A Poem from October 7, 1571

Another poem by G. K. Chesterton about the wars between the West and Islamic empires. The Wikipedia article gives a basic rundown of the battle and its importance. Of literary interest is that the young Miguel de Cervantes, later the author of Don Quixote, fought as a marine in this battle.

LEPANTO

White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shake with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the cape of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.

Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled.
Spuming of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in 'the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael's on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day.
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed—Booms
away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumed lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign(But
Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sex
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

Hell on Your Women

Druid Addresses Scottish Parliament

For the first time, a Druid was invited to offer what I gather is an official prayer at the Scottish Parliament.

I'm just going to publish the prayer she offered, and put forward this question: if I'd told you that I went to a church service at a random church this weekend, the kind of place with 'folk guitar' church music and lots of talk about social justice, would you have caught that this wasn't the prayer offered there?

"Grant, O divine spirit, thy protection. And in protection, strength. And in strength, understanding. And in understanding, knowledge.

"And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice. And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it. And in the love of it, the love of all existences. And in the love of all existences, the love of divine spirit and all goodness.

Probably a church service would have said "O holy spirit" rather than "O divine spirit," but either could serve as a translation of Spiritus Sancti. They don't mention Jesus by name, but frankly a lot of churches don't invoke him by name all that often either.

The alignment between "existence" and "goodness" is strictly orthodox. Indeed, it's the opening of the Summa Theologiae. Questions 2, 4, 5, and 6 from the ST's first part are on this very subject. The relationship of justice to this divine goodness comes much later -- it starts at question 57 in the second part of the ST -- but her formulation is not out of order.

I wonder if such invocations end up appealing to the right place, as one might address a letter to "Santa Claus" or "St. Nick" and expect it to be delivered to the judge's desk in Miracle on 34th Street? Or does precision in the address matter, such that a wrong digit in the zip code would keep your letter from being seen? How good is the divine post office? 

Two on Independent Contractors

This piece suggests that a part of the appeal of the recent victor in Iowa is his appeal to independent contractors.

“Make America Great Again” resonates. He relates to what the college-educated press calls “blue-collar workers”. However, those blue-collar workers aren’t what they used to be. Many of them own their businesses. They are self-directed and self-employed. They should be referred to as “independent contractors”.

Since he was in commercial real estate, [he] has worked extensively with these kinds of people. They are smart, though most didn’t go to college. Their unions have abandoned them.

These people all over the country have seen the government debt skyrocket no matter who is in charge. They have seen a two-tier legal system be implemented. They have seen Washington DC bureaucrats and politicians skim the cream and they get the dregs. It’s a mini-Hunger Game.

When you are working for yourself no matter if you are a hairdresser or a carpenter, you feel the sting of taxes. You see the rot in your neighborhood. You want everyone to do well and factory jobs to increase because it means people will be spending more on your services.

I've mostly been taxed as an independent contractor in my life, and I can therefore tell you that the government hates them. They are required to pay "both halves" of the FICA taxes that are the biggest tax of all, and as such their effective tax rate is much higher than they would be paying if they were categorized as employees. Yet there are signal advantages also: you can set your own hours, determine your own working conditions, and be free of the oversight of HR departments and other corporate disciplinarians who increasingly monitor your outside life and politics to keep you in line.

Not coincidentally, there is a strong push to eliminate the possibility of independence from left-leaning states like California -- and, therefore, from the Biden Administration as well. 

If the analysis I started with is accurate, this is -- coincidentally? -- an attack on the heart of the political support of their most feared and hated opponent. It's certainly got a political angle over and above the tax issue. Everyone's livelihood must depend on the approval of HR, which means everyone must be taught to behave in HR approve ways -- on and off the clock. Everyone must be monitored and taught not to say the wrong things. 

It's another public-private partnership, like the pre-Elon Twitter (and the still current Facebook) that made sure to censor and shadow-ban all the ideas the Establishment asked them to do. They even locked up the accounts of the New York Post, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton, to prevent it from reporting the disapproved Hunter Biden Laptop story in the hours before the 2020 election; and they took instructions, after that election, on things the administration would have liked kept down. That was all exposed after Elon in the "Twitter Files," but you'll only get the NPR-approved version of that story, which highlights the counterarguments instead of the story itself. NPR is another public-private partnership too, isn't it? 

