A coincidence of images? I blame the Zeitgeist.
Goodfellas
Author: William Timberman
A Brief Note On the Current Unpleasantness
Seems like these days I can’t walk more than five feet without stepping on some ignorant fascist’s toes. The pundits recommend learning the hippety hop. Me, I’m dreaming of heavier shoes.
Orange Is the New Orange
My new orange iPhone seems a lot bolder, its nubbly tech woven case a lot cruder than its svelte, steel-blue predecessor, now on its way back to Apple to be reincarnated. I’m afraid some fugitive from Miami Vice is gonna sidle up to me one of these days in Walmart and mutter “brown shoes?” as he reaches for a bag of Cheetos on the next shelf over. Anyway, like it or not, it appears I’ll be fencing with a claymore rather than a rapier for the next two years. Worked for Rob Roy, though, didn’t it?
I do wonder, though, if the damned thing is inevitably destined to become a MAGA magnet. You know, because it’s orange, because of the reptilian case, and because MAGA folks do so love to assert their cultural dominance over anything that attracts their ape-like curiosity.
Gertrude!
Gertrude Stein was a steward of the English language as well as its first modern sorcerer. To this day, fifty years after I first read her Lectures in America, I’m still amazed by how skillfully she managed to dissolve the accepted frameworks of literacy without simultaneously depriving literacy itself of either its traditional subtlety or its depth. In the twenty-first century, as we’re beginning to believe that the written word lacks the ease of use that terminal stage capitalism and its media torrents demand, we look to computers to do the work of creating, disseminating, sorting and interpreting the flood of content for us. That’s a mistake, possibly a catastrophic one. If you want to know why, read Gertrude Stein, the only effective antidote I know of to the Newspeak now being forced on us by the shiny barbarisms of our new century.
Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025
If you can’t defeat Chicago, attack Memphis. If you can’t defeat Ukraine, attack Poland and Romania. It appears that Trump has something to teach Putin about diplomacy after all….
The Kirk Circus
Everybody has a take. Everybody is deploring, threatening, scribbling cringeworthy hagiographies, lowering flags to half mast, offering up thoughts and prayers.
Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. He got what he’d already said he’d be willing to accept, if not endorse, as collateral damage in pursuit of what he considered to be a vigorous and necessary defense of the second amendment.
He never imagined that he’d be the one with a fatal bullet hole in him. Those would be reserved for Jews, immigrants, black and brown people, gay people, women who refused his benevolent instruction, empathetic people, people who’d read the wrong books, and above all, people who’d had a belly full of his trumpeted triumphs of the will to come, the triumphs that he and his equally deluded buddies were peddling to anyone stupid enough to take them at face value.
Civil society is in abeyance in the US. This was never our fault, but restoring it is nevertheless our duty. We can start by not shedding any tears for this sad, sick, puer aeternus, whose intelligence matured tragically earlier than his wisdom.
La fanciulla del West
Lethality Fashions
Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025
Does Stephen Miller really not realize that in painting targets on all our backs, he’s also painted one on his own? I can’t imagine being thrilled at the moral certainty that millions of people are wanting me dead. Despite all Miller’s public bravado, I have no idea how he can either.
I suppose sadomasochism has its own logic. I’m grateful I’ve never felt the urge find out how that logic works.
Trumpism’s Unspoken Antecedents
Joachim von Ribbentrop for foreign policy
The East India Company for economic policy
Joseph Stalin for scientific policy
The Taliban for social policy
The Spanish Inquisition for jurisprudence
Louis XIV of France for taxation
The Eastern Roman Empire for internal staffing and administration
A Humanist Doxology
Whatever their other talents, the best of us have always had one thing in common: a fierce, unyielding clarity about what it means to be a human being. Here, in this short clip of James Baldwin speaking informally, is the most succinct expression of that clarity I’ve ever encountered. There’s no cant here, no unspoken agenda, no recrimination. This is as naked, as vulnerable, and yet as implacable an expression of our true responsibilities to one another as it’s possible for a single voice to utter. James Baldwin honors us all, while reminding us all what little comfort we can demand for doing the right thing. There’s far more on display here than a single talented person’s eloquence. We’d do well to heed it.