Another Short Post on Race

People say the United States is on the edge of a constitutional crisis when in fact the nation has gone over the edge and it is about race. Masked government agents detain and make disappear long established as well as “criminal” people on the basis of them looking Hispanic or speaking Spanish or around places where illegal aliens might be found. The Supreme Court has decided in early September that such apprehensions are justified because the detainees can be released if they are found not to be illegals. That violates both the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments which has for hundreds of years meant that people can be detained for probable cause of a particular crime rather than general suspicion or suggestive features. I don’t know why the American people are not up in arms about this authoritarian move but life seems pretty ordinary despite this insult to the Constitution but after all the Harris campaign did not make much headway with the American people in that democracy was on the line in this election and Democrats today are going back to inflation and economic issues as the basis of their challenge to the Trump administration rather than getting to the core issue of constitutionalism. What the Supreme Court now allows can be used to stop anyone of color or race or political affiliation to be stopped and detained for any suspicion, which means most people and that is an attack on the heart ofAmerica.

Trump’s racist impulses are overt and of longstanding, back to the days when his father discriminated against Blacks in his housing developments and the federal government went after that for that. He came down the escalator to announce his candidacy for the Presidency in 2015 by excoriating Hispanics for having calves like cantaloupes because they were carrying drugs with them over the border. Trump has said that Norwegians can come to America but not Arabs or people from “Shithole” nations. He said Haitian legal immigrants were literally eating cats and dogs inSpringfield, Ohio. He treats inner cities as pestholes rather than struggling populations of the sort of areas from which white ethnics emerged. He doesn’t hate all minorities. He is more supportive of Israel than any prior President and gave the Jews the backhanded compliment when Trump was running casinos that he wanted his accountants to be wearing yamulkas, but all things considered he is the most racist President since Woodrow Wilson, who expelled Black workers from the federal civil service and does worse than Wilson in trying, as abetted by Governor Abbott of Texas and others to eliminate voting rights protections or gerrymander out minority districts. 

People are blase about the present situation and it traces back to the unwillingness of Democrats to ask Republicans again and again whether they supported Trump fomenting the insurrection on Jan. 6th, 2021. Unmasking his racism would be a worthy companion piece. Don’t be civil so as to bring down the heat when the other side undermines American principles. As the Senate hearing yesterday with Pam Bondi showed, the two slides have only contempt for one another. I don’t know how it will end.


A Short Post on the Shutdown

The shutdown is a constitutional way to  confront Trump’s unconstitutional and just very bad policies and statements.

I think I am insufficiently knowledgeable about the inside baseball of politics to know what is going on behind the shutdown, however much the significance of the shutdown is clear and everyone decides whether or not to support it. Four months ago, Chuck Schumer and some of his Democratic Senators went  over to vote with the Republicans to support a continuing resolution so as not to shut down the government on the grounds that Trump would use a shutdown to fire a lot more federal workers more easily than otherwise and his Progressive allies thought that a bad idea but this time Schumer is standing up to Trump and Trump is threatening publicly to do in a few days just what Schumer said would happen. What changed? Maybe Schumer decided that the Medicare and the Affordable Care Act cuts were so serious that he had to take a stand regardless of the consequences. Or maybe the Progressives pressed Schumer on the issue and he gave in. The Progressives think there has to be more confrontation with Trump and not wait it out until the midterm election which Schmer prefers because the Constitution might be in a shambles to wait that long and I tend to agree that Democrats should resist Trump in every way possible that is legal. Moreover, the polls, according to a thousand member focus group by the Washington Post, support the Democrats, with twice as many blaming the Republicans as the cause of the shutdown, which is what happened as well in past shutdowns.  So Schumer is reading public opinion rather than the Progressives on how to play this rather than to accommodate to keep Trump from being even worse. So the Democrats are getting a shutdown on their own issue rather than a Republican issue but the Democrats will gain politically. 

