A Short Post on DEI

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion are the watchwords and collectively the name of programs dedicated to fighting for allowing members of minority communities, such as Blacks, women and LGBTQ+, to be respected and get a fair shake in universities, workplaces and other organizations. I think they are somewhat overbearing in that they savor the thought police out to badger and threaten people into changing their ideas. Trump and his supporters are outraged at these programs and want to eliminate them particularly in the military, however worthwhi;le it was for those programs to have eased the integration of Blacks and women into the military and that malignant attitudes can arise again, as when gerrymandering and unequal voting conditions in the South arose again when  the preclearance of voting rights in the 1964 Voting Rights Act was suspended ten years ago. Moreover, I think that talk of white supremacy or inherent white bias seems to me a bad way to conceptualize the current racial and gender assignments. Better to use the idea of prejudice, which means feeling disparagingly about minority groups, and the idea of discrimination, which means laws and regulations that bar or set quotas for minority members, to remain the most accurate way to describe minority conditions. They are objective and measurable. A study in New Jersey in the Fifties showed that people said they wouldn't mind Blacks buying a house in their neighborhood but that their neighbors wouldn’t like it. 

But the issue remains whether DEI programs are pernicious or not. Do they invoke Critical Race Theory or Project 1619 which say that racism is in the heart of America? Or is it more salutary, by emphasizing how everybody should work to be aware of their shortcomings as human  beings, just as Jesus suggested? It turned out that it was very difficult to get an answer to that question. Organizations devoted to spreading DEI were notoriously vague and anodyne about what specific points of view they were expressing. Brochures promoting DEI curricula say that participants should engage in “tough conversations”. What does that mean? That there is “white supremacy” in the United States? That the United States is deep down anti-Semitic? Such brochures also say they encourage mentorship, which seems a laudable aim until you realize it might mean only Black mentors for Black students. Is that a good idea? Or only Jewish or Asian mentors for people of their races? That seems exclusion rather than inclusion and does not foster getting along with other kinds of people. Couldn’t it be that the specifics are too controversial to be named?

I ran across such an event of intimidation thirty years ago when a lawyer for the university administration came to address the assembled faculty members on female harassment. He said people should use their common sense to address whether an interaction was beyond the bounds. Clearly, he gave this talk so as to cover the university should it be sued. I raised my hand and asked whether kissing the wife of a faculty member at the end of a dinner party was acceptable. Let’s be concrete. He said I should be discrete, which was hardly commonsensical. The leading Feminist in the faculty emphasized my point by saying there are more serious things to deal with, such as female work discrimination and sexual assault. But  vagueness prevailed, is the coin of the realm, as when Sen. Gillibrand speaking to a Democratic National Convention said that a woman can tell the difference between a pat on the ass and a sexual assault, and a few years later got Al Franken to resign from the Senate because of a picture of him faking a grope of an actress playing her part. Imprecision is dangerous.

A Short Post: One Month In.

Donald Trump does not hide what he plans to do, even if the major idea is to damage or destroy institutions rather than to improve them. He made clear in his campaign that he wanted to politicize the Justice Department and that he wanted to get rid of the permanent civil service and he also wanted to deport ten or so million illegal aliens. He has done the first by firing FBI agents who worked on tnhe cases against him and fired people at the Justice Department and wants to make a deal whereby Mayor Eric Adams of New York will have his corruption charges dropped so as to encourage him to go after ilegal aliens, but that was resisted by attorneys in the Federal District Court of Southern New York who say they could not do that in good faith and as of yesterday one attorney agreed to sign the order so as to protect the jobs of the rest of  the staff from resigning or being fired. Stay tuned.

Trump has used Elon Musk to get rid of the permanent bureaucracy, but by slashing programs rather than auditing them first. He shut down USAID which provides children with food and life saving drugs to a number of foreigners without checking out the facts. He claimed a hundred million dollars of condoms were being sent to the Gaza Strip and took it back, saying he would make some mistakes, in that some amounts of money for condoms were being sent to Gaza, Mozambique. So Musk is sloppy checking out his own facts and so he is like Trump, who said Haitians in  Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and did when the Republican governor of Onhio said it never  happened and J. D. Vance shrugged that falsehood as a metaphor for how disorganized Springfield life had become. Musk is looking into the Treasury Department payment system and continues to do so even if there are court orders to unfreeze accounts, reopen USAID and stop snooping around Treasury payments. So there is a potential constitutional issue about whether the Administration will flaunt the judiciary.

