Lance Mannion

Of motes and beams

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Wednesday, November 11, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, December 13.

Detail from a painting, “The Sermon the Mount”, attributed to Gustave Dore, circa 1860s, but possibly an original work by an anonymous artist based on Dore’s black and white engraving. Various sources.

Three ways of making the same point. A short sermon for liberals:

"If you are wrong, does that make me right? If you are bad, does that prove I am good?"---Thomas Merton, "The Seven Storey Mountain".

"...simply because Trump's moral compass is broken does not mean that yours unerringly points north. There is a difference between being righteous and being right."--- Carlos Lozada, “What Were We Thinking”.

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"---Matthew 7:3

Joe among the poets

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, November 8, 2020. Posted Wednesday morning, November 9.

Thomas Hardy's desk in his study at Max Gate, the cottage he designed and had built in Dorchester, England.

All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he’s in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake,
No matter what.

---from “The Cure at Troy” by Seamus Heaney, quoted by Joe Biden in his victory address, Saturday night, November 7, 2020.

Lots of quoting of those lines from Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy” blowing through social media these last few days. I wonder how many people doing the quoting know they’re quoting from a play and not a poem---the equivalent of quoting “Tomorrow, and tomorrow” or “All the World’s a stage…” without considering their place in “Macbeth” or “As You LIke It”. Biden probably knows where those lines are from. They’re his signature quote. Of course we intellectual and literary types are happy to have a president who reads and reads poetry. People not poetically inclined but know and respect the value of words are almost certainly as glad, if only because they won’t have to listen to Trump speaking in advertising slogans and brand mottos anymore. There’s no poetry in Trump. No music either unless you count jingles. Trump is obsessive in comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln. There are so many ways Trump is not like Lincoln, here’s one of my favorites: Lincoln loved poetry. Lincoln wrote poetry. He was a poet. The Gettysburg Address and The Second Inaugural are poems.

Happy as I am about Joe’s affection for Heaney, though, I took this bit from Carlos Lozada’s book “What Were We Thinking” as an admonishment to keep things in perspective. Lozada, you probably know, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the Washington Post and “What Were We Thinking” is a collection of his essay-length reviews of books about Trump and the political climate in which he sprouted and has come to fruit:

Critics scoff at the president’s literary indifference, often comparing it to his predecessor’s reverence for the written word; Barack Obama receives rapturous coverage every time he promotes a new list of titles purchased from the local indie shop. To the extent Trump relies on books at all, it is to confirm his instincts rather than to challenge his assumptions; to ratify, not edify...Yes, I would be delighted if our president read more books, even more so if they were good one. But of the many concerns I have about Trump, a thin [To Be Read] pile is not one of them. I’d settle for him reading his briefing material. Or the Constitution.

But the reason I’m taken this morning with this poem by Heaney is only coincidentally to do with Lincoln, Biden, or Trump. I did go looking through my copies of “Field Work” and “Station Island” for a poem that would be appropriate to the moment and just to be different.

I’ve been struggling through “The Return of the Native” for over a year now. I started on Melville’s hundredth birthday when I got the idea that in the matter of writing about sex Hardy could be seen as Melville’s successor. Hardy was as realistic and cynical on the subject as Melville was hysterical. Didn’t get very far, either with the idea or reading the book. Picked it up again--the book, not the idea---last month, when I started Adam Nicolson’s, “The Making of Poetry”, Nicolson’s meditation on Wordsworth and Coleridge’s youthful friendship and how they inspired each other in their days living and writing and walking and talking in the Lake District with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy and, sometimes, Coleridge’s put-upon wife Sara, and I got another idea: that in their day wandering not at all as lonely as clouds in the north of England they were wandering through Thomas Hardy’s territory in the southwest, literarily and thematically if not geographically. Their letters, journals, and poems were filled with scenes that could have been taken from Hardy’s novels or, rather, that Hardy could have taken for scenes in his novels, Hardy not having published his first story until years after they were both dead, after all. Sara Coleridge, for her part, was living out a Hardy story.

At any rate, you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I picked up "Station Island" and came across Heaney’s “The Birthplace” and read Heaney’s account of his attempts to puzzle out “Return of the Native” while I’m trying to puzzle it out myself, at a different time of life, of course. But Heaney’s description of Hardy’s “deal table where he wrote” reminded me of the small wooden table in my bedroom in the house on Bloomington where I lived my first year in the Workshop:

I

The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain,
the single bed a dream of discipline.
And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants
of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable
ghost-life he carried, with no need to invent.
And high trees around the house, breathed upon
day and night by winds as slow as a cart
coming late from market or the stir
a fiddle could make in his reluctant heart.

II

That day, we were like one
of his troubled pairs, speechless
until he spoke for them,

haunters of silence at noon
in a deep lane that was sexual
with ferns and butterflies,

scared at our hurt,
throat-sick, heat-struck, driven
into the damp-floored wood

where we made an episode
of ourselves, unforgettable,
unmentionable,

and broke out again like cattle
through bushes, wet and raised,
only yards from the house.

III

Everywhere being nowhere,
who can prove
one place more than another?

So we go back emptied,
to nourish and resist
the words of coming to rest:

birthplace, roofbeam, whitewash,
flagstone, hearth,
like unstacked iron weights

afloat among galaxies.
Still, was it thirty years ago
I read until first light

for the first time, to finish
The Return of the Native?
The corncrake in the aftergrass

verified himself, and I heard
roosters and dogs, the very same
as if he had written them.

There were dogs to be heard in the neighborhood when I wrote at that table. No roosters that I recall, although on some quiet nights the quacking of ducks as they settled down for the night carried up from the river. (By the way, the picture up top is of Hardy’s desk in his study at Max Gate, the brick “cottage” he designed and built in Dorchester after he’d made some money as an architect.) And Nicolson’s depictions of Coleridge and Wordsworth on their hikes reminded me of you and me taking our hikes around Iowa City, yakking and yakking about anything and everything, including poetry. And the Mets and Red Sox, naturally. I wish we could get together for a walk, and yak.

Editor's note: Tuesday, December 1, 2020: I corrected a typo in the caption on the photo up top, thanks to the keen eye of reader Charles Sperling. See the comments.

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”.

The Trump of Chicago. Fifth Ward and Final Ward: Triumph of the gang

Ballot box stuffed Thursday, November 1, 2018. Re-counted Thursday, November 12, 2020.

Big Bill Thompson posing for a campaign photo in 1926 when he was running for his third term as mayor of Chicago, a campaign financed by Al Capone. 

