P.M. Carpenter

Why I love Harold Bloom

Just read. Of modern Shakespeare performances, literary critic Harold Bloom, in his recent The Anatomy of Influence, writes that

not infrequently I walk out at the first intermission, reflecting that at eighty I do not need to endure any more high-concept directors, who should be shot at dawn.

The last Shakespeare performance from which I walked out was a production of Macbeth, in which the high-concept director, a woman, played King Duncan. Fortunately, state law barred the carrying of sidearms, for I would not have waited for dawn. I would have shot her on stage.

 

At DeVos's Dept of Ed., it's still 1896

Politico:

Trump’s efforts to bolster relations with historically black colleges erupted in controversy Tuesday after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released a statement equating the history of the schools — founded during an era of racial segregation — to "school choice" policies.

Ah yes, that age of freedom, that noble era of black students liberated by "school choice" — wholly separate but essentially equal institutions of higher education, for which said students eagerly opted. After all, who among them wanted Harvard when there was Howard?

You just can't take the stupid out of conservative ideology.

 

And now he's doing WHAT?

The entire article — "He’s a Performance Artist Pretending to be a Great Manager" — is somewhat repetitive but worthwhile. My favorite passage comes early:

Mere months into Trump’s time as the owner of an airline … [its president] already had concerns. Trump had overpaid with more than $400 million of borrowed money, he seemed most interested in cosmetic touches like the size of the "T" on the tails of the planes, and the debt service quickly became crippling. Once, Trump suggested cutting costs by flying with two pilots, not three, and [the airline's president] had to tell him that would be illegal.

 

Any chance that Trump embraces (or even understands) Steve Bannon?

I'm a bit behind on the crackpot theories of nihilists, neurotics, anarchists, fanatics, flakes, paranoids and top presidential advisers. It was therefore good to be schooled this morning by the Post's Michael Gerson on the nation's singular embodiment of the aforementioned collectivity: Donald Trump's "chief strategist," Steve Bannon. Much of what the latter believes about the world — its history and future — was once distributed on street corners and in mailed, plain brown envelopes; now it's whispered into the presidential ear (although its synaptic distribution and cerebral absorption from there is anybody's guess).

Bannon, as we know, is less a strategic intellect than a Breitbart ideologue, a label that can harbor any one of many an assorted, crackpotted, populist idea. As Gerson describes Bannon's role as the WH "ideologist," it is to "take some partially valid insight at the crossroads of pop economics, pop history and pop psychology; declare it an inexorable world-historic force; and, by implication, take credit for being the only one who sees the inner workings of reality." History is replete with such pop-populists as pretentious high thinkers, just as mental asylums are overbooked by them. They're generally the ones sitting silently in a corner, mournfully surveying the ignorance of society's uninitiated. Not so with Mr. Bannon, who has brayed his "mystic" (Gerson's word) knowingness with unabashed volume. Nonetheless, I hadn't kept up with all the dark workings of his swirling mind, hence I'm grateful to Gerson for the education.

What are the "inner workings of reality" that Bannon has grasped and we haven't? Reveals Gerson: "[I]t has something to do with 'the fourth turning' … [which] apparently involves cycles of discontent and disruption. Lots of disruption." And just what in heaven's name is the deeper meaning of the "fourth turning," yet another "philosophy," as Gerson further observes, "that can be derived entirely from an airport bookstore"?

In 2009, a scholar familiar with the concept, Naval War College professor David Kaiser, received a request by Bannon for an interview on it, which Kaiser granted. His recollection of Bannon's ramblings was this: "You have the American Revolution, you have the Civil War, you have World War II; they’re getting bigger and bigger. Clearly, he was anticipating that in this Fourth Turning there would be one at least as big." It was the Huffington Post, earlier this month, that published Kaiser's retrospection on Bannon's theory, and its headlining tease was more than that: "Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable."

Gerson responds that "there is a problem with the ... economic nationalism and ethno-nationalism" as major contributory elements of Bannon's fourth turning. "It is morally degraded and dangerous to the country." From a non-moralistic view, I see an even bigger problem: The American Revolution, the Civil War and World War II are endowed with as much historical linkage as, say, Jefferson's 1807 Embargo Act and Obama's Lilly Ledbetter legislation. How the three preceding conflagrations are fundamentally tied together and inelluctably foretelling of a global fourth is less "mystical" than utterly mystifying.