An even  more constitutional test will occur in the attempt to engage in large scale deportations, which have so far been minor. The administration needs a lot of money to carry this out legally and more or less humanely. The House is proposing the money as part of the budget bill to be passed through Congress in  March. But there will be a handful of deficit hawk Republicans who will oppose it and so some Democrats will be required to pass the bill. The threat is that failiing to do so will shut down the government. But Democratic congresspeople have said that they will not accept such cuts on entitlements that the Republicans are proposing and get a government shutdown  by not providing money to the executive from Congress. But consider this. What if the Administration refuses to shut down the government? What if it continues to spend? SWnat can the Congress do about this constitutional crisis? The legal remedy is impeachment or the 25th Amendment but the Republicans are so intimidated by Trump that they will not exercise their constitutional prerogatives. What could they do? Raise an army of their own or ask the Pentagon to support them? So far, Trump has said he will obey district court federal judges, but he might get peeved about them or about Congress. 

Some voters may not be particularly concerned about constitutional processes if as some focus groups have said, Trump is moving the government, though not sure to what purpose. I blame the shortcomings of high school social studies. But people may wake up if they find, as the Republican House proposes, to cut Medicaid and ACA. The people are the final resort. Stay tuned.

Grand Themes in Literature

Stories explain societies.

An anthropological definition of culture says that a culture consists of all the customs, ideas and structures that obtain in a society and that are consistent with one another so that it constitutes a distinctive world view. Such cultures predominate in pre-literate societies and the concept is extended to include ethnic groups or nations which have similar characteristics. A sociological definition of culture separates culture from other institutions or functions of society such as production or distribution or norms. The culture is the set of values by which a population is guided, the presumption that values are necessary so that they people can act in that people cannot be conceived as operating from reason or self interest alone. This definition of culture, whereby  cultural objects are largely for the purpose of maintaining order, are characteristic of industrialized societies. A third definition of culture might be called literary. It concerns the number of objects and performances created so as to entertain and enlighten the populace or some section of it, like opera, and so are autonomous in that the creations are the result of a coterie or social calling of some part of the population whether it is to entertain or to enlighten. This kind of culture is overtly and self consciously created and some people in handicraft industries can turn their talents, such as weaving or graffiti, into works of art recognized as such and so take on a distinct kind of being, as an artwork, whether or not they receive remuneration from their efforts, are different from its function and so not dependant, as Stalinists would say, as a kind of production useful as are other workers.

The point I wish to make about this third kind of culture, that is as old as “Gilgamesh” and remains quite active, is that it can explain the other two types of culture and is founded in history and so documented rather than regarded as having existed in a society from the start, as when historians thought that the Lowland countries came from their swamps rather than their writers or Henri Frankfort thought that Egyptian culture emerged from large spaces, these consistent with the first definition of culture. The usefulness of the third approach can be consulted by reviewing some of the great themes that emerge from the artistic artifacts.

A grand theme is a short summary of the arc of a plot that sums up and educates its readers about the basic way the history of a civilization works. This arc seems the most natural and obvious way both history and present day events and feelings emerge even if it includes some harsh realities. A good example of a grand theme is the repeated stories of exile and return that characterize the distinctive Jewish civilization. Moses led his people from Egypt to his Holy Land to the East. The Jews came back to their homeland after the Babylonian Captivity. Indeed, scholars claim that the redactors of the Old Testament were done with this grand theme in mind as a result lof their recent experience. Jews for millennia chanted “Next year in Jerusalem” so as to remind them of their exile, the latest return to Israel having occurred only  in the last hundred years.

The matching of a theme to history or literature may not be perfect for it to remain as a guiding principle. “Exodus” does not explain how the Hebrews found themselves in Egypt, a foreign people in their midst, though we can think Jews came to Egypt as a result of Joseph becoming the czar of foodstuffs during a period of famine. Moreover, the land of milk and honey conquered by the Israelites seems foreign territory rather than already familiar. Jews in exile had been so for so long that Reform Jews in the nineteenth century reconceptualized themselves as a Christian type religion, which meant an association of believers rather than an ethnicity, and so no need to return to Israel. But even Reform Jews in the twentieth century became overwhelmed by this grand theme and so came to support the state of Israel without wanting to jin their brethren in the eastern Mediterranean.

