Is Trump burning everything down?

Back in 1991, as the Iraqis were being routed from Kuwait by US and coalition forces, they set fires to a number of oil wells along the way. There was not strategic purpose to that action, as far as I can tell. It was simply a churlish and cruel decision that signaled: "If Saddam can't have this, nobody can."

Which brings me, naturally, to Donald Trump.

Big story in the NYT this morning asks: "Does Trump Want to Save His Economy?" It tries to explain the seemingly inexplicable -- while this president is dithering on getting a new economic package passed for Americans who have lost their jobs and face losing their homes because of the pandemic.

Lobbyists, economists and members of Congress say they are baffled by Mr. Trump’s shifting approach and apparent lack of urgency to nail down another rescue package that he can sign into law.

The president’s strategy to help the economy “is hard to decipher,” said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has urged Congress to provide more aid to people, businesses and hard-hit state and local governments. “It seems to me there isn’t a clear strategy to support the economy right now coming from the White House.”

Perhaps -- as this story suggests -- Trump is just engaging in another round of magical thinking, believing that if he speaks a recovery into existence without doing the hard work of actually making a recovery happen. Donald isn't big into hard work, after all.

But what if Trump -- dispirited by polls that show him losing badly to Joe Biden -- has simply decided to burn things down?

There is one rule we can be certain of with this president: He does not do anything for the greater good, only for his own benefit. He is entirely transactional, and only in the most material sense -- he doesn't seem to have a sense of enlightened self-interest. It's why he can't see the harm done by accepting and soliciting assistance from foreign countries, for example. It's why -- as Vanity Fair reported yesterday -- administration officials were happy to let the coronavirus rage as long as it was contained to blue states. 

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

So it's not unreasonable, I think, to speculate that Trump has forseen he may soon no longer derive benefits from being president. In that scenario, he might decide -- or instinctively move -- to use his remaining power and platform to set fire to American institutions. He's not the kid who takes the ball and goes home. Worse. He's the kid who takes your ball and chucks it into the river.

If you contemplate the "burn it all down" strategy, it becomes easier to understand why Trump seems uninterested in the economy, or why he continually tries to undermine confidence in elections, or why -- even now -- he does so little to combat the pandemic. He never had much interest in the governing part of being president, anyway, as far as I can tell. 

This might not be a correct take on the president's behavior. But again: He does so little for the good of the country. But I think we start with the idea that his behavior is selfish, and seek explanations from there.

Movie Night: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Three thoughts about LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, coming up...

* This is my first viewing, and the first thought I have is that DANCES WITH WOLVES stole the (more or less) true story of T.E. Lawrence, fictionalized it and transported it to the American West. A white guy ventures out to the hinterlands of empire, "goes native," is lauded by the natives as a kind of demigod, but ultimately can't lead them to real freedom. It's a white savior narrative where the saving, ultimately doesn't really happen.

* It's possible I've let THE CELLULOID CLOSET burrow too deeply into my brain, but it seems like this could also be read a story of a closeted young gay artist who lets himself be his real self -- an extraordinary man -- for a time, only to ultimately accept the closet because it is what is expected of him. (There are one or two scenes where the gay themes aren't really subtext -- the interrogation scene above leads to a beating that really isn't subtle in its implications.) Lawrence (spoilers) walks away from his Arab allies at the end of the movie to return to England. The end of the movie feels like a tragedy.

* I try to watch movies with an eye toward the context in which they were made, but honestly, there are some parts of this that don't age real well. Alec Guinness as an Arab, Anthony Quinn as an Arab wearing a fake hook nose -- super-obvious -- and Peter O'Toole delivering a portrayal of a descent into madness that strays into over-acting. It doesn't make the movie unwatchable, at least for me, but these things are hard not to notice.

BONUS THOUGHT: I do love the old epics, where instead of painting thousands of soldiers in CGI on a computer, they actually had to round up thousands of extras and thousands of horses in order to make some of the battle scenes work. I miss the old days. 

About the filibuster

President Obama today called the filibuster a "Jim Crow relic" at John Lewis' funeral, and I am fine with getting rid of it. The legislative branch already has enough veto points, thanks to being divided in two. The filibuster just makes it that much harder for the government to do the things it should do.

However.

Democrats should remember that when the filibuster goes away, it's gone. They might control the Senate after this fall's elections. They might not. But if they do -- and they get rid of the filibuster -- there will come a time when they won't, when their ability to stop hated legislation by Senate Republicans will be all but eliminated. 

I am ... kind of fine with that. Democracy has consequences. Right now, Democrats can mainly see how getting rid of the filibuster will aid their agenda. Someday, it'll be used against them. That's the price. I am willing to pay it. I suspect a lot of people will change their minds.

I am not persuaded by Zaid Jilani's argument about immigration

This piece by Zaid Jilani at Persuasion suggests that both the right and left have a mistaken impression of immigrants, but only makes the case halfway. Let's start with the headline:

Well, surely at a publication named Persuasion, Jilani will back up this assertion with some evidence, right?

Kind of.

Fearmongering about the ways in which immigrants will transform America is a hallmark of the conservative movement in the age of Donald Trump. Ann Coulter, the far-right provocateur, recently warned that “legal immigration is going to destroy this country.” The more moderate Hudson Institute has claimed that the country’s “patriotic assimilation system is broken.” Even Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has argued for a “cultural distance nationalism” which effectively leads to the conclusion that “our country will be better off with more whites and fewer non-whites.”

Makes sense. Now, as for the left?

Despite their righteous defense of immigrants, many leftists share a remarkably similar view: they too assume that most immigrants are antagonistic to American culture. Trying to appeal to a group of immigrants in Tennessee during his abortive run for the presidency, for example, Beto O’Rourke told them that “this country was founded on white supremacy. And every single institution and structure that we have in this country still reflects the legacy of slavery and segregation and Jim Crow.” Like O’Rourke, many left-wing activists simply assume that immigrants will be sympathetic to a worldview that describes America as a “failed social experiment.”

Now: It's unfair perhaps to ask a paragraph to make an expansive case for an idea. But Jilani did a pretty good job with conservatives, selecting four examples of people and institutions that are influential among conservatives.

With the left, though, he found ... one comment from a failed presidential candidate. And that statement doesn't tell immigrants not to be patriotic! It just offers a pretty typical left-of-center argument about the history of this country. The Cornel West quote Jilani offers has nothing to do with immigration, either. 

Basically, Jilani just assumes the left is unpatriotic. He bases this more on his own college-era reading of Noam Chomsky than anything else. Perhaps it depends on your definition of patriotism -- if it includes "turning a blind eye to America's sins," as a lot of conservatives seem to think, maybe he's right. But I suspect this is just false evenhandedness -- both conservatives and liberals are wrong! -- in the name of trying to ... persuade. But that actually makes it unpersuasive.

Capitalists make the case for socialism, a continuing series

NYT reports that American CEOs are taking minimal -- or even non-existent -- paycuts during the pandemic, letting employees suffer layoffs while refusing to do any real sacrifice.

A survey of some 3,000 public companies shows that the cuts — which, so far, have come in the form of salary reductions — were tiny compared with their total pay last year. Total pay includes things like bonuses and stock awards that typically make up the bulk of what corporate bosses take home.

Companies in this group include the Walt Disney Company, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Marriott International. All of those businesses have laid off or furloughed employees or pressed workers to take pay cuts.

