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

  

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. 

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©

"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.

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

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

Leaning Klobuchar

In this year's American electoral cyc-

le, I do not expect to write actively

or with superfluous energy to recom-

mend the replacement of the Party in

control of the White House, the Sen-

ate, and the Federal Courts. It isn't

likely that anyone not sharing these

preferences would stumble into this

paragraph long enough to consider it.

Garry Kasparov contributed an invalu-

able essay to The New York Review not

long ago, on an urgency of clear think-

ing in the conduct of coalition polit-

ics, which I do commend to anyone in-

terested in having to choose a nominee.

My own feeling is that Amy Klobuchar, 

a Senator from the Midwest, could well

forge a coalition of the requisite di-

versity, for sustaining an effective

challenge to the offending Party. I can

defend this suggestion, but so can she;

and I advance it less to win assent 

than to substantiate her eligibility.

I cannot say quite the same thing for

certain other candidates, more promin-

ently ranked today in the polls; but

coalition politics compels me to ac-

cept the selection of the Party. This

is not only morally justified, it is

morally obvious. 

To so much as lean toward a personal

preference, in the case of Klobuchar,

is to lean first in favor of the con-

duct of a magnanimous but energizing,

dare I say infectious politics. I do

admire this virtue, this year, very

considerably more than I value the

most shining chimera of a star of any

greater glory. And, to those who sa-

vor a dash of wit in a candidate, she

spares one a leap toward inexperience.

Mildly as it moves one to mention it,

I don't think one can fault her for

being of the gender that flummoxes 

the Party to be defeated, given that

she reflects half of its supporters.

Let us all become comfortable with

her in the vanguard of our coalition.

Max Yavno
untitled
San Francisco
1947