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. 

 

Not the easiest thing

 

I find myself reading Jack Schaefer's
Shane (1949) this weekend, occasioned

by nothing more than a browse in Wil-

liam Allard's beautiful Leica photog-

raphy. I don't think there'd be much

chance of my reading a Western these

days, which only goes to show how ill

one can understand one's time. That's

not the easiest thing.

It was a shrewd choice on Schaefer's

part, to present this intensely sen-

timental story through the sustained

first-person voice of a young boy. It

allowed him to support a tone of leg-

itimate awe for the upper Plains of

the American West, to carry the some-

times fevered responses of his narra-

tion. (Noting this, director George

Stevens adopted the same perspective

in a film which so immortalized his

child star, as to illuminate every-

thing this actor did in adulthood,

opposite Paul Newman in Hud). Today,

readers who've been present for the

same years as Brandon de Wilde will

cut this story a wry slack. For all

its naïveté - not to say, cynicism - 

it touches faithfully upon what is

not the easiest thing.

                    He was there. He was there in

                    our place and in us. Whenever

                    I needed him, he was there. I

                    could close my eyes and he would

                    be with me and I would see him

                    plain and hear again that gentle

                    voice.

William Albert Allard

Vanishing Breed

Photographs of the Cowboy

  and the West

Little, Brown & Co, 1982©

Jack Schaefer

Shane

1949

The Library of America

Ron Hansen, editor

The Western

  Four Classic Novels ...

LOA, 2020©

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. 

Of frogs we should have expected

’Twas a warm Summer night, just the 

weather for merchants of sentiment 

to stuff our throat with frogs. Not 

merely to agitate the lachrymose, but 

equally the otiose, our hapless Clas-

sics majors bewitched by the comedy 

of Aristophanes to which the amphibi-

ans lent their name, a battle of tra-

gedians. 

Already in everyone’s mind had been 

shades of Franklin Roosevelt and his

leadership of national recovery, re-

form, and resistance to fascism. Who

would muck with this? 

Enter boldly the nominee, citing FDR’s 

crippling by polio - a virus, he alert-

ly recalled - and then, not referencing 

Roosevelt’s self-exemplifying charity 

to others at Warm Springs, segued into 

presenting himself as mentor to a school-

boy who stutters. None dare call it pla-

giarism, but his opponents are what they 

are, and I hold four hopes in escalating 

order of intensity - 

That the campaign is ready for the fire-

storm of exploitation of his fuel; that 

the soul of FDR is slapping his knee with 

glee at this overreach for his image; 

that nobody faults Aristophanes for our

witless memory; and that the boy in ques-

tion will be held as blameless as he is.

This leaves the nominee. I respect the
necessity to project an unanswerable im-
pediment to Trump and Trumpism's penchant
for mocking his speech as a symptom of 
frailty. At the same time one would like
to be able to expect the candidate to ex-
ercise his own strength, without sending
for a child in his place. One would like
him to stop striving for poignancy and be-
gin to enact raw, exposed superiority:

Listen, swine. I have a neurological prob-
lem with my speech. I'll stutter all day,
before I'll emulate your lies.

Polykleitos
5th C BC
Metropolitan Museum

Saturday commute clxxxi: This very day, no less

In James Brooks’ hit film comedy, “As 

good as it gets” (1997), Helen Hunt, 

playing a single mother of an asthmat-

ic boy being neglected by the American 

medical establishment, receives an en-

dowment covering all of the medical ex-

penses necessary to transform her son 

into a soccer star within a week. But, 

suspecting that this gift comes with 

carnal expectations attached, she turns 

to Shirley Knight, her mother, to fret 

that maybe she should reject it. “No,” 

she flatly declares. “This isn’t a pair 

of stockings, this isn’t a string of 

pearls. This you do not give back.”

I find myself unable to imagine that 

Joseph Biden could have foreseen that a 

prospective running mate, often seen but 

"somehow" blocked in her quest for the 

Presidential nomination that he won by 

attrition, would be revealed as a soccer 

star within hours of being presented with 

his favor. How oblivious the presumptions 

so often are, at the foundation of our ex-

pertise, we need hardly note in this moment 

of Donald Trump. Yet suddenly the campaign 

that might already be seen as straight, but 

which no one pretended might see very far, 

finds itself carried aloft on a wave of ju-

bilation not seen since the conquest of 

Vicksburg.

Look here. People are affected. That very 

night one could feel the country, stand up. 

Stephen Colbert found Jon Batiste, composing 

a song, "for Kamala." Those who were able to 

squeeze into the donation sites of the Democ-

ratic National Committee, managed to deposit

$48 million there in those hours. Personal

ties, political commitments, alumni networks, 

lately moribund in the moment of Donald Trump, 

sprang to giddiest life — and all without the 

least forewarning. There was pandemonium at

the corner of Castro and Market, without a

word from Dionysus. This selection is not 

a pair of stockings; it’s not even a pair of 

Bernie’s fishnets. Alas, it isn’t pearls of 

Elizabeth Warren. It's the ore of our ground,

not of our statues. This is our birth.

