Lance Mannion

I feel no guilt

Posted Thursday night, January 28, 2021.

Workers outside the London offices of Lehman Brothers on the day the company filed for bankruptcy as the housing bubble collapsed. September 15, 2008. Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP. Via Deseret News.

Rahman wrote this in 2014. The scene is set in 2008 during the collapse of the housing bubble when his narrator worked as an investment broker on Wall Street. For some reason it feels immediately relevant this week.

I feel no guilt for what I did in finance. There’s little doubt that the financial crisis will translate into an economic one and that recession will likely follow. People will lose their homes, their jobs, but tell me how I can feel guilt for something that was not only legal but actively encouraged gyt governments everywhere. I never sold mortgages to home buyers; I bought large bundles of them from commercial banks and apportioned the packages into parcels that were sold on to investment firms, all of it done aboveboard and without so much as a quizzical look from regulators. If I am to feel guilt, then surely it is for something I should not have done, when I knew I shouldn’t do it, and when that something harmed others. But even then, how I can I be responsible for all the consequences?

---from “In The Light Of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.

Discouraging the riffraff: Thatcherism defined

Posted Thursday morning, December 31, 2020.

Then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher bidding farewell as she boards a U.S. military helicopter after a visit to the United States, March 2, 1981. U.S. Military photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The epitome of a Thatcherite:

It was of course known that Penelope’s mother was Baroness Hardwick, who spoke in the House of Lords on social affairs, having been put there by Margaret Thatcher. In her time, the Baroness had been a feature of the local press in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where she’d been a stalwart of the Conservative Party in the borough’s politics, thumping tables, championing family values, and telling single mothers and delinquent fathers to shape up or ship out, after having done everything in her powers, it was said, to institute a new housing policy discouraging riffraff from settling in the area.

---from the novel “In the Light of What We Know” by Zia Haider Rahman.

Ted and Bo and the ACA

Posted early Tuesday morning, December 1, 2020.

President Barack Obama and Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy on the sidewalk crossing the South Lawn of the White House, taking what may have been their last walk together, April 21, 2009. Photo via the Barack Obama Presidential Library.

I don’t know how things have gone if Ted had been alive and in good health for the whole of Obama’s first term. Negotiations over the Affordable Care Act would have turned out differently, that’s for certain, and maybe the fight would now be over the future of Kennedycare. But, then, it was a bunch of Democratic senators who made a hash of things, and I’m not sure even Ted could have won them all over. Ah, well. At least we had him when we had him. As senator, he got to call ten men "Mr. President". The first was his brother, of course. The last was Obama, which I'm sure must have gladdened his heart and probably seemed to him like he was closing the circle. From President Obama’s autobiography…

But, of all the pleasures that first year in the White House would deliver, none quite compared to the mid-April arrival of Bo, a huggable, four-legged black bundle of fur, with a snowy-white chest and front paws. Malia and Sasha, who’d been lobbying for a puppy since before the campaign, squealed with delight upon seeing him for the first time, letting him lick their ears and faces as the three of them rolled around on the floor.

With Bo, I got what someone once described as the only reliable friend a politician can have in Washington. He also gave me an added excuse to put off my evening paperwork and join my family on meandering after-dinner walks around the South Lawn. It was during those moments—with the light fading into streaks of purple and gold, Michelle smiling and squeezing my hand as Bo bounded in and out of the bushes with the girls giving chase—that I felt normal and whole and as lucky as any man has a right to expect.

Bo had come to us as a gift from Ted Kennedy and his wife, Vicki, part of a litter that was related to Teddy’s own beloved pair of Portuguese water dogs. It was a truly thoughtful gesture—not only because the breed was hypoallergenic (a necessity, owing to Malia’s allergies) but also because the Kennedys had made sure that Bo was housebroken before he came to us. When I called to thank them, though, it was only Vicki I could speak with. It had been almost a year since Teddy was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, and although he was still receiving treatment in Boston, it was clear to everyone—Teddy included—that the prognosis was not good.

I’d seen him in March, when he’d made a surprise appearance at a White House conference we held to get the ball rolling on universal-health-care legislation. Teddy’s walk was unsteady that day; his suit draped loosely on him after all the weight he’d lost, and despite his cheerful demeanor his pinched, cloudy eyes showed the strain it took just to hold himself upright. And yet he’d insisted on coming anyway, because thirty-five years earlier the cause of getting everyone decent, affordable health care had become personal for him. His son Teddy, Jr., had been diagnosed with a bone cancer that led to a leg amputation at the age of twelve. While at the hospital, Teddy had come to know other parents whose children were just as ill but who had no idea how they’d pay the mounting medical bills. Then and there, he had vowed to do something to change that.