Within a few days of the shutdown, the tone of Democratic support of the shutdown has shifted. Though minority leader Jeffries still insists itis about sustaining medicare and obamacare , others, including Sen. Adam Schiff, have enlarged the confrontation. The President has refused to pay for programs already authorized. He has fired people illegally. He is punishing only democratic cities and states from getting funds for infrastructure. He says Portland is in flames, which it is not, just like saying Springfield, Ohio legal Haitians were eating cats and dogs. He tells the military to wage wat on Democratic cities and regards Democrats as full of hatred, evil and Satanic, when I think only the first two applies to Republicans for cutting off nutrition to malnourished African children even though ngos would take the supplies and distribute the aid before they expired but the State Department refused and no Republican protested. There is nothing to compromise. Jeffries should take up a sombrero and a moustache along with all the other House Democrats as a badge of honor and so to make fun of the President. I don’t want the shutdown to end before the President and the Vice President, who abets the President with his lies and misrepresentations, to resign. It is going to be a long shutdown.

The virtues of politics as an object of contemplation of what it is as a thing and as a participant is that it is clear and easy rather than secretive. It is not a Manoichien world where opposing elites battle above the fray of the common man as Whittaker Chambers thought was the case because he thought the final war wou;ld be between the Communists and the ex=-Communists. To the contrary, the confrontation took place in full view during tbhe Cold War and everyone was aware of it and took sides on whether the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Vietnam was a good thing and it ended with the Reagan=-Gorbachev meeting in Iceland, though I suspect that not all of the Reykjavik Accords have all been disclosed these thirty five years later. Nor is domestic confrontation like it is in the recent very well done but fanciful movie “One Battle After the Other” where an oligarchic cabal represents white people in a war against Mexicans who are armed with secret codes and secret confederates everywhere. The oligarchs are in fact just out there buying Supreme Court Justices and giving gigantic campaign donations as are their opponents and legislation results unless taxes for the rich when the oligarchs win and gigantic campaign donations are offered to the opposition, not that the contributions don’t cancel one another off because what matters is whether the nominee is personable or not. So politics is clear in that what you need to know about it is apparent. Politics is also easy in that you need no expertise to participate not needing to know the expertise required to run a supermarket or a hardware store but relying on whatever information or rumors a voter comes across and apply whatever common sense, as it is called, or ideological framework it has to inform itself. Politics is not in the stars but in peoples selves. So an educated person can decide to rid their hands of the matter, deciding that religion or cultivating one’s garden is the way to live, but I prefer this sport and form of co;;ective interaction as a way to understand something always engaging, a never ending soap opera with new faces and struggles and carrying great moment for how a collectivity will proceed and worthy because it is not opaque but transparent. Politics in our time can muddy or cleanse and see it happen, and that will occur with the shutdown.


Slogans, Then and Now

Slogans are effective forms of communication ranging from those which tersely summarize a point of view to those which make a social structure into a point of view to those which establish categories that effectively deny there is an opposing point of view.

George Orwell thought that slogans like “War is Peace” would obfuscate or even abolish thinking, an intellectual in his dystopia suggesting that talk could be disconnected from higher brain functions. Orwell was incorrect. Slogans have been available for millennia as ways to craft simple but deep messages and some of them are artful enough to persuade large numbers of people while others fail to be convincing. Trump renamed the “Department of Defense” the “Department of War” because the new name showed the United States to be more bellicose but everyone knew what the department did by whatever it was named. “Black Lives Matter” was an imperfectly crafted slogan in that it was to be understood as meaning “Black Lives Also Matter” but is treated by its opponents as meaning “Only Black Lives Matter”. A more successful slogan which doesn’t even use words is the multi-hued LGBTQ+ flag which means the group has a flag, which means it is a group out in the open and constitutes like other flags a corporate group that amounts to an ethnic group each having its own distinct but respectable customs rather than living in the shadows. There are any number of other slogans that have come into history that shape history, some even to abolish the very idea that they negate, and let us consider some prominent ones.

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Talking Past One Another

Wulbert’s observation that people often go past one another when they try to communicate is a deep insight to which I supply examples, most particularly one from “Pride and Prejudice”.

The sociologist Roland Wulbert presented to me what I thought of as a theory of social control though he insists that the four sociological items he compared were neither a theory or about social control but were items that played on whether items were named or not. We will see. His first item is a norm, which he defines as a habit or social practice which is not named until it is violated. Norms include making small talk at a party, or working nine to five, or not being aggressive towards women until they are asked. When a violation occurs, the event pops out as being a guide for behavior. People seem sullen or shy when they don’t chitchat, as when happens when Darcy does not do so at the party where he first meets Elizabeth Bennet and people who work at night are noticed fir not being in accord with the usual routine and overly aggressive men are noted as being so by women among themselves or even with male friends. For my part, I am not sure there is even such a thing as a norm in that I think people are well aware of how they behave and reason for doing what they do. They engage in chit chat so as to ease dealing with strangers they do not know well enough to engage in deep discussion that might give offense. They work nine to five because that is what employers set as the times of collective service so as to make get going. Women carry “mad money” should a beau get fresh. Norms are always practical or conventional and people know when one or the other applies, an open hand an offer of friendship even without knowing it originally meant not carrying a weapon.

