cheese it, the cops!

Real, fundamental change or more Progressive "Tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing"

Long before I got to this article, I knew that the Supreme Court had published its ruling on Abortion, and that it was as draconian and out of sync with American society as it is possible to imagine. Justice Thomas (Holy Cross, Class of 72) seldom publishes an opinion but his opinion says that other aspects of life -- contraception, same sex marriage, and anything covered by the concept of privacy -- are now open for re-evaluation. Because if Roe goes, and it is in fact now gone, the modern legal concept of privacy is dead.

I knew all this because my inbox was staggering under the weight of requests, actually demands for my signature; and, probably, demands for $5 or 10 or whatever amount I could send whomever was asking for that signature.

I don't normally sign petitions, and probably won't start doing so again. When Clarence Thomas and I were wandering around Worcester, our daily travels would begin by visiting the campus center to check our mail, and maybe get a cup of coffee. The lobby of the campus center during those years (September 1969 - June 1973) was filled daily with student organizations collecting signatures for worthy causes. Most of them wanted to stop racism, cure poverty, end the war in Vietnam and end sexism. I generally signed most of them, as did all students of good mind and heart. We were imitating the Chaplain in the Animals' number Sky Pilot, being "good holy men" by attesting to values we were doing nothing credible to achieve or promote.

 

Signing petitions doesn't do much of anything, except get lunatics and fanatics on election slates and allow fools, charlatans and other oddities of the left and right a vehicle to make every corner our own American Speakers' corner.

At this point, life is fairly simple. If you want to preserve the rights of women to manage their own bodies and health, if you want to preserve the right to privacy, if you want to preserve equal rights for gay marriage, if you want to preserve the right to be screwed up and gnarly, then you have one choice going forward. The Republicans have won their 50 years of struggle for a third awakening of religious zealots and various fellow travelers. It's going to take a lot to re-establish the rights of women to manage their own health; it's going to take a lot to preserve the rights to gay marriage, to inter-racial marriage, to contraception and on and on and on. Battles we all thought won, fragile victory or not, through Roe and the modern concept of privacy.

It's simple. Vote Democratic. Send money to Democratic campaigns. And do so every election cycle until a more moderate court can re-visit these issues and a more realistic set of legislators are sitting in the halls of Congress.

If you want to distribute, sign and endorse petitioning efforts, great. But if you don't vote straight D long enough to get veto proof and filibuster proof majorities in the Congress, you're going to have the same meaningless impact of those petitions that the future Justice Thomas and First Sergeant and peripatetic thinker Mike Farrell signed almost 60 years ago on Worcester mornings from September to June.

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

recent items

 

wsj: are rural conservatives voting against their own interests? [pdf]

splicetoday: elizabeth warren lost the debate.

resounding: augustus pablo's rasta hymnody

 

previous resoundings: ann peebles, blue angel (cyndi lauper), the kendalls, the bellamy brothers

as biden and sanders fade, trump removal is urgent

2020 is going to make 2016 look like an innocent time

free speech: a visceral defense

nostalgia for automobile

the highwomen redeem america (or at least americana)

op-ed as advertising

 

 

 

 

 

Mangled! CNN Debate, Night 2

 

 

print version: @splicetoday. 

Video or stand-up version of my @splicetoday column on the CNN debate, night 1: Marianne Williamson, Amy Klobuchar, and Death. Sorry about the thumbnail; I look hostile. But I'm really very nice.

Recent items:

 

wsj: the opposite flaws of trump and mueller

splicetoday: art and capitalism in bentonville

times literary supplement: an authoritative but anti-authoritarian account of 'the dawn of civilization' (review of the great james c. scott's against the grain) [drive]

times higher eduction: teaching beauty and existentialism to the students of now  {drive}

larb philosophical salon: western philosophy as white supremacism

wsj: hatred enhances your self-esteem

Rolling pretty good these days!

Quotes from Joe Biden, interviewed by Chris Cuomo on CNN. By common acclamation, this was better than his debate performance.

"I even went so far in the middle of that busing controversy was saying I'd use helicopters if that was necessary to make the point and really got in a town meeting that got very hot. But what the issue is now is for example -- and it was then, voluntary busing, we supported it."