Through seven Presidents, Teddy had fought the good fight. During the Clinton Administration, he helped secure passage of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Over the objections of some in his own party, he worked with President George W. Bush to get drug coverage for seniors. But, for all his power and legislative skill, the dream of establishing universal health care—a system that delivered good-quality medical care to all people, regardless of their ability to pay—continued to elude him.

Which is why he had forced himself out of bed to come to our conference, knowing his brief but symbolic presence might have an effect. Sure enough, when he walked into the East Room, the hundred and fifty people who were present erupted into lengthy applause. His remarks were short; his baritone didn’t boom quite as loudly as it used to when he’d roared on the Senate floor. By the time we’d moved on to the third or fourth speaker, Vicki had quietly escorted him out the door.

I saw him only once more in person, six weeks later, at a signing ceremony for a bill expanding national-service programs, which Republicans and Democrats alike had named in his honor. But I would think of Teddy sometimes when Bo wandered into the Treaty Room and curled up at my feet. And I’d recall what Teddy had told me that day, just before we walked into the East Room together. “This is the time, Mr. President,” he had said. “Don’t let it slip away.”

---from “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama.

Dreams from his father, lessons from his mother

Posted Sunday afternoon, November 22, 2020.

Ann Dunham with her father Stanley Dunham (left), her daughter Maya (center), and her son Barry (right), who still had a lot of growing up to do, at the Dunham family home in Honolulu, some time in the early 1970s. Courtesy of Maya Soetoro-Ng, via NPR.

“[T]he kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known...What is best in me, I owe to her." Barack Obama writing about his mother Stanley Ann Dunham in his memoir “Dreams From My Father”. The passage below is from his newly released autobiography “A Promised Land”:

Once, when she discovered I had been part of a group that was teasing a kid at school, [my mother] sat me down in front of her, lips pursed with disappointment.

“You know, Barry,” she said…, “there are people in the world who think only about themselves, they don’t care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important.

“Then there are people who do the opposite, who are able to imagine how others must feel, and make sure they don’t do things that hurt people.

“So,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye. “Which kind of person do you want to be?”

---from “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama.

The perversely self-destructive nature of the avoidance of truth

Posted Sunday afternoon, November 15, 2020.

Detail from “The First Meeting of Petrarch and Laura” by Marie Sparteli Spillman. 1889. Via Wikipedia.

The American philosopher Sissela Bok wrote this in 1983; the Italian poet Petrarch walked the earth in the 14th Century. The issue is human nature. Politics has an implicit relation to the matter at hand, only because politics is the result of humans being human trying to live together. The words liberal and conservative are beside the point. But it speaks to certain political questions of the moment, doesn’t it?

Before and after Petrarch, a great many thinkers have...warned of the corrosive and perversely self-destructive nature of such avoidance of truth, of the lies we tell ourselves, and of the secrets we keep from ourselves. But they have seen far different truths---equally obvious in their own minds---at the ones we so obstinately reject through self-deception. In our time, Marx and Freud have signaled, as false consciousness and defense mechanisms, the clinging to illusion that stands in the way of becoming free. Only through unmasking, demystification above all interpretation, can we break through the web of illusion and become aware of our role in perpetuating it.

Some have claimed that we would not become more free through the dispelling of self-deceit, but also more capable of acting morally and leading nobler lives. Echoing Plato, they have argued that if only we could discern what is right and what is true, we would surely choose it. Others have held, more pessimistically, that self-deception may be our only shield against knowledge that would otherwise cripple us---that without what Ibsen call our “life-lies” we could not survive.

Whatever role they assign to self-deception, most have taken its presence for granted. To see the self as deceiving itself has seemed the only way to explain what otherwise might be incomprehensible: a person’s failure to acknowledge what is too obvious to miss. How, if not through such intentional misleading of self, can someone fail to notice that his work leads nowhere, that he lives beyond his means, that his marriage is a farce? How else can so many patients listen to a doctor’s explanation of their life-threatening disease, respond as if they understand, yet know nothing about it a few hours later?

Postulating such self-inflicted ignorance helps point to the biases and weaknesses besetting perception and testifies to the perennial effort to understand human failures that would otherwise seem inexplicable: and it is secrecy that lies at the center of such self-deception: the secrecy that is part of all self-deception. According to such a view, we keep secret from ourselves the truth we cannot face.

---Sissela Bok, “Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation”.

Who they are, what they come here for. Two: "Later I saw her praying before she ate, an iconic image of piety and hope..."

Posted Sunday morning, November 1, 2020.

Mural on the wall of a building on a sidestreet in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Photo by Steve McCurry for “On the Plain of Snakes” by Paul Theroux. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, via the Los Angeles Times.

