The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answer'd: "I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded & remain confirm'd, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote." —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Greetings from the far left coast where we enjoyed a wonderful rendezvous, albeit all too brief, with Trani and Candace from Tulsa, nephew Dan from Minneapolis, and Danny, younger brother of Dan's significant other person and better three-quarters Maribel, a high school senior this fall here to check out Reed College and University of Portland. First time with the family since Christmas 2019. Way too long. They're the best.
Good company, good conversation, good food at Tabor Tavern and a fine repast featuring India Oven takeout, excellent wine Trani and Candace picked up in Sonoma wine country on the first leg of their trip, and panoramic vistas in the Columbia River Gorge where we hiked the Angel's Rest trail. The hike was considerably harder than it was fifteen years ago, the majestic views still worth it.
Bill Russell (1934–2022) stepped on a rainbow yesterday. As a boy I rooted for the Lakers and their stars Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, who always came up just a little short in epic NBA finals matchups with Russell's Celtics, a team I loved to hate. As I got a bit older I came to appreciate Russell's greatness as a player and a person.
HIs accomplishments as a player are many: NBA Hall of Fame, five-time Most Valuable Player, twelve-time All Star, mainstay of a dynasty that won eight NBA championships in a row and eleven total in thirteen years from 1957 to 1969. The last two came as a player-coach after he became the first black head coach in any major US sport in 1966. Before coming to the NBA he led the University of San Francisco to NCAA championships in 1955 and 1956 and what was then a record sixty-game winning streak (surpassed only by UCLA with eighty-eight consecutive wins 1971–1974). Bill Russell famously cared nothing about personal statistics and awards. The team's championships were what mattered.
Throughout his life Russell was an activist and advocate for civil rights. Early in his career, in 1958 before he was a big star, he spoke out against a quota system in the NBA that limited the number of black players on each team. He participated in civil rights marches in the 1960s, including the march on Washington in 1963 where Martin Luther King delivered his "I have a dream" speech. Later in that decade he stood by Muhammad Ali when Ali was vilified for refusing induction into the army. In 2010 Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Tom Meschery, a player of Russell's era who wrote some poetry, called him an eagle with a beard.
Cinema Desk. La fille inconnue (The Unknown Girl) (2016). Dir. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. With Adèle Haenel as Jenny, a young doctor is obsessed by the death of a girl found by the river near her office. Video from her surveillance camera reveals that the girl had rung the buzzer to her office the night of her death. The doctor instructed her intern not to answer it because they had already worked more than an hour past closing time. thinking that the person would buzz again if it was an emergency.
Haunted by the thought that she bears responsibility for the girl's death, she pursues her own investigation that leads to dark secrets, personal danger, and ultimately the girl's tragic story. Naenel is compelling, her Jenny earnest, resourceful, with a character marked by compassion and decency.
Haenel has not appeared in a film since Portrait of a Woman on Fire in 2019. She explained in an interview:
I don’t make films anymore. Because of political reasons. Because the film industry is absolutely reactionary, racist, and patriarchal. We are mistaken if we say that the powerful are of goodwill, that the world is indeed moving in the right direction under their good and sometimes unskillful management. Not at all. The only thing that moves society structurally is social struggle. And it seems to me that in my case, to leave is to fight. By leaving this industry for good, I want to take part in another world, in another cinema. (Christian Zilko, Adèle Haenel Stopped Making Movies Because Industry Is 'Reactionary, Racist, and Patriarchal,' IndieWire, May 15, 2022)
As distinguished family physician and major American poet William Carlos Williams advised young Allen Ginsberg, lotta bastards out there. (I rely on a creaky memory here, all but certain I read this somewhere although unable to lay my hands on the source.) No doubt the film industry has its share. Yet I have seen any number of films that are not as Haenel describes, granting that I cannot speak to what happens on the set and otherwise behind the scenes. Many of these films, some of the best, feature strong women directors and actresses who I like to think would take their own stand against this kind of garbage in whatever manner they see fit. One can only respect Haenel's decision and hope that perhaps someday she will find a director with whom she feels comfortable and return to film. Until then, her absence is our loss.
La chispa de la vida (As Luck Would Have It) (2011). Dir. Álex de la Iglesia. With Salma Hayak, José Mota, Blanca Portillo, Carolina Bang.