"The third one is do you have an administration through their nonelected officials, Department of Housing decide every school should be equally balanced across the board. That's a different issue." (Neither the "Department of Housing" nor, as he claimed in the debate, the then-nonexistent Department of Education, was responsible for overseeing school busing.)

"I don't -- anyway, I -- but here's the deal, what I do know, and this is good and the bad news, the American people think they know me and they know me."

"Since that occurred, I had the most sought after endorsement for the mayor of Atlanta, a black woman who's a great leader, Mayor Bottoms endorsed me."

 

"I don't believe there's anybody out there who believes that I have anything other than a keen and consistent interest in making sure every child -- these are all our children."

 

"This guy is moving to form hate to split, that's the only way he can sustain himself."

 

"No more NATO. Look, I went to the conference that we have, it's called the (inaudible) conference, used to be. The first speech stood up the chancellor, the former chancellor of Germany stands up, she says we have to go in alone." [Merkel is still chancellor.]

"Why did we set up NATO, Chris? So no one nation could abuse the power in the region in Europe, it would suck us in, in a way they did in World War I and World War II. It's being crushed."

"Look, I come out of the arms control era. Guess what, there's two ways you do this. You work or you defend."

 

"And that's the reason why you have security, is because we've allowed stability in the region. They get it. But what they're doing now is we're not dealing with China's problem for us. China's problem is they're stealing intellectual secrets."

 

"They're doing a whole lot of things that make no sense for us to stand still."

"In terms of the economy, Chris, I've been proposing for a long time and look -- I know I'm middle class Joe, I get that part. The middle class built this country. You didn't have Wall Street build this country, how did they do that? You gave people a chance."

"How can you have dignity unless you can live in a neighborhood that's not fouled by the environment and what's going on?"

"And the big idea on education, on health care, on dealing with the environment, I love how, you know, all of a sudden, I wish I had been labeled as moderate when I was running in Delaware back in the days where it was --"

"But the question is, whose issues are best prepared in their wheel house, they've demonstrated they can deal with them?"

"The president when he delegated authority to me from the moonshot to Ukraine, he gave me the authority to make this because I knew where he was."

"A woman came up to me I guess it was, I don't know, a month ago, I guess, I was in New Hampshire, said why shouldn't I vote for a woman? And I said you should. If you think that person is most qualified at the moment, right now, to deal -- I'm not suggesting you vote for a woman."

 

 

Crispin the YouTube Pundit on the second debate and why Joe Biden should dissipate.

Joe Biden, Rattletrap

The video version.

 

items

wsj: Nothing the Russians or anyone else can do on social media can in itself delegitimize any election. 

pdf

splicetoday: Male Aging Memoir, Short Version

"Spying' is not the wrong word. But even if it was...(investigate the investigation)

Resounding: The Kendalls (an appreciation of the father/daughter act's classic cheating songs)

guilty of whiteness

 

 

Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips: They Both Did Well

They Both Did Fine

Crispin Sartwell

There was no physical altercation. Each of them, the young man and the old, exercised his right to be there and express his political and religious beliefs peacefully. Nicholas Sandmann and Nathan Phillips both did just fine.

As I absorbed the invective coming from both sides, or watched the interviews and different slices of the videos, my sympathy wavered from one protagonist to the other. Slowly it dawned on me: I don't think either of them did anything wrong. Not in the slightest, really. It would not take much to re-see this event as something squarely and decently American.

As many have observed, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial are an iconic public space, and you have the right to assemble there and express yourself, so long as you do so peacefully - that is, without physical violence. You have the right to wear a MAGA hat there, or to beat a drum. You have the right to express the traditional spirituality of your group, whether it is a group of Native Americans or of Roman Catholics. You have a right to move around, and you have a right to stand still. You have a right to chant, and a right to smile.

I think Phillips found the MAGA hats of the callow youth offensive, and I think he conceived of his rhythmic response as a way to teach a lesson or even bring healing. I think Sandmann thought that if he just stood there smiling, Phillips would not experience him as threatening. Together, they might have prevented a bit of a wider melee: I see the pair of them as the still eye of the conflict, drawing everyone's attention, and serving in part to keep the various hostile groups apart.

Now, perhaps this is too generous an interpretation, and as many have remarked - and as Phillips and Sandmann have remarked about each other - it is hard to know what is in someone else's heart, harder still on video, harder still after everyone has expressed an opinion about it. But finally it doesn't matter what was in their hearts: they behaved peacefully and expressed themselves directly. One could conceive that simply as a matter of decent citizenship or as healthy public discourse, conducted by drum and by hat.

