The delusion that we could corral all the violence behind a fence

I’m home from my travels. I spent some time with a cousin west of Chicago. A strong storm came through, but not when I was driving. The Reconciling Ministries Network Convocation was held in Madison, Wisconsin. If I write about it, my report will be in a separate post. After Convo I took a tour of the Wisconsin State Capitol, a beautiful building. When in the Supreme Court chamber our guide noted this court has the reverse of what one might expect – of the seven justices there are six women and one man. On Monday I toured Taliesin, the home and studio of famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The buildings show off the style that made him an important figure in American architecture. The guide warned us that Lloyd Wright was about five foot six and built the house to his scale. Men who were six feet and taller had to be careful of their heads. Though the place is well thought out, he sometimes would just try something, willing to replace it if it didn’t work. One such project was an extension of his bedroom. Some important architectural people were coming in three weeks. He had his students do the work. The results looks quite good. But the foundation wasn’t done right and is crumbling. The preservation society that now owns the place may have to rebuild it soon. That bedroom extension is to the right behind the vines.

From there I drove to Dubuque, Iowa. When I was a child my family took long vacations – not so much in time (though the first was four weeks), but in distance. We were also ones trying to claim we had been in as many states as possible. So on one trip we cut a corner of Arkansas and in another we crossed a corner of Iowa. I’ve also seen small bits of South Carolina, Delaware, and Georgia (never left the Atlanta airport while on the ground). I haven’t been to North Dakota at all. So this was a chance to see a *bit* more than a corner of Iowa. In Dubuque I visited the National Mississippi River Museum and Aquarium, which is pretty cool. The place includes the ship the William M. Black, which had been used to dredge the Missouri River. It did that by shooting water into the channel and sucking up the sediment that had been stirred up. Their special exhibit was some of the feathered dinosaurs that had been found in Alaska (cool, but not sure what that had to do with US rivers). I took the Fenelon Place Elevator up the bluff to have a great view of the town and river. This “elevator” might better be known as a funicular or an inclined railway. This one is the shortest and steepest of the kind.

I learned the way to easily find Dubuque on a map. The bridge across the Mississippi at the north end of downtown crosses to Wisconsin. The one at the south end of downtown crosses to Illinois. From there I went to Davenport. Along the way I, of course, passed a lot of cornfields. But I was surprised at how hilly the countryside was. In Davenport I saw the German American Heritage Center and Museum. It has displays about the German immigrant experience – why they left Germany and what they did once they came to America – from about 1850 to 1925. My mother’s ancestors came from Germany between 1830 and 1870 and settled in Missouri. A few things I learned: I think it was the 1910 census that showed over 30% of residents of the Upper Midwest were from Germany. Several other states had German populations of more than 20%. Since the German population was so large they tended to continue speaking German for generations. They formed several types of social or community clubs to promote arts, fitness, and civic life. While other Americans at the time considered music to be an activity of the home, Germans considered music to be a community activity. They formed community bands and choirs. They continued speaking German until 1917, when the US went to war against Germany. Starting then schools would only teach English. Public discourse was only in English. German newspapers went out of business. On Wednesday I made the trip home. I left at about 7:20 am, just as a thunderstorm was hitting Davenport. I soon got ahead of it. I followed I-80 across Illinois and much of Indiana. There was a long construction zone around Joliet, though the traffic kept moving. South of Chicago and into Indiana there were two long sections of stop-and-go traffic. One didn’t have an obvious cause. The other was because an accident squeezed five lanes of traffic down to two. From the start of the first to the end of the second I did 22 miles in 75 minutes instead of the expected 20 minutes. All that put me into the Detroit area and its own backups at rush hour. I stopped to buy food and pulled into my garage as it started to rain. During my travels I finished the book The Road to Roswell, a novel by Connie Willis. Francie goes to Roswell, New Mexico, to be the bridesmaid for her college roommate. The wedding is to be held in Roswell and its UFO Museum during the UFO festival because all involved (except Francie) are alien fanatics. These are hardcore people, especially the groom. Francie is quite annoyed with so much fanaticism. She wonders if she’s there to talk the bride out of the marriage, as she had done before. But it is Francie who is abducted by an alien. It does not look anything like the green humanoid with big eyes seen on posters around Roswell. It resembles instead a tumbleweed with lightning fast tentacles. The similarities to whips gives it the nickname Indy, for Indiana Jones. It demands Francie drive it to ... well, it isn’t sure where it wants to go. Along the way a few more people are abducted – Wade, who sells abduction insurance and way too freely admits to being a con man. Lyle, who spouts every alien conspiracy. Eula May, an elderly woman who is good at making money at casinos. And Joseph, an elderly man who happens to have a gigantic RV for all of them to live in. While Indy sends them back and forth across the Southwest they try to figure out how to communicate with their alien and to find out what Indy is looking for. It’s all great fun and is similar to the other lighthearted tales Willis has produced over the years. I enjoyed it. About the only articles I collected over the last few days are pundit roundups for Daily Kos. The roundups seem to cover the basic points. Wednesday’s roundup by Greg Dworkin quoted Elliott Morris and Mary Radcliffe of Strength in Numbers. The article notes that “The Democratic Party's net rating (-30) is 19 points below that of the Republican Party, and the WSJ’s worst-ever gap for Democrats.” That’s near historic lows. In an accompanying tweet Morris added “But the Dems are still leading polls for the House next year.” Back to the article:

