We’re all a buzz with events yesterday in Helsinki (see below), but long before President Donald John Trump cozied up to President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Glenn Greenwald sat down with New York magazine writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood for
Does This Man Know More Than Robert Mueller? Glenn Greenwald’s war on the Russia investigation. After breezy magazine opening, Zuylen-Wood gets to his buried lede:

For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there’s a conspiracy, he suspects, it’s one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees “McCarthyism.” Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking — and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as “enemies.”

And even if claims about Russian meddling are corroborated by Robert Mueller’s investigation, Greenwald’s not sure it adds up to much — some hacked emails changing hands, none all that damaging in their content, maybe some malevolent Twitter bots. In his eyes, the Russia-Trump story is a shiny red herring—one that distracts from the failures, corruption, and malice of the very Establishment so invested in promoting it.

Greenwald told Zuylen-Wood:

When Trump becomes the starting point and ending point for how we talk about American politics, [we] don’t end up talking about the fundamental ways the American political and economic and cultural system are completely fucked for huge numbers of Americans who voted for Trump for that reason. We don’t talk about all the ways the Democratic Party is a complete fucking disaster and a corrupt, sleazy sewer, and not an adequate alternative to this far-right movement that’s taking over American politics.

I don’t think Greenwald is wrong. Zuylen-Wood continues:

Greenwald’s been yelling about this, quite heatedly, since before the election. In the Democratic Echo Chamber, Inconvenient Truths Are Recast As Putin Plots, reads the headline of an Intercept piece published in October 2016. The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook, reads another, from February 2017. As Mueller’s investigation widened, no fallen domino—not the guilty plea of former Trump national-security adviser Michael Flynn, not the indictment of former campaign chairman Paul Manafort—chastened Greenwald. When it was recently reported that Steve Bannon had lobbed a “treason” charge in the direction of Donald Trump Jr.—precipitating his break with the president—Greenwald rolled his eyes. Bannon’s “motives are pure & pristine and he is simply trying to inform the public about the truth,” Greenwald tweeted sarcastically.

These views have gotten, in Zuylen-Wood’s words, Greenwald excommunicated from the liberal salons that celebrated him in the Snowden era. Greenwald said, “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow. And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.”

Greenwald’s views have resulted in an O-Henryesque twist in the Trumpverse:

His view of the liberal online media is equally charitable. “Think about one interesting, creative, like, intellectually novel thing that [Vox’s] Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein have said in like ten years,” he says. “In general, they’re just churning out Democratic Party agitprop every single day of the most superficial type.” (Reached for comment, none of these people would respond to Greenwald.)

All this has led to one of the less-anticipated developments of the Donald Trump presidency: Glenn Greenwald, Fox News darling. For his sins, Greenwald has been embraced by opportunistic #MAGA partisans seeking to discredit the Trump-Russia story. When alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich sat for a 60 Minutes interview last year, he praised only one journalist: Greenwald. “My opinion of Glenn ten or 15 years ago was entirely negative,” says Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who now heralds him as one of the “clearest thinkers” in media. (A parallel phenomenon involves the rehabilitation by the Resistance of an armada of neoconservative zombies—David Frum, Max Boot, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol—and the lionization, at least temporarily, of Trump-skeptical Republican politicians like John McCain, Jeff Flake, and Lindsey Graham.)

I think that an observation made by Greenwald at the top of the interview is telling. He said:

I really believe that if I still lived in New York, the vast majority of my friends would be New York and Washington media people and I would kind of be implicitly co-opted. It just gives me this huge buffer. You’ve seen how I live, right? When I leave my computer, that world disappears.

That remove gives Greenwald the ability to see the forest. I’m thankful for that.

How serious a problem is there when David French, a senior writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, publishes three essays in four days that I, a progressive writer, agree with? Is the problem me or with him. Or, is there no problem and French is just an intelligent writer with a point of view?

This evening French posted In International Diplomacy, Words Matter to the National Review’s The Corner.

I agree with French, and not just in matters of international diplomacy, words always matter. French begins:

There’s a meme circulating through Trumpist Twitter today, and it echoes a consistent theme in Trump apologetics—that what Trump says is less important than what Trump does, and there is a clear distinction between those two things:

There’s a kernel of truth in the defense. While Trump’s rhetoric has been abysmal throughout the campaign and throughout his presidency, he has provided lethal aide to Ukraine, American forces fought a battle with Russian mercenaries in Syria, and our military bombed Syria, Russia’s ally. Moreover, Trump has pushed NATO to increase defense spending, a move decidedly not in Russia’s interests. So, today’s press conference was no big deal, correct? Everyone should just chill out, right?

