“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
-Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, M.D., P.C
We are all flesh: we live; we die. The seasons
slip through our notice. My God, it’s Christmas! We
have only just remembered to trash the tree
from last year. Of all the brief reasons
to be glad, despite the body’s daily treasons—
its aching mornings and sniffling nights—they flee,
my thoughts, first, to this: that we are free
of immortality, which makes heathens
of the divine principalities, for they
can neither aspire nor want nor hope nor change;
they can’t make their fortune or lose weight,
and nothing escapes their notice: a single day
is a century. Their lives are intolerably strange.
They do not really live. Instead, they hate.
Second Amendment jurisprudence is high on the list of the great national embarrassments foisted upon us by our embarrassing federal judiciary, who continually accept the ahistorical interpretations of people who actually claim that a Constitutional government enshrines the right to armed insurrection against itself. Not even the framers, who had actually and recently fought in a revolution, imagined it meant such a thing, but here we are. America’s quasi-religious fetish for its own Constitution is in any event a strange national obsession. The Constitution is a hash of archaic bylaws whose principal strength is that it’s so vague and badly worded that it can mean whatever we need it to mean at any given time. “A well regulated…”
Well, gun advocates have done nothing if not given us a pithy slogan expressing exactly how incoherent they are: guns don’t kill people; people kill people. This is like saying cars don’t drive on roads or hammers don’t pound in nails. That a tool requires an operator to do its work begs the question. Guns were made to kill things, people chiefly among them. They’re a very good tool for this purpose. It’s possible to nail wood together without a hammer, but much easier with one; it’s possible to commute 30 miles to work without an internal combustion vehicle, but not easy; it’s possible to kill a whole lot of people all at once without a gun, but crossbows and broadswords do lack individual efficiency. Guns are machines for killing, and they kill a lot of people.
Refocusing from the implement to the actor also lends itself to our current absurd scapegoating, in which “mental illness,” never specifically defined, becomes a legitimate target for legislative intervention; Congresscreatures publicly imagine they can legislate sanity, and yet they can’t conceive regulating the purchase and ownership of an industrial product. How a nation that requires a $25 co-pay for a blood pressure and reflex test that you have to wait five months to book intends to provide universal, ongoing, robust psychological care to its 300 million souls, many millions of whom don’t have sufficient insurance and are therefore on the hook for more like $150 if they ever want to visit a regular old doctor, is unclear. Meanwhile, much of the gun violence in the country—not the mass shootings of white people that make the news, but the daily killings of one here, two there in places like Chicago—isn’t a question of mental health, not as the gun debate defines it anyway.
But. There is a kind of moral credulousness on the part of the Nice Liberal critics of our national gun culture, and there’s something intolerably amoral about a politician like Barack Obama assuming a pose of high moral dudgeon to snipe at conservative gun rights advocates while he presides over, among other atrocities, the bombing of a neutral hospital—literally, a war crime. (And the bombing of the MSF hospital is just one war crime among many; we just happen to note it because its victims are Western, professional, media-savvy, and English-fluent.) This isn’t cheap whataboutism; if you ask how we can be such a violent society and exclude sixty years of uninterrupted global warfare from your analysis, then your crass factionalism is showing.
It’s true: blaming domestic gun deaths on America’s violent, aggressive imperialism is a little like blaming it on mental illness; it identifies an approximate rather than a proximate cause and spins its wheels wildly away from a practical mechanism for mitigating the problem here and now. I do, however, wish that those who advocate for stricter gun control in this country would evince a more convincing and universal pacifism, rather than crying out in passionate horror each time some nut shoots up an elementary school but merely regretting each time their president blows one up.
“The court cannot condone the willful disobedience of its lawfully issued order,” Judge Bunning said. “If you give people the opportunity to choose which orders they follow, that’s what potentially causes problems.”
