Palliative Care

Is it surprising that there have been less people jumping out of Wall Street windows than in 1929? Of course margin requirements are more substantial. If you get desperate enough, you have to go to a loan shark who will gladly fit you with cement shoes if you decide to take a walk. Prolepsis means anticipating the answer to a question before it's asked. Daniel Kahneman the Nobel Prize winning economist went to Switzerland to get the best in palliative care (ie euthanasia). Even though was functioning at age 90, he decided to control his inevitable decline (he suffered from mental lapses and kidney ailments) by ending it. It is not if but when. Stop the world, I want to get off. The current regime throws out a new atrocity before one has a chance to respond to the last. What to do when you know you're going to spend the rest of your life dodging bullets?

The Waning of the Middle Ages?

All mention of Diversity, equity and inclusion to be removed, all mention of solar energy removed, no fluoride. Take away 2 billion of subsidies to Harvard together with its tax-exempt status. An immigration court throws a Turkish student in detention without bail for writing an editorial in a college newspaper. Legal and illegal immigrants are swept up willy nilly and sent to the notorious prison in El Salvador with the threat that anyone deemed a threat will face a similar fate. Where is my Roy Cohn...or Savonarola? The president and the DOJ defy the courts. Social Security is threatened along with Medicaid. Veterans hospitals are forced to work on skeleton staff. A prominent news organization (the AP) is barred from the White House for refusing to designate Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. The Federal Reserve always sedulously protected, as an independent agency, come under pressure from the executive branch for the first time in its history. The head of the Department of Health Education and Welfare suddenly is a purveyor of quack remedies out of a QAnon playbook. A mother ending an ectopic pregnancy which could kill her is tried for murder. It’s the Middle Ages with a plague followed by an Inquisition aimed at the extinction of the ivory tower and the project of liberal education itself. It’s the Crusades only this time the knights are perpetrating a genocide in The Promised Land. Enter the lunar landscape of Mad Max. Oh yeah let’s not forget Radio Free Europe, NPR, WNYC, PBS. All the stations and literally the world goes dark literally and metaphysically. 

and listen to "Shake Your Groove Thing" by Peaches and Herb

Trump at Harvard: A Prospectus

Harvard Yard

The biggest difference between Trump University and Harvard is that Trump University is tuition driven. It’s almost impossible to sanction a university by withdrawing research grants when there is no research being done. Of course this last is clever and something Harvard could learn from. Simply close down Brigham and Woman’s Hospital. You won’t have to worry about the loss of grants. Stopping all research will make Harvard less dependent on anyone. Harvard must become one of those universities who advertise onTV. Harvard degrees are prestigious. The university's operating budget would increase if the Ivy League brand name attracted on-line students. What if The Harvard  Crimson became part of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch’s publishing arm? Who will become the Roger Ailes of Harvard Yard? T.S. Eliot was a graduate of Harvard. What would "The Wasteland" have been like if Eliot had majored in English at Trump?

Trump at Harvard: 2025 Courses

Revisionist History at Trump

The 2020 Election:  This deconstructionist analysis of the 2020 uses data collected by Mike Lindell to establish the reasons for the Trump victory

January 6, 2021

Professor David Irving employs his holocaust denial theories to exam events in the capital and their aftermath. Liz Cheney and Adam Kitzinger were two Republicans who joined a committee of congress.This course will try to establish the reasons why in the light of President Trump's findings, those who invaded the capital at his behest were patriots.

Immigration Law 101; This course will exam how American citizens identified as troublemakers can be summarily deported to El Salvador's Cecot prison.

Gaslighting and Modern Politics: President Donald Trump will be the guest lecturer. Methodologies of truth finding and twisting will be discussed.

John Milton: Professor Steven Bannon will examine why it's "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."

Emoluments: This 300 level course will examine how governmental leaders can use their position to make money.

