The Shape of Things to Come

The Ingress and Egress of It All

William Timberman

I’m watching NASA’s preparations for the April Fool’s Day launch of Artemis II, their first crewed circumlunar mission since Apollo 8 in 1968. My twenty-five year-old self watches with me, that long-haired, incurably hopeful New Leftist I used to be jammed into a neighbor’s living room with my then girlfriend and most of the rest of our ambivalent crew, waiting for Walter Cronkite to light up my neighbor’s 13 inch Sony TV with the confirmation that Neil Armstrong had become the first human being in history to set foot on another celestial body.

NASA representatives still talk like automatons, still use unnecessarily cryptic words/phrases like ingress and egress, capcom (capsule communicator), extravehicular activity, translunar injection. It’s all so cult-like, so pious, so oblivious to the atrocities being commited in our name elsewhere on our own celestial body, that blue marble of aspiration, the one we keep betraying. The word then was Vietnam, the word today is Iran. But never mind. For now we are watching a special civilian operation. The special military operation will have to wait until tomorrow.

If Not Now, When?

William Timberman

“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.”

How Not To Be the New York Times

William Timberman

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.

The End Of the Beginning….*

William Timberman7 Comments

The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?

*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q

In Defense Of Indifference

William Timberman2 Comments

We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)

Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.