When I was younger, I was more strident in my atheism. If I lacked the misogyny and gross prejudice—against Islam in particular—that qualify a person for the “New Atheist” label, then I nevertheless held to their practice of swashbuckling into almost any conversation, dull sword drawn, ready to declare that Holy Books hopelessly self-contradict; all those eternal truths are changeable and historically contingent; the notion of any kind of supreme and omnipotent being refutes itself under the simplest tests of logic; and oh, by the way, the Inquisition etc. were very, very bad. All of these arguments are simultaneously true and facile; faith exempts itself from these little eructations of materialism, which doesn’t make it correct but does make it in a sense immune to correctness as a category. In the last decade, my atheism has both deepened and softened. I suspect that had I encountered the right rabbi at the right time in my early twenties, when my passionate anti-religion burned hottest, then I might have been salvaged by grace. Now I tend to view religion, and at least some of the religious, with sympathy, which puts my soul beyond their reach, although it does sometimes force me to remind people that I know there are no gods and just appreciate the poetry.
This long caveat is to say that I have some sympathy for Kim Davis, though not because she’s in the right in her imagined protest. The idea that an agent of the government can nullify the law and obviate the constitutional rights of citizens due to her own private beliefs is manifestly silly. In the immortal formulation of your Catholic hero and mine, Antonin Scalia, you are entitled to your beliefs but not to your government job. Yes, even government employees, even elected officials, can engage in civil disobedience, but you don’t get to ride the First Amendment freely into your pension, especially not by violating its first clause in the delusional belief that in so doing you’re defending its second. As plenty of folks have pointed out, it was well within her small power to deputize some other row officer to sign off on these Satanic permits; that she refused to do so out of a let-us-say theologically suspect belief in the transitive property of the rendered-unto-Caesar suggests a desire to force the issue to a head. The Supreme Court is ironically responsible for this mess: its sloppy Hobby Lobby decision has convinced every minor divine in America that mere belief in whatever puts diplomatic plates on his prejudices.
But the Supreme Court is responsible, and it seems to me that any reasonably dull person, which is to say most Americans, who occasionally tunes into cable news, could easily draw this same conclusion: that “deeply held faith” abrogates temporal law. Egged on in this incorrect belief by unscrupulous legal counsel, you can just imagine how a person like Kim Davis could come to see herself as a hero and a martyr. Unlike her counsel, I don’t actually imagine that Davis holds any particular animus toward gays in particular, but rather has just a vague, foreboding sense of the inevitable decline of the familiar order of things. I grew up in a dying Appalachian coal town in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and I knew plenty of women like Kim Davis. They went to the Church of Abundant Life and believed that Jews were going to hell, although one suggested to my mother that our family might be among the 144,000 to be bodily assumed into Heaven on the Rapture’s eve. They thought homosexuality was an abomination, but they were on perfectly good terms with the chubby homo who feathered and teased out their hair at Bangz. Democrats hadn’t done shit when the mines closed, so they drifted toward George Bush and learned to blame the unions and weren’t entirely wrong in either case. The Kim Davises of the world can’t do shit about the decline of Eastern Kentucky, but by God, this one of them can take a stand against things bein’ different. Correctness as a category does not apply.
Now, your regional sob story and hopelessly convoluted sexual ethics don’t entitle you to discriminate from your elected office, but I have the inescapable feeling that by holding her in contempt and tossing her in the clink, Judge Bunning did precisely the wrong thing. He was correct to observe that a pecuniary penalty would have had no impact; political allies of her lawyers would have made fines immaterial to her. And yes, courts do need a mechanism for enforcing compliance with their orders. But it strikes me that if Bunning could just wave his federal wand and allow others to issue the permits, then I see no reason why he couldn’t do the same without the cell. Despite her protestations to the contrary—that these certificates are somehow invalid without her signature—no one believes that the boys down at the Social Security Office are going to take her word over the order of a federal judge. I’ve seen some commentary on the convoluted authority to issue these permits in Kentucky, but state permitting statutes don’t trump the constitution, and their misapplication doesn’t invalidate gays’ right to marry.
If anything, to have simply swatted away her feckless protest and instructed someone else to marry the couples in question would have been a more fitting, biting, and deserved punishment. Let her whine impotently from behind the permits & licenses desk down at the county office while the janitor signs off under the authority of the US District Court. She will be neither hero nor martyr, and in a few months, she’ll wonder why she ever made such a fuss. Instead, I fear we’ve created another dumb saint in a country that seems to me to be drowning in dumb sanctimony. We must learn to love our enemies enough that the only punishment we desire in their defeat is their irrelevance. That would suffice.
