Ross Douthat is wrong about monuments

Douthat: 

To repudiate an honor or dismantle a memorial, then, makes moral sense only if you intend to repudiate the specific deeds that it memorializes. In the case of Confederate monuments, that’s exactly what we should want to do. Their objective purpose was to valorize a cause that we are grateful met defeat, there is no debt we owe J.E.B. Stuart or Nathan Bedford Forrest that needs to be remembered, and if they are put away we will become more morally consistent, not less, in how we think about that chapter in our past.

But just as Jefferson’s memorial wasn’t built to celebrate his slaveholding, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs wasn’t named for Wilson to honor him for being a segregationist. It was named for him because he helped create precisely the institutions that the school exists to staff — our domestic administrative state and our global foreign policy apparatus — and because he was the presidential progenitor of the idealistic, interventionist worldview that has animated that foreign policy community ever since.

Douthat is incorrect. You don't have to want to repudiate the good things a person has done to bring down a monument. Instead, you might want to reconsider how those good things are memorialized --  say, in the case of the recent controversy over the Freedmen's Monument: Nobody is against ending slavery, but they are uncomfortable at best with a monument that celebrates that accomplishment in a way that appears to reaffirm the submission of black people. You can disagree with that characterization, but the controversy is not remotely a renunciation of emancipation.

You also might want to bring a monument down after a reconsideration of the balance between a person's sins and virtues. Statues emphasize the virtues, to the near-exclusion of the sins. So even though Ulysses Grant was a greatly effective general during the Civil War -- not an accomplishment to be repudiated -- he also launched an illegal, bloody war against the Native American tribes that lived on the Plains. His legacy is thus much more complicated than a statue honoring him might indicate. You can honor the accomplishment while taking a dimmer view of the man.

I think our current round of statue-toppling is petering out, though I think a more process-driven statue reconsideration business will go on for awhile yet.  Probably, we'll find ways to recontextualize monuments in a way that honors the accomplishments of so-called "great men" without whitewashing their sins. History is nuanced, complicated. Bronze isn't. We have an opportunity to do something about that. 

Do American Christians need a strongman to protect them?

David Graham on Jeff Sessions, Christianity and Trumpism: 

When Plott asked Sessions, who is now running an underdog campaign to return to his old U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, how Christians could support Trump, he replied with a reference to Egypt and el-Sisi.

“It’s not a democracy—he’s a strongman, tough man, but he promised to protect them. And they believed him, because they didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt. Because they knew they’d be vulnerable. They chose to support somebody that would protect them. And that’s basically what the Christians in the United States did. They felt they were under attack, and the strong guy promised to defend them. And he has.”

A few prominent, though isolated, evangelicals have been highly critical of the president. They argue that Trump shows none of the signs of Christian devotion or morality, and that Christians who align themselves with the president are making a crude bargain with a flawed man in an attempt to obtain safe harbor. Michael Gerson, in a 2018 Atlantic cover story, criticized the habit of “evangelicals regarding themselves, hysterically and with self-pity, as an oppressed minority that requires a strongman to rescue it. This is how Trump has invited evangelicals to view themselves. He has treated evangelicalism as an interest group in need of protection and preferences.”

I've seen and heard some variation on "American Christians want a strongman to protect them" theory a few times now, and it raises a couple of thoughts:

* I don't think American Christians are really in danger of losing their liberty -- but they are in "danger" of having groups they have disfavored over time achieve the same levels of liberty they have traditionally held in our society. Southern whites and their allies made similar arguments during the 1960s about Black liberation. To folks who have been on top for so long, equality isn't perceived as a net gain -- more freedom for everybody! -- but as a loss of their own advantages. It's not about liberty. It's about power.

* That said (and here my Mennonite roots are showing) I am constantly confused by the need of conservative American Christians to dominate the society around them when they profess to follow a religion whose central narrative act was one of surrender -- to the authorities, to death -- by the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Jesus didn't seek a strongman to protect him. I'm not sure why his followers think they shouldn't observe and act on his example.

Coronavirus diary: Chess, my brain and my son

Since the pandemic began, my son and I have played a regular -- not quite daily -- game of chess.

I am the furthest thing from a grandmaster. My skills really haven't advanced much since I was in sixth grade and learned the game anew, playing against friends in study hall. T, honestly, has more experience than I do in recent years -- but he's a kid, so he has a bit less patience for how the game develops.

One thing that frustrates me about myself, though, is that I'm not great at doing the thing you need to do in chess, which is plan several moves ahead, to see the game unfold before it unfolds. I win a lot against T, but it's not like I'm great at planning victory. Often, it just seems to happen. But the result is that chess is an area where I'm unable to hide behind the Dunning-Kruger effect -- I can see, with some precision, what my limitations are. And they make me wonder about the makeup of how I think in other endeavors, if I'm similarly limited. Indeed, I've also had a chance to read a lot more during the pandemic, and I while I'm a competent enough writer -- I mean, I get paid to do it, right? -- I can see how my writing and the thinking that underlies it probably misses a dimension accomplished by people I admire and respect. I'm not sure how, or if, I can acquire that dimension. Those limitations bump up against my ambitions and pretentions, and that's very goddamn frustrating.

