Yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt

I finished the book Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This is the sequel to the book Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I read this earlier book and last summer I wrote about seeing the movie based on it. This story takes up where the previous one left off – quite literally. Because of that if you haven’t read the previous book (and want to) this is a spoiler alert for the rest of this review. The previous book ends with Ari and Dante out in the desert near El Paso declaring their love to each other in the back of Ari’s truck. This book begins later the same night, perhaps more properly early the next morning, when they realize they had better get home. Ari is the narrator of the story. He feels he has come alive in falling in love with Dante. The story is about Ari’s senior year in high school (Dante goes to a different school, though they see each other frequently). It is 1988 and both are afraid that because they love each other the world won’t accept them and their love. So I kept waiting for the homophobic attacks like there were in the first book. Thankfully, there was only one, and it wasn’t directed at either Ari or Dante. This is a much gentler story, basically about Ari shifting from boy to man. He begins to see his parents as real people and actually talks to his dad. That thing his mom has been doing all his life he now sees actually quite loving. The girls who are always sweet to him but whom he had ignored can be allies. The girl who was always mean to him can be a friend. He surprises fellow students by no longer being “socially disconnected” and challenges a racist teacher who has low expectations of kids with Mexican ancestry, like him. Some people who hadn’t seen him for a while exclaim, “When did you become a man?” He wants to, but doesn’t, say “Last Thursday at 3:30.” Hanging over all this is a big question. Dante has been accepted at a college in Ohio. Ari has been accepted at a university in Texas. Will there love endure or will it merely be a first love? This book is a good one. If a movie is made of this one I’ll watch it too. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported in a few days a federal judge may reveal the names of many of the 187 people associated with Jeffrey Epstein, notorious for providing underage children for his clients to abuse. Of course, there are a lot of people who hung around Epstein (and took flights on his private jet) who did not fly to his private island and who did not partake of his other services. Sumner notes that many news sites and pundits will be making a big deal of one name likely on the list: Bill Clinton. They’ll claim this is the most important name on the list. But those same news sites will be working hard to not mention another likely on the list: the nasty guy. He’s actually the most important name on the list for a simple reason. He’s running for president. Bill Clinton isn’t. Yet the effort to smear Clinton will continue, also for a simple reason. He’s a Democrat. And they hope by association they can smear other Democrats and especially Biden. Yeah, we’ve already had nasty guy sex tapes. That appeared just before the 2016 election. So appearing on Epstein’s list won’t make any difference to his supporters. Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote about a report that appeared in Rolling Stone. It says that in the trial about the nasty guy attempting to overturn the 2020 election his legal team will attempt to turn the courtroom into a “MAGA freak show.” The plans include such things as putting Nancy Pelosi on the stand to accuse her of not adequately securing the Capitol. Claim the attack was an FBI frame job assisted by Antifa. Blame former confidants and legal allies. And they’ll get Hamas and Hezbollah in there somehow. All of this to create the spectacle the nasty guy craves. The base will love turning his own trial into a show trial of his opponents. The actual jury sitting in the DC courtroom – not so much. The prosecution will have a great deal of work keeping irrelevant issues out of the trial. In a pundit roundup for Kos from just after Christmas Chitown Kev quoted Tim Alberta of The Atlantic about the corruption of American Christianity for the purpose of winning elections and dominating the country. That has dropped attendance and the church’s reputation. It has left evangelicals estranged from their secular neighbors.

A community that has always felt misunderstood now feels marginalized, ostracized, even persecuted. This feeling is not relegated to the fringes of evangelicalism. In fact, this fear—that Christianity is in the crosshairs of the government, that an evil plot to topple America’s Judeo-Christian heritage hinges on silencing believers and subjugating the Church—now animates the religious right in ways that threaten the very foundations of our democracy. ... Mobilizing in response to this perceived threat, the forces of Christian nationalism—those who seek to demolish the wall between Church and state, asserting far-right religious dominion over the government as well as the country’s core institutions—are now ascendant both inside the Church and inside the Republican Party. ... Many of the people poised to hold high-ranking posts in a second Trump administration don’t view today’s societal disputes through the lens of Republican versus Democrat or of conservative versus progressive, but rather of good versus evil.

In another pundit roundup what is worth sharing is not the pundits but a comment by Captain Frogbert. The Captain started with a few quotes:

“It is a movement composed of people who are economically comfortable and middle-class, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living, and yet who seethe with a sense that they have been done dirt, screwed over, betrayed—and they are determined to get revenge.” — Tom Nichols, The Atlantic “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” — Herman Melville “When you have been privileged, equality feels like oppression.” “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon Baines Johnson

Then from the Captain, words that do a good job of explaining the MAGA movement – and much of American life:

The entire MAGA movement is populated by people who have led relatively cushy lives — as evidenced by their $90,000+ SUVs and Pickups (and do you know how much it costs to “roll coal?”) and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of guns and ammo — secure in their presumption they were entitled at birth to white preeminence and were certainly born being morally superior to “those people.” Now, “those people” are being recognized and rewarded for their efforts and accomplishments, and not treated (by some) as inferior to the glorious ME, and it burns these MAGA people’s souls. HOW. DARE. THEY? How DARE they pretend black people are equal to whites (ME!)? How DARE they pretend LGBTQ+ people aren’t sick, evil perverts? How DARE they pretend men are not inherently superior to women? How DARE they pretend people who are NOT ME are my equals??? And if those people have anything more than I THINK they ought to have (which is way less than I have, by definition) it MUST be because THEY STOLE IT FROM ME! Worse, those traitorous white people — Sociamalists, commies, Nazis (and not the good kind) LIBTARDS — GAVE MY STUFF to THOSE PEOPLE!!! HOW. DARE. THEY???

Along the same lines Resolute Square posted a cartoon of a baby elephant sitting on Santa’s lap with a very long list. The elephant says, “This is my list of things I don’t want others to have.” An article that’s been sitting in my browser tabs since September of 2022 is a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos by Bill in Portland, Maine and includes this from his collection of late night commentary. Alas, not even the example is dated.

"It's very obvious at this point that the path to Republican power lies in dickishness. I don’t know that there is a political platform or an ideology other than dickishness. This [kidnapping] stunt did exactly what he wanted it to do—jumped his profile [and] made him a hero amongst those for whom dickishness is one of the sole characteristics they're looking for in their leaders. It probably angered Trump because, 'Nobody's gonna be a bigger dick than me.' Imagine the season we are in where they are trying to one-up each other in utter cruelty." —Jon Stewart on Florida governor Ron DeSantis flying Venezuelan asylum-seekers from Texas to Massachusetts for no reason and with no warning.

Farther down in the column Bill included a pretty cool gymnastic floor routine by Katelyn Ohashi. Alas, just now when I played it the video glitched a lot while the audio kept going.