Transactional Analysis: Professor Elon Musk will be the guest lecturer this semester. Professor Musk will explore the use of transactional psychodynamics including psychoanalytic psychotherapy to explore how Human Resources departments can maximize the potential of their labor pools.

Cimabue

Cimabue's "Maesta" (c.1280)

Waiting is attendant upon human existence. You wait by definition in a crowd unless you're waiting for the phone to ring, for an email or for a sign from the eternal. More prosaically people wait to get into the Vatican or the Louvre for the recent Cimabue show. This kind of waiting involves two steps, one waiting to get into the presence of the artwork, the other, the complex process of delayed gratification— by which art is put through the meat grinder of mind. This last is the most significant form of waiting, involving as it does the chemistry of sensation and almost perceptible neuronal activity as serotonin flows between axons and dendrites of the synapses. You may find yourself taking a ticket at the entrance to a popular bakery as you're lured by enticing smells. That is the kind of soggy waiting you endure in the service of carbs and sweets.

review of The Kafka Studies Department by Francis Levy, Booklife

US v. Commissioner of Baseball

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Now,  rumors have it, the DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi is filing to overturn Schenck.The opinion, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1919, famously injures against “crying fire in a crowded theater.” In a separate case US v. Commissioner of Baseball, the court ruled 5-4 against rules in sports. Such shibboleths as the 3 bases plus home plate requirement, the right of the team with the higher score to win, together with prohibitions about drunken fans throwing beer bottles at players they don’t like have been deemed unconstitutional. America will be great again if citizens are allowed to have fun. The new line of originalist thinking propagated by justices Alito and Thomas, of course, makes exceptions for DACA dreamers who are not allowed to have any fun or freedom. Anybody can now exercise their First Amendment rights in crying “fire,” but the bad criminal who allegedly started the fire will be forced to relinquish their right to a trial before being sent to the notorious Cecot prison in El Salvador--forever.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Extemporize Your Eulogy or Eclogue

The ability to extemporize is a gift, particularly when it relates to eulogies. You may have been invited to speak at a memorial service or even a graveside. If it’s a person of note  you’ll be part of a coven of friends and colleagues. Not to be humorous at the expense of…but how to eulogize a mortician?  If cremation or embalming are involved, you need to call upon someone who can speak to a particular skill set. Eulogies are similar to eclogues which Virgil was famous for. Should a eulogy be a hagiography or encomium? Premeditated eulogies tend to fall into the trap of idealization. On the other hand speaking from the heart may yield inadvertent hurts. When you’re standing at the edge of a grave, you see not only dirt but eternity. Write it all out and you don’t have to worry but when you look down at the coffin and realize Joe really died, you may find your mind drifting to how Joe behaved at his bachelor party 40 years when he almost ran off with a stripper. Alas poor Joe, he wasn't joking when he said, now that we've talked about me, let’s talk about me. So the next time you’re called on to deliver parting words, throw away that crumpled piece of paper you’ve stuck in your pocket and let the words fly.

read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

Mediocrity

Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi are mediocre. They exemplify the kind of limited personalities that Trump surrounds himself with. The only MAGA individual who has at least pretensions to anti-humanism is Steve Bannon. In American Dharma he quoted Milton’s “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Bravo! Steve Miller, Pete Navarro, Ed Martin—these are the black shirts. There isn’t even a Goering who as Hitler's Maecenus attempted to loot Italian masterpieces for the Hitler Fuhrermuseum in Linz. Trump probably never heard of Caravaggio, but as Satan in the current Medieval passion play, he has a significant role to perform. This jolly crew does not represent "the banality of evil"--the phrase used about Eichmann. A description of them does not earn that level of locution. These clowns are just banal.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Friends With Benefits