The Crusader Returns from Captivity

THE CRUSADER RETURNS FROM CAPTIVITY

by G. K. Chesterton

I have come forth alive from the land of purple and poison and glamour,
Where the charm is strong as the torture, being chosen to change the mind;
Torture of wordless dance and wineless feast without clamour,
Palace hidden in palace, garden with garden behind;

Women veiled in the sun, or bare as brass in the shadows,
And the endless eyeless patterns where each thing seems an eye....
And my stride is on Caesar's sand where it slides to the English meadows,
To the last low woods of Sussex and the road that goes to Rye.

In the cool and careless woods the eyes of the eunuchs burned not,
But the wild hawk went before me, being free to return or roam,
The hills had broad unconscious backs; and the tree-tops turned not,
And the huts were heedless of me: and I knew I was at home.

And I saw my lady afar and her holy freedom upon her,
A head, without veil, averted, and not to be turned with charms,
And I heard above bannerets blown the intolerant trumpets of honour,
That usher with iron laughter the coming of Christian arms.

My shield hangs stainless still; but I shall not go where they praise it,
A sword is still at my side, but I shall not ride with the King.
Only to walk and to walk and to stun my soul and amaze it,
A day with the stone and the sparrow and every marvellous thing.

I have trod the curves of the Crescent, in the maze of them that adore it,
Curved around doorless chambers and unbeholden abodes,
But I walk in the maze no more; on the sign of the cross I swore it,
The wild white cross of freedom, the sign of the white cross-roads.

And the land shall leave me or take, and the Woman take me or leave me,
There shall be no more Night, or nightmares seen in a glass;
But Life shall hold me alive, and Death shall never deceive me
As long as I walk in England in the lanes that let me pass.

MLK Day, According to the FBI

The shamelessness of the FBI knows no bounds.

 

An Example of the Insufficiency of Liberalism

One of the biggest challenges the liberal order is facing in the West today arises from opposition to immigration. This opposition is understood, by the powerful for whom immigration provides access to cheap labor, as a sort-of racism that should be explained as an unwillingness to extend to foreign-born others the same rights we enjoy ourselves. Liberalism tends to universalize discussions of rights, so why shouldn't someone born abroad have the same rights as human beings born in America? It's obviously just selfishness on the part of Americans, a desire to continue to enjoy an unfair advantage (argue the masters of the capitalist order, who want these people to pick their vegetables at starvation wages).

That's not really what's driving the objection. The real force of the objection is that mass movement -- immigration or migration within a nation, doesn't matter -- disrupts and destroys communities that are the basis of almost all human meaning. It's not really an objection to the people coming in as if they were inferior people: it's an objection to communities and cultures being destroyed, when those things are where we get almost all of the sense of meaning we derive from human life. 

A culture is defined as "a way of life." Ways of life exist among people who live together and share personal connections. You don't know and can't know everyone, but you do know the nice lady at your favorite coffee shop, or library, or bar; you know the people you met at church, or work, or school. You grew up participating in institutions like a church or the Boy Scouts or your town in your home state, with its local sports teams and friends you know from interactions around the place where you live. Together you have built a culture, and it really does depend on the stability of all those things. 

While you get a certain amount of your sense of meaning in life from philosophy or your personal engagement with religion, most of your sense of meaning and being important comes from your interactions with other people. Those are the people who are part of your culture, including your family. When the institutions, including the family, are badly disrupted you lose the connections that make your life meaningful and worth living. 

Of course human beings object to that. If you want a universalizing explanation a la liberalism, this is a universal human drive that is at work.

You can see just how universal it is by looking at the phenonmenon of objections to gentrification. Now gentrification has clear benefits, just like cheap labor results in cheap vegetables. The gentrifying town is getting nicer. Those who lived there thus have a nicer place to live, with less crime and better shops. They might even get a better job as wages increase and labor is needed by those better shops. Yet gentrification, another localized form of mass movement, is objected to just as strongly as mass migration of any sort. The people objecting to it are often on the other side of the spectrum of economic life, too: it's the poor objecting to rich people moving in, rather than richer people objecting to poorer people. The problem is the same one, though. The gentrification is disrupting the community, forcing people to move out as well as they can't afford the higher taxes and cost of living. Soon the institutions that sustain a meaningful life are broken up, families are dispersed seeking places they can live, churches cease to exist, and individuals are stripped of the relationships that made their lives important and worthwhile. 

