Knicks

The Atlantic.com

Common experience is almost a garish concept. Americans pride themselves on individuality and also their degree of alienation. MAGA politics is rightly regarded as stupidity but it's also a response to disenfranchisement. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton coined the term "deaths of despair" to. describe the high rate of suicide amongst white working class males. The working class which built the country for the Robber Barons is being marginalized. Mining is a tough business, but travel to Appalachia and you will discover a pride of belonging. The advent of the first trillionaire epitomizes the concept of income inequality that is the subject of Piketty's Capital in the 21st  Century (ironically a bestseller the author obviously profited from). It is hard to think of Trump as a figure of World Historical Significance,  as was Napoleon for Hegel. Trump voices a dissatisfaction with elites. The lumpenproletariat which is another word for the MAGA demographic actually is a rather sophisticated response to obsolescence. With AI the anger will only increase. Actually Trump for all his money and street smarts will be an excellent example of Great Replacement Theory when he is finally either impeached, or forced out of The White House--when he refuses to leave at the end of his term.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Recolonization

East India House (Thomas Malton, 1800)

Is the master/slave relationship just a reflection of the Great Chain of Being, with God at the top and human then animal life below. Or a device of the imagination? Post hoc does not mean propter hoc. The fact of inequality does not define it as a necessity. The advent of the first trillionaire with the assets to colonize the whole planet, as pointed out in a recent NYT Op-Ed piece "Elon Musk is Colonizing Earth" (6/12/26), brings the issue to light. Now income inequality is so great that the wealthy few, a biblical whale seems poised to devour everything. Trafficking in countries is nothing new BTW. During the age of the British East India Company, the continent of India was itself on the chopping block and countries who now make up NATO were busily gobbling up the developing world ie Africa, Mexico and South America. Remember The Belgian Congo? Trump going after Greenland, Mexico and Canada has precedent in the Colonial Age. During the past century, decolonization has become the byword, as the British Empire was reduced to England. No one dreamt the master/slave relationship would return, as a governing social force on both a collective and individual level. Trump rhymes with thump. How do you relate to a trillionaire who creates a literal and metaphorical sinkhole when they buy the land beneath your feet?

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Martial Arts

Clifford Odets

A trainer once said to an overly enthusiastic young boxer, "You've got the martial part. Now you need the art!" The same can apply to art itself. Marshall McLuhan famously said "the medium is the message." Yes there are pressing. issues,  but what is worse, providing audiences with a hyperbolic universe of delusion or the absence of any message at all? Melodrama is "unearned emotion." An overly promiscuous practitioner becomes a slut, who can use the same lovemaking technique with different lovers. A chorus of misery is a potent tool, but place it in the hands Great Replacement theory advocates and you can become a tearful advocate for segregation. Awake and Sing (1935) is the title of a famed Depression era Clifford Odets play. Sing for what, is the question?

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Emoluments

Scott Bessent showcasing Trump $250 bill

  
What is the relationship facts or data and emotion? Or is there any?  Gaslighting is the term used for the way politicians turn meanings upside down. Trump's self-described rhetorical device is "the weave." Today, deontology is not the lingua franca of discourse, even in institutions as august as the Supreme Court. Many of the justices regularly hand down decisions that are ideologically rather than legally or even ethically driven. Neither Alito nor Thomas seems to have shaken the yoke of MAGA politics--and it's a troubling form of behavior for which there is no precedent, ditto the White House's defiance of the emoluments clause of the constitution. Cryptocurrency is a perfect way to veil self-dealing, though many recent behaviors, such as the attempt to create a $250 bill with Trump's image on it, seem be taken as acts of defiance in and of themselves.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

NC-65

Tokyo Story (1953)

You must be 65 or older to read this post, have you ever seen an old woman with a shopping cart approaching you on a sunny morning in June where youth is displaying its beauty and realized in a major insult to your being that you are in all probability older than her? And that your only recompense is to write about it, after the fact? You may remember Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) about the older couple who feel they're no longer useful or wanted and even a burden. That's not you, you can be reassured. How to describe your state? Try superannuated.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Plinth

plinth from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Do you ever feel you’re about to be crushed by an all encompassing plinth out of Kubrick's 2001. Reality is both impenetrable and entrapping. Kafka envisioned the ideational form of such inelasticity in Before the Law. It is the absence of philosophical traction that epitomizes this Sisyphean state. The Sickness Unto Death, Fear and Trembling and The Concept of Anxiety are Kierkegaard's philosophical riptide. Binx Bolling the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer calls his struggle against despair, "The Search." You are knocking your head up against a brick wall or facing the loneliness of the white canvas with its incipient mark or the empty page on which the first character has yet to be typed. 

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star 

Access Hollywood

 

“Macbeth hath murdered sleep.” DJT once said he could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot people. That was back in the halycon days of Access Hollywood. Today the only way he could get down Fifth Avenue would be in an Abrams tank. Destruction has become the lingua Franca of conversation. Have you ever looked at someone with IPods, thinking at first than they’re one of those mad psychotics who were prematurely released from mental institutions? The product of MAHA politics is a race of people reliving personal attacks and the ripostes  they might have given to their opponents—who are like the title of the Phillip K Dick novel Ubik or everywhere.

read "Double Reverse Midas Touch" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star