The solace I take, though, is that the more often T and I play chess, the more I can start to see a move or two ahead. It takes practice. That gives me hope the same is true for my writing and thinking, but who the hell knows?

One thing I do, though, is I try to make the game more than about wins or losses. In the last couple of months, my son has gone from being overtly frustrated when he loses to calm and willingness to learn from a loss. That's a big gain. And when I win, I try to explain to him what it is I did to win -- my strategy, such as it is, so that he can think about ways to create his own counterstrategy. I'm trying to help him learn to think about these things. And I'm trying to get better at my own thinking.

Terry Teachout, Matt Zoller Seitz, and grief

Terry Teachout and Matt Zoller Seitz hail from different spots on the ideological spectrum, I gather, but otherwise they share some striking similarities. Both are accomplished critics: Teachout, among his many accomplishments, writes about theater for the Wall Street Journal, while Seitz is one of the best movie and television critics of his generation.

They have also been recently widowed -- Seitz, unfathomably and horribly, for the second time. And Seitz's father appears to be in the end stages of cancer.

What I appreciate about both men is that they have been willing to share their grief, both through tweets and blog posts. Which seems timely -- there is so much for Americans, and the world, to grieve right now. But we're uncomfortable with grief, uncomfortable with showing it, uncomfortable with seeing it. We want it to fit into a neat process -- the "stages" of grieving -- but in truth, grieving isn't necessarily a linear process. And in a lot of cases, that process never becomes complete. We just learn to live with it.

Here's Teachout in a recent blog post:

And how am I feeling now that I’m back in New York? That’s hard to say. I think I’m starting to find my way out of the bewildering maze of sorrow, for I no longer miss Hilary with the same around-the-clock intensity that came perilously close to sinking me in April. At the same time, though, her memory is never far from my mind, and I’m still as lonely as I ever was. And while I’ve kept myself busy writing about theater webcasts for The Wall Street Journal, I miss going to the theater in something not wholly unlike the way in which I miss my life’s companion.

For my own part, I don’t know how I’ve managed to survive the simultaneous losses of my beloved spouse and the art form to which I have devoted more than a decade and a half of my life. But I’m still here, and if Hilary’s death and the closing of America’s theaters didn’t kill me, then I figure I’m in it for the long haul. I hope you are, too.

And here is a recent Twitter thread from Seitz:

This weekend marks the seventh anniversary of my mother's death. I still find that grief visits me suddenly and out of the blue, though I don't live with it as a constant low-level thrum like I used to. The really unexpected thing that's happened, though, is that she's gone -- but my relationship with her isn't. I still find myself wrestling with her life and how it affected mine, the love and the conflicts, in just about every interaction I have with my own child.

Anyway, I'm grateful to Teachout and Seitz for their willingness to grieve publicly. I suspect their acts will help others find comfort. We all grieve, sooner or later. You can't prepare for it, really. But maybe you can take solace in knowing you're not alone.

Movie night: THE FAREWELL

Three thoughts about THE FAREWELL, coming up...

* There's a bittersweet pain these days to watching certain movies from the before times. I'm not talking about MCU movies or anything blockbusterish -- I'm talking about films like this one, that don't invent new worlds but take a close look at one small corner of reality. To see people living life together, arguing, celebrating, being passive aggressive, even drinking in close proximity to each other ... to experience that for real is something I miss dearly. And it makes a movie like this a bit more intense for me than it might've been before the pandemic.

* A lot of the coverage of the film, when it came out, was about having Asian representation in the movies -- both onscreen and behind the camera. This is very specifically a Chinese-American movie; the whole plot, inasmuch as there is one, hinges on very specific cultural difference between the two countries. Yet this is also a profoundly human (and utterly lovely) piece about the way we are with our families that is recognizable to anybody who has actually lived in a family -- the conflicts, the lies we use to grease those conflicts, the love that underlies our frustrations with each other. So beautiful.

* Alex Weston's score is memorable and beautiful. 

Trump, America and history

I keep thinking about Donald Trump's most recent interview with Fox News, in which he was asked what message he would send to Black Americans whose ancestors were held as slaves. His response:

My message is that we have a great country, we have the greatest country on Earth. We have a heritage, we have a history and we should learn from the history, and if you don’t understand your history, you will go back to it again. You will go right back to it. You have to learn. Think of it, you take away that whole era and you’re going to go back to it sometime. People won’t know about it. They’re going to forget about it. It’s okay.

Now this is a lot of nothing masquerading as something. We know that Trump's knowledge of history is limited, and I've argued that he doesn't really have a sense of history -- if he could think beyond today's news cycle, this hour's tweet, he might take very different actions with an understanding that history's eye is on him.