Moreover, a grand theme may not be an origin story that has always been part of a people’s understanding but develops over time. The early parts of “Genesis” are about a different grand theme: that of catastrophe and survival. Adam and Eve suffer the catastrophe of being expelled from Eden and then have to manage by Adam sweating on his brow and Eve experiencing labor pains. That is the new life. Noah endures the catastrophe of the Flood and the Bible story goes on to ell what happens to him after he is resettled in the world: he becomes a drunk and develops bad relations with one of his sons. Babel encounters the catastrophe of losing a single tongue and all of us since then have to adjust to that.

More so, there may be different grand themes that exist simultaneously until one of them becomes overwhelmingly convincing. The story of Joseph can be thought of not as an exile who is reunited with his people though in  a different land but as an immigrant who with luck and pluck was able to rise to the top, in which case that is to follow a different grand theme, the one adopted by America as its grand theme, which is that we are all immigrants who have managed to make well in our own land of milk and honey, “The Godfather” a stark reminder, a moral lesson, of what happens when a promising figure looks back and engages in the way of life of previous immigrants.

Grand themes can also be variations on older grand themes, a new civilization altering the grand theme of a different civilization so as to create a distinctive and bold alternative understanding of what a culture is fated to be forever retold.That happens in Christianity which modifies collective exile and return, a political and social matter however deeply felt, with personal exile and return in that people are exiled from their own nature because of the Fall and then can return to peace and tranquility wherever they reside by acknowledging Jesus as their savior, whether in Him as a mystical person or as a moral exemplar whereby people have now become spiritually free. The arc switches with crucial matters: whether law will be replaced by the spirit of the law and whether past and current metaphysical events take place, as is the case in Catholicism, or whether, as in Protestantism, salvation or not rages within each psyche, whether to surrender to Christ’s soul rather than his being the Son of God.

Other civilizations have very different and independent grand themes. The Iliad has war as its topic. Its great theme is about whether  a person is or can become a hero. Achilles has to choose between a long life or a heroic life, as most people in combat also face. And there are different kinds of heroes or can be honored as such even if their qualities are not readily apparent as admirable. Odysseus is sly and Priam is dutiful. People shine in different ways and, to be generous, a great many people can become heroic and so out of the ordinary because of their character traits which lead to particularly decisive engagement with the world. Nietzsche considered heroism as a particularly Greek issue and the Iliad is a way to display or fail to display it. A story is an opportunity to display that and Plato displayed again and again the heroism of Socrates and others to parry their wit so as to conquer opinion with truth, which is an application of heroism that leads to the extension of sci9ence, a method of inquiry the Hebrews never explored. There seems to be a connection.

The Odyssey has as its topic a  post war world, and so is akin to “The Best Years of Our Lives” and the second half of “Gone With the Wind”. How will the veterans adjust to the aftermath of the war? The grand theme is that survivors both at war and on the homefront remain loyal to their pre-war allegiances despite temptations to do otherwise. Helen goes back to Menelaus. Penelope resists the suitors. Telemachus looks for his father. Odysseus goes back to Ithaca despite the temptations of Circe. People are admired for the persistence of their loyalty as a kind of duty even if it is just custom in  that it is thought inevitable, but is nevertheless heroic. The idea of loyalty as an end in itself is an element of stoicism that finds its way not only into Roman culture, as in Seneca,  but also in Chrtistian thinking

European nations presented themselves as civilizations and had specific grand themes that sum up and further their preoccupations. The English culture is laden with the separation of the social classes and how to overcome them. It dominates the nineteenth century novel but goes as far back as ”Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” where a knight who is decidedly minor proves himself to become accomplished as a courtier by achieving feats of courtesy falling short only in sleeping with a woman which is excused perhaps because that is thee way of the world. But I do not know that “Beowulf”, earlier on, was not into the niceties of politesse, but was more like cave people huddled around their campfires to become warm and ward off animals. The theme is fear and foreboding, a very unhappy tale.

