Despite my political feelings about Donald Trump, I am agnostic on whether he should be indicted and arrested for possible financial violations involved in the payoff to the porn star Stormy Daniels…
That said, Trump himself today upped the ante by…warning all of us, point-blank, that he will violate the law if he wants to, and if you don’t like it, you can take it up with the mob that he can summon at will. This is pure authoritarianism…Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis.
—Tom Nichols, Trump Did It Again, The Atlantic, March 18, 2023
Greetings from the far left coast where I cannot keep track of the parade of atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones rampaging through California and now must contend with indictment frenzy. I rattled on about the indictment in yesterday's blog. In the meantime there is not exactly a dearth of other occasions for righteous outrage and cynical amusement. But first…
My friend Marlene Zeiler, retired former owner of Tall Tales Book Shop in Atlanta, passed two book titles my way in a note thanking me for my recommendation of the film My Little Sister with Nina Hoss, which she liked so much she queued up for viewing every other Hoss film she could find. The Mercies (2020) by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a gripping tale of religious fanaticism, patriarchy, witch hysteria, and romance between women in a remote region of Norway early in the 17th century. The accounts of grinding poverty in a small village call to mind Independent People by Halldór Laxness, set in early 20th century Iceland amid near-constant rain and consumption of mind-boggling quantities of coffee. I give The Mercies a hearty recommendation while leaving off with that for now to take up the other book at greater length.
British poet Siegfried Sassoon is a central figure in Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker. (Named Siegfried because his mother loved Wagner, grateful he was not born female because his name would have been Brünhilde.) Sassoon served in the trenches in World War I, was awarded a medal for rescuing a wounded soldier, and was later wounded himself. In 1917 he composed "as an act of wilful defiance of military authority" a statement of his belief that the war was being deliberately prolonged by those who had the power to end it. The statement was eventually read in the House of Commons.
Sassoon had been in communication with Bertrand Russell and other pacifists but was not a pacifist himself. He expected to be court-martialed. His friend Robert Graves intervened and convinced the authorities that Sassoon was shell-shocked and should be hospitalized instead. He was sent to Craiglockhart in the village of Slateford (now a suburb of Edinburgh), "set up to deal with the epidemic of psychological casualties created in the muddy trenches of the First World War" (Webb, 'Dottyville')
Sassoon was placed in the care of Dr. WIlliam Halse Rivers, the hospital's most celebrated member of staff. Rivers treated his patients with speech therapy, but his was not the only, perhaps not even the primary, approach to treatment of shell shock, what would now be termed PTSD. In a harrowing section of the novel he visits another hospital to observe the methods of Dr. Lewis Yealland who used electric stimulation. Rivers is profoundly shaken by what he witnesses. This experience coupled with his own issues arising out of relationship with his patients and their suffering leads to a crisis of conscience as he fulfills his duty, as he sees it, to make the men under his care fit enough to return to the trenches and do their duty killing Germans.
The following passages particularly struck me and give a flavor of the narrative. The first involves Sassoon's war memories and nightmares.
He woke to find Orme standing immediately inside the door. He wasn't surprised, he assumed Orme had come to rouse him for his watch. What did surprise him, a little, was that he seemed to be in bed. Orme was wearing that very pale coat of his. Once, in 'C' company mess, the CO had said, 'Correct me if I'm wrong, Orme, but I have always assumed that the colour of the British Army uniform is khaki. Not…beige.' "Beige" was said in such Lady Bracknellish tones that Sassoon had wanted to laugh. He wanted to laugh now, but his chest muscles didn't seem to work. After a while he remembered that Orme was dead.
This clearly didn't worry Orme, who continued to stand quitely by the door, but Sasoon began to think it ought to worry him. Perhaps if he turned his head it would be all right. He stared at the window's pale square of light, and when he looked back Orme had gone.
At a church service Rivers notices a stained-glass window depicting Abraham and Isaac. The bargain, he thinks.
The one on which all patriarchal societies are founded. If you, who are young and strong, will obey me, who am old and weak, even to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice your life, then in the course of time you will peacefully inherit, and be able to exact the same obedience from your sons. Only we’re breaking the bargain, Rivers thought. All over northern France, at this very moment, in trenches and dugouts and flooded shell-holes, the inheritors were dying, not one by one, while old men, and women of all ages, gathered together and sang hymns.
While at Craiglockhart Sassoon met and befriended another patient, Wilfred Owen, who wrote his first war poems there and edited the hospital magazine Hydra. Sassoon returned to the front at his own insistence and survived to write about the war and Craiglockart afterward. Owen also returned and was killed in action just before the armistice. Sassoon and Owen both opposed the war and acted with heroism in combat.
Marjorie Taylor Greene led a delegation from the House Oversight and Accountability Committee to the DC. jail where pretrial defendants from the January 6, 2021, attempt to overthrow the government are being held. Taylor Greene was a giddy schoolgirl in the company of pop celebrities. She and other Republicans high-fived insurrectionists she called "political prisoners" and were treated in turn to a chorus of "Let's go Brandon!"
Lauren Boebert embraced the mother of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed while climbing through the broken window of a barricaded door into the Speaker's Lobby where police officers were evacuating members of Congress. Consoling Babbitt's mother may be appropriate. Fictionalizing her death is not.