A follow up to my post from earlier this morning:

One encounter in particular stayed in my memory, like an apparition I had been privileged to experience: María, in the Comedor in Nogales, who had related to me how she had left her three small children in Oaxaca. Abandoned by her husband, destitute, with no chance of supporting her family, she had left her children in the care of her mother and crossed the border with four other desperate women.

“I wanted to find work as a cleaner in a hotel,” she said softly.

Separated from the other women in the desert, she’d become lost, was arrested, roughed up, jailed, and then deported. Her eyes fille with tears when she talked about her children. Later I saw her alone, praying before she ate, an iconic image of piety and hope…

---Paul Theroux, “On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey".

Who they are, what they come here for. One: "weeping mothers, separated from their children, struggling over the fence and walking in the desert to save their families"

Posted Sunday morning, November 1, 2020.

A peek through “The Wall”: A little girl takes a look from Mexico through the border fence at the United States. Nogales, Arizona. Photo by Steve McCurry included in "On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey” by Paul Theroux. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt via the Los Angeles Times.

I ended my traverse from Tijuana with the vision of the border as the front line of a battleground---our tall fence, their long tunnels. We want drugs, we depend on cheap labor, and, knowing our weaknesses, the cartels fight to own the border. The migrants were restless young men, tough guys and desperadoes, ambitious would-be students and field hands, and women who wanted nothing more than a low-paying job in a meatpacking plant or a chicken farm. And weeping mothers, separated from their children, struggling over the fence and walking in the desert to save their families.

---Paul Theroux,“On the Plain of Snakes”

Old Joe meets Young Joe and confronts the irony

Posted Thursday night, October 29, 2020.

President Jimmy Carter with his earliest Senate ally, the then thirty-five year old Joe Biden of Delaware, at a fundraiser in Wilmington, Delaware in 1978. AP photo by Barry Thumma, via the Fayetteville Observer.

Spot reading in Jonathan Alter’s new biography of Jimmy Carter, “His Very Best”, to see if I want to commit. Because he’s been on my mind for some reason the last couple of years, I looked up Joe Biden in the index and it took me to this:

But younger Democrats took notice [of “Jimmy Who” and his outsider’s supposedly no-chance-in-hell campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination]. Delaware senator Joe Biden switched his support from [Pennsylvania's governor] Milton Shapp and became the first senator to endorse Carter. As chair of his national campaign steering committee, Biden would appear in dozens of states for Carter in 1976. He joked that at age thirty-three, he was still two years shy of the Constitutional age requirement to be president. So, since he couldn’t yet run himself, he was backing Jimmy.

Even then.

I doubt it ever crossed their minds where they’d be forty-odd years in the future, they had too much else to think about at the time. But if it did, it’s likely they’d have thought it was a real probability that neither one would still be here. Yet, thankfully, here they both still are. I love the irony, though. Joe was already running for president, at least in theory if not yet in fact, and looking forward to being one of the youngest if not the youngest ever elected to the office, and now he’s the oldest to be nominated by either party. I bet if you asked him, Joe would admit he loves it too.

Some one, somewhere must be swindled

Posted Tuesday morning, October 27, 2020.

“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley”: Cartoon by Frederick Burr Opper in Puck, March 27, 1882. “Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled "trickery," "false reports," "private press" and "general unscrupulousness" to knock down bowling pins labeled as "operator," "broker," "banker," "inexperienced investor," etc. A slate shows Gould's controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.” Via Wikipedia.

Henry Adams deplored the escape of [Jay] Gould and [Jim] Fisk from retribution. He expressed hopefulness that “Messrs. Gould and Fisk will at last be obliged to the force of moral and economical laws” which was unduly optimistic. More pessimistically---and astutely---he observed that for the first time an enormous corporate entity had “proved itself able to override and trample on law, custom, decency, and every restraint known to society, and as yet without check.” The belief already was common among the public, he added, that the “system of quet but irresistible corruption” created by [Cornelius] Vanderbilt, Fisk, and Gould” will ultimately succeed in directing government itself.” The “clever” machinations underlying the gold scheme, he wrote, seemed to have had “the single fault of requiring that some one, somewhere must be swindled.” ---from “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America” by Michael Hiltzik.

