What if they gave a riot and nobody came?

I'm seeing this in the NYT:

Fewer than 100 right-wing demonstrators, sharply outnumbered by an overwhelming police presence and even by reporters, gathered at the foot of the Capitol on Saturday to denounce what they called the mistreatment of “political prisoners” who had stormed the building on Jan. 6.

It was, we're told, "peaceful." Maybe it wouldn't have been so small and so peaceful if only the government hadn't prepared so well:

Where only movable metal barriers stood between a mob and the Capitol on Jan. 6, layers of newly erected fence and dump trucks lined end to end guarded the building. Mounted police, absent eight months ago, now stood at the ready. Riot shields were stacked at Capitol entrances, and law enforcement from the capital region, including the Virginia State Police and the police departments for Fairfax County in Virginia and Prince George’s County in Maryland, arrived with armored cars. One hundred National Guard troops from the District of Columbia were also on alert. 

Was that ridiculous or a demonstration of why they say "If you want peace, prepare for war." 

My post title is a variation on another old saying: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" 

I went down a rathole looking for the source of that saying, which I just remember from common speech in the late 60s/early 70s. I won't bore you with the arguments that it originated with Allen Ginsberg, Bertolt Brecht, or Carl Sandburg. I'll just say that the attribution to Brecht is the most scurrilous — written in German, mistranslated. And the Sandburg reference is the oldest, though not verbatim: "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come."

Why did Josh Marshall title his column "The Trumpian Song of Sexual Violence"?

This is a very verbose thing that Josh put up at Talking Points Memo yesterday. I slogged through it, even read some sentences aloud to Meade to test the intelligibility of the multiple negatives and piled up phrases:

The simple fact is that there's no evidence or logic to the idea that anyone who doesn't already hate Hillary Clinton with a passion will believe that she is culpable in some way for her husband's acts of infidelity against her.

But what's up with the title to his column? There's no music to Marshall's prose. There is a musical metaphor at the very end: 

As I've written in similar contexts, when we look at the messaging of a national political campaign we should be listening to the score, not the libretto, which is, like in opera, often no more than a superficial gloss on the real story, mere wave action on the surface of a deep sea. You're missing the point in trying to make out the logic of Trump's attacks on Clinton. The attacks are the logic. He is trying to beat her by dominating her in the public sphere, brutalizing her, demonstrating that he can hurt her with impunity.

Oh, I get it. He shouldn't attack her. That should be seen as sexual violence. If you listen to the music. Not the words. Hmm. Not any logic. Just how it feels. I know how I felt reading this piece, on the wave action of the deep sea that is Josh Marshall. Kinda seasick.

But to answer my question up there in the title. I think he meant to evoke the great song from "The Threepenny Opera," "Ballad of Sexual Dependency." Here's Marianne Faithfull's version:



Here are the lyrics. Read along and contemplate. Count how many times you think sounds like Trump and how many times you think sounds like Clinton and how many times you think Idiots, all of them....

"Your revolution will not succeed because you have not yet learnt to be frivolous."

A line from the 1987 novel "Saints and Scholars" by the communist (his word) academician Terry Eagleton. Asked about that line — why is comedy important? — he says:

“It is... because comedy can be a form of friendship, solidarity. I mean, one of the difficulties of being a radical is always being against or outside things. Radicals want to come in from the cold as much as anybody else.” For Eagleton, it seems, the cold is part of the radical life – he is now both thinking of Bertolt Brecht and quoting him: “‘We who wanted to prepare the ground for friendship could not ourselves be friendly.’ ”

Eagleton says he was "an earnest, high-minded, grim-lipped intellectual" until feminism — of all things! — turned him toward "'low-minded' virtues such as bathos, irony and... comedy." How earnest, high-minded, and grim-lipped a man must be for feminism to lighten him up!