Innocence dwells with Wisdom, but never with Ignorance. —William Blake
Greetings from the far left coast where Portland has experienced the most rainfall for April, May, and early June on record in at least the past 81 years. There is a flood watch along the Columbia River in the Vancouver (WA) and Portland area due to unusually heavy rain and a melting snowpack. The forecast calls for the chance of more rain through end of the week. This may be one of those years where the rainy season lasts right up to July 4. I'll try to keep my head above water.
On Saturday morning my nephew Dan will be running Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota. My brother will be there in person to cheer him on. I'll check in from here before and after my Saturday run when I will be with him in spirit. My spirit is slower than his, but that's okay. Run a good one, Dan.
Cinema Desk. Deux jours, une nuit (Two Days, One Night) (2014) with Marion Cotillard. Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
Sandra is a factory worker who has been on leave suffering from depression. As she was about to return to work she was voted out of her job in a manipulative cost-cutting move by management. She and another worker persuade the manager to hold a second ballot, secret this time, because the foreman acted improperly to influence the initial vote against her. The catch is that if she comes back her fourteen colleagues will lose the thousand-euro bonus promised when the workforce was downsized by laying her off.
Sandra has the weekend to contact her colleagues one by one and try to persuade them to vote on Monday for her to keep her job. It is a miserable affair. The others need their bonuses almost as desperately as she and her husband need her income. No one is well off. Most are sympathetic with Sandra's plight; some have feelings of guilt and regret about caving to pressure to vote for her to be let go. Each has compelling reasons for not giving up the bonus.
Sandra is devastated by the necessity to beg her colleagues to sacrifice for her sake. Torn by what she must ask them to do, she wants to give up. She keeps going by downing Xanax tablets like they are M&M's as her husband drives her from place to place and encourages her to see it through.
Deux jours, une nuit is a serious film about ordinary life. There are no super heroes, no bombs, no explosions, no fashionable social themes, just ordinary people and the existential dilemmas of everyday life, personal relationships, responsibility, caring for one another, wanting to do the right thing when it is not clear what that is. At the end Sandra is confronted with her own terrible choice. Cotillard and the Dardenne bros hit all the right notes in a film that is quietly yet deeply moving.
January 6 committee hearings. One thing keeps coming back to me as I think about Thursday night's prime time hearing. Several individuals explained that they came to DC for the rally and marched on to the Capitol because Trump asked them to. They said they owed it to him because he had done so much for them. What in the world has Trump ever done for anyone but himself?
The footage of the assault is riveting. An attorney for Proud Boy Joseph Biggs insulted us all when he called the testimony of Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards "canned, cagey and morally superior." Well. She had the moral high ground, and Biggs the morally degenerate ground, so I suppose hers was the morally superior position.
Monday morning's hearing documented pushback by White House and campaign officials against allegations of fraud and a rigged election. I did not have a sense of the extent of this pushback before seeing the testimony. Those officials think of themselves as the good guys, Team Normal, as Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien put it. Stepien and others patted themselves on the back for speaking truth to the president. Not their fault Trump ignored them and embraced instead unhinged conspiracy theories trafficked by Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the rest of the Kraken team.
Tim Miller at The Bulwark blasts Stepien for this self-serving portrayal:
Bill Stepien spent 5 years watching Donald Trump’s cruelty, pathological duplicity, irrationality, narcissistic personality disorder, buffoonery, and criminality. After that half-decade of evidence, this "professional" decided to accept a role as the campaign manager for Trump’s flagging re-election campaign.
And he didn’t just take some arm’s length consultancy providing powerpoint decks from the comfort of a Cape May beach house. He chose to sit in the big-boy chair as the man-child responsible for getting Trump four more years in power. (No, Bill Stepien, You Weren’t On "Team Normal." You Were On "Team Coup," The Bulwark, June 13, 2022).
Stepien is now a consultant for Harriet Hageman, who is running against Liz Cheney in the Republican primary for a Wyoming Senate seat. Hageman has been endorsed by Trump.
