Eric The Blue

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and arts ambassador who died last week at the age of 101, could not be accused of having been born on third base and then acting like he hit a triple.* The circumstances of his very early life were so calamitous that certain facts of his nativity were unknown to him into his maturity—he knew his birthday was March 24, for example, but only that the year of his birth was either 1919 or 1920 (it was 1919). His father, an auctioneer in the suburbs of New York City, died right around the time Lawrence was born—the biographical sketch in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry says the elder Ferlinghetti died "while the boy was still small" but his New York Times obituary says the death occurred "before Lawrence was born." His mother was then admitted to a state mental hospital before Lawrence, the youngest of five boys, turned 2. Nothing that I have seen takes up the question of what became of the four older boys. Lawrence was taken in by a woman he called "Aunt Emily," though she seems to have been a more distant relative of his mother. Her full name was Emily Monsanto and she took Lawrence to France, where they lived from 1920 to 1924. She then returned to the New York area with 5-year-old Lawrence. At some point, either before Emily took him to France or after they had returned and she was looking for work, Lawrence lived in an orphanage. She eventually found work as a governess for an affluent family in Bronxville—the Anthology and the obit provide different names for this family. The next awful thing to happen is that Emily went insane. By this time, however, the Bronxville family had taken to young Lawrence and he remained with them, reading through the extensive home library and eventually enrolling, presumably on their dime, at the University of North Carolina, a choice inspired by his devotion to native North Carolinian Thomas Wolfe's autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel. He graduated with a BA in journalism just as the US was entering World War II. Ferlinghetti served in the navy and, after the war, attended graduate school at Columbia, for a master's degree, and the Sorbonne, in Paris, from which he received a doctorate in comparative literature. That's the first 31 years of a life that would last almost 71 more.

Ferlinghetti moved to San Francisco in 1951 and opened City Lights Books two years later. His book store soon became something like a salon for the Beat movement in literature, and its small press published poetry, that of Ferlinghetti and others, including Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1955. No more obscurities in the biographical record from this point forward, but the preexisting ones persist. One of Ferlinghetti's longer poems is called "Autobiography" but its self-mockery would seem to make it an unreliable guide to biographical fact. It's made largely of two- and three-line units, the last line an undercutting blow:

I thought I was Tom Sawyer
catching crayfish in the Bronx River. . . .

I looked homeward
and saw no angel.
I got caught stealing pencils
from the Five and Ten Cent store
the same month I made Eagle Scout. . . .

I landed in Normandy
in a rowboat that turned over. . . .

I hear America singing
in the Yellow Pages.

The text of the whole poem is here. Ferlinghetti himself (I think) reads the poem, here, as a photographic montage of images whirs by, with musical interludes. 

 

*Don't know whether it was original with him, but I'm familiar with this line because Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, of Iowa, applied it to President Geo. W. Bush: "He was born on third base and acts like he hit a triple." 

Public Service Announcement

I have insurance, so this seemed like a lot for a colonoscopy and an office visit. When I called, word salad but no satisfactory resolution. I asked whether it was common to pay about $300 out of pocket for a common, recommended cancer screening. He did not have an opinion about that. Next, I proceeded to appropriate a Jim Gaffigan joke, word-smithed to fit the situation: "I would never have consented to be violated in that fashion if I knew it was also going to cost me $300.” Total effing silence. Evidently not a Gaffigan fan. Maybe it was my delivery. 

We'd had enough of each other, so I called the insurance company for another twenty minutes of elevator music before a really helpful person came on the line. "It's common to receive two claims, one for a 'facilities charge' and the other for the practitioner's service," she explained. "In the case of your colonoscopy, we received a claim for the facilities charge, which we paid, but we never received a claim for the actual doctor bill. If we received such a claim, of course we'd cover it. Similarly with the office visit. No claim received for the doctor bill." Armed with this information, I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. Just my luck to talk to the same guy again! He still had dementia and ended up advising me to "contact the individual provider to straighten this out." I thought that's the activity I was currently engaged in! I guess it's my job to get different parts of their organization to communicate with each other so that I don't take it in the ass again? 

I reverted to a tactic that has sometimes worked for me in the past. I ignored the problem and hoped it would disappear. After a couple of weeks, I got an email from them. The new strategy had failed. I still owed the above impossible amount. In the interim, I had heard a story on NPR in which it was reported that, in America, it's rare to receive a medical bill that is both comprehensible and accurate. The former deficiency makes it hard to detect the latter deficiency. If consumers suspect something is wrong, they're almost certainly right. Yes, I had thought, but you need a sequel concerning the challenges consumers face when trying to explain to the submitter of the bill the errors in said bill. Anyway, yesterday I placed another call to 1-888-313-1492. It seems only this one guy works there! The sound of his voice reminded me of what a judge said about pornography*: beforehand, I would not have been able to describe it, but soon as I heard it I knew it was him. We started over. He talks with more people than I do and most likely only I realized we'd had the pleasure of being previously acquainted. I explained again my theory of the case, the "facilities charge" but not the "practitioner's charge," blah, blah, and this time, like a gift from above, he replied, "Ah, yes, I see what you mean, I will put those claims through and get this taken care of for you."

Possibly our first and second conversations occurred on his first day of flying solo on his new job? I feel like I made about $450 on one phone call and am wondering what to blow it on. I've heard of the sunk-cost fallacy, and that doesn't seem to apply, so maybe I do deserve about 30 boxes of cheap wine. Here's the thing about the cheap stuff: its alcohol content is the same. The end of this Public Service Announcement but here's Gaffigan:

* “I can’t define ‘pornography,’ but I know it when I see it.”

 

 

Browsing and driving

 

If you have a couple spare hours, you might find the above video as engrossing as I did. Last September, Jason Ravnsborg, South Dakota's attorney general, attended a Republican party event at the town of Redfield. He was driving back to his home in Pierre, 100 miles to the west, when shortly before 10:30 p.m. his car struck and killed a man walking on the shoulder of the state highway about a mile west of the town of Highmore. Ravnsborg called 9-1-1 and the local sheriff was dispatched. The sheriff appears not to have exhibited much curiosity. He believed Ravnsborg’s story about having hit something, "probably a deer," and gave him his own car to finish his drive to Pierre. Next morning, Ravnsborg "discovered" the dead body while returning the car to the sheriff.

Since Ravnsborg is the attorney general of South Dakota, North Dakota officials assisted with the investigation. The video is the North Dakota guys' second interview with Ravnsborg, after they'd been able to determine that his story about what had happened was a tissue of lies. He'd actually been reading on his phone conservative news sites while speeding along the highway, and he killed the pedestrian when his car veered onto the shoulder. A reconstruction of the accident and certain items of evidence, preeminently the fact that the victim's eyeglasses were found inside Ravnsborg’s car, make it pretty hard to believe he thought he'd hit a deer.

I feel like if it had been me instead of the South Dakota attorney general, the interview would have ended with a recitation of my Miranda rights. Maybe not: I guess in South Dakota impairment, like from alcohol, is a necessary element of criminal vehicular homicide, and Ravnsborg was only distracted and careless (also illegal, of course). It's a crime to lie to the FBI but these guys are only the Dogberry of North Dakota. Perhaps for that reason, I keep thinking of the movie Fargo: the North Dakota investigators, especially the one sitting across from Ravnsborg,  have Marge Gunderson's accents and display also her brand of low-key job proficiency. Before it's over, the state attorney general resembles poor hapless Jerry Lundegaard. 