"Friends with benefits" is a prominent entry in the dictionary of urban legendary. It's the ultimate albeit quotidian expression of transactional behavior, pleasure being the lingua franca of barter and exchange. Trump's The Art of the Deal is the Gideon Bible of a universe where the calling of Saint Francis with its abrogation of materialism is an increasingly faint barely audible whisper. Barter is actually an ancient profession that precedes currency. Lewis Hyde has related these kinds of economics in his concept of "the gift," which is a non-reciprocal form of exchange. Generosity and benevolence in this paradigm are tantamount to toolmaking in the advent of consciousness. What's so singular about the current Ice Age of sensibility is that it brooks no past. The president conveys a delusory reassurance in his incantations about tariffs. It's as if you no longer remember a world where there was anything else.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Amor Fati

 

Spoiler Alert: 

In the last episode of The White Lotus  one of the main characters cries “he killed my father.” “He was your father” is the plaintive response. "Amor Fati" is the finale. It means "a love of fate." As you will recall Oedipus brings about the very thing he's running from—which is a life lesson for everyone. It’s a particularly clever turn of the screw in this instance  Rather than trying to elude the oracle, the perp is a victim of misinformation. He's got his facts wrong. This final scene also recalls the kind of carnage you find in the finale of Medea. The blood of innocents flows. The notion of the tragic flaw or "hamartia" is almost perfectly limned by Mike White in the creation of his sullen wayfarer. BTW the death scene of the two lovers lying on lilies recalls Millais' "Ophelia."

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Eephus

The premise of Carson Lund's Eephus is wistful and nostalgic. The baseball field, where a local team plays, is being ripped down. However the disquisition itself is noticeably reserved and lacking in sentimentality. One way this is accomplished is by virtue of cinematic digression. There are a number of painterly moments in the film including one of a cloud, another of the woods in back of the field where balls get lost, and another of the Eephus itself. It's a high arching pitch in a baseball game. It distracts the batter and is an objective correlative for striking out.The movie creates a dialectic between the haunting sublimity of loss and the constant intrusion of present reality, which includes one scene in which the ball is literally coming at the movie audience. When it gets dark and the lights of the aged stadium go out, the players pull up their cars, using the headlights so they can meet their one objective, which is not so much to win as to finish the game. The great documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman makes a voice over cameo appearance as a local radio announcer.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

The Decline of the West

Plato, Aristotle, Loomer, Herodotus are amongst the names engraved on the frieze of Columbia’s Butler Library. The bane of the Multiculturalist movement is Western White Male Culture.Aeschylus Socrates, Shakespeare are the hegemons. Saul Bellow famous countered with his famous “who was the Shakespeare of the Zulus?" Bellow would be removed from the Unuversity of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought were he alive today—the university’s notorious stubbornness about free speech not withstanding. Still history creates strange bedfellows. Remember how anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin bonded with fundamentalist Christians. Now ironically MAGA and DEI have their triggers aimed at the same thing—Western Culture! But here’s the problem. Trump has appointment himself head of the Kennedy Center, but what’s going to be on the bill. You can’t have the classics which represent Harvard and Columbia, but you also can’t feature August Wilson who's too DEI. Jackie Robinson was even a bridge too far for Pete Heseth when he took over the Defense Department (his webpage was removed and restored). Maybe  Clint Eastwood is a good beach head. Dirty Harry will appeal to the MAGA anti-gun control and Ivy League film society third alike. 

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

and listen to "Make America Great Again" by Pussy Riot

 

Humanism

Laura Loomer (photo: Gage Skidmore)

Is the whole humanistic project shot? During the last election, you may have started to hear angry town halls in red states where democracy itself was questioned. The economy in fact is still the big issue (though the fact of its continuing decline does unleash the irrational element ofTrump's base remaining loyal despite the adverse affect on their pocket books). Democracy was up until recently a source of pride for most Americans. However concepts like "due process" and "inalienable rights" can be sophisticated and hard to grasp. Along with the discountenancing of ideals has come a skepticism about institutions such as universities which by their very nature propose a liberal aka humanistic agenda. How far away the disciplines of english and sociology still less intellectual history appear in this era. The ivory tower, where campus life provided an oasis from the world, has become discredited  Along with the New Deal and The Great Society, which were arguably products of academia, the great ideas of the Enlightenment have been thrown by the wayside. A new Dark Ages looms where knowledge itself is being undermined by quackery, mysticism and unverifiable conspiracy theories (the purge of the NSC propagated by Laura Loomer being the most recent example). Repetition and insistence are the organizing principles of this new tautological reality. 