Liberalism doesn't have the machinery to address this basic drive. As mentioned it responds to objection to migration with charges of racism; it responds to objections to gentrification with a defense of property rights. The richer people bought that land fair and square, and now it's their land to use within the forms of the law. 

Meanwhile even positive laws can't be allowed to violate fundamental rights, and both "equality of rights" and "property rights" are fundamental rights. The law might oppose illegal immigration, but you can't stand on the law when people are suffering: that violates their equality. The law might support gentrification, which is an exercise of a fundamental property right, so you can't oppose gentrification without breaking the law. 

Part of the reason there's such fear of fascism in spite of an absence of fascism is that the opposition arising from this basic violation of a human need are characterized as fascists. Some of them, indeed, adopt the term for themselves because they also -- being liberals -- lack a conceptual non-liberal way of understanding this drive other than the one they are being charged with by their opponents. So they start chanting Sig Heil, accepting that they must be fascists because they can't walk away from the basic human need that the system is violating. 

Mostly people don't do that, though. Mostly they just put up with being miscatergorized, and fight for what they know they need without having a way to explain that need that makes sense to others. Because the liberal order doesn't have a language for this, they can't make themselves understood to their opponents, and ultimately we aren't able to reason together about these problems. 

That's too bad. Unless we find a way to transcend that contradiction, as Hegel might say, we're going to end up fighting over it. It's a stupid fight, too, because all human beings really do want the stability that allows for a flourishing community in which they can find meaning and durable relationships. The liberal/capitalist order violates that stability by its nature, because it is always organizing for maximal freedom and maximal economic efficiency. Stability gets in the way of those things, and thus is thrust aside. Literally everyone is less happy as a result, and yet the intellectual framework keeps us from being able to talk with each other about it.

The Central "Uniparty" Thesis

Now what Wauck actually wanted to talk about in his "Uniparty" essay, as opposed to the part that interested me, was the failure-by-success of liberalism as discussed by Patrick Deneen.

I will let Wauck's summary of Deneen's argument stand. In brief, the success of liberalism was so complete in the United States that we got a 'Uniparty' because both Democrats and Republicans are liberal political parties. What is meant by the term "liberalism" here is not a common usage, but the formal usage by political philosophers, and a review of the political philosophy immediately demonstrates that there isn't actually agreement there about what it means. Somewhat like God, which is appropriate given that the ideology has assumed an almost godlike power in America, it is easiest to define negatively: we can't say for sure what an infinite being* might be in our finite language, but we can say that he isn't evil or stupid or mean or base. 

So we can say that, whatever liberalism is, it isn't an ideology that suggests that human beings are rightly kept as slaves. There is a kind of presumption that any restrictions on human liberty need to be justified in one of several ways; different kinds of liberals may accept restrictions on human liberty in service to other expressions of human liberty. 

The argument that America embraces liberalism in this largest sense is persuasive. We have so-called 'positive liberals' who believe that humans have a right to things like health care or housing, and thus a right to impose upon other human beings in order to obtain those things; we have so-called 'negative liberals' who reject that in favor a right to be free of compelled labor to provide you with housing or health care. We have Republican Liberals (see the link above: this means Roman Republic philosophy) who believe that the point is to keep everyone free from arbitrary domination. 

We don't really have fascists, as much as the term gets tossed around: Americans don't believe in an all-powerful, all-organizing state. Even the most statist among us have rights they think the government has no legitimate power to transgress: they'll be the first to sound off, in fact, if those rights are violated. Your finest "the government should take over the family and organize all businesses in order to ensure that health care and housing are provided and everyone has the right not to feel oppressed" is still going to squawk when the government violates their freedom of speech, of organization, or of political action.

I won't go through the Deneen arguments, as Wauk does that at length. I will say that his idea that liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction is a regular feature of arguments against liberalism and/or capitalism. Marx is all about the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system, and he got the idea from Hegel. For Hegel, all ideas of any sort have internal contradictions that ultimately render them insufficient, requiring us to first confront the difficulties of the contradictions and then find a way to transcend them. Hegel thought this was part of a grand cycle for created beings, beginning at much lower levels of consciousness than humans and continuing beyond anything we have yet attained. Eventually it leads us back to God, he believed. 