Why did 70 million people vote to keep a villain like Trump as president is the question roiling up social media since the election, as if the answer isn’t obvious in the minds of people asking it and they aren’t prepared to give it in their next sentence. Here’s my next sentence and a couple more for good measure: Why wouldn’t they? Americans have elected villains, sharpers, scoundrels, thieves, knaves, charlatans, clowns and fools, and would-be dictators, often all stuffed into the same flashy suit, to every other office, high and low, in the land, since the beginning of the Republic: it was only a matter of time until one got himself elected president. The wonder, as I say in the notes below and have said in many other posts and tweets before and since, the wonder isn’t that we got a Trump for president, the wonder is we didn’t get one sooner. Big Bill Thompson, three-term mayor of Chicago in the 1920s, was one of those over-stuffed flashy suits...

November 1, 2018:

The reason I keep bringing up scoundrels like Big Bill Thompson every chance I get isn’t that I want to make the high-minded point that having survived the likes of Thompson---and Aaron Burr, and Boss Tweed, and Warren Harding, and Huey Long, George Wallace, Richard Daley, Spiro Agnew, Newt Gingrich, just to name a few of the most recognizable---we’re likely to survive Trump and his gang of vipers. I’m just hoping to remind any political journalists who happen to stray across this once-upon-a-time influential blog that those others existed and not only thrived but ended up paying no price or hardly any for their crimes and depredations. They fooled and they suckered many voters, but most people knew them for what they were and voted for them in spite of it---in many cases because of it. Thompson had two terms as mayor of Chicago, serving from 1915 to 1923, in which he racked up a fair number of progressive achievements but also showed himself again and again for the grafter and clown that he was at heart. In the 1922 mayoral election, he decided not to run again---he had his eye on higher and more lucrative office---and he was replaced by the reform-minded William Dever. Dever proved to be too mindful of reforms, particularly those regarding enforcing Prohibition. Thompson ran against him in the next election, and beat him by 85,000 votes. The people of Chicago were thirsty. They wanted a drink, and Thompson promised to give it to them. He made good on his promise, taking his cut, of course, and sharing it gratefully with Al Capone, with whom he was in cahoots and who had funded his campaign to the tune of a quarter of a million bucks. Thompson’s slogan that year was “Vote for Big Bill the Builder. He Cannot Be Bought, Bossed or Bluffed”.

The rest of the country viewed Thompson’s re-election as a new low for Chicago. The city had chosen as its mayor a “political blunderbuss,” in the words of one journalist---”indolent, ignorant of public issues, inefficient as an administrator, incapable of making a respectable argument, reckless in his campaign methods and electioneering oratory, inclined to think evil of those who are not in agreement or sympathy with him, and congenitally demogogical.”

Many saw Thompson as a product of the special cocktail of corruption and bluster that animated local life.

“They was trying to beat Bill with the better-element vote,” observed the humorist Will Rogers. “The trouble with Chicago is there ain’t much better element.”

But others recognized Big Bill as the symptom of a deeper rot permeating the country---”a strong example,” wrote the Indianapolis Star, “of the potency of demagoguery and appeals to prejudice in American elections.”

For one sociologist, writing in Century Magazine, Thompson’s victory proved that democracy itself had failed---not just in Chicago, but in any major metropolis.

“The people were not fooled,” he wrote. “They knew that a vote for Thompson was a vote for Thompson and the ‘boys.’”

The old open form of government---”the kind envisioned by Thomas Jefferson”---had given way to cabals of crooks, grafters, and party bosses who cut their deals behind closed doors.

“That is essentially what has come to pass with Thompson,” the sociologist wrote. “His election is the triumph of the gang.”

---from “Scarface and the Untouchable” by Max Collins and A. Brad Schwartz.

Thompson ran for a fourth term in 1931, but by then enough voters were tired of his antics that he was defeated soundly by Anton Cermak, who was reform-minded like Dever but also tougher-minded. Lessons learned. All’s well that ends well. Democracy is redeemed. Except that in less than a generation Richard Daley would be elected to his first term as mayor.

This was meant to be the concluding vote in a series that for some reason I didn’t conclude. Here are the links to the first four:

First Ward: "We low-brows got to stick together!"

Second Ward: "Away with decency! Give us our beer!"

Third Ward: A quiet election day in the Windy City.

Fourth Ward: Big Bill drains the swamp.

They don't own the flag and they don't own all the chainsaw art

Posted Election Day, Tuesday morning, November 3, 2010.

Gardiner, New York. Around 8:30 this morning.

I guess they sold the life-size wooden hand-carved Grizzly that stood on its hind legs on top of a log pedestal outside the shop for the last couple of years as mascot and roadside sign, telling you immediately what work goes on here. But it’s still the artist’s open-air studio and gallery, and, as you can see, the artist---or someone in the family---is a painter of signs. Which is a reminder to Republicans: Despite what you think, you don’t own the flag. You don’t own the Constitution. You don't own religion. You don’t own all the guns even. And you don’t own all the chainsaws or all the chainsaw art.

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.

Marilynne Robinson on the bookish roots of the Protestant Reformation

Sunday night, October 25, 2020.

"Caxton Showing the First Specimen of His Printing to King Edward IV at the Almonry, Westminster: With Edward are his wife, Elizabeth Woodville, and their children, Elizabeth, Edward, and Richard" by Daniel McLise, 1851. Via Wikipedia.

Robinson doesn’t get into it here, but the irony is implicit: the inheritors of the Protestant Reformation in the United States are the liberal descendants of New Englanders who populated the blue states and the blue islands along the Mississippi and the coasts of the West and the South, while the brand of Protestantism running wild across the political landscape is anti-book, anti-reading, anti-professor, anti-learning, anti-science, anti-intellectual all around, and its tribes of believers are enthralled by a would-be tyrant who is all those things too but for whom language isn’t poetic or meant to inspire, for whom it has no beauty or dignity, only the power to confuse and distract. He is, in effect, anti-understanding and anti-language as anything other than slogans, catchphrases, and mottos:

The history of the Reformation is very largely a history of books and publication, a response to the huge stimulus given to intellectual life by the printing press. It was in considerable degree the work of professors, men of exceptional learning who were intent on making the central literature of the civilization accessible to the understanding of the unlearned, those who could not read or understand Latin. Luther made his profoundly influential translation of scripture, which became the basis of the development of German as a literary language. Calvin did not make a translation of the Bible into French---that was done by a cousin, Pierre Robert. For the purposes of commentary, Calvin made translations from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. But he also wrote and preached in French. His work was read so widely that he was credited with creating French as a literary and discursive language, and an international language as well. His influence and Luther’s are both very comparable to the impact on English of the Bible in English, generally credited to the Authorized or King James version. So one immediate and remarkable consequence of the Reform movement was the emergence of the great modern languages out of the shadow of Latin, with their power and beauty and dignity fully demonstrated in the ambitious uses being made of them.

---from “Reformation” by Marilynne Robinson, collected in “The Givenness of Things”.

Of course...

Posted Monday afternoon, October 19. 2020.

For all your Second Amendment solution needs. Wallkill River Small Arms, this morning, around eight.

A good old-fashioned, All-American Democratic house

Posted Thursday morning, October 8, 2020.

Front lawn of the Mannion ranch, this morning, around nine, Wednesday, October 8, 2020.

