"Thank you, Lord, thank you for making me who I was and not some little squirming powerless nincompoop."

"Thank you for making me unique, one of a kind, incomparable, victorious."

That's the "deathbed prayer," offered by a character in the novel "Vigil," by George Saunders, which Ezra Klein quotes to Saunders to begin the discussion "George Saunders on Anger, Ambition and Sin" (NYT).

That was a pretty strong way to begin the interview, and I'll bet Klein — as well as Saunders — thinks of himself unique, one of a kind, incomparable, and victorious. Surely, they're not little squirming powerless nincompoops.

"Nincompoop" seems like a word that would be examined in "Why Kids Are Starting to Sound Like Their Grandparents/The strange resurgence of words like 'yap' and 'skedaddle,'" (a NYT article blogged at that link). And it also reminded me of that George Will column blogged yesterday — "JD Vance vies for the gold medal in coarseness and flippancy" — the one that took umbrage at Vance's deployment of the insult "dipshit." If only Vance had been in on the kids' new trend and cared a little more about the problem of coarseness and flippancy, he could have said "nincompoop." Note how the excrement is discretely included.

The word "nincompoop" is, the OED says, first seen c1668 in the form of this title, which will give you lots of ideas for old words that could resurge: "The ship of fools fully fraught and richly laden with asses, fools, jack-daws, ninnihammers, coxcombs, slender-wits, shallowbrains, paper-skuls, simpletons, nickumpoops, wiseakers, dunces, and blockheads."

The first use of the word "nincompoop" in The New York Times came in August of 1861, recounting the statement of then-Congressman John Sherman: "[Congressman Samuel Sullivan 'Sunset'] Cox called [Sherman's] own constituents 'Nincompoops, intelligent baboons dressed up as Wide-Awakes, Gump-heads, mutton-heads, blabber, Dogbanes, toadies, and bloats, Suppose he [Sherman] should speak thus of [Cox's] Democratic constituents, would they not set him down as unfit to represent decent people?'"

An early effort in the 2028 presidential fight: it's George Will in the Washington Post against J.D. Vance.

I haven't read this piece yet. I decided to blog it based on the headline and the photograph, which I find ludicrously unsubtle:

Let's read it:

Spurning the rich subtleties of the English language, JD Vance has a penchant for words that he perhaps thinks display manly vigor, and express a populist’s rejection of refinement. In a recent social media post, he called someone whose posts annoyed him a “dipshit.” He recently told an interviewer that anyone who criticizes his wife can “eat shit.”...

Maybe, because of Trump, "Americans are inured to such pungent language," Will muses, deploying the rich subtleties "inured" and "pungent." George Will's father was a philosophy professor. You can imagine the language he grew up with and that is second nature to him. We know Vance's story.

Here's an excerpt from page 132 of "Hillbilly Elegy":

"It is especially amusing to hear progressives, the principal creators of the watery Caesarism of today’s presidency, sorrowfully describing Trump’s ballroom..."

"... as discordant with the White House’s proper modesty. They should worry less about the president’s residential immodesty and more about his anti-constitutional immodesty.

Writes George Will, in "The choreographed fakery of American politics: East Wing edition/Trump’s residential immodesty is nothing compared with his anti-constitutional immodesty" (WaPo).

I wondered if anyone had written "watery Caesarism" before. It sounds like a bad salad. A real salad, not a word salad. Don't put the dressing on until you're about to eat it. Anyway, "watery Caesarism" did turn up on a few old web pages, but — are you surprised? — they're all written by George Will!

1992: "Trouble is, most presidents are mediocre.

"Benjamin Franklin pointedly wore clothes of homespun cloth to the Court of St. James's, and Thomas Jefferson sometimes wore slippers when receiving presidential visitors."

"Nowadays, however, Americans enjoy leavening republican simplicity with touchingly absurd attempts at grandeur: There are, surely, communities where Kiwanis Club lunches are held in Holiday Inns’ Versailles Rooms, cheek-by-jowl with hardware stores and grain silos."

Writes George Will, in "Trump’s gaudy-awful Oval Office is all too American/The redecorated Oval Office reflects an American taste for wretched excess" (WaPo)(free-access link, because I've hit the use-it-or-lose it point for April).

