Saturday commute cxxvi: Out of the fire

Friends possess great latitude

with me, to inquire in the nos-

iest way, provided they accept

the risk of a querying absorp-

tion of their question. So, it

wasn't so unusual, when a bril-

liant, flaring gem of my exper-

ience lately asked if I'd ever

imagined sharing the remainder

of my life with someone whom I

knew.

I was reminded of the boy on a

road in the Pyrénées, not an e-

vent waiting to happen, but an

event reflecting, before one's

eyes. And the copper, hammered

pan approached on the hypothet-

ical, of willingness to commit

to eliciting an omelet.

Rodrigo Penaforte

Dieter Krehbiel, photo

ca 2015

The old shirts

 I put one on, the

 other day, a pin-

 point cotton wov-

 en in Glasgow and

 fashioned by tail-

 ors in New Jersey,

 about this long a-

 go. Of warm-weath-

 er weight, it im-

 parted a sense of

 luxury to the arm

 from decades admir-

 ably withstood, of

 laundries and more

 genial wearing in.

 It's what I'd been

 rusticated to the

 same place for. I

 did not pursue the

 comparison.

 This is for myself.

We go home now

   Now this. To save their
   soul they say they need
   Ted Cruz.

Origins of Wednesday xxiii: Recourse

    Whenever skies look gray to me

    And trouble begins to brew

    Whenever the winter winds become too strong

   

Cole Porter

I concentrate

  on you

1939

Robert Kimball

  editor

Cole Porter

  Selected Lyrics

American Poets Project

Library of America, 2006©

Reprise de pouvoir par la mode

Staging a dramatic scene
means finding conflicts.
It's mathematical: change
a rhythm, immediately you
have an emotion.

Monday was a splendid day.

The American President was

in Havana, incrementally

disseminating a little air

and light upon a decadent

and caustic spat we could

have ended generations ago,

but for the domestic polit-

ical profit to be extracted

from protracting it; while,

on the mainland, the Ameri-

can Israel Public Affairs

Committee [sic] convened a

talent contest in the per-

petuation of rich and long

exploited strains of crisis.

Mrs Clinton, to no one's

surprise, presented remarks

of unimpeachable obfusca-

tion of the contours of a

stone whose Excalibur she

refused by denouncing it,

neutrality. Never had that

picaresque rapport between

politics and the English

language lofted so sweetly

its ironic refrain, than in

her proud consecration of the

young to an unctuous despair.

                      There are so many young

                      people here, thousands of

                      college students from hun-

                      dreds of campuses around

                      the country. I think we

                      should all give them a 

                      hand for being here and 

                      beginning their commitment  

                      to this important cause.

Roberto Rossellini

Hillary Rodham Clinton
21 March 2016

Anonymous youth

Raf Simons runway

Reaping the whirlwind: what did she see ii

The staggeringly salient crisis
of the 2016 election gives two
sides to the face of discrimin-
ation and our forays in its re-
mediation [disclosure: we were
all involved]. The face of Don-
ald Trump, we know as that of
Ted Cruz, less Uriah's heap of 
piety. But the other side, is
the persistent blindness of the
campaign of Mrs C, to seize a
Party's nomination by resorting
to fracking reserves of grati-
tude from Liberalism's Sixties
lode, to the devastating waste
of the white working class. As
often as we are presented with
the demographics of triumphs
in States she can not contest
in November, and vulnerability
in States which she must hold,
she sallies forth heedlessly
against the tide of time, by
clinging to her maiden's ire.

Those who believe it to be ur-
gent for her Party to protect
the nation from Donald Trump,
are catastrophically being de-
livered to him in droves. Who
will demand a candidate for
these times? Who will demand
of the Clinton combine, that
they loosen their grasp upon
that Party's throat, and let
bygones be bygones? And when,
against impervious pride?

 i  Bruce Weber

Arm music ii

The weekend ending today

saw the most fecklessly

out-of-his-depth pretend-

er to the Presidency, de-

livering the apposite sum-

mation of the most degen-

erate mess to which any-

one living has seen an A-

merican political party

sink. We are losing our

Republic, Rubio said. Yet

still there are the mo-

tions to go through, of

dividing up the spoils of

this least republican of

parties. Donald Trump is

expected to defeat Rubio

in his home state, and

lumber on to a Convention

desperate to bar the door.

The longtime writer for The

New Yorker, Adam Gopnik (The

Table Comes First, Paris to

the Moon) cut best, I be-

lieve, through the odd deni-

als of who is responsible

for Donald Trump, in an es-

say I link below. Trump is,

Gopnik argues, not because

there is anger in his demo-

graphic, which he inflames,

but because he offers solu-

tions.

This weekend we saw Trump's

volatile but carefully cal-

ibrated escalation of inten-

tional incivility reaching

a crescendo suggesting com-

plete confidence, now, in

taking over the Republican

Party. "Violence" is its

voice and its solution.

Every website of serious an-

alysis one could visit was

dominated by one hate-filled

portrait after another, and

all of the same discolored

face. How long Donald Trump's

face remains the logotype of

that Party is anyone's guess.

Whether it should become ours

or not, the world has watched

its emergence, and probably

has framed contingency plans

for the loss of our republic.

Here, it seems only Trump is

comparably prepared. His sol-

ution, meanwhile, is working.

Adam Gopnik

Roots and Rot

  Dodging the Blame

  for Donald Trump

March 9, 2016

The New Yorker

Condé Nast, 2016©

Glen Heppner

This way

undated

That will do

    One reads with moral disbelief
    this evening, that Mrs Clinton
    advised Americans today that 
    Nancy and Ronald Reagan "start-
    ed a national conversation" on
    HIV/AIDS during his Presidency.

    Her remarks were broadcast by
    MSNBC in a brief interview ear-
    lier today. That's strange; we
    didn't see Barack Obama on the
    steps of the Lincoln Memorial,
    praising Antonin Scalia for
    raising awareness of Al Gore.

    Today is not an occasion for ig-
    noring the maxim, Nil nisi bo-
    num. But it is an occasion, and
    this is the only reason she took
    it, and the only reason it was
    offered to her, for evaluating
    the candidacy of Mrs Clinton for
    any office in this nation.

    The extreme falseness of her com-
    ment on this history is not a mat-
    ter upon which "reasonable minds
    may differ." Its boundless insult
    to the mentality of her genera-
    tion's survival of that era is
    not the first; it makes sense
    only as the predicate for rein-
    scriptions of her White House
    years. Yet, this is routine.

    What matters is her compulsion
    to falsify. It flourishes under
    chronic temptation, spontaneous-
    ly to redefine ethics in any way 
    expedient to striking an excul-
    pating or self-aggrandizing pose.
    Yes, she's been shot at on that
    tarmac in Croatia more than once.
    Of all the social climbing qual-
    ities this candidacy embodies,
    its grotesque groveling for in-
    timacy with power or danger has
    to be weighed, against how many
    times we have seen it before.

    How does this differ from what
    Tacitus saw: Plunder, slaughter,
    dispossession: these they mis-
    name government; they create a
    wilderness and call it peace.

    What could be more charming,
    than false compliments from
    the late-coming Mrs Clinton,
    on that effortless toleration 
    of global suffering, propagated 
    by the silence she admires for
    raising awarenesses? She basks
    in praising death, to call it,
    progress. 
    

Thomas Tallis
If ye love me
1560
San Francisco Chanticleer
1994©