"There’ll always be people who say, 'Why can’t the Museum of American History tell everybody’s story?'"

"But the truth of the matter is, America’s history is too big for one building. I really think that what we did with the African American museum—which has become one of the most diversely visited museums in the world—is the right model. This is a two-sided coin. One side is about a community, about identity. But the other side is 'How does that identity shape all of us?'"

Said Lonnie G. Bunch III, quoted in "How Lonnie G. Bunch III Is Renovating the 'Nation’s Attic'/The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall" (The New Yorker).

What is the "Overground Hell Road"?

when the media masses and scholars talk about what started today. Here's a title ...

the overground hell road

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) May 2, 2018

Presumably, he's flipping the term "Underground Railroad" and it's related to his comments about mental slavery that we discussed here a couple days ago.

I thought the article linked here was an interesting take:

The Overground Hell Road: The Similarities Between Kanye and Gandhi Are Scary https://t.co/zw2aN5UKFy pic.twitter.com/IKx6UOBEjG

— Benjamin Studebaker (@BMStudebaker) May 2, 2018

Why not say, more simply, "Overground Railroad"? Because the unhidden equivalent of the Underground Railroad would be taking you to freedom. The "Overground Hell Road" is out in the open. It's the destination that is hidden.

What is a "hell road"? For me, it calls to mind the old saying "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," which I'm pleased to see has its own Wikipedia article:

The saying is thought to have originated with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux who wrote (c. 1150), "L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs" (hell is full of good wishes or desires). An earlier saying occurs in Virgil's Aeneid: "facilis descensus Averno (the descent to hell is easy)"....

Authors who have used the phrase include Charlotte Brontë, Lord Byron, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott,[16] Søren Kierkegaard,[17] and Karl Marx. Ozzy Osbourne used the term in the song "Tonight" on his album Diary of a Madman.

In the movie Highway to Hell, the phrase is taken literally to create one particular scene. The Good Intentions Paving Company has a team of Andy Warhols who grind good-intentioned souls into pavement....

Michael Moore and Glenn Beck try, each in his way, to explain America's alienation from from the elite.

"Meet the Press" had a very interesting segment today with Chuck Todd talking to Michael Moore and then to Glenn Beck about the rebellion against the elite going on in America. The left-wing Moore and the right-wing Beck were saying very similar things about the way people are feeling now.

Moore said people are seeing Trump as "maybe their messenger": "Even though they don't necessarily like him or agree with him so much, I think that... they love the idea of blowing up the system.... [F]or some strange reason, see Donald Trump as their, as their means to get back at, at, at this system."

Beck — who said Moore had correctly "diagnosed the problem in the country" — drifted into a more spiritual realm:

Everybody feels like there's a play going on, and we're just watching it and looking at each other and shaking our heads in disbelief. And nobody's listening to the hardworking American who doesn't feel like they belong to anything anymore. In fact, it's almost as if we're being, we're standing outside and we're not being invited to this party at all....

I couldn't decide if Beck sounded more like a bland minister or a stoned college roommate. He turned to history, which, he said, he's been "looking through":

And the only thing I can come back to is Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What we're going through right now is more of a Malcolm X attitude, where we don't understand reconciliation, we just want to win. We have to stop winning.

We have to stop winning. Donald Trump, of course, is always saying "We don't win anymore." Beck, oddly, is saying it's wrong to want to win. We ought to stop winning! What this has to do with the American people turning against the elite, I don't really know.

And we have to start reconciling with each other. And, and realize, we're not going to lose our houses or our jobs or our country. We're losing something much more important. 

Now, I'm hearing echoes of the words of Jesus: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" Beck continues up to and beyond the edge of coherence:

We're losing ourselves. We're losing our civility. We're losing our decency. We're, we're losing our neighbors and our family. How high of a price are we willing to pay before we say the idea that Martin-- that, that Malcolm X had, which was, "Get 'em" is not the path that we should go on? We have to start reconciling with each other. And unfortunately, right now, there's no leader to do that nationally. It's going to require each of us, in our own communities to stand and, and, and be shamed, and be, and be pilloried for it but actually stand and do it.