I’ve been reading some more of Michael Hiltzik's "Iron Empires" and finding it oddly heartening to be reminded that the cops have always been on the take, Congress has always been corrupt, journalists have always been hacks, and big businessmen have always been thieves and sons of bitches…

Union Pacific insiders had...grounds for concern about Gould’s takeover...for his appearance on the scene revived memories of the “Fisk Raid,” a notorious episode in the railroad’s history. The event dated to 1867, when Thomas C. Durant, one of the organizers of the Union Pacific (and an architect of the Credit Mobilier) became embroiled in a leadership challenge with the brothers Oakes and Oliver Ames. Durant enlisted Fisk to play the role of paper owner of twenty thousand shares, which were to be voted on Durant’s behalf. The issue was eventually resolved without the need of Fisk's votes, and that’s where matters rested until about a year and a half later, when Fisk resurfaced. Irked that Durant had reneged on paying a $3,200 bill for his expenses, he threatened to file a lawsuit to block the Union Pacific from transacting any business unless he was paid a bounty of $75,000.

To the railroad’s management this smacked of blackmail, but it was no idle threat, since Fisk had New York judge George Barnard in his pocket. The Union Pacific was at a critical pass, as it was still racing frantically toward Promentory while struggling to cover a debt of almost $14 million. “Fisk had told us, ‘I will break you up so that you cannot pay your obligations, and the first one you default on I will buy it up, until I get control of the road…’” UP shareholder Cornelius Bushnell later testified to a Congressional committee. “He bragged that he would do that.”

When his demand was refused, Fisk followed through on his threat. His lawsuit loomed over the Union Pacific for eight months, finally coming to a head in March 1869, when Judge Barnard issued the injunction Fisk sought and brazenly appointed William M. Tweed Jr., the son of Tammany’s “Boss” Tweed, as the railroad’s receiver. The uncompleted road’s entire existence hung in the balance.

The railroad simply ignored Barnard’s injunction, at which point the judge ordered the seizure of its Manhattan offices. Tipped off, the railroad’s officers managed to gather up all its books and securities and decamp with them one step ahead of a sheriff's posse to New Jersey, safely out of Barnard’s jurisdiction...There followed a comic-opera denouement in which the sheriff’s men battered in the doors of the corporate safe...only to find it empty. In due course, the Union Pacific relocated its headquarters, and its papers, to the safe haven of Boston. But according to Bushnell the Fisk Raid cost the company $7 million from the depreciation of its bonds during the event. Another $50,000 was quietly paid to Fisk...to get him to slink away.

---from “Iron Empires” by Michael Hiltzik.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Previously: "I work for Mr. E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad".

So he dug, way deep

Updated Wednesday morning, October 21, 2020. Originally posted Saturday morning, October 17, 2020.

Thurgood Marshall, second row, second from right, with fellow Alpha Phi Alpha pledges at Lincoln University, 1926. Photo courtesy of the Langston Hughes Memorial Library Special Collections and Archives, the Lincoln University of Pennsylvania, via Daily Local News.

Growing up in Baltimore in the 1910s and 20s, Thurgood Marshall was known more for his boisterous personality than for his smarts, of which of course he had plenty. He was a practical joker, a loudmouth, a showoff, by his own account a roughneck, and a rover, at least within the confines of the parts of town young black men were allowed to rove. He was also industrious, reliable, responsible, and ambitious. He was studious, he read everything, and he loved to debate. He got good grades, but it was his argumentativeness and his gift of gab and the enjoyment he took in being the center of attention rather than his underlying intelligence that classmates and teachers tended to focus on, taking his keenness of mind for granted. He went away to college at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where, Wil Haygood writes in "Showdown":

[His] booming laugh on the Lincoln campus signaled his presence from around corners. His pranks were ribald; he became an expert in the art of tossing water balloons at the unsuspecting. He had a cool demeanor in the face of imminent exams---"do good enough to pass" is how he humbly put it---and came away with grades good enough to make honor roll lists. He became the envy of others.

He went on to Howard University Law School and graduated from there cum laude. Still, it’s hard to change how the people who knew you when you were a teenager see you. But...

Marshall was proud of himself and the approaching end to his law school studies. Some folks back in his Baltimore neighborhood seemed surprised to hear from his parents that he had done so well in law school. “I’d got the horsin’ around out of my system. And I’d heard how law books were to dig in,” he would say. “So I dug, way deep.”

---from “Showdown” by Wil Haygood.

Previously: “Even the singing cowboys”.

"Even the singing cowboys"

Posted Saturday morning, October 17, 2020.

“Never a dull or lazy moment”: Chadwick Boseman as the 32 year old Thurgood Marshall in 1940, long before he became a justice on the Supreme Court, when he was a lawyer for the NAACP, looking as if he’s almost enjoying the harassment of a crowd of white racists outside the courthouse where he’s defending a black man on trial for raping a white woman in a scene from the 2017 movie “Marshall”.

