Tag: Donald Trump

On Eating a Dog and Discovering the Meaning of Life

Posted on by Scott Samuelson

by Scott Samuelson

Let me say upfront that I have nothing against dogs. In fact, I’ve loved certain dogs more than I’ve loved certain family members. That said, one of my favorite stories in American literature is about eating a dog and thereby getting a glimpse into the meaning of human life. (Admittedly, part of why I love the story so much is that it’s about cooking, and I’ve just written a book about how making and sharing food is a useful paradigm for thinking about the good life.)

John Gardner’s short story “The Art of Living” is about Arnold Deller, a good cook in a small-town restaurant in the late 1960s, and a gang of greaser kids who hang out to chat with him because he talks about real things, things that matter, unlike the rest of society. A tale of disillusioned American youth seeking meaning in a semi-hostile culture is likely always going to be relevant, but it feels especially so in a time when the stage set is collapsing (as Camus once said) and the absurdity of our politics, our economy, our foreign policy, and our educational systems is being laid bare.

So, what’s the art of living? Sometimes Arnold Deller can sound like a downhome Socrates.

You kids had any brains, you’d ask me what to do with oregano. Educate yourself, learn a good honest trade, or, rather, art . . . But I’ll tell you one thing. Better to ask me these grandiose questions than ask somebody thinks he knows the answers.

He diagnoses the deep problem of our culture as a pervasive loss of care.

Everything’s easy, easy as pie!—TV dinners of chicken that never in its life felt the ground under its toes, instant potatoes, lettuce that’s been put in some stuff to make it fresh till the day of the Antichrist—and what’s the result? All humanity begins to be like sheep. That’s right! They baby themselves till they don’t care about themselves.

As it turns out, he manages to sum up my philosophy of cooking in a few sentences.

The thing a person’s gotta have—a human being—is some kind of center to his life, some one thing he’s good at that other people need from him, like, for instance, shoemaking. I mean something ordinary but at the same time holy, if you know what I mean. Very special. Something ritual—like, better yet, cooking! . . . That’s what it’s all about. Making life startling and interesting again, bringing families together, or lovers, what-not.

Halfway through the story, the cook mentions a letter he once received from his son Rinehart, a soldier who was killed in Vietnam. It describes an unforgettable meal that Rinehart had there. As Arnold says, “It wasn’t just food. It was an occasion. It was one of the oldest dishes known in Asia. Sit down to that dinner—this is what he wrote, and he was right, dead right—you could imagine you were eating with the earliest wisemen in the world.”

The dish was Imperial Dog. Read more »

Tuesday, September 22, 2026

Laughter, Forgetting, and Unbearable Lightness or, Why Milan Kundera (Still) Matters

Posted on by Sean Murphy

by Sean Murphy 

i.

Does it tell us much—about the times we live in, about ourselves—that the occasion of Milan Kundera’s passing, at age 94 three years ago this summer, was not met with an outpouring of approbation and appreciation?

If nothing else, it was a reminder of the fickle nature of fashion, trends, and time. It would have seemed a certainty, a decade or two ago, that Kundera’s legacy would accrue advocates and converts, and his readership an evergreen proposition. Of course, history has consistently proven that popular and/or critically lauded writers are anything but guaranteed immortality.

As an acolyte whose flame of both love and envy has never dimmed, I can attest that engaging with his work remains…complicated.

Kundera almost killed me, still in my creative cradle, a writer needing nourishment.

He arrived in my life too early. As a reader, it wasn’t soon enough, as what relatively inexperienced but enthusiastic amateur—fresh from the front lines of grad school and adjusting to a world without texts to deconstruct—won’t benefit from that kind of sophisticated guidance, at any age? Still, as an aspiring writer, Kundera’s work had the odd effect of inspiring me, only too much. One encounters accumulated wisdom of this caliber and feels desperate, like a creature trudging through the heat in search of an oasis. Finally, happening across a patch of water, one laps up every drop, half insane with relief and oblivious to the crocodiles lurking hungrily in the shallows.

Reading Kundera at any age, particularly as an aspiring writer with a future filed under “TBD,” you don’t just want to write like him, you want to be him. On some level you understand: in order to write like that you have to have lived like that. Eventually—and the sooner the better—you recognize it’s an impossibility and, choices narrowed to one, you lick your wounds and get on with the unbearable lightness of being yourself.