Seems obvious at this point that American capitalism is disordered. Right now the shareholders are making a killing -- as Ryan Cooper points out today, the only way to get Republicans to move on an economic relief bill right now is to root for the stock market to collapse -- and so, apparently, are the CEOs. It's the workers who are taking the hit. If capitalists want to survive, they might think about re-ordering their businesses a bit so that sacrifice is shared. Otherwise, why should workers buy in?

Common Book: Toughness

New York Review of Books:

The politics of crime will far more often favor “tough” over “smart” crime policies. As the Harvard law professor and former deputy attorney general Phil Heyman has remarked, “It takes a little time to explain why one thing’s smart and the other thing isn’t. It doesn’t take any time at all to explain why one thing’s tougher than the next.”

The dangers of cynicism in the age of Trump

Vox's Constance Grady pans Zadie Smith's new collection of essays:

And when Smith turns her gaze to current events, to the politics of the pandemic, the results can feel downright facile. In “The American Exception,” she attempts to reckon with why America’s response to the pandemic has been so lacking on every level. Smith’s sentences in this essay can sometimes sing — “We are great with death,” she writes, devastatingly; “we are mighty with it” — but this question has been turned over and over and over so often by so many different thinkers over the past few months that by the time Smith takes her turn, the result feels almost empty. I know by now that my country’s elected officials have failed the country. I know that they are using the rhetoric of American exceptionalism to justify their failure. I know that people are dying as a result. What else you got?

I dunno. Seems to me the failure of American officials -- and the way they justify themselves through American exceptionalism -- is the one of the most salient facts about our country's political life right now. Reckoning with both the failures, and the scandalous use of patriotism and "greatest country in the world" rhetoric, does not have to be an original project because it is a necessary one. Let's not get jaded about this state of affairs. 

Coronavirus Diary: I am cursing a lot

Just a quick note: I think the relative isolation of not-quite-full quarantine is getting to me. I am cursing more these days, more likely to lose my temper than I have been for awhile. Most of the time, I don't even realize that I'm on the raggedy edge until I hear myself say something kind of shitty out loud. I don't like this. For the sake of my family and my own sanity, I need to figure out how to better let off steam.

I worry I am becoming this guy:

Common Book: Cornel West

"Intellect is an interrogation of the most basic assumptions and presuppositions. So intelligence makes immediate evaluations, intellect evaluates the evaluations."

Do Americans even know we're at war in Somalia?

NYT: 

The Pentagon has admitted for the third time that its bombing campaign against terrorist groups in Somalia, which has been underway for more than a decade, had caused civilian casualties there, a military report said on Tuesday.

“Our goal is to always minimize impact to civilians,” Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the commander of Africa Command, said in the report. “Unfortunately, we believe our operations caused the inadvertent death of one person and injury to three others who we did not intend to target.”

A couple of observations: First, I hate how the Pentagon language about a terrible tragedy that has caused grief for an innocent family -- or families -- is treated as a technical oopsie. This is horrific. It is not a clerical error. We shouldn't treat it as such.

On a related note: I do wonder how many enemies the United States creates -- versus the number it eliminates -- with these kinds of attacks. Do Americans even know we're at war in Somalia?

“If everyone around me is wrong, would I have the wisdom and courage to know and do what’s right?”

David French: "When the crowd says yes, consider the option of no. When the crowd says go, discern whether we should stop. And through it all, pray for God’s grace—that we’re not too foolish to know the truth or too weak to do what’s right."

Read the whole thing.

Personal update

Taking a little bit of a Twitter break right now to get my head clear.

Suicide and the passive voice

In the last few years, the way journalists write about suicide has changed greatly. We now say that people "died by suicide" instead of "committed suicide." Other measures are taken to try to prevent glamorizing suicide, blame the person who died, or to inadvertently encourage copycats.

This is all generally to the good, and well-intentioned. (I don't love all the guidelines, which urge journalists to avoid describing "personal details" about people who have died in favor of keeping the information general, because that renders an individual somewhat faceless, IMHO.) A story in the New York Times demonstrates a complication with the approach: It can obscure clarity.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

AMSTERDAM — One hundred and thirty years ago, Vincent van Gogh awoke in his room at an inn in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, and went out, as he usually did, with a canvas to paint. That night, he returned to the inn with a fatal gunshot wound. He died two days later, on July 29, 1890.

Scholars have long speculated about the sequence of events on the day of the shooting, and now Wouter van der Veen, a researcher in France, says he has discovered a large piece of the puzzle: the precise location where van Gogh created his final painting, “Tree Roots.” The finding could help to better understand how the artist spent his final day of work.

Now: If you know anything about art history, you know that van Gogh died by his own hand. The opening paragraphs obscure that fact. You know he was shot. You don't know who!

More than a dozen paragraphs go by before clarity is offered:

There has long been debate about which painting was van Gogh’s last work, because he tended not to date his paintings. Many people believe it was “Wheatfield With Crows,” because Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic “Lust for Life” depicts van Gogh, played by Kirk Douglas, painting that work as he goes mad, just before killing himself.

This is a story in which van Gogh's death is a critical element: Finding out where the painting originated probably isn't a big NYT story if not for the fact of his death. But it feels like that critical element is the object of hide-and-seek in this story. I suspect the recent conventions on how to write about suicide shaped this approach. Perhaps I'm wrong.

I don't mean to be insensitive. I would like to figure out a way forward that is sensitive and yet doesn't create confusion instead of clarity. Any ideas out there?

What the IP MAN movies can teach us about the New Cold War with China

I think I've said this before, but it is worth repeating in the current context: People who want a better understanding of China -- as the United States moves toward a more confrontational posture toward that country -- could help themselves a lot by watching Chinese movies.

I'm thinking particularly of the IP MAN series, starring Donnie Yen. You can find all four movies on Netflix right now.

The movies are fantastic martial arts flicks, so they're worth watching from that standpoint alone. But they are also loosely biographical, telling the story of a real Wing Chun master -- he was Bruce Lee's mentor -- and taken as a whole, they signify something about China's relationship with the west.

The first movie takes place in Foshan, China, around the time of Japan's 1937 invasion. The Japanese oppress the Chinese, Ip Man defeats a Japanese martial arts hotshot in single combat competition, and his countrymen are given the pride they need to defeat the aggressor.

In the second movie, Ip Man moves to Hong Kong -- ruled by the British, who are snarling, sneering colonialists. Ip Man defeats a gigantic English brute named Twister. The whole affair leads to a corrupt British officer getting his comeuppance.

In the third movie -- well, this one's a little different. Ip is still in Hong Kong and the story basically revolves around him proving the superiority of Wing Chun over other fighting styles. (Also, Mike Tyson is involved. Yes, it's ridiculous.)

But in the fourth movie, Ip Man goes to the United States, is treated as inferior by arrogant, racist Americans. Ip defeats the most arrogant American in single combat competition, and his countrymen in San Francisco find newfound pride.

You get it. It's a story of a proud Chinese man refuting the "weak man of Asia" stereotypes that justified decades upon decades of outsider incursions to demonstrate that Chinese are just as strong, and maybe even a little better, than the outsiders who have misjudged them. Some of this is propaganda -- movies don't get made in China without official sanction -- but it is also rooted in the last 200 years of Chinese history.

It's not just Ip Man. Chinese historical epics -- especially those set since the beginning of the 20th century -- are telling us a story.

• Westerners are big, bad, and haughty. “Ip Man 2” isn’t the only movie to depict white guys as oversized grunting meatheads. Check out this clip from “Fearless,” which is about the real-life martial artist Huo Yuanjia.