I've come to suspect, though, that Trump sees and tells American history like he tells his own -- it's a narrative, one in which inconvenient facts are omitted or glossed over, so that the story is one of ever-greater triumphs, never mind all those bankruptcies and unpaid workers along the way. The end of the story is now, and the end of the story is that he's rich, so he must have won, right? It is history as PR.

A fundamental dividing line in this country is between those who want history to be public relations, and those who have a more tragic sense of how events have proceeded. It is probably easier to get elected if you hold the former view. But the people with the latter view, in my estimation, probably have a more realistic understanding of the country we live in.

Movie night: 'A Face in the Crowd'

Three thoughts about A FACE IN THE CROWD:

* Criterion: "A Face in the Crowd chronicles the rise and fall of Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith), a boisterous entertainer discovered in an Arkansas drunk tank by Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal), a local radio producer with ambitions of her own. His charisma and cunning soon shoot him to the heights of television stardom and political demagoguery, forcing Marcia to grapple with the manipulative, reactionary monster she has created."

So. You Know. Fiction.

* Patricia Neal's face during the movie's climax reminds me of the terror you usually see in horror movies.

* In fact, if I ran a film festival, I'd put this together with CITIZEN KANE, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE -- and, I think, the Boris Karloff version of FRANKENSTEIN.

Can K-State boot Jaden McNeil and still honor the First Amendment?

KC Star: 

A select group of student-athletes at Kansas State have begun circulating a letter on social media that states they will not play in games or participate in any donor or recruiting events for the Wildcats until the university makes changes that address racism on its campus.

The letter demands that K-State administrators create a policy that will expel any student who openly displays racism on any platform, such as social media or at school or athletic events.

Another demand: The university must deliver “strong consequences” to K-State student Jaden McNeil, who founded the white-supremacist group America First Students in Manhattan and posted an insensitive tweet about George Floyd that sparked a mushroom cloud of outrage from the Wildcats’ Black student-athletes on Friday.

I share the rage that K-State students feel about McNeil. I don't know, though, how K-State accommodates their demands without running afoul of the First Amendment. I don't even know if it should.

The law on this seems pretty clear:

In case after case, courts across the country have unequivocally and uniformly held speech codes at public universities to be unconstitutional. Public institutions of higher learning attempting to regulate the content of speech on campus are held to the most exacting level of judicial scrutiny. Typically, courts find speech codes to violate the First Amendment because they are vague and/or overbroad. This means that because the speech code is written in a way that (a) insufficiently specifies what type of speech is prohibited or (b) would prohibit constitutionally protected speech, it cannot be reconciled with the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech.

That's the "can" part. How about the "should?"

I've written before why I think restricting speech might be harmful to folks like the angry K-State student-athletes, from a purely utilitarian standpoint.

If American governance and culture are indeed soaked in hundreds of years of white supremacy, and:

If the ACLU protects the rights of anybody to speak, no matter how unpopular the stance or against the grain of government or public opinion, then:

Organizations like Black Lives Matter that are seeking racial justice are probably the prime beneficiaries of the ACLU's work and an expansive application of the First Amendment. After all, protests by minority activists — no matter how justified — are rarely popular.

The ground has shifted since I first wrote that. The BLM movement is relatively popular now, and that's a good thing! But activists had to endure a few years of Trumpism and a cultural default to honoring police officers before that was the case. They were able to make that case because of their right to free speech. The First Amendment protects dissenters and scoundrels. The main defense I can offer for the "defending scoundrels" part is that they are part of the price for "defending dissenters." And the right to dissent is elemental to democracy. 

My heart sides with K-State's minority students. But kicking Jaden McNeil out of school breaks down the protections that allow Black Lives Matter activists to have a voice and be effective with it. I'm not sure the conflict can be resolved.

Coronavirus diary: What I've learned about me...

...is how boring I am.

My routine in lockdown -- or semi-lockdown, as the case seems to be at this point -- is to read, write, watch movies, do a little housecleaning, and, well, that's it.

Which is pretty close to what I was doing before. But now I'm really tired of it.

The horrifying thing to me about my life is how little of it I have given up in lockdown. I don't have any real hobbies. I don't make stuff. I don't go places. I worked at home before, I work at home now, and that's it. Mostly, I miss going to the coffee shop now and again to see people.

I hope it's not too late for me to find a real and more active, more interesting life on the other side of this thing.

The joys and sorrows of reading during the pandemic

I've found myself as a reader again during the pandemic. 

There are several reasons for this. One is that I overdosed on screen time early on, obsessing about every new development as the virus spread. That hasn't changed as much as it should, but I've learned that the best way to curb it is to go to a room -- or a park, or even just sit in the car at Sonic -- and leave all electronic devices, including my iPhone, behind.