Antonio Delgado is our Congressman, Jen Metzger our state senator. Joe and Kamala you know. The flag in the background is ours. I mean it belongs to all of us not just them. You know the them I mean; those angry folks who think they own it.

What they want from their "flawed vessel"

Mined from the notebooks, June 14, 2020. Posted Tuesday morning, September 29, 2020.

Then presidential candidate Donald Trump (top row center, his face lit as if by divine light) “praying” at a service at the International Church of Las Vegas, October 30, 2016. AP photo by Evan Vucci, via WBUR Boston.

Amy Coney Barrett’s conveniently applied Catholicism, in which the only teaching of the Church that truly matters is the one against abortion, shouldn’t figure as the primary reason for opposing her. If anything, it’s of tertiary importance. The first is that she is a political conservative who would be ruling on issues of secular importance. It would be interesting to hear her explain why as a good Catholic she could reconcile her faith with her being on the side of her fellow conservative justices who are anti-immigrant, against the granting of asylum and refugee status to would-be Americans who happen to be brown and from shit-hole countries, anti-environment, anti-marriage equality, anti-labor, anti-health care, pro-letting the police get away with murder, and pro-letting sick people including children suffer and die of treatable diseases, all things she can be presumed to be herself on the basis of her being appointed to the Supreme Court by a president who has proved himself to be all of those things and has done his damnedest to carry out policies that inflict those things on the United States and the world and has never done anything that hasn’t advanced his political and financial interests. It would be interesting to hear her explain how as a good Catholic, which means as a good Christian, she could align herself with the politics of the most unchristian and immoral of men who have held the office of President. Interesting but, like I said, not of primary importance here.

Of primary importance is how her ultra-conservative legal principles---her self-professed "originalism"---would influence her rulings on immigration, asylum, refugees, the environment, labor versus corporate interests and the rights of workers versus the privileges of owners, the right of cops to do whatever they want to whomever they decide needs “policing”, and, of utmost importance to millions and millions of Americans, whether good health care should be, rather than a right belonging to all, a privilege and a luxury to be enjoyed by only those who can afford to pay top dollar, which is to say, who gets to live and who gets to die so that insurance companies make even more money. Those questions can be asked and answered without reference to the Catechism.

But if religion is going to be an issue, it’s not her Catholicism that’s at question. It’s the brand of Protestantism of the people who are most enthusiastic about her ascension to the Court, for whose support her nomination is a reward, and whose near unanimous votes Trump and the Republicans are counting on this election and beyond---the Right Wing Evangelicals.

The question is what their “faith” tells them to demand, what she makes of those demands, and how many of their demands she will grant and to what degree she will grant them.

Came across this entry from the summer of 2018 when the news of the day was full of what turned out to be of no consequence: that some Right Wing evangelicals weren’t happy with Trump for caging and separating children from the families. The blue wave was building and the political media seemed more concerned with whether this might cost Republicans in November and not so much what it was costing those children. It appears that despite their supposed misgivings they stuck with the Republicans, and it was the loss of college-educated white suburban women who helped propel the Democrats to control of the House and several state houses. The media’s fascination with voters they consider “regular Americans’ always gets in the way of their reporting of just who really are regular Americans and what they want.

At any rate, I hope you won’t mind if I quote myself:

Evangelicals aren’t hypocrites for voting for Trump. Some of them may sound like hypocrites in their excuse making and the way they dance around flat out admitting their real reasons for voting for him. They voted for him for the same reason anybody votes for any candidates for any office---because those candidates promise to give them what they want. Right Wing Evangelicals want abortion outlawed and women denied control over the own health, bodies, and lives. They want “religious liberty” for themselves which is their right to end LGBT+ people their rights or at least permission to treat them as if they don’t exist and have no claims upon them as fellow citizens and taxpayers, which amounts to pretty much the same thing. They want unwavering U.S. support for Israel so that it will be around to play its biblically ordained role in Armageddon, the Apocalypse, and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. They want to ban the teaching of established science in public schools. They want to ban public schools. Overall they want the country governed according to what they call “scriptural principles”. (If Donald Trump can name the four evangelists, it’s about the limits of his knowledge of scripture.) They want it affirmed that the United States is a “Christian” nation, as if the Constitution was written by divinely inspired bigots and know-nothings like themselves instead of the Enlightenment era rationalists the rest of us take the framers for. In short, they want the country remade in the image of themselves, with all the rights and benefits of citizenship belonging only to themselves.

Boaters for Biden

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Monday morning, September 7, 2020. Posted Wednesday morning, September 22.

Trump boat parade, Lake Winnipesaukee, Laconia, New Hampshire. August 22, 2020. Copyrighted photo by Joseph Prezioso, via MSN.

Where are the Biden boat parades?

Trump voters don't own all the boats or all the water. The Mohawk and Hudson Rivers flow through several solidly liberal Congressional districts, like this one. There are lots of navigable waterways in Massachusetts and California. Vermont owns half of Lake Champlain.

If I had a house of my dreams on Cape Cod or along Lake George, I'd own a boat, and I'd organize boat parades. Not just to counter the Trump boat parades, but because they look like fun

Well, except for the colliding, swamping, sinking, and catching on fire parts.

Fun is an essential feature of American political campaigns.

Both Joe and Kamala know how to have fun and how to share it.

Local media would love it. Local Democratic candidates would happily get on board. (Ha!) And the national political media would eat it up with a spoon. It would give them something to cover that’s not policy and allows them to pretend serious issues aren’t at stake and we’re all just one big happy polity.

We'd even have a good slogan:

"Boaters for Biden!"

Feel free to use it, @JoeBiden

And make sure to serve ice cream.

Not just vanilla, although that would be the official flavor.

Joe Biden sure loves his ice cream. Apparently, so does the skinny guy in the white button down shirt behind him to the right. Then vice presidential candidate on the campaign trail with Barack Obama in 2008. Photo via Teen Vogue.

The dominant hand

Posted Friday morning, August 28, 2020.

"I'll show you who has the dominant hand...Hey, that hurts!" Our very common president, Donald Trump being beaten at his own game by French President Emmanuel Macron. Brussels, May 25 2017. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP via Voice of America.

Sound like anyone we know?

The battalion commander wasn’t much better. Lieutenant Colonel Fehr was universally loathed among the staff and paid attention to none of them. Before the deployment, before I’d even met him for the first time, our operations officer, Major Eklund, had felt the need to prepare me.

“He’s gonna do this handshake,” the major said. “It’s called the dominance shake. He does it to everybody.”

Eklund was a Catholic convert and had a tendency to tell me more than he should, inside the confessional and out.

“The dominance shake,” I said, amused.

“That’s what he calls it. He’s going to take your hand in his, grip it real hard, and then twist his wrist so his hand is on top of yours. That’s the dominance position. And then, instead of shaking up and down, he’ll pull you in and slap you on the shoulder and feel your bicep with his free hand. It’s Fehr’s little way of peeing on your personal tree.”