Read more »

Friday, June 26, 2026

New Troubles In Belfast

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

John Hume, Nobel Prize Laureate
John Hume—who won the Nobel Peace Prize, for his work in Northern Ireland—as I imagine him looking down today from the heavens.

“John Hume would not have tweeted. He would have been on Kinnaird Avenue.” —As stated by Sara Morrison in conversation with Jenny Holland

A twenty-first century version of the Northern Irish “Troubles” erupted this month on Kinnaird Avenue in Belfast.  This was not a continuation of the centuries-long war between Catholics and Protestants. It was about race, not religion. The attacker was a Sudanese immigrant. The victim and his main savior were white men born in Northern Ireland. The attacker brutally stabbed his victim, gouging out an eye. The savior ended the attack with a hurley stick, the Irish version of a baseball bat.

The riots that followed—labeled as anti-immigrant which sounds correct to me, if over simplified— involved masked mobs, weaponized bricks, petrol bombs and the ensuing arson, burnt homes, displacements and similar decibels of the fear that has engulfed Ireland for centuries, albeit with different enemies. And then, of course, as happens everywhere riots occur, the police arrived: The Police Service of Northern Ireland, with its riot squads and water cannons.

This happened between June 8 and 11. On June 13, thousands in search of a happier ending, gathered outside City Hall to condemn racism in Northern Ireland.

The above is what I think happened from reading news reports. And social media. Most not from Belfast, itself.

Northern Ireland has long been a place reported on from afar. My husband and I, as American journalists, moved to Ireland to live in both Dublin and Belfast in 1984, as that sectarian violence—religion-based with many eruptions over centuries—was underway. We went on a grant my husband was given from St. John’s University in New York, pushed by Irish-Americans who felt the current “troubles,” were underreported. Despite knowing this, it was shocking to find out that so many other international foreign correspondents reported on Northern Ireland from London. Or from farther away. A New York Times reporter based in London, described how terrified she was to finally spend an overnight—or perhaps more—in Belfast. This was something my husband and I did regularly. Read more »

Sunday, May 3, 2026

Sorry Kiddos, We’re Not In Wonderland Anymore. We’re Not Even In Kansas

Posted on by Bonnie McCune

by Bonnie McCune

Much worse. Evidently, we’re in a country that’s gone mad. Bonkers. Off its rockers.

At first, I thought the problem was me. I’ve never felt like I fit in. Even as young as age six, I noticed that I didn’t act or react the way my peers did. Bullying or bragging or doing dangerous stunts held no appeal. By the time I reached the age of reason, which is 12 according to experts, I was accustomed to being the outsider, different, and by college, I prided myself on being unusual.  Many things people took for granted as normal, I thought were weird

It wasn’t until the current leader of this country achieved power again that I realized I’m not the crazy one. We’re inhabiting a completely irrational world. Perhaps it’s always been that way, and I simply was too naïve or slow to realize it.  Evidently, we live in a country where its leader can openly mock other religions, leaders, and countries with impunity.  He feels no hesitation in making fun of people with handicaps or who don’t agree with him. He delivers mind-blowing threats with nary a blink.

Is there anything more unreal than a nation in which the leader has been found guilty of lying under oath, stealing/theft, and numerous other charges without a twitch from a number of authorities. Donald Trump has been adjudged liable, or indicted in numerous criminal and civil cases covering a wide range of legal violations, including falsifying business records, mishandling classified documents, sexual abuse, defamation, and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

All with complete impunity. Read more »

Monday, February 9, 2026

Jackasses in Jackboots: When Ice Met Minnesota Nice

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

ICE Agent, Photo by Betto Rodrigues

The biggest hazard on my one trip to Minneapolis was being invited to too many family picnics and possibly dying from an overdose of mayonnaise. You have to go to Minnesota to really experience what’s known in the vernacular as Minnesota Nice. The term springs from the sincere desire those northern people have that you’ll take a second helping of bratwurst and potato salad, then get home safely, and call your host or your family when you do. It’s kind of wonderful and kind of smothering, akin to having one too many comforters on your bed.