France also has a distinctive grand theme. It is about hiding and then revealing an inner self, perhaps because it is so entranced with the pomp and ceremony that emphasize externality. It begins, as most French things do, with Descartes, who wanted to shed the artifacts of self down to its bedrock reality, revealing that at the heart of self was consciousness, that “I think, therefore I am”, an axiomatic postu;late on which people can stand as indubitable and firm. Subsequent French thinkers modify and challenge the primacy of the self. Pascal shatters it with his wager. If you arise in heaven knowing God to be sovereign, then you had been wrong as a matter of fact from what you had believed otherwise, what had been in your soul. I would surmise, facing the pearly gates, to give in to fact and abjure whatever you had believed previously. Facts triumph over self even if they had been honestly arrived at so that a conscientious atheist could reasonably have believed there was no God and would not be respected for his conscientious posture. Moreover, Pascal’s Wager means that any fantastic claim has to be given credence lest it might be true and so every self is always in terror and so not much is left of the autonomy of the self.

Another attack on the autonomy, and self certain existence of the self comes in a very different direct6ion in the nineteenth century from Emile Durkheim. He does not counterpose the self with what Pascal regards as facts which are just superstitions but with norms, which are the current moment of a cultural more. The self is beaten up by norms in every which way. If you engage too much in a norm, you are liable to engage in altruistic suicide, like a kamikaze pilot. Or if you are too disengaged with norms, you are anomic, which means unanchored and drifting. Not too much or too little but just right which makes you always anxious, which is always an emotion that counters the certainty and solidity of the self, dismembering it into a puddle.

An additional way the French unravel selfhood is offered by twentieth century Existentialists. Albert Camus thought that after you peel off the onion of pretense down to its core, there is nothing left. The protagonist--hardly the hero-- of “L’Etranger” has no feeling, even about his mother’s death. He is soulless, an d so the opposite of the solid ground of self or ego. 

And so the French careen away from what was established as fundamental thought in different forms of negation and so each of them and collectively grand themes about the conflict between self and life. But the French, however, have not always been wedded as a core concept and story to the dynamics of selfhood. Rather, “The Song of Roland” is a prior and seminal figure of the French grand theme and it is not preoccupied with selfhood even if some historians and anthropologists insist that every nation from its origins had such a grand theme, as when nineteenth century historians thought that the people of the low countries are preoccupied with pushing back the floods from a marshy area. The grand theme for the song lof roland is chivalry which means something very different from  the English “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which means politesse or manners, but is concerned with how to carry out warfare, echoing back to the Iliad that warfare is a sly and brutal affair and to be chivalric means to engage in that dirty business such as sending their people as hostages to their enemy, these people to be sacrificed when the ruse is revealed. 

Exhibiting a set of grand themes may seem obvious and faces the objections that one could characterize a civilization as otherwise and could select different literary and historical works to suit one’s case, but the advantage is that this approach allows for evidence and of change. A civilization can be one way or another and need not remain stable as if it is what is called a culture that can be traced to customs established long ago and which never change, Germans doing what they do since before Tacitus and finding notg too distant German atrocities as inevitably in their cultural nature. I would prefer to think that Germany understands itself and has for a very long time been fractured and then unified, its latest unification setting off its present regime in 1989 when East and West Germany unified after the end of the Cold War. Similarly, the story of America as the accommodation of immigrants to America’s advantage is presently challenged by thinking of Americans as an ethnicity rather than disparate peoples  united under the Constitution.

A Short Post on Taxes

Every new Administration follows its traditional tax policy. New Republican Presidents or Republican controlled Congresses try to cut taxes on the rich and cut costs by restricting entitlements for the poor. Democratic Administrations or Congress's try to do the reverse: raise taxes for the rich and expand entitlements for the poor. Despite Trump’s outrageous and unprecedented assaults on permanent government structures, such as USAID and the Treasury Department payment system, Trump is following the playbook of Republican tax policy. There will be a fight in Congress in early March about how many taxes and programs to cut.