“You think he’ll do it to me? I’m a chaplain.”

“He does it to everybody. I don’t think he can help it. He did it to my nine-year-old son at the battalion Easter egg hunt.”

That’s from “Prayer in the Furnace”, one of the short stories in Philip Klay’s National Book Award-winning collection “Redeployment.” Klay is a former marine who served in Iraq at the beginning of the war. “Redeployment’ was published in 2014. It’s probably a safe bet that the story draws on Klay’s own experience in the Marines and was written well before most people dreamed you know who would run for president and Colonel Fehr was based on an officer Klay knew or had heard about from other marines. But there he is, Trump in all his bullying glory. Well, except for the fact Colonel Fehr is a marine and Trump could never have been a marine because you have to volunteer to be one and when he had his chance to serve Trump dodged the draft to stay safe at home and get rich. To be fair, he did do duty in his own private Vietnam, risking his health having unprotected sex during the AIDs crisis years.

Among the many egregious qualities that make him unfit for the job of president and a rotten excuse for a human being is how common Trump is. I don’t mean common as in crass, vulgar, uncouth, rude, boorish, loutish, bumptious, and generally unconcerned with social niceties, gross in manner, speech, attitude, expression, behavior, and what passes in him for thought, although he is all that.

I mean how dime-a-dozen ordinary he is.

This aspect of Fehr and of Trump, the need to show others they’re the boss by physically humiliating them in the cheapest and most cowardly ways---the dominance shake is essentially an ambush---is a common one. Lots of men do it, one way or another, some by instinct, many because they read about it in one of those books that tell you how to succeed in business by treating business as a blood sport, like the ones that were bestsellers when Trump was first on the make in New York---“The Book of Five Rings” and “The Art of War” and Trump’s own “The Art of the Deal”. I worked at a Waldenbooks in Boston’s financial district in those days and we couldn’t keep books like that in stock.  The store was crowded every lunch hour with power-tied, suspendered, anxious-looking men of all ages, buying what they hoped was their golden ticket up the next step on the flow chart.

(Back then I barely knew who Donald Trump was. His was just a name among the names of the many trashy minor celebrities who made the gossip columns when they showed up at Studio 54. “The Art of the Deal” came out several years later, after I’d left Boston for points west.)

Back at the beginning of his presidency, when much of the media was still expecting him to “pivot” and routinely finding evidence that he had or was about to, just you wait, Trump was displaying evidence every minute that he wouldn’t pivot, couldn't pivot, didn’t think he needed to, and didn’t want to even try. He’d run for office as himself, the self he’d been since he left Queens intending to fleece all of Manhattan. The expectation of a “pivot” was usually put in political terms, but it was a matter of character as well---any pivot of the sort gullible pundits touted would have required a complete change in character and that sort of transformation only happens in fairy tales and bad movies and TV shows. Trump showed himself for what he was and always was and always would be right from the get-go. He would never change for the better. He would only get worse. As the miserable specimen of human being he’s always been, he has been governed by whim, appetite, vanity, ego, greed, and desire. Being president would only make him worse because it gave him opportunities and power to indulge his whims, appetites, vanities, greed, and desires. Among the early warning signs the media should have picked up on was his trying out the dominance shake on the leaders of the G7 nations during their first summit in July 2017, which is to say on the leaders of our staunchest and most loyal allies and economic, political, and military partners. To their confusion, consternation, disgust, and disdain, he was intent on showing them he could beat them up.

He made a public display of it. He did it on camera during what were meant to be routine, friendly, and, in the grand scheme of things, meaningless photo ops. One by one he set out to show them and the world who was boss. One by one they showed him it wasn’t him. Trudeau, um, well, shook him off with good grace and good humor. Abe was merely perplexed. Markel won her round by offering to shake his hand first, causing him to reveal his sexism and fragile male ego by withholding his hand. But it was Macron who bested him.

Macron was ready for it. The then 39 year-old President of France took the vain old man’s hand, gripped it hard, and then wouldn’t let go. He wouldn’t let Trump turn his wrist. He squeezed back. He hurt him. He held on and held their hands in place until both their knuckles turned white. And he did it while grinning in the old man’s face the whole time. It took Trump two tries to take his hurting hand back.

Macron has some bully in him. And he’s vain, as they all are. There’s no doubt he took pleasure and pride in beating Trump at his own game. Part of the point was to show Trump who was boss in that situation. But it went far above and beyond that. It wasn’t merely personal. It was official---a matter of national pride. What Macron was doing was reminding Trump that he, Macron, was there to represent one of the leading nations of the free world. He was reminding Trump that all the heads of state there were there representing leading nations of the free world. And he was reminding Trump that he was there representing the leading nation of the free world. He was reminding Trump that he was President of the United States and he should act like it.

Think about it: Trump arrived at the summit in the dominant position. All the other leaders there were ready to defer to him. He should have exercised restraint. But restraint is another virtue he lacks. He treated the situation as he treats all situations, as personal, and all about him. And personally he is petty, insecure, cowardly, and dumb, and so what he is all about is showing off and proving he’s the toughest guy going. He swaggered about the summit as if he could fire everybody else there on the spot and was looking for an excuse to do it.

That the thing about Trump that shocked and confounded John Bolton: that Trump doesn’t know what the job of President entails. He doesn’t even seem to know what the job is.

Michelle Obama has famously said, being President doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.

Being President has revealed Trump for who he is---a very small and mean little man, petty, insecure, dumb, and in every sense of the word...common.

With liberty and justice for ALL

Posted Thursday morning, August 27, 2020.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,
And to the Republic for which it stands,
One nation, under God, indivisible,
With liberty and justice for all.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Photo up top of a Rainbow Flag flying from the porch of a house near the Mannion homestead taken by your faithful correspondent, Wednesday, August 19, 2020. 

Baby's Night Out

Posted Monday evening, August 24, 2020.

Republican convention starts tonight.

Tell us something we don’t know, Lance.

Ok. Let me tell you this...

Don’t watch.

Unless you’re being paid to, give the whole four nights the skip.

Don’t follow it on Twitter either. There’s no point. And it won’t do you any good. Republicans don’t care what we think. They like it when we sputter in outrage and dismay. And you’ll only be helping him. You’ll be telling the networks there’s money in covering him as if he’s a regular Presidential candidate with your impressions, clicks, and eyeballs. You’ll be adding to his ratings, and you know important those are to him. He’ll lie and brag no matter what, but at least you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you didn’t contribute. And he wins by getting into your head and poisoning your soul. If all you’re going to do is tweet your anger and fear, paranoia and despair, you’re doing his work for him.

Watch a movie. Watch basketball. Binge watch a TV show. Read a book. Write some letters. Talk to friends and relations in person, if you can, by phone or on whatever device that’s handiest for you. Take a long walk, if you can. If you can, sit outside and look at the stars. If you have any left, shoot off some fireworks, although I and your neighbors really wish you wouldn't.

