October 16, 2022 What’s The Difference Between Modernism & Post-Modernism? Luke Ford No sacred cows.

What’s The Difference Between Modernism & Post-Modernism?

Posted on October 16, 2022 by Luke Ford

Postmodernism was a reaction against modernism. Modernism was generally based on idealism and a utopian vision of human life and society and a belief in progress. It assumed that certain ultimate universal principles or truths such as those formulated by religion or science could be used to understand or explain reality. Modernist artists experimented with form, technique and processes rather than focusing on subjects, believing they could find a way of purely reflecting the modern world.
While modernism was based on idealism and reason, postmodernism was born of scepticism and a suspicion of reason. It challenged the notion that there are universal certainties or truths. Postmodern art drew on philosophy of the mid to late twentieth century, and advocated that individual experience and interpretation of our experience was more concrete than abstract principles. While the modernists championed clarity and simplicity; postmodernism embraced complex and often contradictory layers of meaning.
THE MANY FACES OF POSTMODERNISM
Anti-authoritarian by nature, postmodernism refused to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. It collapsed the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture, between art and everyday life. Because postmodernism broke the established rules about style, it introduced a new era of freedom and a sense that ‘anything goes’. Often funny, tongue-in-cheek or ludicrous; it can be confrontational and controversial, challenging the boundaries of taste; but most crucially, it reflects a self-awareness of style itself. Often mixing different artistic and popular styles and media, postmodernist art can also consciously and self-consciously borrow from or ironically comment on a range of styles from the past.

From DifferenceBetween.net:

“Modern” and “post-modern” were terms that were developed in the 20th century. “Modern” is the term that describes the period from the 1890s to 1945, and “post-modern” refers to the period after the Second World War, mainly after 1968.
Modern is related to logical and rational thinking whereas post-modern has denied this logical thinking. While the modern approach was theoretical, objective and analytical, the post-modern approach was subjective.
The modernist was in search of an abstract truth of life whereas the post-modernist did not believe in abstract truth or in universal truth. In modernism, there was an attempt to develop a coherent worldview. But in post-modernism, there is an attempt to remove the differences between the high and the low.
A modern thinker believes in learning from the experiences of the past and also has much trust in the text that tells about the past. On the contrary, a post-modern thinker does not have such beliefs. The post-modernist thinks that the text that tells about the past is of no use in the present times.
When a modern thinker analyses a subject by going deep into it, the post-modern thinker does not believe in in-depth analysis. A post-modern thinker bases his views on hyper-reality whereas the modern thinker only considered original works as genuine. A post-modern thinker considers morality as relative.
When considering the arts, modern and post-modern art have many differences. While modern art is based on elegance and simplicity, post-modern art is considered elaborate and decorative.
When modern philosophy is based on effect and cause, post-modern philosophy is based on chance only. When modern thinkers consider truth as objective, the post-modern thinkers consider truth as relative and socially based. It can also be seen that post-modernists involve politics in everything whereas modernists are not that political.

Robert Kerr writes in 2015’s How Postmodernism Explains Football and Football Explains Postmodernism: The Billy Clyde Conundrum:

