The Widening Gyre: Jill Lepore Unleashes Her Inner Joan Didion

 

Jill Lepore has harbored an inner streak of Joan Didion for some years, but in this week's New Yorker (5/5/25) she goes full "Slouching Toward Bethlehem."

Reading the New Yorker in New Hampshire Obadiah Youngblood

She starts off with a litany of complaints about his highness, the Trump, which would make Jefferson blush in envy for its conciseness, its scope and its sheer power.

King George III was doped slapped compared to what Lepore does to Trump.

But then she goes beyond Thomas of Monticello and sails into a truly courageous analysis of why Trump has been able to chop down the structures of government and liberal democracy so easily: the wood had been allowed to rot:

"They refused to denounce the illiberalism of speech codes, the lack of due process in the #MeToo movement and Title IX cases, mandatory D.E.I. affirmations as condition of employment and the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left."

In her famous account of the fragmentation and degeneration of San Francisco in 1967, Didion showed where liberal, liberated thought had brought us. Her essays collected as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," took the title from W.H. Auden's poem, "The Second Coming," which contained the lines:

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."

Which pretty well describes how writers at the New Yorker--Lepore, David Rankin, the whole lot feel right now, in a year which many have compared to 1968. 

Lepore's summation of Trump's offense is spot on, of course:

From his first day in office, he set about dismantling much of both the federal government and the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. By declarations of national emergency, by executive order, and by executive action—and frequently in plain violation of the Constitution— Trump gutted entire departments of the federal government. He defied the federal judiciary. He rescinded funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. He lifted regulations across industries. He fired, forced the resignations of, or eliminated the jobs of tens of thousands of federal employees. He hobbled scientific research. He all but criminalized immigration. He denounced the arts. He abandoned the federal government’s commitment to public education. He revoked civil rights and shuttered civil-rights programs, deriding the goals of racial equality, gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. equality. He made enemies of American allies, and prostituted the United States to the passions of tyrants. He punished his adversaries and delighted in their suffering. He tried to bring universities to heel. He bent law firms to his will. He instituted tariffs and toppled markets; he lifted tariffs and toppled markets. He debased the very idea of America. He created chaos, emergency after emergency.

But it is her analysis of why he has been so successful which is telling: 

Trump felled so much timber not because of the mightiness of his axe but because of the rot within the trees and the weakness of the wood. Many of the institutions Trump attacked, from the immigration system to higher education, were those whose leaders and votaries knew them to be broken and yet whose problems they had failed to fix, or even, publicly, to acknowledge.

She has seen the problem and she knows a big part of it has been the failure of liberals to police their own house. 

COVID Revisionist History

 

Needing podcasts for my two hour bicycle rides, I am always willing to try something new.  Carole Hooven appeared on a podcast called "Dishcast," and its host, Andrew Sullivan, did a creditable job with her so I tuned in to his interview with a Princeton professor, Frances Lee, who wrote a book, "In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us," from which I learned:

Andrew Sullivan

1. Children who were held out of schools--which, of course the authors argue was unnecessary and fruitless--suffered irreparable harm, and rendered into a lost generation of under performing half wits, and all because people like Tony Fauci and the CDC were doctrinaire, unwilling to listen to reason, and dictatorial and too sure of their own superior knowledge.

2. Masking was all theater and should never have been tried, and Tony Fauci was against it before he was for it, and so which was it Tony?

3. Even the vaccines were a failure and social distancing was ridiculous and look at what happened when all those gay guys in Provincetown, MA went out to bars having been full vaccinated and got COVID anyway.

4. And even Francis Collins now says it was a lab leak.

Dr. Frances Lee

Of course, neither of these two Ivy Leaguers listened to a single minute of This Week In Virology, (TWiV), the podcast out of Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons during the pandemic, or if they did, apparently the content went right over their heads.

But there is a whole fad of books now about how stupid and arrogant Fauci and friends were during the pandemic, and how much harm his policies did and how Ron DeSantis was right all along.

When I hear these podcasts, or read this revisionist history, I usually find myself wondering: On what planet did these people spend the majority of their time during that pandemic?