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Is Trump Caligula or Caligari? Caligari could have picked his cabinet. His executive orders intentionally take aim at literally every humane governmental intervention of the past 50 years. Indeed, vengeance seems to be the overarching mandate of this second Trump presidency. Would Bob Guccione have made a movie about him using Access Hollywood as a starting point? But the Dark Ages also come to mind. There's Laura Loomer and QAnon against the background of a plague. On a daily basis one gasps at the latest impossibility ie voodoo economics, book burning and the repudiation of science. Humankind has devolved to an earlier more primitive state where war to quote Clausewitz is a definition of diplomacy. Where is my Roy Cohen? was title of a film taken from a Trump quote. Remember Camelot and The Great Society?This is the age of a presidential advisor who walks around with a chainsaw, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carllson,  a pillow manufacturer named Mike Lindell (creating his own mathematics) and a Vice President who charges refugees with eating pets. 

Question of the day: Will Trump be reincarnated as a caddy?

Liberation Day

Trump should be given credit. He has joined the exclusive club of tyrants who were capable of annihilating civilizations. MAGA Republicans are the Visigoths plundering Rome. Trump is Alaric. What is occurring is nothing left than the destruction of modern Western values (including Democracy) and culture. It turns out he is the most effective proxy the militant face of multiculturalism has ever had. Pete Hegseth should be cast in a remake of Fahrenheit 451. The National Council For the Humanities and Arts have been destroyed in one fell swoop, along with the Kennedy Center for which Trump has appointed himself director. Genghis Khan, Attila, Alexander the Great. Later Hitler and Stalin, Kim Jung-un and Idi Amin would simply murder. Remember the Nazi show of "Degenerate Art" in l937? "Liberation Day" day augurs not only the destruction of free trade, but the corpus of legal structures and mandates that allow for the seamless functioning of the judiciary, legislative and executive branches of government. 

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

King Kong

(1933)

There are psychodynamic parallels to geopolitical actions. Irredentism/reconstitution, isolationism/defensiveness. The MAGA zeitgeist is that of King Kong brandishing the struggling Fay Wray while threatening to takedown the Empire State, literally and metaphorically. Imperial America a notion Retrumplicans now share with Putenescas reflects the urge to colonize. Both the T and P words are unabashed in their desire to annex. The notion of Canada as the 51st state started as a joke. Now Greenland and Panama have both been thrown into the kettle. The Empire Strikes Back is a good title for this movie. Under Gorbachev and Perestroika, Russia became a wounded giant which is exactly how Trump portrays the US ie as the laughing stock of NATO--this latter having taken advantage of their powerful ally’s good will. To Trump the US is a fat cat other countries lean on. It’s not the first time a paranoid view of the world has provided the springboard to tyranny. In the next episode of The Man in the High Castle,Trump and Xi Jinping take over Taiwan, dividing the spoils into East and West Berlin.

