In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 I am going to make a few brief follow-up comments to my post of last week on Oliver Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond."  Because music is more fun and interesting than the general sturm und drang of daily American politics.  Amid the strange brouhaha over this song, I listened, enjoyed the music, and wrote my analysis that the commentariat is, as usual, wrong about everything.  The right has tried to claim the song as a conservative anthem, while the left has demonized Oliver Anthony as some right-wing agitprop mouthpiece.  I went through the song, line by line, and argued that the lyrics were neither liberal nor conservative.  They drew on themes common to left-wing ideologies throughout American history, tracing a folk music lineage back to Woody Guthrie, referencing Merle Travis's "16 Tons."  However, Anthony also commented on inefficiencies and structural issues in the welfare system, along with the new taboo of obesity.  Thus, listening without pr

 It is to my own discredit that I had not read this novel before.  A few months ago, Martin Amis passed away, and so began the international chorus of accolades for one of the last literary giants of Britain.  One cannot read everything, but the most obvious work that I needed to read was Time's Arrow .  The novel follows the life of Odilo Unverdorben, from the perspective of an observer inside his head experiencing time backwards.  The observer has a basic sense of Unverdorben's emotional state, but not Unverdorben's thoughts.  Upon Unverdorben's death, the observer awakens with a range of knowledge, factual and linguistic, but nothing about the world, and then watches the world run backwards through Unverdorben's eyes.  Unverdorben was a nazi war criminal-- a doctor who performed experiments under a Mengele-like character, nicknamed Uncle Pepi at Auschwitz. Run the Holocaust in reverse.  Ovens call down ashes from the sky to build a new race, baked in ovens, and r

 This week, the world has been presented with yet another memorable photograph of one of the most photographed people in the world.  Donald J. Trump.  His mugshot was one of him scowling his scowl, which was not as I expected.  I expected the shit-eating grin.  Consider the shit-eating grin he sported when he got the Mitt-ster to humiliate himself, groveling for a Secretary of State job which was never going to happen.  Had I been advising Trump, I would have told him to eat shit.  I mean, wear the shit-eating grin.  Instead, he scowled the scowl of the scowler, and we saw a mugshot of the angry man of persecution.  It was, of course, less cringy than what happens if you do a Google image search of "Trump bathrobe."  Please, for the love of all that is beautiful in the world, do not do that search. I warned  you.  You had to do it anyway, didn't you?  Don't blame me.  You did the search.  That's on you . Anyway, Trump has been booked, charged and shot his... mug.

 I apologize if I am misusing sport-terminology.  I do not follow sport.  Regardless, I warned that last night's debate would be particularly pointless.  All debates are pointless, but last night's debate was even more absurd.  Sure, you can point to moments of theater that could be entertaining to some, with zingers and gotcha moments, but it all amounts to even less than those in a typical debate.  If I understand the term, "undercard," correctly, there are boxing events and such in which lower-ranked fighters fight each other, and those fights may either be entertaining for their own sakes, have later implications because of rankings, or even just matter for the fighters' pay.  Watch if you so choose.  Presidential elections have no undercard.  It is not even a tournament.  It plays out over a series of primaries and caucuses, but it is still a winner-take-all contest with no dummy prize, unless you count the VP slot, which does not necessarily go to a losing c

 Donald Trump will not participate in tomorrow night's spectacle, making it a very different kind of irrelevant spectacle from the kind of irrelevant spectacle that it would have been if Donald Trump had been there.  Remember, first, that debates almost never matter.  One can make the case that Rick "Oops" Perry oops-ed himself out of the GOP nomination, but the most famous debate moments are essentially irrelevant to electoral outcomes.  Remember, after all, that George H.W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis despite Dan Quayle not, in fact, being Jack Kennedy.  Debates do not matter, and they have gotten worse, with their nadir being Trump-Biden 1:  "Please, For The Love Of Cicero, Make It Stop."  I have argued for years that all debates should be canceled.  This year, the GOP is skipping its nomination contest.  It simply is not happening.  It would be difficult to find any party in any era of American history as devoted to one man as the Republican Party is to Do