A somewhat ridiculous dark comedy. After the lastest in a succession of job interviews that came up empty, an unemployed advertising excutive named Roberto drives to the hotel where he and his wife, Luisa (Hayak), honeymooned some twenty years earlier. He is distressed to find that the hotel is gone, replaced by an archaeological dig unearthing the ruins of a Roman theater discovered beneath the building. Coincidentally, of course, the town's mayor and the site's chief archaologist happen to be conducting a media tour in preparation for the site's grand opening to the public.
While wandering around the site in something of a daze, feeling himself a failure, wondering how he will provide for his wife and the education of his children, he walks past a barrier where access is prohibited and falls some distance to the ground, landing on his back, miraculously unharmed except for an iron rod thrust up through the back of his skull which renders him unable to move or be moved. An ambulance is summoned, then the fire department, and a hapless doctor who does not know quite what to do.
In the meantime, Roberto the ad executive sees a phenomenal opportunity. He calls a friend who heads a PR firm and hires an agent to peddle his story to the media. The middle of the film drags as Roberto lies there while the mayor frets about liability, the political fallout, and what it will mean for his career, the archaelogist frets about what will become of her excavation, a pack of wild journalists scrambles for photos and a story angle, and the sleazy agent negotiates with the possibly even sleazier producer of a tabloid TV show.
Absurd as all this is, the conclusion is almost heroic as Luisa, who only wants for Roberto to be okay, loses patience and beats the crap out of the agent, adding insult to injury by stomping on his phone, then with her daughter, a college student, and son Lorenzo, creepy goth, contemptuously disses the sleazy producer and the millions of euros he offers for Roberto's story.
The perilous allure of the elusive third party. It is a commonplace that each of the two major political parties is in the grip of its extreme elements. If only there were a third party that represented the great American center, goes the lament. Well, maybe. There is something to this, more so, I would maintain, on the Republican side. Republican polemics notwithstanding, Biden, Harris, Pelosi, et al., and their policies are not far left, socialist, Marxist. One might wonder why, if these epithets had any bearing on reality, progressives are so typically in a state of angst and outrage by the perceived failures of Biden and their party's leadership.
Andrew Yang, unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican governor of New Jersey and Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency during the presidency of Bush the Younger, and other centrists have linked arms in the Forward Party (Shawna Chen, Yang announces new Forward party with other centrist groups, Axios, July 27, 2022). Tim Miller writes about the phenomenon in The Bulwark:
Rich people have burned given power couple Mark Penn and Nancy Jacobson $50 million to try and make a No Labels ticket happen. My friend Juleanna Glover made a (fairly serious) case for a Jon Stewart candidacy. Say the phrase "unity ticket" and clap three times and Bill Kristol might show up in your living room. (So You Want To Start a Third Party?, July 29, 2022).
Why am I wary of the trendy embrace of third-partyism? Miller argues that third-party dreamers are really Red Dog Democrats and "their idea might accidentally bring about a fascism even though they have nice arms and nicer intentions."
The crux of Miller's argument is that a new third party would not be able to garner a large enough chunk of voters from both existing parties to win a national election. The more likely outcome is that a third party would pull voters overwhelmingly from one party with a small percentage coming from the other. Need I spell out which party Miller and I believe would benefit?
Laying the groundwork for Trump's encore. Trigger warning: Readers who harbor hope for preservation of America as a constitutional republic may find the following content unsettling.
In a speech last week at a conference hosted by the America First Policy Institute, the twice-impeached former president laid his cards on the table.
Trump sketched out a vision that a new Republican Congress could enact sweeping new emergency powers for the next Republican president. The president would be empowered to disregard state jurisdiction over criminal law. The president would be allowed to push aside a "weak, foolish, and stupid governor," and to fire "radical and racist prosecutors"—racist here meaning "anti-white." The president could federalize state National Guards for law-enforcement duties, stop and frisk suspects for illegal weapons, and impose death sentences on drug dealers after expedited trials. David Frum, Trump Just Told Us His Master Plan: If he gets in next time, he won’t be dislodged by any means, The Atlantic, July 27, 2022
The roster of names bandied about for roles in an encore administration reads like parody by a razor-witted satirist: Fox Newser Jeanine Piro for attorney general, Kash Patel director of national intelligence, Mike Flynn secretary of defense, Mike "Pillow Guy" Lindell, Patrick Byrne (Overstock.com), or Tony Ornato as Secret Service director. Imagine Frank Gaffney as ambassador to China. If this prospect does not send you racing to check that your passport is current and your affairs in order, I do not know what will.
