can’t be certain that at the last second we won’t…jump.

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This post is dedicated to the memory of Old Father Blonde, a Navy veteran, who loved Conrad and, when he was Young Father Blonde and Mrs M was a baby blonde, read “Lord Jim” out loud to her when she was in her crib and falling asleep.

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The Editors recommend a related Mannion re-run: a story from real life about a young seaman who when his moment came did not jump, The day young Ensign Carter was almost lost at sea.

"Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President " by Candice Millard is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.

"Patient autonomy?" Is that what it's called? I'd have called it masochism

Posted Saturday morning, April 1, 2017.

Coincidentally, this story ran just two days shy of eight months to the day since my back surgery. I didn’t watch. My doctor didn’t offer and I didn’t ask. I was out like a light the whole three hours, perfectly content to have surrendered my autonomy.

Choosing to watch your own surgery is one more manifestation of the patient autonomy movement https://t.co/YFU6ms5MGd

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 26, 2017

To jump straight to Jan Hoffman’s article, follow the link to Going Under the Knife, With Eyes and Ears Wide Open at the New York Times.

What horror awaited at the end of the branch line?

Posted Tuesday morning, March 14, 2017.

We have put googly eyes on my model trains. They look:
1) BRILLIANT
2) like they've seen some bad things a little train really shouldn't see pic.twitter.com/dq5df92nFZ

— Tim Dunn (@MrTimDunn) March 12, 2017

Tunnels of bibliophilia

Posted Tuesday, July 26, 2016.

Tunnel of Books: Curved Shelves Wrap Bookstore Walls & Ceiling https://t.co/wqHApDLX2H pic.twitter.com/Mi7iufCHbu

— WebUrbanist (@weburbanist) July 25, 2016

To jump straight to the photo essay, follow the link to Tunnel of Books at Web Urbanist.

The difference between a utopian and an ambitious reformer

The thing that made Owen a utopian, rather than just an ambitious reformer, was that he took these foundational modern ideas---that man is not inherently corrupt, that character is formed from without, and that we can control how that happens---and concluded that the right sorts of institutions can mold individuals, and thus society, in whichever way we desire.

---from Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism by Chris Jennings.