Of "cyclical historical models," Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz informs Gerson: "It’s just a conceit. It’s a fiction, it’s all made up. There’s nothing to them. They’re just inventions." (If leftist-vampire hunter David Horowitz were genuinely interested in just how far today's university history professors have traveled from the old ideological days of Marxist sequencing, well …). The "fiction" of Bannon's theoretical beliefs, however, profoundly replicates a peculiar characteristic of yesteryear's right-wing ideologues: Many of them came as still-believing refugees from the Hegelian-Trotskyite school of dialectics. Indeed, modern conservatism was founded on the sought synthesis of antithetical, internal factions.

Bizarre "fourth turnings," fictions, conceits and historical mysticism — such are the explicit underpinnings of Bannon's ideology, whispered daily, as noted, into the presidential ear. As for my guess as to their reception? The president has neither the time, inclination nor capacity to earnestly ponder them. His own creative recklessness and narcissistic aversion to others' thoughts keep him plenty occupied. We may be safe from Steve Bannon's flaky hallucinations, but not Donald Trump's.

 

Your moment of serenity

It occurs that reading American political commentary has become a more delicate, more complex task than writing political commentary. Printed observations on our wretched political currents reign in, and over, the present — fears are unleashed, invective flows, alarmism rules, and the more sophisticated and informed the commentary, the more the commentary writes itself. All this because of Trump, who is utterly without nuance. His childlike behavior and adolescent notions of governance are nakedly preposterous; his grievances range from the disingenuous to the ignorant, and his many offensive fronts — such as that against the press — are a joke.

Hence writing in opposition to Trump (& Co.) is nearly as effortless as recounting one's ABCs, which, in turn, are as complex as TrumpThought. The essence of "philosophical" Trumpism is little more than a revival of 1960s Goldwaterism, which held that the greater and more aggressive the simplicity of mind, the more efficacious its application to national problems. (Liberalism, on the other hand, embraces complexity, which of course makes its electoral challenges more challenging, given that mass analytical thought is required to appreciate liberalism's approach to governance. Reaganism and the the 1970s New Right picked up on this key political insight, and ran with it — successfully.)

Contemporary commentary of the informed sort is thus virtually indistinguishable in its anticipated truisms. This morning, for instance, E.J. Dionne justifiably rails: "Just when you despair that only chaos animates the Trump administration, along comes Stephen K. Bannon, the White House ideologue, to offer … his Deep Thoughts on Trumpism at the Conservative Political Action Conference." What Dionne confronts is the gobbledygook of Bannon's "deconstruction of the administrative state" — a pseudointellectual corruption of Jacques Derrida's pseudointellectual gobbledygook about the impossibility of discerning the real meaning of written texts, which, naturally, would apply to Derrida's texts themselves. "Deconstruction," then, collapses on itself. (Take note, Mr. Bannon.)

My apologies for that bit of digression. What principally moves Dionne is the despair of Trump's chaos, just as most of us despair. And that's fair enough. Dionne's Post colleague Robert Samuelson simultaneously despairs: "Even without Trump’s eccentric and questionable behavior, so much is in flux that we’re disoriented. Stripped of familiar and reassuring beliefs, we are increasingly governed by disruptive surprises. This is why I call the present moment the age of disbelief." Again, fair enough, a perfectly justified — and quite familiar — observation.

As is Paul Krugman's, over at the Times: "Outrage at what’s happening to America isn’t just justified, it’s essential. In fact, it may be our last chance of saving democracy." Chimes Krugman's colleague Charles Blow about Trump's many outrages: "[His] demagogic language is reductionist language…. It can be quaint and even clumsy, all of which can give idiocy, incomprehensibility and untruth a false air of authenticity." As it did in the early stages of Goldwaterism.

Indeed, it seems we find ourselves in an intellectually untimely warp — one from which we never quite left. How so, more pointedly? This morning I was also rereading Philip Roth's 1960 speech (titled "Writing American Fiction") at Stanford University. Its contemporaneity is as chilling as it is informative:

The daily newspapers … fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is it happening? And of course with sickness and despair. The fixes, the scandals, the insanities, the treacheries, the idiocies, the lies, the pieties, the noise…. Recently, in Commentary, Benjamin DeMott wrote that the "deeply lodged suspicion of the times [is] namely, that events and individuals are unreal, and that power to alter the course of the age, of my life and your life, is actually vested nowhere." There seems to be, said DeMott, a kind of "universal descent into unreality."

