Saturday commute clvi: What massacre is this?

   An amiable, politically connected
   acquaintance of mine of the pres-
   ent generation texted me, Friday,
   to whisper that his sources pre-
   dict the firing of the American
   Attorney General today. Of course
   one's first instinct is to feel
   remorse for one's contact, who'd
   not been around for Richard Nixon.
   His massacre wasn't of a henchman.

It's more fitting to recall
Nabokov's story, Despair, 
in Fassbinder's movie with
Dirk Bogarde - a man who is
able to conceive of a crime
as an entertainment, and
therefore permissible to
continue. This has always
been the frame of reference
of the perpetrator we know,
ironically, as President.

But his genius for sustain-
able suspense is touched,
equally, by a gnawing, per-
sistent sense of being re-
jected, mocked, betrayed,
shaping him as Mercury of 
a sadly compromised base.

We do not deny, the mas-
sacre is mythic, if not le-
gitimately tragic anymore.

Dirk Bogarde

Conference with Fassbinder

1978

Suppose it were Friday clx: Could one accept a pardon?

    The power to pardon is a vestige

    of one of monarchy's several il-

    lusions of a capacity to absolve

    a government of its mistakes. No

    wonder, it appeals to the Ameri-

    can President, in the most aber-

    rant way. The grace of depicting

    such mistakes far outranks abso-

    lution, so superficial as to re-

    double them. I imagine a pardon,

    for forgetting it is Summer. One

    could never credit such a lapse. 

Origins of Wednesday lxxvii: From a ruby Tuesday

The news is full of a somber
unease among the New American
Government's pet despots, here
and there: Potemkin Villagers
of crises dissolved by tying 
the truth into Gordian Knots.

The wild child of Pyongyang,
nouveaux autocrats of Warsaw,
Budapest, and Jerusalem are
said to be resorting to as-
trologers to sniff the waste
of the American Presidency,
as if no one had given them
the Russian's cell number. 

Down on Wall Street, there
percolates a worry that all
those timely stock buy-backs,
predicated on indefinite or-
gy of tax and regulatory re-
lief, may be subject to pre-
mature sunsets, any day now.

Dark yet? Or getting there.

David Gallal
Bruno Santana

What if it really is, all about the Tweets?

 I know, I know. One shouldn't ac-

 cept the occasion of justice, be-

 ing done, as a chance for delight

 in a vitality which has, as often

 as not, stirred a few years or e-

 ven decades too late. Fair point.

 Besides, his evangelists have al-

 ready prepared proofs of our Sav-

 ior's displeasure with the truth.

 OK, then. Let's just be nice when 

 the President's two chummiest op-

 eratives have been nailed, in two

 different Federal courthouses, on

 the same afternoon. Can you imag-

 ine what it will mean, for Tweet-

 ing on the morrow? The neologism,

 the upper-case dyslexia, a spasm,

 here, a reflux, there, of orotund

 mania in full flight, the rapture

 of being Presidential, in blazing

 exposure again as the victim of a

 lifetime, rampant in persecution.

 Meanwhile, as gutters go, ours is

 not so bad, with a little shower.

Sharon Lafraniere

Paul Manafort, Former

  Trump Campaign Chairman,

  Guilty of 8 Charges in Fraud Trial

August 21, 2018

The New York Times, 2018©

William K. Rashbaum, 

  Maggie Haberman, Ben Protess

  and Jim Rutenberg

Michael Cohen Says He Arranged

  Payments to Women at Trump's

  Direction

August 21, 2018

The New York Times, 2018©

O, Mama, can Rudy really be the end

Now the tea preacher looked so baffled
When I asked him why he dressed
With twenty pounds of headlines
Stapled to his chest

   to be stuck inside immobile

   in my slacker's blues again

Bob Dylan
Blonde on Blonde
  Stuck Inside of Mobile
  with the Memphis Blues Again
Columbia Records, 1966©

It would be just awful

 

     Who could agree more: that to
     deny a heroic President a mil-
     itary parade is simply too un-
     fair to contemplate; and that
     if he may not have his gener-
     als, he ought at least to en-
     joy his privates. We ought to
     get somebody on that right a-
     way, lest any chance for hap-
     piness expire before its end.  

Wiktor Sudol x Lulu Delafalaise