Hey, don’t blame me; you hired me to write
these several columns every week, and I
must write each in a little while. White
space is the beginning; it glares back, a bright
tease and an impossibility: for why
(and how) could I have something new to write
three times a week? Why, just the other night
my ex-wife said we’d always lived a lie:
a topic for a column? While my shrink’s white
too-modern couch exerted just a slight
cool leather pressure on my head and on my
weakening back, he averred I not write
about her quite so often. “It isn’t right
to air a private trauma; take the high
road,” he said. His great hair, while white,
is thicker than mine. Sometimes I want to die.
What harder fate than to be a man of high
moral character condemned to write
for money in America while White?
Contra Horace, captive Greece was captive.
The empire smashed you good and made you slaves.
Instructing some patrician’s louche, attractive
son in meter while he misbehaves
and mocks your accent; father drinks and raves
that lazy immigrants won’t take an active
hand in their own assimilation, saves
for his servants a grudging, wholly retroactive
permission to be as you were made to be:
this is the rude conqueror’s capture:
only to be burdened by your surrender, ever
to pretend to regret that you’re no longer free,
amputation cast as hairline fracture,
always and inescapable as never.
The patriarchy’s not how many drunk
and virgin girl’s fratbro Don Juan has “kissed.”
An –ism’s not the plural of an –ist.
Of all our costly fallacies, we’ve sunk
the most bad debt into this junk,
a penny-stock conclusion. What we’ve missed?
Five fingers unconfigured aren’t a fist.
A white boy? Surely troubled. Black? A punk,
a hood-rat twisted by his absent dad
and too-loud mom. But no bad man decided
these pathologies, which render each
black victim criminal, white killer mad—
a thing repeated is a thing believed
even by disbelievers, in the observance, and the breach.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Catholicism, as I do for all things Roman. I love its unrepentant, if cheerfully unacknowledged, paganism; I like that it manages to be both particular and ecumenical, with a vast canonical universe, unlike so much dour Protestantism, which has only the Bible and manages to treat all of the Book’s magnificent poetry like an instruction diagram for the assembly of a confusing piece of Scandinavian furniture. I like its camp and its kitsch. And like a lot of folks these days, I like this Pope. Seems like a decent fellow, although the obsequious puffery of his transcendent moral authority by non-Catholic liberal types every time he says anything to broadly accords with their political preferences strikes me as supremely odd—not that there’s anything wrong with proposing a useful political alliance, but rather because it so frequently and quickly shades into an argument from authority.
Here admitted: I don’t like the phrase “climate change,” not because I dispute the general underlying truth and reality to which it refers, but because the phrase itself is so distressingly market-tested, so anodyne, so wooly and amoral and abstract. It hardly inspires a rush to the barricades, and it reeks of the sort of ineffectual political non-postures that gave us, for example, the huge loser designation “pro-choice”—a place, ironically, where the Pope’s biological credentials seem suddenly less burnishable to a lot of the same people pleased with his stance on ecology. And, apropos this very item, the Pope’s insistence that population growth and population control are ecologically insignificant compared to the “consumerism” of wealthy nations is faintly incredible. Though he rightly criticizes the blind faith in technological fixes, the crackpot conviction that we can invent our way out of the problem via electric cars or whatever, a future as mere facsimile of the present, only, uh, “sustainable,” one hardly needs to be a vulgar Malthusian to understand that the ongoing addition of billions and billions more humans—and the attendant need to get them water and food and shelter and clothing—is a large problem in our larger complex of problems. In other words, there is a deep contradiction at the heart of Francis’s correct criticism of the notion of salvation via technological innovation: he too, in his way, is praying for an electric car. What is lacking is an act of really radical imagination, which would suggest that a harmonious and truly sustainable human society would be not simply different, but unrecognizable—unrecognizable in its conduct, yes, but also and more importantly in its scale.
