And for Gauleiter of Greater Zirconia?

The White House has allowed it to

be known that the self-defrocked

disciple of supply side stupidity,

the Governor of Kansas, has been

rewarded as Minister Plenipotenti-

ary of Superstition Worldwide. Not

a position contemplated by the Con-

stitution, domestically, it is ex-

pected to pass the muster of the

newly corrupted Judicial Branch -

as an exemplary gesture of inter-

national comity, not impinging up-

on the vitality of the Establish-

ment Clause's prohibition of State

Nonsense. Nor has it been ignored,

like the White House's permission

for the proscription of transgen-

der overhead on the Federal books

to be celebrated in the same day,

that these divertissements both

arrive as the Party plans to defy

mathematics if it kills them at

last, making insurance whimsical -

a triumph of treachery - favored

on the grounds, can you stand it,

that the gaudier the skit, the 

jollier the crime.

Jean Arp

1886-1966

Delirium at dawn

If only Olivier were on
hand to see this. It is
commonly understood, the
government does not have
a President, it has an en-
tertainer, a protean nit-
wit of too many guises to
keep up. Only the other
day, he announced he had
his own Justice Depart-
ment. Today, we hear he
has his own Generals. As
Katharine Hepburn was
heard to remark to Cary
Grant in Bringing Up Ba-
by, "Your golf ball? Your
car? Is there anything in
the world that doesn't be-
long to you?"

His mind, plainly enough.

But Howard Hawks made pro-

vision even for that, in

the same shooting script -

"I've got my head, I've

lost my leopard!"

Give us an Amendment to

the Constitution; give it

the number, XXV. Bring up

baby, and cage the beast.

Howard Hawks

  director/producer

Dudley Nichols and

Hagar Wilde

  screenplay

Bringing Up Baby

RKO, 1938©

ii  Micheál MacLiammóir

    Iago's extraction

    Orson Welles

       director

    Othello

    1952

Origins of Wednesday lv: Between day and evening

The senior Senator from Arizona

spoke to the Senate yesterday, 

defying the norm of orations in

that space, without an audience.

Dutiful members of the chamber

turned up on demand, for some-

thing they expected to be con-

genial, a polite concession to

a tide of condescension, under

what're delicately called, 'the

circumstances.' They got some-

thing better, and there'll be

a quiz about it, in that Fall

to be expected only next year.

                    There'll be a quiz at Annapol-

                    is, and Andover, too; and when

                    men, polishing their obelisk, 

                    proclaim their own greatness, 

                    wherever they are on land, or

                    on sea, there will be a quiz;

                    There will be a quiz for smug-

                    ness, and equally of spite; in

                    the salesman's voice, busy dy-

                    ing on the road we keep alive;

                    And it will come down to this:

                    why did he admit to no doubt, 

                    on the principle of conducting

                    republican government, openly?

i   Alex Berlov

ii  Nathan Benn

    Middlebury, Vermont

    1973

Perorations we've not lingered for

       Numberless bents
       Distinguish men.

  If the poet is right,
  an Act of distinction
  is not what we're of-
  fered, in this return
  to the Senate for yet
  another misfire of an
  oft-anticipated clim-
  ax. Sicily is burning
  and apprehension, her
  abandoned sound, muf-
  fles dull similitude. 

Bacchylides

5th Century BC

Robert Fagles

  translation

Complete Poems

  34

Yale University Press, 1961©

op. cit.

iii  Alex Berlov

Between buildings and furniture

    

The things that never become
part of the furniture belong
to the way of life in being.

Take the carrelet, the frag-
ile, ubiquitous fishing pier
in the estuary at the center
of the world of wine, obliv-
iously immobile and obtusely
scattered for the harvesting
of even more elusive things.

Edward Steichen
1903

Alex Berlov

Carrelet in the Gironde

People who make jam

One could derive the foundation
of this page by a simple act of
triangulating certain influence
from other pages, listed in the
sidebar under Context. They are
the people who make jam, and it
is up to you to investigate who
they are, although in one case,
it is obvious. Another, is less
so, having been deleted to keep
stray attention from being paid
to a member of that family. But
the third I interrupted one day
with a transatlantic call, hint
hint, and rang off promptly, so
as not to put at risk the fruit.