We should all pity both Sandmann and Phillips for the firestorm they are reaping now. In the familiar fashion of the internet-to-cable-news sensation, their lives are getting ripped apart; they're liable to be more or less in hiding, along with their families and friends. Any discreditable thing that either has done or said is liable to be laid open to scrutiny. The sensation has narrowed both lives down to the image of the stand-off, which everyone reads for their own purposes. Phillips and Sandmann are being used, and perhaps used up.

One of the most frightening things about our ever-growing political polarization is that it limits and shapes our empathies. One side can't possibly sympathize with what Nicholas Sandmann is going through. The other can't possibly sympathize with Phillips. That is an arbitrary and irrational limitation on the humanity of the partisans, and a premonition of future oppressions.

I hope they do get a chance to meet and talk, which they've both indicated a willingness or even a desire to do. Or on the other hand, if they want never to think about this thing again, I understand that too. Meanwhile, we former Americans seem to be scared of political expression, even as we engage in it maximally. People are confused as between hats and weapons, smiles and violence. I'm not sure how you'd make a mistake like that, but I do know why you'd make a mistake like that: just yapping in unison with your demographic, for no discernible reason, toward no constructive goal, bashing your opponents with fiction.

Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann did better.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

recent items

splicetoday: Fukuyama described the fictional end of a fictional history. This one is real. (also a quick precis of my political orientation)

wsj: Who do you want controlling your internet, Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping?   (or here)

splice: copyright is obviously incompatible with the basic values of scholarship

splice: the scandals at lincoln center and the nature of art

i just want trump to hold me while i cry

Everyone on television appears to want to be consoled and inspired by the same people who coerce them. Not that I'm diagnosing, of course, but I think of anyone who is begging for a president to care for them, or who has spent a lot of time thinking about what they wish the president would say to them,  as . . . sexually complex, but definitely compliant. I respect that, of course.

 

Consoled by Presidents

By Crispin Sartwell

Article II of the Constitution, somewhat cryptically, enumerates the powers and obligations of the President: he is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, for example. He has the power to make treaties, appoint various officers of the United States (with the advice and consent of the Senate), and to grant reprieves and pardons. He has the duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union and to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Conspicuous by omission is what many politicians and pundits evidently regard as one of the core functions of the executive, which we might think of as therapeutic. At times of national trauma - these days, that seems to be all the time - it is apparently the duty of the President to "bring us all together," to "speak words of healing and unity," to be the "consoler-in-chief." We expect our President to bring a sense of hope to all of us in this difficult moment of dummy bombs, hurricanes, and mass shootings. Article II, that is, omits one of the President's most sacred duties: to hold us while we cry. Or at least to convey the impression that, if he could, he would reach out from our televisions and draw us all into a group hug.

Abraham Lincoln, as we learned in school, brought all Americans together with his immortal words, even as his generals burned their way across Georgia. After immolating Waco, Bill Clinton felt our pain and held us as we went through it, though he was also rubbing up against us in a somewhat disconcerting way.

In this regard, many people are very disappointed with Trump, who often appears to be too self-involved to perform the emotional duties of his office. Many pundits portray themselves or at least Americans other than themselves as in need of a sort of national Mister Rogers, to explain this puzzling world to us and convince us televisually, in a deep and quietly melodious voice, that everything will be okay. Even as Donald Trump gets blamed for the bombs, for example, the President of the United States is expected to provide words of healing. Now that is emotional labor.

Feminist sociologist Arlie Hochschild came up with the idea of "emotional labor" in the 1980s to describe, for example, the unenumerated duties of someone working as a waitress: all the smiling, expressions of connection or concern, the self-effacement in the face even of abuse. It is one way, for example, of describing some of the traditional duties of the housewife: to see to everyone's feelings as well as their bodily needs, and hence keep the family functional.

Writing in Quartz, Leah Fessler gives a typical description of emotional labor, both in the office - "constantly smiling, making small talk, planning birthday celebrations, cleaning up after celebrations" - and outside it - "endless texting to help siblings through breakups, evaluating whether friends' hookups were fully consensual, cleaning roommates' dishes." "It is time we start recognizing this unpaid labor, which is disproportionately performed by women," writes Fessler. And by presidents.