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and listen to "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" sung by Luciano Pavarotti and James Brown

Shen Yun

Peyronnie's, 1-800-Cars-For-Kids and Mesothelioma ads are being muscled out by Shen Yun. There are not only ads filled with testaments from dickheads who just love the dance troop but also ads countering the criticisms of Shen Yun, a Falun Gong spin off with dubious labor practices. BTW the ads are for performances at Lincoln Center. What is going on? What was it Joseph N. Welch, the lawyer for the Army once said at the McCarthy hearings, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" It would be funny if Shen Yun was connected to Pizzagate and QAnon. And what about Peter Hegseth, Mike Waltz and Signalgate? Should it be considered free speech to have generals letting the enemy know attack plans? It's a topsy turvy world, but you'd think Ro Sparks, the latest erection enhancer, composed of both Cialis and Viagra, in the way an H bomb has an A-bomb warhead, would push Shen Yun out of the airwaves. If Shen Yun is a "must see," then Ro Sparks is just a plain "must." Remember Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuader's, which unlocked the secrets of the 50s Mad Men? It's surprising Xi Jinping is spending so much time and energy on Taiwan when it's Shen Yun that's the imminent threat to the Communist Party.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Comment of the day: "Duke, Duke, Duke..."

The Inferno

"The Map of Hell" by Sandro Botticelli

Death is painless unless of course you're Dante and believe in hell. Hell is other people is the famed Sartre iteration, but that's not the problem with the Underworld which sounds like it may be a liquid suspension. Broiling in oil is not just a very hot tub you endure with other sufferers. There’s no strength in numbers when it comes to misery. Solitary is the vigorish Satan gets. Buy let’s say you're an Epicurean or a follower of Lucretius who believes only in the present. Dying is anesthesia. You may try to catch the moment you lose consciousness, but you’re out before you've had a chance to let go. So take your pick. Suffer alone while retaining a muted form of consciousness or it’s simply lights out. In either case you've lost your voting rights.

Question of the day: Knock fucking knock...knock, knock...knock, knock, knock...knock, knock, knock, knock

Soren Kierkegaard's Die Hard With a Vengeance

Die Hard With a Vengeance was the third of the series starring Bruce Willis. "Die Hard" sounds a little like Fear and Trembling.  Epicureanism has become the existential condition du jour with the help of Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, which popularized Lucretius’ De Rorem Natura. Taking away the Christian notion of the afterlife is the basic premise from which the great poem begins. But the thing about philosophical premises is they're hard to interpret and even harder to live by. Heidegger said that those who were not aware of death led an inauthentic existence. But death itself is open to interpretation. Batteries die, but how does that compare to organic matter, consciousness? Epicurus who shared Lucretius' stoicism  believed in “the golden mean.” Living in the present was not a  invitation to gluttony. Where does pleasure fit in? And what about pain? Is suffering itself optional, as the saying goes?

Questions of the day: Knock knock? Who's there?

White Bread

"White on White" by Kazimir Malevich (1918)

There are no dearth of conflicted souls. Hamlet is tortured by inaction, Lear by vanity and pride, Othello by jealousy, Oedipus by the awful truth, Antigone by righteousness and shooting ahead another two or three thousand years,  Beckett’s Nell and Nagg by the condition of the garbage cans in which they reside. BTW the two garbage cans bring back Plautus and Roman comedy where identity is the source of the farce. Has there ever been a play or work of art where nothing is wrong and the days pass with characters uttering only the dreadful “I can’t complain.” What about a Strange Interlude about two boring people who come home pop something in the microwave and watch the news. These folks don’t live lives of quiet desperation. Caveat emptor! You can write about boredom but you can’t be boring. Maybe the art of the happy but static existence culminating in a peaceful death is the mandate of the painter.

Answer of the day: "Knock fucking knock, if you don't answer I'm going to knock down the door."