• If Westerners are bad, the Japanese are worse. It’s hard to find a Japanese man in these movies who isn’t playing the villain. No wonder: The Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s and 1940s is estimated to have killed at least 10 million Chinese civilians — some estimates range much higher. It’s safe to say that hurt feelings linger still.

So you wouldn’t expect “Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen” — a sequel of sorts to Bruce Lee’s “Fist of Fury” — to seem so triumphant: It ends, after all, with the Japanese invasion of China underway. But the closing moments are defiant, with Yen — him again — defeating a series of Japanese combatants and crushing the testicles of one particularly nasty officer, before disappearing to join the resistance.

• The Chinese are resilient, strong, and nationalistic in the face of such indignities. “Legend of the Fist” opens with Yen and his comrades winning a battle for the French against the Germans in World War I; “Bodyguards and Assassins” depicts fictionalized efforts to protect real-life nationalist Sun Yat-Sen from those who would do him harm.

In these movies, the setbacks for the Chinese against outsiders is always temporary. Nationalistic pride might go under cover, but it never disappears entirely. Even the worst defeats tend to be triumphs of the spirit.

Now: None of this is to say the Chinese government is good and Americans are bad, or anything so simplistic. The Chinese government is authoritarian in its treatment of the Uighurs and crackdown on dissent, and has even been murderous at times.

But it is also simplistic to go "America good, Chinese government bad." Not just because President Trump has his own authoritarian inclinations, but because in a conflict between America and China, the Chinese people are going to be factoring the ugly history of outside domination in their views of the conflict. They might not think that America is merely aiming for their freedom, but that America intends to limit their country's ambitions, and perhaps eventually to subdue them.

I'm not quite sure how understanding this Chinese view of history modifies American policy going forward, but I can't help but sense that it should. There's a real history here. It matters. You don't have to be a scholar to begin to understand that. (It helps, but not everybody has the time or interest.) All you have to do is watch a few movies.

Democrats should stop trying to get Kris Kobach elected

Some news:

Here's a description of Sunflower State, a "Democratic-linked" PAC, and what it's up to:

The super PAC, Sunflower State, formed on Monday and two days later launched its first TV ad, focused on Kris Kobach and Rep. Roger Marshall, two of the Republicans running in the Aug. 4 primary. National Republicans have expressed concern that Kobach — the former secretary of state who lost the 2018 governor's race to Democrat Laura Kelly — would put the seat in jeopardy if he becomes the nominee, while Marshall has attempted to consolidate support from the establishment in the primary.

The ad is engineered to drive conservative voters toward Kobach. A narrator in the ad calls Kobach "too conservative" because he "won't compromise" on building President Donald Trump's border wall or on taking a harsher stance on relations with China. By contrast, the ad labels Marshall as a "phony politician" who is "soft on Trump."

I think this is bad politics -- see Liam Donovan's tweet above. Being too-smart-by-half, tactically, could end up biting Democrats in the butt.

But it is also bad for democracy. I'd rather see a Democrat win the US Senate seat that Kobach is vying for, but if we're going to get a Republican -- and remember, Kansas hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate in forever --  I'd like it to be the least-bad Republican. I don't love Roger Marshall, the establishment GOP pick for the race, but he's not Kobach, whose ambitions need to be nipped in the bud. It's more difficult to nip them if Democrats egg him on, or put him over the top.

Rather than try to game the system, it's better for us all if we can work to put the best candidates possible in office. 

The easiest prediction I've ever made about Donald Trump

Even if he wins in November, he will claim the vote was rigged against him. How do I know? He's done it once already.

Coronavirus Diary: Cabin fever

Here is how I deal with the stress of being stuck mostly in a small house with a kid who hasn't seen his friends in four months:

I go to Sonic every day at noon and order a large iced tea.

I sit there for an hour in the family minivan, more or less, but basically until I've finished eating all the ice in the cup. 

It gets me out of the house. I can sit in the shade for an hour, socially distanced. I can get away from the people I am around all the time. And it gives structure to the day. 

I'm sure there is a better way of getting these benefits than sitting at Sonic every day. But it seems to be what I am capable of right now.

No, Democrats are not going to bring about a socialist utopia

Steve Pearlstein offers up a list of Democratic priorities to rein in the business community if they take control of government -- go read it -- and it sounds really expansive. "To the business lobby, they represent a nightmare scenario," he writes. "But whatever your view, there can be little doubt that in the short and medium run — the time horizon of most investors and corporate executives — these policy changes will reduce the profits of businesses and the incomes of those who own them."

I'm skeptical. While Democrats as a group are as progressive as they've been in awhile -- and Joe Biden is following suit -- it's also true the party has been mostly on-board the train that has produced greater inequality in America over the last generation or two. If Democrats take the Senate, it will probably be Chuck Schumer -- no enemy of high finance -- who shepherds the party's agenda through that chamber. Business interests may not get everything they want from Democratic governance (and if history is any guide, they'll pout and scream about socialism the whole way) but in all likelihood they'll still be doing pretty well. 

Abolish Trump or Homeland Security? Why not both?

Juliette Kayyem argues that, in Portland, Homeland Security isn't the problem -- it's Trump:

Seemingly desperate to goad Democrats into a fight over law and order, the White House has deployed federal law-enforcement agents from the Department of Homeland Security to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect statues on federal property from vandals. Agents from Customs and Border Protection and other branches of DHS are wearing military fatigues, snatching demonstrators from the streets, and even attacking protesters who by all accounts are peaceful. The Constitution did not contemplate the mobilization of federal assets to fight a war on graffiti. Never having requested the president’s help, local and state politicians in Portland are outraged. Yesterday afternoon, Trump announced an expansion of the program to a number of other cities to “help drive down violent crime.”

These events offer a reminder of how much discretionary power every American president exercises—and why voters shouldn’t give the job to someone whose instincts are fundamentally authoritarian.

The only thing that needs to be abolished is the Trump administration. When the president is bent on using executive power for purely political ends, the specifics of the executive-branch organizational chart do not matter.

She's right on one point: A president bent on abusing his power is going to abuse his power. Trump couldn't use the military, ultimately, to achieve these ends -- so he turned to DHS instead.

But she's also wrong.

The framers of the Constitution got a lot of things wrong, IMHO -- we don't need the Senate -- but they did embrace an underlying thought process that was smart: One way to prevent a president from abusing his powers is to limit the tools he has for abuse.

With respect to Kayyem's (I'm sure) honorable service, the Department of Homeland Security was always particularly ripe for abuse by an authoritarian-minded president, from its name on down. I pointed out this week how one DHS agency, Customs and Border Patrol, is pretty much rogue to begin with, and offered some possible solutions.

The underlying idea is to limit the agency, both in terms of manpower and authority. "Trump and his cronies would surely look for other ways to crack down on protesters," I wrote. "He will abuse any power he has, and claim powers the Constitution doesn't actually grant him. Congress, however, doesn't need to make it easy for him."


So, yes, abolish Trump. But let's also make it harder for any would-be Trumps -- Tucker Carlson, say, or Tom Cotton -- to follow in his footsteps and do even more damage. Abolish Trump and the DHS.

Conservative men are obsessed with penises (What will probably be a continuing series.)

