Our American Circumstance: How It’s Going

“We lift our heads. Something has changed. Somewhere, at some time in the destruction, something awful happened. We stopped our forward move toward being humane, and are slipping quickly backward to the state of animals. The trains still run nearly on time, but we do not. What sustained our hearts and hopes is gone.”

― Jack Cady

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Image note: Cartoon by Mike Luckovich, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 20 March 2024

Cady, Jack. The American Writer: Shaping a Nation’s Mind. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

Nothing New Under the Sun

#DimensionTrump | #WhatTheyVotedFor

Steve Benen notes—

For what it’s worth, it’s not altogether clear why Trump and his team would find this so upsetting. There’s a limited universe of officials who have the experience, skills, and clearance necessary to work on highly sensitive intelligence matters. The idea of aides having a stint at the National Security Council, before making the transition to the staff at the House Intelligence Committee, isn’t especially odd.Indeed, the inverse happens, too. Kashyap Patel, who helped co-author the unintentionally hilarious “Nunes memo,” recently left his staff job on Capitol Hill to join—you guessed it—the National Security Council.So why is it, exactly, that Schiff’s personnel decisions “enraged” the president and some members of his senior staff? Is there concern inside Trump World about what former aides might say about their impressions of the White House’s work?

—and perhaps it seems strange, but, yes, Hot Fuzz, the Wright/Pegg comedy, comes to mind, and that somehow makes perfect sense.

What They Voted For (No, Really)

#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor

A couple points come to mind:

An evangelist pastor criticized religious leaders who are “trading their moral core” by supporting the Trump administration solely due to their stance on abortion.

Doug Pagitt, a Minneapolis-based pastor and executive director of Vote Common Good, wrote in USA Today Sunday that white Evangelicals are blindly support Trump and the GOP-led Congress.

(Gstalter)

First, the question of evangelicals cleaning up their own houses, as such, is fraught and grim.

And for a bonus, there is the mystery of what happened in the last copy edits of the first two paragraphs of the the article.

Image notes: Top — Detail of Corpus Hypercubus, by Salvador Dali, 1954.  Right — United States President Donald Trump reacts to being laughed at during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, 25 September 2018. (Image credit: FOX News)

Gstalter, Morgan. “Pastor tears into Evangelicals for supporting Trump due to abortion stance.” The Hill. 21 October 2018.

Your Tweet of the Day: Cul-de-Sac

“social media is the cul-de-sac where ‘nuance’ & ‘irony’ crawl to die.”

―Joyce Carol Oates

Divinely Buggy Infamy

#blameAdam | #thehashtag

If trying to explain everything amiss, askew, or awry about this panel seems an agonizing prospect, we can most certainly blame Adam.

Any other day I might have gone with panel two, but something about this makes me wonder at the four-panel comic strip version of The Aristocrats.

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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini, by Adam Huber, 23 May 2018.

A Picture of Two Bugs in a Bathroom

#parenting | #blameAdam

Yes, this is filed under Parenting.

No, this is not a mistake.

Yes, you may blame Adam, because that’s just how it goes.

And of course you want to know; that, too, is just how it goes.

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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini, by Adam Huber, 21 May 2018.

A Note Aside: Something About Perspective

#DimensionTrump | #WhatTheyVotedFor

This is called a digression, and it is not hard to guess its provenance. The other name for this exercise is, writing yourself into a hole. Still, the brazen stupidity of the Trump administration is mystifying unless we reconcile ourselves to some aspect of the irrelevance of norms insofar as we are dealing with a phenomenon akin to the nexus of gaslight and sincerely held belief and overlooking some aspect of perspective that would otherwise explain why the grace of subtlety, or even the tired comfort of basic competence come to seem anathema in #DimensionTrump.

†

Note aside: It is hard to figure what to do with an inchoate question having to do with the idea of new and old guards, or, such as it is, institutional traditionalism and institutional insurgency. Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has already spent time with the Mueller investigation; while his reputation as a low-skill bullshit artist was well-established during his time as RNC flak, he still bore some connection to an older way of doing things in the Republican Party. That is, with the jig up, it appears he told the Special Counsel’s Office what they wanted to know, and might well end up with no greater culpability than his reputation already earns him. It is hard to imagine how Sarah Huckabee Sanders would answer the Mueller investigation, but appearances, as such, are what drive the amorphous question about generational differences among conservatives. Where the old guard parses carefully and others might seethe at the appearance of will, there is a newer phenomenon by which people simply give voice to their violations as if it has never occurred to them that such behavior is problematic.

Remember the proposition of alternative facts; it is one thing to wonder if we are laughing at absurdity or genuine malady. This is #DimensionTrump; the President will hang his comms shop to boast of obstructing justice; Donald Jr. hands over emails that appear to convict him. With Hope Hicks on the record, apparently, that part of her job was to lie for the White House, and one former Press Secretary having already spoken with and given documents to the Mueller investigation, it starts to feel impossible that Sarah Huckabee Sanders would avoid the Special Counsel’s Office, and we might wonder what happens if she works to evade under question. One need not be Sam Nunberg to suggest the White House Press Secretary “does Trump’s dirty business”, or that, Huckabee Sanders is “terrible”, at her job.