Black Bag

Don’t try to figure out Black Bag. There is an answer, but you are likely to find yourself doing a lot of reticulated thinking in your attempt to parse out "the truth." Look at the palette Soderberg is using: drugs, a polygraph test (which one character manipulates  with her anal sphincter), fishing and the principle of loosening the line a bit before the catch, a dinner game and a chilling first scene in which one of the players delivers a stigmata by angrily sticking a knife into the other's hand. It's a crucifixion in what is described as "an amoral universe." Are you trying to get me or am I trying to get you?--is one locution. It’s truth or dare, fake news in the portrait of George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchette) as a pair of married British spies. When the wife says she will kill for her husband you somehow believe her, but what about him? At first it's not clear. The actual hard espionage is naturally tied to Russia but the program at the heart of the plot, Severus, aimed at causing meltdowns, is curiously anachronistic. Moreover the expensive digs the agents occupy, replete with the latest in culinary and dress apparel are anomalous. Aren't spies civil servants? DOGE would be letting them go. Black Bag is the perfect movie in the age of gaslighting--where the standard of truth is insistence. Is there a there, there, but where? 

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Site specific question of the day: Where are you?

Frank E. Campbell

If you grew up in Manhattan, Frank E. Campbell was the ur- funeral parlor. If it you grew up on the Upper East Side, it was tantamount to another institution Schrafft’s. You might even call Frank E. Campbell’s the Schraffts of funeral parlors. It was where all the blue bloods went. Now, it’s more ecumenical. As a side note it’s interesting that funeral parlors take on the name of their owners. You don’t have a Frank E Campbell cemetery. Most of the old-line cadavers interred by Campbell went to a place called Valhalla in the town of the same name. The name is btw spot on. Why would one want to affix one’s name to a funeral parlor? Most little boys don’t dream of being morticians when they grow up. It’s odd in fact there isn’t a Trump Funeral Chapel. You have Trump Tower, the Trump golf course at Bedminster. He’s put his name on every thing else.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Question of the day: What's in it for me?

A Checkers Speech

There were the Checkers and before that the oval shaped yellow cabs you see in 30s movies, in which the driver pulls down a flag-shaped lever. In the early 60s the starting fare was $0.35. Now it’s $7.75. There are “public intellectuals.” Susan Sontag was one. Fran Leibovitz was a “public humorist” during the days when she literally “took a cab” as she travelled around town in her Checker. With age she’s come to look like Hannah Arendt. The famous philosopher coined the term “banality of evil.”  Leibovitz who is the kind of celebrity who creates celebrity sightings so she can angrily recuse herself from attention. You know the type, but back to cabs. Remember Skull’s Angels, the fleet owned by the sometime art collector whose name has bitten dust along the way to oblivion. The Bauhaus “form follows function” might describe the New York Taxi of today. Some municipalities have been drawn to self-driving Teslas whose only problem is their occasional blindness to pedestrians. Beyond the fact that self-driving cars are known to kill people, they have also singlehandedly made a  once colorful profession obsolescent. Remember that gabby guy behind the wheel with the cigar in the side of his mouth? A.I. has done the same thing to writers who are the taxis of tomorrow--bilging out ideas without watching where they're going like a president posting rage- filled executive orders on the social media accountants by the the latest incarnation of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Question of the day: When you walk into a room, full of strangers or even people you've known you're whole life, do you feel embarrassed?

Baise-Moi

Virginie Despentes is a French feminist. Actually that isn't quite the right word. Baise-Moi is her chez d'oeuvre. It's a novel about two women who are brutally raped. They steal cars and go on a brutal tear murdering everyone in sight, men, women and children, including mothers wheeling strollers. Despentes obviously studied Pierrot Le Fou. It's really a timeless book but also a metaphor for the Middle East, particularly with respect to sexual violence. You start off feeling empathic naturally in terms of the anger for the depredation, until the brutality of the revenge begins to set in. Any sense of the humanity of innocent and random victims is lost, but the anger ultimately self-implodes. You see this on a macro level say in the Bosnia Serbian war where both sides ultimately set their country on fire.

Question of the day: Is your life an embarrassment? 