After the visit Taylor Greene leveled accusations of mistreatment and violation of due process rights of detainees. It would be surprising if there has not been some mistreatment. It is a prison after all, and the D.C. facility does not have a stellar reputation even as prisons go. However, Democratic representatives Robert Garcia (Calif) and Jasmine Crockett (Texas) offered some perspective with their dissent. Crockett, a former public defender in Texas, Arkansas, and federal courts described conditions she saw as "so much different and so much better" than routine conditions in state lockups in Texas or Arkansas (a low bar, but still). Garcia observed that the January 6 prisoners were in a newer part of the jail where conditions are much better than in other parts. "They were outside," he said. "They each had tablets where they can communicate, watch movies, text their families, talk to their attorneys."
Michael Biesecker, Ashli Babbitt a martyr? Her past tells a more complex story, AP News, January 3, 2022
Ed Pilkington, Marjorie Taylor Greene led delegation to visit Capitol attack defendants in jail, The Guardian, March 27, 2023
Mychael Schnell, Greene, Democrats offer tale-of-two-jails after visit with Jan. 6 defendants, The Hill, March 24, 2023
Josh "Crazy Legs" Hawley called for the killing of three schoolchildren and three adults at a Christian school in Nashville to be investigated as a federal hate crime against Christians, un peu ironique coming from the only senator to vote against a 2021 bill that addressed hate crimes during the pandemic with an emphasis on an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans. The vote was 94–1.
We note that Republicans remain firm in their commitment to universal gun ownership with everyone armed and ready to blast away, now spiced with a dash of transphobia.
Meanwhile in the hallowed groves of academe down at Stanford University we were treated to yet another sorry instance of the puritanical left's commitment to shutting down speech to which the comrades take exception. The incident took place during a speech by conservative judge Stuart Kyle Duncan sponsored by the campus chapter of the Federalist Society that drew precisely the response it was intended to provoke. A Trump appointee to the federal bench, Duncan is blockhead and a jerk. He responded in kind with insults of his own. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal he defended calling the students "appalling idiots," "bullies," and "hypocrites" (Stanford Law official). There was no honor to be found on either side of the ruckus.
The law school's associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion got into the act by taking to the podium with a less than forceful defense of free speech that questioned Duncan's decision to speak on campus where his presence was painful for some students. She is now on leave. The law school has since apologized to the judge.
Ruth Marcus countered the dean's argument that Duncan should have considered whether his appearance at Stanford was worth the pain and division it caused by making a distinction between civility and self-censorship. Civility was lacking on both sides at Stanford, but, wrote Marcus,
Self-censorship is dangerous. It reinforces the notion that we should stay silent in spaces where our views might not be welcomed. This flattens discourse and homogenizes thought. In spaces where provocation is essential—opinion columns, universities and law schools in particular—it discourages the challenging of orthodoxy in favor of the comfortable cosseting of preexisting views.
Marcus also provides an example of what I have in mind when I describe Duncan as a blockhead and a jerk when she relates an incident in 2020 where
he went out of his way to be disrespectful to a transgender prisoner who asked that her name be changed in the prison system…
And he wrapped his incivility in the astonishing, unconvincing garb of maintaining the appearance of judicial impartiality—this from a jurist who had spent much of his previous legal career litigating against gay and transgender rights.
Ruth Marcus, Stanford students lost a chance to learn when they shouted down a judge, Washington Post, March 27, 2023
Student Disruption of a Judge’s Speech at Stanford U Deserved a Forceful Defense of Free Speech by the Administration, PEN America, March 14, 2023
Karen Sloan, Nate Raymond, Stanford Law official who admonished judge during speech is on leave, dean says, Reuters, March 22, 2023
More recommended reading with another fine column from Thomas Chatterton Williams at The Atlantic: You Can’t Define Woke, March 18, 2023.
As I was preparing to go onstage for an event recently, the moderator warned my co-panelist and me that the very first prompt would be “Please define the word woke for the audience.” We all sighed and laughed. It’s a fraught task, requiring qualification and nuance, because woke has acquired what the French philosopher Raymond Aron termed “subtle,” or “esoteric,” and “literal,” or “vulgar,” interpretations. Put simply, social-justice-movement insiders have different associations and uses for the word than do those outside these progressive circles. Before you can attempt to define what “wokeness” is, you should acknowledge this basic fact. Going further, you should acknowledge that as with cancel culture, critical race theory, and even structural racism, the contested nature of the term imposes a preemptive barrier to productive disagreement.
New Blog Posts:
Neutering Language. March 22, 2023. Language guidance is all the rage at academic institutions and nonprofits. Some of it could fall under the rubric of traditional style guidance for formal writing—think of the Chicago Manual of Style, the MLA Handbook, the venerable Elements of Style by Strunk and White for example—but that is secondary to the imperative to ferret out and purge words and phrases…read more>>
Coleridge Revisited, March 27, 2023. At something of a loss after finishing Lakota America by Oxford University historian Pekka Hämäläinen, I plucked Richard Holmes' biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Portable Coleridge from the bookcase and renewed my acquaintance with him. Of the major English Romantic poets I find Wordsworth and Keats most congenial, Coleridge perhaps least, never holding much for me, although I was taken with "Kubla Khan"…read more>>
Indictment, March 31, 2023. Indictment frenzy grips the nation. Well, the news corps and punditocracy, at any rate. Here at the Portable Bohemia nerve center there is as much anxiety as frenzy. What if…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