Ned Ryun, my fellow Kansan, can't just make an argument. He has to call Brian Stetler a flouncing cuck:

This does make me wonder about the sincerity of his Christian faith, which his family parades pretty proudly before the world. Who would Jesus try to publicly emasculate? But Ryun is more Conservative than Christian, and conservatives are really, really obsessed with the status of their penises and making sure people know about their status relative to others. (I once wrote: "The GOP? That stands for the Grand Old Phallus.") It's one reason (along with racism) insults like "soy boy" "beta boy" and "cuck" are so prevalent among the online right. Ryun's version -- "simpering' "eunuch" -- is more of the same.

This kind of misogyny has real and terrible effects, as Jessica Valenti points out today:

Just this week, Roy Den Hollander, a lawyer and well-known misogynist, allegedly killed the son of a federal judge and wounded her husband in an attack at their New Jersey home.

Den Hollander once sued to end “ladies’ nights” at bars, tried to defund women’s studies departments in universities, and fantasized about the rape of another judge who presided over his divorce case. The lawyer was also active in online misogynist groups and had written for A Voice for Men, a men’s rights website tracked as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Ned Ryun isn't going to kill anybody, nor is he encouraging anybody to do so. But it's not hard to see how chauvinism easily morphs into something uglier. 

The challenge of writing about politics in the Age of Trump

I recently took a look back at my last few columns for THE WEEK and saw a pattern:

Now: I stand by each of those columns. But it felt like maybe I was getting into a rut. And within my capabilities, I greatly desire not to be a hack. So I tried to get out of it by reframing the questions I was looking at. Yes, Trump Sucks. But that's a given. What else is there to say about the issues that face us? Why not de-center the president?

So when I the federal government started kidnapping protesters and throwing them in unmarked cars in Portland, I tried to take a different look at the issue. And I came up with this:

Which I also stand by. But looking at it two days later, with the Trump Administration expanding its Portland efforts to other cities, I wonder if that was too small-bore. Maybe the real story here is Trump Sucking, Again and More.

Trying to find the balance is difficult. The problems we face are bigger than Trump, and have roots that precede him -- at least in many cases. But Trump is also the catalyst for elevating those problems to crisis level. He is the elephant in the room of almost any political topic I'll write about, whether I write about him or not. Focus on the Big Picture and maybe you miss something important about the now. Focus on the immediate threat, and maybe you lose something important about the Big Picture. I honestly don't know what the answer to this is -- at least in terms of writing stuff that both informs and advances the conversation we collectively have about our politics. I guess I'll keep trying as long as they let me.

Happiness is a warm gun

AP:

When it comes to states’ rights, President Donald Trump is all over the map.

To battle the coronavirus, he’s told states they’re largely on their own. But when it comes to stamping out protests in cities led by Democrats, Trump is sending in federal troops and agents — even when local leaders are begging him to butt out.

“After seeing Trump in the White House for three and a half years, anyone expecting to find classical ideological consistency is bound to be mistaken,” said Andrew J. Polsky, a political science professor at Hunter College. “All of this is done for partisan political purposes with an eye toward the election.”

This is true. Trump does whatever maximizes his authority while avoiding responsibility. 

But the other through-line in this is a characteristic Trump shares with a lot of conservatives: At his core, he believes the answer to most issues is being -- or, perhaps more precisely, being seen -- as tough.

The virus is very difficult to be "tough" against. It has no emotional response to anything. It just does what it does. That hasn't stopped the president from trying to out-tough it, by calling himself a "wartime president" and refusing to wear a mask until he wore one. Even the ramped-up tensions with China in the pandemic's wake can probably be seen not just as scapegoating -- though it is certainly that -- but as a function of the need to be seen "cracking down" on something in response to the crisis.

With protesters, though, it's pretty easy to be tough. Just lob tear gas and rubber bullets at them.

The problem, though, is that even where toughness produces something like results -- a change in the situation, kinetic displays -- it doesn't always, or even often, produce good results. Doesn't matter. Trump and his allies aren't concerned with effectiveness. It's showing the iron fist that matters. Federalism doesn't really matter to the question.

For the GOP, any woman will do

Interesting tidbit from Dave Weigel:

Adam Serwer recently noted Trump is struggling to make a culture war case against Joe Biden:

For the past few months, Trump and the conservative propaganda apparatus have struggled to make the old race-and-gender-baiting rhetoric stick to Biden. But voters don’t appear to believe that Biden is an avatar of the “radical left.” They don’t think Biden is going to lock up your manhood in a “testicle lockbox.”

 But Republicans can be relied on to use scare tactics when it comes to Democratic women. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez follows Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton as bogeywomen of the right. They'll keep doing it as long as they think it's successful.

Movie Night: A DRY WHITE SEASON

Some thoughts about A DRY WHITE SEASON, a Grishamesque legal thriller with a powerful conscience. Spoilers ahead:

* This movie came out in the late 1980s, as the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa neared its climax. The opening credits show a white child and a Black child playing together, joyfully. Before 15 minutes have passed, the Black child will be dead. This is not a movie that shies away from that violence -- the camera lingers on the faces of dead children, massacred for the crime of protesting. This is not a movie that will let you feel comfortable. Not even at the end. 

* The protagonist is played by Donald Sutherland - we'll talk more about that in a bit - a schoolteacher who comes to realize his own complicity in apartheid, the death, cruelties and injustice inflicted in its name that he has let himself ignore for the sake of living a comfortable life. "They must have had a reason," he says when his gardener's son is arrested. The costs of coming to terms with the that reality is not greeted warmly -- the authorities, his coworkers and even his wife and daughter variously warn and rage against his effort to seek justice. Being true to the cause of truth, this movie suggests, can cost you everything. Everything.

* One passage was startling to me in the echoes I hear in the current backlash against Black Lives Matter.

Ben du Toit: Jesus, Susan, this is not just about Gordon! This is about all of us!

Susan du Toit: No. It's about all of *them*. And I will be damned if I let them destroy my family. I don't want Gordon's ghost in my house! I don't want the one with the dark glasses, any of these kaffirs here ever again! I just want to go back to the way it was!

Ben du Toit: If you had come with me... if you had seen what was happening in that court, you would know that we can never go back to the way it was.

Susan du Toit: I *was* in the court.

Ben du Toit: What?

Susan du Toit: Listen to me, Ben. I heard what the police did, and I'm not saying it was right. But you think the blacks wouldn't do the same thing to us, and worse, if they had half the chance? Do you think they'll let us go on living our nice, quiet, peaceful lives if they win? They'll swallow us up! It's our country, Ben, we made every inch of it! Look at the rest of Africa, it's a mess... It's like in war. You have to choose sides. You are not one of them and they don't want you to be!

"You have to choose your own people," Susan concludes, "or you have no people."

"You have to choose truth," Ben responds.

Preach it, Ben.

* Given that Donald Sutherland is the protagonist and the marquee names -- Marlon Brando (who received an Oscar nomination for his performance), Jurgen Prochnow, Susan Surandon, Michael Gambon -- it would be easy to pass over this movie as a white savior flick. But it's important to note that this was the first Hollywood movie directed by a black woman, Euzhan Palcy, and the story of how she shepherded this movie into being -- and why she disappeared from Hollywood to France -- is fascinating.

* You can find this movie on Criterion Channel until the end of the month.

Morality then, morality now

I am reading David Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass -- with current arguments about monuments and Black Lives Matter very much in mind -- and I am freshly struck by how many slave-owners were rapists who treated their own children, their own flesh and blood, as property to be bought and sold. It was a terrible thing.