So I don’t think too many of us were expecting Minnesota to be our modern-day Gettysburg, when all those nice people came out onto the streets to fight Trump’s reviled brand of fascism. Minnesota was largely out of my news feed until these past few weeks when the jackbooted thugs from ICE began to tear apart the famously neighborly city of Minneapolis. Occasionally I’d hear about a brutal cold front coming down from the arctic or an exceptional year for the Vikings, but there just weren’t that many sensational stories coming down from the Land-O-Lakes.

Before Trump and Kristi Noem sent their band of thugs up to Minnesota, the people there were busy carrying on what appeared to be, on the whole, enviable lives. Statistics never tell the whole story, but when it comes to quality of life, Minnesota consistently ranks in the top five US States based on metrics like poverty levels, health care, safety, education, and fiscal stability. Its consistently high safety ranking—factors like crime rates, quality of hospitals, quality of roads, and speed of emergency medical services—certainly took a blow when the masked goons dispatched to “make cities safe again,” showed up and wiped their boots on the Constitution.

We all saw the grotesque murders of Renee Good, a young mother, and Alex Pretti, a young ICU nurse, by trigger-happy ICE agents just weeks apart from each other. Even with all the other violence going on in the world—Ukraine, Gaza, and the rest—those murders were hard to watch. Whether it was the stuffed animals in Good’s car or the mournful version of Taps played as co-workers wheeled Pretti’s coffin down the hall of the Vets’ Hospital where he worked, there were poignant emblems and imagery reminding us that those two never should have been shot dead. Read more »

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

Inferior Men: Donald Trump and the I Ching

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness… —I Ching, #36, Ming

Ji Chang (King Wen)

Years ago, someone gave me a copy of the I Ching, Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm. It’s a heavy little brick, more than 700 pages, and bound with a bright yellow cover. When I received the gift, I looked at it skeptically and never expected to read it. To my surprise, it’s been with me ever since, I’ve read it dozens of times, and the spine of the book is sadly broken from too many readings.

I grew up in a family with fairly skeptical parents and some very skeptical siblings. I vividly remember asking my parents if Santa Claus was real at an age when parents should definitely not disillusion a child of that belief. My parents looked at each other with pained expressions and then, too honest to lie about it, tried to let me down gently. So nothing in my formative years prepared me to like the I Ching.

Not all I Chings are equal, and there are some pretty flimsy versions out there. There’s even an app called I Ching Lite. Of the English versions, the Wilhelm/Baynes translation is one of the most respected.

The I Ching is said to be almost 3,000 years old and originated in China’s Zhou Dynasty. The structure consists of six stacked lines (called hexagrams), each either broken or unbroken. You’ll remember from your high school math that if you have two binary options (broken or unbroken) on six lines, you end up with 64 possible combinations. And that’s what the I Ching looks like: 64 hexagrams, each with its own special meaning. Read more »

Monday, July 14, 2025

Presidential Appetites

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Palmy Days at Mount Vernon, by Thomas Prichard Rossiter, 1866. emuseum.mountvernon.org

George Washington and his wife Martha were committed eaters and generous hosts. A meal was a serious affair: fine China, glassware and cutlery, a variety of spirits, wines, and champagne, soups and souffles, trifles, crisps, tortes, any number of things pulled or plucked from the soil or vines, harvested from the bays and rivers, or trapped, shot, or simply domesticated and destined for the table.

The couple preferred English-style cooking and apparently were fond of meat pies. For a Christmas meal one year, their kitchen turned out a family favorite—a cover-the-bases delicacy that called for a bushel of flour for crust, stuffed with five different types of boiled fowl—pigeon, partridge, duck, goose, turkey—all baked on high heat for four hours. I’m not sure what that might be called—perhaps “pipparduckoosekey”?

Of course, none of these monumental affairs began with George and Martha doing any of that pulling, plucking, sowing, reaping, boiling, or broiling. Nor setting the table, clearing it afterwards, washing up, polishing the silver, drying the China, or putting it away. The Washingtons had “staff” for that, quite a large staff, in fact.