* In his insightful Reading Football, Oriard made the argument that football’s narrative structure proved to be so rich it made it easy for even run-of-the-mill sportswriters to give readers of newspapers and
magazines a sense of thrills, suspense, and athletic prowess. The audience responded enthusiastically, finding in football “an irresistible duality” that was “at once mythic and visceral, liberating and lethal . . . rolled
into one compact drama,” as Almond put it. And once all that became evident to individuals and groups alert to social trends that presented opportunity for commercial exploitation, the boom was really on. “Football succeeded as a spectacle because the games’ own structure made narrative drama possible,” Oriard pointed out, “but also because these narrative possibilities were exploited by football’s promoters.”
* Time and again, colleges and universities have ultimately embraced the compromise that football represented between their traditional missions and values and the many undermining forces the game brought to campus. Clearly those forces—including the violence and other antisocial behaviors, the mockery of academic standards, the corruption of money, etc.—have been there from the start. But so has the game’s irresistible appeal to audiences that enables colleges to attract students, alumni support, political influence, financial support, etc. The history of higher education is replete with examples of university leaders tapping into the force field of football in order to build their institutions.
* For well beyond his team’s games, influential narratives produced and shaped by [Oklahoma coach Bud] Wilkinson reached larger audiences with the potential to create “systems of meaning and standards of reality shared by writer and audience,” as media historian James Carey has characterized such message making. Wilkinson contributed narratively to his times in ways both tangible and intangible. One of the former that stands as a formal effort to utilize mass media is his Football Letter. Wilkinson’s renown came as one the game’s winningest coaches ever—his teams from the Fifties still hold the record for most consecutive victories by a major college football team—but his institutional newsletter offers narrative-making insights beyond football.
* Over the seventeen years Wilkinson was head coach at Oklahoma, his newsletters consistently articulated an idealistic vision of college football as a metaphorical realm where wholesome warriors strive for collective
progress. Especially in his early years that emphasis on self-sacrifice in the name of team progress dovetailed with the formative wartime experience of both Wilkinson and his newsletter audience, most of whom had just returned from World War II service at the time Wilkinson began his coaching career at Oklahoma. And his early athletes at Oklahoma, most of them World War II veterans, validated his metaphorical vision. However, in the second half of Wilkinson’s career, that vision began to be challenged by a younger generation of athletes raised on affluence, television, and individualism instead of wartime sacrifice and collective effort.
* Byron Searcy told Gary King for a 1988 account of the era. “I saw in ‘57 an entirely different bunch of guys and it began a whole different era for Bud in dealing with the boys. There were guys on that team who questioned; they didn’t see the importance of discipline.”
* In stark contrast, one of Wilkinson’s last All-Americans was Joe Don Looney, an unruly hedonist who spent his days on the Oklahoma team capriciously defying the head coach. When Looney was dismissed from the team in 1963, the Oklahoman made it the lead story on its front page.
Though Looney played only a little more than one season at Oklahoma, and only sporadically in professional football later, his anti-hero antics contributed to a popular following that continued even after his death in
1988 in a motorcycle accident.
* In that same early-Seventies era, writer Roy Blount spent six months with professional football players for a nonfiction book and found a world not significantly dissimilar to that of Billy Clyde’s. Blount found pro players to be “adults who fly through the air in plastic hats and smash each other for a living.” He ended up titling his book Three Bricks Shy of a Load, inspired by a conversation in which a defensive lineman told him, “You picked the right team. Oh, a great bunch of guys! And a bunch of crazy fuckers! I’m crazy too! We’re all about three bricks shy of a load!” Blount concluded that last sentence “summed up my six months with the Pittsburgh National Football League team better than anything else.” Those “crazy” Steelers went on to win three Super Bowls that decade.
Football historian and former NFL player Michael Oriard declared Semi-Tough transformational in that it contributed to changes in the way people think about the game and its participants. “Football was not always the most sexually charged of American sports; this part of its myth is a recent trend since the rise of professional football to prominence in the late fifties,” he has written. For most of football’s history before Semi-Tough, he said, the dominant image of a football player was Frank Merriwell, who wooed his long-time sweetheart with “two kisses over a period of several years” before finally marrying her and starting a family. Most influential in refocusing popular imagery of football players on “the sexual ‘stud,’ ” in Oriard’s assessment, have been media representations that highlight “the excessively sexed male such as Billy Clyde Puckett of Dan Jenkin’s Semi-Tough.” He called it “the most complete portrait of the stud football player in American fiction. . . . In fact, sex is the foundation of Billy Clyde’s ideal world—everyone enjoys it and nobody is hurt.”
* The bestselling novel found a huge audience for its fictional world in which every sort of vice, indulgence,
depravity, and mayhem played out with a cartoonish harmlessness, because somehow it all contributed toward successful football. However audacious an assertion it may have been, as we shall see, it has been rather widely embraced ever since.
* The best articulations of postmodernist theory show us that so much of what we pretend is consistently and clearly explainable actually is not. The worst suggests that nothing is explainable.
* Postmodernist thought represents a source of wisdom that knows our modernist impulses always crave simple, sure answers. But it keeps finding ways to tell us, sometimes gently, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes rather arrogantly that no matter how much we do want such answers—or reliable metanarratives, etc—we can’t have them, because they so often don’t exist.
* For truly one can consider any game of football, from kickoff to final play, and extending even before and after those moments, to be nothing without the narratives that sponsors, participants, media, fans, and others impose upon it.
For example, the fans must embrace the notion that there is great significance for them in deeply bonding with one group of individual players wearing a particular uniform (rather than those wearing another), when in fact any player in theory could potentially be wearing one uniform or another. How, for example, would fans respond if the two teams in any given game decided at halftime to swap uniforms? Would fans still maintain the same bond with different players wearing “their” team’s uniforms? Or would the supposedly deep union between the fans and “their” players wearing one uniform endure when the players switched to the other team’s uniforms?
In essence, what actually happens in all games of football at even the highest levels of play is no more than what happens when a bunch of kids take a football out in the yard, choose up sides, and see which can do the things that will count as scores more often than the other team can. To that end, the participants will shove and chase each other about for some period of time. And beyond that, all meaning imposed upon those activities is narrative—an effort to develop stories with explanatory power. It offers textbook examples of processes that sociological scholars and others would call meaning-making, the social construction of reality, or narrative creation.
* Before, during and after the games, such narratives seek to impose meaning upon what will happen, what is happening, what has happened.
The appetite for such narratives among audiences seems to have no limit. And only football truly feeds the hunger. As journalist Warren St. Moon has written, “without football to generate controversies and scandals”
once the season ends, even the most successful sports talk-show hosts like Paul Finebaum in Alabama have to “improvise—sometimes desperately—to keep listeners tuning in for four hours a day.”
* Oriard has noted, “it is most important to recognize that no single interpretation of football’s place
in American life has ever achieved consensus. The value of the games was debated from the outset and never resolved.” Recalling the clash of two dominant figures at the University of Chicago around the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “In what [Coach Amos Alonzo] Stagg called sportsmanship, [Thorstein] Veblen found exploitation and the desire to inflict damage on others,” Oriard mused, “Who spoke for America, Stagg or Veblen? Both did from different vantage points.”
So postmodernist theory tells us, perhaps, what we should have recognized all along—that football is not likely ever to give us definitive answers, but always it will give us the endless narratives that we may need even more. And just maybe, that is why the game exists and endures and flourishes and means so much to so many Americans anyway.

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The God Idea

Posted on October 16, 2022 by Luke Ford

I like to spend Sunday mornings journaling on the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous.

I read the Big Book with HerbK’s three questions in mind:

* Why am I doing this work?
* Why am I doing this work now?
* In what parts of my life am I being dishonest with myself and others?

I’m currently journaling on chapter four — “We Agnostics.”

This morning I read the following:

We had to ask ourselves why we shouldn’t apply to our human problems this same readiness to change our point of view. We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn’t control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we couldn’t make a living, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn’t seem to be of real help to other people…
When we saw others solve their problems by a simple reliance upon the Spirit of the Universe, we had to stop doubting the power of God. Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did.

I rejoiced that thanks to my 12-step programs, I no longer have extensive trouble with personal relationships, that I generally feel in control of my emotions, that I’m rarely prey to misery and depression, that I make a living, that I never have a feeling of uselessness, that I’m rarely overwhelmed by fear, that I’m happy, and that I feel myself regularly being of real help to others.

Then I read: “Our ideas did not work. But the God idea did.” I stopped. For most of my life, I believed in God and it did next to nothing for my emotional addictions. So why did the 12-step approach to God work for me when the Christian and Jewish approaches to God do next to nothing for my addictions?

I realized the 12-step approach gave me:

* Specificity with regard to the relationship between God and to recovery from my particular addiction.
* I got a community with my specific problem and then I felt the joy of bonding with people who’d been where I had been and gotten better.
* I heard stories from people with my specific problem talk about how the program enabled them to overcome their addiction. I identified with large parts of these stories, and then I felt comfortable sharing my story (what it was like, what happened, what it’s like now).
* I made friends and acquaintances with people with my specific problem and I opened up to them, I got honest with them, and I was willing to take guidance from them (because virtually none of them wanted to judge my life or to run my life, they only wanted to share their experience, strength and hope to the extent I wanted to hear it).
* In each program, I got 12 steps, 12 tools and 12 traditions that had enabled thousands of other people to overcome their compulsions.
* I got sponsorship that wasn’t overwhelming or bossy or intrusive or judgmental. Instead, it simply held me accountable.
* Nobody preached at me and nobody tried to abuse me. In my 12 years in 12-step program, I never recall suffering a loss from gossip. I am sure people have gossiped about me, but I don’t ever recall suffering any harm from it. Nobody, for example, took my social media posts and reported them to a higher authority (which frequently happened to me in Judaism). Nobody tried to bully me and nobody threatened to exclude me or to ban me.
* I got something that was incredibly pragmatic and flexible.
* Nobody I knew was making money from this thing. I’ve seen very little abuse of power and prestige. Twelve-step programs are the only things I know where they don’t want money from outsiders, and they limit the amount of money they will take from insiders (usually no more than $2,000 a year).
* Ego deflation at depth that enabled me to consistently transcends my heretofore crippling narcissism.