If romance is a possibility, make it a night of romance. Throw yourself a party, even if it has to be a party of one.

If you can’t resist the lure of social media, remember that most people online aren’t here to obsess over politics and there’s lots going on that’s interesting, informative, and fun. Like on my blog. I don't write just about politics, you know. Fer inskinks.

If you can't help yourself, whatever you do, don't watch it on one of the major networks or follow it via their newsfeeds. They're going to "report" on it and "analyze" it as if it's not all lies in service of re-electing a criminal lunatic , proven incompetent, and unabashed racist president. C-SPAN, MSNBC, and Amazon Prime are showing it whole without cutting away to give it over to the bobbleheads so they can blather. But better for your heart, soul, and sanity not to bother at all.

With that said, however, if you have to, absolutely have to, watch a convention, re-watch ours. All four days along with selected highlights are still available for streaming at the DNC’s website. We had a good one, a joy-filled one, and had a better time than they’re going to have.

Photo up top was taken the other day by your faithful correspondent. The big baby's crib is on a street close to Uncle Merlin's boyhood home. Up and down the street and up and down most of the steets in town are Black Lives Matter signs and houses with rainbow flags and Biden-Harris signs that have sprung up seemingly overnight, replacing the Biden 2020 signs that had been there since February. What can I tell you. It's a Democratic town. Except for the house three doors down from Baby Trump. They're flying a Gadsden flag. A faded one. The neighbors probably do their best to ignore it.

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.

Her first TV

Mined from the notebooks, Thursday morning, August 13. Posted Monday morning, August 17.

Screenshot via C-SPAN of California Senator Kamala Harris making her first speech as the Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, Tuesday August 11, 2020. I didn’t ask the clerk at Barnes & Noble what channel she watched the speech on her new TV. It was none of my business, like a bunch of other things that were none of my business when she sold me my copy of Harris’ memoir. The important thing to her was that she had a new TV.

The clerk who rang up my copy of Kamala Harris’ memoir, “The Truths We Hold”, was a short, thin, white woman about my age, with wire framed glasses, dark graying hair haphazardly pinned back from her heart shaped face, her eyes smiling brightly over her surgical blue cloth mask. Her eyes got brighter as she slid the book under the plexiglass. “Did you see her speech?”

Her tone suggested she had and it had made her an enthusiastic Harris fan, if she wasn’t one already. It also suggested I must be one too. Why else would I be buying the book?

“I saw part of it. I came in late,” I said regretfully. I didn’t get into the problems I’d had getting it to stream on my computer. “I heard the best part was the beginning when she talked about her friendship with Beau.”

She assured me it was a nice tribute. I told her I hadn’t known they were friends. If I had I would have believed she was a lock for the nomination. “I don’t much about him,” she said apologetically. I resisted the temptation to mansplain the man. I said, "I think there's a section in the book dealing with him and their friendship," and left it at that. She said she looked forward to reading it. I asked for her impression of the whole speech but it turned out there was something she was more excited about than the speech itself---that she had been able to watch it. “I just got a TV!” she practically burbled. “It’s my first.”

This threw me a bit. A fellow boomer and it’s her first TV? I went quickly through the possibilities. She meant it was the first TV that was all her own? All her previous TVs she’d shared with her family, roommates, partner or spouse? That raised questions about her living arrangements and what became of the “owner” of the old TV, questions that were none of my business. Or was she one of those people who had not wanted a TV or hadn’t been able to afford one when she’d set out on her own and found she got along fine without one? So then, why had she decided to get one now? Had she inherited it? From whom and under what circumstances? Again, not my business. So I said, “Just in time for the convention.”

“I can’t wait!” she said.

“Let’s hope it’s all good news from here on out.”

“If it’s not,” she said, still cheerful but with a note of steely determination, “it’s going right back!”

It's her...I think...I hope...It better be!

Adapted from the Twitter feed, June 15 and June 17, 2020. Written up July 15. Revised and posted Tuesday morning, August 4.

The ticket I’m rooting to see: Joe Biden with Kamala Harris on the campaign trail pre-lockdown. Uncredited and undated photo via Harris’ post in Medium announcing her endorsement of Joe for the Democratic nomination for President, March 8, 2020.

A joint note from the Departments of In Search of Lost Time and Like I Would Know…

I want to get this in for bragging purposes before Biden announces his choice for VP, just in case. Harris has been my favorite since she dropped out of the presidential race in December, for a number of reasons, the main one being I like how fierce she can be. But back then, when I had long since already concluded, reluctantly, that Joe would be the nominee, I thought Harris could provide the fire he lacked on the campaign trail. She could be Joe’s Teddy Roosevelt to his McKinley. Biden could campaign from his figurative front porch while she barnstorms around the country making fiery speeches and rallying crowds of the faithful. It also seemed he liked her and I expected he’d choose someone he was most comfortable with who could do the most for him attracting the voters he needed to win. That wasn’t Warren. Isn’t Warren. The pandemic has upended everything, of course, and I’m not sure how Harris’ strengths on the stump will carry over onto virtuality. But there’s also this: She’s what Joe isn’t. Someone Trump and the GOP can demonize in their voters’ eyes. Everybody likes Joe. That’s his main strength. But, wow, are they going to hate on her. They already do, even if they don’t know it’s her they hate specifically. She represents everything they fear and loathe. This makes her a problematic choice. Having her on the ticket might scare off potential Republican and Republican-leaning Independents in a way Biden himself doesn’t. And, then, there’s developing conventional wisdom that Biden might want a VP who won’t overshadow him, even inadvertently, by pursuing presidential ambitions of her own while she’s supposed to be giving her all to helping enact his Presidential plans and policies. One of Joe’s weaknesses throughout his career has been his susceptibility to conventional wisdom.

At any rate, I’m still rooting for her. But, as always, like I would know.

The post below is adapted from a Twitter thread I posted back in June in response to that letter. You might remember it. Nope. Not that one, the one that appeared in Harper’s. The one before that one. The open letter to Biden from the self-styled liberal Democrats favoring Warren for the VP. The one putting forth arguments against Harris that were, ironically, sexist and implicitly racist in the way unreflectively morally and politically self-approving white liberals can be...

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

It’s her.

I think.

I hope…

So this open letter to Joe making the case for Elizabeth Warren and against Harris really broils my brisket.

And Lawrence Tribe’s defense of the letter infuriates me even more.

Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, where Warren once taught, said that there would be some “symbolic ways in which some people would be disappointed” if Biden does not choose an African American woman, and that disappointment should count. But Warren’s record, he said, makes her the strongest choice.

“I think African Americans above all would be the first to say they are more interested in results than cosmetics,” said Tribe, who signed the letter.

Tribe should know better.

