They used their god to mock the law

   It's good they

   didn't ask me.

Suppose it were Friday clxiv: Could you coo?

   Could you coo -
   could you care -
   for a cunning con-man
   we could share ?

Just as nobody can reasonably fault

George and Ira Gershwin for abusive

third-party travesties of their mu-

sic and lyrics, no one can reason-

ably credit Broadway Donny Thump-

Thump for originality in anything.

Still, he deployed his best Dirty Old

Man tone of voice at his latest rally,

the other night, tempting us all to a

candybar of his snidest oozing treacle.

Channeling Henry Fonda's Tom Joad to

his mother, in the final scene of The

Grapes of Wrath, he gave us the phan-

tom of the oppressed male child, hound-

ed into oblivion by a virago he'd nev-

er met, in a staggering corruption of

the testimony of the strongest witness

yet to speak against his character and

social set. "Reciting facts," his nit-

wit press secretary said; "a factual

rendition," his South Carolinian Sen-

ate toady intoned.

They called this, "mockery," but it

was of a worse than insulting kind.

It was an enlistment of a following

for the proposition that a President

may corrupt the implementation of 

law with impunity. That's almost an

original idea, but for Iago. 

But it's Friday, inherently a good

day; and one's thoughts turn to the

brighter side of seduction as we en-

gage with it in this Depression. In

1930, I've Got a Crush on You was

presented in the Gershwins' Strike

Up the Band; and until this week I

have never regretted that absolute-

ly everyone knows it by heart. Now

we know to ask, what sort of heart?

Origins of Wednesday lxxxi: Mississippi inversion

The President took his Jack of Clubs

routine down to Mississippi last e-

vening, not necessarily to distract

from The Times' simultaneous exposure

of his decades of fraud and tax eva-

sion, although it couldn't have hurt.

No, the principal deal - and what an

odd resort to stereotype - had been

to indulge a good run of the hotter

blood of misogyny, which binds his

tribe to him as an incubus steeping

itself in its fount. He had warned,

after all, of his fury with women in

his first campaign debate, snarling

on stage his objections to menstrua-

tion - the shortest route, it soon

emerged, to a Republican's heart-

felt respect for a woman's evidence.

We want Kavanaugh, they chanted.

Rather a first, wouldn't you guess:

a rock star cannibal of scruples,

for a Court that won't play fair.

Possibly not a time to recall the

Nobel Prize for Literature, with a

rape conviction suspending the a-

ward this year. But our own last

laureate in that field had already

warned, of being down in Mississ-

ippi, a day too long. Didn't need

presidential corroboration for that.

Blueberry eyes

It's a busy time. I ran into an

undergraduate today, selling me

a half pound of Sulawesi coffee,

and remarked to her that I was

wondering what the tsunami will

mean for obtaining this excellent

varietal. She hadn't heard about

the thousand or more dead and the

humanitarian crisis, so to put it

into perspective, I reminisced on

losing Jamaican Blue Mountain cof-

fee after the hurricane; but she

hadn't heard of that event, and

possibly not of Jamaica. The oc-

casion illuminates the facility

with which the President can an-

nounce his aides' salvaging of

NAFTA, as modified two years ago

in the TPP that he trashed in his

first week, as a personal triumph: 

"Who knew?"

This week he proposes to woodshed

the Deputy Attorney-General, and

elevate an exposed liar-zealot to

the Supreme Court - the one, be-

cause he believes in the rule of

law, the other because he believes

it does not extend to a President.

In consolation, we know his baby-

sitters are on the job, mopping

up after his worst debaucheries

against international relations

and the global climate. But will

they leave us without our law?

Franz Kline

Blueberry Eyes

1960