None of this is really meant to single Francis out for criticism. I really do like the guy, admire much of what he says, and as regards his Franciscan ideas about a human ecology, I sympathize and at least partially agree. Compared to the national leadership of our larger and more influential countries, and certainly compared to the greenwashing corporate sector, the Pope’s statements are worthy of much of the praise that they’ve garnered. But, to use a business metaphor I’m otherwise fond of mocking, the idea that they’ve disrupted anything is incorrect. It’s just regular competition in an existing space.
1. Early on, we see a hotel room. Subsequently, however, as the crisis unfolds, we see multiple incidents of thousands of guests held in the hot sun on an outdoor concourse, even as the park director, dinosaur expert, and others scream about getting inside. Additionally, the dinosaur expert lives in an airstream trailer. Conclusion: Jurassic World has only one hotel room, substantially too few for an island resort that is at least a full day’s journey from the mainland.
2. Despite several employees possessing two-way radios, management primarily communicates with park staff via cell phone, an inherently less stable and reliable platform. Additionally, when radios are used, the signal often breaks up, suggesting a) insufficient repeater range/capacity, and b) poor battery charging discipline.
3. Front-line staff are untrained in emergency preparedness, and are not helpful in either evacuation or shelter-in-place scenarios.
4. Self-piloted, two-person vehicles are described as being able to withstand the terminal ballistic force of a .50 caliber round. This seems to be an incorrect safety standard in an environment in which the principle physical danger to vehicle occupants will be not be high-velocity impact, but rather sustained, high-pressure stress and/or repeated striking. Additionally, it is inadvisable to permit un-trained/non-licensed guests/vehicles to self-operate non-tracked, fully autonomous vehicles. Finally, the same technology that locks grocery cart wheels upon transition over a magnetic strip at the edge of a parking lot might be advisable where conditions otherwise amenable to driving such vehicles beyond their designated zone of operation exist.
5. Executive direction and daily operational control should be separated. While marketing/finance and operational duties may overlap, some separation of responsibilities is advisable, especially in a high-physical-liability environment. Suggest creating two senior positions, reporting to a General Manager.
6. In fact, reporting relationships are generally unclear, leading to significant and persistent confusion among front-line employees and management staff.
7. While it is never wise to carelessly damage or destroy capital assets, the stated cost of park attractions is substantially less than the potential tort exposure in the event of an attraction-guest consumption event. In fact, the stated cost of the park’s most troublesome attraction is only $26 million.
8. Broadly speaking, despite claims that the park has employed “the best structural engineers,” capital building assets are woefully inadequate and easily damaged by the regular and routine operations of the attractions. This suggests either a) these systems are, despite claims to the contrary, under-engineered, or b) despite good engineering, construction does not follow industry best practices. Given that our observations indicate the park ownership acts as its own general contractor/construction service, the latter seems more likely.
9. Technology is a complement to, but never a replacement of, good physical/visual inspection of safety and security components. Everything, everything has a limited useful life!
10. Although it appears to operate in a foreign jurisdiction, there appears to be substantial exposure to significant workers comp risk.
11. The public address systems, where they do exist, are not very loud.
12. I did not observe a responsible waste diversion program with clearly marked receptacles.
Nothing matters if we aren’t safe; our lives
are emptied by the scent of risk; our passions,
proximate to chance, all strictly rationed;
it cannot be enough merely to thrive,
to love our families, like our work, survive;
it’s insufficient that our God has fashioned
us to perish. Ours will be the Athens
of the modern world, a reborn state derived
from the demos, although I find democracies,
even within strict limits are a bit
too chancy. Nothing ventured? Nothing lost.
Elect me! I will be your Pericles,
though rarely modest and without the wit,
without the chance of gain, but without cost.
If not for her, then I could not have written
a book about man’s moral sentiments
with such precision or such elegance;
It was all her. I was merely smitten
with the fine turn of her prose; once bitten
by the sharp turn of her thoughts, evident
on my mind like a sting on skin, and delicate
and irresistible as a little kitten,
I—I’m not ashamed to say—became
a nobler man, a better author, bigger
than my critics, certainly humbler in my own life.
Can a muse be another half of the same
person? She is the sole source of the vigor
of my prose. I also thank my wife.
Jacob Bacharach 