Wrong. Today’s press conference was a problem. Trump’s rhetoric is a problem.

Like a lot of other progressives, I’m uncomfortable defending our intelligence community because, from where I write, their track record is not so good and the whole the enemy of my enemy is my friend idea has never set well with me, but French thinks our president crossed a line in this exchange with the Associated Press’ Jonathan Lemire:

LEMIRE: Just now President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every US intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did. My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: So let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server? Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the democratic national committee? I’ve been wondering that. I’ve been asking that for months and months and I’ve been tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know, where is the server and what is the server saying? With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia.

I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be, [Emphasis mine, JH] but I really do want to see the server. But I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? 33,000 emails gone—just gone. I think in Russia they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 emails. So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that president Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today. And what he did is an incredible offer. He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators, with respect to the 12 people. I think that’s an incredible offer. Okay thank you.

French continues:

[Trump] didn’t rally Americans against Russia, he rallied Americans against each other—in part by publicly trafficking in rank speculation and feeding conspiracy theories. Moreover, when given the opportunity to publicly hold Russia accountable for “anything in particular,” he says he holds “both countries responsible,” says “the United States has been foolish,” and that “we’re all to blame.”

So now Trump apologists are promoting idiocy like the idea that this is an example of keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. No, he’s been alienating America’s friends and flattering America’s enemies. Trump’s words are the product of an ego so fragile that he simply can’t handle any insinuation that his electoral triumph is tainted in any way Russian actions—so he has defend his victory at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate the setting. In other words, Trump’s press conference wasn’t about advancing America’s interests, it was about defending Trump’s accomplishments.

My immediate response to that would be, well duh, but that would be counterproductive. I want the Americans to see that the president is buck naked here. None of this will touch the trumpies here, but maybe enough of the electorate who really voted against Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016 will see that while that was probably the right action, they probably should have gone with a third choice, or never put themselves in that dichotomy in the first place.

How very different Ricky Nelson’s 1972 message is from that touted by Bob Dylan during his born-again christian period in his 1979 hit Gotta Serve Somebody.

At the end of Cary Goldstein’s The Art Of Fiction interview of Charles Johnson, he concludes with this exchange:

GOLDSTEIN: [Dr. Martin Luther] King, in Dreamer, feels that he’s failed. He has a wish to live a simpler life. Is that something you have felt in some way?

CHARLES JOHNSON: I can easily relate to the need for a simpler, less cluttered life. That’s how Dreamer opens—with King dreaming about going to Kerala, India. By the time Dreamer came out in 1998, I had been making a promise to myself for about ten, fifteen years that by the age of fifty all my duties, obligations, and responsibilities to everybody in my life from childhood forward would ­finally be discharged. Every bloody one. Period. I worked to serve others—family, colleagues, friends, students, the book world—as completely as possible. To stay “at my post,” as Emerson put it. Then, at age fifty, I promised myself that I would be free to step back or away from these social obligations and allow my commitments to the Buddhadharma to deepen. I’m only just realizing that goal, but now I want to spend my time, this winter season of my life, in spiritual practice, creating, learning—I am a lifelong learner—and just writing about the things I love.

This is perhaps why, very early in my life, I decided that children were not in my future. I’m simply too selfish. That’s a flaw, I admit, but at least I didn’t try to correct the flaw, fail and seriously ruin other lives in the process.

Last month the Cuyahoga County Charter Review Commission voted 8-0 in favor of adding campaign finance language to Article III, Section 3.09 of the Cuyahoga County Charter which enumerates the powers and duties of the council. The proposed language for 3.09(13) (see page 12) reads:

To establish by ordinance campaign related laws governing the election of any County officers and officials including, without limitation, campaign finance regulation, donor disclosure requirements, donor age limits, enforcement or other provisions to avoid violations of the public trust.

Tomorrow, the proposal goes to the next step when the Committee on the Whole will begin consideration of the commission’s report at a 1 p.m. meeting.

Steve Holecko, political director of the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, writes:

[Council members] have 60 days to decide whether to pass the amendment unchanged to the voters, to fail the proposed amendment entirely, or to vote down and submit an amended proposal. If passed by Council, the proposal will move to the ballot in November.