That is at least one of the key issues in any government whether or not such negotiations on either side is corrupt or self-serving rather than crafting tax policy for the interests of the people. Tax policy is an essential part of all governments. Just as businesses all engage in producing products or services such as lawn care or automobiles to be sold to individual consumers, just as they also package and advertise their wares, and also collect and monitor their receipts, all governments engage in parallel functions. They provide social services such as welfare and agricultural price supports and maintain defense departments and food safety; they appeal to their constituents for votes, which is the equivalent of purchases, and engage in campaigning, which otherwise is advertising, and they do the equivalent of getting remuneration by getting taxes. Ever has it been since governments began. The elders (but maybe not the old men) got the best parts of the giraffes the Pygmies had slain.

Here, however, is a problem faced by modern societies as that was outlined in the Fifties in John Kennnethj Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society”, those ideas still central to my thinking. The United States was very successful at providing individually produced privately owned goods and services. Competition might be redundant but effective at getting better products and services cheaper-- though I wonder about the entertainment industry which now, through streaming and cable, charges people to watch baseball  and football when they used to be free. Clearly, though, Galbraith claimed, collective goods and services such as fire departments and police departments, which make better sense to buy as a group rather than individually, because your house can get fire from an adjacent house that does not individually buy fire department services, the same true of regulations on clean air or defense establishments and the NLRB, are undersubscribed, even if some people conceive of how to package individual purchases of old age pensions and FEMA services. Taxes are not sufficiently raised to deal with the levels of demand needed by collective purchases. So American health care and education and struggling populations in Appalachia and the inner cities are not well serviced. And so there is a real fight in every Administration over whether to change the balance between collective and individual services and congresspeople are very articulate about this real issue, some finding the private or the public sector at fault, business ripping off consumers or government lazy and incompetent. These are rock bottom perceptions, Trump or not.

A Short Post on Gaza

Three weeks into the Trump Administration, there have been comic and dreadful incidents. The first week was comic opera about taking over Greenland, Canada and the Canal Zone, and then there came the tariffs on Mexico and Canada which were quickly resolved by the two countries agreeing to do what they would have done anyway if politely asked to do so, but that is not Trump's way, which is to bluster for its own sake, to make himself seem strong. Remember that he is a deeply superficial man.

The next week was much more sinister, and still unfolding. What does Musk plan to do now that he has access to the United States payment system? Getting unqualified people in office and purging Justice Department career employees seems not only vindictive but it also suspends the civil service system that has existed for a hundred fifty years. This is a very radical change that may or may not be Constitutional but still seriously worrisome. But it is fruitless to anguish about those real politics as whenJake Tapper and A. J. Vance bickering with ever more heat about whether Trump really said Pelosi and Schiff were of the enemy within. We know that Trump can be edited to mean whatever his supporters make him to mean.

But it is difficult not to be taken aback, especially by Trump’s supporters, with Trump’s jaw dropping announcement two days ago that he will take ownership over Gaza, has not ruled out using American troops to do so, and expelling the Palestinians from Gaza while making it the Riviera of the Near East.even though, as Trump admitted, the two nations don't want the by rebuilding after resettling Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan even, as Trump admitted, the two nations don '/t want the Palestinians. The America Firsters who supported Trump do not want foreign entanglements. No American boys and girls in Gaza. What is up with Trump? Is he serious or is this just a ploy? Who knows?  The Israelis don’t want it to happen either. It has been their long standing policy to fight their own battles with their own troops, except for experts and the Navy fliers who shot down Iranian drones and missiles. Israel does not want to be a colony of the United States; it wants to manage a great deal of autonomy as was shown by Netanyahnu thumbing his nose at Biden and pursuing his war on Hamas for fifteen months.

But Trump, for all his cynicism, is very naive and ignorant. He says he does not want to repeat a failed policy. He probably doesn't know that when the Israelis abandoned Gaza in 2005 they left an agricultural greenhouse industry that would provide exports throughout the Eastern Mediterranean  and the Palestinians destroyed them. There was English funding for building a high speed rail up and down Gaza and money for other infrastructure and new industry but the plan was rejected because the English would audit the books and the money not sent to graft and armament.  So that possibility was tried but Trump can't face up to that, while I am left with the prospect of a forever war, Hamas reborn in ten years and trying again to exterminate Israelis. Wouldn't it be nice to be in Coo Coo Land and everything bad would go away, like bleach clearing out Covid, as Trump had hoped?