CNN political commentator and Democratic consultant Karen Finney said it succinctly in this tweet:

No ⁦@tribelaw, Black people are NOT “cosmetics” and it’ll be more than “symbolic” disappointment. Your comments are a prime example of the ways that white liberals are just as bad about telling Black people to just wait our turn. Shame on you.

The other top named signers are not representative of the Democratic left. They are charter members of the Democratic elite, just slightly more liberal than their fellow members.

In fact, that they would presume to speak for POC, tell them what's best for them and essentially tell them "wait your turn...again" disqualifies them from speaking for the liberal rank and file.

Harris was my first choice for the nomination. She’s my first choice for VP. It's not a symbolic choice for this old white guy either.

I not rooting for her because I want to see the first black woman as Vice-President. I want her to be the first black woman VP. Same as I didn't want Hillary Clinton in 2016 because I wanted to see the first woman President; I wanted HRC to be the first woman president. I think Harris will be good at the job and, if it should come to it, if President Biden decides not to run again or can’t, I think she'll be the best candidate for the 2024 Presidential nomination.

I see Warren as the symbolic/cosmetic choice. She'd add nothing special to the ticket except as a consolation prize to "progressive" voters who think Biden owes them for beating their preferred candidates.

The letter portrays Warren (D-Mass.) as the best prepared prospect to serve as president and one uniquely capable of helping Biden politically in the November election. It asserts that he is “already strong” among nonwhite voters but could use help winning over disaffected voters who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the primary — even as some of them have soured on Warren.

I’ll say Biden’s already strong among non-white voters. Particularly black voters. That’s how he won the nomination. But that doesn’t mean he can take them for granted. Rewarding and rallying the voters who got you here and showing you value them is far more an imperative than chasing after a petulant remnant who won’t appreciate your efforts to court them anyway and respond with the sought-after enthusiasm.

As for "qualified", I think Harris is the more qualified. She has more executive experience, she has more experience as a politician answering to a community, and she's even more involved in the current moment.

Then there's the bit about how Warren would make a fool of Pence in their debate. So what? First off, that's easy. Second off, nobody will care. The only reason for making that a qualification is intellectual snobbery and vanity. We'd all like to see Pence get his comeuppance

But it won't come in the form of liberal elitists smugly talking/tweeting/zooming about it the next day with other self-satisfied liberal elitists

What's more, Harris is a good debater and interrogator herself. That’s how she grabbed my attention. I jumped on her bandwagon before there was a bandwagon to jump on, in March of 2017, when she went after Neil Gorsuch at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. At one of the early debates last year, she got in trouble for being "too hard" on Biden. Warren would run intellectual circles around Pence. Harris would eat him alive.

And let me get this straight: A major concern about Biden is his age. His birthday’s November 20. That’ll make him seventy-eight come January 2021. We're worried his health and his stamina won't hold up over the next four years. So the answer to this is for him to pick as his VP a punk kid of...seventy-one?

Warren looks to be in great shape for a person her age. But people in their 70s are still old and they tend to develop all sorts of serious health issues seemingly overnight.

For the record, she's still only 70 until next week. Her birthday is June 22.

She has the energy and spirit that suggests she'll live to be a hundred. But it's not improbable that Joe will outlast her.

This is my most petty objection to the letter. But that its signers, while making the case that Joe’s age means that his Vice-President will have to be ready to take over at any moment, are pushing the notion that a fellow septuagenarian is the best qualified to step in if necessity demands is indicative.

It's incredible that at this moment the signers would dare tell black Americans to "wait their turn" and that an elderly white woman who floundered in the primaries in good part due to her failure to develop the necessary level of good will among them is their best hope.

What it comes down to is the signers pushing one of their own for the job and signalling quite plainly that they do not regard Harris or any of the other women of color said to be on Biden’s list as belonging to the club.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

To read the whole story about the letter, follow the link to "Warren allies send letter urging Biden to pick her as running mate" at the Washington Post. For Harris' post endorsing Biden jump here.

Filed under The Presidential Horserace 2020.

It's the ones willing to finish the fight for him who worry me

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Sunday, July 19, 2020. Posted Tuesday morning, July 21.

"That's for me to say and you to find out": Trump looking cagey as he listens to reporter's question on the White House lawn on July 15, 2020, a few days before his familiarly disturbing and characteristically unmoored sit-down with Chris Wallace. Patrick Selansky/AP.

President Donald Trump is refusing to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming White House election, recalling a similar threat he made weeks before the 2016 vote, as he scoffs at polls showing him lagging behind Democrat Joe Biden. Trump says it’s too early to make such an ironclad guarantee.

“I have to see. Look ... I have to see,” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace during a wide-ranging interview on ”Fox News Sunday.” “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.” --- AP. July 19, 2020.

I don't think it will matter if Trump refuses to "accept" the election results if he loses. Who knows what goes on under that weave but I just don't see him putting up a real fight.

By it won't matter if he refuses to accept the election results, I simply mean it won't keep him in office. What Joe Biden say: Trump doesn’t get to decide. The American People do, and under their orders “the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.” It will matter because whatever amount of fight he manages to put up, it will cause the American people pain, suffering, turmoil, chaos, confusion, and across the board damage to the body politic it will take years to repair.

He'll throw a tantrum of course, type RIGGED on his cell until the screen cracks, gibber and blather on Fox about the FAKE NEWS and the DEEP STATE, shriek and shout things to any audience he can gather meant to incite riots, call for Second Amendment solutions, send for his lawyers and fixers, but before the marshals come knocking he'll fall into despair and fold.

That's his history.

He likes to call himself a fighter. He loves it when his sycophants and apologists call him one too. He's a counter puncher, they boast on his behalf.

But what he is is a sucker puncher. He hits when you're not looking or before you're ready or after you've got him already beat and are heading back to your corner…

Then he runs for the nearest open door...

Leaving it to others to finish the fight for him if they're inclined.

Discretion has always been the better part of valor with him

It's the ones willing to finish the fight for him who worry me.

His mobs of hideous men eager for an excuse to use the guns they take pride in scaring little kids with the sight of.

And the true and committed fascists in his administration like Barr and Pompeo, Mark Meadows and Chad Wolf and Betsy DeVos, and the probably many others we don't know about.

And the smart, ambitious, vicious, and truly bold and therefore truly dangerous ones in the House and the Senate, like Dan Crenshaw and Tom Cotton.

And the ones in the military and the others in the police forces. And the corrupt and incompetent but reliably partisan judges packing the courts.

And the right wing loons at their microphones egging them all on...

I think they'll lose in the end but it will be violent if not horrifically bloody…

And then Trump will poke his head out from wherever he's been hiding to tweet, "Don't blame me. I had nothing to do with it. They were a pack of incompetent losers. Want to buy a membership in one of my clubs?"

A bad man

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday afternoon, May 24, 2020. Posted Tuesday morning, May 26.

Our most godly President, leading a prayer in praise of himself at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, February 6, 2020. AP Photo by Evan Vucci.