I love it that Thurgood Marshall’s secretary Alice Stovall called the Westerns her boss enjoyed “they-went-that-a-way movies”. I wish she’d been a character in the movie “Marshall”. I wish the movie had shown Marshal going to a movie with a singing cowboy star. I wish I’d been able to find a photo of the real 32 year-old Thurgood Marshall to go with this quote from Will Haygood’s book “Showdown”:’’

Marshall began doing legal work for the NAACP. Charlie Houston [the first president of Howard Law School and Marshall’s mentor] kept a close eye on his onetime star pupil. “There’s never a dull or lazy moment, except when I have to travel with him,” Alice Stovall, another one of Marshall’s earliest secretaries, would come to recall. “Then I’m always left on the train while he spends his time in the dining car, gossipping with the crew...If we have a layover, changing trains, I sit by myself in the station, by preference, while he goes off to see one of those they-went-that-a-way pictures; anyone will do, even singing cowboys.”

---from “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America” by Wil Haygood.

Second Amendment solutions to democracy and religious freedom

Posted Friday morning, October 16, 2020.

“Come and take them!” Gun rights advocates including members of militia and extremist groups carry signs and flags near the Virginia Capitol in Richmond to protest Virginia’s new gun control regulations, January 20, 2020. Photo by Julia Rendleman for the Washington Post.

The novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson wrote this before you know who descended that gold elevator. The arms-bearing folk have been irked for a long time:

It seems these days as if the right to bear arms is considered by some a suitable remedy for the tendency of others to act on their freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and especially of religion, in ways and degrees those arms-bearing folk find irksome. Reverence for the sacred integrity of every pilgrim’s progress through earthly life seems to be eroding. The generosity to the generality of the people who gave utmost of our best institutions would be considered by many pious people now to be socialistic, though the motives behind the creation of many of them, for example [fine colleges like Oberlin, Grinnell, Knox, and many others], was utterly and explicitly Christian. If I seem to have strayed from my subject, it is only to make the point that forgetting the character of the Reformation, this is, the passion for disseminating as broadly as possible the best of civilization as the humanist tradition understood it, and at the same time honoring and embracing the beauty of the shared culture of everyday life, has allowed us to come near to forgetting why we developed excellent public libraries, schools, and museums.

---from the essay “Reformation” by Marilynne Robinson in “The Givenness of Things”, 2015.

"Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country's flag!'

Posted Thursday morning, October 15, 2020.

Colorized detail from “Barbara Fritchie waving tattered U.S. flag from window, Frederick, MD, 1862”, an illustration by N.C. Wyeth, 1922. In the Library of Congress’ collection, via Discover Poetry.

My reason for posting this can be found on my Facebook page. (Fans and friends of Mrs M will get a kick out of it.) But it’s also to remind Republicans that not only don’t they own the flag but their voters include a sizable cohort who proudly wave a different country’s flag every chance they get and count Stonewall Jackson as one of their heroes.

Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep,
Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep,

Fair as a garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched over the mountain wall,—

Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced: the old flag met his sight.

“Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
“Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;

She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word:

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

Ever its torn folds rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;

And through the hill-gaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night.

Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,
And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

Honor to her! and let a tear
Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down
On thy stars below in Frederick town!

---”Barbara Frietche” by John Greenleaf Whittier.

Curtains of Deference

Posted Wednesday night, September 30, 2020.

Nothing left to say to each other: Donald Trump and then-Secretary of Defense Marine General Jim Mattis at a White House Cabinet meeting, June 21, 2018. Reuters photo by Yuri Gripas, via the Washington Post.

Yep, I'm reading it. Note the tucked-away reference in the passage below to Trump’s “formative years.” An awful lot of his perception of how the world works now is based on his perception of how it worked when he was a young con artist on the make. Remember: the key word in “Make America Great Again” is again. Also, I wonder if Mattis ever quoted George Kennan to Trump. I’d have liked to have been in the room when he did. It would be interesting to know if Trump thought Kennan was being recognized more and more than Frederick Douglass. Kennan was alive and recognized not just during Trump’s formative years but well into Trump’s middle age. Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101...

Mattis later described for others what it was like to attend meetings with Trump: “It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it could go on what I kind of irreverently call the Seattle Freeway off-ramps to nowhere. [He would s]hoot off onto another subject. You could try [to get him back on topic]. But then something that had been said on Fox News was more salient to him.”

…

Mattis frequently used a phrase coined by George Kennan, the father of the doctrine to contain the Soviet Union: “the treacherous curtain of deference” that comes down when someone is around high-level officials, especially presidents.

In Trump’s case, there were additional impediments to connecting and communicating with the president, Mattis said, beyond that sense of “Oh my gosh, I’m in the Oval Office.” Advisers had to push past “the additional curtains of Fox News, of his formative years. Those are long-held beliefs. So those were the real curtains…”

“...facts would be dismissed, and we’d be off on one of those ramps that circled around...And then you’re sitting there, and it’s not deference at this point. It’s grasping for a way to get back on subject. And it was just very hard. And there wasn’t a lot of time for it.”

