After a talk he gave a year or so before he died, a young woman in the audience asked the following question: "Mr. Camus, if everything is absurd, does that mean that nothing we do matters?" Camus supposedly looked at her for a long moment and then, in a measured voice, said, "It matters. It all matters. If the telephone rings, and I don't answer it, it matters." —Vivian Gornick, Camus on Tour, The New York Review of Books, November 23, 2023, issue
Greetings from the far left coast where I am rereading Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, a 900-page condensation of five previously published volumes by Frank on Dostoevsky's life and works. Accounts of the intellectual ferment in the 1840s, when Dostoevsky was young, and in the 1860s, after his return from Siberian exile where he served four years in a prison camp and six years in compulsory military service, are the sort of thing that still fires my intellectual imagination. Controversies of our present day find parallels, a familiar ring, in the divide between Westernizers and Slavophils and in agitation within critical circles over the proper role of art, whether literature should stand as an accusation and exposé of the evils of Russian society in furtherance of the immediate task of obtaining social justice or whether it should pursue more purely aesthetic ends, art for art's sake that takes up the "eternal" entanglements of the human condition, with Gogol the model for the former, Pushkin for the latter. Through it all came Dostoevsky's "transformation [during his years in a Siberian prison camp] from a philanthropic radical with Christian socialist leanings into a resolute believer in the Russian people as the unique national embodiment of the moral ideals he had found so appealing in Utopian Socialism." In Diary of a Writer (1873), Dostoevsky remarked "on the regeneration of my convictions. It did not occur so quickly, but gradually—and after a long, long time" (quoted by Frank).
On a lighter note. Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement to Axios, "Leader Scalise, Whip Emmer, and Chair Stefanik have been trusted friends and advisors throughout this process, and we are already working like a well-oiled machine to deliver results for the American people" (Juliegrace Brufke, GOP leadership looks to help Mike Johnson settle in as House speaker). I cannot recall the last time anyone accused House Republicans of working like a well-oiled machine. Perhaps he spoke in jest, with the old wink and a nod.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauen Boebert were a comedy team like no other when they made their debut in Congress a few years ago. Move over Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Lucy and Desi. These twin buffoons brought their own inimitable brand of decorum and gravitas to the congressional stage. Who can forget those crazy dames heckling Joe Biden from the cheap seats during his first State of the Union address?
Somewhere along the way, as seems to happen with comedy duos, there was a falling out. As far back as April 2022 Politico reported that Republicans were saying privately that Boebert detested being tied to Taylor Greene. During a House Freedom Caucus board of directors gathering the two got into it over Greene's appearance at an event organized by a known white nationalist. "Their confrontation grew so heated that at least one onlooker feared the Greene-Boebert back-and-forth might escalate beyond the verbal cage match had another board member not stepped in to de-escalate," according to the customary unnamed member granted anonymity to describe what happened. The incident was reportedly confirmed by three unnamed people connected to the Freedom Caucus.
Earlier this year The Daily Beast reported a screaming match in a bathroom just off the House floor when Taylor Greene criticized Boebert for not supporting Kevin McCarthy during his first grab for speakership glory. In June Taylor Greene called Boebert a "little bitch" on House floor, later crediting Daily Beast reporting on the incident as "impressively correct." Then in September came Boebert's adventure immortalized on security camera footage at a performance of Beetlejuice. I am willing to take it on faith that The Beast's reporting here too is impressively correct:
Greene has resorted to a playbook familiar to any woman who survived high school: She’s telling GOP colleagues, according to lawmakers, that Boebert is a “whore.”
One Republican lawmaker, who has heard Greene use that word multiple times to describe Boebert, told The Daily Beast that Greene has been at this campaign for some time.
“Calling her a whore, that’s not new,” this GOP lawmaker said. “She’s been doing that for a while.”
Another GOP lawmaker also witnessed Greene refer to Boebert as a “whore.”
It just gets better. Yesterday Politico reported "a nasty turn" on Capitol Hill. Republican Rep. Tim Burchett, who voted to take away McCarthy cherished speakership, charged that the former speaker elbowed him a vicious kidney shot in a Capitol hallway. Burchett ran after McCarthy, told him to "have some guts" when McCarthy denied the accusation, and called him a "jerk," in an exchange witnessed by Politico. "He would not push any effort to censure McCarthy, Burchett said, but he said they could settle differences in 'the parking lot' and that 'it would be a very short fistfight.'”
Charlies Sykes wrote about McCarthy's history of this sort of thing in his morning newsletter: Are They Liars? Or Fools?: Plus: Congresses embarrassing Fight Club.
Matt Gaetz got into the fray by filing an ethics complaint against McCarthy, charging him with a breach "of the binding Code of Official Conduct, whose first rule is that 'A Member... shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.'" Gaetz, it goes without saying, is known for behaving at all times in a manner that reflects creditably on the House.
Over in the Senate, Markwayne Mullin (MAGA, Okla) rose from his seat to initiate a physical confrontation with a Teamsters official testifying before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, prompting Committee Chair Bernie Sanders to step in: "You’re a United States senator, sit down."
Back over in the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene flamed out on multiple resolutions to censure Rashida Tlaib and impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Tlaib is a hothead and a loose cannon, but a rank amateur in those categories compared to the world-class Taylor Greene, who responded to Republicans who did not support her censure resolution with some choice name calling: “Colonel Sanders” (Chip Roy), “Vaping groping Lauren Boebert” (vaping, groping Lauren Boebert), and “CNN wannabe Ken Buck.”
Well-oiled machine indeed.
Anthony Andragna, Olivia Beavers, 'Clean shot to the kidney,' fight threats and 'smurfs': Capitol Hill takes a nasty turn, Politico, November 14, 2023
Joe Perticone, Today’s Republican Meltdown in Congress, The Bulwark, November 14, 2023
Meanwhile, in Israel. "What has already changed is that Netanyahuism…has entered its last days. Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history, in office with a few interruptions for more than fifteen years. He has never been more unpopular." Netanyahu and others in his extremist government deny responsibility and accountability for the failures of October 7, blaming instead Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, "the crimes of Oslo and the crimes of the left," high-ranking military and security officials, everyone but themselves.
But the public, for the most part, is not convinced. The evasions ring hollow and only generate more disdain. At Shamir Medical Center in Tel Aviv, a woman yelled at Idit Sliman, a hard-right Likudnik and the minister of the environment, before a scolding doctor in scrubs forced Sliman out. When Miri Regev, the transportation minister and a hard-right pugilist, arrived at the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, irate citizens surrounded her car and threw their beverages at it. Similar scenes have played out in hospital waiting rooms across the country. (Joshua Leifer, Inhumane Times, The New York Review of Books, November 23, 2023, issue)
New at Portable Bohemia Substack. Each time I write about Israel and Gaza I think to myself that this will be the last time, I have said what I have to say. Invariably something pulls me back into it. Thanks for bearing with me.
• The Spectre of a Great Catastrophe, November 4, 2023. On October 25, 2023, a man was elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a position two doors down from the presidency, who for more than two decades has spoken and written frankly…read more>>
• Trying to Imagine How I Would Feel, November 12, 2023. Albert Camus was born in French Algeria in 1913 into a family of pieds noirs, French colonial settlers, and grew up in a poor neighborhood in Algiers. At the University of Algiers he studied philosophy and played goalie on the soccer team. He would later say that what little morality he knew he learned on the soccer field and the stage…read more>>
Keep the faith
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
