Saturday, November 11, 2017

Now they've come for the Virgin






   Dietrich Bonhoeffer didn't
   of Republican casuistry at
   the Department of Justice,
   and agencies of the nation
   across the board, now lib-
   erated from fact. Still he
   resisted, until they hang-
   ed him by piano wires, for
   the delight of the head of
   state. Now they are saying
   the Virgin was but another
   ploitation -- "a little un-
   usual," but not a problem.

   Bonhoeffer must have known
   how right he was. He would
   have recognized Roy Moore.


















Jeremy Dufour






Thursday, November 9, 2017

A gift we might have done without





We wake up and check his Twitter feed 
and we can feel exactly what the pres-
ident is thinking, said Thomas Binion, 
director of congressional and execu-
tive branch relations at the Heritage 
Foundation. That’s brand new to Amer-
ican politics. We haven't had access 
to a president's mindset and emotions.






Novelty is not everything it's crack-
ed up to be, in the assumption of the
Executive Branch of the American gov-
ernment. In her first year of madness
rampant over head, the United States
is not the only entity which has been
changed, as has been noticed well, in
the reports cited below. Her people,
and the natural world, itself, have
undergone the imprint of his madness,
the stab of Ahab's extremity on the
slimy deck of his Samsung abbatoire.

Great, frantic and terrible waste has
only begun. We have seen, there is no
distance between American captives of
this anomaly, and those situated else-
where in the world, to look on in hor-
of their life by malevolence and in-
stability, in freakish possession of




This page, an exercise in identifying
customs in common - a phrase borrowed
affectionately from the late English
historian E.P. Thompson - has adopted
the label, ain't we got fun, for en-
tries addressing this condition. That
reference goes on, for continuity's
sake, and with rededicated satire. It
is the hopeful mode. Despite alarm of
cause or bearing, it preserves play.

It remains, then, to defy his corrup-
tion of play, resourcefully refusing
his game, without ever ignoring its
vile intents. He feints to exhaust -
as he has been, by decades of practic-
ing the jests he hawks to his horde.
This is a man who must never have
won or lost fair, and knows he hasn't.
How wonderfully he deserves the high.
























Hermelindo Fiaminghi
Alternado 2
1957

Year One
The New York Review
  of Books
November 6, 2017©

Katha Pollitt
Year One
The New York Review
  of Books
November 7, 2017©

Autocracy
The New York Review
  of Books
November 10, 2016©







Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Referenda






    The nearest thing to rebellion,
    and fraught with risks of ex-
    cess, the referendum is an axe
    sometimes creating no more than
    an even worse impasse. We saw
    yesterday, where the human right
    to health care cleared a Repub-
    lican Governor from the beach.

    Notice has already been taken.
    The movement to secure health
    care as a right is hydraulic
    in implacability, and it will
    find its channel, in our time.























Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Road work ahead





   News of today's election!

   Wherever two or more are
   gathered together, or the
   paths they walk, improved,
   Let the paving proceed!












The Washington Post
Virginia Election Map
November 7, 2017©



Crosswalk coffee










  I don't think it
  came from inhib-
  ition.

  I'd say, it came
  from seeing what
  takes its place.



























Monday, November 6, 2017

Wondrous election advice for Virginians





Just in time to lecture Virginians
on upholding good manners in pol-
itical behavior, a full-time cleric
from Brookings assumed the election
pulpit over the weekend, to demand
that they vote for the candidate 
who vows to prohibit any Virginian
municipality from declaring itself
a sanctuary against conscription in
the national pogrom against undocum-
ented aliens, so that they could re-
sist the candidate who is a little
expediently uncertain about the or-
igins of the Late Unpleasantness.

Not since North Carolina's lusty
legislature avenged itself against
Charlotte's enlightened regulation
of its genders, in exactly this
forbidding engrossment of the whole
State in the practice of repression, 
has such a cunning precipitation of
disappointment been recommended, 
against the risk of moral struggle.

Before their eyes, Virginians have
witnessed a cowardly capitulation
to legislation, binding the Common-
wealth to historic shame, as a perch
against a mouse of mere rhetoric.

This is how things do not get better:
when Elders invoke their own urgency,
and people do not cast their ballot,
if at all, as if for the first time.
Virginia has tried sure destruction,
before. If one were to recommend how
to handle two threats, one would go
with the lesser, not the greater, of
two probabilities - on the wise basis,
that the measure of good manners in
politics is not how many years are
left to oneself in this world, but
how little one uses them for wreckage.



















E.J. Dionne, Jr.
The Northam-Gillespie
  Election is Once in a
  Lifetime
November 5, 2017©


Joe Bruha
Pulling into our
  driveway
2017©

Oscar Kindelan
Esquire España
November, 2017©






Sunday, November 5, 2017

What does Suetonius have to say about treachery in Rome?







Like you, I worry for the
staying power of our new
head of state, and if his
mode of governing by antic
fabrication will hold his
claque in thrall to the mid-
terms. In his Life of the
Twelve Caesars, Suetonius
gives a fine portrayal of
the precedents of Caligula,
but I forget what, if any,
weight that great historian
placed upon the gathering
ennui of his subjects, in
procuring his untimely (and
unthinkable) demise. For that
matter, what ingenious feeble-
ness might have neutered his
resistance, to compare with
the zest for schism we noted
this week from Donna Brazile,
as fine a jest of treachery as
might be wanted by any tyrant?