Not going back!

Erudite Partner's latest essay for TomDispatch looks back on "a low dishonest decade." It's her 99th piece for this lively opinion site which brings experts to attempt “a regular antidote to the mainstream media.” She first came on as someone equipped to write engagingly and informatively about torture and abuse by the American government. What a vocation!

Her title comes from a phrase in the poem by W.H. Auden: September 1, 1939. Given that analogy, her reflections on the last 20 years of American hubris are pretty dire.

But she's still kicking. 

... A few months after the 2016 election had disproved my Peak Trump theory, I wrote about waking up terrified, imagining what might be coming. “I’m an old dyke,” I said, “a little ragged around the edges, and prone to the occasional night terror.” I added, though, that while I might quake occasionally at two in the morning, “I’m too old and too stubborn to cede my country to the forces of hatred and a nihilistic desire to blow the whole thing up just to see where the pieces come down.”

I wasn’t done then and nine years later and all that much older, I don’t consider myself done yet. As I put it at the time, “I’ve fought, and organized, and loved too long to give up now. And Trump and the people who run him can’t shove me — or any of us — back in that bottle.”

I believed that then and I still do today. I’ve watched ordinary people insist on fighting back, organizing, and loving each other and this country for too long to give up now. They can’t shove all of us back in any genie’s bottle. ...

You can read it all here. 

Calling out the crimes

Nice to see Northern Californians doing something we do well: taking to a cold Ocean Beach yesterday to assert our opinions.

Brad Newsham deserves credit for pioneering this local artform. 

The San Francisco Chronicle has surprisingly good coverage of protests around the Bay. Coverage always becomes better when the local powers know they are up against the sentiment of the people.

Stay angry. It's good for your mental health.

The last week has been bad. ICE murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Donald Trump raided Venezuela on shifting pretexts and apparently has no coherent plan for the aftermath. Oh yeah, and he's threatening more mischief in Greenland.

We're ruled by a dangerous sociopath. Of course that's depressing and disorienting. It's a lot worse than simply being ruled by bad politicians who start stupid wars and funnel the product of our land and labor to rich people.

Garrett Graff offers a cogent description of what it does to us: 

... unfortunately some communities and populations have long had reasons to fear government in various forms or question the “protection” of the police, but never have Americans collectively experienced anything like the accumulation of mental weight we have in this last year.

All that weight is piled upon all that we also accumulated in 2020, from Covid to George Floyd to January 6th — the last, also disastrous year of another Trump presidency — and all that other mental weight we’ve accumulated that comes from the rising fear and collective understanding that because of GOP policies, far-right culture and media, and a nation that has lost its collective mind, you cannot count on being safe in the places where we should feel safest — synagogues, churches, schools, universities, offices, and more — and that when you kiss your children and send them to school, you can’t guarantee that they will come home at the end of the day.

That heaviness you feel, that drag on your mental health, that drain on your emotional energy and lethargy in the face of world events, like yesterday, is real. We are all carrying a lot of new weight in the era of Trumpism....

But, dammit, let's remember who we are. We're the descendants and successors of a gritty, fractious bunch of migrants who defied a king, overthrew an enslaving oligarchy, fought 19th and 20th century capitalists, fought Nazis, and inspired colonized people all over the world to dump their overlords. (Even to dump us, sometimes.) The Trumpian crew are greedy second-raters who want to steal for themselves what a great people built together.

Resistance to tyranny is what people in this country have done, over and over. And don't forget it.

These women and the flag waver at the top of the post came out today even though the main local demonstration of disgust, defiance and determination happened on Thursday here. The population is small in January; the Indivisible lead volunteer organizer had already put on one good sized rally in Vineyard Haven this week. 

But she exhorted any who wished to get in sync with so many taking a stand this Saturday across the country: "Old School - Just Show Up!"

Some folks did. 

Friday cat blogging

 

Gremlin came to visit.

It was not long before she spread herself out to accept homage. But she's a playful creature, curious and even affectionate. We miss her.

Standing up against our aspiring king

At Five Corners intersection on Martha's Vineyard island in Massachusetts:

 

It was cold, but not that cold, and the sun shone a bit as year-round islanders stood in witness to a woman killed and a regime which steals from us all and murders because it thinks it may.

The island has had its own invasion by ICE.

The masked thugs were not popular. There are plenty of people here who've come from other countries to work. Many have made a life in this place -- legally or otherwise.

New Englanders know BS when a would-be tyrant tries to feed it to them. ICE shot that woman in Minnesota because they thought they could.

These folks have a proud tradition to uphold. 

This is about deep story

I was disinclined to give Elaine Pagels' Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus a fair shake. I was wrong. I encountered a book that intrigued, broadened, and even fed delight. 