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Ideology. Party. Culture

Progressivism and Populism challenge Liberalism and Conservatism as tjhe leading American ideologies, political parties and cultures.

There is a continuum of political ideas that range from those that are more to less rationalized and which coalesce at various points as forms of social groupings Three of these nodal points are ideology, party and culture. Conservative and Liberal as well as Progressive and Populist are currently available configurations of ideas that are all three.

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Charlie Kirk's Decorum

I liked Charlie Kirk when I saw his YouTube videos of his format that any topic is up for discussion at meetings with college students, at one of which he was assassinated Wednesday. I liked when he took up Feminists who couldn’t say what a woman was and he took up Hamas supporters who were very ill informed. I didn’t agree with him when he was out of his depth and didn’t see the difference between Soviet Communism and Socialism. Maybe he should have finished his undergraduate education. An autodidact will have a lot of holes in his education. But many educated people also think they know more than they do, including me.

What I liked best about him was the manner and content of his discussion with students. He was pointed, humorous and, most important, never tried to demean his interlocators, only to make a shambles of their intellectual positions. He was respectful, just the way a debater is supposed to be, which is not what political advocates and especially politicians do not do. 

There were two immediate standard responses on the news of his death. David Axelrod said that both sides should draw back and consider carefully their remarks so that people recognize that they are human beings rather than just partisan advocates. Elizabeth Warren provided a different take. She said that Trump should be blamed for having fomented violence, and there is some truth in that in that Trump is notorious for villainizing and personalizing his opponents ever since he appeared in 2016 presidential debates and talked about sleepy Jeb and little Marco. So the Republicans are more the offenders to decorum in politics rather than equal offenders with Democrats. I remember when Jesse Jackson during a Presidential Primary Debate in 1984 confronted Phil Donahue, a talk show host trying to play moderator, who was being sarcastic. Jackson  said all of these candidates deserved respect. It was a grandstand gesture to answer a grandstand attack but still deserves notice as the honorable custom for how people for high office should be treated.

 Oh yes. There was the trucker who said  on the evening of te assassination, “This is war”, disregarding or even not knowing that two Democratic Minnesota state senators had been shot in their home a few months ago. If this is war, like the movie “Civil War”, then you are entitled to kill the President or a trucker, and we haven’t come to that. In fact, the anti-Trump people have showed remarkable forebearance. They have not accused the newscast Trumpites of being in the league of insurrectionists, as all supporters of Trump were, as there is plenty of evidence of that from the Jan. 6th investigation and the tape ofTrump trying to fix the vote in Georgia. Trump nor his allies have ever offered an explanation of those matters and the rest of us have let go because the judicial system was too slow to bring Trump to court..

Cable news commentators on MSNBC are also violative of political decorum. They go after the persons rather than their positions. Lawrence O’Donnell showed the video of hair dye streaking down Rudolph Guiliani’s cheeks so as to defame him. MSNBC shows Trump to be having intestinal difficulties, the back of his pants stained. More undignified for the ones who present these facts than the ones in physical distress. Remember that photographers did not take pictures of FDR in a wheelchair though later on when addressing Congress about the Yalta meeting he said he would have to sit because carrying around a lot of iron was tiring. We had come a long way to when the Miami Herald broke the story of Gary Hart dallying with Donna Rice in 1988, dooming his Presidential nomination or Ken Starr trying to doom Clinton’s Presidency because of Clinton’s liaison, hardly an affair, with Monica Lewinsky. Nor do I care about connecting Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. There are bigger fish to fry, such as cancelling USAID so that food packets for malnourished children in Africa will not be distributed to them.

So we lost in Charlie Kirk a model of decorum even if his President, his principal, does not exemplify that.


Custom and Law

Custom is the Conservative ethos for how to live while law intrudes on that in a revolutonary way even if law becomes hedges to protect custom and avoid chaages in custom.