There we were, on the precipice of the New Frontier — an opening to the civil rights movement and feminism and all manner of revolutionary thinking and activist urges — and yet the intellectual consensus, as expressed by the sick and despairing Roth, was one of national fixes, scandals, insanities, treacheries, idiocies, lies, pieties and noise.

That those torments — generally, a "descent into unreality" — also exemplify Trumpism is inarguable. Thus do political commentators (including myself) argue the point unremittingly. And yet the informed reader already comprehends the descent, the insanities, the idiocies, the lies. Of what novel value to the reader, then, is all the unremitting commentary?

What the reader must muster, as he or she journeys through so much depressingly indistinguishable political commentary, is historical perspective. Trump and Trumpism are, in so many ways, unique abominations on the republic; nonetheless, their horrors are far from historically unfamiliar. That is what's absent from so much of today's political commentary (again, including mine). And so it is, perforce, up to the reader to pull intellectual tranquility from emotional panic.

It just might get you through the day — and, ultimately, on to the new New Frontier.

 

On Trump's WHCD no-show

Proof that there's some good in all of us: Hitler loved dogs, and Trump hates the White House Correspondents' Dinner.

It's creepy to endorse a Trumpian decision, although my creepiness is mitigated by the doubtless fact that Trump based his no-show decision on his hide's exceptional thinness. He's a bullying coward, eager to trash the press at cheering Bund gatherings such as CPAC, but terrified by unintimidated journalists and comedic critics. There are no political kitchens whose heat he can stand, and so he avoids them.

That said, with or without Trump the WHCD has become a national obscenity. All-day C-Span coverage of who's traipsing Washington and Hollywood's insiders' red carpet is a dispiriting adventure in egocentrism. To "be seen" is the event's fundamental objective; to be uninvited is a professional disgrace. Or so goes the insiders' self-assessments.

To willing outsiders, the annual event's aristocratic nature (scarcely a feature of yeomanlike journalism) has become so grotesque, ridicule is all that's left. As the Washington post reports, "Comedian Samantha Bee announced in January that she was planning an alternative event on the same night for 'journalists and non-irritating celebrities from around the world.' (Its tentative name: 'Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.)"

Nonetheless, the White House Correspondents’ Association is determined to maintain the fallacy that the yearly, preening penguin-suit gathering is a noble occasion: "[The dinner] has been and will continue to be a celebration of the First Amendment," wrote the WHCA's president in response to Trump's declared absence. Then so were the Dean Martin roasts.

From 2012, here's what Andrew Sullivan had to say about his attendance at the, ahem, First Amendment's celebration: "It was a really magical evening…. I bumped into many people – we were next to John Legend and his fiancee and the British ambassador and his wife at dinner – and did have a brief and warm chat with the president…. George Clooney came up to say hi. Not since Jon Hamm came out as a Dish reader at the White House Correspondents' Dinner did such a shiver go up my leg."

I don't mean to pick on Sullivan. His reflections above, though, represent the self-promotional essence of the White House Correspondents' Dinner. It possesses virtually no other reason for being. It has become a national obscenity.

 

Trump's end game? A dead end.

According to the White House's press secretary, Sean Spicer, America has already begun its slip into the abysmal slope of a yawning dictatorship.

Roughly two months ago, Spicer mused that full media access to the office of the U.S. presidency is "what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship." Spicer defended the Trump campaign's barring of certain media outlets from access, while pointedly noting: "Look, there’s a big difference between a campaign where it is a private venue using private funds and a government entity. I think we have a respect for the press when it comes to the government. That is something you can’t ban an entity from."

But, of course, "you can." And Spicer has.

His boss, meanwhile, at CPAC, lectured the nation that the press "shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name." Observes the NY Times, one of Spicer's banned media outlets: Trump's "comments came shortly after his own aides had held a briefing for the White House press pool on the condition of anonymity." Such is the sick, twisted, ad hoc logic of a dictatorial regime.  

Added Trump in somewhat martial language, the press is "the enemy of the people." He went on. "We’re going to do something about it." They did — and with more to come, no doubt.