Pagels is a Princeton University historian of religion, an authority on the numerous texts in the Mediterranean world from the decades just before and at the beginning of the Christian era that didn't make it into the official (canonical) version of the Bible. 

Pagels' subject matter is what made me suspicious of her scholarship. This derives from a quirk of my history. When the Dead Sea Scrolls, 3rd century BCE texts uncovered by archeologists in the Judean desert turned up in the 1950s and early '60s, my intellectually curious, historically inclined, mother was for awhile gripped by a sort of fever for the discoveries. Though just an annoying child, I remember feeling there was something a little too credulous in her enthusiasm. Something didn't feel right. The whole accumulated history of the ancient world couldn't be overturned by some bits of clay covered with scratches. That's not how history works; there are no secrets, just complicated, crooked byways to explore. 

It seemed many mid-20th century popular religious writers, encountering the new historical tidbits, lost their bearings. As I studied history more, I wasn't going there. (Mother eventually got over her enthusiasm as well.) 

And I long pigeonholed Pagels as one of those enmeshed in the glamour of poorly grounded novelties. In Miracles and Wonder she's not, at least not much. Instead she muses with restraint on what modern historical interpretation of the times means to thinking about Bible narratives.

... given the opportunity to draw upon a far wider range of sources than those available to many historians in the past, I am excited to return to the questions with which we began: Was Jesus actually a historical person? If so, what kind of person? The answers are not obvious, since our earliest sources are brief, and often contradictory. There are more questions than answers -- many gaps in what can be known. But the evidence confirms that he was, indeed, an actual person; everyone among his contemporaries who mentions him agrees on that, whether they speak of him with reverence or contempt. 

I began this book with other questions too. What was the social and political context of Jesus' life in Judea? How is it that Jesus, who lived thousands of years ago, has not gone the way of other beings, gods and humans, like Zeus or Julius Caesar, who populate our culture's remote past?

The result is a little uneven, but interesting. 

She particularly chases down the notion, found in multiple more or less contemporary sources, that Jesus had a known male parent, one Pantera, a Roman legionnaire, who presumably raped his mother Mary.

... Recognizing the political context of first-century Galilee is necessary, though to understand the gospel stories. What they tell is what the writers knew well: that everyday life in occupied Judea often included violence. Roman writers picture their empire as a civilizing force, but Josephus [a contemporary Jewish historian] depicts first-century Judea as a land in turmoil.  

What has lent credence to the stories of Pantera is what local people knew: that Roman soldiers brutally suppressed any hint of revolt, exploited subject people, and targeted local women with sexual violence. ... 

... As for what actually happened -- divine miracle, human dilemma, or both -- who can say? As I see it, however these various writers interpret Jesus's origin, [gospel authors, canonical or not] all agree on the spiritual truth: that Jesus is "Son of God," and embodies God's presence on earth. 

That is, this is an historian who gets around sticky, messy questions of "what is truth; what really happened?" by defaulting to "does this story inspire?" This is no way to write academic history, but it may be the only way to chronicle actually existing, longstanding religious faiths whose content morphs and grows within history. This is Pagels' method.

My own experience as a historian has made me cautious. We do not know which episodes were made up, and which might be based on actual or visionary experiences. Furthermore I have shown that some scenes that sound like invention are written as metaphor. ... 

... what fascinates me is not only the historical mysteries my book seeks to unravel but the spiritual power that shines through these stories. ... every one of these gospels -- not only those in the New Testament but also the "secret gospels" [non-canonical fragments] -- ends in the most astonishing reversal of all. After Jesus suffers the worst imaginable fate, betrayed by a trusted friend, abandoned by everyone, falsely accused, tortured, and cruelly executed in public, he is raised to glorious new life, reunited with those who love him, and elevated to receive the highest praise in heaven, to reign over a world renewed in justice and peace. 

Hebrew Scriptures set the pattern for such shifts: people enslaved are set free; a shepherd boy named David fells a hostile giant with a slingshot; hungry lions spare Daniel's life; and Jonah emerges alive from the belly of a whale. The point is as clear as a lightening flash: "God can make a way out of no way," transforming what we suffer into joy. I love this about the gospel stories. Is that what keeps the stories of Jesus alive amid the twists and turns of history? As I see it, they give us what we often need most; an out burst of hope.

This is a generous book. We live in a time that needs a lot more generosity. I recommend it less for the truth it reveals than for its spirit. But that ain't nothing.

Five years on from Trump's coup attempt ...