A Short Post on Race

What if one of what the new White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, calls “legacy” reporters, meaning from the presumably fake news crowd, were to put her on the defensive in the White House Press Room by asking what about the two Trump plane crashes. After all, there had been no major air accidents in the United States for many years and then two happened during the second week of Trump’s second term. Couldn’t they be related? What’s up? That would be no more foolish than both the President and the Press Secretary saying at the podium that the first crash was the result of DEI even though no pilot of either the commercial plane or the helicopter has been publicly identified as a black, a female or a dwarf. Race was introduced only because the two speakers cared to do so, pursuing the idea that a minority must have done that. Such an attribution is clearly racist because it cites a deficient minority member for no reason even though such a minority pilot might have been perfectly competent, as years ago Eleanor Roosevelt attested when she insisted that a black pilot from the Tuskegee airmen be the one who flew her around an airfield.

Moreover, what if that legacy reporter then left the White House Press Room, saying I don’t have to legitimate such remarks. After all, the White House Press Conference is a two way street, the press gathering since there was a gaggle of reporters who stood around FDR’s desk asking him questions and he provided his own cagey  answers and there has never been a time from then to now when the press was assaulted by racist remarks until that recent exchange. The Washington press corps can look for other sources of information than the mostly trivial handouts provided to them, such as oncoming events, and so don’t have to stand with that. No legacy reporter comes and that ruins Leavitt’s party, leaving the place to Trump acolytes, not worthwhile covering on the networks.

The First Ten Days

So far, bluster, confusion and cruelty.

FDR in his first ten days stabilized the banking system by making bank deposits secure. What has Donald Trump done in his first ten days? His efforts have been fits and starts that are the result of impulsive initiatives and sloppy staff work in that his ideas are either bluster or platitudes and, whether through slyness or stupidity, manages to engage in a vagueness which directs attention to those who carry out policies rather than himself. His way of operating was best exemplified when he famously spoke to the adherents of his at the ellipse before sending them off to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6th in 2021, saying they “should be strong” and the future of the nation was at stake, even if he did not ask for violence, but that was the clear inference they could draw from what he said and so he was complicity in the insurrection even though he never said so in so many words and so is excused from the clear meaning of his words on many occasions, treated as sentiments or exaggerations rather than lies or assaults, his words redefined as a version of what he says in a more reasonable manner, as when  J. D. Vance said Trump was using Haitgians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio was just a metaphor for how bad immigrants were though Trump treated that ass literally true. Imagine if Biden had used language so vaguely or needed interpretation to make what he said palatable. But Biden stayed close to truth and wass can did even about world leaders, as when he said managing Bibi was difficult.

Susie Wiles as chief of staff had not had any interagency memo or detailed plan or contact with the Colombians before sending illegal immigrants back to Colombia and so had to bring the planes back from en route and then threatening to put up high tariffs on Colombia so that the military planes with shackled Columbians could be accomplished in their deportation when a little preliminary conference could have allowed extradition without difficulty. Just use commercial planes and no shackles. Trump and the Republicans see Trump as being strong and respected by his threat but that just means the Colombians and Latin America just see America as to be feared rather than respected, unless as Machiavelli thought, there is nothing to respect except fear. Latin America will be wary of braggadocio. To cover up a botched deportation.

The rhetorical obfuscation came next concerning those rounded up illegal aliens in the United States. The ICE leader, Tom Homan, said that the first to be deported were criminals, people who had raped and killed and assaulted people. But some of those rounded up were only illegals, those without documents, but Homan said it was alright to deport those people because they were illegally in the country. But that makes them violative of a misdemeanor rather than a felony, which is what people understand as deporting criminals first. It was perhaps inevitable that rounding up the truly criminal would include otherwise illegals, but Homan tries to confuse the two. Deporting law abiding aliens will raise lawsuits including habeas corpus ones, and would cost money and time, and sufficient funds have not been allocated by Congress for that purpose and so there will probably be illegal deportations that violate the constitution but we are all wary of fruitless trials never convened and constitutional suits and so the deportations will go on, found illegitimate after the fact, as happened when the internment of Japanese Americans was found unconstitutional long after it happened, however much those internments were decried in retrospect.