---from “Rage” by Bob Woodward.

Stalin's talent

Mined from the notebooks, Thursday, August 13, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, September 10.

Detail from “Lenin and Stalin in the summer of 1917” by Ivan Vladimirov. Via Wikiart.

More from “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine” by Anne Applebaum…

On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had “no money, no permanent profession, other than punditry,” as a recent biographer has written. Born in Georgia, educated in a seminary, his reputation in the underground rested on his talent for robbing banks.

Validation for communists

Mined from the notebooks, Thursday, August 13, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, September 10, 2020.

Leon Trotsky at his desk, 1918. Via Wikimedia Commons.

From “Red Famine” by Anne Applebaum:

For everyone in the Communist Party, the Civil War era was a true watershed, personally as well as politically. At the beginning of 1917 few of them had much to show for their lives. They were obscure ideologues, unsuccessful by any standard. If they earned any money, it was by writing for illegal newspapers; they had been in and out of prison, they had complicated personal lives, they had no experience of government or management.

Unexpectedly, the Russian Revolution put them at the center of international events. It also brought them fame and power for the very first time. It rescued them from obscurity, and validated their ideology.

Kissinger: the Novel

Posted Monday morning, August 22, 2020.

American G.I.’s with German children at the end of World War II. The soldier on the right, in the shadows where he always liked to operate, is Private Henry Kissinger.

In contrast to so many Americans, Kissinger has lived without hope, without expectations, and certainly without confidence in either the workings of democracy or the inevitability of progress. Policy, he has argued, must start from this grim vantage point. This is not a heartwarming perspective, but is there anyone looking out at the world today who would say that his pessimism is not a more sensible foundation for foreign policy than...optimism? That is why, given the current state of international relations, it is foolish, even dangerous, to ignore him. The lessons he has been trying to teach may not be to the liking of most people, but they are more important than ever before. ---from the introduction of “The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World” by Barry Gewen.

Why do I want to read a biography of Henry Kissinger?

I don’t mean “Why would I want to read a biography of Henry Kissinger” as if I’m responding to a publisher’s come on or an overly enthusiastic headline on a review. I mean, plainly, why do I want to read a biography of Henry Kissinger, because I do---specifically, “The Inevitability of Tragedy” by Barry Gwenn. It’s not just that this review by Thomas Meaney in the New Yorker makes it sound like an interesting and well-written book. Meaney’s review made me realize I don’t really know much about Kissinger.

Of course I know who he was and what he did. But I don’t know what made him the person he was. He seemed to have sprung, a fully formed monster, onto the national stage when I was in junior high, and stayed there until I graduated from college, despicable until the end. And all I cared to know about him and needed to know was that he was directly and purposefully responsible for the deaths of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of human beings. I knew, or, actually learned as time went on, that he was a Harvard professor, an expert on foreign policy, with a reputation for the brilliance of his scholarship and thinking. And I got a kick out of it when a friend who knew about this stuff told me that he was the model for Peter Sellers’ portrayal of Doctor Strangelove, even though Kissinger was not a former Nazi, just the opposite, in fact, a Jew who served in the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II and took part in the liberation of a concentration camp. But I don’t think I ever seriously thought about how he thought and wrote his way into becoming a monster and the architect and chief henchman of Nixon’s policy of mass murder in Southeast Asia and South America. How that happened, how Kissinger became Kissinger is something I want to know----something I should know. Something I think we all need to know, particularly political journalists.

I think he’s worth knowing as a villain and not simply a monster because villains are interesting in their villainy and because this one got away with it. He not only got away with it. He’s still celebrated for it. Hillary Clinton bragged about her friendship with him when she was running for President, for crying out loud!

I’ve written and tweeted many times that the wonder isn’t that we elected a Donald Trump president; the wonder is we didn’t do it sooner. I think the trouble the political media had---and to a degree still has--covering Trump as the villain and monster he is, is they couldn’t get their collective heads around the fact that a villain and monster like him could get himself elected to any office, let alone the presidency, despite the many examples of villains and monsters who have risen to the top in any and every industry, including journalism. It’s as if they believe that Nixon was a one-off in the whole of American history. Kissinger is just one of the most egregious specimens.

So I just checked “The Inevitability of Tragedy” out of the library, and it’s gone right on top of the stack of the fifty-four books I’m convinced I’m going to read by the end of the week.

But as much as I’m looking forward to reading Gewen’s biography, I’m eager to read the as yet unwritten novel by whoever out there is the contemporary equivalent of Gore Vidal and who would limit their story to Kissinger’s experience as a young soldier and build it around his friendship with this character...