The good news is I'm catching up on literature I've long meant to get around to. I reread THE FIRE NEXT TIME, and finally go to Toni Morrison's BELOVED. Right now I'm juggling Jill Lepore's THESE TRUTHS with THE SECRET GARDEN -- a family read -- and MOBY DICK. I'm loving everything. And I'm not bothering with books that don't capture me. I read 50 pages of a relatively recent novel last week, decided it wasn't for me, and returned it to the library. Life's too short.

On the other hand, life's too short. And I'm more aware of it right now than ever. From where I'm sitting, I can see books by Louise Erdrich, Gunter Grass, NK Jesmin and others waiting to be read. I want to read them. I feel like I should. But I can't read what I'm reading fast enough to get to them as fast as I want. 

I want to read everything now.

On the final hand: Life's too short. I'm going to die someday. And all this reading I've been doing ... will it die with me too? If so, what's the point?

I don't know.

But I'm going to keep reading anyway.

On John Bolton, and why 'virtue signaling' is a con

John Bolton is making a big deal of how bad the president is now. Why didn't he say this stuff when he saw it -- particularly to Democrats who were proceeding with impeachment at the time?

This confirms my long-held view that the term "virtue signaling" is a con -- a way to avoid acting virtuously, to hold virtue in contempt, while still preserving an air of superiority.

Don't get me wrong: Lots of people want to be seen as behaving admirably, and that can lead to hollow, performative acts. But a lot of times when people -- conservatives -- use the term, it's is because they disagree with the virtue being signaled (say, acting against racism) and hate to see people acting as though the virtue in question is actually admirable. They're not really against virtue, or acting virtuously, or a lot of people who use the term perjoratively would never go to church again. They just dislike left-of-center virtues.

Bolton's use of the term is even worse. Nobody was asking him to "signal" anything -- they want to know why he didn't take real-time action, potentially effective action, against corruption and criminality. In his hands, an already hollow term becomes an even more hollow slogan to provide cover against doing the right thing. And paradoxically, it becomes it's own signal -- Bolton may be criticizing the president, but he can still use the language of conservatives. He's letting them know he's still one of them.

You can't say #BlackLivesMatter and play college football this year

Slate's Joel Anderson offers up some chilling statistics:

This week, players returned to campuses all around the country preparing themselves for a season that almost certainly shouldn’t be played. Just look at the early numbers. Two weeks ago at Oklahoma State, three players tested positive for the virus. Last week, the University of Houston suspended workouts after six players tested positive. And Thursday at the University of Texas, news reports emerged that 13 players tested positive — an uptick from the six reported the day before.

I've long predicted that American sports leagues probably will try to resume playing soon, but that somebody will get sick, and everybody will shut down for the rest of the year. But it's ironic that efforts to resume sports are happening at the same time as the "Black Lives Matter" protests -- which started out as a policing issue, but have spread to hard discussions about racism and the exploitation of Black people in all sectors of society.

College sports should be one of those sectors. In the major sports, black and other minority athletes provide disproportionate share of the labor with relatively little compensation, considering the money they're generating for their schools. It's already an exploitative system. But now there's a chance that exploitation will lead to illness and, possibly, death. The excuse that young, healthy people don't face as much danger from the coronavirus, but the truth is there's still a lot we don't know -- and we're learning all the time that asymptomatic carriers of the virus might also face long-term health problems.

The coaches and other university officials need to stop this, now, or their words of racial harmony will ring especially hollow. You can't say that "black lives matter" and keep playing the games. Not this year.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, Sam Brownback and the GOP's view of "Sharia law"

Trump-adjacent conservative Henry Olsen writes in the Washington Post says Republicans must defeat GOP congressional candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, because of her conspiracy-mongering views. Part of Olsen's bill of particulars:

Let’s start with her anti-Muslim bigotry. She has said there is an “Islamic invasion” of the U.S. government and that members of Congress should have to be sworn into office on a Bible. She slurred Muslim men, saying they can have sex with “little boys, little girls … [and] marry as many women as they want.” She said Muslims who “want Sharia law” should “stay over there in the Middle East” and “have a whole bunch of wives, or goats, or sheep, or whatever you want.” She said on Wednesday that “Sharia Law” is “a real threat to our nation,” a blatant falsehood since there’s no effort anywhere in this nation to institute it.

Is opposition to Sharia law out of bounds in the Republican Party? If so, that would probably be news to a lot of Republicans. From 2012:

Republican Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed a bill aimed at keeping state courts and agencies from using Islamic or other non-U.S. laws when making decisions, his office said on Friday, drawing criticism from a national Muslim group.

The law has been dubbed the “sharia bill” because critics say it targets the Islamic legal code. Sharia, or Islamic law, covers all aspects of Muslim life, including religious obligations and financial dealings. Opponents of state bans say they could nullify wills or legal contracts between Muslims.

Brownback, incidentally, is now the "ambassador at large for international religious freedom," because irony is dead. But Kansas wasn't the only state to undertake such an effort. Less than a decade ago, conspiracy thinking about and efforts to ban sharia in the United States were pretty mainstream among conservatives. At one point, as many as 13 states saw bills introduced to ban sharia. Several states adopted the bans. I can't swear that all the bills came from Republicans, but Republicans were the main drivers of that effort.