If Conservatives are thought of as a point of view which looks back to a better time, then how far back will they go to find a Utopia back then? It is often said that they want to return to the Fifties when women and Blacks knew their place and the United States was the King of the Walk and prosperity was busting out all over. But it is hard to be nostalgic, which means a degree of remembrance of a real event, for a time now seventy years old as the state of stability when in fact it was a time ever changing, rushing through McCarthyism and the deepening Cold War and Existential angst. And Conservatives now acknowledge by and large that the end of Jim Crow was a good thing.

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The Value of Sargent's Paintings

“Value” or “quality” ae the same word that describes art and also real life and can be applied to John Singer Sargent paintings. When the term means  “comparative”, Sargent’s work is not of the very, very best, but if the term means “distinctive”, then Sargent accomplishes greatness.

John Singer Sargent uses the word “value” in a number of different ways as do we all. His paintings have value because they can sell for money at a high price. His paintings have value because of their artfulness and significance. Value also is a word that applies to the ton or shade of a color. Value also means moral weight, and we can wonder whether Sargent’s paintings are edifying enough to make the Great Beauties of his time as moral exemplars rather than ornaments, though we do treat movie stars as role models regardless of their morality. 

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Lot and His Daughters

Whatever Feminists say about the patriarchical society at the time of “Genesis”, the sraightforward fact is that the women portrayed there are more complex and with more strengh and resiliance than do the men.

Feminists portray the patriarchal world of the early parts of “Genesis” as one which engaged in the oppression of women. That view makes the elementary mistake of confusing setting with plot. Women do hold subservient positions in the social structures; that is taken for granted by the texts. The important point, however, is that the social arrangements of tribal and nomadic life are described rather than advocated, for to advocate suggests that the arrangements are problematical, which they were not, while, on the other hand, the moral qualities of the people observed are problematical, and are therefore to be judged. That distinction made, the literature from patriarchal times has some very pointed things to say about how men and women get on with one another. Indeed, what George Bernard Shaw said was happening with the post-Victorian “New Woman”, that she was becoming opinionated and feisty and independent and fully able to handle her own intellectual and emotional needs, seems to have been largely accepted by those in Exilic Persia who edited the Old Testament, which gives some additional credence to Harold Bloom’s claim that the primary editor might well have been a woman, and certainly gives credence to the idea that there is something very secular about family relations in patriarchal times. Secularism presumes independence for women in that they are part of the workforce, make their own decisions about marriage, rather than leave that to their families, and have all the weaknesses and strengths of the other sex. Indeed, the absence of human rights or an adequate place in the workforce remains a cardinal indicator of whether, as in Saudi Arabia, a country has not yet emerged into secularism. A world of suppressed women is just what the secular world overcomes, testament to which are all the popular songs of the Twenties and Thirties that made love and marriage freely chosen rather than arranged and so the tangible meaning of a child of an immigrant generation taking his or her place among the modern people of America.

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The Mamdani Effect

Take heed Democrats. The Democratic nominee for New York City mayor is a Socialist and, much worse, an antisemite.

New York City has had a foreign policy ever since Peter Styvesant was Governor of New Amsterdam and was instructed from the Netherlands to accept Jewish immigrants from Surinam even though he didn’t want them. In the second part of the twentieth century, candidates for mayor visited “the Three I Ring”, which meant Italy, Ireland and Israel, so as to appeal to their constituents. Ed Koch refused to meet with Yasser Arafat when he visited New York to attend the United Nations and Fidel Castro made a point of staying at a Harlem hotel when he came to New York. It has been a long time since Richard Hatcher became the first Black to become mayor of a major city when he became mayor of Gary, Indiana in the Sixties and now most major cities are led by people of color or women or both. And now Zoltan Mamdani, a follower of Islam and a naturalized citizen from Uganda has won the Democratic nomination to be mayor of New York, the only Muslim mayor of a big city. New York belies Tip O'Neill's old adage that politics is always local. It is always bigger than that as in a mayoral race in New York or a Presidential race taken control; by national events and figures. 

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Johnson's Deep Conservatism

Samuel Johnson develops and exemplifies a deep, perennial philosophuy of Conservatism, whereby unchanging and distinctive ideas concerning authority and inevitability is to be compared with the Liberal idea of remediation and the distinctiveness of individuals rather than the Conservative bent to see institutions as incomparale to one another.