The Circus

Trump's Second Term

One of the signature acts of any circus is the juggler. Having a lot of balls in the air gets even more complicated when you do it on a high wire, so is riding a bike on a high wire or even doing it riding a bike on a high wire with someone on your shoulders doing the juggling. Along with clowning, danger is the lingua Franca of any circus. The Wallendas tragically found that out.  Elon Musk clowns by dancing around grinning ghoulishly as he performs his chainsaw massacre. Trump juggles so many executive orders, it’s impossible to editorially respond or even realize what is going until like in The Apprentice “you’re fired!” There’s value free diplomacy for you. The president claims he will carry the ball (s) and break the record solving Gaza and Ukraine. It’s not surprising he is continually dropping them.

read "Never Brush Again" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star

Question of the day: Are you embarrassed?

Noel the Coward

Have you ever been convinced you don’t have one brave bone in your body? Climbing in the Himalayas is tough but you have company in the form of Sherpa guides, but what about joining a demonstration in the lobby of Trump Tower and being marched away in a paddy wagon. Say you’re claustrophobic and don’t like being locked up for the few hours before your  annoyed partner bails you out ( “I was terrified,” she screams, “don’t ever do that again!”). Ok you’re in caught in the cross walk as the light is changing and you casually give the bird to the driver of an incoming car. It’s easy to to say “fuck you” to someone to a person or object in motion. But lo here’s a chap who isn’t happy being told to fuck himself and is not afraid to pull up next to you, get out of his car and threaten you with his MMA resume. Might mention there’s liquor on his breath. You stand there like a goof ball with your hands in your pockets as he puts you before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Would you "have not decency" and "welch" on your old communist cellmate? Or would you go to JAIL and fail to collect you $200? You know yourself. Deep down you’re the stuff of Welsh rarebit. Run! That or try to excuse yourself from your local genocide by claiming you’re not the liberal intellectual you seem to be. Cry and lie—thems is your weapons, unless you’re the latest product of Walter Mitty’s or rather Lee Childs’ imagination, a super hero named Reacher!

Question of the day: Should you take it personally when someone rejects you?

Ukraine Light

 

“If you’re not on the table you’re in the menu” was the pronunciamento by a recent CNN guest described as a veteran negotiator. It’s the world of Kissinger, realpolitik which ultimately goes back to Machiavelli and before that Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. One has to smile about the strange bedfellows which derive from a cross-pollination of transactional and humanistic aims. Here’s one. Trump proposed that the United States take over Ukraine’s electrical grid and nuclear power plants. Ha! No need for a standing army to afford protection. The Russians Are Coming was the name of a 60s anti-war satire. While anything is possible, it’s highly unlikely Putin is going to take aim at a Connecticut Light and Power. "Value free politics" is the name of the game. Yet the transaction yields the right result—if you’re interested in preserving  autonomy and democracy both.

Question of the Day: Do people still eat each other?

Decline and Fall

Gibbons famously authored The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Then there were the tomes you may have grown up with, Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War, Carlyle's The French Revolution, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and finally Democracy in America, de Tocqueville’s peripatetic analysis of a political philosophy that ultimately may have outgrown itself. Are populism and democracy fundamentally incompatible? Are the complexities of the constitution its due process and inalienable rights difficult to by a populist base? As January 6 illustrated, it doesn’t take much for a collectivity to turn into lynch mob. Francis Fukuyama discredited his own The End of History and the Last Man, as it became apparent that tribalism would triumph over the notion of a unifying technocracy. The adoption of a precarious citation that some might even regard as tasteless by Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his Min Kamp, illustrates the question mark that hangs over any attempt to encapsulate the politics of the current world. Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz later adopted for television by Fassbinder used place to define Weimar Germany. What’s to be Done was the broadside by Lenin. Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and Marx Das Kapital. What soubriquet will grace the book about this turbulent period of American history?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Rumble in the Jungle?