Those efforts didn't just fade out. Here's Andrew McCarthy at National Review in 2017, arguing that immigration policy should deliberately shut out those he called "sharia supremacists": " To fashion an immigration policy that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the Constitution."

So the idea that Islamic law is a threat to the American way of life was, and appears to remain, a mainstream conservative position. Henry Olsen treats it as disqualifying. Did conservatives change their minds while I wasn't looking, or is Olsen just trying to make the GOP look less nutty than it really is?

If Trump were merely competent...

... he would be a lot more dangerous. And a bunch of DACA recipients would probably be preparing for deportation today.

SCOTUS today overturned Trump's decision to end DACA because he didn't follow procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act, which guides executive branch rule-making. If Trump and his lackeys had simply crossed their Ts and dotted their Is, it's a good bet they would've won today.

This is the pattern: 

I'm not sure that it's possible to elected a version of Trump that is more competent and less given to shortcuts -- Trumpism, to a large degree, is a set of impulses more than an ideology -- but just imagine if that actually happened. If somebody with Trump's inclinations and a bit of self-discipline took the White House (say, somebody like Tom Cotton or Tucker Carlson) they would probably be much more successful at turning their inclinations into actual public policy. We're not dodging Trumpian bullets because he's wrong, but because he's so bad at the actual business of governing. That's too close a call.

The pure narcissism of Donald Trump

I know we know this, but still...

...it is remarkable the degree to which this president thinks everything is about him. I don't wear a mask when I go out because I don't like Trump. I do it to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in my community. And the Supreme Court didn't rule against Trump on DACA because of Trump, but because his administration bypassed the legal process for overturning DACA. To the extent that the latter ruling came about because Donald Trump doesn't like to bother doing things the right way, I suppose it is about him. But only indirectly. He could still be Donald Trump, and the court would've ruled in his favor if his administration just had its shit together. He's too narcissistic to understand that.

America is sinning against Indigenous women. Again.

Lot of news going on lately, but I want to make sure this sinks in. ProPublica:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A prominent women’s hospital here has separated some Native American women from their newly born babies, the result of a practice designed to stop the spread of COVID-19 that clinicians and health care ethicists described as racial profiling.

Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque implemented a secretive policy in recent months to conduct special coronavirus screenings for pregnant women, based on whether they appeared to be Native American, even if they had no symptoms or were otherwise at low risk for the disease, according to clinicians.

Such separations deprive infants of close, immediate contact with their mothers that doctors recommend.

“I believe this policy is racial profiling,” one clinician said. “We seem to be applying a standard to Native Americans that isn’t applied to everybody else. We seem to be specifically picking out patients from Native communities as at-risk whether or not there are outbreaks at their specific pueblo or reservation.”

America has a long - and relatively recent - history of mistreating native women and their offspring. I only became aware of this during the last year.

A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office finds that 4 of the 12 Indian Health Service regions sterilized 3,406 American Indian women without their permission between 1973 and 1976. The GAO finds that 36 women under age 21 were sterilized during this period despite a court-ordered moratorium on sterilizations of women younger than 21.

Two years earlier, an independent study by Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, Choctaw/Cherokee, found that one in four American Indian women had been sterilized without her consent. PInkerton-Uri’s research indicated that the Indian Health Service had “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.”

This kind of stuff is rightly regarded as genocide: Only one of the five means defined in the Genocide Convention is mass murder. The others are "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group," "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part," "imposing measures intended to prevent births with the group," and "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

America's treatment of native peoples has included pretty much all of the above. Forced sterilizations certainly fit the bill. Separating native mothers from their children based on nothing more than their apparent ethnicity does too. This is a grave injustice. Unfortunately, for Native Americans, it's just more of the same.

Atlanta police decide they don't have to 'protect and serve' if they don't want to

WaPo:

Hours after the Fulton County district attorney announced felony murder and other charges against the former Atlanta police officer who fatally shot Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old black man, in the back, a number of Atlanta police officers called in sick just before a shift change Wednesday evening.

“This is not an organized thing, it’s not a blue flu, it’s not a strike, it’s nothing like that,” Vince Champion, a spokesman for the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, told NBC News. “What it actually is is officers protesting that they’ve had enough and they don’t want to deal with it any longer.”

Let's be clear what's going on here: Atlanta Police on Wednesday night decided it was more important for them to protect their impunity from accountability than it is to protect the public. That they did so in organized fashion - Champion's denial of such is transparent BS - gives lie to the whole idea of "a few bad apples." Police violence is a cultural problem, aided and abetted even by the "good cops" who stick with their brothers even when they shouldn't.

I have been a critic of the "defund the police" slogan, because I suspect most Americans think the police are necessary and won't sign onto efforts they think will abolish the police. But the arrogance of the Atlanta Police will make the abolitionists' job easier. The cops are acting more like a protection racket - Nice city you have here. A shame if anything happened to it. - than the guardians of law and order.