The Washington Family at Mount Vernon, by Christiaan Julius Lodewijk Portman, 1857. emuseum.mountvernon.org

George and Martha kept slaves—per the Mount Vernon website, at the time of George’s death, there were 317 on the plantation. There is nothing to indicate Washington was a particularly difficult master, and Mount Vernon was in temperate Virginia, not some swampy, snake-and-insect-ridden killing field in South Carolina, but the “Peculiar Institution” was certainly vibrant enough there. As one might expect, the staff didn’t enjoy quite the same creature comforts as the Washingtons did. Again, from the website:

The standard slave quarter on Mount Vernon’s five farms was a rough one-room log structure with a wooden chimney, measuring about 225 square feet. Some dwellings were slightly larger and divided into two rooms, each housing a different family. As many as eight people could be crowded into a single room. They slept on pallets or on the dirt floor.

History is complex and contradictory, isn’t it? Certainly, one that demands you put inconvenient parts aside so as to appreciate the more celebratory. Still, this is George Washington, so let’s talk about the Father of Our Country’s personal qualities. No doubt he was uncommonly brave, an oak for the thin reed of independence to lash onto. He was incorruptible, rigidly self-disciplined, and, as Parson Weems reminds us, even as a boy, honest in trees and axes. Read more »

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

An Interview With God

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

3QD: The old cliché about a guest needing no introduction never seemed more apt. So instead of me introducing you to our readers, maybe you could begin by telling us a little bit about yourself, perhaps something not so well known, a little more revealing.

God: I am, I am.

3QD: Indeed. But what about your early years? We don’t often hear much about your childhood. What was it like to emerge from nothingness? Or did you precede nothingness, first creating the void and then all of the somethings that filled it up? Or, as some speculate, were you and the great nothingness one and the same? Did you, personally, go from nothing to everything?

God:

3QD: Perhaps too difficult to talk about. We’ll let that be. Nonetheless, you quite literally burst onto the scene, creating everything in 6 days. I don’t think it’s worth getting into your sense of time versus human constructions of time, but whether it was six of our days, or six of yours which might be billions of our solar years, it was a phenomenal debut in the truest sense. Bigger than Elvis’ first single, the Beatles first album, or Justin Bieber’s first YouTube video. More gravitas than Shakespeare’s first play, Henry V, Part II. More charisma than Julie Andrews’ screen debut in Mary Poppins. Scarier, in many ways, than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was just 19. Better received by the public than Gary Coleman’s turn as Arnold “What’chu talkin’ about, Willis” Jackson on Dff’rent Strokes. More disorienting, in many ways, than Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Some would even say more impressive than Orson Welles’ screen directing/acting debut, Citizen Kane, which he pulled off when he was almost inconceivably young, only 25 years old. But here you were, creating the entire universe and everything in it as your first known work of art. How did you handle that? Were you able to maintain a sense of normality, or, like so many young artists who receive so much fame and praise so quickly, did it damage your sense of self or impede how you related to others?

God: Read more »

Monday, April 21, 2025

Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

“Loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it.” –Mark Twain

American flag

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I’d read our founding documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution of the United States, decades ago. I knew about the Boston Tea Party, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Washington at Valley Forge, all that and more, it was in my blood. And now…well, why don’t I just get on with it and tell my story. Read more »

Monday, March 24, 2025

Republicans Speak Trump; Democrats, Esperanto

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

It is more proper that law should govern than any one of the citizens. —Aristotle, Politics

Supreme Court interior, Washington, D.C. Photograph in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Aristotle was an optimist. Try to visualize an old Greek guy in a himation as a talking head on one of the Sunday shows. He’s never getting an invite to the White House—and it’s not just because of the clothes. Limits on an American President? This American President?

It is grim out there if you are a Democrat. The House, gone; Senate, gone; White House, so far away the distance is measured in light years. SCOTUS, nauseatingly gone. Day after day, Trump, with the cunning of an outlaw biker President, uses his power to taunt, punish and utterly dominate anyone who had or has the temerity to oppose him. Based on the number of prominent people and institutions that have knelt before him, he’s darn good at it. He’s also darn good at speaking to his supporters, and particularly skilled at keeping his fellow Republicans in line. Trump speaks fluent Trump, and Republicans, increasingly, are learning repeatable, debate-ready whole paragraphs of Trumpiness to be used in almost any circumstance. It’s a “Newspeak” modernized from 1984, and it works. People understand it. They react to it viscerally.

How about Democrats? With some notable exceptions, they mostly speak Esperanto. Excellent at cocktail parties with your photos of the Prado (“The Goyas were amazing!”), but not all that useful for everyday conversation.