Deneen thought we could no longer make sufficient arguments for tradition or authority because even objections to them have to be cast in liberal terms in the American model. There's definitely something to that idea, which I will briefly discuss in a third post on the subject.

*Whether or not infinity is even an appropriate description for the divine is disputed. Some philosophers have really liked to use that concept: see e.g. Nicholas of Cusa, who even liked to draw mathematical diagrams to illuminate the problem of trying to understand God from a finite perspective. Others -- convincingly to me -- explain the infinite as still functioning as a limited concept within Creation, and reject it as appropriate to apply to a being that genuinely sits beyond and outside of Creation. Liberalism is not God, though, and is a created 'being,' so there's no similar issue for our present analogy.

Wauk "On the Uniparty"

I notice that with several of these essays lately, I've been inclined to write two posts: one about the asides that are often more interesting than the main thesis, and one about the main thesis. So too with this one, Mark Wauk's "On the Uniparty."

There are several interesting and challenging ideas here. One of them is that the American Constitution was a kind of coup by a fading power against the rest of the country:

The last time we saw the Federalist Party was in 1816. Still, they occupy an important place in American history—after all, they led the first coup, and a wildly successful one to boot. What, you ask? Recall—the US Constitution. The proto-Federalists seized the opportunity of their leading opponents being out of the country to declare a “Constitutional Convention”, despite the US already having a Constitution—the Articles of Confederation. Conveniently, the population of the country didn’t get to actually vote on this new Constitution.

There's something to this idea. You may recall that the Federalists favored, inter alia, the Bank of the United States. They managed to enact this central bank, and it survived until the first genuinely democratic counterrevolution led by Andrew Jackson destroyed it. No central bank existed in the United States until another anti-democratic coup established the Fed in 1913 (a non-government organization that was ceeded the power to control the American dollar). Revoking the Fed's authority is often discussed by Americans interested in politics, but it is almost anathema among those who actually get elected to office. You might ask if we are on the verge of a similar counterrevolutionary effort now, and if that isn't what Wauk calls the Uniparty really fears.

If you are inclined to accept that the enactment of the Constitution represents a kind of coup, because it represented a real realignment of power that was only covered by a veneer of procedure, there have been several others in American history. Some of these are more-or-less popular, but they all represent points at which the legitimate forms of power transfer were set aside and the result was papered over with legitimacy after the fact. A brief list off the top of my head:

1) The Reconstruction Amendments (13, 14, 15). These were ratified by main force: states were placed under military occupation until they agreed to ratify them as a partial condition of resuming self-government. Notably Congress allowed these states to change their ratification votes from 'no' to 'yes,' but refused to allow free states in the North to change their votes from 'yes' to 'no' when some of them attempted to do so as a protest against the anti-democratic force being used. These amendments are popular today, and probably now enjoy wide democratic approval (especially the 13th). Nevertheless, especially the 14th Amendment centralized power in the Federal government. That power has been used for purposes both good and bad: it was the core of the Civil Rights crusade against Jim Crow, which was good, but it is also behind the current effort to remove a certain candidate from the ballot even though he appears the odds-on favorite to be elected by the people. Love or hate that guy, the move threatens to delegitimize the election and really the entire system in the eyes of much of the citizenry. 

2) The Fed, as mentioned already. There was a law passed, but this was really an Article V-level transfer of power from the government to a nongovernmental organization led by the banks and the rich. It definitely would not have survived the amendment process, so they stole it. 

3) The New Deal. FDR had a significant amount of democratic legitimacy, but his efforts were unconstitutional -- as the Supreme Court determined several times. So, he ran the court packing scheme in order to (successfully) intimidate the Supreme Court into letting him do exactly what they'd said several times was unconstitutional. The biggest part of this power transfer was allowing Congress to delegate its lawmaking authority to the bureaucracy. That's how we got into the mess with ossification that we have today: it allowed for a vast administrative state of the kind that Max Weber was warning against at about the same time (see the Weber commentary on the sidebar). 

*4) The JFK Assassination. I am giving this one an asterisk and not counting it because the facts still aren't fully clear; however, it is widely believed to have been a coup by agents within the government. Was it? I don't know. 

