Another vehicle in passing

  

  

  Needless to say, our formal goodbye
  was cool and reserved. It scarcely
  amounted to exchanged looks or a 
  handshake. In the course of our 
  young lives we had parted and met
  again too often for handshakes to
  have become our usual practice.

Thomas Mann
Doctor Faustus
1948

 

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. 

 

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©

Saturday commute clxxxii: Nice start

After an interval of unexpected length, it is a pleasure for me to look now upon a fresh, unmarked page in this journal. I would be the first to join whatever chorus there may be, for leaving it that way, if the project were completed. 

However, we have just noticed that the United States has discharged the obligation of disposing of its sitting President, and good behavior is always to be encouraged within sight of the young. Compliments, then, to the people of the United States disdained by that figure, over the last four years of exercising his preference for the fragment he seduced and betrayed. By every count, from epidemiology to pluralist reconciliation to international comity to planetary stewardship to fiscal sanity, he had rendered the nation the first justifiably outcast pariah of the New World. How delightful, then, that on the very date when first permitted by their constraining founding document to right his institutionally unchecked hostilities, the country showed him the door.

I know, there are those morose who wail, that this remedy is not enough. They are wonderfully paid, glitteringly honored, and as obvious as yesterday's excesses. I see too many minor movies, not to have heard Rossano Brazzi declare to Katharine Hepburn for David Lean, "Eat the ravioli." Please, do not instruct us in the array of anomalies still disfiguring the feast. Rather, organize for the State of Georgia's double Senatorial runoff in early January, of which more, soon enough. For this weekend, come outside. 

Refresh acquaintance.

Photo courtesy, ubayuri©

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. 

Word from the land of always something

 

Word came to Americans some time in

the evening of the 18th that a hold-

out against replacement on the high

court had passed from the scene, al-

lowing speculation of whether, how,

when, by whom something definitive

would be done about this. This was

not the first intrusion on a wedding

anniversary of mine, when a highly

presentable plate of rognons de veau

was first served to me on the night

of my farewell to the East Coast. I

found myself back here eventually,

unmarried, and although cured of com-

memorating occasions with food, still

easily consoled by a determined defer-

ence to offal.

This latest bulletin in the struggle

for power in the United States found

me just as glad to be able to rely on

my friends already to be in earnest,

plotting various interventions. No 

one had telephoned me, anguished to

be reminded, how to breathe, and I

found myself managing equally well,

once I'd recalled the virtues of 

fresh coffee. Not for this house-

hold, then, will hands be wrung in

wonder of what will become of life

for another 40 terms of this court;

no swooning on the indignity of the

present power structure's swan song

of bottomless villainy. Possibly,

some frantic defections from that

cabal can be negotiated; possibly

a bolt of gastronomic clarity will

descend upon the illumination of

well-grazed kidneys, but in any

case, calving season will return, 

in all its telling raucousness.

For more than 50 years, a tenuous

claim to a position in the general

population and an ill-bred fixation

on the mythology of judicial review

have left me with the conviction 

set out above, that one's time can

much more securely be invested in

a study of the classics in cuisine

than in the tergiversations of a

casuist tradition under demagog-

ic appointment. Enough, please, 

of heroes of magical powers. Win

games, breed good beasts, honor

reality. 

Now. That's revenge.

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