These are some tough numbers for Democrats. But I think the collective freak-out over this one poll is unwarranted — and in general, I wonder if party favorability is telling us something all that useful or actionable anyway.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme that touches on the latest bit of the Epstein scandal. The nasty guy complained that Epstein had “stolen” more than one of his employees who were underage girls.

Molesting Adolescent Girls Allowed Anti-drag laws have been introduced in AZ, AR, FL, ID, KS, KY, MO, MT, NE, OK, SC, TX, and WV to “protect kids.” Child marriage is legal in 12 of those 13 states.

Remember that hypocrisy is a declaration of strength – I can do things that I won’t let you do (even if my reasoning is illogical). In Thursday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Yuli Novak, the director of an Israeli human rights organization writing for the Guardian on why Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide.

Genocide does not happen without mass participation: a population that supports it, enables it or looks away. That is part of its tragedy. Almost no nation that has committed genocide understood, in real time, what it was doing. The story is always the same: self-defense, inevitability, the targets brought it on themselves. In Israel, the prevailing narrative insists this all began on 7 October, with Hamas’s massacre of civilians in southern Israel. That day was a true horror, a grotesque burst of human cruelty: civilians slaughtered, raped, taken hostage. A concentrated national trauma that summoned, for many Israelis, a profound sense of existential threat. But 7 October, while catalytic, was not enough on its own. Genocide requires conditions – decades of apartheid and occupation, of separation and dehumanization, of policies designed to sever our capacity for empathy. Gaza, sealed off from the world, became the apex of this architecture. Its people became abstractions, perpetual hostages in our imagination, subjects to bomb every few years, to kill by the hundreds or thousands, with no accountability. We knew more than 2 million people were living under siege. We knew about Hamas. We knew about the tunnels. In hindsight, we knew everything. Yet somehow we were incapable of understanding that some of them might find a way to break out. What happened on 7 October was not only a military failure. It was a collapse of our social imagination: the delusion that we could corral all the violence and despair behind a fence and live peacefully on our side. That rupture arrived under the most extreme rightwing government in Israel’s history, a coalition whose ministers openly fantasize about Gaza’s erasure. And so, in October 2023, every star in our darkest nightmare aligned.

In the comments are several notable memes posted by exlrrp. First:

Ghislaine asking SCOTUS to overturn her conviction should worry you because her family is wealthy and can pay for Thomas’ and Alito’s next vacations, get Kavanaugh a lifetime supply of beer, Amy Coney Barret some designer handmaids uniforms and pay Roberts to look the other way.