Prior to my first 12-step program in 2011, I had contempt for spirituality and too much faith in religion, therapy, psychiatric drugs, self-help, and the power of self-control and self-sufficiency.

I’ve been listening to the Audible book Verbal Judo. It was a sobering experience because I realized how little willingness I have at times to put my ego aside and ignore the insults of others.

So why am I doing this work? Because it works for me.

So why am I doing this work now? Among other things, I notice I have this hair-trigger temper that does not serve me. Also, I consistently lack consideration for others and for myself. I go into my interactions with what I want and I pay inadequate attention to what others want. There’s a reason I got the nickname “User.”

Where am I being dishonest with myself and others? In my lack of concern about my temper and my inconsideration. I love a good joke, even if it makes the rest of the Succoth table uncomfortable.

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Senses of Style By Jeff Dolven (2017)

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights:

* Nonetheless the claim there are only interpretations is as flattening as the claim style is everything…

* Style holds things together, things and people, schools and movements and periods. It makes us see wholes where we might be bewildered by parts.—But it makes us see parts, too. Say you are asked to identify or describe a style, to account for an act of recognition. ( That sounds like Gertrude Stein , or that looks like a Holbein .) You might pick out a detail like a figure of speech or a quality of line, and you might well find a name for it, isocolon or crosshatching. Style, with all of this specialized language, is manifestly an art, a technical accomplishment with terms and rules that can be taught and learned.—Then again, can’t style feel like something you are simply born with? Something that is in your gait or your hands, something you couldn’t lose if you tried? A long habit, or even your nature, whether you like it or not. Style’s idiosyncrasy is the individual signature that modernity, and not only modernity, wants from every great artist.—And yet, is it not style that dissolves the artist into her time, his country or city, her circle of friends? Everyone and everything has a style, a style that is nothing more or less than location in social and historical space. None of us can escape that space, nor could we ever finally want to.

* If style is continuing, one mode of that continuing is across social space: synchronic style, the kind that affords a sense of being oriented in the present. In the poem “My Heart”—looking back six years, to 1955, when O’Hara, who worked the front desk when he first got to New York, had just returned to the Museum of Modern Art as an assistant curator—he explains that he wears work shirts to the opera. (“I / don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time, / do I? No.”) At the opera, there are other men in work shirts, in among the tuxedos and the suits and the women in gowns and dresses and skirts and, here and there, in the middle of a well-dressed decade, smart pants. He and his friends are like one another, and they recognize each other by virtue of sharing a style. They are also different from other patrons. Aesthetically, socially, erotically, their distinctive continuity orients them in the world. Such social space can align with real space, with the cheap seats or, more broadly, with a neighborhood or a nation. It can also be the imaginary landscape of affinity that makes people who share a mixed space with others feel as though they are somehow particularly there together, situated or moving particularly in relation to one another, among other communities different and indifferent.

* Style continues inside occasions, too: conversations, parties, giving them their particular feeling, at the time and afterward even more. There is a silent count at a good party, maybe the music helps or maybe it’s just the talk, everybody keeping it going, noticeable sometimes only when it’s broken.

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NYRB: To what extent did newspapers influence public opinion in the US and Britain before and during World War II?

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books:

* In The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, Kathryn S. Olmsted claims that these monstrous moguls exercised a clear and malign influence on American and British policy, and that their desire not to “confront the fascist dictators made a war against fascism both more likely and more difficult to win,” while Alexander G. Lovelace’s theme in The Media Offensive is summed up in his subtitle, “How the Press and Public Opinion Shaped Allied Strategy During World War II.” Both books are informative and stimulating; whether they succeed in making their respective cases is another matter.

* The problem comes with Olmsted’s claims about the power of the press. She has no difficulty showing what a ghastly crew Hearst, McCormick, and the Pattersons were, as well as Beaverbrook and Rothermere, but she fails to demonstrate that they wielded great influence, since the evidence is to the contrary. For years on end the American press barons ferociously savaged Roosevelt. And with what result?

* In England the limits of the press lords’ power had already been dramatically demonstrated by their one attempt to unseat a party leader. In 1930, while Stanley Baldwin led the Tories in opposition, “Beethameer” launched a concerted attack on him, even running parliamentary candidates. He saw them off in a single speech, and with a single phrase (provided by his cousin Rudyard Kipling), denouncing the press lords for seeking “power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.” Whatever his other difficulties, Baldwin was never again troubled by “Lord Copper and Lord Zinc,” as the two ogres of Fleet Street became in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

What frustrated critics of the right-wing press are reluctant to concede is the extent to which popular papers become popular by reflecting opinion rather than directing it. From Northcliffe and Hearst on, the press lords have succeeded by tapping into sentiment—often ugly enough—that was already there. The Daily Mail beat the drum for the Boer War and then the Great War, but it didn’t cause them. In Citizen Kane, a movie plainly inspired by Hearst, there is an episode supposedly taken from Hearst’s life, when Kane sends a correspondent to Cuba to foment the 1898 Spanish-American War. The correspondent cables, “Could send you prose poems about scenery…there is no war in Cuba,” to which Kane replies, “You provide the prose poems—I’ll provide the war.” As it happens, those last words were exactly the sense that Tony Blair conveyed to John Scarlett, chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, twenty years ago. Scarlett duly provided the prose poems in the form of distorted or exaggerated intelligence, and Blair provided the Iraq War, or the British contribution to it. But again, although the London press allowed itself to be manipulated by Blair, and although Murdoch warmly supported that disastrous enterprise, he didn’t start it.

* Olmsted writes that “British public opinion was, of course, partly shaped by one of Britain’s best-selling newspapers, the Daily Express.” But was it? She quotes Ernest Bevin, the great Labour politician: “I object to the country being ruled from Fleet Street, however big the circulation, instead of from Parliament.” That was at the time of the 1945 general election, when almost every important British newspaper apart from the Daily Mirror supported Churchill and the Tories and roasted Labour, as Wodehouse might have said, with Beaverbrook’s Express doing so in poisonous fashion. After Churchill’s outrageous radio broadcast warning that a Labour government might mean “some sort of Gestapo,” the front-page headline in the Express read “Gestapo in Britain If Labour Win.” That evening Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, broadcast a masterly reply, in which he said, “The voice we heard last night was that of Mr. Churchill, but the mind was that of Lord Beaverbrook.” Within weeks Labour had won one of the greatest landslide victories in British electoral history. It’s hard to see much “shaping” there.

