White House media chippie mauls naïve reporter

One hates to be late with a bulletin,

but how many of us can keep pace with

the flings and farrows of our porcine

President? Only the other day, the na-

tion exulted as one, as he loosed one

of his crack party hostesses upon an

unprepared reporter, lunging for his

microphone, not to say his lifeline,

crying, Climb it down, Buster, as the

Little Father belched his approbation.

Not since Rosalind Russell pinned Cary

Grant to the mat, has the front page

captured such hilarious retribution

against the molestations of inquiry.

Yet, to many, this was no particular

news. Then, on cue, our White House

made it so, by interpolating a reality-

enhanced video clip of the encounter,

complete with BAD GUY etched in the re-

porter's forehead, plain enough for of-

ficial media goons to ostracize him.

Mohammed bin Salman, eat your heart out.

Thus sighed the nation with relief to

see, at least a chastened Court can

maintain a perkily irreverent style.

Shall we proceed, then, to a weekend?

Where all enjoy, a grasping at straws.

ii  Michael Bidner

We go home now ix

It is a tempting response to the

Provincetown photographs of Joel

Meyerowitz, which have been seen

here before, to adjust their re-

production to suppress an ambient

haze, where of course the quality

of their light is the whole point.

Not just the light, but the haze,

itself. "Greedy boy," as Smiley

teased Lacon and the Minister,

when they leapt at intelligence,

"you hounded Control out, and you

let Karla in." The suppression of

uncertainty is to color, as the

critic Jed Perl remarks in his es-

say on Delacroix just now, in The 

New York Review of Books, a clari-

fication more in tune with the au-

thoritarian, than the authoritative.

It remains as wonderfully im-

pulsive to identify the facts

of one political election as

responses to another, as it

had been to reckon with the

latter by dismissing its lav-

ish haze. This temptation, so

widely shared as to have crept

even into comment here, invoked

the sense of reality in a grop-

ing more for prestige than for

authenticity. Yesterday, the 

legislative district in which

I reside managed to replace in

office a card carrying savage

of the casuist Far Right, with

a retired female operative of

the CIA. We have color today

for which we prayed, and haze.

             When we warn people not to pit their wills

             against the greater power of the historical

             situation, which they cannot alter, or can-

             not alter in the manner they desire, what

             we mean is not that we know facts and laws

             which we obey, but that we do not; that we

             are aware, beyond the facts to which the po-

             tential reformers point, of a dark mass of

             factors whose general drift we perceive but

             whose precise interrelations we cannot for-

             mulate, and that any attempt to behave as if

             only the clear 'top level' factors were sig-

             nificant or crucial, ignoring the hinterland,

             will lead to frustration of the intended re-

             forms, perhaps to unexpected disaster.

Take away the haze, take away

the hinterland. We see, reform

has been chastened enough, be-

fore its eyes, to respect the

haze of a historical situation.

Le Carré, Perl, Isaiah Berlin.

As Johnson said of Taliesin, 

when Wright invited him home,

He has developed the arrange-

ments of secrets of space. I

call it the hieratic aspects

of architecture, the proces-

sional aspects .. the essence

of architecture. Play itself.

ii  Robert Frank

Sir Isaiah Berlin
The Sense of Reality
  Studies in Ideas 
  and their History
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
1997©

Ballot security

     From the very day the New American

     Government took office, to this

     certain first day of its collapse,

     it has advanced a confusion of bal-

     lot manipulation with ballot secur-

     ty, so odious, as to encourage on-

     ly the most cynical embrace of the

     franchise. Yet within the mechanism

     of the personal secret, there is a

     paradise of inviolability that all

     have tasted, and delight in sharing.

Jay Maisel

Boy in New York Harbor

1950s

Public enemy number one

Never forgetting the American President's

denunciation of menstruation in his first

campaign debate, with a stage full of Re-

publican wise men who stayed right there,

instead of leaving him in the solitude he

earned right then and there, always it is

the Other who energizes him to vitriolic,

inhumane depths never domiciled before in

the Office he holds, by the most discred-

itable cowardice and complicity of people

who hold office as Republicans. Together,

now, they bring their caravan to the bal-

lot box. Let them claim asylum elsewhere.