Nowhere in these anti-establishment renditions is there mention of those 18 wheel rigs lined up outside Mt. Sinai Hospital, Roosevelt Hospital, Bellvue Hospital, The New York Hospital, Columbia, which were stacked to the roof tops with the bodies because the morgues could not hold them all. Nowhere mentioned is the estimate that with the best data, 3 million Americans were going to die, although, in the end, likely because of public health measures like quarantines, distancing, maybe even masking and certainly the vaccine, only 1 million died, so likely 2 million were spare owing to public health measures. 

Of course, with COVID, most of the data was hard to parse and it's always tough to be sure when people died at a nursing home, how many actually died from COVID.

The TWiV Team

But, had Andrew Sullivan listened to Dr. Fauci on TWiV, he would have heard him say, repeatedly, "You know, we're in a data free zone here. I'm giving you the best advice I can, right now, based on what we know today, but two weeks from now, I may well be saying the opposite, after new studies get done."

He was hardly arrogant. One thing you can say about Fauci, and this has been his hallmark since he was at Cornell, is Fauci has always been surprisingly not arrogant, and has always been aware of having grown up in an apartment over his father's pharmacy in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, went through high school, college and medical school on scholarships.  He may not be exactly humble; he's confident, but he is not arrogant. 

He did not think masks would help, initially, because to a virus the pores in a mask look like the Holland Tunnel, but when it turned out droplets were a problem, he embraced masks, and what is so onerous, really, about wearing a mask? Low cost, possibly high return.

And as anyone who actually took the time to listen to the 4 hours a week of TWiV, during those years 2020-2022, the Provincetown outbreak would have been no surprise: The vaccine was never expected to provide protection from infection or disease. Like the influenza vaccine, it was hoped it would prevent intubation in an ICU and death, which it did. Vaccinated people caught COVID, but they did not die and most did need to be hospitalized

Yes, Sweden opted to keep kids in school, and it's not clear Sweden suffered more deaths, but comparing Sweden to the US is like comparing New York City to Claremont, New Hampshire. In urban populations, in countries with dense concentrations of population, infectious diseases tend to be spread differently. And, for the most part, deaths in the Red states were more likely because the Red state folks did not follow public health advice.

The professor and Mr. Sullivan made much of the way people in power behaved, like Boris Johnson's "party gate" and Gavin Newsome's visit to the winery, as if they really knew all along isolating people was worthless and so they party-ed on. As if...

And as for the lab leak: As Fauci has said, anything is possible, but lab leak is not the likely culprit, not when a far more likely culprit exists: wet markets.  The TWiV crew has addressed this repeatedly, and they've marshalled the details of what evidence exists--the finding of the exact virus in the drains at the wet market, the timing and pattern of the spread of the virus from the market, the fact that multiple other viral epidemics have emanated from these markets in the past, the culprit vectors, pangolins, bats, all add up to a beyond a reasonable doubt it was a crossover virus making the leap, as so many other viruses (SARS among them) have done in the past. 

You did not need to invent a Jack the Ripper to explain deaths when you had the Black Plague ripping through town.

And so what if it was a lab leak? Ted Cruz would have you believe that Tony Fauci's NIH funded the Wuhan lab to make this virus, and it escaped or was deliberately loosed upon the world by some James Bond type villain in China,  so it's all Tony's fault. In fact, Tony Fauci would be only too happy to help the Wuhan lab work with this virus and other potential threats like it, so we can avoid pandemics in the future.

Professor Lee and Mr. Sullivan are not a unique species. There is a type of academic and a type of news media specimen who thrive on playing the role of the smart guys, who are not afraid to speak truth of power, if not to power, who are clever enough to see past the prevailing wisdom to the truth, which is available to hard headed thinkers, who can "do their own research" and get past the establishment to the truth.

They are, at base, conspiracists. 

But they are wrong and wrong headed.

And they are, whatever else they are, Monday morning quarter backs, who have never had a shot fired in anger at them, and never had to make hard calls under duress. 

They are, to use Spiro Agnew's immortal phrase, "effete elitists." 

Nobody's Perfect, But Pritzker's Perfect Enough

J. B. Pritzker, governor of the land of Lincoln has been good for a long time. 

A few years ago, he spoke at the Democratic state convention and he brought the delegates to their feet, chanting, "Pritzker for President," and when they didn't stop, and officials wanted to move on with the program, Pritzker finally raised his hand and said, "Look, I'm 300 pounds and Jewish. Not going to happen."