This proposed amendment would add a section to the Cuyahoga County Charter that codifies the ability for Cuyahoga County Council to create campaign finance-related legislation by ordinance. It does NOT add specific campaign finance limits into the Charter. Rather, if passed by the Council and approved by the voters, elected officials, experts, advocates, and citizens would work together through the legislative process on what that ordinance could look like. Right now, there is no campaign finance language in the Cuyahoga County Charter. We, the people, can finally change that!

In addition to the Democrats and Republicans on the Charter Review Commission, the proposal has also been endorsed by the Honorable Mayor Bruce Akers (former Chair of the 2012 Charter Review Commission), the Cleveland Branch of the NAACP, Common Cause Ohio, the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus, the League of Women Voters of Greater Cleveland and more!

In advance of tomorrow’s meeting, Holecko has three suggestions for residents:

Step 1: If you are a resident of Cuyahoga County, call your Cuyahoga County Council representative, give them your name and that you are a constituent and ***kindly and respectfully*** ask that they “support passage of the Charter Review Commission Campaign Finance Charter Amendment to the voters.” That’s it!

Step 2: If you are available to attend the meeting on the 4th floor of the Cuyahoga County Headquarters, 2079 East Ninth Street, it would be great to have people there in support of the Amendment.

Step 3: Please share and spread the word! If you have any friends, family or community organization that want to support this, please let me know and encourage them to contact their Councilperson as well.

I have a student at that time, but I called my representative for District 5—Michael Gallagher—to say that I favor the change and Steve can consider this my spreading of the word.

Charles Bramesco, writing in Who is America? Sacha Baron Cohen’s new show aims high but goes low for The Guardian, was not impressed:

Somewhere around the bit in which Sacha Baron Cohen recalls being cuckolded by a dolphin while on vacation with his (human) wife, a viewer is liable to be hit with a wave of nostalgia. Sitting through the largely tiresome pilot of Cohen’s latest program Who Is America? inspires longing for a simpler past, when Cohen’s profile was still low enough that he didn’t have to mask his face with nightmare-inducing prosthetics just to go incognito. He plays four characters in the first episode of this new series – an obese quack doctor, an NPR-listening uberliberal, a limey ex-con, and a gruff Israeli commando – all of whom evoke fonder memories of sweet Borat, the good-natured traveler in thrall of a “very nice” world full of “great success!” As hardliners on the left and right, gun nuts and bleeding-heart activists, confrontation is baked into the very premise of this new quartet.

One-out-of-four is not good.

Cohen saves the clear standout segment of the first episode for last, in which, with minimal difficulty, he convinces a handful of congressmen to support a bill arming four-year-olds with firearms. It will go down as one of the more effective works of Trump-era satire, as damning and chilling and disarmingly strange as the latest tweet from the commander-in-chief. The sight of a geriatric man brandishing a semiautomatic rifle outfitted with cute bunny-rabbit ears will not leave the memory of those who gaze upon it any time soon.

To Cohen’s detriment, that only throws the shortcomings of the other segments into sharper relief. In the first three parts, he ribs Bernie Sanders as a yokel with a fundamental misunderstanding of what the “one percent” is, discusses his daughter’s free-bleeding onto an American flag over dinner with small-town staunch conservatives, and pitches his bodily-secretion artworks to a Laguna Beach dealer. While the latter of the three has the distinction of being astonishingly weird (the woman that gladly clips a lock of her pubic hair is, hands down, the most game person Cohen has ever interviewed), they’re all hamstrung by a sense of inconsequentiality.

Maybe our banality is part of the problem?

Reading Charles Johnson’s interview for The Art Of Fiction in The Paris Review is making me think more than I have in sometime about the block I have in my current novel project Absent Son. The block is this: the novel is set in Charleston, South Carolina, during Reconstruction and my first draft had not a single major character who was African-American. I found myself fearful of getting the character wrong.

I had this conversation with my brother Cavana Faithwalker and in his wise way he told me to just write the damn character and not worry about right or wrong; let the character be who he—Xavier Brüt, in this case—wants to be.

In the interview, Johnson offers another perspective on my problem:

I think that black literature has reached a point where it is full of exhausted conventions. The slave narrative and slave stories, for example. You’re always going to have the master, evil or benign. You’re ­going to have the slave who is content, you’re going to have the slave who isn’t content. There are conventions and threadbare tropes that come up again and again and again. And I wonder if that’s a good thing. We have a tendency to exclusively interpret the black experience in terms of victimization—­victimization and oppression. And if that’s not in a story about black characters somewhere, or in a story about the black American experience, some readers will be disappointed, and ask, Where’s the oppression? Where’s the discrimination? It’s an expectation that’s drilled into us in terms of narratives about black Americans. I think it’s racial and political kitsch.