He’s a bad man. We all know it. The general tendency is not to say it directly. We call him a sociopath, a malignant narcissist. He’s destructive, divisive, vindictive, malicious. Corrupt. He’s a thug. He’s a bully. A con artist. A grifter. The Criminal-in-Chief. He’s worse than racist. He’s far more than merely sexist. He’s vicious and cruel. We use political terms that carry the heaviest moral judgment---fascist, tyrant, traitor. We should flat out call him evil except evil implies intent and intent requires consideration and forethought and he’s too lazy to bother with either---he allows himself to be governed by appetite, ego, and whim. But the word for him is bad. Just plain bad.

The trouble with calling him that, though, is it almost lets him off the hook. It confuses the issue. It suggests he’s simply a bad President, which he is, arguably the worst at the job we’ve ever had, but it doesn’t emphasize he’s a rotten human being to boot.

Bad men have been President and proved good at the job of presidenting, Several exemplary men were less than successful Presidents. Some very good men did terrible things as President. But none of them did as many bad things---immoral and incompetent---in the course of an average day. None of them were as bad at the job and as bad an individual.

Which makes it such a bitter irony that he’s “ordered” the states to let the churches re-open, confirming for his Right Wing Christian voters that he’s the most godly President we’ve ever had.

There’s really no point in arguing with them that he’s far from godly and not by the least measure Christian.

He was raised to worship money. The only divine eye he’s ever cared is watching him is the camera’s eye. He rarely goes to church. He doesn’t know how to comport himself when he does.

The photo is from last June. He barged into MacLean Bible Church in Vienna, Virginia coming right in from the golf course still in his cleats. He stayed for eleven minutes. And the service he interrupted was dedicated to the twelve people who’d died in the mass shooting in Virginia Beach a few days before. He didn’t pray for them. He let the pastor pray for him. Look at him smirking. It’s like he thinks he’s getting an award. And he was, wasn’t he? Better to say a reward. The same one the hypocrites do when they pray in public. On Easter last year, asked what Easter means, he gave the impression he’d never heard of the Resurrection. He’s unclear about the Crucifixion too. This year he wished us all a Happy Good Friday. At the National Prayer Breakfast in February where the President traditionally leads the gathering in prayer, his “prayer” was a self-pitying jeremiad full of spite and vituperation aimed at the sinners who’d brought about his impeachment. In place of a Bible, he held up the front page of the Washington Post with the headline “ACQUITTED”.

Supposedly he has a spiritual adviser. More like a coach. Paula White. She’s a grifter too, like most everyone who goes to work in the Administration or sets themselves up as his advocate, apologist, or unofficial aide. Her job is to help him crib for moments when he’s supposed to sound like the leader of a “Scripture-based”---read White Christian---nation his religiously minded voters expect him to be. He probably pays as close and sustained attention to her as he does to all his advisers.

Try pointing all of this out to any of the Right Wing Evangelicals who make up the real majority of his voters and the ones who don’t meet you with blank stares will tell you he stopped sinning when God made him President. Others, who are more honest with you and themselves, will tell you he in himself and as himself doesn’t matter, the Lord has often used broken vessels for His purpose. Look at David. And if you look, you can see where they’re coming from.

Donald Trump, the idiot who would be President, is often viewed by the fanatical Christian right as delivered by God. Yes, a man who has had three wives, cheated on all three of them, five kids total (well, and possibly another one out of wedlock), paid off a porn star and a stripper, lied, cheated, stolen and conspired with a foreign adversary to cheat his way into the White House - he is their moral compass.---Red Painter, Crooks and Liars, June 2, 2019.

You can write a reductive biography of David yourself that almost matches that. In fact, you have to leave out a couple of details to avoid making David sound worse, like arranging to get one of his own soldiers killed in battle so he could sleep with the man’s wife. On the other hand, to make the comparison work, you have to ignore that David was punished for his sins. That he repented and begged for forgiveness. Trump has cavalierly confessed he’s never asked for forgiveness or seen any need to. And you have to ignore that David was a warrior and hero, a good king---as in competent and successful, along with, for the most part, wise, just, and answerable to his people and attentive to their needs and concerns. But if you add this to the discussion, and you’re not met with more blank stares or insistence that Trump is a good president, you’ll get reminded that it doesn’t matter what he is personally. What matters is he’s doing the work God wants done. And, you know, as a former Catholic, I half-see the point.

One of my early and favorite lessons on the value Catholics place on good works as the ticket into heaven is the story of the mean-spirited and cold-hearted miser who is nonetheless a philanthropist and dies beloved by the people in general and celebrated and mourned by the nation even though his family is not the least bit sorry to see him go. His dead soul is surprised to find itself welcomed into heaven and even makes the case to St Peter that there must have been a mistake. He was a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner, worse than Scrooge before Scrooge’s reclamation, and if anyone deserved damnation it was himself.

St Peter reminds him of his philanthropy and of all he gave and did to help people in need and make the world a better and happier place.

The miser says, “But I only did all that to spite my greedy relatives and do them out of the money they expected to inherit!’

To which St Peter answers, presumably with a smile broadening his tear-scarred face, the reminder of his own damnable sin of denying Jesus three times on the night of Jesus’ arrest and his repentance and forgiveness, “It doesn’t matter why you did it. It matters what you did and you did the world a great good.”

The “good” Trump does is in hurting THEM, Those Others! Like appointing hack judges who will rule to ban abortion and to make America great again by making it a white Christian nation where only straight, white Right Wing Christians can claim to be real Americans, no others need apply.

But the why he’s doing something is inseparable from what he’s doing. What he’s doing is trying everything he can think of to get himself re-elected, which includes pushing for churches to re-open their doors on Sundays. He’s doing exactly what he means to do---trick his own most loyal voters to march out and get sick and die to save his political skin.

Most churches remained closed to in-person worship. Ones that had already re-opened their doors have closed them again as it’s turned out they were tempting their Lord and God and their ministers and congregants came down with COVID-19. It’s all God’s will, right?

Fortunately, polls are showing that the vast majority of Americans, including many of his voters, are far more sensible than he gives them credit for. We’re more inclined to listen to our doctors, local health officials, local newspapers and TV station news, to our families, friends, and neighbors, and our own common sense than to him and the idiot Right Wing Republican Governors aping his reckless political skin-saving.

Still, it’s infuriating. It’s even gotten to Father James Martin, the popular Jesuit priest, author, and theologian. Martin is usually close to saintly in his mild-manneredness, as anyone (like me) who’s been watching his daily live Faith Sharing video chats on his Facebook page can tell you. Friday, though, he wasn’t as characteristically mild-mannered in his post reacting to Trump’s “order” that states allow churches to open their doors. You can almost see his jaw-clenching as he typed:

The President said today that he will "override the governors" and force states to allow churches to open. Churches should not be opened (or closed) by order of a president, but because it is safe to do so. To open churches before it is safe would needlessly put more lives at risk. And that would be the opposite of pro-life. Governors and religious leaders should follow the advice of public health experts and epidemiologists to help prevent the spread of infection and preserve life. Everyone wants to go back to church, including me, but not at the risk of increased infection and death, especially among the most vulnerable.