Be shamed? What is Beck asking people to do?

"It’s time to stop pointing and laughing at the Republican primary. For all the GOP front-runner’s flaws, many veteran Democrats are beginning to conclude..."

"... Donald Trump is a canny operator who just might end up in the White House if they’re not careful. He appears to be cracking the code with white working-class voters who could help him put blue Rust Belt states in play against Hillary Clinton. He’s helping to fuel record turnout in GOP primaries and he’s mastered the media like no candidate in recent memory, with his constant feeding of catnip to cable TV and his 140-character missiles on Twitter....."

From "Democrats to Clinton: Don't laugh off Trump threat/The populist billionaire could be a potent general election candidate, Democratic strategists warn," by Daniel Lippman.

It's time to stop laughing? No, it's laughably long past time. Republicans laughed too long, and it got late early, and Democrats seem to think their window of time for laughing is still open. It's fun to laugh, isn't it? Your laughing is the result of his technique, disarming you with laughter. He enjoys you enjoying yourself.

I saw this going around on Facebook:



Oh? Did that make you laugh?

"He stopped writing and exclaimed: 'Is it five?' I replied with a guilty conscience: 'No, Bapu, it is one minute to five.'"

"'Well, Kanti,' he said, 'what is the use of keeping a wristwatch? You have no value of time…Again, you don't respect truth as you know it. Would it have cost more energy to say: It is one minute to five, than to say It is five o'clock?' Thus he went on rebuking me for about fifteen to twenty minutes till it was time for his evening meal."

He = Mahatma Gandhi.

"[F]or a 'pro-life' argument to make sense it has to make sense..."

"...that it follows from a spiritual instinct, or from religious dogma, however deeply held, is not something that rational people have to pretend to respect. It is easy to cite the source of moral ideas in religious vision. Don’t you know that Dr. King was a Christian minister? Didn’t the ideas of the Abolitionists rise from the Northern churches? It’s perfectly true that many good and noble and necessary ideas have come from churches and chapels—as many others have come from temples, universities, Masonic lodges, and presumably one or two from a Satanic cult. But their relevance and plausibility have nothing at all to do with their source; they have to do with the moral and practical sense they make to those who don’t have any special respect for their origins. Dr. King was a Christian minister whose ideas about equality and social justice were crucially affected by his faith; those ideas were just as crucially affected by Gandhi and, for that matter, as J. Edgar Hoover would have pointed out, by the Communists in King’s entourage. His 'Dream' speech, though deeply rooted in his faith, appealed not to the authority of religion but to the common language, irresistible to all, or almost all, of justice and moral order and practical benefit. Lincoln may have entered politics with a passionate hatred of slavery, but once he was a politician his arguments were distilled from passion into reason and law, and sometimes even into legalism."

Writes Adam Gopnik — in  "Arguing Abortion" — explicating one of the
two major originalities" in Katha Pollit's book "Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights."

An Uneasy New York Times Juxtaposition.

Click to enlarge and fully enjoy:



Here's the actual article, "An Uneasy Inheritance of India’s Political Dynasty," published in The NYT on April 30. Thanks to RLC for noticing that and sending me the screen shot.

You think: "What a good-hearted, mellow person I am," I think: "Inside the Madison cocoon."

He "will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. … He is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations."

Can you identify the "he"? It's not Barack Obama. The statement was made by the man's father, quoted in an article printed in Slate in July 2000. I ran across that article, which is written by Bob Wright (whom I talk to from time to time on Bloggingheads), because I'd just done that post about the problem of shame, and I knew shame was one of Wright's big topics. (He's pro-shaming.)

"At the root of the reality distortion was Jobs’s belief that the rules didn’t apply to him."