* If, as Olmsted writes, “the conservative British and American media titans had achieved little in their efforts to influence domestic policies before 1937” (or after 1937 either, she could have added)…

* Murdoch may at one time have had a knack for backing winners, but he has not dictated the course of British politics any more than Fox News has stopped the Democrats winning the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

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The Rapid-Response Novel

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Luke Ford

Giles Harvey writes in the New York Review of Books:

* Over the past decade, but especially since the epochal events of 2016, a growing number of writers have been running a sort of stress test on the form, stuffing their books to the point of bursting with headlines, social media posts, and other such glittering ephemera. I am thinking, among others, of Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018), Jenny Offill’s Weather (2020), Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021)—short, frenetic, highly praised books, from which, it can sometimes seem, almost all the standard novelistic furniture (scene, plot, character) has been removed in order to accommodate the surplus of up-to-the-minute information.

Like Twitter, whose influence is everywhere in these novels, the results can be engaging and often quite funny, at least for a time.

* A page of this writing—spare, kinetic, boisterously relentless—may be thrilling, but over the course of an entire novel, even quite a short one, the effect begins to pall, especially in the absence of an organizing principle beyond keeping pace with the headlines.

That is the problem with… rapid responders. They seem content merely to replicate the chaos and confusion, the interminable shapelessness, of our news-crazed lives—something readers might reasonably expect a novel to deliver them from.

* In most rapid-response novels, that circle is never drawn. There is simply a quick-fire accretion of harrowing data, together with the breathless, telegraphic commentary it inspires. For all its surface agitation, such fiction is actually founded on a complacent premise: that all that’s needed to achieve profundity is to write down what happens. How this material is shaped and ordered, by what geometry it is finessed into meaning, remains, at best, a secondary concern.

* [Ian McEwan’s new novel Lessons] provide[s] something lacking in most rapid-response novels: a sense of perspective. The everything-all-of-the-time quality of today’s online news coverage (“Twitter’s ABLAZE gurl”) can lead us into thinking we live in unprecedentedly awful times. Without downplaying the nightmare that is our current political situation, McEwan exposes this attitude as a form of historical narcissism. Far from being exceptional, the sense of looming annihilation, of going about our daily business on the edge of an abyss, has been the norm for quite some time.

* McEwan’s rejection, or partial revision, of his deterministic view of human character comes with a political corollary. Roland is an avid consumer of the news, but what does he do about any of it? The answer is not nothing. In the 1970s he befriends a couple in East Berlin (his girlfriend at the time has a diplomatic pass) to whom he smuggles banned books and records through Checkpoint Charlie. When they are arrested for a subversive remark, he tries to intervene on their behalf, though to little effect. Back home, he does some pamphleting for Labour but is generally less engaged. Later on, when he looks around him at the world his grandchildren will inherit, he is haunted by a sense of squandered opportunity, though (as in his private life) he finds a measure of bleak consolation in the idea that there is nothing he can do about it: “Who cared what an obscure Mr. Baines of Lloyd Square thought about the future of the open society or the planet’s fate? He was powerless.”

* Because of its formal fragmentation and ultra-contemporary subject matter, the rapid-response novel carries an aura of modernist innovation. Life itself has grown more manic and fractured (the implicit argument of these books seems to run), and novels ought to reflect this. Looked at another way, however, the genre could be seen as a capitulation. Working from the premise that readers today, conditioned by social media, have trouble focusing on anything for longer than thirty seconds at a time, the rapid-response novelist decides to cater to their ravaged attention spans by writing brief, topical books comprised of tweet-like fragments generously set off by quantities of white space.

* Roland’s inner life is as dense and vivid as the outer life bearing down on him. In contrast to the thinly drawn characters who populate the work of Laing et al., he isn’t buried beneath the weight of current events.

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My Fame Peaked In 2006

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

Google’s Ngram viewer tracks mentions in published books.

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American Universities Began Asking For A Personal Statement Essay To Weed Out Jews

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

College admissions in America operate with the tools of the last century that were enacted to limit the admission of Jews. In most countries, admission to university is done on the basis of test scores, but American universities in the 20th Century moved away from that objective standard to subjective standards that allowed them to reduce their intake of Jews without overtly stating they didn’t want Jews.

To increase their intake flexibility, American colleges added requirements for demographic information, personal essays, and extracurricular activities. Why? So they could exclude Jews and anyone else they didn’t want on the public basis that the university was looking for gentlemen rather than drones. What constitutes a Harvard man? This is subjective, ergo, Harvard gets to choose who it admits.

Universities assumed that Jews would fall short of their moral character standards, but moral character is a fiction. We don’t have a moral character. We have moral characters in different situations. Our traits are domain-specific. We may be honest in our marriage but not at work. We may be nice to strangers but vicious to our family. Who we are depends upon the situations we find ourselves in. The situation is frequently more determinative of how we behave than any supposedly innate character traits. Nobody is always brave. Some people are brave in certain circumstances and other people are brave in different circumstances. The person who is a hero on the football field Friday night may well be a docile lamb Sunday morning in church with his mom and then a rapist at a party that night with a stranger and then a life-saver when he stops on his drive home and rescues someone from a burning car.

America’s elite universities today use subjective admission criteria to limit their intake of Whites. Without these subjective standards, there would be more Whites on the best campuses and fewer of every other ethnic group.

Professor Merve Emre, the author of the following essay, is a Turkish-American professor at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing.

Though I was born to blog, to quote journalist Rob Eshman, I’ve never been much good at writing essays. My friend Dave Deutsch compared me to a porn star who can’t give a hand job.

I don’t believe the individual is a fiction, but we are primarily the product of time, place and heritage. I wouldn’t be who I am right now if I weren’t writing these words in anticipation of you reading them. I wouldn’t be saying these words alone to a wall. I don’t exist as I am without you. Without you, I am not me.

I am a historicist. I believe everything and everyone has to be understood in their time and place. I don’t see the world as the classical liberal does — a collection of individuals with inalienable rights. Rather, I see the world composed of nations. I don’t see individuals primarily as individuals but primarily as members of nations and whatever rights those nations can afford will be circumscribed by circumstances.

Most people who talk about themselves publicly are boring because most people don’t see themselves accurately. The winning formula for first-person writing, then, is to keep the focus on what fills you with shame. We all prefers to read about others’ troubles rather than their triumphs.