... we should be clear about what is happening. American fascism is on the march, and anyone who balks at saying that clearly, who makes excuses and pretends that Trump and the people he brought in aren’t monsters, is deeply unpatriotic. If we are to have a chance at saving democracy, our first duty must be clarity. No sanewashing, no bothsidesing. Only facing the horrible truth can set us free. -- Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman

That's Krugman's substack reflection on the fifth anniversary of Donald Trump's attempted coup in 2021 and the current Trump regime. I have no beef with this formulation. I do have a beef with fancy pundits who haven't dared or won't see so as to speak so plainly.

But I am interested also in this from the comments on Krugman's post; a reader writes:

American voters voted for this [in 2024]. 77 million of them looked at Donald Trump and decided they wanted someone who was a convicted felon, greedy narcissist, sex pest, insurrectionist, profoundly stupid, massively ignorant, racist imbecile, and dedicated to destroying the United States government. 77 million Americans voted for this.

And now the country is getting what it deserves. 

It's easy to be disgusted by our fellow/sister citizens. 

The reflexive, easy response is to think: No -- that's not what they voted for. They wanted cheaper eggs. Or, to be more respectful, lower costs for higher ed or to buy a house. Less respectfully -- Yes, they wanted the old white guy, even a criminal old white guy, in preference to any accomplished Black/South Asian-origin woman. 

The commenter has a point; the dimwits who casually put Trump in office do perhaps deserve what they are getting. 

Much of it will fall on other people, who didn't vote for him or didn't vote at all. The Trump/Musk tantrum at USAID is estimated to have already killed 600,000 people, mostly children in Africa.

But Trump voters will catch some of it when they can't afford increases in the price of health insurance or when there's nobody answering calls for rescue when flood waters rise. 

But then I reflect: none of us really get what we deserve in life -- for ill of course, but also even more for good. What we think of as our desserts is not how it works. 

We just have to forge on, trying to fix what we can and passing on something at least as good and perhaps something a little better to the humans who come after us. As I usually say to people who ask why I do what I do -- my activism -- "Nothing else to do..."

• • • 

Historian Diana Butler Bass offered a thoughtful reflection on January 6 in 2022 and reposted it today. 

...Some of my earliest memories are political ones — mostly of John F. Kennedy and of the Civil Rights Movement. Between the two, I learned that democracy was a hope-filled possibility and that it wasn’t perfect. Indeed, it wasn’t complete. It was a project. There were people who couldn’t vote because of the color of their skin. There were people who didn’t have certain rights because they weren’t men. There were people who couldn’t publicly proclaim who they loved because others considered them deviant. There were those with no access to democracy because they were poor or marginalized or went unnoticed.

How to fix these things, make the project work?

Democratic shortcomings were addressed by better democracy. In the middle of the twentieth century, people fought to widen democracy’s reach, to establish the dignified participation of everyone in voting, and to guarantee equity under the law. The federal government must stand as a protector of democracy for all citizens, no matter an individual’s political party, class, or creed. Indeed, many Americans shared a sense of democratic responsibility for people across the globe who were seeking a fairer, more just, and humane existence. Democracy was a worthy project, and it was a bright birthright, our political North Star.

... Democracy, the rule of the people, is a political system based on us. The rule of the people can be as inspiring as the greatest human impulses, as fickle as human nature, and as devious and deluded as human beings can be. In this way, “democracy” isn’t an ideology. You can’t put an “ism” on the end of democracy. Indeed, it is a practice of being a person in community, a polity based more on faith in the commons than a systematized doctrine. You can’t really believe in democracy. Instead, democracy asks us to trust that we belong to one another — all of us — and that together we can behave more justly and learn that liberty and happiness are possible.

... The cruel facts of history came home when armed Americans, deceived by an American president, destroyed a proud tradition of the peaceful transfer of power and attempted a coup to overturn the results of an election — all in a corrupted notion of actually saving democracy.

... January 6 was backlash on steroids. Backlash to a Black president. Backlash to marriage equality. Backlash to women’s rights. Backlash to the widening of democracy over most of our lifetimes — a widening that saw democracy reaching to include all sorts of people who had been excluded, a democratic correction of the flaws and misuses and mistakes of democracy past. January 6 wasn’t just about Donald Trump or the Big Lie. It was backlash to four decades of democratic progress that had been, by any historical account, extraordinary. 

... We can neither diminish nor deny January 6 — its memory — and how we remember it — is foundational for whatever happens next. So, don’t give up on the truth. Let’s practice the future of democracy. Starting from today. Starting wherever and however we can start. We’ve got work to do repairing and saving this messy, ironic, and imperfect project of government by all the people and for all the people.

Diana's consciousness of long-expanding democracy is common in my generation, most especially among comfortable-class white women. Look at all those white heads at No Kings. But we're not alone in this; it's the core American myth and it still has some life.