4) The Coup against Nixon: The election of 1972 was a landslide in favor of President Nixon, who used it to finalize his end to the JFK/LBJ Vietnam conflict. The administrative state turned against him and worked with his opponents outside the government to set up a popular campaign to impeach him. His resignation was legal, but it resulted in a power transfer to agents of Wauk's "Uniparty" that allowed them to undo much of what they feared he was doing. 

5) The Obama-era "Iran Deal." Obama's government set up a series of fake NGOs that they then credentialed by having the White House recognize them and treat them as legitimate experts. The media was thereby taught to listen to them and re-report their 'findings' as if they were real experts. (This is not in dispute: Ben Rhodes, Obama's message guy for this 'echo chamber,' explained it all in an interview with the New Yorker after the fact.) With the appearance of strong NGO support and the media almost universally echoing it, Obama got away with inverting the treaty approval process required by the Constitution. Instead of a 2/3rds majority of the Senate voting to ratify the process, he managed to set things up so that a 2/3rds majority was required to reject his approach. As a consequence, he got his agreement and Iran got a lot of money as well as technical help on nuclear power.

6) The 2020 Election. Setting aside the parts of the controversy that are in dispute, the "fortification" efforts described to the press by participants already suffice to make the election unconstitutional because they weren't carried out by state or Federal legislatures as the Constitution requires. I would also add the courts' refusal to grant standing (most egregious when Texas sued, as the Constitution clearly grants the Supreme Court the authority to resolve disputes between states), so that no one could challenge the results; and the widespread and successful efforts to prevent audits in the affected states, and to disable similar inquiries where they could not be prevented.

There are some other candidates we might mention, but this list already suggests that this kind of coup is an ordinary feature of American politics. When power finds its heart's desire to be out of order with the Constitution, a way is found around the legitimate order and then is papered over. We live with the illusion that the Constitutional order has been maintained since the late 18th century, but in fact it has been fundamentally altered several times without lawful process.

Escape from Mordor

You all know the line about how one does not simply walk into Mordor. Well, today it’s flying out that’s not working. 

I did manage to get as far as Virginia, though that wasn’t easy either. The Metro train’s blue/orange/silver lines were down, cutting off both airports that way. The yellow line was still running to Reagan, but it was delayed inexplicably. I finally got to the airport, and even onto an earlier flight to try to dodge the storms, but it was delayed until it was too late. 

Ah, well. Getting home safe is the only thing that matters. If it takes a little longer, that’s not so bad. 

UPDATE: We made it to Charlotte. That was quite a ride. 

There was a tiny baby in arms on the row ahead of me, with her mother and father. She slept perfectly soundly through the roughest airplane ride I’ve ever had. Her mother said she expected the baby to go flying through the air at several points, but she slept quietly through all of it. 

UPDATE: Not going to make it tonight. We flew to Asheville but they turned us around due to fog once we got there. It’s just been a difficult day for travel. 

Back to Mordor

A short trip this time, but I’ll be back in DC until Friday evening. Light posting from the road. 

In what universe?

Not to dump on this single Gen Z-er, whose video went viral, because it seems that every generation finds the burdens of independent adult living a big splash of ice-cold water. But do you recall that it was difficult to find an entry-level job that paid enough to cover an apartment you didn't have to share with someone? Not only did I not manage to live alone for years after college, I never really did: I got by in a cheap shared commune-like house for many years, then moved out with my husband when we finally could swing a house mortgage together. That was in 1987, after I'd graduated from law school and had a solid paycheck, and he was going back to school to study engineering. We were 31 and 33 at that point.

Thinking back, I can barely recall even distant acquaintances who could afford to live alone immediately after college, unless their bills were being paid by wealthy parents. I knew a handful of married couples who pulled it off quite young.

I can't bring myself to be shocked that a single entry-level unskilled job won't support an independent household. I'm not even inclined to blame it on disastrous economic policies embraced by either party over the last 50 years. It's nothing but a juvenile pipedream for most people, and a strong hint that they need a better plan than to sign on at the nearest WalMart and sleepwalk through the working day.