My tendency is to acknowledge oppression but to also call forth ­other profiles of the black experience, because I know that black life, like all life, outstrips our perceptions, that so much of black life still remains—to invoke Ellison here—invisible, unseen. In my fiction, I have stories where you don’t know what the character’s race is. Or it’s about a character who’s black, but he’s Martin Luther King Jr. and still a grad student finishing up his dissertation, like in Dr. King’s Refrigerator (2005). He’s got a new wife, and that’s what the issue in the story is. He’s spending too much time on his work, away from his wife, and so on. You get to the end of the story, after he’s had a Buddhist epiphany about the interconnectedness of all things based on the food in his fridge, and you know within twelve months Rosa Parks is not going to give up her seat on a bus and he’s going to become a “world-historical” figure, partly prepared for that role by his revelation a year earlier. Those are the human moments important to me—he’s figuring out how to be married and how to deal with all the duties heaped upon a young minister. There doesn’t have to be a big conflict, and there doesn’t have to be a big racial conflict. I don’t believe that’s the totality of our experience.

Twenty years or so ago I made a resolution to read the Torah, the five books of Moses, across the course of a year and I chose the Shabbat class taught by Rabbi Roger Klein as the vehicle to carry through the year. I actually went through three cycles and learned a great deal from one of my greatest teachers. Rabbi Klein liked to extend his teaching beyond the strict text and he would introduce the class to words and authors that many were not strictly speaking intimate with.

That was how I was introduced to Rambam—Moses ben Maimon—and his writings and I remember a particular morning when the word epiphany came up. I don’t recall the context but I remember Rabbi Klein repeating a lesson from his father that if you want to make a word your own, you have to use the word correctly 10 times the day you first lean the meaning. That stuck with me, and reading about Johnson’s description of King’s Buddhist epiphany brought all that back because that’s the way they happen. No one ever went looking for an epiphany and found one. They just happen.

Xavier Brüt isn’t a hero or heroic. He’s a man learning—as is my protagonist Cassius Alexander William FitzRoy—to operate in a world he never expected to experience. Unlike Cassius, however, Xavier lived the transition. He has a memory of what happened and that continuity helps him to cope. Understanding that experience—good fiction is the writer’s attempt to understand what they don’t—is my challenge. How do I write about a life I haven’t lived. Cav’s advice to just write the damn character is spot on, as Johnson elaborates.

CARY GOLDSTEIN: Are there proprietary subjects in American literature? Are there topics or perspectives that are off-limits for exploration by someone who hasn’t had that experience himself?

JOHNSON: It’s tricky. The question is, Can you write outside of the cage of your race, class, gender, or cultural position? We’re talking about it in terms of writing, but these are larger questions about America right now, and they’re reflected in what we say about literature. Who has the right to write about, say, a black woman’s experience? It’s very complicated, and I don’t quite know what to say. And as I said, I will write stories in which the race of the character is not important, a reader will not get any designations of that character’s race, because race isn’t important for the story. Or put it this way—we must, as writers, be able to empathize with the racial, class, gender, and cultural other. We must use our best research and imagination, as I try to do in a few stories in my new collection Night Hawks, to write stories about Muslim American soldiers, Japanese Zen abbots, black people, Plato and the Buddha, and ­stories that have no racial signatures at all.

That’s tough. When are race, class, gender or cultural heritage not important? Are there universal, human experiences that where we as writers can emphasize with that other? That’s very tough. Goldstein continues:

GOLDSTEIN: And yet, if you weren’t black, you wouldn’t have written the novels and stories you did.

JOHNSON: No, I wouldn’t be writing novels about the things I’m writing about. I am not blind to the illusion of race, I am not blind to American history and the history of race. But I’m not bound by these matters either.

Now, could I write about a white character? Yes, I could, and I have. Remember, I’m trained as a philosopher and a journalist—I had to learn how to take on any assignment. The reason you can’t do this sometimes is because you don’t know people. I’ve read that, overwhelmingly, white Americans live in neighborhoods or communities that are all white, so they don’t have much personal contact with black Americans. They don’t know us. They don’t know how we talk. They don’t know where we came from. They don’t know our individual histories. They don’t know our hearts. They have to project ideas on us that may have nothing to do with us whatsoever. [Emphasis mine, JH] This is the agony we’re facing in America right now, so it’s got to show up in our literature.