You might be confused or misled as to Johnson’s conservatism if you only consult his politics because he feels sorry for the poor rather than blame them for their misery in his essay “Capital Punishment” (Rambler 114, 1751). Johnson argues that it is disproportionate to give the ultimate punishment for anything other than the ultimate crime of murder. It cheapens the act. And, practically speaking, he is in agreement with contemporary Liberals that applying capital punishment to a robbery might lead criminals to kill people so as to avoid being caught for a robbery because there is nothing left to lose, either one getting the death penalty. Johnson is therefore less committed to the idea of increasing penalties in the service of the necessary ideal of law and order as fundamental to social life in general, looting or similar crimes a threat to the very social order, a threat to the social compact, rather than an unseemly excess beyond the customary and regular societal peace that presides in most times.

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Past and Present

Past and present are two tenses that are two kinds of being and some late or just past twentieth century novelists elaborate that while a later generation largely does not.

Time is always ironic, As the past, ever mentally marked as the past, moves on to successive presents, the mind is capable of comparing the two and the many to see what is surprisingly the same and what is surprisingly different and decide which of these times are real and which of any number of them are false or simply one a paler image of the others. So to a Christian, what happened two thousand years ago remains lively and thinks of many present moments as replaying past dramas of atonement and salvation and the lifestyles of ancient Judea. The present is recapitulation. On the other hand, people can be amazed at how different things have become, fully aware and validated by the present, as when I reflect that a surgeon that saved my life a quarter century ago saved my still existent life while people just a few years before had died of the condition. The present, in that instance, is progress rather than recapitulation. Freud, for his part, thought the past was a very lively part of the present in that it spoke in symbols of what mattered in the past even if not part of present recollection. But the mind knows what it remembers and hath wrought what it may.

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Explanations of Warfare

The standard explanations of warfare rather than the excuse for a war, are short in number but all unsatisfactory. because no explanation explains all wars.

George Marshall thought that Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War” was the best book ever to explain foreign policy. He was perhaps thinking of the conference in Melitus where the representatives of the opposing sides met behind closed doors and talked to one another truthfully, each presenting why the other side did in their own interests. The peopl from Militus lost the arguments and so they were massacred. A terrible object lesson of interest over ideology. But that vivid example of warfare shows how diplomacy is conducted rather than why wars arise. Mostly, histories of war describe the process that take place in preparation, execution and aftermath of war, as when Robert Sherwood described in “Roosevelt and Hopkins”, how FDR conducted warfare from the White House. rather than the purposes of ear which are the motivations leaders and population decide to go into war, such as to please, god, nation or morality, the number of those motivations few and often repeated and one or another of those applied to different circumstances, as when Mahan proposed that sea power projected influence onto many shoes and so warfare had a military purpose even though he restricted his examples to before the age of steam but his applications were best exemplified in World War II, where American sea power projected across the Pacific and the Battle of the North Atlantic every much vied with the Battle of Britain to make Great Britain secure. There was victory at sea but also on land. However, the theories of those motives of war that have been offered in the last 2500 years mostly arise and are applied at a particular stage of social development and I will offer at the end of my essay a theory of war that is viable only, I would say, since the middle of the nineteenth century.

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Sleazy and Serious Politics

The Jeffrey Epstein case shows the differences in the Democratic and Republican parties.

When I taught introductory sociology and courses on social problems, and when AIDS was introduced to the world and all we knew at the time were the demographics of the disease, I would discuss with my students the inferences to be drawn from it so as to show how such inferences were made and keep my students up on current events. Haitian men seemed prevalent and were only later revealed to be homosexual because homosexuality was so frowned upon by the Haitian community. It was known, however, that children did not catch AIDS from the others in the family who shared utensils and a common living space, and so the disease was not transmitted by air or touching surfaces. When AIDS was discovered to be a STD, I would discuss what kinds of unions, what form of copulation, might lead to an infection and I did not feel queasy about discussing these matters with my mixed sex undergraduates because this was, after all, a biological matter, no different from discussing Malthus, who said that population increased more quickly than agricultural productivity. 

On the other hand, I did feel embarrassed discussing, some years later,  the stained blue dress Monica Lewinsky kept without cleaning it as evidence of her liaison with Bill Clinton which she revealed to Linda Tripp who told Roger Starr and that got rolling the Clinton impeachment. But I did talk about it, as well, such as concerning Clinton’s insistence that he had not had “sex” with her because he used that term only when there was mutual satisfaction. It was all so sordid and not befitting people of high political stature, just as it was unappealing to learn about Gary Hart’s dalliance with Donna Rice, which destroyed his presidential campaign, and the romantic entanglements of FDR, which were hidden, or the unfaithfulness of Martin Luther King, Jr., where J. Edgar Hoover tried to drive King into suicide but to no avail.

