The purest treasure mortal times afford Is spotless reputation; that away Men are but gilded loan or painted clay… Mine honor is my life; both grow in one; Take honor from me, and my life is done.
—William Shakespeare, Richard II
“Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I said, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”
Erika Kirk clearly can’t tell the difference between piety and hypocrisy, between grief and grift, and seems to have convinced herself that we won’t be able to either. Sadly, she has that in common with most of her fellow MAGA enthusiasts. If they weren’t so smug about their ambitions, it’d be a lot easier to pity them.
I was asked a few years ago how an atheist like me could square his atheism with his fondness for snippets of church Latin. It does seem an odd affectation—I wasn’t raised Catholic, and a couple of years of Latin classes in a public high school in Oklahoma back in the Jurassic hardly qualifies as any Latin at all for those who truly know it. Amo, amas, amat, Gallia in tres partes divisa est, and the ablative absolute are just the beginning of a long quest, and I was forced off the trail early.
My response to being caught in this seeming contradiction—that I was an atheist “d’expression chrétienne”—was admittedly flippant, but it was also accurate. My atheism was assembled in the back rooms of the western culture I grew up in. The only tools I could find there, at least early on, were those left behind by the Catholic Church in its long retreat, the only materials its doctrinal remnants worked over in the centuries since with more or less success by the secular carpenters who preceded me. Small wonder, then, that Deo gratias, or sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, still seem appropriate to express the awe I feel for that branch of the human experiment I’m descended from, even though I’m as aware as Nietzsche ever was that God is dead. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa….
…try keeping tabs on people who are already living there:
Life among our insistent MAGA fascists is made almost palatable by the caprices of human immanence. Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Doctorow—their antennae have long been busy registering what’s coming, even if ours have not, at least not yet. Here’s a revelation from Sterling’s Holy Fire that has lately added to the strain on my already overworked engines of impermeability:
Maya blinked. “Men and women just think differently, that’s all.” “Oh, that’s so stupid! ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ That’s all gone now, you understand? Anatomy is industry now!”
Okay, Zuckermuskians, top that if you can. We see you. Do you see us?
From Federico Thoman in the America-Cina Newsletter from today’s Corriere della Sera:
Ma anche dagli Stati Uniti abbiamo parecchi spunti: un’analisi su come Trump ha cambiato la retorica di un presidente americano e di come l’amministrazione abbia imposto una «censura» a termini come «cambiamento climatico» ed «emissioni» al dipartimento dell’Energia. Se, come diceva il filosofo tedesco Heidegger, «il linguaggio è la casa dell’essere», non siamo messi benissimo.
But we also have plenty of insights from the United States: an analysis of how Trump has changed the rhetoric of an American president and how the administration has imposed a “censorship” on terms like “climate change” and “emissions” at the Department of Energy. If, as the German philosopher Heidegger said, “language is the home of being,” we’re not in a good place.
There are some fine things still to read in the world, especially if you’re lucky enough not to be trapped in the prison currently being fashioned by MAGA zealots out of American English.
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.
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.
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.