My task is to honor Johnson’s vision.

I only this were true. I made E5 (Petty Officer 2nd Class/Sergeant) when I was 22 and my prefrontal cortex was still forming.

David French is a conservative who thinks, instead of reacting and startling at every noise. What he has to say in his piece, Mueller’s Latest Indictments Show That ‘Witches’ Are Very Real for The Nation, will not make the rabid right happy—just take a look at the comments on French’s piece—but then, nothing that doesn’t neatly fit their tropes could.

French lays out four points regarding the latest revelation from the most recent indictment in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation:

1. This indictment demonstrates why it’s important that Mueller be permitted to finish his work. Our nation needs to know what happened in 2016, and Mueller — through both the social-media indictment and the hacking indictment — has provided a clearer picture of the precise details of alleged Russian election meddling than any other source. This is a valuable public service, and to the extent that he can hold the actual conspirators accountable, it’s also an act of necessary justice.

2. It’s now becoming increasingly clear why intelligence agencies believe that Russians were trying to help Trump and hurt Clinton — the scale of the attack on the Clinton campaign, the DCCC, and the DNC was troubling. And while there are past reports that the Russians attempted to hack Republicans, this indictment outlines a comprehensive and sustained effort against the Democrats and is silent about a similar conspiracy aimed at Republicans. Perhaps more information will emerge, but the available public evidence at this point bolsters the intelligence agencies’ unanimous conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump.

3. The indictment practically screams, “More information is coming!” — including additional information about Russian communication with American citizens. For example, paragraph 43a of the indictment contains the first evidence of possible Russian collusion with an American candidate for public office — not President Trump, but an unnamed candidate for Congress.

4. This indictment makes it even more troubling that Trump mocks, denigrates, and undermines the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” We now know that there was real wrongdoing; we just don’t yet know its extent. [Emphasis mine, JH]

As French notes in his third paragraph:

The hacking scandal was different. The hacking scandal mattered. [Emphasis in original, JH]

French follows that declaration with:

There’s no way to know if it moved enough votes in key states to swing the election, but the leaks of hacked emails dominated multiple news cycles, embarrassed key Democrats, and sowed a degree of discord within the Democratic party. Republicans, including Donald Trump, exulted in the revelations and sometimes explicitly called for more. “Russia, if you’re listening,” Trump said publicly on July 27, 2016, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

Interestingly, it appears the Russians may indeed have been listening. “After hours” on July 27, the conspirators “for the first time” targeted “email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office,” according to Friday’s indictment.

I imagine that Trump thought of his call for Russian intervention as a dog whistle for the trumpies. I don’t think he knew who would answer.

White Woman Calls Cops on California Man Chilling in His Car Listening to Yoga CD

Apartment Complex Manager Suspended After Black Resident Kicked Out of Pool

Judge of Characters: Meet the Racist Caucasian Crusaders

Black Man Denied Entry To Bus in Martha’s Vineyard ‘Because You’re Black’

Georgia Cops Flip a Coin to Decide Whether to Arrest Driver Who Was Allegedly Speeding

Two White Women Attack Their Latinx Neighbors, Call the Police on Them, and End Up Going to Jail Themselves;

Watch: New Details Emerge in Case of Minnesota Cops Pulling Guns on Black Kids After Fake 911 Call

Man Screaming Racial Slurs at Black Teenage Girl Arrested For Threatening to Kill Me, You, Your Mama and Your Cousins Too…

Cop Fired For Calling Black People ‘Alabama Porch Monkeys’… Then Re-Hired

Woman Goes on Hate-Filled Anti-Muslim Rant on New York City Bus: ‘ICE is Here For You’

Officer Who Stood by as Man Harassed Woman in Puerto Rico Shirt Resigns

And then there’s 4ProfitPatty.

Previously…

Previously…

[Update at 0428 on 21 May 2020:

Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and New Left are Rising, The by Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti.

Kimchi Chronicles: Korean Cooking for an American Kitchen: A Cookbook, The by Marja and Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

ConBody: The Revolutionary Bodyweight Prison Boot Camp, Born from an Extraordinary Story of Hope by Coss Marte.

Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality, The by Bhaskar Sunkara. p. 139

New York Times Magazine for 18 August 2019: The 1619 Project.]

