Where went the Whips, or, Why didn't Schumer play for a mistrial?

Bearing in mind, that the prosecutorial obligation in the late Senatorial miscarriage of justice had always been, to minimize the shame of the United States to her people and to the world, anguished partisans had counseled against procuring the underlying impeachment, at all. That would only have established the impression of unanimous indifference to the structure and scruples of their government, and yet no one foresaw honest conduct in the Republican near-majority. In other words, the Senate trial went ahead with only the most hilari-ously forbidding impediments before it.

This was no excuse for the abdication of strategy; rather, resolution ran only the other way. Yet evidently, only the tactic for achieving a poignant loss seemed to guide prosecutorial conduct, a posture lending ample shelter to the other side. The responsibly canny tactic, leaping into the lap to lick the face and wag the whole Canterbury pilgrimage, lay rolling around on the floor, rather, like a spent bottle of gin.

With endlessly voluminous wreckage from the previous government demanding immediate attention, to say nothing of the vilest maladministration of public health since the government's Tuskegee frolics with syphillis, pressing hard for Senatorial dispatch, the languishing of a lost cause against the same "massive resistance" would have suggested, to any strategist, a plan to exhibit the highest quality of proof with an eye to shielding it, at present, from the mockery of a verdict. It would have taken many months to compel the necessary testimony of witnesses, and for the rot only beginning in the defendant's reputation to expand to critical mass, before something resembling an open mind should invade the Republican redoubt. A schoolchild knew this.

Yet by no more than majority vote, firmly in his grasp, Schumer was in a position to introduce a motion to declare a mistrial as of Saturday morning, on the fortuitous emergence of obliterating and incontro-vertible evidence of the defendant's guilt, which only time and the press of responsible governance precluded the Senate from exhibiting. To the positively rapturous outcry of oppressive practice, certain to emerge from the minority, Schumer had been schooled by his predecessor already, to observe that elections have consequences.

There are valiant and almost cogently palliative opinions in print even now, to the effect that the most poignant defeat of American honor was elegantly achieved. These exultations are impossible to score, with any instrument of reliable pitch. A mistrial, on the other hand, with its open threat of a new trial at any time during the term of the present Congress, would leave the defendant where he belongs, and the United States with a victory unambiguously pending. 

Even a child learns how to wait.

i   François Reichenbach, 1954

ii  Private source, 1955

  

Samothrace revisited

Approaching tabulations of the final two per-cent of ballots cast, the State of Georgia was seen today to have rejected the campaigns for re-election of incumbent Senators representing the same Party, replacing them with candidates offering instead to represent people of Georgia. 

Resisting this distinction, 

much discordant heat had been generated by the disgraced head of the Party, which was anxious-

ly observed, suffered, and seen transformed into light by those it had scorched. 

 

Timely blades and second chances

No one, of course, has any appetite for
seeing a certain name again, except as

a line to avoid selecting, at the top of 

his ballot, At last the gathering of a di-

verse and remarkably distributed storm

of revulsion is poised to restore self-

determination to the United States. The

ingenious photography of Damon Winter of

The New York Times portrays a rescue op-

eration deeply reminiscent of med-evac

Hueys lifting from the battlefields of

Southeast Asia, saving the passengers if

possible, but more certainly ceding na-

tive ground from which they are removed.

Nor was this an expulsion by cruel chance,

but by the incapacity and illegitimacy of

the occupation, revealed in its helpless

incompetence and reliance on its own lies.

This chance is one not to blow, but also

not to crow. It's generous, even to desig-

nate this deliverance as a restoration, 

given how few have ever influenced their

own governance in this country. But every

such valuation is relative, and is being

re-examined under pressures both urgent -

pandemic, racial discord, economic dis-

location - and implacable - climatic

crises, other environmental despoiling,

and international security hazards both

recklessly propagated or negligently

denied by the government soon to depart.

The circumstances are auspicious for a

popular insistence on self-determination.

They are equally vulnerable to repressive

pre-emption, which is the unfailing custom

of our history. But now at least we know

why: racism has been the contortionist

corrupter of every populist opportunity in

this nation's experience. This contortion-

ist is avid to overwhelm the pending elec-

tion by intimidation, deception, malicious

prosecution, and every rejection available.

At last, the great anti-progressive energy

of the American experience has fallen into

the hands of a spent force. We now behold

the readying of an electoral swift sword -

a climax of nothing, a beginning to be de- 

termined by the People. We have our vote. 

