The Ice Age

 

Photo: Museum of Natural History

Would that this were the Ice Age! Imagine all the dinosaurs purged from the earth—leaving a verdant planet. You know how you come back refreshed from the spa? Now with all the Retrumplicans on the way to becoming fossils ( which is undoubtedly the highest iteration of their being) whatever remains of the US will rejoin the Paris Climate Accords. No need for any meteor to hit the earth.The planet has taken a big enough hit, one greater than any piece of space debris could effect with the GOP in control of the senate, the house and the executive branches of government. Will life go on after Trump's executive orders aimed at destroying everything from vaccines to social security and Medicare? Will it be able to muster the energy without due process and the protection of the average person from the whims and wiles of an increasingly capricious national order?

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

Majority Rules?

History is a nightmare says Stephen Daedalus, but is this hell? Is humanity walking around, shell shocked creatures in a Max Max movie? The rubble has yet to be. Go to Yemen if you’d like a preview. First there’s a plague replete with witches' brew of conspiracy theorizing. Remember, QAnon and Pizzagate, and the refrigerated trucks filled with bodies? Civilization is a fragile thing. Go to Rome. Those ruins are stone. Not plaster props on the Cinecitta lot. Democracy is back to being an experiment. No doubt the US is in a  constitutional crisis particularly with respect to the judiciary and the exective branches. Is a constitutional convention in the offing? What's the thesis, antithesis and synthesis in the current historical dialectic. Populism might be defined as democracy on a bender. Majority rules were not quite what the founders were thinking about when they deployed notions of due process and inalienable rights. Hitler's Willing Executioners is the title of the Daniel Goldhagen book. It's both unthinkable and chastening that Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Stalin were what the people wanted.

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

Pollutant

Lee Zeldin

Shit provides a function: the excretion of toxic substances. By appointing Lee Zeldin head of the EPA Trump insured that less money will be spent on removing toxicity from the environment. Together with RFK's campaign against fluoride the country is on the way to become a bastion of industrial waste. Of course Trump himself is one of the biggest polluters of all, shooting the air with toxic words. One of the most favorite locutions of this supposed public servant whose words are not even as good as excrement and who fails excrementally at governing is it to call someone he doesn't like, a bad person. One could say that Trump treats the electorate like the strict nuns who paddled little boys or girls who didn't behave. Don, don’t you realize that humankind has come a long way from the days when "good" and "bad" were used as descriptors? Still what about “Piece of Shit” as the title for the hagiography that will undoubtedly premiere at The Kennedy Center?

listen to "Make America Great Again" by Pussy Riot

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