#neveragain: A New Generation Draws the Line by David and Lauren Hogg.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by Brian Wansink, page 131.

The New Rules of Lifting for Life: An All-New Muscle-Building, Fat-Blasting Plan for Men and Women Who Want to Ace Their Midlife Exams by Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove.

Reporter: A Memoir by Seymour Hersh.

Modern Macrame: 33 Stylish Projects for Your Handmade Home by Emily Katz.

Deskbound: Standing up in a sitting world by Kelly Starrett and…

The Kingdom Of Speech by Thomas Wolfe, page 74.

In addition to returning these library books, I’ve canceled a hold on The Fall of Gondolin by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I have, however, kept holds on several books of light fiction for my bedtime reading:

Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly, John Woman by Walter Mosley, The Reckoning by John Grisham, Eight Million Ways to Die a graphic novel adaptation by John Snyder of Lawrence Block’s classic and Little Scarlet another by Walter Mosley.

There are also one audio book—Calypso by David Sedaris for drive-time listening and three movies—The Death of Stalin; the fourth season of The Brokenwood Mysteries, Series 4; andYankee Doodle Dandy—on my hold list at the library.

The Founders formed the federal government as three separate, but equal, entities to ensure a separation of powers. That has deteriorated, I argue, since the end of WW II. I base that argument principally on Congress’s abdication of one its vital constitutional duties set forth in Section I, Article 8, Clause 11: the Congress shall have Power To… To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.

The last time the members of our Congress issued a declaration of war was on 8 December 1941. Since the end of WW II some 90,000 Americans have died in combat and thousands more have died in non-combat incidents related to undeclared wars.

That is not what the Founders intended.

David French, writing in How the Kavanaugh Nomination Reveals a Deep Challenge to Our Democracy for National Review, makes the conservative case:

Yesterday I wrote a piece rejecting the absurd alarmism surrounding Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. No one will “die” if Kavanaugh is confirmed. His judicial philosophy doesn’t represent an “emergency” for the “safety” or “freedom” of the American people. If anything, his jurisprudence will largely lead to greater protections for individual liberty against state power.

But today? Today, I’m going to reverse course just a bit. I do think that Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination does help reveal a terrible challenge to American democracy, but it’s not a crisis of personal safety or individual liberty. The various versions of the “Bork’s America” speech for 2018 that are circulating online are overblown and ridiculous. No, the challenge is structural, and a structural challenge can be just as dangerous to the health of a constitutional republic as cultural or political division over any given set of issues or values.

Kavanaugh’s nomination — indeed, every modern Supreme Court nomination — reminds us that the most powerful branches of the federal government are the most removed from the democratic process. The vision of the Founders has been subverted. Your vote matters less every year.

Members of the House of Representatives—and, while less so, members of the Senate—have rendered themselves increasingly irrelevant because they’re more interested in re&?euml;lection (and holding onto the wealth and power their office provides them) than they are in governing as the Founders intended them to. French agrees:

This is exactly and precisely wrong. This is not what the Founders intended. And it’s inherently destabilizing and polarizing. Consider this: Both the executive and the judicial branches operate under essentially a winner-takes-all format. Once the president wins his election, he doesn’t need the consent of Congress to craft regulations, and his authority to craft regulations is immense. He effectively doesn’t need the consent of Congress to launch a war.

Similarly, at the end of a Supreme Court case—whether the vote is 9–0 or 5–4—jthere is a winner and a loser. The courts are where litigants go when compromise has failed. There is, by design, little democratic recourse for reversing a Supreme Court decision, and losers often lose for a generation or more — even when their cause is just (think of Dred Scott, Plessy, or Roe).

To put it plainly, this means you — the American citizen — get one vote every four years (one out of 130 million) to decisively influence both of the most powerful branches of government. Your congressional vote, the one you cast every two years — the one that matters most to the outcome of an election — has become a vote for a glorified pundit. He or she will issue press releases, argue with other members on cable news, and pledge to do the bidding of (or oppose) the man with the true power.

French goes on to argue, correctly, that the Founders intended our weakest branch, the one voters have the most contact with to be the strongest.

The Founders didn’t intend to create executive or judicial supremacy. They didn’t even intend to create “co-equal” branches of government. They intended legislative supremacy. The legislature can remove the executive. The legislature can pass laws over the president’s objection. The legislature can remove any federal judge or justice from the Supreme Court. It can sharply limit the jurisdiction of the courts. Its latent constitutional authority is breathtaking in its scope.