Juneteenth now

Who might ever have guessed that the genealogy of America's deliverance from Donald Trump and his Republican Party would be traced directly through the emphatic embrace in Spring, 2020, of racial equality before the law?

And why was this, except that both the necessity and the reward for struggle came to be seen as one. People turned to each other in disbelieving unison to ask, Where the hell have we been, to forget that playing fair is first of all to play? They rid themselves of Trump by reclaiming the sheer pleasure of the soul-sustaining resolve to be fair. 

"Change," and other motives

I have been toying with an impression that one could be relevant with-out, necessarily, being topical. Circumstances, it now seems to me, are not a bar to this ambition, so much as the intrusive omnipresence is, of the day’s leading personality. This represents a measurement of the scale of the latter as greater, possibly not to our surprise, than that of the most unnerving neutral scourge to engulf the planet in the present generation; and this would be true if he hadn’t undertaken, with his genius for precaution and infamous antic exuberance, to inflate the horror of it all past humane imagining. 

Children, raised in the most distant continents, studying the seizure of their parents and siblings by protracted asphyxiating torment and implacable extinguishment, must now mature in the understanding that what crippling he willed upon the vital organs of international epidemiological co-operation, had left his signature on these more proximate formations of their consciousness. A mind, we used to say in charitable moments, is a terrible thing to waste, only to discover now that the waste of a terrible mind lives after it. In short, laboring under the oppression of the rudest topicality, we must inquire again, Es muss sein?

Yet I couldn’t claim the agency of my own reflection as giving form to these effects, without the help and support of two of our least impeachable chronic-lers these days, Haberman and Martin of The New York Times, who published today this fascinating reduction as their lead:

President Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Mr. Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

And you were suspecting, dear Reader, that a reference to remote continents were a reach too far? Well, then you are exactly the reader to see this Pulitzer-provenanced projection for what it is: a preposterous hypothetical. It isn’t necessary to be an Isaac Newton to recall that inertia on a certain scale does not turn on a dime.

The stunning silliness of the condition laid down in this writing only exposes, once again, how confident so many have become in the habitation of unreality, or rather, the shiny-object dominion. Republican officekeepers don’t clamor for a radically improved course. They want a defter twirl of the topics. The passivity to which they’ve succumbed has never been more eloquently pealed. At the same time, the exalted powers presumed by our correspondents, for the constant puller of their focus, can be a lesson to us all in what to read. 

I’ve been wondering if Miss Anne really could have harbored a conjugal intention toward Wentworth through all those missing years, without her captivity in Austen's fiction, and why Fielding's Sophie Western exhibited such indifference to the escapades of Tom Jones, unless her education in Paris had been comparably varied, or reconciled to exploiting his. 

Even now, though, I marvel that our media could be so helplessly fully abducted, as to leave us having to accost each other for the preservation of relevance. And who better, to cultivate the taste for what we must hear?

ii   Robert Mapplethorpe, USS Coral Sea, 1983

iii  Arnold Newman, Igor Stravinsky, 1946

iv   Bill Emrich, unidentified models, 1991

NB  The final link refers to a column published
        several hours after this posting, and was
        inserted as compatible, the next day, with
        no change in the original posting.

Saturday commute clxxx: No rush ii

Like Stephen Spender, discovering
he'd been discovered by Pasternak,
Spring has been patient with us in
Virginia this year, on the sound
principle that someone is bound to
notice her before the onset of our
regional tragedy, Summer. At the
same time, this page has enjoyed 
an unannounced interruption of un-
usual length, for us, in the less
tenable belief that the American
President's lust for exhibiting
himself at his worst will dissip-
ate, allowing a subtlety like bud-
break to be restored to its proper
place above the fold. But now our
Piedmont temperatures are rising
to the 80s, F, placing us on not-
ice to take note. We do, and the
excuse is not unwelcome, to shed
our screen of distance from an
effrontery of just the right kind.

Christopher Schulze x Adam Washington

A most peculiar fallout

Almost as if outrage and anxiety,

goaded by virulent, unrelenting

cynicism and savagery, had ex-

tinguished all hope of resort to

reason in recovering the nation,

the call of Mr Sanders and a few

novices in Congress for "revolu-

tion" has seemed to precipitate

a most peculiar inference, that

extreme emotion is a substitute

for political feasibility. Yet,

for all the depredations of the

present government, its experi-

ence has only confirmed the op-

posite, at almost every turn. 

The damage that can be done in

the misuse of language is sel-

dom any match for the thrill of

taking one's turn with mocking

fact and reason. Now it is un-

derstood, that language is the

enemy against which every hyper-

heated "issue" is arrayed, for

which it must pay the price of

the extinction of definition.