In 1942, Kissinger was drafted into the U.S. Army. At Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, he befriended Fritz Kraemer, a German-American private fifteen years his senior, whom Kissinger would call “the greatest single influence on my formative years.” A Nietzschean firebrand to the point of self-parody—he wore a monocle in his good eye to make his weak eye work harder—Kraemer claimed to have spent the late Weimar years fighting both Communists and Nazi Brown Shirts in the streets. He had doctorates in political science and international law, and pursued a promising career at the League of Nations before fleeing to the U.S., in 1939. He warned Kissinger not to emulate “cleverling” intellectuals and their bloodless cost-benefit analyses. Believing Kissinger to be “musically attuned to history,” he told him, “Only if you do not ‘calculate’ will you really have the freedom which distinguishes you from the little people.”

Kraemer sounds like a real-life Baron Munchusaen who may have embellished here and there but didn’t exaggerate to the point of telling fantastical lies, just enough to make him an unreliable narrator. Which would make him an interesting choice for narrator of young Kissinger’s story, although, probably because I’ve been reading “Burr”, I imagine Kissinger doing the narrating.

But the model doesn’t have to be Vidal. Conrad, Dostoevsky, Graham Greene---all good models. It’s just that, like I said, I have Vidal on my mind. And now that I think of it, I’m surprised Vidal didn’t write the novel himself and I’m irrationally disappointed he didn’t. It would have made a perfect cap to the “Narratives of Empire”.

Maybe I should write it myself?

First I have to do the research and get a lot smarter.

In the meantime, here’s more from Gewen’s introduction to “The Inevitability of Tragedy”...

In the 40 years since left government service, Kissinger has devoted himself largely to two goals: the burnishing of his reputation and instructing the American people in the principles of Realpolitik. The first of these has provoked intense controversy with detractors and admirers lining up on either side...The second, while it has not been ignored, has hardly elicited the kind of thoughtful discussion it deserve, and the reason for this, I would say, is that Kissingers’s thinking runs counter to what Americans believe or wish to believe. He challenges people to rethink their assumptions. Kissinger’s lessons about history, power, and democracy can be discomfiting, even painful, for those who insist that freedom and democracy are the aspirations of people everywhere or that America is some kind of moral beacon. To argue otherwise is to be, well, un-American.

...

Kissinger...learned from his personal experience, but the lessons he drew are [dark]...As an eyewitness to the rise of the Nazis to whom he lost many members of his family, he saw that democracy was not a universal desire and that, under certain circumstances, it woulc lead to the worst tyranny imaginable. Sometimes, when people “seize their rights,” they do so in order to deprive other people of their rights. Whereas [Condoleeza Rice, for example, as she writes in her book “Democracy”], understands human history as moving in a forward direction with transcendent meaning, for Kissinger history is more like one damned thing after another, unpredictable and uncontrollable; the basis of foreign policy has to be a pursuit of the national interest because, in an uncertain world, that is the anchor of stability. When correctly conceived, it contributes to rational relations among nations, giving them a shared foundation for working out their antagonisms; everyone understands where everyone else is coming from. World order is an end in its own right, and those Americans who insist on trying to impose their democratic values on others are likely to be disrupters of the peace, hegemonists by another name, or in Kissinger’s language, “crusaders.” One can’t expect too much in foreign affairs. The task for policymakers in his view is a modest, essentially negative one---namely, not to steer the world along some preordained path to universal justice but to pit power against power to rein in the assorted aggressions of human beings and to try, as best they can, to avert disaster. This is a perspective shaped by pessimism and a dim view of humanity.

Kamala Harris' first victory

Posted Thursday evening, August 20, 2020.

U.S. Senator and Democratic nominee for Vice-President Kamala Harris back on her first day as San Francisco’s District Attorney. She had just been inaugurated and had come into her office to get a feel for it---and to get to work. Personal photo courtesy of Kamala Harris, via the Bemidji Pioneer.

In the video short introducing her at the convention last night, someone close to Kamala Harris described her as “fierce”. I didn’t catch who it was. Her sister? Her best friend? No matter. Someone who knew her growing up. When I heard the word “fierce” I jumped up from my chair. “Yes!” I cried to myself. Fierce is one of the words I’ve been using to describe her on the blog, on Twitter, in analog conversations, from the start. Her ferocity is one of things that drew me to her when she first came to the Senate in 2017 and I saw her at work in Judiciary Committee hearings and then helped make her my first choice for the presidential nomination. It’s what made her my favorite for the VP nod. I think Biden needs her ferocity. He needs her to be fierce on his behalf. And what I like most about her ferocity is how calm she is when she is at her fiercest.