I've got a teenager working for me now, walking my excessive dog population once a day for about an hour total. At first, he was predictably clueless about the concept of wages for hire. He showed a strong tendency not to show up for a variety of lame reasons. I had a heart-to-heart with him, though, and he's settled down nicely. He lives nearby and can bicycle here. He understands that the options for paid work are harshly limited for kids living in the middle of nowhere with no driver's license. He gets on well with my dogs, shows up 7 days a week on time, says "Yes, Ma'am" while making eye contact, and is losing that dreamy "why am I here?" affect. I have some hope he'll land a real job at some point and have the personal skills to keep it.

Related: Federal Involvement in the Infamous Riot

With the understanding that the journalist involved here has a vested interest in shocking stories, and the Congressman he's interviewing certainly must also have an angle, these claims are official given that they are being raised as a result of a Congressional investigation.

Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who has been investigating the Capitol riot, says that there were at least 200 undercover FBI assets embedded in the crowd, inside and outside of the Capitol Building..... 

FBI Director Wray has long refused to answer whether the FBI had assets dressed as Trump supporters at the Capitol that day.

One point that Higgins made was that it is highly improbable that civilians would know how to get around the Capitol without help from people who knew where they were going.

“There’s no way they can come in some random door that gets opened and then get their way directly to Statuary [Hall] or the House chamber or the Senate chamber. It’s just not possible,” Higgins told Carlson....

Higgins says the evidence points to FBI undercover agents who planted the seeds of a "radical occupation" of the Capitol online before Jan. 6.... the evidence suggests that the Capitol riot, which has been used as a pretext to incarcerate Trump supporters without trial and to even prevent Trump from being allowed on the ballot in various states, was a set-up.

“I’m following the evidence, and to my horror, it implicates our FBI at the highest level,” Higgins said.

The usual defense of entrapment as a tactic is that you couldn't entrap people who weren't at least somewhat open to committing the crime. If the crowd had been made up of people who would never consider rioting, committed to peaceful and lawful obedience at all times, even 200 instigators salted through the crowd would not be enough. To my mind police entrapment is always wrong, but that's their usual defense so it's fair to raise the point.

Likewise, Trump himself bears responsibility (link is to my post from that day) for having staged a rally so close to the counting action that was taking place. It doesn't require a brilliant mind to know that a riot was likely given that you concentrated so many of the aggrieved in one place, not that far away from where the votes were being counted. His poor judgment on that day is inexcusable even if the Feds were acting like complete scoundrels. 

That said, the most inexplicable thing about the whole event was the cascade failure of the security systems in place to prevent such things. From about a week after: 

One of the things I've been trying to piece together is how all the various security forces we have in place at the Capitol failed on 6 January. It's quite embarrassing, really: the Capitol Police alone have 2,000 men, the DC National Guard another thousand-plus battalion, and then there's the FBI, the Park Police, the Metro Police Department, the National Guard units from VA and MD that could be called with short notice, even the 3rd Infantry Regiment in Arlington (and the Marines not too far down the road in Quantico). 

We had plenty of guys who could have been there, and plenty of advance notice of a demonstration likely to spin out of control. Yet somehow, dudes with bison hats were wandering the halls of Congress. 

The simplicity of the explanation that the cascade failure was intended, and thus directed, is attractive compared to the nest of coincidences that would otherwise be required as explanators. It also explains why the FBI never found any suspects for the "pipe bombs" that were allegedly planted near party headquarters that day. I remember Jim Hanson -- former Green Beret -- and I looked over the photos and decided the 'bombs' pictured were probably mock-ups instead of real bombs anyway.

Now, the old saying that 'the simplest explanation is always best' -- which is itself a bastardization of Occam's Razor -- is not accurate. The true explanation is always best. Occam's Razor is a heuristic for gamblers, not a truth-identifying tool. The tangled-nest explanation of the cascade failure could be the true explanation: after all, we saw an even more complex cascade failure of our systems during the Afghanistan withdrawl the next year.

Still, a tool for gamblers does tend to identify high-probability bets. This one is worth looking into further, and keeping an open mind about, even if it is currently the fodder of hard right wing Congressmen and journalists. 