In his artificially constructed war against the press, Trump's end game is both vastly perplexing and stupendously obvious. He's a minority-elected president with a base destined to dwindle, as his administration's incompetence becomes apparent to the minority's periphery (all, that is, but Trump's hardcore base). Some observers have speculated that Trump's incompetence will in fact never become apparent to the fringe's fringe, because of the right's infamous bubble, "epistemic closure" and echo chambers. It should be noted with indefatigable persistence, however, that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh et al — the echo chamber's usual suspects — do not possess 63 million (Trump's 2016 tally) viewers and listeners. Thus in time — six months, 12 or 18 — Trump's electoral base will narrow to its more natural order: perhaps the high 30-percent range, approximately 10 points lower than the 46 with which he was elected.

Hence the stupendously obvious. Having rejected moderation (and anything close to a national consensus) as a governing principle, Trump must maintain flamboyant levels of hysteria among his minority base. The press is the enemy, as are — and this is the more critical point — all those who credit the press with credibility. The president will rule as a besieged dictator would — a ruler necessarily antagonistic to the majority. From a democratic perspective, a philosophical and profoundly anti-democratic perversity is well on its way to defining the Trump administration.

And yet therein lies the vast perplexity of his end game. Trump's heated intensification of a minority power base is doomed as both a governing principle and reelection proposition. It will, as well, alienate his tentative congressional allies. Trump is deliberately closing off all supportive avenues, except that of the 30-some-odd percent. One suspects that Trump's pathological narcissism has him convinced that the nation will come around to his dictatorial approach to governance — but that, as any conscientious survey of the American political tradition would suggest, is, indisputably, an absolute dead end.

Our perplexity is resolved, then, only by this singular proposition: Donald Trump is barking mad — utterly, even psychotically out of touch with political reality.

 

The 19th century's Donald Trump

 

 

Trump's endless healthcare shell game

Trump, at CPAC, today:

The bottom line, we're changing [Obamacare]. We're going to make it much better, we're going to make it less expensive. We're going to make it much better.

Trump, speaking to the Washington Post, mid-January:

Trump said his plan for replacing most aspects of Obama’s health-care law is all but finished…. "It’s very much formulated down to the final strokes. We haven’t put it in quite yet but we’re going to be doing it soon," Trump said. He noted that he is waiting for his nominee for secretary of health and human services, Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), to be confirmed [italics mine].

Two weeks ago (NYT):

The Senate early Friday approved the nomination of Representative Tom Price to be secretary of health and human services.

 

Trump's oddly exhausted CPAC speech

I watched the president's CPAC performance this morning. To borrow from a classic "Frasier" episode, the meat that Trump threw to the assembled crowd was so raw, a skilled veterinarian could have saved it.

Trump commenced his ramblings with yet another assault on the free press. He said he dislikes its quoting of  anonymous "sources," which, he implied, were as imaginary as his secret plan to defeat ISIS. (That plan, by the way, is now is place, said Trump, although even the enemy, it seems, is to be kept in the dark as to its valiant unfolding.) From there he went on to complain about election polls. Why? Who the hell knows. He then swung back to the wicked press and unveiled his ramblings' most ominous passage: "We're going to do something about it."

From there he re-introduced the truly peculiar notion that Trumpism is a political "movement" like the world has never seen before. The earthshaking breadths of the French Revolution, Bolshevism and Maoism begone. The crowd, steeped in a Trumpian understanding of history, roared in agreement.

When defining the "movement" came most of Trump's raw meat — not one sinew of which was novel. From here on, he said, America will look after itself first; it will build a Southern wall; it will conquer the federal debt (by adding more $6 trillion to it); it will reinvigorate the coal industry (oh, those poor miners who've bought into the fantasy); it will rebuild its depleted military (the world's vastest by far); it will crush job-killing regulations; and it will rid itself of "bad" trade deals.

From nowhere — and I do mean nowhere — Trump added that "it's time for Americans to get off welfare."

And there you have it, the essence of Trump's morning ramblings.

Does this writing seem rather flat? Good. I've achieved the intended effect, which is to mirror Trump's speech. It was flat, familiar, tired and altogether clichéd. For a budding political movement, Trump's Trumpism seemed dead already.

 

Trump voters and Democratic outreach

Charles Blow and Nicholas Kristof parry and thrust on the matter of Democratic outreach to Trumpeteers.

Blow:

I have no patience for liberal talk of reaching out to Trump voters. There is no … compromise point with those who accept, promote and defend bigotry, misogyny and xenophobia…. Trump is a cancer on this country and resistance is the remedy. The Trump phenomenon is devoid of compassion, and we must be closed to compromise…. No one need try to convince me otherwise. The effort is futile; my conviction is absolute.