John Bolton reveals the problem with 'intellectual Trumpism'

Washington Post:

Mr. Trump said so many things that were wrong or false that Mr. Bolton in the book regularly includes phrases like “(the opposite of the truth)” following some quote from the president. And Mr. Trump in this telling has no overarching philosophy of governance or foreign policy but rather a series of gut-driven instincts that sometimes mirrored Mr. Bolton’s but other times were, in his view, dangerous and reckless.

“His thinking was like an archipelago of dots (like individual real estate deals), leaving the rest of us to discern — or create — policy,” Mr. Bolton writes. “That had its pros and cons.”

This has been obvious for some time - Trumpism is Trump - but that hasn't prevented a cottage industry of writers like Henry Olsen and Victor Davis Hanson or pretty much anybody on the roster of the Claremont Institute to offer an intellectual sheen and overarching consistency to the president's lurching from one crisis to the next. Some of this is to give something undeserving of respect a respectability, but I think some of it is also an effort to steer Trumpism for their own desires. The former effort is spin at best, a lie at worst. The latter effort is probably a doomed project - Trump will be Trump, and if he decides its in his interest to dump his putative allies and propagandists to adopt a different agenda, he most certainly will. 

Did progressivism cause the Tulsa Massacre?

Not going to link this. But still worth understanding the Trumpist perspective.

A couple of thoughts:

* AmGreatness is pretty closely associated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative outfit whose primary role these days is to provide an intellectual sheen for Trumpism. There long-term project, though, sees the original sin of America mostly in terms of the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century, along with with the "administrative state" it helped enable. Some of these critiques have merit -- Woodrow Wilson was really a racist asshole! -- but it is also the proverbial man with the hammer who sees the whole world as a nail. The errors of Herbert Croly explain everything bad in the United States, even when they don't, really. Ascribing the Tulsa massacre to progressivism is ridiculous. 

* Why? Because Americans were enslaving and killing African Americans long before progressivism reared its head in the United States. The KKK was not a left-leaning outfit. Americans didn't need ideology to kill black people. It's what we've always done. 

To be fair, AmGreatness acknowledges that, but only in throat-clearing fashion. 

* Anyway, for the AmGreatness crowd, racism doesn't seem to exist, except in that A) it can make the left look bad, or B) when it does happen, it's actually "multiculturalists" criticizing and opposing white conservatives on college campuses. Meanwhile, the AmGreatness crowd is pretty terrified of the influence of minorities in the country's culture. Make of that what you will.

I can honestly say that racism in American life has come from the left, the center, and the right. I don't think Trumpist conservatives are willing to make the same concession. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that position is held in good faith.

A fun thing to do when you're watching a great movie...

...is to look it up on Wikipedia. A lot of times, you find out stuff that enriches your understanding of the film, or gives you new movies to check out.

For example, we're watching TOKYO STORY this week.

Wikipedia:

"Ozu and screenwriter Kōgo Noda wrote the script in 103 days, loosely basing it on the 1937 American film Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey."

Which got me interested in MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW.

Again, Wikipedia:

"Orson Welles said of Make Way for Tomorrow, "It would make a stone cry,"[2] and rhapsodized about his enthusiasm for the film in his booklength series of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. In Newsweek magazine, famed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris named it his #1 film, stating "The most depressing movie ever made, providing reassurance that everything will definitely end badly."[3]"

MWFT is not available on any streaming service. Which means I have to hunt it down on DVD.

The generals are ignoring Trump. That's bad.

This isn't good for democracy. Josh Rogin, on President Trump's decision to withdraw some troops from Germany:

One reason it will take time is that, according to multiple senior administration officials, the Pentagon won’t submit the options for implementing the withdrawal that Trump wants. Trump’s request for such plans was communicated to the Pentagon in a classified Cabinet memo signed by national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien and initialed by Trump, officials said. But the Pentagon is treating Trump’s demand as if doesn’t carry the authority of an actual presidential decision. The generals are effectively ignoring it.

“Whatever you think about the specifics of withdrawing troops from Germany, there’s nothing heroic about deliberately ignoring the president’s expressed intentions,” a senior administration official said.

There's a temptation to figure that if Trump is for something, anybody opposing it must be right. But that's not the case here. The generals are substituting their own judgment for the president's -- and that's not how it is supposed to work. They are supposed to obey the president's lawful orders. As far as I know, his order to withdraw is lawful.

And this doesn't just happen to Trump. Here's something I wrote in 2010, during the Obama presidency:

Bob Woodward's new book reminds us of an important proposition: American democracy and long-term war are a bad mix.

It's certainly bad for democracy. One of the most disturbing revelations is the lengths that President Obama went to in order to ensure the military obeyed his orders in Afghanistan -- dictating a six-page single-spaced document dictating the terms of 2009's surge of 40,000 troops to that country. Why the detail? Because the president felt sure his generals and admirals would find "wiggle room" to violate the spirit of the order setting a 2011 deadline to begin drawing down troops there.