"He had some evidence for this; in his childhood, he had often been able to bend reality to his desires. Rebelliousness and willfulness were ingrained in his character. He had the sense that he was special, a chosen one, an enlightened one. 'He thinks there are a few people who are special — people like Einstein and Gandhi and the gurus he met in India — and he’s one of them,' said [Andy] Hertzfeld. 'He told Chrisann this. Once he even hinted to me that he was enlightened. It’s almost like Nietzsche.' Jobs never studied Nietzsche, but the philosopher’s concept of the will to power and the special nature of the Überman came naturally to him. As Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 'The spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.' If reality did not comport with his will, he would ignore it, as he had done with the birth of his daughter and would do years later, when first diagnosed with cancer. Even in small everyday rebellions, such as not putting a license plate on his car and parking it in handicapped spaces, he acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him."

A paragraph from Walter Isaacson's fabulous biography "Steve Jobs." I'm reading it and loving it. I'll share some more stuff as I go along.

I'd give you a page cite, but I'm reading it in the Kindle (the app, on iPad) so I can only give you "Kindle location 2242-2251." Is that how we will do cites in the future?

"On Wisconsin! On Wisconsin!/Champion of the Right!/'Forward!' our motto/God will give thee might!"

At the Capitol today, does anyone have a good voice? Can anyone get the national anthem started? And if everyone sings the national anthem, will anyone sing the state song?



There's some nice camaraderie in this video, a flashback to a slip-and-fall, and a discussion of the morality of capitalism. It begins with "Power to the Peaceful" and a man in the middle of leading a prayer for peace in all the countries in the world. He prayed for each, separately, by name, in alphabetical order, and — before that — for each of the states, by name, in alphabetical order. Edited down, appropriately, I hope, by me. Video by Meade.

(Presumably, now, anyone who ever wants to stand in the middle of the rotunda and lead a long prayer, will be completely free to do so.)

AND: The "he" that talked about commerce and morality was Gandhi.

"Suicide is generally considered taboo in Hinduism, the religion of most Indians, because it disrupts the cycle of reincarnation that is central to the soul’s progress...."

"But the willingness to die for a cause, as exemplified by Gandhi’s epic fasts during the struggle for independence, is seen as noble and worthy. Ancient warriors in Tamil Nadu, in southeastern India, would commit suicide if their commander was killed.... And the practice of sati, or widow burning, although outlawed, remains a potent symbol of wifely devotion."

Adolf Hitler, Robert Mugabe, John McCain... and in sequence #2: John Lennon, Al Gore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Barack Obama.

With flashing images, Madonna is trying to tell you something.

The complicated story of Rielle Hunter and Jonathan Darman, the Newsweek reporter.

Jonathan Darman has his claws out:

The first time I laid eyes on , I could tell she was a story. She had frizzy blond hair with DARK roots, wore bright nail polish and moved like someone who knew how to work a room.

Huh? This made me a little suspicious of Darman. So what if her hair was frizzy and she wore bright nail polish? Lots of boring people do. And there's nothing amazing about dark roots. Why do you appear to be FREAKING OUT about it?

She was on a cramped commuter flight and she was flirting with a candidate for president of the United States. It was July 7, 2006.

I'm still not seeing it. Women flirt with the male candidates all the time.

Most of the other passengers seemed to have no idea who Edwards was. But this blond woman, putting away her bags, was visibly captivated by him.

One person recognizes a celebrity and others don't. The one that does is way more excited than the others. But in fact, Edwards and Hunter were already having an affair, and Darman is showing off — now — that he smelled something fishy back then. But give the man credit. He noticed, and he talked to her:

She told me her name and asked me what my astrological sign was, which I thought was a little unusual. I told her. She smiled, and began telling me her life story: how she was working as a documentary-film maker, living with a friend in South Orange, N.J., but how she'd previously had "many lives." She'd worked, she said, as an actress and as a spiritual adviser. She was fiercely devoted to astrology and New Age spirituality. She'd been a New York party girl, she'd been married and divorced, she'd been a seeker and a teacher and was a firm believer in the power of truth.

All right, then! We know a little more about John Edwards's judgment.