That Americans allegedly want to be nurtured or consoled, by the same person who, in faithful execution of the laws, operates the Federal prison system, or who is to see that the taxes are collected, or who can press the nuclear button, annihilating life on earth, is puzzling in a way; there's no particular reason to think these functions ought to be combined. It seems, really, that we want a national Dad to discipline and protect us and a national Mom to do the emotional dishes and rock us to sleep, as European nations split their authority figures into President and Prime Minister.

Now, one may be somewhat puzzled by the power of the President to console a wounded nation. He speaks to all of us in general and none of us in particular. When he is doing the emotional labor we expect, he is uttering highly conventionalized words, like a customer-service representative. We know exactly what he is supposed to say before he says anything - "This is not who we are as Americans," for example. President Obama reached the point, after responding in the conventional fashion to a number of mass shootings, where he remarked on the futility he felt in speaking at all: "Somehow this has become routine," he said after a 2015 shooting in Oregon. "My response here, from this podium, has become routine." And yet he produced the required response anyway, because he acknowledged our deep need.

Perhaps Article II can be amended to enumerate a list of emotional duties within the purview of the executive, and then Trump can be impeached on the grounds that he has failed to perform some of them satisfactorily. Admittedly, the amendment process will be difficult in this partisan environment. But I have faith that it will happen. After all, even in the darkest times, Americans have always risen together to meet every challenge.

***********

Here's Donna Brazile on "This Week":

 

Here's Kathleen Parker, again telling Donald Trump, word for word, what she wants to hear from him. What good it is going to do her or any of us to operate Donald Trump like a sock puppet is anyone's guess.

That people think this way about political leadership, or rather about government power - that it should nurture and heal them, and tell them what is true and not - is a pretty good candidate for the fatal evolutionary flaw that will bring us to extinction. 

it overlaps with this and this for splice

recent items

splicetoday:

okay. for real. i'll shut up now. (on old men and #metoo)

stoner country (new riders of the purple sage, asleep at the wheel, grateful dead, commander cody)

apocalypse in the theatrocracry

the fight for the soul of america (mccain, etc)

country needs women (sister sadie, the great all-female bluegrass band)

 

wall street journal: how to argue with a young socialist (on google drive)

 

 

What strange hell...Part II

I didn't post part 1 of this, but Part II is very stand alone. 

I kind of like this one. I'm 90% or so through Nussbaum's book and about 70% through Woodwards, and they're both interesting. Toss in the new one by Gelfand, and I may begin to understand.

https://www.veteransnewsreport.com/2018/09/17/wolf-country-gazette-what-strange-hell-part-ii/

 

Few comments on the material -- I did the sentence that refers to the US as a country of broad shoulders, and decided that the poem, or most of it, belonged in the article. As a nation, our mojo kinda sorta is on vacation; I think that Trump's election depended in large part on a lot of people showing off their pencil necked geek. Chicago was a great image of America, a country with flaws but broad shoulders. Trump's triumph requires that a part of us give up and just slump our shoulders and demand our American version of Dostoyevsky's Inquisitor. It's ok to be depressed, but damn it, you need to go out shoulders back, head high and be aggressively depressed. Or something.  

 

Dylan number is from his 88 tour of Australia with a little known band from Gainesville as his backup....Tad Putty and the Heartburners? Something like that. Looks like he's playing a Dean acoustic guitar which strikes me as odd. 

 

New Vets setup limits the amount of music I can post. As I was finishing up, I realized I wanted to add this, mainly for the first verse -- 

 

 Same old tune/fiddle and guitars/ where do we take it from here?

Rhinestone boots /big shiney cars/ it's been the same way for Years

We need a change...

Somebody told me when I got to Nashville

Son you really got it made

Old Hank made it here and we're all sure that you will

But I don't think Hank done it this a-way

I don't think Hank done it this way?

 

If old Hank did it this way, it would sound like Chuck Prophet. 

https://youtu.be/gc-9Hf_dnwE

 

Politics and Geography

By Crispin Sartwell

There’s recently been a revival of an argument that goes back to the 18th century: that the form of government prescribed by the Constitution gives more representation to rural than to urban people, and to people from relatively sparsely-populated states than to people from populous ones. The clinching demonstrations of this are the composition of the Senate and, less extremely, the electoral college. Now, everyone takes the position on this matter that would help their own side get elected. Nevertheless, the question does show something fundamental about the nature of political representation.