Full stop. I am not going on an extended “TDS” rant, or its post-November 2024 variant of perpetual Democratic self-flagellation. Newspeak is also a definite no. Let’s talk about power in our system, the extent and implications of it, how it’s expressed and constrained, and the political application of it. In short, let’s channel our inner Aristotle and survey the role of the Rule of Law in contemporary politics.

Perhaps it is best to state the obvious at the beginning: What role? The Rule of Law is a losing argument in recent elections—and it is a losing argument to make to politicians. Maybe that will change, maybe it’s a temporary phenomenon of the Trump Era, maybe it just lacks a compelling spokesperson, but many voters don’t care—and in fact, some cheer its failure.

What is it they are rejecting? What is the Rule of Law? Read more »

Ken Burns, Donald Trump, and the Lies that Bring Us Together

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt 

Last spring, American documentary film maker Ken Burns gave a commencement address at Brandeis University in Boston. Burns is a talented speaker, adept at spinning uplifting yarns, and his speech soon made the rounds on the internet. As is the way with commencement addresses, there were signposts pointing towards what awaited the graduates, and plenty of pablum on how to live a good life. But Burns also delivered his address as the nation was staring down the barrel of the 2024 election, and so in addition to vague life advice, he offered up ruminations on the near future.

Burns’ films strive to unite modern Americans through a shared understanding of the past. Personal displays of political partisanship would make that difficult, so beyond stumping for PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Burns’ has always remained publicly neutral on the day’s political events and issues. Yet during his speech at Brandeis, Burns broke with this tradition, and voiced dire political concerns. Without naming Donald Trump directly, he warned of the potential calamity a second Trump presidency would bring.

Trump’s hyper divisiveness is in direct contrast to Burns’ plaintive, gather-round-the-maypole interpretation of America. And even nearly a year ago, Burns already grasped the threat that Trumpism poses to U.S. constitutionalism and democratic institutions. In many ways, Burns and Trump couldn’t be less alike, and Burns spoke with gravitas, as if he felt duty-bound to move beyond his comfort zone and warn the nation, even if he was preaching to the choir at Brandeis.

Yet the distance between Donald Trump and Ken Burns is neither so simple nor so vast as it seems. It may sound counterintuitive, but Ken Burns’ version of U.S. history actually has quite a bit in common with Trump’s version. I say this as a professor of history, and I think that if we’re willing to look past all their obvious differences, and identify their subtle intellectual overlap, we can perhaps learn more about what it means to be American today than we ever could from Burns’ saccharine films or Trump’s racist rants alone. Read more »

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Why Summer Camp Matters, Even In Winter, Part Two—The Memoir Continues

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the big sky of the Jensby farm.

A dining hall at a Web-Met Camp
A dining hall at a Wel-Met Camp.

I was there because, as my last chapter noted, Wel-Met, my summer sleep away camp, had a free-range philosophy. Campers planned their own activities, hiked into the woods for sleepovers and—when older—lived in tents rather than bunks. This was a preparation for the next step: Cross-country camping trips. Wel-Met ran six of these each summer and in the 1960s they all stopped at the farm of Clarence and Florence Jensby. The Jensbys welcomed all with open arms—campers and returning counselors alike. (I arrived three times). On the surface, we could not have been more different. Or in today’s lingo, more diverse. Most of us were Jewish New Yorkers. The Jensbys were Christian midwesterners.

It did not matter. With great panache, the Jensbys introduced us to their operation and their pigs who, well, smelled like pigs. This came as a surprise to the city slickers. Mrs. Jensby demonstrated, with schoolteacher-like skills, how to prepare a live chicken for dinner. Trip after trip, year after year, she showed city kids how she would break the chicken’s neck, pluck the feathers, yank out the guts and prepare it for cooking. Some campers were horrified. I saw her humanity. I saw her as a farmer who worked quickly to minimize suffering. Today, when I view pictures of chickens raised in crowded coops, not free-range—or hormone or antibiotic free—I think of how Mrs. Jensby did it better.

I also have a memory of Mrs. Jensby dressed up, wearing her good shoes and leaving the farm—perhaps for church. I wondered how she did this without stepping on any animal droppings. I wondered how she had transformed herself so quickly from farm wife in a blood-stained apron to a “proper” lady. A lifelong lesson: there is more to a person than you see at first. Read more »

Tuesday, February 4, 2025

What Was So Great About America Again?

