The Second Coming

The Second Coming (W.B. Yeats), adapted for 2016
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The drone cannot hear the operator;
Things fall apart; the center has been sold;
Some dick-pic talk is loosed upon the world,
The Twitter feed is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of democracy is drowned;
The best run out of sick burns, while the rest
Convict them with passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely Hamilton will save us now?
His Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Dealio
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of upscale Queens
A shape with lion body (corpulent, zoo-kept) and the head of a man (lion-maned),
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its small hands, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant Romney tweets.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That demagoguery’s stoned sleep
Was vexed to nightmare by a country it did not care to recognize
Or feel itself recognized by.
And what rough beast, its hour come round again,
Slouches towards Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Center to be born?

The Tragedy of Antonin Scalia

Much of the dislike of Scalia (whom I disagreed with and saw as a force for harm on many many questions) is also a side-effect of how our undemocratic Supreme Court works. Partisan disagreements get played out in the weird lexicon and theoretical debates of legal elites, and views fading from influence and acceptability hang on there as long as life tenure lasts. It's the flip side of the adoration of RBG: we treat the Justices half like titled aristocrats authorized to rule us, half like maddening older family members whom we can't escape and can't stop resenting.

But within that weird elite world, Scalia started with a perfectly cogent view: as the least democratic branch of government, the courts should interpret their authority narrowly to leave more room for legislatures and the executive to make and revisit political judgments. This, not ancestor worship, was the basis of his originalism and his "textualist" way of reading statutes. (His motives for developing this view must have had plenty of conservatism in them, but general theories of legal interpretation tend to grow from, or alongside, other commitments - another weird feature of this whole institution.)
Yet Scalia's vanity undid him. That's not a slur on him. People are vain, the culture is vain, and life tenure being addressed as "your honor" must foster it. As time went on, he wrote more and more in a voice intended for the papers, the blogs, and the conservative presses that republished his dissents. He appealed half-nakedly to the biases of the GOP's conservative constituents. He mercilessly mocked writers of majority opinions, who were not always as smart as he and certainly wrote less engagingly (but also less floridly). He helped to make the Supreme Court, in the public's eye, not just a political body, but THE SAME KIND OF POLITICAL BODY as every other. That is just what he would not have wanted, had he been able to reflect on it in advance, and had he meant what he said about the Court's role.

His opinions as time went on also lost some of their quality of principle. I believe a genuine conservative would not have reached for the desperate and novel theory that almost knocked out the Affordable Care Act in 2012. I would like to think he would have been much less certain about the lessons of history that aligned conveniently with NRA propaganda in creating a personal right to bear arms in 2008. Scalia joined the aggrandizement of an increasingly conservative court. Perhaps he was growing more cynical about the possibility of doing anything else. If so, he was not alone, and the particular quality of that cynicism was something he had helped to cultivate, quite against his own better intentions.

May he find more peace than he offered to most of the vulnerable who came before his Court. Like most of us, he meant well once.

Poems of the Climate, I

(After Eliot's Waste Land, of course)

December is the weird-ass month, raising

Daffodils from dozing land, mixing

Hallmark cards and bafflement, mudding

Up our seasons with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, no joke there,

Earth in forgetful grey, not even

Bothering to freeze the ticks.

…

I read, the long evenings, drive north and it stays warm.

What is the tropic here, what equinox

orders this unfrozen scene?  Son, hey son,

You’re quick to say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, affixed to tweets,

And the almond gives no shelter, the Gulf Stream no relief,

And the Arctic the sound of water.…

I will show you fear in a season of rain.

Poem: Tongue-tied leaves

Why shouldn’t all things be oracular
for one whose words
get swallowed or perch
on the tip of the tongue?

Tongue-tied leaves,
pleading in sworls
of orange, green, and crinkled brown;

Beech-bark maps
of coasts, swamps, broken lands,
the wen or burl of settlement;

Ridges spelling out lines for the sky,
and even clouds, old tricksters,
dropping their sticklebacks and mouses’ ears to say,
Hear me down there, listen and
lend me what you have.

Talk About the Weather

Reasons to talk about the weather.
1. It gives you feelings.
2. It's a metaphor for mood and consciousness.

3. Its event seem to imply personality.
4. And polytheism.
5. It reaches you through all the senses.
6. It links the global and regional scales through your own horizon and personal sensations.
7. It's now a real-time newsfeed of planetary history.
8. Light changes everything, all the time.
9. Clouds are amazing.
10. The only boring thing about the weather is the mind it can't reach.

Benevolent Authoritarian Reviews

         Amused to pieces by an Amazon review that complains about After Nature's support for democracy and asserts, "An authoritarian leader with a real commitment to solving these problems could be more effective," I decided to apply the benevolent authoritarian standard to a sample of reviews and commentary.

      Other Amazon review: “What this pattern-weave bathmat lacks is a commitment to benevolent authoritarianism. Three stars.”

            Yelp review of new Thai restaurant: "I liked the drunken noodles, and the appetizers came out quickly; but the service showed a distinct lack of grit; I left still hungry for the feel of the iron fist within the velvet glove. Two stars."

RateMyProfessor Review of male professor: “Obviously very knowledgeable, even though he couldn’t always answer our questions.  Sometimes intimidating, but that’s his job! LOL Didn’t beat us enough, though.  Three stars.”

            RateMyProfessor Review of female professor: “Great shoes!  Didn’t seem self-confident, sometimes couldn’t answer our questions, which made wonder if she’s really an expert.  LOL. Didn’t beat us enough.  Two stars.”

            David Brooks column: Will you people please tell me how to live my life meaningfully, already?  Have I mentioned that freedom is a burden?  I’m giving you all two stars; no, three, because I’m still the friendly conservative.

Yelp review of old Chinese restaurant: “The egg rolls were fine.  Nice to have forks as well as chopsticks.  The General Tsao’s Chicken did not lay to waste my stomach and burn the fields of my intestines, nor did it build a new society on the ashes.  Three stars.”

            Focus-group review of Bernie Sanders debate performance: “Liked his clear talk about inequality, political corruption, prison reform.  Felt good to be harangued a little.  But I was really hoping a so-called socialist would assign me a job and tell me which uniform to wear to work.  They don’t make ‘em like they used to! Two-and-a-half stars.”

            Focus-group review of Donald Trump’s campaign: Five stars.

             

#OtherNerdyHulks

Postmodernist Hulk prove you always already smashed.

Foucaultian Hulk interpellate you to smash self, agonizingly, invisibly.

Marxist Hulk smash bourgeois state. Marxian Hulk take long view, dissect changing means and relations of production, new class formations.

David Brooks Hulk: last good smash was Princeton class of 1910. We are Hulks with hollow chests. Email Hulk tips on living with your green self.

Ross Douthat Hulk: Do not make me moral panic. You not like me moral panicked.

Antonin Scalia Hulk smash how Founding Fathers smashed.

Historian Hulk smash contingently; how differently it might all have turned out! Too late: all is smashed.

Hobbesian Hulk rationally smash first.

Humean Hulk have always smashed before, but maybe not this morning.

Kantian Hulk not understand moral formula whether or not to smash. Kantian Hulk head hurt.

Walt Whitman Hulk smash multitudes.

Emily Dickinson Hulk contemplate mote of dust, beam of light, ephemeral insect, and fleeting feeling: impulse - to smash -!.

Academic Hulk table smashing motion pending re-consideration by committee.

Hillary Clinton Hulk, given what we now know, could not prudently endorse own earlier smashing.