The political reasons for the phenomenon are familiar from your history textbook: the US originates as an alliance among independent states. The less populous states were concerned that their voices and interests would be drowned out or swamped by those of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York; they had to be cajoled into the nation. Similar assurances about representation were required, for example, by smaller nations in constituting the European Union, and the United Nations pays lip service at least to a principle of equal sovereignty among nation-states, not representation in proportion to population. It had to start there if it expected smaller nations to join.

Most of us do not, any longer, think of the US as an alliance of independent nations; we consider the United States a single political unit in some sense. Under that presumption, and as an abstract matter in democratic political theory (which is liable to start with a principle of equal representation or one person/one vote), it is hard to argue that the 600,000 or so people of Wyoming should have the same representation in the Senate as Florida’s 20,000,000.

But whatever the theoretical and practical drawbacks of the system as it stands, it also shows some of the real complexities and some of the possibilities for beauty or profundity that lurk within the practices of political representation. The neutral, abstract scheme of one person/one vote yields a kind of minimalist or hyper-simplified picture, but the concrete practices of political representation on the ground are variegated, swirling, showing many relations of human beings to one another and to other bits or dimensions of the world.

In almost any real democratic system, the space or geography of the nation is represented to some extent as well as its human population. This is striking, in that it suggests that, in representative politics, the physical configuration of a country as well as its people is the subject represented: what the picture is a picture of, as a portrait represents the person who sat for it or a still-life painting a bowl of fruit. A democracy in some sense represents the place in which it is located as well as people it encompasses as citizens. In addition to being a portrait of the people, that is, a representative system is a sort of landscape painting or topographical map of the terrain it operates within.

The spaces that Florida and Wyoming occupy in the Senate chamber correlates better to their relative physical size than to their relative population, and in general the Senate comes closer than the House, for example, to resembling the sweep of the nation across the vast central plains and mountain west that has been central to the national narrative. Obviously, this doesn’t work so well for Delaware, but the point is that the different principles on which different branches and levels of government are selected ends up yielding a remarkably complex depiction of a nation.

Any representative democracy and indeed almost any political system is obliged to represent geographies as well as populations. Geography, after all, accounts to some extent for the distribution of populations in the first place. But any political situation or system of any size coordinates smaller units: provinces, counties, townships, and so on, and reflects to some extent the physical environment it occupies.

Indeed, when we think about America, we do not think of it only, or even primarily, as a group of people, but as a physical terrain (purple mountains and fruited planes, sea to shining sea, and so on). We might think of it, as well, in terms of located sub-cultures: Latino culture in southern Texas, peoples meeting in New Orleans at the mouth of Mississippi, Appalachia, and a hundred others. The principle of one person/one vote irrigates all the deserts, flattens all the mountains, and bridges all the rivers, but even the attempt to apply the principle with perfect neutrality ends up connecting to the highly differentiated landscape and acknowledging the connections of the people to it.

Every political system represents the space it occupies as well as the people occupying that space, and represents them as inseparable. We may want to ameliorate specific political inequalities that this generates, but I think it is more something we should try to become conscious of and even celebrate than something we should seek to expunge. 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Entanglements: A System of Philosophy (SUNY 2017).

original sin and rebellion

nytimes: what's good about original sin

splice: why i'm an anti-authoritarian

Stop buying some ideology off the shelf and start thinking independently.

Why I'm Not on the Left

Why I'm Not on the Right

(No, I'm not in the middle.)

 

But I'm Not On The Right

I'm still trying to destroy the left-right spectrum, and I'm going to do a three-part series: Why I Am Not a Leftist, Why I'm Not on the Right, and Why I'm an Anarchist, and what that means in this case. I really do think that a wretched mistake lurks at the heart of the left, starting with Marx, an unconscionable and utterly implausible detachment of means and ends.

recent items

splicetoday: gospel music as liberation, how strong women made it from bessie smith to janis joplin

the great nathaniel peabody rogers on how to write, unpublished since 1842

why they suck: w.e.b. dubois

reality and representation: martin luther king on facebook

pc entertainment as medieval allegory

nonsense demography

it's true! i'm in the wall street journal today. i think people have failed to see something pretty glaring about analyzing politics, or prosecuting it, primarily through demographic categories. namely, that the thing is incoherent. incoherent, i tell you.