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.

As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?

Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.

For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021. Read more »

Monday, January 27, 2025

In Search Of Normalcy

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Puck cover illustration, titled “Money Talks.” September 12, 1906. Library of Congress.

Senator Warren Harding had a big appetite: for food, for whisky, for cigars and cards and hanging around with his cronies. For spittoons and smoke-filed rooms. For another man’s wife when he had one of his own—Carrie Fulton Phillips, with whom he carried on (sorry) for about 15 years. Their passion ended badly when, in late 1919, he felt an urge for higher office, and she felt an urge for a little monetary compensation.

The best evidence we have is that both urges were satisfied. Carrie was consoled by a bit of largess. Harding stopped writing coded-but-torrid letters and focused more on a stay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This was as it had to be. It was an era in which the prurient was taboo—but it was also an era where few spoke on the record about it. Harding wouldn’t be the only aspiring candidate with a spotty record on fidelity. In general, boys will be boys, so long as what they do in private is kept private.

Urges aside, Harding “looked like a President”—handsome, good chin. He spoke like a President: mostly vacuously but with a roll that imparted a sense of some deeper wisdom. He was from Ohio, then, as now, a key state. He had influential friends, like Harry Micajah Daugherty, a powerbroker in the Ohio GOP, who saw him as the perfect compromise candidate—the man others would turn to after a bit of Convention turmoil. So, why not Harding for President?

That was Daugherty’s plan, and he executed it perfectly. In 1920, Republicans had a great many men who saw themselves as “papabile.” They even had several who had the standing for the job, but when the GOP assembled in hot, steamy Chicago in June, none of those men, qualified or not, could get enough traction to get a majority of the 984 Delegates. Harding was fifth after the first round, didn’t break 100 until the seventh ballot, and only made it to 135 on the eighth. Then, reputedly, the wired-in wise men of the Party—the Daugherty-types—went into a room and, after the prodigious consumption of tobacco products and alcohol, coupled with lively and creative horse-trading, made a decision. Harding went from distant third to clear first on the ninth ballot and closed it out on the tenth. Popular Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge was quickly selected as Veep. Read more »

Thursday, January 16, 2025

The Normalization of Sexual Violence

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

1. Bloodthirsty

Swedish journalist Kim Wall in a 2015 portrait taken in Trelleborg. Wall died aboard Danish inventor Peter Madsen’s submarine.

I have a morbid personality; sometimes I stay up late at night, googling serial killers and rapists. In the light of the computer screen, scrolling through articles on websites published by amateur sleuths, I feel the dark pull of the unspeakable deed. But my fascination isn’t for the blood and gore; there is no thrill bubbling up inside, no voyeuristic kick. Nor am I moved by an urge to understand the killers’ psychological predicament or the geometry of their desire. The pull I feel is not toward their person or otherwise banal lives, but that point of no return when the not-yet-killer gives in to the irresistible urge, forfeits his allegiance to society, and defects to the other side. How strong does that urge have to be?

I worry. The brain is an organ, it’s unreliable, prone to illness; a sick brain thinks sick thoughts. There was a point in the killer’s life, I think, when he or she hadn’t yet committed the crime, a point when it would have been possible to stop and reflect on the inevitable consequences—not a life of adventure and freedom, but the monotony of prison, of incarceration and boredom, isolation, enforced celibacy. Could this happen to me—could something push me over that tipping point, and I’d find myself a moment later in a foreign land? I am horrified by physical violence; a bloody scene in a movie makes me turn my head away. The mirror neurons in my body tingle in response when I see someone else’s wound. What happens to people who lose this visceral reaction, who grow numb and enter a realm in which the divide between the self and the other is so absolute that they live as though in a vacuum, sealed off, in communion with their darkest compulsions, indifferent to the living reality of another human being’s existence?

