Was Trump influenced by Derrida? He has always been impressionable. One wonders if he hung with a group of francophiles at Wharton who honed to deconstruction to explain the phenomenon of gaslighting. Was January 6 an attack on Democracy and the peaceful transfer of power? Retrumplicans would have you believe the mob were storming the Bastille. "Let them eat Brioche," said Marie Antoinette. Who does the pronoun, "them," apply to? Besides Derrida, Trump was also influenced by the Berkeley Free Speech movement since he says whatever he wants. In the famous Schenck decision Oliver Wendell Holmes famously argued against the right to cry "fire" in a crowded theater--an action that Trump obviously feels is not only permissible but desirable.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Trump and Derrida
Monday, November 4, 2024
Project 2025
Is our current politics a Star Wars scenario with Kamala Harris as Luke Skywalker, Trump, Darth Vader, the Empire or Axis, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Hungry and China as the Mona Lisa whose emotion as conveyed by the expression on her face is famously enigmatic. China's two mandates trade and irredentism clash. China has become a vulnerable giant, the Polyphemus of the East and a potentially moderating force due to its divergent objectives. There's war in Ukraine, a worsening conflict in The Middle East and an explosive election in the US which holds no hope of resolution. The Confederacy was a "two state solution." Now there's nothing to unify a divided electorate Trump has said he won't accept the results if Kamala wins, but it's quixotic to believe that Democrats will live with Steve Bannon, Project 2025 or the President of the United States performing oral sex on a Mike.
Sunday, November 3, 2024
Citizen Trump's MAGAlopolis
Will the Orson Welles of tomorrow (some distant melange that includes the DNA of the Coppola name) produce a media work (by that time it will probably be some construct that trains directly to the neurons and axons of the brain) rendering the current instantiation of Kane's Xanadu and Hearst's San Simeon akaTrump's Mar-A-Lago into a Death Star, one of those Kepler planets 1200 light years from earth into GREATNESS! Will it be called MAGAlOPOLIS in homage to Megalopolis, the great wine grower's last work. By that time no one will even remember what a movie was--since memory will be a thing of the past, but Coppola will be canonized for his vineyards and an artifact of ancient civilization called The Godfather.
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Anora
A strip club named Headquarters in Manhattan |
Friday, November 1, 2024
The Clash of Civilizations
The historian Samuel Huntington propounded the notion of "the class of civilizations." His theory was a repudiation of the work of his former student Francis Fukuyama who wrote The End of History and the Last Man. Actually Fukuyama would repudiate his own theory in the face of a highly polarized increasingly sectarian world. The Civil War itself illustrated a similar process. Reconstruction was followed by a recidivism which fired up the roots of slavery. Today the United States is as torn as it was in the post-reconstruction period and as divided as The Middle East. There will be no winner in the current election no matter who wins. A Two State Solution? If not what will be the disposition of the current divide? Dialectical materialism is a recipe for historical evolution. In the Marxist paradigm, the clash between feudalism and capitalism lays the way for the dictatorship of the proletariat. What if that complex and lumbering dinosaur known as democracy no longer fits the foot of modern life? What ideology, system or philosophy will succeed it?
Thursday, October 31, 2024
Nineteen Eighty-Four
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the famous Marquez novel but it's an almost biblical expression of an age of interiority. Now there is little privacy and still less quiet. Social media forces one's hand and identities are stolen as ubiquitously as gold in the Wild West. You may read about Chinese hackers getting into phones but consciousness itself is no longer sacrosanct. Claudius is almost murdered in prayer but thought itself is no longer sacrosanct. Tik Tok hath murdered sleep. Big Brother is the famous invocation from 1984, but the frightening truth is that today's Winston Smiths exhaust all possible escapes when the mind no longer provides a safe harbor.
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Superconductivity
"Leon N. Cooper, 94, Who Unlocked Secrets of Superconductivity, Dies"--NYT, 10/27/24
"He surmised that electrons attract positive ions in the lattices of the atoms that make up certain metals.That creates a charge imbalance in the lattices, making one side of them slightly more positive. In superconductivity, that is enough to attract other electrons flowing through the metals towards the lattices."
"At Brown he became interested I neuroscience..."
"Their theory was that as synapses approach saturated levels of activity, the electrical signals that were driving them would become less effective and the synaptic connections would revert to less saturated levels. The connections would thus oscillate between being saturated and unsaturated, like a skier gliding between two fences but never hitting either."
"Phil Lesh, Bassist Who Anchored the Grateful Dead, Is Dead at 84"--NYT, 10/27/24
"In his autobiography, Mr. Lesh compared the Grateful Dead's music to life itself. 'Both,' he said, 'were a series of recurring themes, transpositions, repetitions, unexpected developments, all converging to define form that is not necessarily apparent until its ending has come and gone.'"
read "Why Big German Words Like Vergangenbangenheit Carry Weight" by Francis Levy, HuffPost