Friends, especially if you did it, do not talk to the cops without a lawyer, even if you are a lawyer yourself and have a dim view of the intelligence of law enforcement officials.  It's their line of work and there's probably stuff you don't understand. One of the interview's poignant moments occurs when it's revealed that after Ravnsborg had turned over his phones, but before this interview, he had questioned some of his own employees about what might be revealed from a forensic examination of a cell phone. The answer is: enough so that the cops will figure out what article from what right-wing news site you were reading when you ran a guy over, killing him.

Bad party

Eisenhower was president when I was born, and Trump is the most recent Republican president. Taking those two as bookends, it's tempting to conclude that the long, slow descent of the Republican party is the big political story of my lifetime. But of course Ike and Trump are just two data points. Joe McCarthy was contemporaneous with Ike, and his reputation has taken up permanent residence in the same shantytown for which Trump's is headed. Figures like Reagan, Bush the Elder, and John McCain don't land nicely on the downward sloping line, but, unless we tend to forget the buffoons of yesteryear, it does seem like the clown car has been picking up more and more passengers. Heck, McCain put Sarah Palin, the half-term and half-witted Alaskan governor, on the national ticket: she was below the sinking line back then, a herald as opposed to a lagging indicator. 

On the other hand, maybe I see a pattern when, as ever, it's really just one thing after another and the orderly human mind placing accent marks, inventing a story out of the chaos. 

Whatever the back story, though, a long slide or a lurch into the ditch, the Republican party is in a bad place. Its members can still win elections in much of the country, but I have in mind the merits of the case—the party's status as a governing entity and not just a loose affiliation of trollers eager to own the libz. It's perfect that in 2020 the Republicans declined to draft and adopt a party platform. On health care, for example, a matter of urgent importance to millions of people: what are their ideas? what do they want to do? what reforms would they pursue in order to cover more people at an acceptable cost? Trump campaigned on repealing Obamacare and replacing it with "something terrific." That's not my satire, it's literally what he said, over and over again. You might think that a candidate for the presidency would feel obliged to give a few details of the "something terrific" but no, wrong. Then he won. He was president for four years and he never divulged the details of "something terrific." (He also did not repeal Obamacare.) He had nothing. "Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated," he said, indulging himself in more unconscious self-satire. Maybe he hoped to adopt as his own a "Republican plan" that was presumably half formulated and out there, somewhere, maybe in the head of a noted "policy wonk" like the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. If so, that was a mistake! Nobody had anything except lurid, fanciful critiques of Obamacare. I don't count the small-ball stuff they sometimes talk about, Health Savings Accounts and the like. Save $25 per month, tax-advantaged, so there is no problem when one day you need surgery and chemotherapy! Even they understand they're beclowning themselves, which may explain why they insist climate change is a hoax: it's the needed excuse to have no plan, so that you're not tempted to vocalize your laughably deficient ones. 

Well, don't bother them, it’s taking all their energy to figure out how to keep so many people from voting! 

She's succumbed to grade inflation: C-

I guess before a game last week the basketball team at East Tennessee State knelt during the playing of our National Anthem. All 27 Republican members of the State Senate therefore signed a letter that was sent to the presidents and chancellors of all the public universities in the state. Here it is, with the italicized comments of an imagined "adjunct professor" inserted. I think she teaches an introductory course in English composition, or American Studies, or some such thing that will likely get cut from the curriculum once the authors/signees have enacted their cuts to public education. Her salary is $2150/mo. for nine months.

In light of recent news reports, we want to address the issue of our student athletes kneeling during the National Anthem prior to sports competitions. Wordy. What is the purpose of the introductory clause? It seems like the ruffling of feathers before the bird begins preening, a show called forth by "news reports." The National Anthem is a symbol of pride for America. I recognize the English words but what does this sentence mean? It lifts our spirit toward the ideals upon which our great country was founded: that all are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Ah, the plumage is on full display! Written during the Battle of Baltimore, the National Anthem represents not only the freedoms we enjoy as Americans but the ultimate sacrifice paid by many in order for us to enjoy those freedoms. Does the "liberty" referred to in the last sentence, and the enjoyed "freedoms" in this one, include the freedom to have a less exalted view of the National Anthem? The liberty to protest peacefully while it's being played?

During athletic competitions, our student athletes represent not only themselves but also our universities and all the citizens of this state, many of whom view this form of protest as offensive and disrespectful to the very thing our National Anthem represents. You are overworking the verb "represents" and not-only-but-also constructions. You are correct, however, about people disagreeing. If they didn't, there would be no need for the First Amendment. While we recognize that our student athletes may express their own views on a variety of issues in their personal time, we do not condone any form of protest that could be viewed as disrespectful to our nation or flag while they are representing our state universities. Say more about your choice of "condone." Would it be more honest to state that you will not permit expressions you disagree with or find offensive? If "condone" means something less that that, the sentence becomes tautological: you're asserting that you disapprove of that which you disapprove. When they don the uniform of a Tennessee university, they step out of their personal roles and into the role of an ambassador for our state. Previously you said that "our student athletes represent not only themselves but also our universities and all the citizens of this state." Now you say that student athletes "step out of their personal roles." Which is it? And does it matter to the First Amendment what you are wearing? We expect all those who walk onto the field of play representing our universities to also walk onto the field of play to show respect for our National Anthem. So awkward I had to check three times to persuade myself I had transcribed it correctly. Hardly anyone would agree with what I take to be a more straightforward statement of your apparent view: "To play ball for Tennessee, you must not express disagreement with us regarding what does or doesn't deserve respect." 

To address this issue, we encourage each of you to adopt policies within your respective athletic departments to prohibit any such actions moving forward. Why limit the proposed prohibition to athletic departments? I don't see why the logic of your argument wouldn't apply to all students and faculty within the state university system. We view this as a teachable moment in which administrators may listen to concerns from students but also exercise leadership in stating unequivocally what the National Anthem means to this nation and explain proper times, places, and manners for expressing protest. I note yet another but-also construction but at least you're finally making clear your distaste for the First Amendment: students can protest, but we will say when, where, and in what manner! While we work together to make Tennessee a better place for all our citizens, let's not focus on what divides us but on what unites us, which is being an American. Ungrammatical pablum.

Sincerely, [that’s what I was afraid of]

&c

Charles Dickens and David Copperfield

I baked a pie, surprising my roommates, but one thing I'm not going to do during COVID is finish reading the novels of Dickens. I started David Copperfield last fall, and am coming to the end just now. My edition is 826 pages, so 8.26 pages a day for a hundred days would accomplish the task, though in my case I left off once for maybe a month before starting up again. In my life, I've been working backward through his oeuvre, more or less: the remaining unread novels include all the immense tomes from early in his career—Dombey and Son, Martin Chuzzlewit, Barnaby Rudge, The Old Curiosity Shop, others, he died at 57 and I'd like to know the ratio of words published to adult days lived—and these are going to remain forever unread by me. The novels widely regarded as his best are dull enough. 