But after his appearance at Manchester days ago, his liabilities do not seem to matter.

Finally, the Democrats have found a fighter.

Fact is, we might have had one in Tim Walz, but he was muzzled when he observed the MAGA movement, the MAGA crowd and all those who love it, are just plain "weird." 

Oh, that was too much like Hillary's basket of deplorables. All the careerist pundits were aghast. It was like those early West Wing episodes when Jed Bartlet was calling out his opponents by name and the cognistenti were trying to muzzle him and insist he call his opponent, "My opponent" rather than mentioning his name which was giving his opponent "free advertising." And Bartlet said, "That makes me look like I can't remember his name."  Only when his team decided to "Let Bartlet be Bartlet," did he catch fire. Once all the "handlers" stepped aside, the Democrat took off.

Life appears to be imitating art now. Not that Pritzker has ever been anything but Pritzker, but now the handlers in the party may be realizing he may be the man for the job, morbid obesity and Jewish notwithstanding.

He eviscerated Trump and his mob,   

“We have a Secretary of Education who hates teachers and schools,” he said. “We have a Secretary of Transportation who hates public transit. We have an Attorney General who hates the Constitution. We have a Secretary of State, the son of naturalized citizens—a family of refugees—on a crusade to expel our country of both.
“We have a head of the Department of Government Efficiency— an immigrant granted the
privilege of living and working here, a man who has made hundreds of billions of dollars after the government rescued his business for him—who is looking to destroy the American middle class to fund tax cuts for himself. And we have a President who claims to love America but who hates our military so much that he calls them ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’ and who can’t be bothered to delay his golf game to greet the bodies of four fallen US soldiers. And we have a Grand Old Party, founded by one of our nation’s bravest Presidents, Abraham Lincoln—who today would be a Democrat, I might add—... so afraid of the felon and the fraud that they put in the White House that they would sooner watch him destroy our 

country than lift a hand to save it.”

                 watch?v=zMndfvxVeRo 

 

 And all the Democrats exploded with relief, joy and a sense of "Finally!"

Let Pritzker be Pritzker and make him President.

But before that, help him destroy the Maga mob and all they embrace. Let him wield that terrible swift sword and join the battle. 

Alito: The Monster Behind the Mask

 

Reading Justice Samuel Alito's dissent in the case of Trumpist deportations of Venezuelans to that same gulag in El Salvador where the Maryland man abducted by Trump's masked ICE agents was dumped does not take long.

A Reliable Vote for Despotism

Justice Alito found that there was no justification for the Court to prevent further illegal abductions because:

1. The United States lacks jurisdiction: i.e. it's not our problem any more. There's lots of historical precedent for this idea of course: the United States sent a boatload of Jews back to Europe because they did not have paperwork signed by the local Gestapo attesting to their good character, and once those boats left American ports, well, there was no way the American government could help them--not our jurisdiction.

2. Stopping deportations means the government has to be given time to argue why its current program should continue, but in the meantime the government should not be thwarted from the kidnapping program they've rushed into. If Justice Alito had been asked to stop Adolph Eichmann from loading all those Jews into cattle cars in Holland, France, Poland and shipping them off to the camps in Germany, he would presumably have found Mr. Eichmann should be given time to prepare his case, but in the meantime keep those railroad cars rolling.

3. There is not enough evidence the men in question are really being harmed: Just because a man is thrown into a gulag in Central America is no reason to suppose he's not having a good time.

The essence of Alito's objection is: "What's the rush?" 

American Justice 

My favorite sentence in Justice Alito's decision is the last:

"I refused to join the Court's order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate. Both the Executive and the Judiciary have an obligation to follow the law."

We can count ourselves fortunate Justice Alito is not a trauma surgeon--just because a felon stabs some poor passerby on the street, and the victim is rushed to the emergency room does not mean the surgeon should be roused from sleep at midnight to attend to the bleeding. The insurance card has to be examined, and the insurance company phoned, and if the hour is late, well, we'll just have to wait until tomorrow morning, so we do not violate the prescribed procedures.

And now, Justice Alito can go back to bed.  Heaven forbid the system should be pushed to act with urgency!

When I heard two justices had voted to keep these criminal governmental acts going, sending victims to  El Salvador, imagine the look of surprise on my face to learn which two justices those might be!  