Merve Emre writes in the New York Review of Books:

A more specific genealogy for the genre—and an explanation of its distinctively American quality today—is the “personal statement” that high school students applying to US colleges and universities were asked to produce starting around 1920, and which has evolved into a cornerstone of the admissions process. Although it is difficult to pinpoint how many students per year write personal statements, more than 5.6 million applications were submitted in 2019–2020 through the Common App, a generic college admission application that requires the applicant to write at least one personal essay. Orbiting these millions of essays is a burgeoning industry of tutoring, prepping, and editing services, evinced by the popularity of books such as How to Write the Perfect Personal Statement, The Berkeley Book of College Essays, College Essays That Made a Difference, and How to Write a Winning Personal Statement. The personal narrative is the designated genre to reveal the writer’s “inner self,” an “opportunity to differentiate yourself from everyone else,” writes Alan Gelb in Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps.
The first mention of the personal essay as an admissions requirement, according to Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), came during Harvard’s drastic changes to its admissions practices in the 1920s. Since the turn of the century, selection based on exam scores had created what administrators called a “Jewish problem”: the admission of more Jewish applicants than the university deemed acceptable. “We can reduce the number of Jews by talking about other qualifications than those of admission examination,” wrote Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1922, advocating for a subjective set of criteria. The other qualifications he listed, “character” and “leadership,” were to be assessed through three new genres, as Karabel writes: “Demographic information, a personal essay, and a detailed description of extracurricular activities.” The assumption was that Jewish applicants would fall short of the school’s desired “character standard”—that their “centuries of oppression and degradation” meant that they were characterized not by a commitment to individual and personal self-assertion but by a “martyr air.”
To weed out Jewish applicants, universities mobilized the essay as an heir to the Catholic tradition of confession and the later Protestant tradition of narratives of “saving faith,” notes the historian Charles Petersen in his dissertation on meritocracy. No doubt the version of individualism championed by administrators drew on the moral culture of the Protestant bourgeoisie, what Max Weber described as its use of education to cultivate a rational, self-assertive personality. This type was marked by its ability to adhere to a consistent and subjective set of values in a disenchanted world. Forced to conceive the meaning of things, and even man’s relationship to reality, as an individual matter, Weber’s rational personality type formed intellectual arrangements to anoint himself the master and the arbiter of his own destiny, and eventually the destinies of those around him.
The premise of elite college admissions was that this relation could be cinched, and indeed enhanced, by reversing its terms: that the ability to demonstrate, through the genre of the essay, one’s commitment to an idealized model of private and rational individualism marked the applicant as someone well-suited to higher education. Whereas in previous centuries, higher education would have secured a career in the ministry, now it led to executive roles in industry and government. Beyond its discriminatory function, the personal essay sought to identify the students whom the university could transform into the political and economic leaders of the future. Learning how to “game the system” was only a sign of the system’s success at shaping applicants’ behavior.
The overtly discriminatory origins of the admissions essay have been superseded by more covert models of calibrating personhood by ethnicity, as in the recent case of Harvard University admissions officers accused of assigning Asian American applicants lower scores in subjective categories such as “positive personality.” Yet the value the admissions essay—and the college application process in general—places on the private individual as a self-reflective and self-governing subject, the rightful heir to the spoils of capitalism, remains as powerful as ever. Kathryn Murphy and Thomas Karshan, in On Essays: Montaigne to the Present (2020), write:
Applicants are encouraged to draw a moral out of a personal anecdote, often about struggle, and enriched by some element of their reading or studies: “failure,” an expert on the admissions essay tells us, “is essayistic gold.”
Far from signaling weakness, the proud narration of failure speaks of character in precisely the terms set by the educated bourgeoisie of the early twentieth century: character as the capacity to maintain one’s self-comportment in a moment of distress, to tell a tale of hardship lit by the glow of self-knowledge.
At the start of the last century what Petersen has described as the “Catholic tradition of confession,” with its ponderous moral and spiritual accent, its desire for masochistic public exposure and redemption, had yet to enter the scene of personal essay writing and did not do so until the mid-1960s. Almost all the guides mentioned earlier warn applicants away from striking a tone that is too testimonial or therapeutic, working hard to buffer the admissions essay from the sins and perils of what is commonly called confessional writing. Unlike the admissions essay, whose rules and stakes are firmly pegged to educational institutions, confessional writing speaks to a shift in the importance of the individual and the technologies used to conceptualize new notions of personhood. “Its development coincides with new cold war cultures of privacy and surveillance, with therapy/pop psychology culture, with the falling away of modernist and ‘New Critical’ approaches to art and literature, with the rise of the television talk show and the cult of the celebrity,” writes Jo Gill in Modern Confessional Writing (2006).

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LA’s Anti-White Coalition of the Fringe Falls Apart (10-12-22)

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:30 LAT: Listen to audio of L.A. council members making racist, crude remarks
02:00 Tucker on PA’s senate race
12:00 Reb Dooovid joins
29:00 Why couldn’t priests with defects serve in the Temple?
31:00 List of disqualifications for the Jewish priesthood
39:00 Kanye West accused of anti-semitism
1:07:00 Mickey Kaus says he’s no longer a character voter
1:12:00 Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior

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Donald Trump Is ‘Blind to the Beautiful Mosaic’

Posted on October 9, 2022 by Luke Ford

I’m reading chapter four of Maggie Haberman’s new biography (Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America) of Donald Trump. It is called “Blind to the Beautiful Mosaic.” Apparently, Trump was largely blind to the beauty of diversity.

Haberman writes:

* Up to that point in his life [1986], Trump had had few meaningful interactions with New Yorkers of color. When he was a child, in the decades after World War II, the city’s segregated neighborhoods were cauldrons of bigotry and resentment, cleaved off into “us” versus “them.” His childhood home in Jamaica Estates was just a seven-minute drive from Hollis, Queens, which had primarily been settled by Black residents since after the Korean War, but the two may as well have been many miles apart. The borough was on its way to becoming one of the most racially and ethnically diverse places on earth, but Trump never appeared to value the unique multiculturalism of his surroundings.
Black people were not known to be part of Fred Trump’s circle of influence…
* Donald himself spoke favorably about Black people who succeeded in entertainment or sports. But he would recount that Roy Cohn had advised him to hope for a Black judge, with the implication being that they could be manipulated, and associates recalled Trump musing about having Black judges preside over his cases. He told associates that one of his security guards disliked Black people and was aggressive when they got too close to Trump. (Trump called both statements false.) And he continued throughout his life to identify ethnic groups with the article “the,” as in a 2011 radio interview in which he declared, “I have a great relationship with the Blacks.” Over my years of reporting in New York City, Trump was the only political figure other than another Queens-born politician, Andrew Cuomo, I ever heard publicly use that specific phrase. It reflected not just a minimizing, reductive view but a transactional one: ethnic and racial groups were simply discrete units to be won over as allies in elections, or in real estate or zoning battles.
Trump publicly demonstrated little interest in the civil rights movement, though his college years coincided with one of the most intense and geographically widespread moments for race relations in our country’s history.
* Trump experienced that racial tumult at a remove. When Tony Gliedman arrived at the Trump Organization in 1986, he insisted on bringing along his assistant at the city’s housing agency, a young Jamaican immigrant named Jacqueline Williams. At the time, Trump was known to invoke stereotypes of Black people, such as laziness. Trump’s assistant, Norma Foerderer, initially expressed anxiety at the suggestion of hiring Williams. Foerderer told Gliedman that they’d never had a Black person working on the executive floor, a comment that was later shared with Williams. Foerderer requested that Williams interview with her before she could join the staff. “Wow,” Foerderer exclaimed when they met. “You’re beautiful anyway, so you’ll fit right in.”
* Trump’s most sustained encounters with Black people came as he pushed beyond real estate and into the sports business.
* The new proximity to Black athletes, celebrities, and political figures did little to change how Trump talked with people about race. Trump had seemed a largely oblivious bystander to so many of the social and cultural revolutions that defined the young-adult years of many of his peers. But as new opportunities pushed Trump beyond the lily-white milieu of his adolescence, his social ambitions pulled him from the facade of traditionalist domesticity that Fred Trump had erected in Jamaica Estates, and toward a world where sex seemed to be at the forefront of everything.
* They [former employees] also recalled Trump mocking gay men, or men who were seen as weak, with the words “queer” or “faggot.” If someone gay was of use to Trump personally or for a business purpose, Trump appeared open to the person, but it did not exempt them from private scorn. In front of one openly gay executive, Trump was nothing but pleasant and accepting, even taking him and his husband for Florida weekend getaways on his private jet and calling the executive’s husband for advice on orthodontia for Trump’s children. Behind the executive’s back, however, a former Trump Organization consultant named Alan Marcus said, Trump belittled him as a “queer” and bragged that he paid the executive less than he would have to otherwise because of it, a claim about compensation that appeared to be untrue.
The homophobia that had existed throughout the country for decades intensified around the AIDS virus. The New York Times carried its first, brief report of a rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals , as the headline put it, in July 1981. The mysterious condition, which became known as AIDS, had what was at first an uncertain transmission but was identified as circulated through sexual contact and drug use. Yet for years polls showed Americans casting judgment on people who got infected. New York City became an epicenter of the disease. Ed Koch, who never married and whose sexuality was a source of speculation over his time in office—posters that cropped up during Koch’s gubernatorial race against Mario Cuomo in 1982 read vote for cuomo, not the homo —was widely seen as late in trying to mobilize public awareness of the virus. A city’s carefree attitude toward sex quickly turned dark, curtailing the greatest excesses of the club scene where Trump had once enjoyed being visible.
A country that was slow to react moved to action as the disease suddenly began impacting celebrities and heterosexuals. President Ronald Reagan made his first public reference to AIDS in 1985, years after it became an epidemic, and by which time panic about the virus was everywhere. Trump was plainly terrified of the disease, which seemed to elevate his fear of germs and illness to an almost pathological level. He told one friend after another that he wore two condoms to protect himself, and he announced publicly that he would require prospective dates to take an AIDS test. “It’s one way to be careful. There are a lot of ways,” he told an interviewer. “I’m saying, take all of those ways and double them, because you will need them.”
Among straight New Yorkers, fear of AIDS also increased speculation about sexual orientation—musing about who might be gay and who wasn’t, including about Koch—that was often homophobic in its effect. Trump was far from alone among prominent men in New York City experiencing some level of that panic, but for him, the anxiety was pronounced. He called reporters to inquire if people with whom he had just met might be gay, worried simply because they had just exchanged a handshake.
* In the world of New York’s broader racial politics, Trump was extreme, but not so completely out of sync with other whites—both the white ethnic working class of his native Queens and the elite of his adopted Upper East Side, who were perhaps less overt about expressing their prejudices—as to stand out glaringly in day-to-day conversations. Koch’s relationships with some Black leaders were famously contentious, beginning with the closure of a hospital in Harlem and right into his final reelection campaign; he made controversial statements and then complained that Black leaders and voters reacted to them. “It’s been my impression there is a lot of anti-Semitism amongst substantial numbers of black leaders—not all,” Koch said during his 1985 reelection campaign, sparking a furious reaction.
* Over time, the calcified racial politics of New York City began to loosen, transformed by demographic and cultural change, but Trump’s own views did not seem to. As he built his Manhattan real estate empire, the “Fear City” moniker that public-sector union leaders had used to pressure City Hall a decade earlier had come to describe a city where crime rates had stayed historically high for ten years. There were nearly 2,000 murders in 1980 and 1981, and violent crime reports overall exceeded 180,000 both years. By the mid-1980s, New York was plagued by the crack cocaine epidemic. In the city, street crime exploded as users of the drug robbed people to pay for the next cheap hit. Tensions over crime and policing provoked a series of racial conflagrations with a uniquely New York character.
* Police, Trump said, needed to be let loose. “Unshackle them from the constant chant of ‘police brutality’ which every petty criminal hurls immediately at an officer who has just risked his or her life to save another’s. We must cease our continuous pandering to the criminal population of this City.” The primary target of Trump’s ire was Koch, who had instructed citizens not to carry “hate and rancor” in their hearts. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” the ad continued. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence. Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze or understand them, I am looking to punish them.”
It was as clear a guiding ethos for his life as Trump seemed to have: hate should be a civic good. He sat with a handful of reporters to underscore his message that hate could be a uniting force for the city. “You better believe that I hate the people that took this girl and raped her brutally,” he said. “I want society to hate them.”
The case increased Trump’s visibility as a commentator on topics well outside his area of business expertise. On CNN’s Larry King Live , he spoke about what he characterized as the weakness of policing tactics, a subject that did not at all relate to the specifics of the Central Park Jogger case. (On air, Trump scooted back from King and said he found the host’s breath to be unbearable.) “The problem we have is we don’t have any protection for the policeman,” Trump said. “The problem with our society is that the victim has absolutely no rights and the criminal has unbelievable rights, unbelievable rights, and I say it has to stop.”
Trump was hardly the lone voice furious about the crime, or even the lone voice demanding swift justice. (Some white liberals, living in a terrified city that had seen record crime increases over more than a decade, agreed with Trump’s general sentiment more than they would be comfortable admitting publicly.) But none called for brutality in response quite as Trump did.
* The same year as the Central Park assault, Trump appeared on an NBC News special focused on race relations, along with other guests including the filmmaker Spike Lee, poet Maya Angelou, home-entertaining celebrity Martha Stewart, and conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. The guests were asked to speak about affirmative-action policies and their impact on economic opportunity in the United States. “A well-educated Black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market,” said Trump, whose father’s connections and money shaped nearly every aspect of his career. “And, I think, sometimes a Black may think that they don’t really have the advantage or this or that but in actuality today, currently, it’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a great. I’ve said on occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today I would love to be a well-educated Black because I really believe they do have an actual advantage today.”
* From the outset, it was clear that he would incorporate racial paranoia into his public persona and his views of civic life. The first time I saw Trump after he left office, in an interview for this book, I asked him how he thought racial politics in New York were different than in the rest of the country. “I think they’re more severe,” he replied. When I asked in what way, he said only, “I don’t know why. I think it’s more severe. I think it’s a tougher game.” He added, “Racial is more severe in New York than it is anywhere else that I can think of.”
That was the lens through which Trump seemed to view the entire country, if not the world: tribal conflict was inevitable. One day in the 1990s, Alan Marcus brought up a news item he had just seen about the changing demographics of the United States, projecting that nonwhites would one day be the majority population, intentionally trying to get a rise out of Trump by raising a subject he knew would needle him.
That won’t happen, Trump said. First, he insisted, there would be a revolution. “This isn’t going to become South Africa,” he said.
* A year after he was released from prison in March 1995, Tyson moved into a new mansion in Farmington, Connecticut, an upscale suburb of Hartford. When Sharpton arrived for a party there, he followed a winding staircase to a terrace overlooking the pool, where he found Don King chatting with Trump. The topic of their discussion: Tyson’s white neighbors were petitioning to get him out of the community, and they were speculating about how much money Tyson could demand from them if he obliged by moving out.
“When Trump got elected, that’s what occurred to me: if Donald Trump had been born Black, he would have been Don King,” Sharpton said. “Because both of them—everything was transactional.”