No tentative “connection with the future,” the 

cliché of the day — or light at the end of a

tunnel, Kamala Harris declares the truth of

this very day, that only an unyielding maze 

of sordid, illegitimate structures could con-

ceal. Nor could it be lost in the confetti,

this revelation was ultimately forced upon

powerfully reluctant beneficiaries. But it's
done, and what one feels is the pace at which
such power can shift.

ii  Joshua Lott

    Getty Images©

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. 

Tom Cotton, Tom Cotton: whose moon's misbegotten?

I ask you to imagine being a fellow

with a nicely developed capability  

to pass as conventional, who wanted

as much to be admired as something

of the model for that virtue. You'd

leap at the chance to have been

named Tom Cotton, would you not? Ah:

a burnished ordinariness, with the

sobriquet to make Huck Finn wilt with

envy! One could go far, even within

the enchanted salons of condescension.

Even if ordinariness where you come

from is racist, even if convention

where you come from is the chivalry

of the anguished lost cause, even if

the way to be its model is to linger

for the retirement of the drooling-

est old dog, Tom Cotton plucks you

from the vestibule of pretenders.

What say you, Robert Penn Warren? 

Thus at last, the mise-en-scène

had been laid for our own Tom Cotton,

the scrupulously exact impersonator

of such knighthood, to pass an op-

Ed diatribe through that most con-

tested gate in journalism, the guest

room of The New York Times.

A lifelong dissident friend of mine

found it reprehensible, that the

inn-keeper hadn't even read the

text, but what would he read it for?

Accuracy of aim, when its aim would

perforce be so corrupted, the gauge

does not exist to measure it? Impec-

cability of grammar, when the death

of that value is one of the merriest

bear-baiting rites of modern media?

Virtue of advice, when its virtue

swims up through such a provenance

of the cuspidor as to cite mucosity 

as its sponsor? Probably not. An edit-

or who vouches for a guest will only

contradict himself with the next one.

That much being obvious, we need turn

to the intoxicated momentum of de-

manding heresy in defense of prin-

ciples too ascendant to be trusted.

Do we need a more handsome depiction 

of crowd-sourcing our shunnings, a

loftier torch of our convictions,

than a festival for their frailty?

Anti-racism is having such a vogue,

just now, that it seemingly can't be

trusted to remain a default condition

of human literacy. Enter the keepers

of the flame, to be sure their as-

sociations are unviolated; hoist the

petard of endangerment. Exile the

editor, by that brightest of all hy-

pocrisies, the exhibition of chastity.

Another friend, whose long leniency 

to rmbl has shown no audible limit,

has gently inquired into the cause of

its present mode of meagreness. That

question claims priority for its own

occasion, but a silence in the face 

of an epistolary auto-da-fé such as

this, is not within one's capability.

One can hardly feel let down, by the

publisher's concession to his flock,

in re-assigning a person who misjudged

the terms of a private employment. One

can claim no necessity to publish an

essay of such silly insistences, as

Tom Cotton submitted to the Times. Yet

again and again and again and again,

excuses have to be made for benign 

distrust of the mind, or this must be

recognized as its universal menace. 

No huzzahs for any nitwit's repression 

can possibly advance the cause of jus-

tice better, than the exhibition of

the awesomely distinguished Tom Cotton.

It's possible to see a particular dan-

ger, in any impression of thinking as

a correspondent to Americans. It is 

that their impression of themselves is

so variable that it is too often at

its least stable, when it is certain.

I don't fear Tom Cotton. I can resist 

his repulsive gambit, but he's not our

dog in this hunt. It is one thing to be 

ineducable. Yet another, to demand to be.

Tom Cotton

Send in the Troops

The New York Times

June 3, 2020

My glimpse

    Fifty years later, the detail enlarge-

    ment is still the best penetration I

    have found, of the character of this

    snapshot from Cam Ranh Bay. I under-

    stand the expression at this moment,

    because I had seen it for 20 years.

    I was born with a youngster officer, 

    looking after me. Whenever in life I

    have turned, in pain or fear or des-

    pair, even before 1969, I have felt

    he has known what I mean. I know it.

Hey now, Super Tuesday, who will hang his name on you?

If this "Super Tuesday" casino of political preferences is not the end of the Democratic Party in the United States, it is likely to be cited as the last required mile marker of that destiny. A doctrinaire hysteric from one of the very least representative jurisdictions in the country is said to be poised to dispatch the candidacy of a gen-uinely mawkish bore, endlessly boasting of great personal sorrow and flattering servitude in a previous Presidency as its ceremonial gofer. In the contest still is the single credible candidate remaining, without the stature she originally brought to the field, yet with still more vitality than it would welcome.

It isn't that the program disappoints, it's that what could utterly have been foreseen by the unapproachable, anonymous, and incorrigible powers who structured it as a compulsory cataclysm waiting to happen -- appears so plainly to have been foreseen. Particularly after the last Democratic "Super Tuesday," when the least popular politician in America highjacked the political rights of an electorate starkly deprived of viable choice, who could not have predicted this re-run of the same generation of the same credentials, given how sparklingly well that worked to block the fascist seizure of power in America? 

Let it be remembered while it can be, then, what lies beneath this morally impeccable structure of policy distribution in America. Some 327 million human lives, all arrayed to function as required, if not to be marginalized by the only choice which is theirs. Rosebud. 

Lise Sarfati
Russia
1990