Will we allow second rate, greedy mobsters to kill it?

It's not solely about the oil

As a parenting advice column points out, unconstrained little boys like to blow things up.

Boys love explosions ...  I'm not sure about girls and explosions. I suspect they're less enthusiastic. 

Boys seem to have an inborn, visceral affection for explosions. As they mature, they gain the additional motivation of staging explosions to impress girls. I doubt girls are really impressed by this. But some of them might act impressed because they want to please boys. This only leads to more explosions. I'm guessing that the entire fireworks industry, and possibly war, has been built on this dynamic. ...

We've given the keys to our military to an uninhibited toddler and his enablers. So we get murder on the high seas and in Caracas.

Noah Berlatsky reflects:  

“The speed, the violence”

Trump’s refusal to try to get anyone on board [with his Venezuela adventure] is obviously an expression of contempt towards all people who are not his cronies. But it’s also an indication of Trump’s own fecklessness and confusion. He has not explained himself in part because he is not willing to do the work of understanding his or his country’s own motivations or interests. He’s going on impulse. And his impulses are for blowing things up.

Trump has long been praised by fools and opportunists as a non-interventionist, largely because he has long claimed, falsely, to have opposed the Iraq War. But even in his first term, it was clear he believes that war is a fun and exciting expression of power and masculinity (at least when it is waged against relatively weak foes). In his first 100 days in office, he used an enormous non-nuclear device — the “mother of all bombs” (MOAB) — in Afghanistan, then reacted with the same sort of gushing enthusiasm he showed after the Venezuela attack.

“We have the greatest military in the world, and they have done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and thatʼs what theyʼre doing, and frankly, thatʼs why theyʼve been so successful lately.”

In his second term, Trump has launched a constant series of military interventions. In addition to the murders in Venezuelan waters, he authorized strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities last summer and threatened more intervention this week if Iran killed protestors. He’s also bombed Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Iraq.

These actions have all been framed — especially by [Trump's Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth — as triumphal expressions of American awesomeness and virility. Addressing military officers in September, Hegseth boasted that “we don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country.” He denounced “politically correct” approaches to war and advocated instead “maximum lethality.”

... In short, Hegseth framed murdering people in defiance of the law as a moral and partisan goal. 

Trump’s praise of “speed and violence” and Hegseth’s nattering about “maximum lethality” are of a piece with [19th century futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's] fascist embrace of war as “the world’s only hygiene” and with Hitler’s assertion that “mankind has grown strong in eternal struggles and it will only perish through eternal peace.” Fascists don’t need a reason for this war or that war because they believe that war is a good in itself. Force is exciting and fun; using bombs and guns shows you’re strong. Trump’s a bully; he likes bullying.

... As political science professor Elizabeth Saunders said, “we have the foreign policy of a personalist dictatorship” — and the dictator’s personal preference is to watch TV shows in which the US military blows things up at his whim. What could go wrong? Unfortunately, we’re about to find out.

I believe we are about to learn that the time is running out in which US enjoys impunity for the consequences of our toddler behavior.

In fact, Trump's enthusiasm for bolstering his waning potency by beating up our western hemisphere neighbors shows a dim apprehension of that fact even in the wily brain of the bully. He wants to cede the rest of the world to other bullies so he can enjoy a free hand closer to home. Bullying in this arena didn't actually work out very well for another Republican imitation cowboy -- that would be Ronald Reagan in his illegal interventions in Central America -- and it is not likely to work even that well for this petulant incompetent. 

As is usual as a consequence of America's wars, we'll end up providing refuge to many of the best (and some of the worst) humans tossed about by our imperial pretensions. That's something to like about this country, I guess.

They broke it; they own it

Our Trump regime's Venezuelan adventure has produced one of the most revealing paragraphs ever in the New York Times: 

Ms. [Delcy] Rodríguez, 56, arrives at the job of Venezuela’s interim leader with credentials of an economic troubleshooter who orchestrated the country’s shift from corrupt socialism to similarly corrupt laissez-faire capitalism. ...

Since corrupt capitalism is Trump's game, he likes that. And he clearly thinks he's won the chance to steal Venezuela's oil. We'll see how it goes.

Good riddance to Maduro. Pity the Venezuelans. Pity us. When legal restraint is swept away, we will all suffer. And pity any country cursed with "black gold" -- except maybe Canada.

They are stark raving bonkers!

When they get through screwing around with Venezuela, there's this. Katie Miller is Stephen Miller's wife, presumably expressing the hopes and fantasies of the cabal of lunatics in charge of the United States.

Somehow I doubt it.