At any rate, in this anecdote from her memoir “The Truths We Hold” she tells a story from when she was a law student interning in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office in California. She describes herself getting what she needed to get done by begging and pleading with the court clerk. But I imagine what moved the clerk to action was that she sensed the ferocity beneath the begging and pleading and knew to get out of the way...

As summer interns, we understandably had very little power or influence. Our job was primarily to learn and observe, while assisting where we could. It was a chance to get a taste of how the criminal justice system worked from the inside, what looked like when justice was served---and when it wasn’t. We were placed with attorneys who were trying all kinds of cases, from DUIs to homicides, and had the chance to be in a room---and part of the process---of putting together a case.

I’ll never forget the time my supervisor was working on a case involving a drug bust. The police had arrested a number of individuals in the raid, including an innocent bystander: a woman who had been at the wrong place at the wrong time and had been swept up in the dragnet. I hadn’t seen her. I didn’t know who she was or what she looked like. I didn’t have any connection to her except the report I was reviewing. But there was something about her that caught my attention.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, and most people had gone home for the weekend. In all likelihood, a judge wouldn’t see her until Monday. That meant she’d have to spend the weekend in jail.

Does she work weekends? Is she going to have to explain to her employer where she was? Is she going to get fired?

Even more important, I knew she had young children at home. Do they know she’s in jail? They must think she did something wrong. Who’s taking care of them right now? Is there even someone who can? Child Protection might get called. My God, she could lose her kids.

Everything was on the line for this woman: her family, her livelihood, her standing in the community, her dignity, her liberty. And yet she’d done nothing wrong.

I rushed to the clerk of the court and asked to have the case called that very day. I begged. I pleaded. If the judge could just return to the bench for five minutes, we could get her released. All I could think about washer family and her frightened children. Finally, as the minutes in the day wound down, the judge returned. I watched and listened as he reviewed her case, waiting for him to give the order. Then with the pound of the gavel, just like that, she was free. She’d get to go home to her children in time for dinner…

It was a defining moment in my life. It was the crystallization of how, even on the margins of the criminal justice system, the stakes were extraordinarily high and intensely human. It was a realization that, even with the limited authority of an intern, people who cared could do justice. It was revelatory, a moment that proved it mattered to have compassionate people working as prosecutors. Years before I would be elected to run a major prosecutor’s office, this was one of the victories that mattered most. I knew she was going home.

And I knew the kind of work I wanted to do and who I wanted to serve.

---from "The Truths We Hold" by Kamala Harris.

Enlisting the people against the people. Ukraine, 1919.

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday, August 8, 2020. Posted Thursday morning, August 13.

Detail from “Requisitioning” by Ivan Vladimirov. 1921. Via the Russian Travel Blog.

I've been reading more of Anne Applebaum’s "Red Famine" and getting all sorts of smart. I've also been getting all sorts of angry, all sorts of depressed, all sorts of horrified, all sorts of scared out of my mind, and all sorts of confirmation of my standing belief that people are no damned good.

In the immediate aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks were consolidating their power in the nascent Soviet Union, Stalin, under Lenin’s direction, waged a war of attrition against Ukraine using starvation as a weapon of mass destruction. Kulak was a general term for prosperous small landholders and farmers. Shlikhter was Alexander Shikhter, the recently named People’s Commissar of Food Collection in Ukraine, and isn't that job title pure Soviet-speak?

While attacking the Kulaks, Shlikhter simultaneously created a new class of allies through the institution of “poor peasants” committees…[the committees] would later play a role in the Ukrainian famine, but their origins lay in this immediate, post-revolutionary moment, in Shlikhter’s first grain collection campaign. Under his direction, Red Army Soldiers and Russian agitators moved from village to village, recruiting the least successful, least productive, most opportunistic peasants and offering them power, privileges, and land confiscated from their neighbors. In exchange, these carefully recruited collaborators were expected to find and confiscate the “grain surpluses” of their neighbors. These mandatory grain collections created overwhelming anger and resentment, neither of which ever really went away.

---from “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine” by Anne Applebaum.

Unless...

Posted Monday afternoon, July 20, 2020.

Model of the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 in the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian.

For some reason this seems relevant...

Later, as we know, just after the flight of Sputnik, Eisenhower brought in James B. Killian as the Scientific Adviser to the President, together with a scientific advisory committee. This form of organization has persisted, and it certainly provides a direct means by which the President can obtain promptly the best of scientific advice on any problem before him. It will not work, of course, unless the President wants to use it.

---Vannevar Bush, among other things in a long and distinguished career, chair of the Office of Scientific Research and Development under Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, writing in 1970 in his memoir “Pieces of the Action”.