The American Constitution is clear: The president is the commander-in-chief. He makes the country's big decisions about how we fight war. Generals and admirals give their best military advice, and then execute the decisions the president has made. But top military officials clearly see themselves as political players in the process, lobbying the president and circumventing his orders. Woodward reports Gen. David Petraeus told his staff Obama was "(messing) with the wrong man." Such reports should concern anybody concerned with Constitutional order.

Nothing has changed. We're overdue for a reset on civil-military relations. The generals need to remember who is the boss. It's not them -- not as long as we can plausibly claim to be a democracy.

I miss the blogosphere

The blogosphere, back in the day, made me feel smarter and more informed.

The Twittersphere occasionally does that. Mostly, it makes me feel like it's really easy to get into a fight -- that it invites the forming and hardening of opinions, rather than creating a space to try to understand situations, or arrive at conclusions that don't adhere to a binary pole.

I'm still trying to figure out how to manage myself on Twitter. I would love it if I could find a read-only version of the website, but that doesn't seem possible. Self-control is required. Which, online, is not my specialty.

What I'm going to try to do:

* Spend less time reading Twitter.

* Use it, when posting, as a sort of RSS for my blog and Instagram. I'm hoping the time taken to explain myself better will A) keep me from knee-jerk posts, slow me down and B) thus make me use my brain more.

In other words: I'll do less responding directly to tweets. If I can't take time to craft a thoughtful comment that's blogworthy, then it's probably not worth the 10 seconds it takes to dunk.

I've tried and failed before to find ways to make Twitter work for me better. This may also fail. But I feel like I have to try.

The Democratic Party is very against* sexual harassment.

News:

The Democratic candidate challenging Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse in Nebraska lost the backing of the state party Monday after it was revealed that he had made graphic sexual comments about a campaign staffer in a group text.

In the messages, obtained by the Associated Press, candidate Chris Janicek asked a group that included the staffer whether they should use campaign dollars on “getting her laid.”

“Our Democratic Party has no tolerance for sexual harassment,” NDP Chair Jane Kleeb said in a statement on the party’s website. “Our Party will not extend resources or any type of support to any candidate that violates our code of conduct and doesn’t treat men and women with the dignity and respect they deserve.”

This is frankly an easy stance for the party to take, since Janicek probably has no real chance of beating Sasse. Call me back when senior party officials stop regretting that Al Franken is no longer in the Senate.

Amtrak begins its abandonment of the hinterlands

This isn't really a surprise, but it is sad:

Amtrak is ending daily service to hundreds of stations outside the Northeast, and you can blame the coronavirus pandemic, the railroad said this week.

Starting Oct. 1, most Amtrak long-distance trains will operate three times a week instead of daily, the company said in a memo to employees Monday.

Among the routes getting cut: My beloved Southwest Chief, which I've taken several times from the Kansas City area to Chicago. The last big trip I took before the pandemic, in fact, was a long weekend to the Windy City -- I gifted my dad with the trip. He had once worked on a track crew, and his father retired from Amtrak, but he had never taken a long train trip before. We spent the entire ride there in the observation car, kind of zen experience of meditating on the countryside in Missouri, Iowa and Illinois that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times.

It beats the hell out of air travel, that's for sure.

'I am not a racist.' Jimmy Fallon - and me

This is relatively minor in the scheme of things, but it is also very connected to the current moment, so I want to take a second with it.

Monday night, Jimmy Fallon apologized on air for the 20-year-old SNL in which he performed in blackface. It was fine as far as it goes, but he said one thing that stuck in my craw:

“I’m not a racist. I don’t feel this way,” Fallon explained.

I think this is something we white people should avoid saying when we commit racial fuckups. It's a kissing cousin to "some of my best friends are black" -- it reflects an effort not just to apologize for screwing up, or learning a lesson, but to assure everybody who can hear that the speaker (whatever stupid, mean or hurtful thing he or she just said) is really a good person.

And honestly, who cares?

Let me back up. I have fucked up on racial matters, in a way that drew national attention. It was painful -- but worse than that, much worse, it created pain in a community that I valued and treasured. Rightfully and understandably nobody cared if I thought of myself as a good person. They only cared what I had done. 

It's possible that if you search, you might find that younger version of me online somewhere telling people I'm not a racist. I remember making a conscious attempt not to defend myself in such a fashion, but the the temptation not to be a bad person -- and we see racism, rightly, as an indictment of the character of its practitioners -- that it can overwhelm the desire to simply apologize, to take your punishment, and to realize that in some people's minds you are forever tainted. 

Shame is not fun, but it is also much less pain than a lot of black Americans have to live with, dealing with oppressive and even deadly policing in their communities. So the best thing to do, in my mind, is to offer an unqualified apology, then put your head down and do the work of being better, and making it better. And do it quietly, instead of performatively -- because that is simply another way of letting everybody know that, no really, you're a good person.