Now that I'm toward the end of David Copperfield, and the hero is married with marital problems, my interest is trending upward. I guess grown-up problems are more interesting to me than the exploitation of defenseless, pre-teen orphans? A poor advertisement for me, no doubt, but I'm pleading guilty. David's entire relationship with his wife, Dora, from their first meeting onward, is hazy to me. You're reading along, suddenly he's in love with this new character, and I anyway cannot discern why. She's the daughter of his boss, but if it's a matter of social climbing, he keeps that from both himself and the reader (he's the narrator). Though, by the lights of this reader, it might still be so, since he keeps to himself whatever the reason is. His aunt sees trouble ahead, which is some part of why the reader does, too, but a bit of a tangled web arises from the fact—I think it's a fact—that the reader foresees trouble even though the narrator is the source of all the reader's information, and the narrator does not himself foresee trouble till he's in it. 

David Copperfield is Dickens' most autobiographical novel. Before he began it, he'd been at work on a straight autobiography, and apparently fairly long stretches of the novel are lifted directly from the nonfictional draft with only names changed. This suggests a possible reason for the haziness of the Dora sections. The wife with whom Dickens was unhappy was very much his wife and anyone who knew him well would understand that the novel was autobiographical. Into how much detail could he go? Along this line, another reason the marriage to Dora perplexes readers like me is that there's another character, Agnes, whom the narrator idealizes, working overtime to persuade the reader of her human excellence, without ever forming any matrimonial ambitions. Why, then, the silly, empty-headed Dora? In the novel, Dora dies, and David marries Agnes, the woman he should always have been with. Seven years after the publication of David Copperfield, Dickens deserted his wife—divorce was not an option in Victorian England—and took up with the actress Ellen Ternan, with whom he lived for the last 13 years of his life. The novel did not follow the author's life in every respect! 

Domestic

I think I'm eating better during COVID, and not only because I get more takeout. This is a pic of my first pie, baked today. Apple. Homemade, though, unlike grandma's, the crusts were not made with lard and rolled out with a rolling pin on my kitchen counter: baking aisle at Cub. I think maybe they weren't quite big enough for my 9.5 inch pie plate? The bottom one didn't extend above the edge of the plate and it was hard to make the top one meet it and get them fluted together—if that's the word. A bit of an esthetic failure, but my girls ate it lustily, and, when I asked them what kind I should try next, told me to make apple again. They may harbor doubts about my culinary range. If he made something half decent, best to stick with it.

Fourth grader (Claire) going back to school tomorrow. First time since last March. So excited she took a shower without being asked. Seventh grader (Lydia) goes up to shower after fourth grader is done and soon can be heard yelling.

Lydia: Claire, did you use four towels?

Claire (bored): Yeah.

Lydia: JESUS!

Later, eating pie, Lydia announces what she considers to be "possibly" her two best traits: "I'm smart and I have nice hair." Claire replies immediately, "You do have nice hair." 

Not going

I'm not planning to attend—because I'm single, and $10,600 seems like a lot for just one meal. But I have been watching news. Apparently half of Texas is under an advisory not to drink the tap water without first boiling it. Which amuses Texans since

a. they can't get water from their taps; and

b. if they could, they couldn't boil it.

Their governor explains that the Green New Deal is to blame. Sir, the Green New Deal hasn't been enacted. The system that's failed is the system you have. You're the fucking governor. What else do you need explained to you? JFC. 

Also, Ted Cruz is a sack o' shit, a trait he shares with every name known to me in the above invitation, to say nothing of the unnamed host, the Lord of Mar-a-Lago. Over and out.

 

Re Marlowe and his contemporary

I've been reading up on Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan dramatist I referred to the other day (because a line from one of his plays gave Hemingway the title for "In Another Country"), and I see that a correction is in order: I said that Marlowe was murdered when he was 30, but actually he was 29. I think he gets the silver medal in English literature's "What Might He Have Achieved" competition, the gold going to the poet John Keats, who died, of tuberculosis, in 1821 at the age of 25. 

The circumstances around Marlowe's death are a topic of intrigue. According to Hallett Smith, author of the headnote to the section on Marlowe in The Norton Anthology, the dramatist was killed on May 30, 1593, at a London tavern, over a dispute about the bill. The method was stabbing with a dagger. It's possible for a Law and Order fan to imagine a jaded 16th-century London homicide detective debating with himself whether there might be more to the story. On the one hand, your work experience has impressed on you the sorry drab circumstances that can end in homicide. A person might very well be murdered over a dispute about a bar tab, especially considering the effects of alcohol on inhibition and judgment. But Marlowe was a notorious figure whose sudden death in a bar fight might attract suspicion—and it has attracted suspicion. Smith's headnote includes the following information:

From the time of his first great success, when he was 23 [Smith refers to the first production of the play Tamburlaine], Marlowe had only six years to live. They were not calm years. In 1589 he was involved in a brawl with one William Bradley, in which the poet Thomas Watson intervened and killed Bradley. Both poets were jailed, but Watson got off on a plea of self-defense and Marlowe was released. In 1591 Marlowe was living in London with the playwright Thomas Kyd, who later gave information to the Privy Council accusing Marlowe of atheism and treason.

In an essay called "Marlowe's Damnations," the poet and critic John Berryman energetically amplifies:

Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apart, only of Christopher Marlowe among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist's life and his work, which interest an increasing number of readers in this century, and the existence of which is denied only by very young persons or writers whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux ["so much the worse for them"—French phrases, British spellings: you'd never guess Berryman was born in Oklahoma]. Marlowe was a professional secret agent, a notorious unbeliever, a manifest homosexual, cruel, quarrelsome, and perhaps murderous, his habitual associates scoundrels and traitors. . . .

Let us take both the atheism and the homosexuality seriously, because Marlowe did: he was missionary about both and he could have been burned for either. As William Empson has remarked, he was lucky to be murdered before he was burned.

Thus a cottage industry of criminal theories. He was murdered by the Church. He was murdered by a double-crossed spy. He was murdered by a double-crossed gay lover. He was murdered by the Privy Council, which was Queen Elizabeth's version of the FBI. It's wild that all these are defensible, though only one could be true, and it's also possible that a barroom fight was just a barroom fight. In his dramatic works, Marlowe's theme of themes is the transgressive pursuit of forbidden things. It's not surprising, for example, that one of his plays is a version of the Faust legend and that, in his hand, the tale is a parable of intellectual history: the medieval view that the purpose of human life is to work out one's religious salvation is contrasted with the desire—the lust—to find things out, to get knowledge. 

He had been born at Canterbury in February, 1564, and was therefore older than Shakespeare by two months, a circumstance that has resulted in Marlowe being often compared to the GOAT. This hasn't necessarily worked to Marlowe's disadvantage. For example, in one of Shakespeare's best known sonnets, the 29th, the speaker acknowledges having "desir[ed] this man's art and that man's scope," which has caused some to speculate that Shakespeare envied Marlowe's art and scope. (Because who else could possibly have aroused his jealousy?) Smith states that Shakespeare would "scarcely be known today" had he died at the same age as Marlowe. Investigating this claim, I discover that, by the best estimate of scholarship, only four of Shakespeare's extant plays clearly belong to 1593, the year he turned 29, or before. These are the first, second, and third parts of Henry VI and Richard III—a linked series of English history plays about strife between the Houses of York and Lancaster. The comedies Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and Love's Labour's Lost all belong to his 30th year, give or take a year. From what we can tell, Shakespeare's 20s were devoted to acquiring practical work experience in the London theatre world. At first, the principal vehicle was acting, and he was in his late 20s before writing plays supplanted acting in them as a career path. He would have known Marlowe, or at least been familiar with his work, and you don't have to think the man two months his senior is lurking in the 29th sonnet to have fun wondering what he thought about him. The two were in many ways opposites. Shakespeare seems to have possessed an essentially conservative temperament, and, though it's easy to see that he had knowledge of drink, drunks, and alcoholic dissipation, he was himself a poor candidate for getting stabbed in a tavern—and, indeed, he did not.  He was also one of the world's preeminent autodidacts, whereas Marlowe spent six years on scholarship at Cambridge. Berryman points out that Marlowe's plays are full of his classical education, and I identified what I take to be his "theme of themes." Such notions suggest the limits of his art and scope. It's possible to detect his obsessions in his work. Shakespeare's output is too variegated for that. No one speaks of Shakespeare's obsessions.