 Earlier this year, I revealed some unpleasant events that took place at Case Western Reserve University.  Anyone reading this post will know the events that I reference, and for the reasons to be described herein, I do not want to describe them again.  I revealed those matters after allowing CWRU's formal processes to play out for many months, and with some questionable institutional decisions.  I keep making references to philosophers like Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Seneca.  Something does not fit. Act with purpose. I use this blog to enjoy the process of writing, and sort out ideas of politics, economics, philosophy, literature, music, and whatever other topics suit my fancy.  I write for the sake of writing, because writing is the best way of thinking.  You will not find a Facebook page for me, nor any other social media profile, wherein I post pictures of myself, nor any other nonsense.  Write.  Think by writing, and the ideas are their own reward.  Act with purpos

 I should stop wasting time reading bad books.  I am learning the skill.  I put down a book, again.  I expected to find some interesting ideas in Scotto Moore's Battle of the Linguist Mages , along with some irritation, but the ratio tilted too far towards the latter, so I stopped, and this is a healthy practice.  I shall comment.  First, here is the concept, and why I bothered.  One of the tropes of magic and spellcasting in fantasy-- books, games, television, movies, your wacky wiccan relative-- is nonsensical chanting.  You have to do something, right?  What, though, are you saying when you speak these incantations?  Here is a concept.  If you can layer tone on top of tone within your voice, you can layer meaning on top of meaning within a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning within a language.  Do that with enough sophistication, and you can create the Bene Gesserit's "voice" effect from Dune , or maybe even more than that.  An ad agency stumbles onto t

 Let's do something different this morning.  During the week of another Trump indictment, there is a more interesting demonstration of our polarized cultural moment, this time again related to country music.  A few weeks ago, I wrote a post, somewhat more nuanced than you are likely to find elsewhere, on Jason Aldean, the history of violence in music, and how polarization now interacts with violent attitudes.  (It's only bad when your side does it.)  Now, the internet is in a state of internet-ness over another song.  Oliver Anthony's "Rich Men North of Richmond."  This one is more interesting for many reasons.  First, it is better music.  When I commented on Jason Aldean, I wrote about the history of Appalachian murder ballads, how that carried forward, and any examination by the hypothetical and entirely non-existent reader of this blog would recognize that I am a sincere fan of "real" country music, with all of the snobbery implied by the phrase, alon

 Robert Walter, "Criminals Have A Name For It," from Super Heavy Organ Groove .

 Yesterday was a day ending in -y, which apparently now means that former President Donald J. Trump was indicted for some of his many brazen, public crimes.  He will not be convicted because juries are like Soylent Green.  They are made out of people.  Rather than rehash banalities, I am concerned this morning with larger and more difficult questions-- those of political violence.  The United States is/are on a dangerous precipice.  Prior to the 2020 election, despite being far from a leftist (and indeed, disgusted with academia's leftist dysfunction), I counted myself among the alarmist faction in political science.  I pointed to Donald Trump's repeated refusals to state that he would accept the results of the election, I warned that if he lost, he would do anything and everything to try to steal the election, up to and including violence.  As Trump's legal challenges fell under the weight of their own stupidity, I commented that I dramatically overestimated Trump's le

 Based on the title of the post, one might presume that the subject of this morning's observation is the insurmountable challenge of the ongoing threat Donald J. Trump poses to law and order in the United States of America.  He is now on trial for a wide range of felonies, and he is about to be indicted again in Georgia.  He has already used his social media platform to post messages like, "IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU," in the obligatory all-caps of Trump-speak, with further statements about Judge Chutkan, Jack Smith, and really, his publicly known enemies list, in Nixonian terminology.  After the aforementioned pre-trial, all-caps social media post, which was made after Judge Chutkan had to remind Trump that witness tampering and such are crimes, Smith sought a protective order, which we all know that Trump will disregard, repeatedly, with no consequences.  Chutkan eventually threatened Trump, not with revoking his bail, which is what would happen to lit