"The logic of the suit is balanced against the magic of the tie. The two together become symbolic..."

"... the gray or blue jacket reminds us of a common class background; the distinctive pattern of the tie orients us toward the wearer’s unique identity.... The tie could sometimes get so compressed in its significance as to lose its witty, stealthy character and become overly and unambiguously 'loaded.' There is no better story of suicide-by-semiotics than that of the rise and death of the bow tie, which, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, became so single-mindedly knotted up with neoconservatism, in the estimable hands of George Will, that to wear one was to declare oneself a youngish fogy, a reader of the National Review, and a skeptic of big government. The wider shores of bow-tie-dom—the dashing, jaunty, self-mocking P. G. Wodehouse side of them—receded, and were lost. It became impossible to wear a bow tie and vote Democratic...."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "The Knotty Death of the Necktie/The pandemic may have brought an end to a flourishing history" (The New Yorker).

Never heard of? He's been my favorite of the GOP candidates since he started.

I clicked to read George Will's column, "Meet the unusually qualified presidential candidate you’ve never heard of" (WaPo), and while he's wrong about my never having heard of him, I'm thrilled to see some high-level attention to the worthy contender, Doug Burgum.

Snippet:

If wokeness survives Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s hourly onslaughts (which DeSantis might not survive; talking smack about Bud Light is unpresidential), a President Burgum would not regard fighting it as part of his job description. He would be a presidential rarity, acknowledging the 10th Amendment. (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution … are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”) Cultural issues are, he says, irrelevant to presidential duties

"Perhaps no single male fashion accessory provokes as much emotion as the bow tie."

"People who wear them fall in and out of love with them or bear them as a burden for life. People who have to look at them can find them irritating or worse. The presence of a bow tie always seems to draw comment and the phrase 'bow tie-wearing' in certain contexts can sound like a slur.... To its devotees the bow tie suggests iconoclasm of an Old World sort, a fusty adherence to a contrarian point of view. The bow tie hints at intellectualism, real or feigned, and sometimes suggests technical acumen, perhaps because it is so hard to tie. Bow ties are worn by magicians, country doctors, lawyers and professors and by people hoping to look like the above. But perhaps most of all, wearing a bow tie is a way of broadcasting an aggressive lack of concern for what other people think.... Another class of bow-tied men is comprised of comedians who wear them ironically, like Mark Russell [and] Pee-wee Herman.... [George] Will said he started wearing a bow tie in the 1960's as a statement 'when things started going crazy.'..."

From a 2005 NYT article by Warren St. John: "A Red Flag That Comes in Many Colors."

These kids today "are fluent in the thin-gruel cant (diversity, inclusion, equity, anti-racism, antipatriarchy, antiheteronormativity, etc.) of ostensibly political but actually just emotionally satisfying performative demands."

Says George Will, in "How millennials became aggressively illiberal, censorious young adults" (WaPo).

In a flattened world drained of greatness, today’s steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates is a lagging indicator of lack of interest in humanity’s lessons learned on the path to the present. Given this nation’s unhappy present, it is remarkable to remember that the arrival of screen-soaked lives was cheerily announced as the next stage of the “information age.” LOL.

I wondered: How old is George Will? Answer: 81.

"[T]he boys are arguing that their use of biologically correct, if politically incorrect, pronouns is speech protected by the First Amendment."

"The Constitution also forbids the district from compelling them to speak as district bureaucrats suddenly — how long ago did they embrace this orthodoxy? — prefer. Furthermore, the [the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty] says it has spoken with another Kiel Area family “whose daughter was recently given an in-school suspension for ‘sexual harassment’ based on a single statement using an allegedly ‘wrong’ pronoun — and the statement was said to a third party, not even to the allegedly 'misgendered' student."

Writes George Will in "When the pronoun police come for eighth-graders" (WaPo).