Wayne Glanton

The video is about Wayne Glanton, my next door neighbor for about 10 years starting in 2007. I've occasionally written about him, like here. I'm not surprised he talks about Wheelock Whitney in the video!

Wayne was born in 1922, and moved into an assisted living place a couple years after his wife, Clo, died in January, 2015. I hadn't thought about him for awhile and, while typing his name into Google, was half expecting the first return to be his obituary. It's not been a good year for 98-year-olds living in congregate care settings. But, no obit, and better yet this really nice video about him—take a few minutes and watch it, he's quite a guy, and the history is interesting, too.

Symmetry

There is a symmetry to the current political divide in the US. In the last election, Biden and Trump both won 25 states. Also, there are 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans in the Senate. Since each state has two senators, the symmetry would be perfected if the 50 Democratic senators were all from the 25 Biden states and the 50 Republican senators were all from the 25 Trump states. That isn't the case, but it's close. The 25 states Biden won are represented by 47 Democratic senators and 3 Republicans. The 25 states Trump won are represented by 47 Republican senators and 3 Democrats. The Republican exceptions are Senators Toomey (Pennsylvania), Johnson (Wisconsin), and Collins (Maine). The Democratic exceptions are Senators Manchin (West Virginia), Tester (Montana), and Brown (Ohio). The three Democrats may be more doomed than the three Republicans, since Trump won West Virginia (landslide), Montana (smaller landslide), and Ohio (comfortably), while Biden's margins in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Maine were narrow. But in the short term the Republicans are the imperiled ones. Democrats Manchin, Tester, and Brown were all re-elected in 2018, so their terms are not up until 2024. But the Republican seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania will be on the ballot in 2022. Toomey has announced his retirement, which means there will be no incumbent in the Pennsylvania race. No doubt he wants to spend more time with his family, but it's also possible that he's concluded he's unlikely to win. Even so, he'd probably have a better chance than the Republican who ends up replacing him on the ballot. Johnson, of Wisconsin, is all-in on Trump and has covered himself with ignominy since the election, most recently by arguing that the Jan. 6 insurrection wasn't an insurrection—baseball bats, gallows, and handcuffs, sure, but not enough shots fired, and a modest body count of 5 at the US Capitol. What's the big deal?

There are an odd number of seats (435) in the House of Representatives, so an even split, assuming "full occupancy," is impossible. The current partisan breakdown is 221 Democrats and 211 Republicans with 3 vacancies, which is about as close to 50-50 as you'd expect if you flipped a coin 435 times. On account of the metropolitan-rural divide, augmented by gerrymandering, 435 coin flips is an inapt analogy: most congressional districts are either navy blue or red as a MAGA cap. But, above ground level, the point stands. The navy blue districts are about equal in number to the crimson ones, and the leftovers are closely divided, too. 

How long is this balance apt to persist? I keep arguing that it's actually artificial, a mirage that arises from our penchant for drawing circles of different sizes around people before counting their votes. Biden and Trump may have won 25 states each but Biden won 7 million more votes, which worked out to a margin of 4.5 percent—close, but not that close. Nevertheless, he almost lost in the electoral college, where a shift of fewer than 50,000 votes in three states (and the metro of Omaha, Nebraska) would have sufficed to "re-elect" Trump. While there are an equal number of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate, the 50 Democrats represent more than 55 percent of Americans. (Corollary: the 50 Republicans represent less than 45 percent of us.) I keep whining that this is unfair and undemocratic, which seems to me undeniable. Consider the Supreme Court. When there's a vacancy, the president nominates someone, and the Senate, acting as a check on the president's authority, votes to confirm or reject the nominee. Trump, having been outpolled by Hillary Clinton, made three nominations, all of which were confirmed by a Senate in which Republicans were in the majority despite representing a minority of Americans. By their votes, people indicated they did not want Trump justices, but that's what we got. I'd point out that the decisions of the Supreme Court do not wax and wane as one travels from state to state. Only the weight of a ballot changes from state to state.

But I'm beginning to think there is a downside in this for Republicans, too. They haven't experienced the discipline imposed by the necessity of getting to 50 percent. They might have lost the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 presidential elections, but they've won 3 of the 8, and gerrymandering and the undemocratic Senate have turbocharged the boost supplied by the electoral college. Why change course? Their access to power hasn't been blocked by the failure to persuade a majority. Again, look at the Supreme Court. But when there are no electoral consequences for recklessness you eventually get a figure like Trump. He's never even tried to get to 50 percent. Instead, he tries to overturn elections. He's been defeated and disgraced. The Republican in the land now holding the highest elected office has as much as said that Trump belongs in prison. There's a clear rift in the party, which in four years has lost Presidency, House, and Senate. Yet Trump is still their guy! It's as if they've gotten so used to not having to change course that they no longer can. Lifelong Republicans are worried that the party could fracture into a Trump faction and a remnant of non-hooligans. "You'll get tired of winning," Trump once promised them. 

American stories: Hemingway's "In Another Country"

 

The title is taken from a play, The Jew of Malta, by the Elizabethan dramatist Christopher Marlowe, who is best known for savagery and nihilism (and for having been murdered when he was 30). A Jew, Barabbas, is being tried before a panel of Christian clerics when he anticipates a question:

FRIAR BARNARDINE
Thou hast committed—

BARABBAS
Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

The story will end with a somewhat less cynical expression about a deceased woman, but we might start by observing that the phrase "in another country" is (trivially) apt in the sense that the narrator, an American, is in Milan, Italy, recuperating from a war wound, and (nontrivially) apt in a sense relating to a more figurative geography. To attend their therapeutic sessions, the narrator and the other convalescing soldiers must cross a bridge spanning a canal, on the other side of which the hospital rises. The older part of the hospital is architecturally "very beautiful" but the soldiers get their therapy in "new brick pavilions" that, we know without being told, have been thrown up to meet the need arising from the carnage of war. The narration lays a peculiar stress on the bridge crossing to get to the hospital. It's in a different district, across a boundary, "in another country" to which the casualties travel. 

The therapy is a new technology that receives its first mention in the sentence about the hospital campus:

Beyond the old hospital were the new brick pavilions, and there we met every afternoon and were all very polite and interested in what was the matter, and sat in the machines that were to make so much difference.

Polite and interested while understanding that the official good cheer and optimism is wishful thinking, or a lie: that's the implication. In case the reader misses the resigned bitterness, the narrator provides the following account of his experience with the machine that was to "make so much difference":

My knee did not bend and the leg dropped straight from the knee to the ankle without a calf, and the machine was to bend the knee and make it move as in riding a tricycle. But it did not bend yet, and instead the machine lurched when it came to the bending part. The doctor said: "That will all pass. You are a fortunate young man. You will play football again like a champion."