From chapter eight:

On and off over roughly two years he had dated another beautiful model nearly two decades his junior. Kara Young was seen by his employees as fun, interesting, and down to earth. She was also the daughter of a Black mother and white father. “Do you think she looks Black?” Trump asked Marcus.
Young has said very little about the relationship over the years. In one of her few interviews on the topic, she described a boyfriend who exhibited a cultural ignorance about Black people and appeared to rely on stereotypes to process unfamiliar activities. When they attended a tennis match featuring the sisters Venus and Serena Williams, Trump expressed surprise at the racially diverse crowd because he appeared to believe that Black people were not interested in tennis. “ He was impressed that a lot of black people came to the U.S. Open because they were playing,” Young recalled to The New York Times in 2017. Yet she also helped Trump ingratiate himself into a new world of Black celebrities, such as the rap artist Sean Combs and the influential music producer Russell Simmons. Trump would later point to those associations as examples of why he couldn’t be a racist, because he knew Black people, and, more significantly they had engaged with him without taking issue. (Weeks after meeting Young’s parents, Trump told her that she had gotten her beauty from her mother and her intelligence “from her dad, the white side.” He laughed as he said it; Young told him that wasn’t something to joke about.)

From chapter twenty:

After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, Trump was reluctant to dispense aid, due in part to his refusal, in conversations with aides, to accept that the island was a part of the United States; he seemed to view it as a distressed property, referring to it as a place with “absolutely no hope” when an aide described its potential.

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Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission

Posted on October 7, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this hilarious 2022 book by Mark Leibovich:

* McCain also had an impressive capacity for grudges. He went years without speaking to New York Times reporters after our paper published an article in February 2008 that suggested he’d had an affair with a Washington lobbyist, Vicki Iseman. Both parties denied a romantic involvement, and Iseman went on to sue my employer. (She later dropped the suit, after the Times agreed to print a note to readers saying the story did not mean to imply a sexual relationship.)

* He was fond of cold assessments about life and death and legacies. “ This will all be over someday, and no one’s gonna give a shit who I used to be,” McCain would often say, in so many words. But he clearly did give a shit, at least about the choreography of his last act. To ensure a proper send-off, McCain took a direct role in planning his memorial services, all six of them (multiple funerals are an essential flex for any proper D.C. bigwig). There was the service at North Phoenix Baptist Church, the public viewing at the Arizona Capitol, the ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy, the one at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, the wreath laying at the Vietnam Memorial, and the granddaddy of them all at the National Cathedral, preceding the burial back in Annapolis.
Following his terminal diagnosis, McCain convened regular Friday sessions to plan his departure rites. He made his wishes known about pallbearers, hymns, prayers, eulogies, and eulogists. He wanted his program to feature a murderers’ row of speakers. They included the forty-third and forty-fourth commanders in chief—George W. Bush and Barack Obama—both of whom had inflicted defeats upon McCain in his two presidential campaigns. “ It was almost as if he was planning someone else’s funeral,” McCain’s longtime campaign adviser Rick Davis observed. “He was really excited about it.”
Along with his wife, Cindy, McCain dictated who should be invited and, more to the point, who should not be. Palin did not make the cut. Neither, for various reasons, did some of his higher-profile aides from 2000 or 2008 (John Weaver, Mike Murphy). To no one’s surprise, the forty-fifth president topped John McCain’s final shit list.

* In death, as in life, John M C Cain stood for another cherished American asset: media overkill.
The cable networks kicked into their “Special Report: A Nation Mourns” modes. No shortage of trained observers were eager to pregame the National Cathedral service.
“A statement about the bigness of America,” MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt would declare of this solemn observance. Or maybe, Hunt allowed, it could all be taken as “a funeral for civility.” This one could go either way.
The pundit-historian-theologian Jon Meacham, who would eulogize Bush 41 in this same church two months later and would go on to write speeches for Joe Biden, ministered through his live shots. You know it’s a momentous Washington ceremony when Meacham gets called in. Where did this Great Deceased Man fit into the American story? Only Meacham knew for sure.

* Steve Schmidt, a longtime Republican bulldog who turned hard against Trump and whose emphatic cable diatribes made him a Never Trump icon, was another stalwart of McCain commentary. “John McCain was a great patriot,” said Schmidt, who was a top aide to the 2008 presidential campaign. “He more perfectly loved this country than any man I’ve ever known.” McCain, however, did not “perfectly love” Steve Schmidt by the end, for a variety of reasons, and Schmidt, too, wound up among the uninvited.
“This was John McCain’s way of shoving it up Donald Trump’s ass,” the greenroom eminence Al Hunt told me outside the basilica. “Leon Panetta just told me that.” Yes, he did, and quite conspicuously. Panetta practically shouted the words and did the old Italian fuck-you arm salute for good measure, drawing stares outside the church.
The pageant called for every sober sage on deck. Tom Brokaw came down from New York. We chatted in front of the church before the ceremony. People kept spotting him and thanking him for his service, though Brokaw himself had never actually served, at least in any wars. He had, however, penned a blockbuster book— The Greatest Generation —about those who did serve, which was not nothing. At the very least, Brokaw was a commanding officer in the Greatest Generation of TV context givers.