The highest-rated comment over there is: "Misgendering someone maliciously is discrimination. Your crutch of 'biological sex' gives your argument a veneer of legitimacy, when you're really arguing that it's fine for these boys to bully this kid. You devoted a whole column to defend teenage bullies picking on the kid that's different. Please think about how sad that is. Why make an argument against inclusion, just because it doesn't fit perfectly into your worldview? Genderqueer people are only asking for basic dignity and respect, it's not 'woke-ness,' it's basic human decency."

Oh, come on. If it isn't an orange hair, it's not worth saying.

At The Washington Post right now, there's the headline on the column...

 

... and the teaser on the front page:

 

And though that doesn't seem to me to be something worth reading at all, it's currently ranking #1 on WaPo's "most read." I take that to mean there's still a ravenous demand for anti-Trump porn.

ADDED: The hair-on-the-sleeve metaphor calls to mind clandestine sexual relationships. That orange hair found on your sleeve that should have been noticed and removed — one pictures a wife discovering your adulterous affair. 

AND: Here's the link to George Will's column in case you want to read it. Let me know if he characterizes the Trump haters' relationship to Trump as sexual. 

Oh, I'll read what Will wrote about hair: "Floundering in his attempts to wield political power while lacking a political office, Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve." 

Bleh! Mixed metaphor! If something is "floundering," it doesn't look like a stray hair. It looks like a flopping, dying fish. 

And speaking of the "fl-" words in that dismal sentence, flicking isn't the right motion for removing a hair from clothing. Flicking works on dandruff and other small flakes and flecks. You'd better get a pincer grip on that hair and pull. 

No wonder you're having so much trouble with deTrumpification. You don't know how to use the right words, and you don't know how to take the right actions.

"Could those who concocted this sentence ever recognize their kinship with the moral purifiers of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge? Or of Mao’s Cultural Revolution?"

"Or the Stalinist interrogator Gletkin in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel 'Darkness at Noon'? If so, would UIC’s unconscious emulators be discomfited by the resemblance? Unlikely. Today, bureaucrats parasitic off academia’s scholarly mission outnumber actual scholars. These threat-discerners, diversity-planners, bias-detectors, sensitivity-promoters, sustainability-guarantors and other beneficiaries of today’s multibillion-dollar social justice industry are doing well during the nation’s supposed apocalypse."

George Will condemns the authorities at the University of Illinois at Chicago for their treatment of lawprof Jason Kilborn after he gave a civil procedure exam with a fact pattern about a lawsuit brought by a black woman against an employer whose managers had called her — and this is how it was written on the exam — a “n_____” and a “b_____.” 

Here's Will's column: "Even by today’s standard of campus cowardice and conformity, this repulsive episode is noteworthy" (WaPo).

For details about the what UI did to Kilborn, here's the complaint in his lawsuit against the university. You can see all the measures the university took and also the serious difficulty over Kilborn's statement that the dean might have thought that Kilborn would "become homicidal" if he saw the student petition criticizing him about the exam.

Soulcraft.

I don't remember ever noticing the word "soulcraft" before today, when I saw it in a David Brooks column. Writing about "the cultural transformation" that could be achieved through the Democrats' $4 trillion in spending, he declared: "Statecraft is soulcraft." I blogged that — with disapproval — here. 

But what is "soulcraft"? If "statecraft" makes sense, it must mean the work of the state, so shouldn't "soulcraft" mean the work of the soul? But, in context, it seems to mean the state's work is to work on the soul. I think he's saying that the state ought to engage in massive spending with the aim of shaping the soul of the people who live under the power of the state, and the lack of parallelism in the use of the ending "-craft" is disturbing.

I try to think of other "-craft" words. "Witchcraft" is the work of witches, not the shaping of witches. It's done by witches, not to witches. It fits with "statecraft," not "soulcraft."

In the comments to my post, Lloyd W. Robertson and Peter Spieker independently bring up George Will, and Quaestor writes: 

"Because of his incontinent use of it, the rhetorical mustard that the president slathers on every subject has lost its tang."

Writes George Will, slathering his own rhetorical mustard in his new WaPo piece, "The nation is in a downward spiral. Worse is still to come."

Yeesh. That title. It's like a parody of the columns Bari Weiss was referring to when  she wrote about the NYT "publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world."

In the news — the attack on individualism.

