So delicious. Beyond delicious.😂😂😂😂😂😂 It’s Lindsey’s fault! It’s Lindsey’s fault Trump talked to Woodward 18 times! And agreed to be recorded! It’s Lindsey’s fault that Trump lies! It’s Lindsey’s fault that Trump is stupid! —Claire McCaskill

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.” (quoted by Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark)

Thanks to family and friends who have called, emailed, texted, and Facebook messaged to check on my safety. I am safe. Wildfires raging to the east and south of Portland have not made it to Multnomah County. The smoke has. Air quality this morning remains hazardous but not off the chart beyond hazardous as it has been at times. The current air quality alert is in effect until noon Thursday.

The sky takes on an eerie coloration like something out of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. The most uncanny aspect is the silence. Under ordinary circumstances there is a parade of pedestrian traffic up and down my little neighborhood street throughout the day. Now no one. I miss it.

Stocks of beer and wine are running low. The situation is not yet perilous but could become so by week's end. There is hope that conditions will improve before then.

The mail brought diversion at the end of last week with delivery of new issues of The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books and the September order from Powell's: Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy by Wolfram Ellenberger. Thanks to the poet Chuck Oliveros for the recommendation. The decade referred to in the title is the 1920s, when Ludwig Wittgenstein was telling Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, eminent British philosophers of that time, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it," it being his book Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Martin Heidegger was writing Being and Time, and Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer, with whom I am less familiar, were heading down their own idiosyncratic and influential paths. Ellenberger is solid on the philosophy and leavens the ideas with engaging anecdotes and biographical detail. For instance:

Of our four philosophers Cassirer is the only one whose sexuality never blossomed into an existential problem, and the only one who never suffered a nervous breakdown.… Among the four great thinkers of this politically tumultuous decade, he was as much as anything the only explicit supporter of the Weimar Republic, founded late in 1918. Indeed, he was the only democrat.

I find that a sense of the writer as a person adds flavor and insight to the writing, be it philosophy, poetry, fiction, &c. Ellenberger delivers.

John McWhorter is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and teaches linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of some of the best essays I've come across recently about  free speech, academic freedom, racism, anti-racism, white fragility, cancel culture, and other raging issues of the day.

McWhorter writes that he has "been receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their career because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook." The examples in his recent article Academics Are Really, Really Worried About Their Freedom are anecdotal but as with accounts of police misconduct in encounters with people of color are too many in number and too convincing to just dismiss them.

From an assistant professor of color:

At the moment, I’m more anxious about this problem than anything else in my career…the truth is that over the last few years, this new norm of intolerance and cult of social justice has marginalized me more than all racism I have ever faced in my life.

I have made cracks about journalists and others who speak as if fresh from a session in self-criticism and thought reform at a cultural revolution reeducation camp. McWhorter is thinking along the same lines:

Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report "bias" that they have perceived. One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution.

I am again left spluttering. Note that many of these reports are coming from people who are left of center politically, not just from propagandists for the conservative culture of grievance, Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, et al. Perhaps this silliness is not as widespread as it appears. Nonetheless it sometimes seems that the academy is in the hands of business majors, human resources administrators, and diversity consultants.

Danielle Allen is a political philosopher, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard, and author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Her article The Flawed Genius of the Constitution opens with these thoughts:

Why do I love the U.S. Constitution? This instrument formally converted the worth of my great-great-grandfather Sidiphus into three-fifths’ that of a free person. Living in the East Indies as a free man, Sidiphus had been tricked into enslavement—recruited to a Georgia farm just before the Civil War by the promise of a foremanship. Had he managed to escape Georgia and bondage prior to the onset of the war, the Constitution would not have protected his God-given natural rights.

…

Given the crime against humanity written into the Constitution because compromise was necessary to form a union—and given the sharp and unabating attention that the nation’s Founders and their writings have received in recent months—I had better have a rock-solid explanation for my love of that document. Simple love of country, land of my mother’s milk, won’t do. My love must be sighted, not blind.

The essay is worth reading in full and giving some thought.

My New York Review subscription got me a special streaming of The 50 Year Argument (2014), a documentary film about the magazine directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi. The film is a delight. I loved seeing interviews and archival footage with people whose articles and essays I have been reading for years, decades, people like Joan Didion, Mary Beard, Timothy Garton Ash, Darryl Pinckney, Susan Sontag, Derrick Walcott, W.H. Auden, Isaiah Berlin, to name a few. There is a great segment from an old Dick Cavett show with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer. Vidal had written a piece published in NYR on male attitudes about women in which he lumped together Henry Miller, Mailer, and Charles Manson. Mailer took exception. It was entertaining.

SIFT (The Four Moves) is a concise list of "things to do when looking at a source" to help us better sort truth from fiction as we take in news and stuff that purports to be news. The author, Mike Caulfied, is director of blended and networked learning at Washington State University Vancouver. A link to the web page has been added to the list of Fact Check resources on the Portable Bohemia home page.

One new blog post, on the subject of protest and responsibility (link below in the usual place). Though you might not be able to tell from the published version, it is the product of weeks of thought and bumbling with multiple drafts on a subject I am still trying to come to grips with. Perhaps it can be viewed as a beginning, groundwork for further and better reflection. As always, thanks for reading.

48 days to Election Day, 78 days after that until Inauguration Day.

Keep the faith.

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