last few splicetoday columns:

boys: we will survive

american and world politics is reconfiguring very quickly

why bill gates sucks

children: our treasures, our targets

 

 

 

little crispy tosses rotten fruit at godlike michelangelo.

the post-physical economy and the rise of trump

for the wall street journal: the modern epic of denunciation. a couple of related pieces:

the president of the united states of america: god, slave, scapegoat

i need a comforter-in-chief

splice, yesterday

it won't surprise you that i, like you, am terribly in need of a comforter-in-chief. 

undomesticated

henry david thoreau, from "walking" (1862):

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various.

 

nathaniel peabody rogers, from "politics" (1843):

Good farmers are learning that there is a better way to treat their cattle than by blows. The hostler of intelligence and kindness, is ceasing to maul his noble horse. They are leaving off the practice of breaking steers and colts, for the reason that it is cruel: undeserved by the horse and unworthy of the employer, and because a whole horse or ox is better than a broken one. Political action is unfit even for brute animals. Is it fitter for man? Is humanity less susceptible of moral influences than what we call brutality? A politician is but a man driver, a human teamster. His business is to control men by the whip and the goad. His occupation would be unlawful and inexpedient toward even the cattle.

thoreau was demonstrably reading rogers in 1843.

 

 

conscientious objection to pastry

this week's splice:

no reason to force people to bake cakes for gay weddings

New Wolf Country Post

New post. Gratuitous although relevant Doors music. Shakespeare. List of Russian Movies on Afghanistan. General Character assassination of Trump, although there's really not that much to assassinate. Call for Jesus to Smite Mike Pence. Normal Wednesday here in Wolf Country.

 

http://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/08/23/dispatches-from-wolf-country-idiots-sound-fury-go/

trump and i

[how donny did the eclipse]

 

alright, i'm going to tell you, guiltily, what i like about trump, why i keep returning to a seemingly sympathetic tone, or why i sometimes 'relate,' though i utterly reject his politics. on the charlottesville weekend, i wrote this on saturday. (on saturday a counter-demonstrator was killed by a white supremacist, trump gave a lame reaction or a 'both sides do it' sort of thing. then on monday he said exactly what everyone demanded he say. then on tuesday he went off, in the disastrous way that finally convinced me that he actually is sympathetic to white supremacism.) 

through my life, i have done a lot of saying what i was not supposed to say, from the slightly continually inappropriate to the in-your-face transgression. i have calmed down a lot through the years, actually, but i definitely have an impulse, in any given situation, to feel for the verboten position, word, line of jive, and then find a way to deliver it, perhaps with a slant that makes it a bit hard to interpret. when i feel that people are telling me what to say, i have a vivid physical sensation of constraint; i might comply for awhile; ultimately it won't go well. the peeceer the people around me, for example, the more i talk wrong, or work on ways to undermine the constriction.

this impulse, i feel, has stood me in good stead many a time, and if you ever want a counter-consensus position, i am the wholesale outlet. it's led me to important moral insights, i believe, including that the political state is completely incompatible with any decent ethics whatsoever. but it will also tempt me toward the dark side, toward, for example, the views that are the opposite of the pc views. but that they're not pc, of course, does not entail that they are not evil, and so on. i sort of sometimes end up on the wrong side even by my own lights.

trump has that same set-up, which is more or less why i connect with him. whatever his views on race, etc, his very being was rebelling at the notion that everyone was writing a script for him, that they didn't care what he thought as long as he said a pre-rehearsed set of words that anyone could write in their sleep. that press conference tuesday was his whole being just saying 'fuck you'; he was chomping at the bit; he had the sensation of a release from physical constraint, of selfhood and self-respect and defiance. but he also expressed considerable sympathy with fucking neo-nazis, alright? you cannot have that in a pres of the united states, however he got there.

sorry about slow blogging. i'm not missing everything, however, in this wild and woolly period. real-time political commentary has basically moved to my weekly column on the world's liveliest website, splicetoday (today: political idolatry and iconoclasm, on confederate memorials and such) and my twitter feed @crispinsartwell. i'll be back on the blog too, i expect.

this week in splicetoday: oh no! we lost the war on vulgarity. man events swamp columns these days.