Other people can't see our hearts. They can only see our deeds. So we white folks need to stop boasting about the content of our character and instead live it in everything we do. "I am not racist," isn't an apology. It's self-affirmation.

Trumpist Christianity isn't Christianity

McKay Coppins writes about President Trump's photo op at the church:

As I’ve written before, most white conservative Christians don’t want piety from this president; they want power. In Trump, they see a champion who will restore them to their rightful place at the center of American life, while using his terrible swift sword to punish their enemies.

If you believe in Christianity, you believe in a God who sent his son not to overpower his enemies, but to die at their hands. It is really that simple. And that is the opposite approach of Christians who seek to dominate their neighbors rather than love them.

Trumpist Christians aren't Christians, at least not in a religious sense. Sure, they may attend church. But mostly, they're another tribe -- a tribe that wants little more than what other tribes want. Power. Profane power.

It will not lead to salvation.

The president's "dominance" ideology

The president is talking a lot about "dominance" today.

It would be one thing if he was talking about "restoring order" in the wake of protests that have -- to some extent -- morphed into violence. (Some of it is real rebellion, some of it is simple looting, and some of it instigators trying to create disaster. I don't know how much of each go into the mix.) If the president simply was trying to bring about calm, that might be welcome.

Instead, he is talking about dominance.

That's different. It is undemocratic and authoritarian. But it reflects Donald Trump's truest ideology. More than appointing conservative judges, more than stopping immigration, his real goal is dominance -- those other goals simply help him achieve the thing he desires most of all.

We can no longer save democracy. But we can reclaim it.

A few weeks ago, I wrote for THE WEEK that democracy was slipping away, and I wondered if we would notice if and when we hit the tipping point.

Many Americans understand that Trump and his allies have given the country's norms and institutions quite a beating, but they may not realize how close our democracy is to outright failure. The breakdown will not come all at once, in a single moment. Instead, constitutional governance might die a death by a thousand cuts. The shutdown of the Michigan legislature is a warning sign: American democracy is still alive, for now, but the end could be nearer than we think.

That was before George Floyd.

Tonight, the president threatened to send the military into American cities if protests over Floyd's death continue. He seemed to offer praise to peaceful protesters -- "we cannot allow ... peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob" -- but his words were immediately belied by his actions.

Simply put, the president of the United States unleashed state violence against peaceful demonstrators outside the White House.

And he did so ... for a photo op.

Moments earlier, just outside the White House, federal authorities used rubber bullets, flash bangs and gas to clear peaceful protesters from the area.

Trump then walked across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church, where a fire was set Sunday evening. The president held up a Bible and nodded to media cameras, before being joined by Attorney General Bill Barr and others to pose for photos.

I would submit to you that the tipping point has been reached. The rule of law -- of a Constitution that guarantees the freedom of expression, and to peacefully assemble -- has been replaced, for now, by the rule of dominance. That is not democracy. 

So I believe we can no longer save democracy.

But I do believe we can reclaim it. Or, at the very least, we should make every effort to do so.

How? Uh, that's where I come up short. I think there are some dark days ahead. I think it will be easier to go along to get along because the costs of not going along may be high indeed. All I'm left with, really, is the final words from Anne Applebaum's new piece in The Atlantic:

In the meantime, I leave anyone who has the bad luck to be in public life at this moment with a final thought from Władysław Bartoszewski, who was a member of the wartime Polish underground, a prisoner of both the Nazis and the Stalinists, and then, finally, the foreign minister in two Polish democratic governments. Late in his life—he lived to be 93—he summed up the philosophy that had guided him through all of these tumultuous political changes. It was not idealism that drove him, or big ideas, he said. It was this: Warto być przyzwoitym—“Just try to be decent.” Whether you were decent—that’s what will be remembered.

Just try to be decent.

The War on Terror comes home

Republicans are starting to sound scary. This is a sitting congressman:

And this is a senator who stands a decent chance of being president someday.

The first tweet advocates "hunting down" American citizens as though they were opponents in the misbegotten "war on terror." Cotton, meanwhile, served in the Army in Iraq, which was was war-on-terror-adjacent.

One thing that was notable about America's war on terror efforts is how cruel they often were. Dick Cheney told us we'd have to work the "dark side," and so we did -- at Baghram, Gitmo, and at secret torture sites around the world. Civil libertarians opposed these actions in real time, and a few low-level soldiers were prosecuted. But nobody in a position of real responsibility was held accountable, and indeed, pundits like Marc Thiessen made their names and careers defending the torture regime. When Barack Obama took office, he declined to prosecute the war criminals in his predecessor's administration, citing a need to "look forward." Admittedly, I thought that was the right approach at the time.

Now, though, the chickens are coming home to roost. Some leading American conservatives don't want to merely unleash the worst techniques of the war on terror against foreign terrorists -- they're ready to bring those techniques home.

Who's gonna stop them?