Not a new observation, of course. It's just hitting me anew again tonight. I don't think it's presentism to judge that behavior. Frederick Douglass, certainly, knew it was wrong at the time.

Movie Night: PATHS OF GLORY

Three thoughts about PATHS OF GLORY, coming up with spoilers...

* This is one of my favorite movies, about the awful absurdities of war and the deadly, inexorable illogic that results when scandalous "patriotism" and amoral careerism meet each other. Men who sit in gilded palaces order an impossible attack -- they know it from the beginning -- and then judge the troops who fail to succeed in that attack as cowards. Kirk Douglas is the hero here, but even he agrees to carry out the attack knowing it almost certainly won't succeed, rather than let somebody else take charge of his regiment. Three men are chosen to stand trial for cowardice -- as stand-ins for the entire regiment that failed -- and sentenced to death. The system is so relentless that even those who see the terrible, Kafka-esque qualities of it -- or those who should, like the regimental priest -- go along with it anyway. There are constant exhortations to courage from men who show none to men who have already demonstrated it -- but it is the latter group that suffers.

The movie is based on a true story.

* PATHS OF GLORY was made in 1957, and while it would still be subversive today, it's amazingly so for an era of Cold War-influenced filmmaking of movies like THE CAINE MUTINY and FORT APACHE whose ultimate messages were: "Sure, your leaders may be nuts and misguided, but you owe it to them to support them and carry out their orders anyway." Indeed, Wikipedia tells me the film wasn't shown in Francisco-era Spain until 1986, nor in Switzerland until 1970. In the US, it was banned at all military bases. On that basis alone, this is worth watching.

* It's also worth watching, not just for its themes, but for the performance by Kirk Douglas, a lion of a star at his absolute peak. Nobody did righteous fury like Douglas. It is something to behold.

Colin Powell was not indispensable

Very frustrating piece from Robert Draper, about how Colin Powell didn't want to go to war in Iraq -- but ended up being the man who legitimized the effort more than any other figure.

Why? Well, he was a team player. But also:

Powell had cautioned Bush a few months earlier about the consequences of invading Iraq, and he had gone further in private conversations with others, saying he thought the idea of going to war was foolish on its face. But the secretary of state had never expressed this outright opposition to the president. And although Powell would not admit it, Bush’s request that he be the one to make the case against Hussein to the U.N. was enormously flattering.

Even Cheney had explicitly acknowledged that Powell was the right man for the job. As the secretary told one of his top aides: “The vice president said to me: ‘You’re the most popular man in America. Do something with that popularity.’” But, Powell added to his aide, he wasn’t sure he could say no to Bush anyway. “There’s only so many times I can go toe to toe with the V.P.,” he said. “The more I think about it, the more I realize it’s important to keep the job.”

If I'm reading this correctly, Powell believed that his ability to be a counterweight to the hawks in the administration ultimately meant that ... he had to make their case for war for them. It's a terrible, tragic irony. But it is also born of hubris: No one is indispensable, but thinking you are can lead to awful compromises. Powell, ultimately, might've been more effective by making the anti-war case to Bush and resigning.

It's also a lesson for well-intentioned people who might still be serving in Donald Trump's employ. If you're not prepared to resign on principle, then your ability to be a good influence within the administration is probably much less than you think it is. You're going to get rolled. It can happen to the best of us. 

Coronavirus Diary: The limits of being an introvert

I used to be an extrovert. When I was single, it was rare the night I went home from work, had a meal, and went to bed. I'd stay out, and stay out late -- not always with people, but always in a place where I could be with people.

Getting married didn't change that -- not the desire part, anyway. (Obviously, my habits did.) Having a kid didn't change that. But the surgeries I had in 2011 did.

Going out since then has taken energy. It's been difficult to arse myself to do much but sit on the couch and stare at a computer. Occasionally, I'd get out to have breakfast with a friend. But mostly I stayed home, even to work. I missed my old way of being, but I also didn't know how to be a person among people the way I used to. 

It was kind of depressing.

So. Not a lot changed for me when the pandemic set in. I work at home. I stare at the screen. I eat. I go to sleep.

Somewhere in the last week, though, I've hit my limit. I am desperate for people again. I miss hugging people. I miss enjoying just being around them. I miss conversations. I miss feeling good about having the friends that I have after a conversation.

I'm feeling kind of crazy. I also don't want to die. I hate everything I failed to do when I could do it. And I fear that if I can do it again, I'll go back to not doing it. 

The Trumpist trolling of The Lincoln Project

I've been arguing for awhile that if Trumpism is understood not just as ideology but as a particular style -- trolling, for lack of a better word -- than the NeverTrump Republicans who make up The Lincoln Project are fighting Trump with Trumpism.

At Vox, Jane Coaston more or less confirms this theory:

One tweet describes President Trump’s campaign as a “criminal enterprise.” An ad — with the hashtag #TrumpIsNotWell — shows the president struggling to walk down a ramp, and another mocks the size of the crowd at Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, saying, “You’ve probably heard this before, but it was smaller than we expected.”

They’re all from a political action group called the Lincoln Project, and according to co-founder Reed Galen, they’re meant for one specific audience: Trump himself.

“We have what we call ‘an audience of one’ strategy, which is clearly aimed at the president,” Galen told me.

So: Trolling.

As Coaston notes: "Some observers have argued that the campaign operatives responsible for the Lincoln Project are, through their deep ties to the pre-Trump GOP, indirectly responsible for his rise. Lincoln Project board members helped George H.W. Bush win office in 1988 and George W. Bush win reelection in 2004, as well as down-ballot races where their ads often featured the same kind of fearmongering they now appear to abhor."

More than that, some TLP folks -- and their allies -- cultivated a conservative culture of trolling long before that word became Internet currency. They're the ones who encouraged (and benefited from) the rise of figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as "thought leaders" for the conservative base. Those figures, in turn, were foundational to Trump's rise.

Lots of liberals like to share TLP ads on Twitter when they come out, and it's easy to get gleeful at their audaciousness. But if Trumpism is both the result of and cause of a vulgarizing political scene that is, ultimately, bad for Democracy, then what might feel good -- and maybe even be effective, in the short run -- might ultimately be destructive. 

Hugh Hewitt's very terrible plan to save the economy

Hugh Hewitt:

To restart the economy, Congress needs to give Americans access to their own savings.

If Americans could withdraw up to half, or a third, or even a quarter of the funds they have saved for retirement, hundreds of thousands of Americans would do so. And they would use those funds to rebuild their lives and survive this economic storm. The economic takeoff would be sharp and prolonged.

This is a terrible idea, for a couple of reasons: First of all, it requires a rewriting of the rules that's more complicated than "let's just give people money," which the government has done once already with fairly successful results. 

But also: Taking money out of your retirement account now -- assuming you're not a journalist, like me, with puny retirement savings -- is a good way not to have the money you want for retirement later. 

Quartz, 2018:

"In a perfect world, you never touch retirement savings until you retire. Taking it out before then not only reduces your savings, it robs you of years of compound interest. If you are 35 today, taking $10,000 out of a retirement account would leave you short $68,000 when you retire, assuming a 6% average annual return.

A third reason this idea is bad: It does nothing to help poor people -- including poor workers -- who don't have much in the way of savings. Giving them money to spend helps them AND helps the economy when they spend. Encouraging people to dip into their retirement savings now just clears the way for another economic crisis a few years from now, when retirees find themselves short of the cash they need to live comfortably.