Fernandez on 2024's Election

Richard Fernandez (who long blogged under the handle "Wretchard") has been one of the military/political analysts I respect most for many years now. He writes on the mystery of why the Biden campaign has settled upon an attempt to outright delegitimize the election itself. As always his analysis is worth reading for itself, but I take two key points away:

1) A clean victory in an observably-fair 2024 election by the Establishment over Trump and his MAGA politics is the only thing that could actually do away with the challenge Trump and his supporters represent.

2) The pre-emptive attempt to destroy the only bridge to that outcome suggests that a final victory is not what is wanted. 

Fernandez then inquires into what they might be seeking instead.

I think the general consensus has been that the attempt to disquailfy Trump and his most loyal Congressional supporters from running, get him and them off the ballots in key states, and paint their supporters as 'the same exact [thing] as Nazis,' is just that Biden knows he can't win a fair contest. If (1) is already off the table, pursuing something else is the only thing to do. Margret Thatcher used to use the slogan TINA, standing for "There is No Alternative." 

Fernandez thinks it's not as simple as that. The Democratic machine might have pulled out a victory, even given the weights of Biden's evident age and an economy that is dragging, given that the media will reliably gaslight on their behalf. As the Washington Post reports today, the Republican hope to govern is afflicted by their infighting. There's no reason to believe that the Democrats can't win. 

Fernandez observes:

How does one explain the paradox of Biden destroying his one sure means of victory and opting for a course that will probably lead to prolonged and indecisive conflict? The obvious explanation is to observe that is what he always does. He seems to prefer stalemates and chaos over clearcut solution. Why does he frequently do this? The answer is simple. It creates opportunities that would not exist in a clear cut situation. Turning 2024 into neither and yet both a regular election and insurrection would knock a lot of power loose for the grabs and this is perhaps the point.... Recent political developments become less confusing when we relax the assumption that events are ultimately about America. Ambiguity is the enemy of constitutional democracy, but confusion is the friend of operators and dealers. Perhaps the correct paradigm is not to judge events through the prism of national interest but by the criteria of factional gain.

I take him to mean that, just as the Establishment prefers an eternal stalemate in Israel in pursuit of a 'two state solution' that never materializes, and preferreda eternal war in Afghanistan to either withdrawal or victory, and apparently an eternal war Ukraine to giving Ukraine what it would take to win, and eternal 'strategic ambiguity' on China and Taiwan to a resolution either way, here too they prefer the conflict. The point is not to vanquish the Trump/MAGA "insurgency" but to ensure it can never take power, especially because it makes sure it is formalized as the eternal opponent. 

As long as the structural levers can be wielded to be sure they stay in power -- whether changing the voting rules extra-Constitutionally by administrative actions or consent agreements with activist lawsuits, instituting unwatched mail-in "drop boxes," or a rejection of voter ID, or keeping opponents off the ballot by administrative or judicial magic -- it's better for them to have an opponent who is never beaten. They become the enemy in every Hollywood or Disney drama (as, one critic argues, they have been since the 1970s), every political speech, and every campaign. You can stop bothering with policies that help people, because the only thing you need to sell is keeping the dire evil enemy out of power forever. 

Fernandez suggests this is a "political bank-robbery already in progress." He is a keen observer and thinker, none of whom are right about everything but all of whom are worth considering.  Is he wrong?

The Feast of the Epiphany

Today is the final day of the Christmas feast, at least the twelve-day feast of historic fame. It marks the revelation of the Christ to the Magi, and thus symbolically to the whole non-Jewish world. 

Pragmatically this is the traditional day to take down Christmas decorations, which occupied much of my afternoon. I also shifted from feasting to fasting (in the worldly sense of those terms) after New Year’s Eve. We are eating a more sensible diet, and as always I’m observing Dry January. Now that the decorations are gone and things are barren for the winter, we can look forward to a cold, dark season — but one that ends in spring and new hope. 

Surprise! SECDEF Hospitalized

Readers of the Hall are old enough to remember many occasions when a President has been put under for a medical procedure, and the Vice President has been acting President for the day. It’s always been public knowledge, secure in the fact that American government had a well established bench of people who were trusted to take over if the top guy fell. 

Currently, the Secretary of Defense is just being released from a week long hospitalization that was kept secret. (Get well, Secretary Austin.) Military Reporters and Editors is protesting the secrecy as a violation of the Pentagon’s published rules on information sharing. It’s definitely out of order with standard practice, as their letter shows. 