No, it won't pass. The narrator isn't fortunate. Playing football was for the world that existed before the brick pavilions and these useless therapies. That's what the narrator understands but, maintaining a certain sense of decorum, does not state outright. The "geography" of the story refers to a region of the mind or spirit. The narrator's experience of life, especially of war, has exiled him from the land of respectable, uplifting views.

This theme is variously developed, considering that the story is very brief—less than 4 pages in this online  pdf. The machines are one lie. Another is the medals that the soldiers have been awarded. The narrator has medals since he'd been wounded, the wound being in his view a mere accident: he might have escaped injury, or he could have been killed, but it happened that he was wounded, so he has medals and commendations stating, "with the adjectives removed, that I had been given the medals because I was an American." That is his experience; here is someone else's:

Another boy who walked with us sometimes and made us five wore a black silk handkerchief across his face because he had no nose then and his face was to be rebuilt. He had gone out to the front from the military academy and been wounded within an hour after he had gone into the front line for the first time. They rebuilt his face, but he came from a very old family and they could never get the nose exactly right. He went to South America and worked in a bank. 

Another accident, a disfiguring wound, a bitter joke, the way in which the flatness of the details that are divulged tend to undercut notions of honor, valor, glory: "He went to South America and worked in a bank."

The story ends with an episode relating to another of the patients, an Italian major with a withered hand. Being older and from Milan, he is apart from the other soldiers, but the narrator speaks with him when he comes regularly for his treatments. Though an Italian, the major resides in the same figurative country as the other soldiers—the first mention of him, before he steps forward at the end, is his half humorous, half mocking contribution to the narrator's conversation with the optimistic doctor: "And will I too play football, captain-doctor?" He knows the machines won't change anything, but, like the others, goes along with the prescribed regimen, and he and the narrator speak Italian together, the major giving lessons in grammar after the narrator says that Italian seems the easiest of languages. The story till now has been all decorum on the surface, cynicism and despair just below. Then one day the decorous major blows up. He pronounces the machines "idiotic." He calls the narrator an "impossible disgrace" for his grammatical mistakes. He somewhat oddly asks the narrator whether he plans to marry, insisting, "Speak grammatically!" When the narrator says he hopes to marry, the major explodes with anger. He jerks his hand out of a machine, tells the attendant to "turn this damned thing off." He is ushered away briefly and, returning, apologizes to the narrator for his outburst, explaining that his wife has just died. Then:

He stood there biting his lower lip. "It is very difficult," he said. "I cannot resign myself." 

He looked straight past me and out through the window. Then he began to cry. "I am utterly unable to resign myself," he said and choked. And then crying, his head up looking at nothing, carrying himself straight and soldierly, with tears on both his cheeks and biting his lips, he walked past the machines and out the door. 

"I cannot resign myself. . . . I am utterly unable to resign myself." I have mentioned before this "trick" Hemingway has of achieving an elevated effect by pretending to translate speech in one language into English that he can then make sound like the King James Bible (since it's a translation, possibly wooden or literal, rather than the actual words spoken). Maybe he was too fond of the trick but I think it worked this time. Part of the success must be that all the soldiers seem "resigned," and the major, facing a catastrophe unrelated to war—the scope in this very short story is widening—suggests that he regards "resignation" as an ideal that he has in this instance failed to attain. But he recovers himself to make a "soldierly" exit. 

There is one more paragraph describing how the major stayed away for three days before returning for more useless treatments. In those three days the doctor has filled the walls with framed photographs of functioning limbs supposedly healed by the new machines. The story ends:

In front of the machine the major used were three photographs of hands like his that were completely restored. I do not know where the doctor got them. I always understood we were the first to use the machines. The photographs did not make much difference to the major because he only looked out of the window. 

Some of Hemingway's stories are unscreamed screams. In this one, the scream comes out and is then stuffed. 

Morning after

The Dems are taking a lot of criticism from their voters for calling for a witness, winning the vote, and then, having won the vote they demanded, negotiating away their win and settling for the witness's statement to be entered into the record. Someone said that it's as if they don't like the feel of their boot on the neck of their foe. Being unburdened by a legal education, it's possible that I fail to comprehend the evident magical  powers of testimony given under oath, but everyone knows what the witness was going to say, right? So why should it change anything when she says it? No votes were going to change. Everyone already knows Trump shot someone in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue. More than 40 Republican senators don't care. 

If the goal was not to convict, but to demonstrate to the country that the Republican party is morally bankrupt—well, the country already knows that too, unless it never will.

I will give credit where it's due, and good for the seven Republicans who voted to convict, but perhaps their single most defining characteristic is distance from Republican voters. Burr and Toomey are retiring. Sasse, Collins, and Cassidy were all reelected last year and so are not up again until 2026. Romney’s term ends in 2024 and Trump is not popular in his state, Utah. The exception is Murkowski, whose term is up in 2022, and, of course, there is already talk that she will be challenged, perhaps by Sarah Palin, in the Republican primary. 

It's impossible to be too cynical about Mitch McConnell. His speech lambasting Trump five minutes after he voted for acquittal was, for him, like a two-putt par on the PGA tour. When he finally said "but," what followed was the notion that a president who's been impeached may not be tried and convicted if he's no longer in office. He didn't mention that he's the one who put off the trial till after Inauguration Day! But  absurdity abounds: in the world according to Mitch, a corrupt official who'd been impeached could wait for his trial to start and, if prospects looked dim, forestall conviction by resigning before the vote was taken.  Maybe he thinks the Constitution was written by Sarah Palin. 

Only seven Republicans voted to convict a president who watched with pleasure on TV as his supporters ransacked the Capitol. "Well, Kevin," the president told his own party's congressional leader, who in a panicked phone call was begging him to call off his mob while the attack was in progress, "I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are." It takes ten Republican votes to end a filibuster. I wonder whether the evidence in the impeachment case against Trump, and the fact that only seven Republicans voted for conviction, has persuaded any Democrats that nothing good can come out of the Senate unless they nix the filibuster.  

Watching TV (updated through the afternoon)

Lol, they are playing clips of Trump proclaiming himself the law-and-order candidate to rebut the charge that he incited a riot. Your honor, I'm charged with a crime, but I have cut commercials and given speeches critical of crime. Plainly not guilty!

Now he's talking about the impeachment being "constitutional cancel culture." In the next breath, he says it's time to retire partisan talking points. Defendant urges prosecutors, "Back off, let's heal!"

They have 16 hours to make their defense. They say they will use just 3 or 4. And it now appears that they will devote half of that to establishing that Democrats have frequently urged their supporters to "fight." Might have to take more time if they were interested in context. Telling a man you're going to "kill" him may or may not be a threat. 

Not sure what the purpose of this footage is. Impeachment managers will stipulate to Nancy Pelosi having aged 15 years since 2005.

He says the argument he's about to make is not "whataboutism" so get ready for "What about?"

Called it.

Saying that the other side hates Trump doesn't prove he isn't hate-worthy.  Perhaps the reason he's been impeached twice is that he keeps committing impeachable offenses. 

They’re taking a short break and live TV can be a bitch. Static electricity is making that lady's skirt somewhat shorter than the one she bought at the store. 