Could it be Justice Alito and, wait for it, Justice Thomas?

American Justice

Which is not to say that Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts were sure things when it came to voting to correct an illegal act--kidnapping, abducting and imprisoning. In roughly descending order of Trumpism, those four are only usually reliable in finding that whatever President Trump wants to do is just fine--he can get money in any way he pleases; he can do whatever he wants as long as he says it's part of his job as President, and he can never be tried in any court for any crime--even murdering someone on Fifth Avenue. The only way to depose the President is for the Senate to convict him after the House of Representatives impeaches him.

Not Going to Save Democracy

So, as long as the American public votes Republican, there is no controlling Mr. Trump, and abductions, imprisonment, extortion and bribery are just fine with the American voter and with the Supreme Court of the United States. 

The Disappeared

 Mad Dog is a little blurry on the details, but wasn't there a time when we used to read about certain South American nations where people were just "disappeared," picked up by anonymous hooded police or soldiers and whisked away and never heard of again? The only sure thing about those events was the guys in the hoods with the guns and the vans were working for the government, not for some cartel because the vans, the equipment were all government issued.

Abu Ghraib 

And then there were men who were whisked away from some battlefield in some Middle Eastern nation, bound and hooded and they woke up in Guantanamo (Gitmo) or Abu Ghraib. 

American government operating outside the law, or, put another way, illegally. ("Extra-legally" is an anemic dodge, a way of saying, "well it's not actually against the law; it's just outside the law."

When confronted with the photos from Abu Ghraib, George W. Bush said, "This is not who we are."

Sure, I lynched 'em. 

But, of course, he was dead wrong about that.

Americans have been cheerfully lynching Negroes for centuries, grinning into the camera. And the Gitmo black site, same thing. And the disappearing of of people just living their lives, not committing crimes, off the streets, not just a South American or Russian thing.

After Church Party for the Children

It's now All American smirking crimes committed by knowing, willful American police, ICE or DHS personnel.

Arrest, habeas corpus, arraignment, public defenders, trial--all gone. Inefficient. Why waste time and money on trials, lawyers and courts? 

We have smirking Trump sitting next to the smirking dictator of El Salvador, laughing about a man from Maryland who was disappeared to an El Salvadorian gulag and they say, "So, what are you going to do about it?

Hey, What's Done Is Done

This America, man. This Trump America. 

You voted for it, America. 

Eliminating Waste and Abuse: Why Spend Money on Three Branches?

Mad Dog has been contemplating this whole idea of waste, fraud and abuse in the United States federal government.

Way Cool Hand Jive

 

Actually, the parts of the government with which Mad Dog has had personal experience--Medicare and Social Security--have always impressed him as being quite efficient, and the administrative costs of running Medicare are way lower than the same costs in the private sector medical insurance companies. 

But why, Mad Dog asks, do we really need those other two branches of government? Why are we spending billions on courts, salaries for judges, paying jurors, endlessly litigating stuff like whether the President can cut off funds for medical research at Harvard and Columbia? All those activist judges ever do is slow things down, erect roadblocks, tie up what needs to be done with endless trials and we know how corrupt juries and trials are--look at those fiascos in New York where they took months to find Mr. Trump guilty of 34 felonies, and what was the result? The judge told him he was a bad boy and that was that.  So why did we even bother? What a waste of money, not to mention time. 

Vice President Vance says judges aren't or shouldn't be allowed to control President Trump's legitimate power. And who could disagree with that? If Trump is legitimate, well then, why all the fuss? 

And then there is the legislature. Five hundred and thirty five salaries, not to mention the upkeep of the Congressional gym and all those offices and staffs.

  

President Trump who was legitimately elected  this time, (unlike the time before, when he was illegitimately not re-elected) knows what needs to be done: He can round up anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant rapist/murderer and put them on a plane to some prison in Central America where we will never hear from them no more at all. So, why waste a lot of money passing laws to do that, and fighting individual cases in the courts? Waste and abuse, for sure. Maybe even fraud.

And the whole thing with judges is they are weak. They can sit there in their black robes and issue a verdict, but they don't have any army or police force to actually enforce it. So why bother with them? 