I scroll through reports of repulsive deeds: the Danish inventor who murdered the young journalist who came to interview him because he was convinced that the rush he would experience at the very moment he was annihilating her would be superior to all the orgasms he’d had previously; the Coloradan who strangled his wife and smothered his two children in the expectation that the life he would then be free to live with his girlfriend could be happy and carefree, unencumbered by child support payments and filled with the real-life equivalents of the emojis and exclamation marks that decorated his love letters to her. Unremarkable, contemptible people on nearly every level. In the first case: megalomania and a history of power issues and abusive relationships; in the second, murderous intent hidden behind a mild-mannered demeanor and a stupidity so dumbfoundingly obvious that the footage of his interrogation at the hands of a brilliant woman detective deftly guiding him toward claims that proved effortlessly refutable is almost a pleasure to watch. And yet: there’s something I’m not getting. What is it that draws me in? Read more »

Monday, December 30, 2025

The Melting Pot Melts Down

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe? —Thomas Jefferson, 1801

“Spoiling the Broth,” political cartoon by E.W. Gale, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1920.

Last month, after 3 Quarks Daily published my “A Requiem For Post Mortems,” I got a direct email from a reader politely critiquing it. We exchanged emails afterwards, and I asked him if I could raise some of his points in a subsequent post. I’ve chosen one, not intending to diminish his other ideas, but because this one, where he said I’d “misse[d] first on the importance of the migration issue, i.e., that … Trump was right and Dems wrong on the need to control migration [and] that Trump controlled migration much better than Biden, who didn’t even try until the 3d trimester” has the most salience right now.

So, since Elon and Vivek and Laura Loomer and pretty much all of MAGA-land are talking about immigration, let’s go there. Let’s do something we have never ever been good at and talk about immigration.

We can start by acknowledging my correspondent’s point, although I would phrase it differently. Certainly, from an electoral perspective, Trump was right on the need to control illegal immigration. Biden didn’t do it until very late in his term, too late to help Harris in the election. It is not clear to me why Biden didn’t move more aggressively earlier, but, during his four years in office, aggregate immigration, legal and illegal, rose to a level not seen since 1850. I can ascribe to Biden a good-hearted intention—a genuine desire to ease the suffering of others—but it cannot be ignored that part of a President’s job is to be practical and even a little cold-hearted when the situation requires it, and Biden, for whatever reasons, wasn’t. We don’t have hard polling data that indicates that swing voters, and even some Biden 2020 voters, went Trump in 2024 solely because of the immigration issue, but it could not have helped Harris.

Would voters have been less critical of Biden’s approach if he had been able to curtail illegal immigration while otherwise maintaining a generous posture? Hard to say, not just because of the potency of the issue and the effectiveness of Republican messaging, but also because of the layering of how policy is determined and applied. Read more »

Monday, December 2, 2024

A Requiem For Postmortems

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

We might have been a free and a great people together, but a communication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity. —Thomas Jefferson, “Jefferson Draft” of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. 

“Despair,” by Edvard Munch, 1894. Munch Museum. Oslo.

George Washington may have been the “Indispensable Man” whose strength we used as our North Star, Benjamin Franklin the cherubic, ever optimistic face we showed to the outside world, James Madison the primary architect of our Constitution, but, for raw emotion wedded to soaring eloquence, no other American of the Revolutionary period quite approached Thomas Jefferson. 

I have never been a big Jefferson fan. He runs a little hot for my taste. I prefer the brooding-yet cerebral miniaturist approach of Lincoln, who says, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

My passion right now is somewhat strained, and I’m concerned that being a free and great people together might be a bit far-fetched. Like just about everyone else on my side of the divide, I want to know what happened and why. How on Earth did we manage to break the GPS and end up right back where we started? 

Let us take a deep breath, and, with the cool professionalism of the Federal Railroad Administration’s Accident Management Branch, examine the wreck. Yes, I know, Trump has targeted the Agency and plans to roll back safety regulations on hazardous gas transit, crew member requirements and fatigue risk, but this is only December 2024, and we are still living the good life.  

OK, exhale. 

This was not a landslide, not actually, and not by any historical metric. Harris clearly lost, Trump clearly won, but Trump’s popular and Electoral Vote margins are more in sync with the trench-warfare-limited-gains of the non-Obama elections we’ve had since 2000. Similarly, it was not a mandate for anything, no matter how often Trump and his team in Congress and the media claim that.    

Why does this feel like a landslide, when historical context tells us it isn’t anywhere near one? Read more »

Friday, November 22, 2024

Make Art Dangerous Again

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

I recognized the corner immediately: it was right next to Cooper Union, on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. There used to be a large parking lot on the other side of the street, where passers-by occasionally happened upon a colorful bricolage cobbled together from stuffed animals and clothes, discarded household items, deformed umbrellas, and battered car parts. These strange and playful conglomerations looked as though the bric-a-brac and refuse had been plucked together by some invisible furious force to house a spirit or daemon. They were, of course, carefully composed works by the late African-American artist Curtis Cuffie, one of the many ephemeral assemblages he created in the streets of downtown New York in the 1980s and 1990s.