Having created a tag "the attack on individualism" — for reasons stated in the previous post — and gone back to find that subject in my archive, I wanted to look at the present and see how much of this topic was in the current news.

Here are a few things I found:

1. "Big Data Analytics Shows How America's Individualism Complicates Coronavirus Response" (UVa Today):

Painstakingly, and with tremendous amounts of data processed by 97 advanced computers, Jingjing Li, Ting Xu, Natasha Zhang Foutz and Bo Bian went county-by-county to track levels of individualism – measured by the amount of time each locality spent on the American frontier from 1790 to 1890 – and correlate individualism to social distancing compliance and COVID-19-related crowdfunding.... “We were astounded by the large magnitude of those numbers, because they suggest that variations in individualism could account for almost half of a policy’s effectiveness,” said Li, an assistant professor of information technology in the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce.

2. "Andrew McCutchen criticizes Yankees' hair policy: 'It takes away from our individualism'" (CBS Sports):

The Yankees' "appearance policy" has been in force since not long after George Steinbrenner purchased the team in the early 1970s. As the story goes, Steinbrenner didn't care for Thurman Munson's appearance during one singing of the national anthem, and he put in place the following mandates: "All players, coaches and male executives are forbidden to display any facial hair other than mustaches (except for religious reasons), and scalp hair may not be grown below the collar. Long sideburns and 'mutton chops' are not specifically banned."

3. "How Individualism Spreads Racism" by Jackson Wu (Patheos):

"In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses..."

"... is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, 'But the judges, the judges!' the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined."

Writes George Will (WaPo).

"As changing technologies and preferences make government-funded broadcasting increasingly preposterous, such broadcasting actually becomes useful by illustrating two dismal facts."

"One is the immortality of entitlements that especially benefit those among society’s articulate upper reaches who feel entitled. The other fact is how impervious government programs are to evidence incompatible with their premises.... America, which is entertaining itself to inanition, has never experienced a scarcity of entertainment. Or a need for government-subsidized journalism that reports on the government."

Writes George Will in The Washington Post. 

Wexit.

"Conservative columnist George Will told PJM he has officially left the Republican Party and urged conservatives not to support presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump even if it leads to a Democratic victory in the 2016 presidential election."

Obama and the bathtub.

On "Fox News Sunday" this morning, Chris Wallace had a long interview with President Barack Obama. One vivid image that came up and persisted was: the bathtub.

Wallace quoted something from The Atlantic: "Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do." He then asked Obama if he thinks "we make too big a deal of the terror threat."

Obama said we don't, but that it's important — as we pursue the number 1 goal of protecting America — that "we abide by our laws" and "our values."

Chris Wallace went back to the bathtub:

WALLACE: -- when you say more people die in bathtub accidents, and I understand you’re not saying [fighting terrorism is] not important, but you’re saying we can’t overreact to it, is bathtub manufacturers aren’t trying to kill us, and they’re not trying to up the body count....

I pictured Stephen King watching and getting an idea for a new horror story.

And some people wonder... do you worry about terrorism and feel the threat of terrorism the way they do?

Of course, Obama said that he did, and Wallace asked:

WALLACE: So why do people sometimes think you’re diffident....

Obama gave a good answer, one that made me think of George W. Bush:

OBAMA: Well, I think part of it is that, in the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been my view consistently that the job of the terrorists, in their minds, is to induce panic, induce fear, get societies to change who they are. And what I’ve tried to communicate is, "You can’t change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you down, and we will get you. And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston, after the marathon bombing, we’re going to go to a ballgame. And do all the other things that make our life worthwhile. And you have nothing to offer." That’s the message of resilience that we don’t panic, that we don’t fear. We will hunt you down and we will get you....

All he needed was a bullhorn.

Later, in the panel discussion, George Will got back to the bathtub:

WILL: Chris, you referred to his diffident tone. I think he comes across as condescension. I mean it’s one thing to say, as many people or more people die in bathtub accidents, but bathtubs aren’t trying to kill us. There’s a difference and the American people feel this between an individual accident and premeditated mass murder. And when he coolly says, if people only understood these numbers they would calm down, it inevitably communicates condescension to the people.