This van der Veen guy is now praising himself for possessing the requisite courage to defend Trump. Says his family's livelihood will be imperiled. Sean Hannity disagrees, but it's got nothing to do with the issue at hand. 

"The House managers selectively edited our client’s January 6 speech. Let me tell you over and over again about the one time in the speech that he pronounced the word 'peaceful.'" 

Lunch time. This guy isn't going to engage with the evidence against his client but he does raise for me the question of whether to type Michael Van der Veen or Michael van der Veen. I guess he sued Trump last year. 

I say he's not going to engage with the evidence against Trump. I don't mean to suggest that Trump's lawyers have to do that in order to secure the result they seek. They were meeting with jurors last night about "the status of the case." I think an acquittal is a distinct possibility!

I heard over the sound of the microwave Mr Judicial Thinking Guy lecturing on the definition of "insurrectionist." He then said that Trump's "real supporters" understand that he's a law-and-order champion—as opposed, presumably, to the unreal ones who feel strongly enough about him to travel to Washington to commit real crimes on his behalf.

He must be smart though because he's got some Latin phrases to unfurl. The Latin means, "If the House managers did not persuade you of something, then you can be sure their whole case is bunk, including the parts we're not going to try to rebut." 

I like how the clips of Democrats talking have clangy, threatening music dubbed in, like the parking ramp scene in a cops-and-robbers thriller. It's okay, however, because the Trump team had previously complained about the other side "doctoring evidence."

Not sure he's smart enough to know that he's conflating impeachable offenses with violations of the criminal law. 

For some reason, he's talking about Trump's phone call suborning election fraud in Georgia. He refers to the Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, as Ben Roethlisberger, who is the Steelers' quarterback.

The defense rests. I don't think they took 3 hours, and more than one hour was off-point video montages, which suggests to me they were impressed with the other side's case: "Their video evidence was highly effective and we must respond in kind!"

I guess the next stage will be questions from the senators directed to the House managers and Trump's defense team. 

Ah, Lindsey Graham has a question for the defense lawyers with whom he was meeting last night. Possibly the attack on the Capitol was not the only thing pre-planned!

So far, the questions have been from Democrats to the House managers or from Republicans to the defense team. Only questions to the other side can possibly be probative. The others are softballs, or even rehearsed: asked and answered off stage beforehand, then performed on TV.

Yikes, a question from Collins and Murkowski, two moderate Republicans, both of whom voted for acquittal in the first impeachment trial, asks the defense what time Trump first learned of the breach at the Capitol, what he did to stop it, and what time those steps were taken. The answer—not kidding—is that they don't know, and that it's the other side's fault they don't know.

Predictably, Sen. Merkley, a Democrat, [or maybe it was Sen. Markey, who is also a Democrat] repeats the question of Collins and Murkowski. I thought it was directed to the defense, but no one comes to the lectern to answer. Finally one of the House managers, Stacey Plaskett, walks to the microphone and says the defense doesn't want to talk about what Trump might have done to end the violence. 

Sen. Romney asks the defense whether, at the time Trump sent a disparaging tweet—Romney's phrase—regarding VP Pence, he (Trump) knew that Pence had been evacuated from the Capitol. The answer is at first an emphatic No (which seems highly unlikely) and then slides into "there is nothing in the record to prove that he did." 

A speculative question from a group of Republican senators regarding the constitutionality of impeaching a former official reminds me that the defense did not make much of this point, which is a little surprising, inasmuch as it is the "off ramp" they are said to be looking for: we don't have to hear the case against Trump, because we shouldn't even be here. But the whole issue is bogus. Trump was impeached by the House while he was president. Constitution says Senate has the sole power to try all impeachments. By the textual interpretation favored by conservatives, "all" means all. Moreover, the trial could have occurred while Trump was president, but was delayed by McConnell, who declined to call the Senate back into session. It's pretty rich that Republicans should now say, "Sorry, too late!" 

Instead of answering questions, the defense lawyer named van der Veen explains that he's outraged—outraged!—about something or other.  Ooops, he's enraged by this new question, too. "Who asked that question?" he demands. Very theatrical. You don't have to answer questions if you just emote for the allotted time. 

I think Democratic senators should direct all their questions to the defense. The argument for conviction is strongest when the defense is speaking. 

Question from Ted Cruz suggests that, for conviction, Trump must be guilty of "incitement" as defined in the criminal law, which is false. 

Bill Cassidy repeats Romney's question, in a different key. Cassidy is the Republican senator who switched his vote on whether the impeachment trial is constitutional. I'm beginning to think he might vote to convict. Van der Veen has no answer for him. Taking his turn, lead manager Raskin points out that all these things the defense complains about not knowing are known to their client, and that he was invited to testify, but declined. Why should senators in their role as jurors not make the obvious adverse inference?

This answer, or complaint, about lack of "due process" is without merit. The Constitution says no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Whether Trump is convicted or acquitted, he will not be deprived of any of these. The defense's diverse complaints are incompatible. You've gone too fast! You're late!

Okay, signing off, enough, daughters not so interested in this, and more hungry than I am.

 

 

Trump on trial

I've been watching the impeachment trial, and I think the House managers are doing a great job, but the Daily Show's Trevor Noah points out that the case will likely crumble when Trump's lawyers get their chance and start talking about how there used to be more creamy filling in the center of Oreos. From the transcript of their opening statement:

I saw on television in the last couple of days, the Honorable gentleman from Nebraska, Mr. Sasse, I saw that he faced backlash back home because of a vote he made some weeks ago, that a political party was complaining about a decision he made as a United States Senator. You know, it's interesting because I don't want to steal the thunder from the other lawyers, but Nebraska, you're going to hear, is quite a judicial thinking place, and just maybe, Senator Sasse is onto something. And you'll hear about what it is that the Nebraska courts have to say about the issue you all are deciding this week. There seem to be some pretty smart jurist in Nebraska and I can't believe a United States Senator doesn't know that.

Trying to imagine someone listening to this and thinking, "Damn, he's stealing my thunder!" I guess it's possible if you're a lawyer representing the former President of the United States.

Occasionally the House managers seem determined to flatter the Republican senators, like when they put forward Mike Pence as a great patriot bravely performing his constitutional duty (before he had to hit the bricks to avoid being hanged). I'm afraid that's useless. The managers have to talk about Trump's big lie concerning the election having been stolen, a fabrication that the majority of Republican senators have endorsed, either explicitly or implicitly. Even the most granular evidentiary bits implicate jurors. Today, the least known of the managers, Stacey Plaskett, of the Virgin Islands, spoke of the incident last fall involving a "Trump caravan" of vehicles that tried to run a Biden campaign bus off a freeway in Texas.  She meant to establish Trump's pattern of encouraging riotous behavior in his supporters, for he had immediately celebrated their crime in a tweet—but, then, the Republican senator Marco Rubio celebrated it with even more relish and boasted that things like that happened in his home state of Florida all the time. 

To convict Trump, the managers need Republican votes, with the result that the corruption of the entire Republican party is the proverbial elephant in the room. The mob boss is on trial and his fate is in the hands of his accomplices and lackeys. 

