by Bill Benzon

Donald Trump, of course, is the forty-fifth President of the United States. He is a real person, but Leroy Jethro Gibbs is not. He is the central character in NCIS, one of the most popular and longest running shows on network television. Gibbs is a Senior Special Agent in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The Trump campaign is known to have targeted NCIS viewers. Why? What appeal would a show like NCIS have for Trump voters?

The honor to serve

Let’s look at a scene from an episode in season seven, which started airing in 2009. The episode is called “One Shot, One Kill”. It opens in a video game arcade where some teen-aged boys are blown away by the skill of Marine Corps sergeant. We cut to a recruiting office where the sergeant is giving the boys the hard sell about hitching up. He’s talking about Iraq: “Been in the corps 16 years. Closest I’ve ever come to a bullet is…” Shatter! Wham! Splatt! He’s shot. Slumps over on the desk.

Gibbs and his team are called in to investigate. In the course of their investigation the recruiter who replaces the first one is also shot. In both cases, sitting at the desk, shot from long distance, through the window. Sniper.

Gibbs decides he’s got to go under cover. He’ll pretend to be a Marine recruiter, which will be easy form him as he had once been a Marine. To protect Gibbs bullet-proof glass is placed in the window and he wears a bullet-proof vest. Three microphones are placed outside so that, when the shooter fires, their Forensic Specialist, Abby Sciuto, can pick up the sound and use it to triangulate the shooter’s location. We then scoot over there and make the arrest.

We’re in the recruiting office, Gibbs looking sharp in his old Marine uniform. One of his Senior Agents, Kate Todd, is in uniform as a captain. She’s there to profile potential recruits as they visit they office. The major who heads the recruiting unit wants to stay; after all, he’s lost two men to this sniper. Gibbs objects. The major insists.

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Antony

—I imagine you still playing

You said to me,
unclejim teach me guitar,
and what little I knew I did
You took it and flew, a musical id,
and the places you flew, the music that slid
from fingers to strings was by god a grace bridge,
the kind walked on in skies where geese are
where love and you are
where god's hid
and all
is
.

Jim Culleny
9/7/17

by Daniel Ranard

how do you know the moon
is moving: see the dry
casting of the beach worm
dissolve at the
delicate rising touch:
–A.R. Ammons, in Expressions of Sea Level

During the August eclipse, I overheard a funny bit of philosophy. I'll tell it verbatim, I swear. Tree branches had enclosed a stretch of path in Central Park, where sunlight fell through small openings in the leaves. The light cast hundreds of crescent suns along the asphalt: pinhole images, a natural camera obscura. Beside me, a mother and two children stared at the ground, confused, starting to understand. The father ushered them onward. "It's just a representation of the eclipse we tried to see earlier," he said, and they left.

You probably sympathize with the man. Today it's all images, images; and what about the real thing? So I've compiled a helpful list of ways (for next time) to encounter the eclipse as it truly is.

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by Gerald Dworkin

In three previous columns I have discussed the ethics of lying. I am still working on this topic and, in the course of doing so, have accumulated some interesting remarks. Here is a sample:

Some topics–is it decaf?–require absolute honesty. With others–military secrets, some non-contagious diseases–some legitimate exceptions may be allowed.

—Michael Kinsley

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings

—David Sedaris

Can’t come. Lie follows.

—Charles Beresford

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Earthy
.

by Max Sirak

(Scroll down for the audio version.)

What are your five favorite things?

No. Seriously. I'm asking.

Can you – lovely reader you are, patron of this fine site, gracing us with your most precious of resources (attention and time), answer my question?

What are your five favorite things?

No one's here to judge you. Hell, unless you speak them loudly and in public, no one will even know your particular quintet. And it's not like there's a wrong answer.

It's just an exercise in self-knowledge. An excuse for each of us to take a moment, reflect, and become consciously aware of things in our lives which we love. No more. No less.

Here, I'll show you. I'll go first.

1) Conversation

For about as long as I can remember, I've always felt my most authentic self when I'm in the middle of a conversation. I'm not talking about small talk. Trivial banter about unimportant matters with acquaintances doesn't count. I mean an honest-to-goodness conversation about life and ideas.

I remember being in Whole Foods a number of years ago and seeing a rack of magnets being sold near the checkout. You know how it is, little knickknacks conveniently placed near the cash registers in hopes of inspiring impulse buys. Well, I can't say I'm much of an emotional spender, but I remember that magnet to this day.

It was a riff on something attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt. "Small people talk about people. Average people talk about events. Great people talk about ideas." While I'm not trying to feign greatness here (despite the fact, that is what my name actually means…), I do think the magnet's wisdom holds, at least for me.

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YOU AND I

By Mohammad Iqbal

You know the secret
I lack depth

You govern the sky
I am desire’s hostage

You have a home
I am a nomad

You profit by interest earned
I am losing the duel

Your ship sails in the air
Mine has no sails

There is no rest in this garden
You are spring; I am fall

You are weak; you are strong
I am this; I am that. So?

Translated, from the original Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

by Maniza Naqvi

Blindness

The total eclipse of the sun, a one in several lifetimes flood, a jester becomes king. Through the emulsion coating of a negative containing memory of childhood—that image protecting me from the searing blindness of light, I watched the moon block out the sun.

National Geographic

At the beginning of summer a National Geographic cover promised to tell us why we lie. Declaring us all liars by doing so. As if we all did this and it was okay and would be scientifically explained to us. The article mentioned all sorts of sweet things. But never Iraq. Never why we all lied and let the lie, lie. The last page of the issue was as if on our tolerance. It was on Himalayan bees that produce a hallucinogenic honey. The honey produces a psychotropic effect that lasts awhile.