She told me that she had met Edwards at a bar, at the Regency Hotel in New York. She thought he was giving off a special "energy."

Blech. Energy. The buzzword of idiots.

Four months later, Rielle emailed Darman offering him a story. They meet for lunch at a restaurant in NYC and — shocking! — she's into drinking wine and is being smoochily friendly.

She told me that she'd felt a connection to me when we'd first met, that she could tell I was a very old soul. This meant a lot to Rielle.

Oh, did it? Sounds like one of her lines — along with what's your sign, sensing your energy, and feeling a connection.

At this point, I go looking for a picture of Darman. Well, damn! I feel a connection, sense his energy, and — sure — detect that he's an old soul. Let's meet for lunch and wine in SoHo, Jonathan.

Her speech was peppered with New Age jargon—human beings were dragged down by "blockages" to their actual potential; history was the story of souls entering and escaping our field of consciousness. A seminal book for her had been Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now." Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.

So I guess we know the seduction routine she aimed at Edwards — who perhaps got to thinking that Elizabeth was a blockage.

Her latest project was John Edwards. Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential. The real John Edwards, she believed, was a brilliant, generous, giving man who was driven by competing impulses—to feed his ego and serve the world. If he could only tap into his heart more, and use his head less, he had the power to be a "transformational leader" on par with Gandhi and Martin Luther King. "He has the power to change the world," she said.

To feed his ego and serve the world. Ha. Note how that chimes with Edwards's self-analysis (in the "Nightline" interview):

Ego. Self-focus, self-importance... a self-focus, an egotism, a narcissism that leads you to believe that you can do whatever you want. You're invincible. And there will be no consequences. And nothing, nothing could be further from the truth.

But the frizzy-haired energy lady said I could remove blockages, release my old soul, and serve the world....

Back to Darman:

"Do you talk about this stuff with the candidate?" I asked. "All the time," Rielle replied. "I'll lecture him on it when he's getting too much up in here," she said, gesturing toward her head.

And not enough down here, she said, pointing to her crotch. (Kidding!)

"He'll see a look on my face and say, 'Yes, I know, Rielle, "Power of Now" says …' " Rielle wanted me to know all these things because she wanted me to write about them.

Oh, yeah, I forgot. There was no confessing to the sexual relationship here. She was trying to get the news out to the world that John Edwards would make a great President, with his old soulfulness and his ability — encouraged by Hunter — to get through the blockages and release his powers that are somewhere other than in his head.

Even if they didn't have an affair, we should question his judgment in wanting to put up with listening to this bullshit and, certainly, in wanting her to film a documentary about him.

After Hunter is fired, she tells Darman she's working with novelist Jay McInerney "on a 'genius' idea for a television show about women who help men get out of failing marriages by having affairs with them." She also says she's in love but won't say with whom. When the National Enquirer starts writing about the affair, she calls Darman for advice and seems to be trying to pressure him to think that he can't use all the material she'd given him. He refuses — it was never off the record — and she stops talking to him. Darman opines that she must have been "saddened" to realize he'd always been a reporter when she thought he was her friend — I'm sure he's read "The Journalist and the Murderer" — but I would guess that she was using him as a media connection all along and that she was now, on stern advice from Edwards, doing what she could to keep him from writing anything that would corroborate The National Enquirer.

So now I have "a 'genius' idea for a television show about a woman" who has an affair with a presidential candidate and who befriends a reporter — leading to all sorts of complexities about whether the woman is falling for the reporter, looking to him as a friend, or — most likely — massaging him into writing stories promoting the interests of the candidate. The woman travels with the campaign in the guise of a film documentarian, so our show can use her badly done and embarrassingly revealing video clips as a narrative device — in the manner of "The Office" or "The Comeback." And maybe her real job — for which she deserves the money that seems thrown away on her as a filmmaker — is to hand-feed favorable stories to reporters. Our adorable reporter tries to do his job as he teeters between falling for her and figuring out what is going on.

Email me, Jay. Lunch in SoHo?

UPDATE: The complicated story continues.