Bonus problem

It would be too cold to go anywhere even if there were anywhere to go, the bathrooms are clean, and I'm feeling the force of the maxim concerning how all the ills of the world may be traced to the inability of people to be alone with their thoughts. I'm on a medication, a blood thinner, that is not supposed to be used with alcohol, so probably it's lucky that my 7th-grader has a math problem she can't get:

Oliver, Ros, and Alice want to start a petting zoo. They decide the best animals to have are hippos, monkeys, and zebras. Oliver decides to buy 7 hippos, 10 monkeys, and 3 zebras for a total of $151. Ros decides to buy 5 hippos, 2 monkeys, and 9 zebras for a total of $185. Alice buys 4 hippos, 6 monkeys, and 5 zebras for a total of $137. What is the cost for each animal? Set up and solve this system of equations using any method of your choice. Show your work!

Actually, this was a question on a test, and Lydia showed it to me as an example of how outrageously unreasonable her teacher is. As she explains it, you get graded on a 4-point scale, and for a 4 you have to get the "bonus problem" right. The above was the bonus problem. How can anyone except "Mickey, the class genius," possibly get a 4 when "Ms. Novak's never showed us what to do if there are three variables!" Etc., etc., Ms. Novak is a tyrant, etc. I say maybe Ms. Novak wants to see who can apply what they know to a new kind of problem and who will just throw their hands in the air and moan. Now I'm in the same moral category as Ms. Novak, but hell if I'm going to agree that the teacher's expectations are too high. Put on your thinking cap, Whiney McWhinerson!

She'd actually made a good start—the "setting up the system of equations" part:

7h + 10m + 3z = 151
5h + 2m + 9z = 185
4h + 6m + 5z = 137

It was at this point that she'd thrown her arms in the air, or maybe just hoped for partial credit on the dreaded bonus problem. She can solve the problems with two equations and two variables, and the method is pretty much the same: you "manipulate" the equations to eliminate variables and make apt "substitutions." The permitted "manipulations" are multiplying any of the equations by the same constant, and adding (or subtracting) one equation from another (which amounts to adding the same quantity to both sides of an equation). The more variables, the more "manipulations," but it can be fun if it's cold out and you're a big nerd. 

Like, with these equations, it might be useful to subtract the third one from the second, because then you will get an expression for h that can be substituted into other equations:

5h + 2m + 9z = 185
4h + 6m + 5z = 137
  h – 4m + 4z = 48-------->h = 48 + 4m – 4z

Now, in the first original equation, substitute "new h" for "plain old h":

7(48 + 4m – 4z) + 10m + 3z = 151
336 + 28m – 28z + 10m + 3z = 151
38m – 25z = –185
25z - 38m = 185

We can then substitute "new h" for "plain old h" in, say, the third original equation:

4(48 + 4m - 4z) + 6m + 5z = 137
192 + 16m - 16z + 6m + 5z = 137
22m - 11z = -55
2m - z = -5
z = 2m + 5

That worked out nice!—an expression for z that can be substituted into the equation highlighted above:

25(2m + 5) - 38m = 185
50m + 125 - 38m = 185
12m = 60
m = 5

If m is 5, z is 15 (since z = 2m + 5—we're "back substituting" now). And if m is 5 and z is 15, we can substitute those values into one of the original equations to find that h is 8. To be OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) about it, substitute all 3 values into the original 3 equations to make sure it checks out, and it does. Hippos are $8, monkeys are $5, and $15 for a zebra.

Only two hours now till the Gopher basketball game, and some of that time will be taken up by making supper, and eating it, and cleaning up afterwards. Pump out those vaccines, man—though I won't need one if we lose to Nebraska. 

"Give the poor guy a break!"

Watching "one of those shows" with my second cup of coffee, I see that Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY—or, as Nancy Pelosi would say, Q-KY—is complaining that if Trump's speech to his supporters on the Ellipse is going to be "criminalized," then Democratic mayors and others should be prosecuted for having encouraged BLM protests. The interviewer, alas, did not respond by observing that Trump isn't being charged with a criminal offense and that his speech therefore isn't being "criminalized." No matter what the Senate decides in the impeachment trial, Trump won't go to prison or incur any penalty provided for in the criminal law. Were he to be convicted, he'd be barred from holding federal office in the future. The individual senators get to decide what principles should guide their verdict—many of them describe their function as that of a juror when they are actually more like judges—but a plausible justification for a vote to convict would be that Trump violated his oath to see that our country's laws are faithfully executed. 

Paul and others fail to comprehend the purpose of impeachment, which is prophylactic. It isn't that the defendant needs to be punished. It's that the country needs protection. 

Nikki Haley, exhibiting the same misperception as Paul, complained to Laura Ingraham, on Fox News, that Democrats, by impeaching Trump, were mercilessly pursuing him beyond the bounds of propriety and

I mean, at some point, just give the man a break.

For some reason, her misperception just makes me laugh. I think it has to do with the gulf between the image and the reality. On the one hand, the Trumpists confront us with their strut, their swagger, their bombast, their curled lip, their sneers such as the one on the bumper of a pickup truck I fell in line behind recently: "Trump: fuck your bullshit." (Happily, the kids in the back seat were scrolling their phones.) On the other hand, this is just a pose to drown the sound of the whine, the perpetual whimpering complaint, the petty grievance, what Trumpists themselves call "snowflakery." It's funny when occasionally they let down their guard so that anyone can see the truth obscured by all the actual bullshit. "Stop being so strict!" "You're so unfair!" "Give the poor man a break!" 

The House impeachment managers will try their case as they see fit, but if it were me I'd highlight Trump's behavior not only before the January 6 attack, the "incitement" that everyone talks about, but during, as he watched the riot with evident pleasure on TV, and also afterwards. For when it was over, after the Capitol had been invaded and vandalized, after his supporters had erected a gallows on the Capitol grounds and chanted "Hang Mike Pence," after they'd posed for selfies and brutally assaulted a cop by bludgeoning him about the head and neck with a fire extinguisher (he later died of his injuries), after that and more, the President of the United States passed judgment in a tweet that, for its odd mix of megalomania and whiny plaint, is for him representative:

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!

You might either throw up or laugh, but voting to acquit on any ground, including that the poor guy needs a break—well, it's almost certain that he will be acquitted, and maybe it's better to laugh, but I feel a patriot would throw up first. 

Gophers lose on the road, I'm mocked at home

At least the Gophers' deteriorating basketball season lifts the spirits of my daughters, who are filled with glee by the sound of me shouting at the TV. When my agony is at an end, they mock me with imitating cries—"Stop standing around!" and "Take care of the ball!"—before breaking into peals of laughter. "It's just a game, dad," advises the 10-year-old, when she's stopped laughing enough to speak intelligibly. I'm too worked up to explain that "everything" is "only something" and that not caring who wins basketball games puts you on a slippery slope to nihilism. 

Why is it so hard to win a road game? I used to think that a boisterous home crowd, ten thousand or more packed into an indoor space, tended to intimidate the visitors, breaking their poise in a close game and maybe having a subconscious effect on the officials as well. COVID has shot down that theory. Gophers can't win on the road in an empty arena. The conference season is more than half over and last night was the first road game in which they were remotely competitive—usually they've been close at halftime before getting obliterated in the second half. Meanwhile, they've lost only one home game. I fail to understand.

Also, I used to be mildly amused by how many college basketball coaches were game-day fashion plates. Now suddenly they all dress like Bill Belichick. Apparently the sporty jackets and loud neckties were for the fans, not the TV cameras. Maybe this is a good thing. If Richard Pitino had had access to a necktie last night, he presumably would have used it to hang himself in the locker room after the game. 