A brief thought about The 1619 Project

I guess we're still doing this:

I've tried a couple of times today to write about this and failed. So let's be plain: Secretary Pompeo's preference is for a history that omits the viewpoints of Black people.

If you get rid of the perspectives of Black people, of Native Americans, of the Chinese, and so forth, then it's pretty easy to construct a "good, better, best" narrative of history.

If Black people aren't really part of our American community, but an "other" upon whom we can enact our national self-improvement, if they're just extras in the movie of our national life, then Pompeo's criticism of The 1619 Project makes sense.

But if they are part of they community, if they are part of us, then American history is far more tragic than the story we like to tell ourselves.

The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Loving vs. Virginia was decided in 1967. This is not ancient history. My parents were teenagers when those events occurred. These events were less than a decade before I was born. The history of America as a nation whose laws fulfill the promise of all people being equal is, in the long march of history's sweep, a very recent thing -- and far from perfected.

The 1619 Project had some imperfections, I'm aware. But I'm convinced the main problem people like Pompeo have with it is that it refuses to flatter our collective vanity. The 1619 Project aspires to liberty and democracy -- indeed, its foundational essay asserts that Black people have perfected our democracy despite what has been done to them -- but it won't pretend this country was born in goodness. We earn our goodness. It is not conferred upon us by myth. Pompeo prefers the myth. 

Bag O' Books: THESE TRUTHS: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

Three thoughts about THESE TRUTHS: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by Jill Lepore:

* The book follows two streams of thought -- one that weighs, from the earliest moments of European settlement in the Americas, whether the United States has lived up to its creeds, and another that follows how various technical and media developments (the rise of newspapers, telegraphs, radios, television and the internet) have affected the evolution of our democracy. Long story short: We've fallen short a lot but also progressed -- though Lepore doesn't elide the falling short in order to put on a happy face. As for the technology: America has seen a lot of utopianism that never really panned out.

* It's good to read history during these crazy times. America has "been there, done that" with division and dissension so much over the centuries -- and not just during the Civil War. It's good to remember that we're not experiencing much that is new, that hasn't been experienced, by generations prior to our own.

* If the book has a flaw, it's in the last chapter or two as the timeline moves into the modern era, where Lepore's evident rage at current events shines through. It's not exclusively reserved for the right, as you might expect: She rails against campus hate speech codes and deplatforming, as exercises that go against the debate and free speech that are at the heart of a vital democracy. She didn't sign "The Letter," and this book came out well ahead of that, but it seems likely she is sympatico with its sentiments. 

Movie Night: PALM SPRINGS

Three thoughts about PALM SPRINGS, coming up:

* This movie has been compared with GROUNDHOG DAY a lot, and that's fair as far as it goes. But whereas the earlier movie is all about self-improvement, PALM SPRINGS is more about surrender, about finding peace -- and maybe happiness -- in the mundane grind that is this life. That sounds like messages that are at odds with each other, but I don't think they have to be. I'll have to sit with it.

* Cristin Milioti is the soul of this movie, playing so many layers of emotion as she explores her reactions to the time loop. The camera focuses on the eyes of its lead characters a lot, and Milioti's eyes are so big and expressive. She's been around for awhile, but this movie should make her into a bona fide star. I'm not sure how the pandemic affects the star-making machinery these days, though.

* I owned Genesis's INVISIBLE TOUCH cassette when I was a kid, so I cannot tell you how excited I was to hear "The Brazilian" during PALM SPRINGS. Loved that track.

The big business of conspiracy mongering

Oliver Stone is still trying to find JFK's real killer:

The NYT heavily annotates its interview with Stone to point out that his grasp and interpretation of facts can, uh, depart from mainstream understandings of the matter. But it struck me to read this interview on the same day President Trump retweeted this bonkers bit* of conspiracy mongering:

Back to Stone: His movie, JFK, which was all about evidence of a conspiracy to kill the president in order to really go to town on the Vietnam War, reportedly made more than $200 million worldwide during its run in 1992. I saw it in the theater myself! The film received eight Oscar nominations, including for Best Picture.

I mention all this by way of making what is perhaps an obvious point: Conspiracy mongering in the United States is often, well, a profit-driven enterprise. A studio invested its money into creating an alternative version of the JFK assassination, and it reaped benefits. A substantial portion of moviegoers ended up believing that alternative version as a result.

I don't doubt Stone believes everything he says. (I think -- contra his theory -- the evidence suggests JFK was stumbling into Vietnam on his own anyway.) But it took a whole system to bring his belief to mainstream culture. We didn't get here by accident.

* "Bonkers bit of conspiracy mongering" is redundant, I know.

MOVIE NIGHT: AD ASTRA

Three thoughts about AD ASTRA:

* TOMMY LEE JONES' EYEBROWS ... IN ... SPAAAAAAACE!

* "Hey guys, let's try to make a movie like 2001, but with fewer acid trips and more daddy issues!"

* And that's it. Feels like there should be more there there with this movie. It's well-crafted, but seems empty. Oh well.

Hugh Hewitt is wrong about China and right about 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'

Here's Hugh Hewitt in the Washington Post:

The central issue of the current campaign ought to be the nature and ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party — its reckless disregard for the world in the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak, its repression of Hong Kong, what may be genocidal treatment of the Uighurs and its plans to dominate not just the South China Sea but the international order for decades to come. The election of 2020, like that of 1984, ought to turn on which candidate is best equipped to deal with the country’s most significant adversary.

A few thoughts:

* Hewitt is wrong that the CCP should be the "central issue" of the presidential campaign. We should look in our own backyard, first! We've got a raging pandemic to deal with, as well as an incipient Depression. If the United States can't get its own act together, our ability to act effectively on the world stage will be curtailed anyway. China? It's Issue Number Three, at best.

* It's notable that Hewitt raises the issue of the Uighurs without noting John Bolton's report that President Trump sold out the Uighurs to the Chinese in favor of getting a trade deal. It's additionally notable that in a column that purports to compare Joe Biden and Donald Trump on the China issue, he makes no effort at all to defend Trump's handling of China.

* Meanwhile, Hewitt's main attack on Biden is that Biden was wrong about some stuff ... 40 years ago. It's unconvincing. Daniel Larison has made a better case on why to be skeptical of Biden on foreign policy, but it comes from a distinctly less militaristic bent.

* But Hewitt is right about one thing:

The left has long liked to attack conservatives for a supposed lack of intelligence and sophistication, along with alleged warmongering and other crimes. One of my favorite novels, John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany,” is marred by this twitch. It was published in March 1989, an unfortunate mere eight months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is full of the then-conventional contempt for Reagan that accompanied the nuclear freeze movement, that condemned Reagan’s deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles in Europe, his embrace of strategic nuclear defense — derided as “Star Wars,” first by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and then everywhere on the left — and, of course, opposition to Reagan’s support for the contra rebels of Nicaragua, which reached hyper-pitch as Iran-contra scandal unfolded.

“The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law — they disgrace democracy by claiming what they do, they do for democracy,” Irving has his narrator rail. “They should be in jail,” he huffs after labeling Reagan an “old geezer” and slamming him with the innuendo of Hollywood stupidity routinely traded in by anti-Reagan newspaper columnists in those days.

OWEN MEANY is a beautiful, funny novel -- I've read it once a decade, at least, since my 20s and find that I get something new out of it each time. But the Reagan hatred portions really are pretty tedious. Hewitt isn't wrong about everything.

