Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Things
It's all about "things." We have more things in one bedroom than we had in our whole house growing up in Winfield.
Things displayed. Things that are functional and useful. Things that are useless. Things that we cannot live without. Things that we COULD live without and never miss. Things that are lovely to look at. Things that beg the question "what are we ever going to do with these THINGS!" Blue things are my favorite, but that's just a personal preference. I'll take yellow in a pinch.
The thing of it is, we can never get away from the task of dealing with "things."
Yet:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I know, I know, but the latter is more than I can deal with on a rainy Wednesday in January.
Monday, January 21, 2019
Today
The mood is noticeably more somber as government, business and nonprofit leaders from around the world are gathering this week in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual World Economic Forum.
While the president's relationship with much of his base remains strong, his ties are fraying with voters in key pockets throughout the industrial Midwest.
Friday, January 18, 2019
How Trump Works
The torrent of political sewage from Donald Trump's White House and his enablers and defenders in the right-wing hate media is designed to keep you distracted. It is a test to wear down your defenses in order to prepare you for the next crime and undermining of your freedoms. This is how democracies die. Authoritarianism 101.
Trump, like other authoritarians and neo fascists also uses "national emergencies" and "crises" to gut the rule of law and democratic norms and procedures. It is now revealed--again--how Trump and his white supremacist ghoul Stephen Miller have actually created an artificial "crisis" at the U.S.-Mexico border as a tool for their extreme and very dangerous political agenda.
Conspiring to deny people their human rights and rights of due process are also be an impeachable offense. Here is a great summary of Trump's manufactured crisis and the racist and nativist lies which accompany it.
Silence is complicity. Passivity is encouragement to evil.
Dear America: what are you going to do about these crimes being committed in your name and paid for with your tax dollars?
Chauncey Devega
Tuesday, January 15, 2019
The Prez Honors Clemson
The Pure American Banality of Donald Trump’s White House Fast-Food Banquet
Donald Trump’s fast-food catering was an inevitable result of the government shutdown, which has left federal employees furloughed—including, presumably, the White House kitchen staff.
“Ithink we’re going to serve McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, with some pizza,” Donald Trump told the press in an interview on Monday morning, discussing the White House’s planned banquet that night for the Clemson University Tigers, in celebration of their victory in this year’s N.C.A.A. football championship. “I really mean it. It will be interesting. And I would think that’s their favorite food. So we’ll see what happens.” As with so many Trump promises, it could have been just a gust of wind. So it was something of a surprise—a small, mild surprise, like a sudden itch on the sole of your foot—when, on Monday night, the photos began to roll out of Trump grinning behind a mahogany dining table arranged with silver trays bearing stacked boxes of Filet-o-Fishes and Quarter Pounders, and McNuggets, and a few dozen of something in paper wrappers from Wendy’s, and piles of anonymous-looking salads, and a couple of pizzas, and Burger King fries that some hapless aides had decanted into paper cups bearing the Presidential seal.
Far be it from me to defend any of Trump’s choices, but serving a meal of fast food at a fancy gathering is not inherently a bad idea. In fact, it can be wonderful. A few dozen wings and thighs from Popeyes or a Chick-fil-A nugget tray make for a festive dinner-party centerpiece. Shake Shack-catered weddings are all over Pinterest. No less glittery an event than the Vanity FairOscar party has served In-N-Out burgers to its throngs of the gorgeous and powerful. There is, at many of these occasions, an element of class-based pantomime—for guests invited to eat fast-food burgers in a designer dress, it’s the fast food that is presented as a novelty, not the couture. But the culinary pleasures are real: fried chicken, famously, only gets more delicious as it cools down, and, if you hire In-N-Out and Shake Shack to do the catering at your event, they show up in person and sling their burgers fresh.