And now the nation is confronted with the Jeffrey Epstein case and whether Trump was entangled with that and I also find the whole matter sleezy, not a proper topic of discussion in high politics because it demeans everyone touched by it including the female journalists cloaked with their own respectability but hardened to deal with unpleasant things because of their duties, like policemen or female lawyers. ButI do not want to hear about such things because however unfortunate are the victims, and that criminal penalties should be assigned, these are not matters of state, issues that turn the nation in one direction or another, such as international relations or tax and welfare policy, which impact vast numbers in the popu;ace. Both Republicans and Democrats violate their vows and people have done so through history, and we make progress for the nation by improving, in general, the condition of women so that none of them need to be exploited. Why care so much about sexual malfeasance in high places?

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan is my current pin up girl because she wants to take the high road when Democrats confront Republicans. She thinks Democrats can win if they recapture the economic issues; I hope a generation from now she can run for President. She is a centrist Democrat who appeals to Republicans as well. But I think she is mistaken about the electorate. The economy was doing pretty well. Wages were up and inflation was low even if it did not result in de-inflation to make up for the inflation of the Covid years. That was not the engine for Trump. It was immigration and the deep state and Republicans and what are called low information voters who adopted those issues even though they told opinion polls that economics were the reason for supporting Trump because that was a more respectable reason to offer. They liked the disagreeable man because he was disagreeable: crude and angry. They wanted a strong man, cynical that leaders could be noble and considered, like Henry Fonda when he played a President. It is hardly comforting that recent polls show that immigration and decimating the bureaucracy are no longer in favor once Trump started doing what he promised to do. They voted for him and there are no reruns for elections, just the next one, but I am not sure Republicans will change their hearts now thatTrump is no longer on the ballot.

Republicans win by doing Republican things and Democrats win when they do Democratic things. Republicans since the end of the Second World War have been plagued by conspiracy theories and more establishment Republicans have had to deal with that. Joseph McCarthy insisted on numerous Communists in government agencies but always changed the figures of how many and shuffled his papers at a press conference so asto indicate information he never provided, just as MAGA people insist there is a great conspiracy of pedofile bureaucrats without providing information, as if they had lost the ability to distinguish speculation about terrible things with evidence. But while McCarthy was talking about something that was real, the Communist movement in the United States, which was in fact trivial and honeycombed with FBI agents, the MAGA people are so intellectually impoverished that they cannot think of any greater threat than a pedophile ring to assign as what is rotting America. They might have focussed instead on the diabolical nature,. let us say, of Hollywood and Broadway. MAGA does vie with elite universities as having subverted America, insisting on more representation for Conservative professors and students, without considering that the brightest prefer to abjure Conservatism because MAGAs insist that politics is a faith that need not be explained, just extolled. Moreover, moderate Republicans also engage in an upward climb against what George W. H. Bush considered “voodoo economics”, the height of which are current MAGAs voting for the biggest deficit in relation to GDP since the Second World War.

The Democratic Party, for its part, has been ever since FDR on a long march to expanded entitlements. Obama was in line with that in thinking he had accomplished only one big accomplishment in that direction, the Affordable Care Act, and no more than such an increment could be expected in any one Administration. Sen. Slotkin is in line with other Democrats in saying it is always the economy, stupid. But that is not the truth. Civil liberties, immigration and the Constitution were on the ballot in 2020 and it was right for Harris to pit democracy versus authoritarianism. The fault was not in the message but in the voting public which failed to understand the key issues to be what they were.

Moreover, to our surprise, Trump in his Big Beautiful Bill is out to overcome incrementalism in the other direction by expelling millions and millions of immigrants, thrashing the bureaucracy, and violating civil and criminal law. Trump may be ignorant but he is still audacious. Why can't he make Canada the fifty-first state? Some Republicans these days who are outspoken Christians condemn the assaults on women by Epstein and his ilk, are nevertheless willing to accept allowing foodstuffs to be destroyed rather than sent to malnourished  children. They are hypocrites. They forget the coals in their own eyes. Jesus must weep.