A very detailed map

I'd be happy on Crusoe's island if its WiFi gave access to only this site—"an extremely detailed map of the 2020 election," courtesy of The New York Times. It appears to be incomplete for certain states, such as California, but for most of the country, including all of Minnesota, you can see the result by precinct, that is, at the level of individual polling places. You just enter the name of a city or town, or zip code, to get in the vicinity and then zoom in or out to the very specific location you're interested in. When you hover over the area assigned to a particular polling station, it shows you how many votes for Biden and how many for Trump were reported out of it, and the corresponding percentages. The map is colored shades of red and blue to indicate who got more votes and how close it was.

Trump managed to make my postage stamp of home turf—Minneapolis's Ward 11, Precinct 1—even more Democratic than usual, which isn't an easy trick as typically in the past Democrats running for statewide office get around 80 to 85 percent of the vote here. Not a lot of upside, but in 2020 it was 1528 for Biden to 152 for Trump, 90-9 in terms of percent. For locals who might be interested, the precinct is bordered on the east by 35W, on the north by 46th Street, on the west by Lyndale Avenue, and on the south by 50th Street. 

I would describe the neighborhood as unpretentiously and uniformly middle-class. You notice neither signs of opulence nor any shabbiness. My neighbors are well enough off to consider me, a known consumer of Miller High Life, an object of charity. The Dollar Store on Nicollet Avenue, a block from my house, has closed to make way for a Trader Joe's. This is a good sign for the neighborhood and, assuming the market comes with  attached liquor store, convenience might induce me to try some beverages more to the neighbors' taste. 

If you exit 35W at 46th Street, go south a block or two, and then head west through the precinct, you might notice that the homes become a little grander as you get farther from the freeway. This is the opposite of bragging, since I live just a block from the freeway, but in truth I think you'd have to be alert, or a real estate appraiser, to detect the difference. Maybe it's just my imagination. When, however, you cross Lyndale Avenue, the main north-south thoroughfare in the area and the western boundary of Ward 11, anyone could tell that you're now in different socioeconomic territory. Lake Harriet is about a 10-minute walk ahead, and this pleasant topographical feature is at the center of some of Minneapolis's nicest residential neighborhoods. As you proceed west now the homes change from lovely to large and lovely. If one happens to be for sale and out of curiosity you grab a flyer from the box in the front yard, there's a chance that the price is in 7 figures. If you'd like to buy me such a place as a gift, fine, but I'll be bankrupt within a few years unless you pay the property taxes, too. I set this all out just as a tease about what the election result might have been in this precinct that's far more affluent than the one I live in just to its east: instead of Biden by 1528 to 152, it was Biden by 1818 to 170. So where I live, get Biden's number by adding 8 after multiplying Trump's number by ten, whereas to the west, among managing partners of law firms and the like, you have to add 118 after multiplying by ten. 

It's fun just to scroll around and be surprised by stuff—or not surprised. I like to check out places to which I have a personal connection. At the polling place where my parents would have voted while I was growing up, in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, it was Biden 783, Trump 353. Where my sister votes, in Northfield, Minnesota, a college town, it was Biden 1653 to Trump 623. Our parents both grew up in outstate Minnesota, dad in a tiny village a little west of Willmar called Sunburg: Trump 47, Biden 13. Mom grew up on a farm in Watonwan County outside of St. James: Trump 111, Biden 55. The most startling result I stumbled on seems like it could be a near violation of the secret ballot. From a precinct in Harlem, northern Manhattan in NYC:

If there is one sullen old white guy on the block, suspicion is going to fall on him! 

The representative from Georgia's 14th congressional district

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new US representative from Georgia's 14th congressional district, is "bat-shit crazy" according to Erick Erickson, the right-wing blogger and radio talker from her home state. If even he can tell, you may rely on it, and collecting examples of her bat-shittery makes for good copy. What's my favorite? It's like asking a Catholic mother-of-many to identify her favorite child, but, if pressed, I think I'd point to her insistence that mass shootings—Newtown, Parkland, Las Vegas—are false flag operations staged to drum up support for gun control. Granted, I'd feel bad about having left out her view that on 9/11 a "so-called plane" crashed into the Pentagon (she has said it was really a missile launched by deep-state operatives). There's a lot more but these for whatever reason strike my fancy. How to account for the plane wreckage at the Pentagon? What does she think became of the flight? Are the passengers and crew partying with JFK Jr. in South America? Regarding the Las Vegas massacre, she thinks it's significant that the killer strafed a crowd of country-western fans, since it's Republicans who like country-western music. 

It's natural to wonder about the people who elected her. Georgia's 14th congressional district is bordered on the north by Tennessee and on the west by Alabama. It's 85% white, has a relatively low median household income, and includes no big city, although, in its north-south dimension, it may be said to stretch from the northern exurbs of Atlanta to the southern fringe of the Chattanooga metro. In other words, Trumplandia: he carried the district by 75-22 percent against Clinton before sagging to 73-25 percent against Biden. Cook Political Report gives the district a PVI (Partisan Voter Index) of R+27, which makes it the tenth most Republican district in the country (and the second most Republican in Georgia, which contains multitudes, obviously). MTG began her campaign for Congress in Georgia's 6th, a swing district in Atlanta's northern suburbs represented by Democrat Lucy McBath, but moved to the 14th when its Republican incumbent, Tom Graves, announced his retirement. Pro move! She beat a big field in the Republican primary by being the loudest and Trumpiest of them all, and of course the general election was a snap. The district was created after the 2010 census and no Democratic candidate for the seat has ever won as much as 30 percent of the vote. In two of the previous three elections, the Democrats hadn't even fielded a candidate. Against MGT they put up a sacrificial lamb who, after his wife served him with divorce papers during the campaign, moved in with his parents in another state. It was too late to remove his name from the ballot, and he lost by 75-25 percent, 25 percent being what Democrats get in the district no matter where they live, whether they're married or not or in between, or campaign actively or not at all. 

Lost in this mad shuffle is MTG's biography before she began being openly crazy and getting elected to Congress. She seems to me an exemplar of a pitiable American type. Her father founded a very successful Georgia construction company. She studied Business Administration at the University of Georgia and then worked for him until, in 2002, he sold the company to her and her husband. She would then have been 28. In company filings, she was named as the C.F.O. until 2011, which is when she established a CrossFit gym and, it seems, began devoting herself to an obsessive fitness regimen instead of to her dad's business. This passion lasted till about 2017, when she became hyperactive on social media, singing Trump's praises and filming herself trolling his political foes, such as survivors of the mass shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida, who were advocating for stricter gun laws. This newest obsession, and a congressman's retirement in a district adjoining the one she lived in, soon landed her in the House of Representatives. Her qualifications are essentially zero and her intellect is plainly not strong enough to repel bat-shittery. Perhaps if she'd been born into a family of normal means the necessity of earning a living would have rendered her harmless. Instead, she's had too much free time and the details of her biography have about them the whiff of a privileged person trying to fill up her life with something, anything, to avoid facing the fact of her own moral shipwreck. Her string of marital affairs is an open secret and at least one of her extra-curricular partners has expressed to a journalist his perplexity about the Christian zeal with which she hectors sane people. ("I am a Christian and a gun owner" is for her a speech act so common as to have attained the status of a mantra.)

Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, has appointed MGT to the Budget and Education Committees while moving to strip Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach Trump, from her leadership role within the House Republican caucus.