Mike Allen, Navarro's dream cabinet for a potential second Trump term, Axios, July 28, 2022
Frederick E. Hoxie, Dennis Aftergut, Who Would Staff a Second Trump Term? Spineless sycophants, that’s who, Axios, July 29, 2022
Jonathan Swan, A radical plan for Trump’s second term, Axios, July 22, 2022; Trump's revenge, Axios, July 23, 2022
The DeSantis option in 2024: Two takes from The Bulwark faction.
"I expect a lot of the anti anti-Trump media to embrace DeSantis. I mean, National Review is basically a fanzine for Ron DeSantis at this point." —Charlie Sykes
"Gun to my head, I’d side with the people saying DeSantis would be less of an existential threat. To be clear—saying someone is less of an existential threat to democracy than Donald Trump might be the faintest praise ever uttered in American politics." —Tim Miller
Further adventures of the missing Secret Service texts. It seems that the preplanned system migration that resulted in the deletion of Secret Service texts on and around the fateful date of January 6 is a task other organizations routinely manage without losing data and records. These records are by the way required by federal law to be safeguarded and submitted to the National Archives.
Several experts were critical of the Secret Service’s explanation that it had asked agents to upload their own phone data to an agency drive before their phones were wiped. Cybersecurity professionals said that policy was “highly unusual,” “ludicrous,” a "failure of management” and “not something any other organization would ever do." (Drew Harwell, Will Oremus, Joseph Menn, Secret Service’s 'ludicrous' deletion of Jan. 6 phone data baffles experts, Washington Post, July 29, 2022)
In yet another startling coincidence, January 6 texts on the phones of top Homeland Security officials are also reported missing (Carol D. Leonnig, Maria Sacchetti, Jan. 6 texts missing for Trump Homeland Security’s Wolf and Cuccinelli, Washington Post, July 29, 2022).
What is Nancy Pelosi thinking? Pelosi's Taiwan expedition is a lose-lose proposition. The US looks weak and Republicans will weaponize that if she steers clear of Taiwan on her Asian trip. And if she goes through with the visit, there are singifcant risks even if China responds with nothing more than saber rattling. I do not know what the possible reward would be.
The flimsy stuff of conservative originalism.
Although conservative originalists have for years been touting their method as restrained, sensible, and tightly tethered to constitutional text and history, this term blew away such pretenses. If this is the great conservative originalism, then those professing it have finally and conclusively revealed it to be what many skeptics already considered it: a hollow edifice designed to hide an ugly and aggressive ideological agenda. (David H. Gans, This Court Has Revealed Conservative Originalism to Be a Hollow Shell, The Atlantic, July 20, 2022)
The I get a kick out of this kind of thing department.
For the most part Greek artists depicted the Persians as worthy, if inferior, opponents, but one red-figure vase stands out as an exception: it shows a Persian archer with a comically frightened expression, dressed in a kind of leotard, his body bent at the waist in an awkward position; on the other side of the vase, running as if to pursue him, a lightly clad Greek holds his erect penis in one hand. An inscription above the Persian figure declares, in Greek, "I am Eurymedon; I stand bent over." The name seems to refer to the site of a battle in which a Greek force defeated the Persians, on their own territory, in the 460s BCE, in which case the image would represent that incursion into Asia as a sexual violation. As if in retribution, a Persian seal stone in the same gallery—a delicately carved emblem with which a high-ranking Persian would "sign" clay documents—shows a Greek warrior, wearing only a helmet and with genitals on full display, getting speared through the groin by a Persian king. The monarch stands proud and tall, in elegant robes and intricate crown, while the warrior crumples beneath him, his nudity anything but heroic. (James Romm, Kings of the Universe: Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs, New York Review, July 21, 2022
Ah, yes, the roots of our civilization.
New blog post: Jordan Peterson and the "Yes, Russia is wrong to invade Ukraine, but…" Faction. July 21, 2022. My old bête noir Jordan Peterson has resurfaced in the ranks of the "Yes, Russia is wrong to invade Ukraine, but…" faction. As David French notes, "And what follows the 'but' is invariably an avalanche of excuse-making and false moral equivalence. NATO provoked Russia…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: Columbia River view from Angel's Rest trail July 22, 2022