But it can attain its intended dominance only through bipartisan compromise. The supermajorities necessary to trump the executive, for example, can’t exist without either extraordinary emergencies, extraordinary foresight, or a necessary deescalation in our political rhetoric and a transformation of political incentives.

That’s one reason, for example, that “people will die” or “Flight 93” arguments are ultimately so destructive to our body politic. What rational person would compromise with an opposing legislative force that wants to kill you or end America?

Legislative supremacy depends on debate and compromise. It depends on forging actual relationships. And it puts legislators up for a vote every two years—making public accountability an omnipresent force in a House member’s life. Executive and judicial supremacy, by contrast, incentivize mass tribal mobilization followed by the exercise of raw power to deliver on the promises that brought tens of millions to the polls. The challenge to American democracy—even to American unity—is obvious.

To me, and perhaps to you. To the Trumpies? Not so much: Our Founding Fathers wanted Legislative supremacy? Tribalism is bad?? Compromise is good?!? You RINO you!!! Aargh! —jgbrownhornet, in the comments.

I’m continuing to read Charles Johnson’s interview in The Paris Review and stopped this afternoon at this passage:

When I was younger I was drawn to [Hermann] Hesse, who was popular on college campuses in the sixties. I read his short stories and novels, and literary scholar­ship on his work, like that by Theodore Ziolkowski, who examined themes and structure in Hesse’s fiction. I wanted to learn his method of composition, the way he thought. Hesse is interesting to me precisely because he works with different forms in his novels. He also has a spiritual dimension—he has us looking toward the East. A friend of mine gave me Demian when we were undergraduates. I wasn’t really impressed. But it led me to Siddhartha. And then I thought, Here’s a German in the 1920s writing about the Buddha and getting a good deal of it right. Man, that book so affected me. I really wanted to respond to it. And that response is, of course, Oxherding Tale. But what I did was respond from a black American perspective.

I came to Hesse a little earlier than Johnson; I read him during my high-school years. I was so taken with him that for a time I added the extra ‘e’ to my name and drove my teachers a bit nuts. The book I struggled the hardest with was Das Glasperlenspiel, Hesse’s final novel and the one cited as occupying a special position in his 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature.

When I first started reading the book—I have my copy still—I was 16, but I couldn’t finish (although I started almost yearly) the text until I was in my late 30s. Some books are just that way. If the author had been anyone buy Hesse I would not have tried even a second time.

Oxherding is on order and reading Johnson talk about Hesse has made me all the more anxious to read his book.

Oh happy serendipity! While looking up a few items for this post, I discovered that in 2010 BBC Radio 4 produced and recorded a dramatization of Das Glasperlenspiel in two parts, presented below.

I began reading The Root back when Jimi Izrael was a regular. My favorite reporter there currently is Michael Harriot. This morning he has two stories in the Dumb-Racist-Shit category. I won’t detail them here, go read the originals. What I do want to do is list the unbelievable number of similar stories published in just 2018.

Cop Pulls Gun on Children After 911 Caller Falsely Reports Armed Black Kids Roaming Around in Park;

Kentucky Governor: Black Kids Playing Chess ‘Not Something You Would’ve Thought Of’ in Black Part of Town;

#SummerJobWhileBlack: Child Gets Cops Called on Him for Delivering Newspapers

White Couple Who Called Police on 12-Year-Old Mowing Lawn Called Them Again on the 4th of July Because They Felt ‘Threatened’;

California Prosecutor Called Maxine Waters a ‘Loud Mouthed C-Word in the Ghetto.’ His New Boss Calls it ‘Salty’ Language;

If You Live in One of Chicago’s Black Neighborhoods, Stop Reading This and Go Check on Your Car;

Man Who Drove Through Antwon Rose Protest, Ran Over Demonstrator, Only Charged With Misdemeanor;

#CaucasianCallingTax: White People Need to Be Taxed for Wasting Police Officers’ Time;

Can We Live While Black?;

Paul Blart, Pool Cop Fired After Calling Police on Woman For Swimming in Her Own Pool;

Black Man Forced to Crawl at Gunpoint After Police Thwart Imaginary Robbery;

#EatingOutWhileBlack: Subway Employee Calls 911 on Black Family Because She Thought They Would Rob Her;

Priest Who Called Cops on Black Funeral-Goers Placed on Leave ;