Movie Night: THE CLIENT

There were many John Grisham movie adaptations made during the early 1990s. This is one of them.

Three thoughts about THE CLIENT, coming up....

* My favorite thing about John Grisham movies/novels is all the ridiculous names. Reggie Love. Roy Foltrigg. Thomas Fink. Avery Tolar. Gavin Vereek. Sometimes Grisham went the Dickensian route, matching names to the characteristics of his characters. And sometimes, I swear, a cat walked across the keyboard.

* That said, this is pretty powerhouse cast: Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon, obviously, but also Mary-Louise Parker, JT Walsh, Bradley Whitford, William H. Macy, Will Patton, Anthony Lapaglia, and Ossie Davis, just to name a few. This is a by-the-numbers 1990s legal thriller, but all the good actors in it -- even in minor roles -- make it just a little better than it should be. 

* Two things really embarrassed me about this movie, though. Parker's character is a single Southern mom living in a trailer park, and my God, she plays it to the absolute max of what you think that character is. Not her fault. It's the work she was given. But hoo boy.

Also: Anthony LaPaglia's wardrobe:

Commonplace Book: On Democracy

From Jill Lepore's THESE TRUTHS:

Republicans and militarism

What we've learned from Lt. Col Vindman's semi-forced retirement from the Army and Congressman Dan Crenshaw's attack on Senator Tammy Duckworth is that the GOP really respects your service to the country -- unless you obey the law or a Democrat. 

It was already true that you should never believe politicians who use "supporting the troops" to justify endless, stupid warfare. Supporting the troops can and should mean "bring them home so they don't have to die, or live with having killed." The GOP in this century has been skilled at weaponizing (so to speak) the bodies of soldiers in service of their foreign policy objectives. But Republicans have increasingly revealed cynicism underlying their "pro-troops" rhetoric. Donald Trump was criticized for his attacks on John McCain and Gold Star families -- but he didn't do anything that the the GOP, with its swiftboating attacks on John Kerry and Max Cleland, hadn't perfected years before.

My own leanings are pacifist. But Vindman is being sacrificed because he told truth, Duckworth attacked because she ... isn't a Republican. Their service to their country was a source of respect from Republicans. Until it became inconvenient. 

Fauci should quit

From Fox News tonight:

Anthony Fauci has been a voice of reason during the pandemic. Perfect? No. But he has offered straightforward medical advice at almost every step of the way, and his guidance has frankly been better than the president's.

The president has undermined him, like he did tonight. And the president has stifled him -- the White House has curbed his U.S. TV appearances, probably because Fauci's advice rather notably conflicts with the president's.

So the best thing Anthony Fauci could do for public health at this point is quit.

He's 79. It's not like he has a lot of career ahead of him. And he wouldn't even have to criticize Trump directly. But as a newly retired foremost public expert on COVID-19, he might find his services to speak publicly and on TV in demand -- and might do a better job of getting good information to the public as a result.

The president is determined to magically think the virus away. And he has a leash on Fauci. The good doctor should quit, and serve the public by making his voice heard.

Donald Trump is holding our children hostage to his narcissism

Oh boy:

As I mentioned earlier today, we've already decided to keep our son at home this fall. You know why we made that decision? Well, it had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Taking this tweet at face value, it means that the president of the United States cannot conceive of reasons why schools and parents would not want to fill up the classrooms this fall -- unless it's to make him look bad. He is so self-centered that the idea that people don't want to die, or that schools don't want to risk their students or be liable for that risk. He can only conceive of how that reflects on him.

Let me be clear: I wouldn't be sending my son to school this fall even if it meant that going or not going could guarantee Joe Biden's presidential victory. Again: Our decision had nothing to do with Donald Trump. But Trump cannot understand a universe in which he is not the center, in which people make decisions based on their own interests instead of how it affects his. His narcissism has always been one of his most terrible qualities. Now it could be positively lethal.

We are keeping our kid home this fall

We officially made the decision this week: Our son -- a rising seventh grader -- will be learning from home this fall.

We don't love this decision. The boy is better at learning in a classroom setting than in digital, distanced-learning environment. He would love to see his friends again. But despite President Trump's constant pressure on schools to reopen, I'm just not comfortable that sending him back to school is the best decision -- for his health, for the health of anybody working at the school, or for us in his family.

And there's stuff like this:

An overnight summer camp in rural southwestern Missouri has seen scores of campers, counselors and staff infected with the coronavirus, the local health department revealed this week, raising questions about the ability to keep kids safe at what is a rite of childhood for many.

Missouri is one of several states to report outbreaks at summer camps. The Kanakuk camp near Branson ended up sending its teenage campers home. On Friday, the local health department announced 49 positive cases of the COVID-19 virus at the camp. By Monday, the number had jumped to 82.

I realize that keeping our son home is a privilege. His mom and I both do most of our work from home, anyway. And we have wifi, as well as a school district willing and able to provide online learning. Not everybody does. As I said in THE WEEK a few weeks back:

Parents understandably worry that lost classroom time means their kids will fall behind. Others may not have access to the technology needed for remote learning, or they may need the schools to provide meals to their children. More than a few parents need schools to reopen simply so they can have some daytime childcare. Nothing about this is easy. It will be a good day when schools can reopen safely.

But parents should be wary of risking their children's health to buttress the president's vanity and image. If schools reopen this fall, there is a good chance my child won't be in attendance.

Well, the choice is officially made. 

Donald Trump and the 'Bradley Effect'

David Graham on Donald Trump's increasingly racist reelection effort:

While it’s true that a lot of the media coverage made a Clinton victory seem like a foregone conclusion, there were warning signs of her weaknesses for some time, and Biden is already doing better on several of those fronts. The presumptive Democratic nominee holds a larger lead, and a more consistent one, and he’s eating into Trump’s edge in key demographics including white voters and older voters.

The reason for this, as I wrote last week, is that voters are horrified by Trump’s handling of race issues and of protests. The president’s unfavorability rating remains high, though within its normal range, and voters still give him high marks on the economy, but there’s been an immense shift in opinion on race. White voters have changed their minds, and they’re no longer with the president—but he’s sticking to the same talking points.

I wonder if we're seeing an inversion of the "Bradley Effect" here.

The Bradley Effect is a phenomenon in which black politicians underperform their polling when voters actually cast their votes. The idea is that white voters tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate because they don't want to look racist but maybe are secretly a little bit racist when they go into the voting booth.

The idea is that racism and discomfort with racism can coexist in the same person. (We're large, we contain multitudes.) Republicans have exploited that discrepancy over the years by running meta-campaigns on crime and welfare while studiously avoiding going full N-word. As long as there was a plausibly non-racist explanation for a Republican candidate's position, the GOP got the benefit of the doubt. Voters could vote for the Willie Horton ad guy and still feel OK about themselves.

Donald Trump is a blunt object, though, given to saying the quiet part loud. Voters who might support a subtly racist candidate can do so and tell themselves that they're not supporting a racist candidate. But Trump is, increasingly, foreclosing that option to those voters. He is plainly trying to divide America along racial lines, defending the Confederate flag and racist team names, praising "Manifest Destiny," even going after NASCAR's one black driver -- and all of this in the last 24 hours. Voters who can look past somewhat subtle expressions of racism are finding that Trump's expressions aren't all that subtle anymore. They don't like it. And so Trump is failing.

Then again, if the Bradley Effect possibility holds, it could be that voters are telling pollsters they don't like Trump and his racism -- but will give him their support in the privacy of the voting booth. There's only one way we'll find out.