Right below that one:

And the simple, gut-wrenching truth here is this: No one cuts deals with monsters unless they are terrified of the truth those monsters could unleash. And no one empowers a trafficker – unless they have something they need to keep buried.

Further down but on the same topic:

Why was a 15-year-old working at an adult spa...owned by Donald Trump? There it is, folks. There. It. Is. The question they never want you to ask. The answer they’ll never be able to explain.

And a meme that shows a tweet from The Bulwark:

Q: “Would you support a pardon or commutation for Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker?” Speaker Mike Johnson: “That’s a decision of the president...I won’t get in front of him, that’s not my lane.”

That’s followed by a tweet from Mehdi Hasan:

The Christian speaker of the House can’t bring himself to publicly oppose a pardon for one of the worst child sex traffickers of our lifetime. That’s the story. That should be the headline. Astonishing.

Yet another “scandal” is the revelation of evidence that the nasty guy consistently cheats at golf, the game for which he most frequently leaves the Oval Office. Rambler797 got into a discussion with exlrrp about it and Rambler797 wrote:

It’s an odd fixation, to so obviously fabricate something like a club championship. Compulsive need to be seen as a winner. Not to win, mind, but to be seen as a winner.

And in today’s roundup Dworkin quoted Liz Dye of Public Notice commenting on Epstein “stealing” underage girls from Mar-a-Lago. The nasty guy claims the “steal” ended his friendship with Epstein.

Jeffrey Epstein did not “steal” Virginia Giuffre — she was a 14-year-old girl, not a vassal on Trump’s estate. Giuffre was working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000 when Maxwell picked her up and hired her as a “traveling masseuse.” And in any event, his timing doesn’t line up at all. As law Professor Ryan Goodman points out, two years later the bromance was still going strong, with Trump guffawing to New York Magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy … a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” But Giuffre wasn’t laughing. She spent five years being abused by Maxwell and Epstein, and appears to have been haunted by the experience for the rest of her short life. She died by suicide just three months ago.

A 14-year-old working as a “masseuse”? Red flag right there. Dworkin quoted David Shuster of BlueAmp. Just before most of Dworkin’s quotes there is a summary sentence I assume Dworkin wrote. I usually ignore them, but this one is quite good.

A man so pathetic, so filled with self-loathing, envy, jealousy, such a Grand Canyon of emptiness inside, he's President of the United States and still has to cheat at golf.

The quote from Shuster:

Let’s be clear. The game of golf, admittedly a pastime for the idle rich, is governed by a code of honor. A golfer keeps his or her own score and plays the ball where it lies. A true golfer does not helicopter into the rough, kick his ball back onto the fairway with the discretion of a Clydesdale, and then claim a birdie with the sanctimony of a choirboy. But truth and Donald Trump have never been close enough to be a golf pairing. A few years ago, Sportswriter Rick Reilly wrote a book titled “Commander in Cheat”— based on the author’s interviews with Trump caddies. Trump’s own employees noted Trump cheats all the time and said Trump kicks his golf balls into better positions so frequently that the caddies call Trump, “Pele,” as in the soccer star.

The nasty guy cheats at golf? Alas, not a surprise. A tweet by Yashar Ali:

Under pressure from the White House, the Smithsonian has removed President Trump from the impeachment exhibit at the American History Museum. The exhibit now says that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal,” referring to [Andrew] Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton.

Larry Sabato added:

Absolutely disgraceful. Rewriting history to please Trump. He’s the only President impeached TWICE. Shame on the Smithsonian. Shame on Trump and his minions.

In the comments another meme posted by exlrrp, this one quoting @iamharaldur: *+* I don’t know if I can think of a worse defence against being called a pedophile than to say you stopped being friends with another pedophile because he stole a teenager from you! *+*