Then Trump’s White House declared he would not spend money allocated by Congress for a variety of new programs they White House does not approve, but that violates the impoundment act whereby there has to be a sixty day notice for consultation before proceeding with that and whether the Executive has the Constitutional right for what is in effect a retrospective line item veto. Constitutional issues of the highest order are at stake and the American people, who don’t trust the Supreme Court anyway, may chaff at the Supreme Court siding with Trump, which they are likely to do. But Trump is used to being in court and wearing out the judicial system and so may prevail, however it strains American legality

Then the White House fired a number of people who had civil service standing so that they could be replaced by political appointments, also a promise made by Trump on the campaign trail, but violated the statute that there had to be a thirty day notice for such severances, an easy enough procedure except for undue haste and lousy staff work to go through laws and regulations that apply, the new White House not terribly preoccupied with legality.

And then, most recently, a freeze on programs to bar money to groups such as Meals on Wheels because it is not a disbursement to a person, as is Social Security, but granted to an organization. Whatever the legalities, it was an attack on a charitable organization and so cruel. But the new White House Press Secretary was not able to see which organizations were barred or not, such as Medicaid, which is bloc granted to the states, and so yesterday the freeze was dropped, though defended the previous day, and we will see what happens. Vague declarations in the spirit of Trump but never developed with precision because, I think, they do not think with precision but only with their anger. It is to be seen if the American Republic or Republicans become tired of such gestures, but the public and that party are so used to being sloppy in thought and execution  that they will treat that as the way things are done. Who will stand up and says the king has no clothes?

This New Year's Eve

Here is a story about New Year's Eve and afterwards. My wife Jane and I weren't much taken with New Year's Eve as a holiday. It seemed superficial, unlike Christmas, where Jane had a tree ever since when she was a kid and her mother who immigrated from Odessa said that this was America and if her grandchild had a Christrmas tree, that was alright. I liked Passover, but I gave it up in my teens, and that was a sacrifice, when I became as secular as possible. Jane and I rarely stayed up late to watch the ball fall in Times Square, that holiday liturgy, turning in early. When my kids were little, one or the other got double hours for babysitting in the neighborhood coop and so had hours banked until March.

Last night, my son and daughter in law and myself had champagne and steak and by the time it was over, it was 9:45 pm and so I turned on my tv to see the ball drop from New York, two hours later in its time zone from me. I found it very touching: all those people being so cheerful, young couples kissing, small children on dad shoulders, animated and just being happy to be part of the crowd, amid the lights, with festooned lights and a lot of confetti, despite a ban on porta potties, backpacks, no containers of liquid, and police in abundance. Everyone was wishing one another a good new year, especially by the friendly Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen on CNN.

And then I thought about the sentiment. As I told you, things are going to be bad before they get even worse with the new administration. The debacle may occur as soon as Jan. 3rd, when Johnson may be ousted as Speaker because the deficit hawks don't think he is conservative enough even if Trump backs him. But chaos of weeks before a new Speaker is chosen is preferable to efficient Trump leadership that actually tries to pass money to build detention camps for 13 million people and jail political enemies and perogue the civil service. Drag events as long as possible until the 2026 midterms. Delay confirmations and defeat some of them.

Then, this morning, I heard about the New Orleans truck ramming which turned out to be by a native born American who had served honorably in the military, but had been declared by Trump to be an illegal alien. It is amazing to know that a President in three weeks is so fast and loose about facts rather than the government relied on to be careful to tell the truth except when it is deliberately lying, as happened when Cheney and company said that they were certain there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I thought the American people couldn't possibly re-elect George W. in 2004, but they did despite his betrayal of trust. Now we have elected a President who lies all the time, congenitally, and we of the press are in the awkward position of honoring a Presidential office while reporting his latest lies. Apparently, the uncooperative press people will be eliminated in the new White House Press Room.

Some people are suggesting to take a new tack and compromise with Trump rather than just oppose him. But his declaration of war is his stated attention and his past treasonable offenses to which he never answered in the court of public opinion, much less a trial. So he is a constitutional pariah and that is all that needs to be said.

These will be dark days and there is no reason to celebrate the just past New Year's Eve.