Violence Vortex.

Violence is a vortex. A whirlpool. You can join in at the edge of it on one end and pick your side but you will quickly get swept up into the velocity of its madness, the whirling and spiraling. Quickly disoriented and forgetting where you had entered, how, when and why. Only the what will remain. Violence.

What's Not to Like?

We're all in boot camp now with Mr. Trump. He's sandblasting, blow-torching and yelling the safe spaces out of us. Pulling the trigger on the triggers. He's triggering the triggers right out of us. He's lacerating the growing blister full of unspoken pus of self-righteousness, latent racism and hate that is thinly veiled as liberalism in America. Whether he is doing this consciously or not, it seems as if that's what's happening. We're toughening up, able to argue and withstand an opposing point of view an argument delivered loudly without shrinking away and wilting, as if we were all Victorian ladies, fainting and in need of protection. We're no longer concerned about niceties. Or maybe we're exhausted and just not concerned. As long as Netflix and Amazon Video keeps streaming.

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by Christopher Bacas

The first time I saw A was backstage at Ravinia, summer of 1984, holding court, in blazer and turtleneck, amid a thicket of horn players; his new band. He came out of retirement to front a group playing his music. One of the true masters of his instrument and a complete musician, A stopped playing nearly 30 years before. That quitting both a petulant and supremely honest action; ending a long personal struggle with celebrity and the corrupt music business. He also told a much younger musician that he had been "a slave to the instrument" and wanted to do other things. In bright sun and a festival atmosphere, a guitarist and saxophonist played "Sweet Sue" for him, the guitar accompanying intricately. After listening a bit, A barked:

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by Samir Chopra

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Wovoka (named Jack Wilson in English), a Northern Paiute, dreamed
he was taken to the spirit world and saw all Native Americans being
taken up into the sky and the Earth opening up to swallow all Whites
and to revert back to its natural state. He claimed that he was shown
that by dancing the round-dance continuously, the dream would become
a reality and the participants would enjoy the new Earth. This was also
called Ghost Dance.

Ghost Dancing

I was ghost dancing a dream
I am ghost dancing a dream

I'm a dancing ghost,
a lone ghost dancing
between surf and horizon
from where sun sets to
when it rises

a ghost whose dance is familiar,
so familiar it reminds me
of one I did not know
but whose breath was mine,
and whose skin
but who, now dancing
in this skin, breathing,
is less unfamiliar than that ghost
who danced on tenderfeet, tripping
(but not the light fantastic,
just a young klutz who looked up
while dancing close to an edge
being, dreaming)

dancing on a brink
like a will-be ghost

……….. dancing
……….. dancing
still….. dancing

ghost . dancing
………..
.

Jim Culleny
8/25/17

by Carl Pierer

Sometimes, speech achieves something. Sometimes even, speech is necessary to do something. For instance, in the now famous example, somebody is getting married by uttering "I do." Austin's theory distinguishes three aspects to such utterances. First, what is being said: the locution. Secondly, what effect it has (on, for example, the hearer): the perlocution (or perlocutionary force or act). Thirdly, what is being done in saying so: the illocution (or illocutionary force or act). Austin's main interest lay with the last, the most subtle and difficult one.

He gives a rough-and-ready marker: "in saying" for the illocutionary act and "by saying" for the perlocutionary act: In saying "I do", she was marrying. By saying "I do", she upset her mother. The right context for the utterance ensures that it in saying "I do", she was indeed marrying, that it achieved its illocutionary act. That she also upset her mother by saying so is an effect the utterance produced in the hearer, its perlocutionary act.

These acts are, of course related: one person urges another: "Read the book" and the second person reads the book. The illocution here is the urging. The same locution may have a different illuction: the first person could have advised or ordered the second.

Austin argues that illocutionary force is institutionalised, that is, in order to achieve the act, it has to obey certain felicity conditions: in the above example, it is the context (the priest's question in the setting of the marriage ceremony, for instance) of her uttering "I do" that ensures that she is marrying.

This is the background in the philosophy of language that Langton develops in a much regarded article published at the height of the feminist debate surrounding the prohibition of pornography. The aim, of that article is not, at least not primarily, to argue for the prohibition, but rather to show that the claim that pornography subordinates makes good sense. In a second part of this article, not discussed her, she also argues that pornography silences women.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

Does anyone have any good eclipse stories?

My 2017 expedition had its start in a conversation about supernova.

"Wouldn't it be amazing to look up one night and see a supernova as bright as the full moon?" I said to him.

An astronomer, he looked worried and began mumbling about how hard it is to predict something like that. No one can say when a star will explode, after all. But then, he brightened up and asked,

"Maybe it's not exactly a supernova, but what would you say about a total eclipse of the sun?"

Hmmm, I thought. That did sound rather intriguing. So, I began reading everything I could get my hands on about totality. And the more I read, the more excited I became. For totality is much more dramatic than a supernova. Day becomes night? And as the stars and planets become visible in mid-day, people can easily become overwhelmed by it all. Some are terrified; while others become utterly beguiled by what they see unfolding in front of their astonished eyes. There are those sparkling beads that shine out like laser beams as the light of the sun comes streaming through the valleys of the moon's surface. And what about the famed diamond ring that encircles the moon as it comes seemingly to rest for a moment in front of the sun. Then there is the corona–something most people will never have the chance to see in their lifetimes if they don't experience a total eclipse of the sun. Reading, I realized that there are few natural phenomena that have the power to awe people like this.

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