 

"Remember Float like a Butterfly." Then there was Mike Tyson, "everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." The Dems have been KO'd. Approval rating low and heading downwards. What is needed is literally some one large. Remember also the Rumble in the Jungle where Mohammed Ali prevailed with his "rope a dope." Mohammed Ali had brawn, but he had brains too. He was really a talented poet. It's not only Musk and Trump, Doge and Russell Vought (who now runs The White House budget office). Have you watched "Reacher." Lee Child's creation is a larger than life figure who throw people through windshields but has a rap that comes fast and furious like that of Ali. Trump once cried "where's my Roy Cohn (which became the title of a film)?" Where is our Mohammed Ali? George Foreman trained by chaining himself to a jeep which he then proceeded to march up a hill, but down he went. It's a tall order, but who's the person capable of delivering MAGA that knockout punch? Or maybe here is the scenario. Trump continues the trade war, which he loses. Russia wins back Ukraine. The nation wakes up. The president is a Quisling. He's siding with the enemy--to the extent that the enemy is literally everything that is bad for the country. Isn't anyone who kills democracy a traitor to American values?

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

The Men in Their Glass Booths

You’ve undoubtedly read about the poor souls who have such compromised immune systems that they have to live their lives in isolation tents. That’s probably but as bad as a body cast. Then there was Eichmann. Robert Shaw wroteThe Man in the Glass Booth and he was Hannah Arendt’s subject (in Eichmann in Jerusalem), whence "the banality of evil."  All of these examples themselves traffic in extremis. Most people like to think they are keeping things close to the chest. Unbeknownst even to themselves they might as well be insects in a terrarium. The female praying mantis partakes of a sexual cannibalism in which they bite off their male counterpart's head. You have undoubtedly heard of women who are accused of being ball busters. The fact is it’s almost impossible to conceal anything. Counter espionage is a far cry, in the age of the digital footprint, from Vidkun Quisling the traitorous Norwegian minister of defense. The advent of AI has put everyone in a goldfish bowl. Disguises are a charade. It’s usually the perpetrator who has the wool pulled over their eyes.

and listen to "The Tracks of My Tears" by Linda Ronstadt

Mickey 17

Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 is full of eccentrically grotesque tropes that disguise a fundamentally derivative, somewhat simplistic plot. Mickey and Nasha, the romantic couple at the center of the disquisition, are reminiscent of Winston Smith and Julia in1984. The concept of dehumanization by replication recalls the marketing of organs in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. In this case Mickey is an "expendable." You have replicants like Mickey on the one hand then a race of ghoulish "creepers" who are victims of the local Trump clone, Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo). The first lady, Ylafa Marshall (Toni Colette) makes sauces from the tails of baby "creepers." Parasite was a complex meditation on society and the structure of the human mind itself. The director’s ambition remains yet the result is constrained by the techno-tyranny that's the movie's palette. Parasite is a large armoire with many drawers and secret compartments while Mickey 17 is little more than a funhouse mirror. Every great director has to flex their muscles and prove their mettle by entering the commercial blockbuster sweepstakes. Not to diminish the huge ambition of Parasite, but this is Bong Jong-ho's Godfather (in fact Ruffalo does at times look at little like Brando as Vito Corleone in the way spittle emerges as he smacks his lips). The director parodies the AI generated universe he's created to make the movie; he's graduated from human parasites to a race of unearthly creatures. He's even got the lemmings.  

and listen to "The Tracks of My Tears" by Linda Ronstadt

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann creates a clever item in The Magic Mountain. It’s called a "silent sister"--a thermometer without a scale. The subject is pathology. How do you determine if someone is sick? One of Mann’s characters is deeply upset to learn she is to be sent home from "the berghof" (a sanitarium) because she has nothing wrong with her. Another of Mann’s profound concerns is time for which he evinces a more labile Bergsonian paradigm. Remember the clocks with no hands in Wild Strawberries? Where the mental life is concerned, there is the DSM, but therapists are, by definition, locked into their own counter-transference. When it comes to spirituality, Mann’s invisible gradation is a dramatic representation of life itself.

listen to "Love's In Need of Love Today" by Stevie Wonder