The line peddled by a bizarre alliance of foreign policy realists and holy warriors against American imperialism and global capitalism is that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war between the US and Russia whose proximate cause is NATO encroachment on Russia's sphere of influence. Never mind that Putin and those around him consider Poland, the Baltic states, Finland, and Sweden, Eastern Europe generally, to be part of Russia's sphere of influence. Putin made his intentions clear again in remarks during a meeting with young scientists and entrepreneurs where he invoked Peter the Great, with whom he has compared himself.
"You might think he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands," Mr Putin said, referring to the Northern Wars which Peter launched at the turn of the 18th Century as he forged a new Russian Empire.
"But he seized nothing; he reclaimed it!" he said, arguing that Slavs had lived in the area for centuries.
"It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen," Mr Putin concluded, with a near-smirk that left no doubt he was referring to Ukraine and his aims there. (Sarah Rainsford, Putin and Peter the Great: Russian leader likens himself to 18th Century tsar, BBC News, June 10, 2022)
David Ignatius reports that Biden administration officials believe the balance of war is not yet tipping in Moscow's favor despite Russian advances in eastern Ukraine. He warns though that the US needs to supply more weapons more quickly.
Administration officials are right that this isn’t a time for panic about Ukraine. But President Biden needs to demonstrate, in a way that gets attention in Kyiv and Moscow, that he is truly prepared to deliver on his promise to give Ukraine “the means to deter and defend itself against further aggression.” (In Ukraine, is the balance tipping in Moscow’s favor? Not yet, The Washington Post, June 14, 2022).
His conclusion: "The Ukrainians aren’t winning right now, but they aren’t losing, either. And they should have a lot more weapons arriving soon."
Tom Nichols first came up on my radar early in 2018 with his recently published book The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. I read the book and discussed it at some length in April of that year (Tom Nichols and the death of expertise; or, experts and the rest of us Part 1 and Part 2).
Since then I have read any number of articles and essays by him at The Atlantic, The Bulwark, and elsewhere. I have found Nichols, who describes himself as a New England moderate-conservative Republican, to be intelligent, thoughtful, a no-nonsense sort who can come off hard-edged. He doesn't suffer fools gladly, as the saying goes. Nichols is invariably worth reading, even when I find myself disagreeing on certain points, perhaps most worth reading when I find myself disagreeing, because that can prompt me to reexamine my own thinking, never a bad thing.
Yesterday in a short piece at The Atlantic Nichols defended Joe Biden (Leave Joe Biden Alone). Talk about a voice crying in the wilderness.
I always kind of liked Biden as someone to whom I could relate: a working-class centrist who spoke his mind, even when his thoughts were garbled or when he seemed comically full of himself.
The Joe Biden who ran in 2020 appeared wiser, sadder, somewhat deflated, and seemed to be taking on the presidency as a public service and a burden. Time and tragedy had tempered Biden, and I liked him even more than I did in his flashier, Jason Sudeikis–like youth. These days, I think he’s done a pretty good job, especially given the fact that he’s dealing with a pandemic, revelations about an attempted American coup d’état, and an economic slowdown over which he had no control.
And Russia's brutal war on Ukraine.
Forget about the Republicans, he says, where the fringe is now the base and the wackiest among them are running the show.
One might have hoped, however—and by one, I mean "me"—that the Democrats would hold their fire and stop their whispering about what happens if Biden steps down, or even dies. And if Biden does hold on—well, there are some prominent young Democrats who haven’t decided if they’re going to support him. (And by young Democrats, I mean "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.")
I have been critical of Biden on more than one occasion and anticipate that will continue. Even so, I stand with Nichols here.
New blog post: Impressions from the January 6 Committee Prime Time Hearing. June 10, 2022. Last night we were treated to a rare and welcome display of our elected representatives comporting themselves in a manner befitting the high office they hold… read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
Pictured below: poets in their youth. Debbie Hiers brought this flyer to my attention recently and I found a copy in my files. Appears to be from 1982 (date on newspaper clipping).