Naming the Madison school that will not be Vang Pao Elementary School.

You remember that Hmong hero Vang Pao was arrested — by us — for plotting to overthrow the government of Laos and that the plan to name a school after of him was therefore shot. We're in the middle of a process of generating the new name, and they've got a list of 87 possibilities. Some are clearly not serious (Brain Dead Madison Metropolitan), some are just not serious (Steve Irwin), some I can't understand (RPA (Romanized Popular Alphabets)), and some just don't have enough to do with Wisconsin (Mahatma Gandhi). But I do like the idea of naming the school for Jeffrey Erlanger (the son of my colleague Howie Erlanger)(I wrote about him here)(more here).

"Look, I'm renowned not only in the U.S. but across the world for my capacity to be vengeful, aggressive, brutal, and ruthless..."

"... and I'm already about ten times as intimidating to any foreign despot as John Edwards could be even if he shaved his head and got some tattoos."

What Hillary could've said when that guy asked her how she's going to get taken seriously by the "Arab states, Muslim nations" where they see women as "second-class citizens." According to Beldar, anyway -- who thinks ¶ 19 of my debate blogging is too accepting of what was an "incredibly" and "amazingly" "lame" response:

Starting with a reference to visits she made as First Lady is, I am convinced, a careless use of that double-edged sword. None of those visits she made as First Lady were anything more than ceremonial....

If one is going to cite examples of notable national leaders who were effective notwithstanding their lack of a Y-chromosome, then then screamingly obvious example is former British Prime Minister Margaret ("The Iron Lady") Thatcher, followed (equally obviously) by Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi. Babbling about little-known women heads of state from Germany, Chile, or Liberia — Liberia?!? — cuts against her case, since none of those countries, whether headed by a male or a female, is going to be perceived by American voters as having a role remotely comparable to that of the United States in world affairs.

Looking at the transcript, I see what he's talking about. And I can see that my comment is very much a representation of how what she said merged with my own thinking on the subject. The key problem that I ignored wasn't the First Lady business, but her failure to address in any way the problem of the way Muslim countries treat women. She acted as though the question was just: Can a woman be President?

This was a question that begged for a thoughtful, articulate statement of principles. There are so many things she could have said about how we must not abandon our values just to gratify those cultures and countries who don't yet embrace sexual equality. This question was a medium-speed fastball right over the center of the plate — and she laid down a not-so-good bunt with it.

Maybe Elizabeth Edwards is right about Hillary: She really doesn't have the best feminist instincts.

What would Gandhi...

... have thought of Daniel Pearl?

Audible Althouse #78.

Time to catch up once again with Audible Althouse: it's a podcast of the odd last few days on a blog called Althouse.

Things are not what they seem. How do you know what you're looking at? There were those "Aqua Teen Hunger Strike" non-bombs that freaked out Boston, those polar bears not really stranded on an ice floe not necessarily caused by global warming, and the 29-year-old guy who posed as a 12-year-old to attend school and do sleepovers with kids who thought they found a friend. Are you going to believe your own eyes?

You can stream it right through your computer here.

But all the cute animals have subscribed on iTunes:

This podcast is dedicated to the Althouse blog historian, Ruth Anne Adams.

IN THE COMMENTS: Daryl Herbert writes:

Aqua Teen Hunger FORCE, not "strike" The error is excusable when you consider that Master Shake was omnipresent at Cindy Sheehan's hunger strike... But frankly, I wouldn't watch a TV show based on anthropomorphicized fast food items singing praises of the Nazi death machine (what better way, Gandhi asked, could Jews prove their moral righteousness, than to limply submit to the Nazi extermination campaign?) I think it's a better political statement to eat a hamburger than set out on a hunger strike.

LOL. But I think Hunger Strike is better, because of the double meaning. Are they on strike or are they striking out? Frankly, if I was a food item, I'd favor hunger strikes. Why are cartoon food items always happy about getting eaten?

Strong women are dying this week.