I wonder if it is a result of the President’s own obvious frailty, combined with a generalized sense that the VP is a lightweight who can’t be trusted to take charge? Maybe the powers that be were terrified by the idea that the SECDEF was down too. Maybe they were afraid that, even with the President in place, that would have been too much of a vulnerability if it became clear to foreign powers. 

UPDATE: Apparently they didn’t tell the National Security Council, either. 

UPDATE: Or anyone. 

Liberty Bell 7

A little different, but well within specs. 

Tooling Around

Big ice storm coming through tonight, so I rode over to the clubhouse station to make sure things are in order. 

On the Importance of Prepositions

An opinion piece in today's Washington Post is titled, "I killed a deer in my bathroom." 

Now that sounds unsual! Deer are normally very circumspect around people, and while they might come into your yard in search of apples dropped from your apple tree, or a nutritous grass, they aren't likely to come into your house. I decided to read the piece, expecting perhaps one of those stories in which a deer thought killed by a car is placed somewhere like the trunk of a car, only to revive and need to be dispatched later. Perhaps he was planning to clean it in his shower, avoiding the chill of winter while being able to avail himself of the drain and the showerhead for easy cleanup? That would be insightful for a Washington Post guy.

It turns out that, no, the issue is that the editors decided to fudge the preposition to make the piece sound more interesting. What he really meant was that he had killed a deer from his bathroom, i.e., by shooting out the window. 

The piece is otherwise kind of interesting. It endorses hunting as a humane means of culling a deer herd that has -- he claims, and I'll just assume without evidence that he is right -- grown to 14 times what can be sustained. It's good citizenship, even good environmentalism and conservationism, for him to buy a rifle and take up hunting. That's a view that I would be happy to encourage, provided that it doesn't encourage the common misconception of the Second Amendment as a sort-of right-to-hunt amendment. 

Venison is also very healthy; I eat a lot of it myself. Last night I made a venison cube steak braise in a Chile Colarado sauce; for New Year's Eve, the venison steak pies that I like on that occasion. If he's correct that we have an overabundance of deer, maybe think about going and getting some yourselves. 

Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

I started reading The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius last night. Two years ago during January we read through the Enchiridion by Epictetus, who deeply influenced Aurelius' own thinking. In spite of that strong influence, I don't feel qualified to write a commentary on Marcus Aurelius' work in the way that I felt qualified to comment on the Greek's, whose own influences are well known to me. 

Aurelius' work is strongly conditioned by his Roman upbringing -- I suppose everyone knows that he was a Roman Emperor as well as a Stoic philosopher. It is immediately obvious to me, from the opening lines of the first book, that he is starting in a different place. 

Book One

From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.

From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character.

From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.

From my great-grandfather, not to have frequented public schools, and to have had good teachers at home, and to know that on such things a man should spend liberally.

From my governor.... 

From Diognetus.... 

From Rusticus.... 

From Apollonius I learned freedom of will and undeviating steadiness of purpose; and to look to nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason; and to be always the same, in sharp pains, on the occasion of the loss of a child, and in long illness; and to see clearly in a living example that the same man can be both most resolute and yielding, and not peevish in giving his instruction; and to have had before my eyes a man who clearly considered his experience and his skill in expounding philosophical principles as the smallest of his merits; and from him I learned how to receive from friends what are esteemed favours, without being either humbled by them or letting them pass unnoticed.

From Sextus....

This goes on for quite a while, each ancestor of blood or thought recognized and gratefully thanked for his heritage. There's nothing like this in Greek philosophy. Aristotle very often starts an inquiry by rounding up the opinions of the wise, but it is to explain them and then explain what is wrong with them. There's no point in a new enquiry if we already have the right answers, after all. Plato likewise uses his predecessors as a starting point for a new enquiry, with plenty of room to see how they were wrong as well as where they may have had ideas that are worthy of further exploration.

The Roman is aware of his heritage, his position in a tradition, and he is grateful to those who came before him for wise lessons. He still wants to explore the universal problems. He wants to talk about death, which comes to us all and washes away our positions and traditions and often even memory of them. He wants to talk about suffering, which comes even to Roman Emperors. Those are the real subjects of his meditations. Nevertheless, he begins with gratitude and acknowledgement, and a recognition of the wisdom of those who came before.