Movie night: THE PAJAMA GAME

Three thoughts about THE PAJAMA GAME:

* The original Broadway production marked Bob Fosse's emergence as an in-demand choreographer, and his work is on display here. The dances are nacently Fosse, but unmistakably so -- the hats, the herky-jerky Chaplinesque moves. Just good fun.

* I sometimes get very emotional when I see great joy expressed through dance. I found this out right after I got married -- oddly enough, during the "ABC" scene in CLERKS II. It can get embarrassing at times. But it has happened often enough that I recognize the pattern. So let's just say the performance of "Once-A-Year Day" got me a little bit verklempt.

* Why don't we have more great musical comedies about workplace labor strife?

On Trump's hope Americans will "grow numb" to death

WaPo:

The goal is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus — that schools should reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the year and the economy will continue to improve.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official.

I believe President Trump's political prospects are being kept alive by two groups at this point: Racists and pro-life evangelicals.

I have some sympathy for the latter group. I grew up with them, went to a conservative evangelical Mennonite college where almost everybody was pro-life. I knew four people on campus who admitted to voting for Bill Clinton in 1992, and I was one of them. I don't agree with all those folks on much these days -- but I love them still.

Admittedly, the abortion issue is a close moral call for me. I think that unborn children exist on a spectrum of bearing moral worth -- but I also think real questions of women's health and freedom is bound up in the all of this, and, for me, that settles the issue in favor of a pro-choice position. But I know a lot of people who come down on the other side, and I respect that for the most part. When I don't, it's because their acts and positions suggest to me that they're more interested in power over women than they are in saving lives.

I can kind of understand, then, why evangelicals support Trump despite his manifestly un-Christian bearing. He's giving them the judges they want to undo -- either by overturning or neutering -- Roe v. Wade. A good friend of mine once told me he was disgusted by Trump, but also felt like he should thank him. I wonder, though, how they can sustain their pro-life witness and continue to back this president.

I mean, consider again these words:

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll...

Why? Well, because trying to save all those lives is hard. And (Trump believes, I think wrongly) that the economy will bounce back if Americans decide to live with the virus and the damage it does.

Pro-lifers tend to reject -- and can even be contemptuous of -- the many women who argue that they are unable to bring an unborn child into the world because they don't possess the economic resources (or other resources) to support that child. For pro-lifers, life trumps any economic argument.

But not now.

If Americans grow numb to death, I wonder how pro-lifers can defend the fact the president they support is OK with your grandma or spouse or child or other loved one dying or being disabled by the virus? Do they think that engenders a "culture of life?"

Maybe there's an argument that COVID was inflicted by nature, while abortions are an active choice. But when you look at America's climbing coronavirus cases and compare them to other developed countries not run by right-wing populists, it's is clear that allowing widespread death in America is a choice being made by the president and his accomplices.

Can you be truly pro-life and support President Trump? We all make moral compromises when we do politics -- purity is for the ineffective and impotent. But at some point, maybe the compromises become too much. Maybe they start to work against your professed values. I think that may be what is happening to pro-lifers right now. No one can say they weren't warned.

Movie night: THE ROCKETEER

Three thoughts about THE ROCKETEER:

* This is a movie from the last days of practical effects, before TERMINATOR 2 wowed everybody with CGI and things started to change.  By the end of the decade, George Lucas would be making movies entirely with green screen and computers. Here, though, there are lots of scenes that were shot in the real world - particularly the scenes involving airplanes. I miss real airplanes in movies.

* I was thinking that the movie owed a lot to the INDIANA JONES films, afterward looked it up -- THE ROCKETEER was directed by Joe Johnson, who got his start in movies doing effects on STAR WARS and the INDY movies. He learned at the feet of Spielberg and Lucas in the 1980s, and man, does it show. There ought to be a ROCKETEER/INDIANA JONES mashup, like Batman v Superman, or Alien v Predator.

* Alan Arkin is a sign of quality every time.

Spielberg, Lincoln and Frederick Douglass

Finally saw Spielberg's LINCOLN this week, and I loved it, but one thing bothered me: A story about the end of black slavery in America largely pushes Black people to the margins. That's somewhat understandable -- the country was run exclusively by white men, so depicting the political machinations of the age is going to be very heavily focused on white men. But it's a movie about the fate of Black Americans in which Black Americans have very little screen time.

I thought of the movie today when reading Frederick Douglass's "What tot he Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech. Particularly this part:

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

In other words: It's absurd that human beings should find their very existence and dignity as human beings debated by other humans. The existence of the debate itself, even when there are people on the right side of it, is belittling and dehumanizing.

And that kind of debate is pretty much the entirety of LINCOLN.

I'm not throwing away the baby with the bathwater here, so let me elaborate. There's a scene in LINCOLN when Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, decides to profess a desired state of black equality that is short of what he really believes. He does this because he believes that without that rhetorical hedging, he won't get the 13th Amendment at all -- he wants the whole loaf, but he has to talk about getting half a loaf in order to get any part of the loaf at all. He compromises his ideals in order to achieve his ideals. (It's played with relative subtlety, but I'm glad the movie depicted that.)

Similarly, it was both absurd and insulting to debate the rights and freedom of Black Americans and also absolutely necessary to have that debate so that those rights and freedoms would begin to become manifest.  

I'm not sure there's a way out of that conundrum, then or now, or even what to do with this tension -- except, perhaps, to acknowledge it. Maybe wiser folk than I can offer some insight. 

KellyAnne Conway's family - and ours

If you're reasonably informed, you probably know about the Conway family. Kellyanne is a top advisor to President Trump. Her husband, George, is a Washington lawyer who has emerged as one of the president's vociferous critics. There has been a lot of speculation about their marriage, and I've tried to refrain from spending much energy or many words on the whole topic because, frankly, marriages are weird and the accommodations we make inside a marriage might be incomprehensible outside it. Plus, the soap opera aspect of it 

Their daughter, a teenager, has now joined Twitter -- and joined the fray, as another very harsh critic of Trump. She's gathered a lot of fans along the way, and said (or implied) terrible things to or about both her parents. I'm not going to link to it. If you have to find it, you have to find it.

A lot of people are rooting the whole ugly mess on. I think we should be mourning what's happening to the family. But a lot of people don't.

Maybe it's just Twitter. It's probably just Twitter. The site, as any number of observers have suggested, is filled with "vice signaling." Maybe real people are better than this. I haven't actually seen many real people lately, so it's hard to know.

We need to figure out what are politics are for. Is it just about getting ours and (bleep) everybody else? Or is it to work together, however imperfectly, to try and make the places we live better than they would be if we all just went our own ways?

I prefer the second option. 

The history of humanity is full of stories about how a righteous pursuit can shade into self-righteousness and eventually into bloody zealotry. We're not at the last stage, at least not yet. But a whole lot of us have decided we don't need to be humane to people we think are wrong -- or even to people who are demonstrably wrong. Cruel schadenfreude has become, to a remarkable degree, our national default.

This isn't to say that we can't or won't or shouldn't disagree, or that there aren't some people who deserve upbraiding for self-interested or bigoted beliefs and acts. But I don't think a lack of righteous outrage is our problem right now. We need to bring more humanity to our debates, more treating other people like they are humans with moral worth and real, complex, sometimes noble and sometimes misguided motivations -- because they are. 

Even Kellyanne Conway. Even George Conway, if you think he's the asshole in all of this.