First, Ann Richards. Now, Orianna Fallaci. Here's Michelle Malkin's tribute to Fallaci, focusing on her polemical last books. But let's remember her whole life. From the WaPo obit:

Fallaci set the pace for a daring life when she joined Italy's anti-fascist resistance as a teenager during World War Two, then showed the same fearlessness as a war correspondent.

She covered conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Latin America at a time when few women braved the front lines, and was shot and beaten in 1968 during student demonstrations in Mexico.

Later, she succeeded in fiction with novels including "A Man," inspired by her love affair with Greek resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis.

Her exchanges with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, the Shah of Iran, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and other leaders, collected in her book "Interview with History," stood out for her provocative, uncompromising questioning.

In her interview with Kissinger, Fallaci needled the U.S. statesman until he agreed that the Vietnam War was "useless."

Kissinger later wrote that her interview with him was "the single most disastrous conversation I have ever had with any member of the press."

RFQ and The Red Shirts.

The Vermont Guardian reports:

[N]ew grassroots organizations have coalesced around the recovery effort. One, commonly known as The Red Shirts, came together as a band of 10 people who set out to clean the streets and administer first aid. This group continues to hit the streets wearing their trademark red and impressing many with their self-imposed 12-hour shifts. To date, their most impressive achievements were the cleaning the wrecked Jackson Square, and removing a fallen brick wall.

Another group, Restore the French Quarter (RFQ), came together shortly after the levies broke. RFQ, which includes 40 volunteers, has cleared their share of downed trees and rubbish. One of their fist acts was to make the Esplanade, a major street marking the border of the neighborhood, passable by vehicle.

The group has also built a public stockpile of necessary items that includes food, water, tools and clothing. The goods and the organization are housed in a makeshift headquarters on the corner of the Esplanade and Decatur — a 9,000 square foot three-story building owned by Harry Anderson of Night Court. It is equipped with generators, a fully stocked bar and a large gas grill. RFQ has gone the extra step of stenciling white “RFQ Volunteer” T-shirts and even printing ID badges for their members.

Standing in the courtyard of the headquarters, RFQ member “Steve,” who works in construction, declared that the group’s first action, shortly after the disaster struck, was to help distribute guns and ammunition to area residents to use for self-defense. Since then, they have turned their attention to fixing roads and keeping people fed.

Earlier this week, RFQ was in the process of gathering resources to repair area roofs damaged by Katrina’s winds, when a rumor stopped them in their tracks. On Thursday, word got around that either the local or federal government was about to begin enforcing the mandatory evacuation. Earlier in the day, a number of Louisiana State Troopers entered Johnny White’s and initially demanded that patrons leave with them. After some heated words, the troopers called their superiors for confirmation. As things went, the troopers left with no one in tow. Even so, the story and fear of looming forced removal spread like wildfire across the French Quarter.

“Is that stupid or what?” asked Steve. “There are hundreds, even thousands, of people right here that would be active volunteers. We know this city like the back of our hands. We are not driving around like Mississippi cops that don’t know this place. We know what we’re doing, where everything is, and how to get resources. We can get this place back up and running. They [the government] need to leave the French Quarter alone, and let us do this.”

And I'm also finding this, on a South African website:

Back in the French quarter RFQ leader Stephen James was printing up T-shirts bearing the ad-hoc group's logo.

"We should just let people help themselves and not have government do it all for them," said James to cheers of approval...

Where Gandhi advocated passive resistance, the French Quarter holdouts pledged to employ clean-up power.

James said he hoped a gang of 100 holdouts would be on the streets on Saturday morning with brooms and garbage bags.

"I don't think we are going to have any problem from the New Orleans police department," he said. "If we are helpful, maybe they will leave us alone."

Many of those at the meeting had seemed depressed and fearful in recent days, but seemed to find new strength and determination, perhaps from safety in numbers.

I wrote about my love for the holdouts yesterday. I was reading reports that portrayed holed-up individualists, and my response to them was sentimental. Today, I'm reading about people forming groups, articulating principles, and improving the community — the roots of civil society. Shouldn't the government work with these people?