Michael George
Sean, traveler in Aubrac
2013

Origins of Wednesday liv: Letter from a watchman on the coast

Stubbed toe

Mulling it over, I have hope that this fracturing of the Republican Party over its cardinal objective will make it harder for Bannon and Trump to achieve the intimidating character they were looking for, by means of any salient legislative triumph in the two Houses they unambiguously possess, not merely control. Their erasures of Obama's regulations and their extraordinarily prompt destruction of the Executive departments, possibly excluding the Pentagon but plainly not the State Department, are of truly daunting semi-permanence, which will probably mature into irreversibility if they control both Houses for another two years. But they left the President unsatisfactorily feared. He needed (not that he knew it, but Bannon does) to exhibit himself as truly contemptuous of his base, in order to solidify his position. This was Himmler’s insight, and he is evidently Bannon’s model, his exemplar in the genuine seizure of power over the ostensibly organized, neo-representative State. He doesn’t want to martyr them, any more than he particularly wanted to expose the tremulous docility of Congressional figureheads. But he does need them go to mad in the knowledge of his control.

Bannon knows, Trump can never achieve all that he must as merely ‘primus inter pares’ in a party already obsessed by visions of financial concentration in the fewest unregulated hands. He must mature that consequence. He must destroy the position of the United States and avenge any pretext for its liberties.

The alienation of dozens of millions, of whole organic sectors of the population from sustainable life - the unifying vision of “health care” legislation emerging from both Houses of Congress - would represent the most articulate image of this agenda, imaginable, short of full bore terrorism hysteria in the streets, with all its racist and religious ornamentation, all the darling bells and whistles of anarchic carnage. Garden variety thievery, such as we see in the rape of Dodd-Frank and foretell in tax “reform,” are mere orthodoxy of Republicanism, not the clarifying eradication embodied in the health care crusade.

I passed along Al Hunt’s appreciation of the rôle of Old Media in this. I don’t wish to exaggerate it, but the Times - one has to admit - has been vigilant in this beyond precedent, and we did read the damn paper every day through the Administration of Richard Nixon. The Post, by slight contrast, has taken the lion’s share of open warfare with the President’s personality in all its ramifications, certainly not avoiding the health care fight but casting its net just as diligently into foreign policy, trade policy, war and peace (its arrogated purview, for many years), and of course the partisan tradecraft of Party politics. Bannon welcomes this; not that he has a choice, but because it affirms his lifelong message to the base — “they” are snotty pricks. What the Republicans could not have measured, or at least failed to do, was the energy of CNN in its own open warfare against the President, to say nothing of SNL’s remarkable cheerleading for us all. This made the essayists, from lettered venues such as The New Yorker, The New York Review, The Atlantic, New York, and The Nation, Huffington, etc, etc, not exactly superfluous, but almost. One didn’t need to know Plato, to know that the President is incompetent, crazy, and adored for both virtues.

So, I do think there is a momentary condition of trench warfare now, with both sides “dug in,” and you will tell me, it is such an unstable interval, and untenable for Trump, that I should expect something extraordinarily depraved on his part, any day now. Well, I do. He does retain the initiative, merely because any reprimand is in partisan lockdown in the Republican Congress. But this only argues for not letting up in the exposure, while it still bleeds, of the rotten carcass of Republican health care, so that whatever Trump next pursues, will draw its revolting stench. He does control the Party well enough, still, for imminent lying before investigative committees to be seconded, praised, upheld and embraced. So, for me, if Summer has shown us anything, he is immune in his corruption, his betrayals, his treasons and his striking incapacity. But he is not feared enough to satisfy himself. And this bothers him, because he really is the only power who can bring himself down.

History tells us to expect a trade war exacerbated by a naval incident or two. I don’t think George HW Bush’s foray into Panama affords the scale this time. Sounds like China, from where I’m sitting. He has to be seen to be willing to make his base suffer; and he has to be seen as so reckless of security, that he can claim not to need it, and of common sense, that his genius can be seen at last. But endocrinology tells us something else, which is the intolerability of the gradualism of a strangulation by commerce. He needs a paroxysm - garish, noisy, inversely scaled to his magnitude. If he were sane, we'd say he had endangered himself. Not intentionally. As he has taught us, he'll eat whatever will bear his name.

I ran into Mitch McConnell en route to the bath

     Under the circumstances

     I didn't think it right

     to try cheering him up.

     I promised him his plan

     will stay a secret they

     could not drag from me.