Photo from the publication “Curtis Cuffie.” Scot Portnoy, Robert Snowden, Ciarán Finlayson (eds.); Katy Able, Carol Thompson, Curtis Cuffie, Michael Galinsky, Margaret Morton, and Tom Warren (photos), 2023.

Cuffie installed his improvised ensembles of found objects on fences, window grilles, sidewalks, and traffic signs in Cooper Square, the Bowery, and elsewhere; they were always temporary, and only a few of his works have survived. Cuffie periodically lived on the streets around Cooper Square and his homelessness must have made his emotional tie to the treasures he found and wheeled around in shopping carts all the more urgent. Most of the works he created from this repertoire of materials were abstract, shrines that seemed to grow out of the flotsam and jetsam of a city in constant transformation; seen from a passing car, they flashed in the sideview mirror like otherworldly apparitions. But there were also figurative sculptures: ragged garments strung on wire and string and adorned with hats or wigs became animated spirits on a secret mission. Today, the few remaining works by Cuffie that were not taken down and destroyed by the police or street cleaners are shown and sold in the pristine white spaces of uptown Manhattan galleries, stripped of their context and also, perhaps, a good deal of their meaning. Read more »

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Frozen Thought

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

In daily life we get along okay without what we call thinking. Indeed, most of the time we do our daily round without anything coming to our conscious mind – muscle memory and routines get us through the morning rituals of washing and making coffee. And when we do need to bring something to mind, to think about it, it’s often not felt to cause a lot of friction: where did I put my glasses? When does the train leave? and so on.

So, we get on well in the world of medium sized dry goods, where things can be dropped on your foot and the train leaves at 7.00 AM.  Common sense carries us a long way here. For common sense is what we know already, what we can assume and the things we know how to do because we know what they are.

There are limits, though. We begin to run into difficulties when we apply the categories of the understanding – the normal way we think of things – into areas which look as if they are same kind of thing, but are not. I’m thinking of anything to do with long term change, of the way in which structures underlie what we see, of the complex interactions of the economy and politics. The kind of thinking that we might call common sense is the ‘spontaneous ideology of everyday life’, and it has problems with the larger and longer-range things that both run through our lives and have a history that we should try to grasp.

If we fail to make that effort, we typically find ourselves falling back on the notion that these are just things that we can assume to be the case. This can lead to quite problematic positions.  So, a friend of mine – intelligent, well educated – announced to me, apropos of Trump et al ‘half of America is just sick’. Perhaps on reflection he’d think that a bit inadequate, but it does represent the baffled contempt many have for the people who support a party and a politician who they see, rightly, as a threat to whatever democracy remains in the USA. Read more »

Monday, July 29, 2024

Chess, Greasy Pigs, and American Politics

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ––Creighton Abrams

In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrificed his queen early in the game with a move that made no sense to a middling chess player like me. But a few moves later Kasparov won control of the center board and marched his pieces into an unstoppable array. Despite some desperate work to evade Kasparov’s scheme, Kramnik’s king was isolated and then trapped into checkmate by a rook and a knight.

I like to think that President Biden played a bit of Kasparovian chess in delaying his withdrawal from the November election until after the Republican convention in Milwaukee. I don’t know if there’s any truth to my fantasy, but in many ways the timing was perfect. The entire Trump campaign was centered around defeating an aging president who was showing alarming signs of mental decline. Despite some real accomplishments like the passage of the infrastructure bill and multiple wins for conservation of the natural world, Biden appeared to be headed for defeat. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump galvanized an already cultish following and the Democratic Party was in the doldrums—vanquished and confused.

Oh what a difference a week makes!

At this writing, no one yet knows who the Democratic nominee will be now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, and frankly a lot of us aren’t that choosy as long as he or she has a pulse and beats Donald Trump in November. It appears that Kamala Harris will be chosen and money—the singular expression of enthusiasm in American politics—is rushing in like a storm. Harris raised more than $80 million in just 24 hours. Read more »