And President Trump is really trying, you know. He told everyone to buy stocks after the market crashed, when he slammed in those tariffs, and those citizens who listened to their favorite President joined him in buying lots of depressed stocks, and then the President slyly rescinded the tariffs and stocks soared in response and people who bought low made a bundle. 

So why do we need an internal revenue service when we have a President who can make us all rich, if we just listen to what he's saying?

And the military? What a waste of money that is.  Soldiers are just suckers, you know. President Trump has been honest enough to say that. Imagine, they fight for strangers. 

 And as Laura Loomer has so clearly shown, you can just fire generals for disloyalty and nothing bad happens.  Eventually, all the soldiers of the Third Reich swore an oath of allegiance, not to Germany-- but to Adolph Hitler, which was way efficient. They even had this really nifty hand jive thing they did while they were swearing their Hitler loyalty oath, which we should really be working on here and now, as it is absolutely no cost and huge benefit. 

Wow! She's HOT! She MUST be smart!

Talk about efficiency: What could be more efficient than that? 

That Silly Putty Called History

When General Eisenhower was shown the concentration camps just liberated by American soldiers he ordered camera crews to document it all. .

Actual Tough Guy

Eisenhower wanted the movies made by his men to provide evidence of what actually happened, "In order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"

Local Good Ol' Boys and One Hero

Military people know better than most how history gets handed down. They know history is one long argument. They know history is malleable, but they also know that some facts are stubborn, that some things, like a dead body, cannot be denied. 

So, Mr. Trump tells us Ukraine started the war with Russia.

Kent State

Hitler asserted the Poles attacked Germany to start WWII. Also, he said, the Czechs  oppressed German speaking people in Czechoslovakia, and so he had no choice but to rescue them by marching into the Sudetenland. 

Southern Hospitality

And now, most Americans can barely recall who fought who in World War II. The soldiers who actually fought it are mostly dead now. There are more years between Pearl Harbor and today (84 years) than there were between Custer's Last Stand and the bombing of Hiroshima (69 years.)

Lunch Counter Reception

The most cringe worthy part of every Jimmy Kimmel Show is his man on the street interviews, where he asks random United States citizens questions like who the United States fought during the Civil War, or who was the first President of the United States.

Keeping Them In Their Place

Statues to Confederate heroes of the Civil War are saluted as being homage to "Southern heritage," rather than statues to traitors who fought to keep chattel slavery in place.

To control the present, you must first control the past. Or, as George Orwell more elegantly phrased it, "Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future."

Golden Childhood

For Trumplings, there was once a golden past, when white men controlled their wives, their communities, earned a good wage at the factory down the road, where they went off with lunch pails full, and came home at night to a home they ruled and had enough money for vacation homes, automobiles and times were good. 

Elon Musk's Efficiency Plan

Of course, there may have been times when some of that was true, but those were also times when women were not allowed to have credit cards or bank accounts, unless their husbands cosigned for them. And there were daily lynching in the Confederate states, where a black teenager whistling at a white woman was strung up a the nearest tree, where bathrooms, motels, restaurants, swimming pools were labeled "White only," or "colored." When nobody admitted to having sex outside of marriage, and when women were not supposed to really enjoy or seek out sex, which was for procreation. "Those were the days," Archie Bunker sung, when men were men and women were property, and the dark races knew their place.

Pretty Much Says It All

Those were the days when Senator Joseph McCarthy said he had a list of Communists in the American State Department and the Army and he would get around to naming names, and he said Hollywood was under the control of Jews and Communists and fellow travelers and careers were ruined simply by placing a name on a list. Those were the days when neighborhoods were "red lined" so no people of color, no Jews, and even sometimes, no Catholics need apply. 

Fighting Communism

And then came the sixties and the government of Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson lied on and on, insisting the war in Vietnam would be won quickly and, for the Americans, painlessly, all the while knowing the war was unwinnable in the short term and unpalatable and unsupportable in the long term. Those were the years when American boys from suburbia and from inner city America got dropped off in the rice paddies, armed with automatic rifles and they mowed down villagers, whose only offense was wanting to harvest rice and to be left alone. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d8FTPv955I

And now we learn from Mr. Trump,  America has been raped and plundered by the rest of the world. And as we all now know, while Mr. Trump may be willing to live with rape, he is very offended by plunder.

Now that's a wrong, written in history, which has to be rectified.

Postcard from a Lynching