The Jeffrey Epstein case will pass. Despite the Democrats thinking otherwise, the MAGAs will not eat their own. Today, July 22nd, Speaker Johnson closed Congress by going into summer recess so as to avoid a bill to open the Epstein files and the suits to open the files will be bogged down in technicalities, as has happened with past attempts to make Trump responsible for his actions. Just as well. I don’t want the public to make decisions on the basis of sleaze.. Let us get on with more serious politics.


American Legends

The major legends of America are all thwarted but the American ambition to make every person purposeful remains the goal of the government.

A myth is an extraordinary event, at least partly magical, which explains the nature of existence. Ovid;s stories are myths and the Oedipus story is a secularized version of a myth, the existence of human life to be ex[lained by the fateful relations that reside in families. As Harold Bloom might have put it, Sy. Paul engaged in a deep misinterpretation of the myth of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden to explain that people are essentially evil and so deserve their fates. Woe be this desolate perspective, I would suggest that the Eden story, like the creation story, are added on at the beginning by redactors to provide a universal history to the corpus of historically based works that follow. Myths are interpolated into the Odyssey, less so in the Iliad, and even into modernist novelists like Joyce, who retains his Catholic roots, or Kafka, who turns it into a joke, the doctor getting into bed with his female patient, a clear application of a bedside manner.

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The Rape of Dinah

Women are important protagonists during a context of the patriarchical society of “Genesis”

There is another way of appreciating the stories of women in the patriarchal setting if one casts aside a preoccupation with the oppression of women.:Legends tell of the origins of civilized familial relations, or at least what would seem required to make family relations recognizably current in the court of an oriental despotism such as the Persia of the Exile. How, the redactoress might have imagined, could these primitive people have moved themselves beyond being primitive in those spheres of activities recognized as being under the influence of women?  The redactoress is remarkably insightful about what makes families workable as distinctive units caught up in the larger social structure. 

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Charity and Politics

The political process undermines the impulse to engage in Christian(and Jewish) charity largely because, I think, that Social Darwinism remains  a strong current of thought for many Americans.

All religions applaud charity, which is understood as giving assistance to the needy, whether the poor or the sick or the drug addled. And yet in politics, legislators and executive officials work hard to short circuit or avoid providing charity, however profound their sense of religious belief. Why do people circumvent their own deepest feelings about a feeling and belief that is a simple idea and feeling and a fundamental part of their beliefs?.The reason is that charity is not at all simple and neither is politics, which can be thought of only by some as a vehicle of charity.

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Contra-God

God is meaningless as a concept, has no special emotion, and is purposeless, but people adhere to it anyway for other reasons.

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and atheist who jousts regularly with theists. Dawkins says that he cannot disprove the existence of God but that he has never found an argument for the proof of God that is convincing and that would seem sufficient for me and him to think that there is no God. If no argument ever works, what is a God so obscure as to allow a reason for His existence? Wouldn't it have been cruel of God to withhold that evidence? I, on the other hand, do make a further assertion. Contrary to St. Anselm, who said there were any number of proofs of the existence of God when he composed his ontological proof, I would assert there are many disproofs of the existence of God and I will produce some of them that seem to me conclusive and go along with the famous LaPlace statement that asserts that God is an unnecessary hypothesis which means to me that the world can be explained without God and so does not exist. Here are some other arguments I think as well to be weighty, even if there are some well known ones that are not weighty, such as why God allows children to suffer, which reduces God to being a social worker when anyone could think of reasons why God punishes people including those who are innocent. God might exist even though he is fearsome rather than nice.

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Bombing Iran Atomics

A week during which Donald Trump exercised his foreign policy.

An initial question about Trump authorizing the United States to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities on June 26,2025 is why Trump could be driven ro do so, given his reluctance to make war, he being a bellicose rather than a stalwart warrior, while John McCain never found a war he didn’t like. Trump talked big about North Korea but did nothing, which was just as weak. On domestic matters, he is a wet noodle, running for cover up rather than standing up for his announced principle, as in te case of tariffs, which he withdrew when the Stock Market showed it didn’t like the idea of that “beautiful” word. Trump was labelled by opposition wags as “TACO”: Trump Always Chickens Out”. Why decisive enough to stick with the bombing from conception to execution? It was refreshing and surprising to see and hear, even with vulgarity, him attending to matters of state rather than just milking the Presidency with his cryptocurrency scheme and the reported million dollar a plate dinner.

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