Kristof:

[I]t’s shortsighted to direct liberal fury at the entire mass of Trump voters…. [S]tereotyping a huge slice of America as misogynist bigots is unfair and impairs understanding…; demonizing Trump voters feeds the dysfunction of our political system … [which] risks making our country ungovernable…. Tolerance is a liberal value; name-calling isn’t…. [And tactically], It’s hard to win over voters whom you’re insulting.

While sympathetic to Blow's impatience, I'm disappointed with what, quite vividly, is the straw man argument he deploys in support. By whom on the left, and in what manner, has "compromise" with Trump voters been proposed — compromise, that is, on Trumpism's bigotry, misogyny and xenophobia? It's true that a handful of congressional Democratic leaders, from Charles Schumer to Bernie Sanders, has suggested (erringly, in my view) compromise with the Trump administration on, for example, infrastructure funding. But that — legislative deal-cutting — is not the sort of compromise that Blow raises. To him (and I find this dismaying in a writer of ordinarily impeccable intellectual integrity), Democratic compromise with Trumpism somehow entails compromising with sublime human ethics; some partial Democratic embrace or tentative tolerance of many Trumpeteers' squalid notions of social propriety. In this, Blow is arguing against a self-created phantom. If indeed he doesn't know better, he should.

As for Kristof's opposite stance — that of condemning Blow & Co.'s "shortsightedness" in refusing to reach out to Trump voters — one detects, or at least I detect, a related but once- or twice-removed breed of disingenuity as well, which I'll historically frame. Millions of Nationalsozialistische voters differed with the party's programmatic anti-Semitism. They simply wanted jobs and a cessation of Germany's hellish economic turmoil; the sentiment behind their pro-Nazi votes began and ended just there. Bigotry played little to no part in massive swaths of early Hitlerism. Are we ethically justified, then, in refusing to condemn those voters — even though many understood (or intuited) that along with their improved socioeconomic standing might come the oppression of others?

To me, and in general, though, the Blow-Kristof debate — a microcosm of the much larger Democratic debate on the wisdom of outreach — seems overblown in importance. The most effective Democratic overture to Trump voters is being divinely accomplished by Trump and the GOP themselves. They are making a muck of things in ways that, merely a month or two ago, were unimaginable — even for these clowns. Their utter unsuitability for national governance is becoming undeniable to nearly any Trump voter who voted for Trump for reasons short of unmitigated bigotry, misogyny and xenophobia.

Hence leave these voters alone, I say. Let them absorb for a few months longer the staggering ineptitude of Trumpism. In time they'll splinter off and come around, back to some semblance of sanity. As for the Democratic Party? It had best be preparing a coherent political program. "Outreach" itself, for now, can wait.

 

My GOP congressman's town hall meeting, sans a meeting

I'm misrepresented in Congress by a member of the personal responsibility party.

I just checked his town hall meeting schedule, and it turns out that his latest meeting was held today — at the convenient hour, for the working class, of 11 a.m.

What's more, my congressman wasn't present. He sent his staff.

To what depths of absolute farce can Congress's majority party go?   

 

The GOP and the arts: intrinsic ideological corruption

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime," observed Balzac. I would add, Behind every petty corruption there is an ideology.

A seemingly subdued, somewhat lesser sort of Trump- and GOP-bashing op-ed appears in the Times this morning, penned by one Thomas Campbell, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What Mr. Campbell observes, however, is immensely powerful and anything but subdued. It exposes the seedy, rancid and culturally corrupt ideology of contemporary conservatism: its philistinism, materialism and anti-intellectualism — all features of shallow, hollow, one-dimensional men.

The National Endowment for the Arts "is, once again, under threat of being abolished, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities," writes Campbell. "The purported reason is cost savings…. [I]t is a false saving. The N.E.A.’s budget is comparatively minuscule — $148 million last year, or 0.004 percent of annual federal discretionary expenditures." In other words, fiscal peanuts — financial morsels that wouldn't keep the Pentagon in toilet lids for 12 months.

"Claiming that N.E.A. cuts are purely for cost savings conceals a deeper, more partisan agenda," continues Campbell. That agenda is, by now, an old and familiar one. "The last time the N.E.A. was this under fire was during the 1990s, when funding was challenged for artists and institutions that refused to conform to a narrow definition of propriety." Such is Campbell's "fear," although his fear — often an emotion in confrontation with the unknown — is more of an acknowledgement of guileless reality. "Eliminating the N.E.A.," adds Campbell in frank yet nonpolemical language, "would in essence eliminate investment by the American government in the curiosity and intelligence of its citizens."