Trump’s bulk order, on the other hand, was a dinner fighting against the odds. One imagines those poor sandwiches steaming limply inside their cardboard boxes on the drive to the White House, and during the fuss over arranging them on their silver platters (with sauces sorted by type and piled high in silver gravy boats) and properly lighting the gilded candelabra. Then came the photo shoot: Trump, centered beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, flinging his arms out behind this table of quick-serve abundance, in a gesture that’s equal parts ownership and invitation. There is a particular awfulness to McDonald’s or Burger King once it’s gone cold. By the time America’s greatest collegiate football players arrived, in their navy blazers and Sunday shoes, to pick up porcelain plates and work their way through this cardboard buffet, the French fries would have grown cold and mealy, the burger buns soggy, the precise half slice of American cheese on each Filet-o-Fish sandwich hardened to a tough, flavorless rectangle of yellow.
Trump’s affinity for fast food has been well documented since the earliest days of his public life. In the nineties and early two-thousands, he filmed commercials for Pizza Hut and McDonald’s. On the campaign trail, at a televised CNN town hall, he explained to Anderson Cooper that he enjoyed “a fish delight,” referring to the Filet-o-Fish. He continued, “The Big Macs are great. The Quarter Pounder. It’s great stuff.” Trump seemed to relish posing with fast food, especially the winking high-low of Instagram photos of himself eating value meals on his private plane: here’s Donald Trump grinning with a bucket of K.F.C., there’s Donald Trump grinning with a Big Mac and a cardboard sleeve of fries. His former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski wrote, in “Let Trump Be Trump,” his book chronicling the campaign, that “on Trump Force One there were four major food groups: McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza, and Diet Coke,” and that his boss’s go-to McDonald’s order was two Big Macs, two Filet-o-Fishes, and a chocolate milkshake. (After a horrified outcry, Lewandowski clarified that the 2,630-calorie meal is more healthful than it appears, because Trump makes a point of removing the buns.) After taking office, according to a Politico report, Trump reportedly preferred a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with cheese (lots of ketchup, no pickles) to the White House kitchen staff’s iteration.
Trump, in typical form, spun Monday’s catering as ultimately the fault of his political opponents, an inevitable result of his own elective government shutdown, which has left hundreds of thousands of federal employees furloughed—including, presumably, the White House kitchen staff. Trump, a purported billionaire, made a big deal out of the fact that he paid for the fast food out of his own pocket. But we might wonder if there is also something more pure in his decision to bring in a drive-through feast for the history books: an attempt, however opportunistic, for a man who loves fast food to fulfill his straightforward desires—a gilded hall filled with as many fried and griddled patties as money can buy, more Filet-o-Fishes and Quarter Pounders than one body could possibly consume, the teetering towers a quantifiable testament to his Presidential power. “We went out and we ordered American fast food, paid for by me,” Trump boasted to the reporters gathered before the fast-food spread, grinning his fast-food grin beneath a brooding portrait of Abraham Lincoln, painted in 1869, by George Peter Alexander Healy, and praised by Lincoln’s eldest son as the greatest likeness ever captured of the man. “Lots of hamburgers, lots of pizza. Three hundred hamburgers. Many, many French fries.”
Monday, January 14, 2019
Twist of Fate
The cruel twist of fate is that the drafters of our Constitution in Philadelphis in 1787 did not trust "the people" in a nationwide popular vote at the time to elect our President, and rightly so. They came up with the Electoral College at the last minute as a compromise and a buffer to the electorate at the time at large. The cruel twist of fate is that the Electoral College in 2016 elected the very type of person they were going to avoid by erecting their buffer.
Active or Passive? Same Damage
Trump is either an active or passive agent of Putin and Russia abetted by the Republican Party. The scandal will continue to unfold. The evidence is coming into view for all to see. If the goal is to destabilize the country, it's working. How will the American people respond? This is the greatest scandal in American history.
Sunday, January 13, 2019
William James
In Praise of William James
I’ve devoted a significant chunk of this one life I have to reading, though I really don’t believe that books offer any greater chance of salvation than, say, windsurfing. Yet I can’t help feeling that I was saved, for a while, by William James.
About 10 years ago I was hurting; not from a broken heart so much as an exhausted one, having spent several of the previous years caring about people whose own hearts and minds were in states of distress. When I picked up “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” an edited version of 20 lectures that James delivered in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902, I wasn’t expecting it to be a profound balm, but that’s what it was.