Churches are indeed essential for Christians, and the desire to worship together is a holy desire. But holy though your desire may be, it's not just about you and your desire. It's about protecting the other person, especially if you are, like many people, asymptomatic. Wearing masks, maintaining social distance and even not gathering in churches protects the other person…

I'm not sure why this is so hard to understand. If you have the measles and a doctor says, "Don't go to church because you might infect a woman who is pregnant," you don't rail at your doctor for "impinging on your freedom." You listen to the doctor, make the sacrifice, and stay home, as a way of protecting the other person.

All these preventive actions are ways of caring of the other person--that is, ways of loving.

You can read Martin’s whole post and watch his videos by following the link to his page.

By the way, Sunday was an important Holy Day in the Church calendar: the Feast of the Ascension. (I’m betting Paula White didn’t get that into Trump’s head. I’m betting she didn’t even bother to try.) But in most dioceses Catholics weren’t obligated to go to church to attend mass. In most dioceses they still couldn’t.

Needless to say, Trump doesn’t care that there are other kinds of houses of worship besides Christian churches, congregations of believers other than Christian, and they all don’t meet for services on Sundays. He doesn’t seem aware that even at Christian churches the faithful don’t need them only on Sunday and for things other than singing a few hymns, muttering half-hearted prayers, and trying not to fall asleep during the sermon.

And even more needless to say, he didn’t go to church Sunday.

Trump among the Mediums

Posted Wednesday afternoon, May 13, 2020.

The notorious early 20th Century medium Eusapia Palladino (center) levitating the table at a seance in 1909. Photo via Wikipedia.

In case you’re still wondering how Trump’s approval ratings continue to hover in the 40s instead of having plummeted into the 20s with only actual Nazis, Klu Kluxers, neo-Confederates, Second Amendment absolutists, and other racist lunatics and fools left supporting him: Submitted for your approval…

Eusapia Palladino, the great medium of the [pre-World War I] period, had something none of the other recent pretenders could claim---the backing of respected researchers…[These] scientists reported that Palladino, a Neopolitan...with fiery, protuberant eyes, could move furniture about the room by some unknown power. With a commanding stare she drew the seance table toward her or raised it into the air. Seated in her chair, she purportedly levitated herself while sitters clung to her. She raised a fist and violent raps were heard as if...someone were striking wood with a heavy mallet. And when the psychic emitted a breeze of cold air from a cleft in her forehead, it was joked that [one of the researchers, who was of slight and slender build] was carried away with it…

Certain that Signora Palladino was ready for a bigger stage, [the author, psychic investigator, a Palladino patron Hareward Carrington] had brought her to America in 1909 for a series of ballyhooed exhibitions that some said fattened his wallet. He had negotiated a magazine deal with McClure’s and was charging for an evening Eusapia a hefty $250 for a seance. Unfortunately, her psychic channel had somehow been lost or corrupted in the passage from the Old to the New World. By the end of a disastrous New York tour, the newspapers were calling her an unmitigated fraud. Her disappointed supporters still maintained that Palladino, though apt to cheat when frustrated, had produced unparalleled effects in Europe. But Eusapia was no longer the hope of the Psychical Research movement. She died just after the War, though here spirit was said to possess a medium who had inherited her power. ---from “The Witch of Lime Street: Science, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World” by David Jaher.

Note that even after Palladino had been shown up as a fake, supporters still made excuses for her and explained away the evidence she wasn’t what they believed she was and probably needed her to be for reasons of material, psychological, or egotistical self-interest.

People don’t like to change their minds, especially if in order to do it they have to admit they were wrong in the first place or stupid, and especially especially if changing their minds means giving up the benefits of their initial opinion. It’s why all con artists, snake oil salesmen, flim-flammers, cardsharps, shysters, fortune tellers, and quacks don’t have short careers that end in jail time or violence.

As if it wasn’t clear from his biography, evidence started piling up even before he was sworn in that Trump wasn’t up to the job. Every day since he’s shown himself to be incompetent, ignorant, lazy, irresponsible, dumb, and in a dozen other ways unfit to be President. But they stick with him. And I’m not talking about the cynics and opportunists who act as his apologists, enablers, and parasites in Congress and the media.

His voters, rank and file Republicans along with his mobs of hideous men and women, won’t---can’t---quit him. They make excuses. They place the blame on his (and their) political enemies. They insist that his frauds and failures are inventions; in fact they’re the very opposite of frauds and failures---they’re evidence of his greatness! They refuse to see him for what he is, and insist it’s we who are perversely seeing him as what he isn’t. They need him to be the successful leader who’s made America great again and going to keep it that way. They need this for many reasons, but the overarching reason is they need not to have been wrong. The magic must have worked or, at any rate, it soon will, just you wait!

Hereward Carrington, by the way, was a popular and well-regarded writer of self-help books with titles like "Vitality, Fasting, and Nutrition", "The Hygienic Way Of Life", and "Physical and Mental Factors in Health", along with books of a more esoteric nature---"Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them", "Death: The Causes and Phenomena, with Special Reference to Immortality", "The Invisible World", and..."Woman's Love Life"?

He also wrote how-to books for beginners on astronomy, chemistry, ventriloquism, and Hindu magic. He died in 1958, continuing to publish almost until the end. He conducted a decades-long quest to identify genuine mediums and expose the frauds. He had more success with the latter than with the former. He was quite a character himself, a mixture of fraud, showman, con artist, true believer, and technical, scientific, and mental and physical health expert.

Dr Carrington had joined the [American Society for Psychical Research] in 1900 as a precocious nineteen-year-old embarking on what would be a lifelong psychic journey…

He was an Anglo-American who lived in New York but had spent considerable time in Europe, as well as the Orient. He was fastidiously well-mannered, charming but elusive. He had a wife whom no one saw anymore and a PhD from a university in Oskaloosa, Iowa, that no one had heard of. At dinner parties---while the men discussed Ty Cobb’s hitting or whether the Naval Treaty would hold---Carrington might sit with one of their wives, discussing the premonitory dream she’d had when she was twelve. Some thought him a crank. Carrington was one of the first to introduce Americans to a mystical form of contortion called yoga. He wrote scores of books, not just on clairvoyance, but also on health and diet. He called for a return to the “natural food of man”---subsistence by means of raw fruits and vegetables. He had the wan ethereal look of psychic, but he was a former vaudeville magician who knew all the tricks and gaffes that spook mediums used in the seance.

Sounds like the perfect Oprah regular, doesn’t he, a forerunner of Dr Oz and Dr Phil? The ongoing dramedy of life in these United States is like a centuries-long run of Grey’s Anatomy: the cast of characters changes but the types and the overall format remains the same.