McCarthy for President
As we plunge into what looks like a naked singularity (a black hole with no event horizon), I find some comfort (probably entirely self-delusion) in thinking we have come back from various brinks before. As I know from my work on my 15,635 page Mad Manuscript, previous very serious emergencies occurred in this country after 1800, 1916, 1948, and 1968, and each time we recovered. However, this seems worse.
This issue's main essay is about Eisenhower throwing his mentor and friend, George Marshall, under the bus for Joe McCarthy. The difference, however, between then and now is that, when McCarthy, a one trick pony, aimed his punches at his own party after it won the 1952 election, the Republicans rounded on him, in the 1954 Army-Mccarthy hearings, and put him down mercilessly. Today, humans who cowered in fear in closets on January 6, 2020 are defending the man who sent the mob, and claiming nothing happened. This is a level of cowardice mixed with ambition (what a toxic brew) we have never seen in this country. Nothing like it even occurred in Hitler's Germany. For anything like it in the twentieth century, you have to look to Stalin's Soviet Union in the purge years.
Cabinet Appointments
In an early movie by a comedian-writer-director whose name I no longer mention, there was a line about civilization ending when a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear weapon. Shanker was the colorful, loud, sinister head of the New York City schoolteacher's union,vilified during strikes. Today, Albert Shanker Redux x 10 has the nuclear codes. If you had asked me who in the public scene over the decades of my adult life was least likely ever to be President--in the sense of least qualified and most dangerous-- Shanker having left the scene, I would have named Donald Trump.
What we are seeing now, and quite naturally, is the appointment by him of mini-Trumps to cabinet positions. Who is the worst candidate ever for Justice? Matt Gaetz! For health? Robert Kennedy! For intelligence? Tulsi Gabbard!
The question is, how long can a government actually run with people like that, before it dissolves in chaos, recriminations, mutual back-stabbing, and resignations? Prior Republican Presidents, such as Nixon and Reagan, perfected the art of appointing people inimical to agencies to diminish them in a slow, deniable way. Trump's appointees aren't intelligent or sane enough to do that. Nobody seems to be thinking that when a government dissolves, something else, usually worse, immediately takes its place. What will that be?
Abortion Travel
In late 2023, in the thick of representing students and faculty being sanctioned or threatened for pro-Palestinian expression, I received a very flattering invitation to file a First Amendment amicus brief in the 9th circuit Court of Appeals. The state of Idaho was appealing an injunction pro-choice activists had won against a new state law criminalizing helping young women travel outside the state for legal abortions. I informed the Court that the right of interstate travel has long been thought to emanate from the Constitution itself, but has also been characterized as generated by the First Amendment freedom of association.
The appeals court, once thought to be a bastion of liberalism, has now limited the injunction (essentially taking the stuffing out of it) by attempting (impossibly) to differentiate between activities which it characterizes as pure speech (I meet you and discuss travel) and action (I buy you a ticket or give you a ride in my car). The outcome is stunning, in an America which had for all this time supported certain assumptions, such as that you could cross state boundaries freely for any activity legal in the other state. When historians a thousand years from now (if there are any) look for watershed moments, the Idaho decision will be one.
An Instance of Late Capitalism
Early in the pandemic, I set up an online account with Stop & Shop to have my groceries delivered, and continue to use it four years later-- or did, until a couple of weeks ago, when every search, for example, on "eggs", produced a "Something Went Wrong" message. Like the stuff I record in the "Nothing Works" section of the Mad Manuscript (and occasionally here in Rags and Bones) its a bit hard to know whom to blame: Did it originate as a Stop&Shop problem, a cloud problem, a wifi problem, a computer problem or a Chrome problem? Or is it more than one of the above?
That same week, Stop&Shop announced that due to a destructive hack, their web-site and also their supply system were not working properly, so that some sections in stores were also bare of products. But now they claim they've fixed it, and every search still produces the error.
The phrase "on demand" was applied to the Internet in an earlier, more naive age. The idea is that I should be able to order groceries from my computer whenever I wish. In an analog age, almost a prehistoric time, before computers, say from the 1960's on, I could go to the supermarket, shop for food, find everything I wanted, pay for it, and arrange for it to be delivered within an hour, on demand: the same routine worked every time I initiated it. Today, companies either can no longer promise that-- or no longer want to.