Mr Sanders and his clique are

converts to what they oppose.

In every thrust of his disor-

derliness, he has turned the

word, justice, into the blunt-

est, crudest, least coherent

of all the epithets of politics,

rivaling greatness in villainy.

Sandro Botticelli
Portrait of a young man
Pitti Palace
ca 1470

Suppose it were Friday clxxiv: One's heart goes out to poor Roger

Our followers of the rustications
of Jonathan Swift will not forget
his remedial holiday in the house-
hold of a rural divine, documented
for us by Dame Edith Sitwell, in a
bravura display of relevancy in her
biography of Alexander Pope. But to
ponder the case of our poor Roger,
having squandered the best years of
his naughtiness in pitiable exculpa-
tions, only now so belatedly to dis-
cover the blessings of rebuke in a
Federal Court, is to comprehend the
Dean's wistful trepidation on the 
impending return of the lady of the
house. For, who could possibly now
deprive our Roger of his whole car-
eer's affirmation, but some insen-
itive pardoner of his cheeky pranks?

Origins of Wednesday cix: An acquittal worse than the crimes

                   I've just been clearing my ears

                   from the proceedings in the US

                   Senate, and I must say, I'm sor-

                   ry I bothered. What posturing I

                   have heard, has been enough to

                   persuade me that the staggering

                   leap into denial on display, is

                   grossly worse than the betrayal

                   of the national interest under

                   prosecution. The President's

                   Party gives every sign of being

                   captivated by a perversion giv-

                   ing ordinary Constitutional in-

                   terpretive casuistry a halo of

                   innocence: oh, we forgot to tell

                   you, we've always believed in

                   absolute Executive power. How

                   comical it now seems in retro-

                   spect, to have seized power on

                   the pretexts of tiny government.

                   Credit an Annunciation arriving

                   under deprivation of legality

                   and reason, for exposing to this

                   Party the true, latent, revealed 

                   rights of its disorderly organs.

                   It's bathed in shining awe, to be

                   wringing no longer its hands, but

                   its own neck, out on Fifth Avenue.

I find that I'm with Queen Victoria

 As hereditary an authority as
 one could summon to mind, on
 the dual risks of removal
 from office - for an oddity
 of the head, or for simply
 having one attached to one's
 neck - her perplexity with a
 system of popular government
 was incurable, especially in
 view of who'd determine that.

  These are trying moments,
  and it seems to me a
  defect in our much-famed
  constitution to have to
  part with an admirable
  government like Lord Sal-
  isbury's for no question
  of any importance, or any
  particular reason, merely
  on account of the number
  of votes.











 To whose predicament is Her
 Majesty's aperçu now more
 applicable, than those to
 whom the burden falls, of
 tidying up the government
 of the United States, from
 the top? Far from querying
 the prohibitive immensity
 of his popularity, the jan-
 itors need merely to act on
 the oddity or the existence
 of his head. All else is
 bound to fall into place,
 without all this unseemli-
 ness of constitutionality.

 No stranger to internation-
 al treachery in the miscon-
 duct of states, Her Majesty
 clarified entirely how to
 adjust to such interventions.

John Julius Norwich
More Christmas Crackers
  Citing Peter Vansittart
    In Memory of England
Viking, 1990©

Whose pendulum is this, anyway?

As if one were some President of
the United States, it can be aw-
fully challenging to respect the
spectrum of incentives for aging
when protracted infancy beckons.

Now that all 20 of our centuries
have thrust us into our 20's, it
heartened me no end to find this
comparatively recent report from
the frontiers of great age, in a
note to the Editor of The Times,
London, from November 11, 2002 -

   As you grow old, you lose interest

   in sex, your friends drift away,

   your children often ignore you.

   There are many other advantages

   of course, but these would seem

   to me to be the outstanding ones.

Oh, "Give me antiquity or give me shame," must have been the vow that won the popular vote in the Continental Congress, losing only to that favoritism to the slave states which saw "Liberty or Death" carry the day in the Electoral College. Fortunately no choice so ironic has survived into the present era, not that anyone has had the temerity to propose retiring the slogan. It's telling, though, that sex and offspring remain the rage in the unpopular states, which doesn't mean they still insist on slavery, only that by their practices in family matters, one can't be so sure.

Matty Carrington

  swing player

Mr Richard Needham

  correspondent

John Julius Norwich

The Ultimate Christmas

  Cracker

Julian Fellowes

  editor

John Murray, 2019©