* No way Donald Trump belonged in this club.
“It was almost as if it were a meeting of Washington’s political underground,” my Times colleague Peter Baker wrote in his funeral game story, “if the underground met in a grand cathedral with 10,650 organ pipes.”
But if it was really a “rebellion against the president’s worldview,” it would be a brief and bloodless one. You could also make a case that Trump’s pariah status at an event like this was precisely why his base loved him so much. The assembled Washington respect payers had collectively nurtured all the notions, false promises, and wars that put Trump in the White House to begin with—Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, deficits, gridlock, cynicism, decadence, and anything that fit under the foul heading of “the Swamp.”
In his eulogy, Bush instructed mourners to always imagine McCain whispering over their shoulders. The capital never lacked for dead voices said to be exhorting us to greatness. “We are better than this,” Bush said, quoting the mythic figurine of McCain’s ghost. “America is better than this!”
That felt unsettled. But we all have stories we tell ourselves.

* Graham had minimal regard for Trump as a serious thinker and moral human being. That was evident to anyone Graham spoke with privately. But he also reserved a certain awe for his new patron. He couldn’t believe how Trump could endure the crises he did or got away with what he got away with. It created a mystique around Trump, especially among politicians, who tend to be rule-bound by nature, mindful of precedents, and terrified of being shamed. Trump had no such inclination toward rules or common respect and no capacity for shame or embarrassment. He was a pure and feral rascal. It gave him the advantage of being bulletproof in his own scrambled head.
Some of the most hard-boiled politicians I knew, people who dealt with all kinds of schemers and scoundrels in their careers, reserved a perverse curiosity about this president. “Trump is an interesting person,” said Harry Reid, the former Democratic Senate leader who did battle with Las Vegas mob bosses as Nevada’s gaming commissioner in the 1970s. “He’s not immoral, but he is amoral. Amoral is when you shoot someone in the head, it doesn’t make a difference. No conscience.”

* One outcome of great interest to Graham was winning a fourth term in the Senate. This required him to speak one way in South Carolina and another way when being interviewed by a reporter in Washington who was onto him. “You just showcase your issues, right?” Graham said.
Well, sure. Graham was hardly the first politician to “showcase” different themes and postures before different audiences. But Graham spoke out of both sides of his mouth with such gusto it was rather audacious. He could squeeze Trump like a teddy bear in South Carolina and then—safely back with the people who are so smart in Washington—boast of playing him like a tuba on the golf course.
Graham was happy to lay out exactly the game he was playing. He knew I was versed in the election-year “showcasing” he was now engaged in—that I was one of the “people who are so smart ” that he derided earlier in the week. I was also one of the convenient devices “who hate us ,” although nothing about Graham’s cozy manner with me suggested that he really thought I hated him or his constituents.

* I’d heard a million versions of this excuse: that Trump was too inept to shake down a key ally (Ukraine), too undisciplined to plot to overturn an election, too naive and childlike to abide by basic governing standards.

* Rooney was more amused by the prospect than anything else, mostly because DeSantis was known within the House Republican caucus as a socially awkward weirdo who had minimal profile outside his district.

* “The Senate is like a country club; we’re like a truck stop,” Kevin McCarthy was always saying. This overlooked that the Republican side of the truck stop was attracting more and more racists, freaks, and extremists who once would have been consigned to darker corners of the rest area.

* “You have a situation where the leader of our party models the worst behavior imaginable,” another outgoing Republican member of Congress told me. “And if you’re a Republican in Washington, the idea is basically to make yourself as much of a dickhead as possible in order to get attention and impress the biggest dickhead of all, the guy sitting in the White House.”
I asked the outgoing congressman—very nicely, even a tad aggressively—whether I could attach his name to this excellent quote. “No fucking way,” he said. Why? “Because a lot of these dickheads are my friends. And I might have to lobby them one day, too.
“I know, it’s depressing.”

* [Stormy] Daniels, the suddenly very famous porn actor, had dropped into town to promote her memoir, Full Disclosure, which was not your typical political memoir in the way that, say, Henry Kissinger’s memoir would be. The book included a lot about her difficult childhood, her abusive relationships, and her entry into the world of adult film, where the former Stephanie Clifford would rechristen herself Stormy Daniels. The stuff about her childhood and relationships and professional journey was ignored in favor of the spicier details, such as the part where Daniels compared the shape of Trump’s penis to a mushroom (“smaller than average,” “unusual,” “like a toadstool”).
On his show a few nights earlier, Jimmy Kimmel had helpfully presented Daniels with a tray of actual mushrooms and invited her to pick the fungus that best resembled the presidential member (she picked the smallest). At one point, Kimmel referred to Daniels “making love” to Trump, which understandably set her off.
“Gross!” she protested. “What is wrong with you? I laid there and prayed for death.”

* “There is no doubt that the president and I have extremely different styles,” [Susan] Collins said. It was always amusing to hear elected Republicans who were plainly appalled by Trump try to paper over their differences with him as a matter of “style”—if only he wore different shoes or something. Or the ever-present, ever-lame “I don’t like his tweets” complaint, as if Trump’s use of the medium itself were the issue.

* In 2015 and 2016, more than half of Republican poll respondents were still saying that they believed Barack Obama was a Muslim, and probably not born in the United States, too. The instinct—by the media, by the GOP grown-ups—was always to consign this to a fringe view, or a “settled question” (which of course only required “settling” because Trump had previously questioned Obama’s country of origin nonstop). It was not a polite or uplifting topic. It hardly mattered that they were ugly and demonstrable lies. But the reality was, these views, or “suspicions,” existed solidly in the Republican mainstream, even after Obama had been president for nearly two full terms.
“We had a Muslim president for seven and a half years,” said Antonio Sabato Jr., the underwear model, reality show character, and big Trump supporter. Sabato made this claim in an interview with ABC, just before delivering a speech on the first night of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
“It’s in my heart,” Sabato said, when asked what the source of his claim was. “I see it for what it is. I believe that he’s on the other side . . . the Middle East. He’s with the bad guys.”

* It was not clear where “LOL, Nothing Matters” began, but the refrain started popping up on Twitter in the early Trump years. The phrase packed an exasperated tone, an acknowledgment of the consequence-free environment that Trump had fostered.
The longer Trump survived without ramifications, the easier it became for him. No scandal could ever be processed before the next one came along. Outrage fatigue was his best enabler.

* People would inevitably invoke “the nuclear codes” whenever Trump kicked it up to next-level bonkers.

* The most fascinating aspect of watching Romney in the Senate was seeing him toss an increasing number of fucks out the window. (He would word that differently.)

* Friends and aides first noticed a change in Trump after he contracted COVID-19. The doctors at Walter Reed pumped him with Canseco levels of steroids. Trump’s physical condition improved, but he seemed more paranoid and erratic in the aftermath.

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