I immediately read more work by and about James. I began to verbally annotate everyday life to friends by referring to things he had done or said, with the same frequency with which I had once (no less annoyingly, I’m sure) called on scenes from “The Simpsons.” He was a Swiss Army knife of psychological and emotional insight.
It’s a cliché for people unswayed by religion to still believe in William James, to allow him access to their souls because of the way he sneaks in through their brains. A psychologist and philosopher (and oldest brother of the novelist Henry), James was not a follower of any church, and had little academic interest in institutional religion, but he was obsessively curious about the inner experiences of believers.
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“Varieties” in the book’s title is a bit misleading. James cataloged one type of experience: the personal; the intimate. The subtitle, “A Study in Human Nature,” is perhaps a more accurate reflection of its contents. James’s subject was not theories of heaven nor different types of congregations; it was each congregant at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling, alone. His sensitivity was to the reasons we feel compelled to believe — among them our “conscience,” “helplessness” and “incompleteness” — and how belief might reward those reasons.
A substantial percentage of the book is given over to personal testimonies, sometimes quoted at length, taken from memoirs, pamphlets and other researchers’ work. These testimonies cover sudden conversion (“I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me”) and despair (“O God! What a misfortune to be born! Born like a mushroom, doubtless between an evening and a morning”) and mysticism (“I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence”).
Four of the most memorable lectures in the book — two each on the subjects of “healthy-mindedness” and the “sick soul” — consider these two categories of people at length: those whose disposition is “organically weighted on the side of cheer” and those who are depressive or congenitally pessimistic, to be brief. These chapters are my personal D.S.M. I consult them to find beautifully articulated reasons to go easier on myself and other people, and to expect more from all of us at the same time; to feel the fullness and complexity of both our vulnerabilities and our capabilities.
Sick souls range from the easily irritated (think Larry David) to the self-loathing (Charlie Brown) to the pathologically melancholic (Tolstoy, who wrote: “Is there in life any purpose which the inevitable death which awaits me does not undo and destroy?”). It feels safe to say that most of this book’s devoted fans — and it has many of them, as one learns — are sick souls. In creating a taxonomy of them and sympathetically describing their needs, James makes them feel, to use modern psychological parlance, seen.
To James, the very broad category of religious experience was inextricably human, and to attempt to argue people out of it would have struck him as similar to trying to argue someone out of right-handedness. “Taking creeds and faith-states together, as forming ‘religions,’ ” he wrote, “and treating these as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question of their ‘truth,’ we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions of mankind.”
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James compared trendier systems of religious thought (ideas that resemble what we call New Age) to the gospels because of “the adequacy of their message to the mental needs of a large fraction of mankind.” His pragmatism led him to not care whether it was natural constitution or willful decision, systems age-old or newfangled, that led someone to a life filled with meaning and consolation. He even freely admitted that “reducing inner discord is a general psychological process, which may take place with any sort of mental material, and need not necessarily assume the religious form.” Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote: “Some of the enchantment of ‘The Varieties’ comes from its being a kind of race with James running on both teams — here he is the cleverest skeptic and there the wildest man in a state of religious enthusiasm.”
In the space allotted here, I can’t begin to enumerate all of the book’s delights, the wisdom it conveys on every page. Not to mention the warmth of James’s voice. The introductions to most important works from more than a century ago serve as sense-makers, maps to consult before diving into the thicket. With James’s work, there is the opposite effect — no matter how illuminating the introduction, you can barely wait (and sometimes can’t, skipping ahead) to get to James. He is the rare historical figure who, across eras, can speak clearly for himself.
The British philosopher A. J. Ayer once wrote that James “was in frequent, if friendly, dispute” with certain peers. The notion of friendly dispute is increasingly alien to us, and this might be the thing that feels most poignantly lost about James’s temperament. Even as he quarreled with someone on the page, including himself, he exuded generosity. His voice is instructive but not didactic; opinionated but not at all polemical — in fact, anti-polemical. James originated a brand of American thinking that can feel on the verge of extinction, but it lives and thrives in the preserve of his books.
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