#CampaigningWhileBlack: Someone Called the Cops on an Oregon Legislator Who Was Out Canvassing;

Gang of White Thugs Hurl Slurs at Black Mom, Smash Her Car Window, Yet Somehow No One Went to Jail or Even Had a Damn Mugshot Taken;

When Caucasity Costs You Your Coin: #PoolPatrolPaula Fired After Harassing Black Teens at Public Pool;

#PermitPatty Said She Only ‘Pretended’ to Call the Police. The 911 Recording Says … That Was a Lie; and for today, I’ll finish with:

Them vs. Us: How Black Cops View Policing in America

This shit should have stopped with Trayvon Martin, but DRS continues to happen.

The first tools is any writer’s toolbox are words. Even if you subscribe—as I do—to the admonitions of Henry David Thoreau, E.B. White and George Orwell—the greater your vocabulary the greater will be the clarity of your writing.

The editors at Merriam-Webster get that. That’s why they publish Words At Play and this week’s: Wonderful Words That You’re Not Using (Yet).

All of the words are wonderful, but I was particularly drawn to No. 6: Nauseant because of our current political reality.

Nauseant: an agent that induces nausea. In the event that you ever find yourself feeling nauseated (or nauseous; either one is fine), say, perhaps by a meldrop clinging tenaciously to the nose of the person with whom you are speaking, it may prove useful to distract yourself with the knowledge that there is a word for the thing that makes you feel that way. Before you use the word loosely, you should know that nauseant is generally used in a medical sense, referring to a specific agent that causes nausea (and often is an expectorant, rather than just anything which turns your stomach).

Having thus, as we conceived, exhausted all the material medica, we turned to the second class, which is called atonics, and which we found to consist of blood-letting, issues and setons, nauseants, cathartics, gases, and abstinence. —Monthly Review (London, UK), Nov. 1810

What are your top three nauseants?

The tell-all books just keep coming and coming. The latest is from President Donald John Trump’s former White House Press Secretary—and arguably Melissa McCarthy’s greatest mock—Sean Michael Spicer: The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President.

The book won’t be published until 24 July, but early reports indicate that President Trump will not be happy.

Tom McCarthy, writing in Sean Spicer contradicts Trump’s Manafort claims in new book for The Guardian, ledes:

Dreamily envisioning Donald Trump as “a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow”, former press secretary Sean Spicer has filled a new book with breathless memories of his role in recent American history—while admitting that Paul Manafort, suspected of being a tool of Moscow, played a central role in the Trump campaign.

In The Briefing: Politics, the Press and the President, which will be released on 24 July and a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian, Spicer dramatically compares the work of a press secretary to that of fighter jet pilot, champion boxer and tightrope artist.

At impressive length, the book purports to set the record straight on an extensive string of micro-episodes and mini-scandals from the Trump campaign and early presidency.

But Spicer’s description in the book of Manafort’s campaign role belies Trump’s characterization of former campaign chairman Manafort as a minor campaign figure.

While I have no doubt that what Spicer wrote is true, I won’t waste a cent or a second on his book. What his former employer has to say however, could be priceless.

I do wonder what he said to Robert Mueller, however.

Voter fraud, at least at the level of the voter, is not a problem in the United States. Voter fraud is in our country a conservative boogie man to suppress voting by likely liberal/progressive voters. (Coincidentally—perhaps?—boogie is also a racial pejorative.) The voter fraud narrative, like the ginned-up brouhaha over immigration is a political fun-house mirror that makes the conservative vote look much bigger than it is.

Conservatives have size issues and we must not allow them to make their vote look bigger by making the votes of their opponents disappear.

Ralph Nader, writing in Universal Voting Dissolves the Obstacles Facing Voters, offers a solution:

When will the authoritarians and their political henchmen stop harassing American voters and let all citizens vote? No other Western country comes close to imposing so many obstructions for certain categories of people to keep them from the voting booth. In Canada, England, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, it is very easy to vote.

Voter suppression is real and getting worse. Voter fraud is virtually non-existent, but this spurious claim is used as the excuse for unnecessary restrictions. Voter turnout, not surprisingly, is lower than in any other Western country.

According to the New York Times, here are seven ways the state of Alabama is obstructing voters. This former plantation/slavery state doesn’t overtly keep people of color, especially black people, from voting. That would clearly violate the federal civil rights laws. No, instead of race, Alabama electoral tyrants use class Continue Reading »