And there you have it: the ideological essence of contemporary conservatism, the 21st-century outpost of antebellum Southernism; a moribund structure of cultural closure, self-celebration, xenophobia, willed ignorance and cognitive intransigence — all of which are threatened by curiosity and intelligence.

For America's movement conservatism to thrive, it must be dead. Enlightenment, wandering consciousness, intellectual exploration, however one wishes to frame it, imperils that which must never change: "conform[ity] to a narrow definition of propriety."

Akin to this modern ideological petrification was of course 20th-century European fascism, in which a singular partisanship identified cultural "degeneracy," right down to jazz music or the transcendent artistry of a Pablo Picasso. "Great" art exhibitions were staged for the public's consumption, just as "Degenerate Art" (chiefly, works of the Bauhaus School) was put on display for mass ridicule. Fascism's "aesthetic" yet higher political objective was, it scarcely needs noting, to impose official "propriety" on an otherwise potentially "curious," intellectually searching population. Therein lay danger to regimental groupthink.

I am borderline tempted to give Nazism some credit here. Through 1933's Enabling Act provisions, government funds were freed to support right-thinking art. Contemporary Republicanism's answer, on the other hand, is a more scattergun approach: Just shut it down, shut it all down, simply suffocate all funding for the arts — the humanities as well.

As a one-time semi-professional artist myself, perhaps I'm too sensitive to what I (and Mr. Campbell et al) see as the GOP's ideological brutality toward the arts. The party's counterargument is that art should be self-sustaining; if the public wants it, the public will financially support it. Government assistance is unneeded. It is that very counterargument, however, that reveals the profound philistinism — as related to the arts — of movement conservatism. If the public also wants (as the GOP says it does) a Great Southern Wall to protect us from the ravages of swarthy rapists and drug hustlers, why should the public not voluntarily fund that? Why allocate government monies for a wall?

In sum, why pick on the arts? Why the assault on a mere pittance of $148 million while lavishing billions on a climbable wall? The answer is self-evident. Modern conservatism is hypocritical brutality itself — its "essence" being one of imposed philistinism, a narrow propriety, a dreadful fear of the enlightenment that artistic innovation promises. Art cannot change society, but it can portend unforeseen nudgings.

Throughout modern history, every generation's artistic creations have, to some appreciable extent, introduced what has come to be known as expanded consciousness. And that, gentle reader, is what contemporary conservatism fears most. Hence, shut it down — in every way possible.

 

Update, Feb 21

Apologies for my political-writing sloth of late, especially today's. This morning I've been burdened by a particularly disagreeable load of at-home, post-operative chores (open-wound bandagings, tube flushings, injections, ileum care-takings) which in reality are not that burdensome — unless one is a wuss, as I, apparently, am. All that, plus standing in the shower for 10 minutes — a damn-near herculean task for, well, a wuss — has me worn back to supineness, momentarily at least.  And I still need to take a walk. Two or three, actually.

Additionally, I'm trying to get caught up with more than two weeks' mail, much of which revolves around my daughter's financial aid arrangements for college next year. All I can say about that is thank God for Pell grants and independent scholarships and the like, since a certain father's financial contribution couldn't cover a week's worth of higher-education costs.

In brief, however, I am recovering, bit by bit — the ultimate goal being my third and final surgery, which I  dearly hope can occur within the next two months. That may be overly optimistic, but even weak-kneed wusses can dream. Meanwhile, I am regaining some strength, and plan on writing politically within a very short span.

Please bear with me. Thank you.       

 

Good to know

An interesting tidbit in the NYT story on the hiring of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster:

[One other NSC candidate] interviewed on Sunday [was] John R. Bolton….

Mr. Trump made a point on Monday of praising Mr. Bolton and saying that he would find a position for him in his administration eventually.

"We had some really good meetings with him. Knows a lot. He had a good number of ideas that I must tell you I agree very much with," the president said.

John Bolton, one of the more pro-Iraq war lunatics on record — a foreign policy blunder unequaled in American history, which, as you know, Trump consistently criticized on the campaign trail (having originally supported it). Now, in Trump's opinion, Bolton possesses a "good number of ideas" with which Trump "agree[s] very much with" — catastrophic, neoconservative, Boltonian ideas that haven't changed in decades.

This will not end well.