Perhaps it is a difference of cognizance. Some will rail against criticism or even criminal charges because they must, despite their culpability. There are those, however, who will never understand why their culpability is culpability. If we recall a time not so long ago during which conservatives fixated on the proposition of “sincerely held beliefs” entitling exemption to obligations under law—e.g., discrimination in bakeries, hospitals, &c.—then we might propose, in the moment, to witness what we might otherwise hope is the crest of that wave: Can we imagine Sarah Huckabee Sanders attempting to hold out under scrutiny from the Mueller investigation, according to sincerely held beliefs in alternative facts?

At some point, someone in the #trumpswindle is going to throw down explicitly that, certainly, they said this and did this other thing but it’s not illegal because they say so.

At what point does it occur to these people that, yes, they really can get in trouble for what they are doing? How many will recognize the danger before Mueller calls them in? How many will never understand why this is happening to them?

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Image note: Top — Composite of President Donald Trump (Photo: Reuters) and Puti-Toots (Credit: Unknown).  Right — Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters); White House Senior Advisor Kellyanne Conway (Image: NBC News); White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Photo: Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

Nuzzi, Olivia. “Sam Nunberg on Mueller, His Media Spree, and His Message for Trump”. New York. 6 March 2018.

Not Really Worth Your Time

[#nevermind]

Two and a half not-quite random notes on blogging:

(1) While This Is has seen, in recent months, an apparent increase in readership, it is, as near as anyone can tell, all bots and spiders and whatever else. The pattern is clear, though: When posting daily, it is true the blog sees greater readership than, say, this time last year. Longer periods between posts can trigger a swell in readership; it really does appear some manner of Scooby-Snack behavioral econ, trying to get attention so someone will be encouraged to use the product more.

(2) While this would seem to point back to WordPress and Automattic, neither can I explain the weird phenomenon about “Top Searches”. Then again, this has been going on longer than the increased reader statistics that never really do add up. Still, the constant inquiries about journalists are ridiculous.  

Not Quite Nostalgia (Easy Pickings)

#familyvalues | #WhatTheyVotedFor

This is a candidate for Freudian Slip of the Year:

The former judge condemned the Washington Post story during a campaign speech in Huntsville, Alabama. Earlier, another fellow Republican, Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, urged Moore to drop out of the race, saying Moore’s explanations had been inadequate.

In a Huntsville gym, Moore assured supporters that the Post story was “a desperate attempt to stop my political campaign” and that the allegations that he was “involved with a minor child are completely unfalse and untrue and for which they will be sued.”

(Associated Press; accent added)

Just sayin’.

Once upon a time, there was this short, angry man touring the daytime talk show circuit, cosplaying a Grand Something of the Kaykaykay, and to be honest when he got all worked up he reminded of a skinny, embittered, ranting garden gnome, and then someone would talk back to him and he would really go off, to the point we could not understand the words coming out of his mouth.

Whenever these good ol’ boys get themselves so worked up as to stop making any sense whatsoever, the beady-eyed joke in a robe, the unbelievable stereotype of what it takes to be a supremacist, finds time for a comeback tour. Or maybe Cartman is more accessible; imagine one of these angry, Southern, white supremacists getting so screechy and incomprehensible that you never realized until that moment the South Park character was actually a stereotype and not parody.

Oh.

Er … ah … well, now you know.

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Image note: Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore responds Wednesday, 27 April 2016, to complaints made in January by various groups protesting his administrative order explaining the legal status of the Alabama Sanctity of Marriage Act and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act in Montgomery, Alabama. (Detail of photo by Julie Bennett)

Associated Press. “The Latest: Moore dismisses allegations, says suit to come”. 12 November 2017.

What Bugs a Sith Lord (When Nature Strikes Back)

When history looks back on this period of American thought and communication, we might from our present vantage in that past to be wonder how prominently will stand out the question not of re-definition, but, rather, de-definition. Once upon a time it was enough to simply mutter and growl that transition is a noun. Meanwhile, pretty much any noun in the language can now be converted to a verb; simply apply the gerund form to mean, approximately, “using the [noun] as the [noun] is to be used”.

This makes sense in some cases; ’tis true enough that some words simply were as such when they arrived in our knowledge. There is a Fulghum joke in that, but it’s a regional thing, or it would be except nobody really cares. But it is, in fact true. We saw with a saw, for instance, and that is simply how the word arrived in our lifetimes.

Robert Newton Peck once explained it is always a lasso and never a lariat; you lasso with a lasso, but do not lariat with a lariat. And maybe he was wrong, but the lesson stuck. American pedantry is a thoroughly internalized empiricism.

So it goes. For the moment it suffices to blame Adam.

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Image note: Detail of Bug Martini by Adam Huber, 8 March 2017.