ADDED: The bathtub isn't trying to kill us... intentionality matters. Which takes us to the discussion of Hillary Clinton's email:

WALLACE: Can you still say flatly that she did not jeopardize America’s secrets?

OBAMA: ... Here’s what I know: Hillary Clinton was an outstanding Secretary of State. She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy. ... Now what I’ve also said is that -- and she has acknowledged -- that there’s a carelessness, in terms of managing e-mails, that she has owned, and she recognizes. But I also think it is important to keep this in perspective. This is somebody who has served her country for four years as secretary of state, and did an outstanding job....

The bathtub never intentionally put your family in any kind of jeopardy. It served your household well, giving many outstanding baths. But it was negligently designed and it killed your father.

Donald Trump hits "a new high," nationally — 41%.

That's more than twice as much as his nearest competitor Ted Cruz, who gets 19%, in CNN's new poll. What's most impressive is how stable the numbers are. In CNN's last poll, in late December, Trump had 39% and Cruz 18%. A more negative stability is seen in Rubio's numbers. He had 10% then but only 8% now.

Trump leads "among both men and women, younger and older voters, white evangelicals, conservatives and both self-identified Republicans and independents who lean toward the party." He even leads among college graduates — with 26% (20% for Cruz) — and  tea partiers — with 37% (34% for Cruz). And Trump's supporters are, by far, least likely to change their minds: "70% of Trump's supporters say they are locked in compared with 40% who back other candidates."

Isn't it obvious that Trump will get the nomination? Nothing works on him. You especially can't hope that maybe he'll say something horrible. He's shown time and again that he can say things media people think are fatal gaffes and nothing happens. Nothing bad for him, that is. Many people love the supposedly horrible things.

Trump's case for the presidency rests at least in part on his standing as a political outsider. The poll finds that a broad swath of GOP voters (55%) say they feel completely unrepresented by the government in Washington, and among those voters, Trump holds a 47% to 19% lead over Cruz.

ADDED: The very next thing I looked at —  the front page of the NYT — had: "As Trump and Cruz Soar, G.O.P. Leaders’ Vexation Grows." I laughed out loud. "Vexation" is a funny word. I'm vexed — vexed! — I tell you! Seems like something a movie villain would say. I picture George Will. Look at him here, squirming — squirmishing — as he claims the "New York values" attack is hurting Trump:



The NYT article, if you click in from the front page, is: "As Donald Trump and Ted Cruz Soar, G.O.P. Leaders’ Exasperation Grows." I have no idea why "vexation" seemed like the right word for the front page and delighters in vexation like me got bait-and-switched into mere "exasperation." First paragraph:

Republican leaders are growing alarmed by the ferocious ways the party’s mainstream candidates for president are attacking one another, and they fear that time is running out for any of them to emerge as a credible alternative to Donald J. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Leaders of the Republican establishment, made up of elected officials, lobbyists and donors, are also sending a message to the mainstream candidates, such as former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, that they should withdraw from the race if they do not show strength soon.

Soon?! It was apparent last October that Bush should withdraw and back Rubio. I wrote on October 29th:

And now, it's really too late for Jeb Bush.

On October 22, I said "It's time for Jeb Bush to withdraw and endorse Marco Rubio"... and now, after last night, it's too late even for that.... And so ends the sad tale of Jeb Bush, the man with cooler things to do than to help the man with the best hope of returning the Presidency to his party.

It's 3 months after I wrote that, and the Republican establishment is "growing alarmed" that it might be getting too late for a mainstreamer to emerge?! They're still waiting to see if Jeb might show some strength? His weakness has been one of Donald Trump's main jokes since last summer. What fool would hold out hope for something different to happen "soon"? But why not pretend there's hope? Why be realistic when there's nothing to be done?

AND: Just about the next thing I look at is David Brooks proving my point. Last lines of his new column "Stay Sane America, Please!":

In every recent presidential election American voters have selected the candidate with the most secure pair of hands. They’ve elected the person who would be a stable presence and companion for the next four years. I believe they’re going to do that again. And if they’re not, please allow me a few more months of denial. 

Sleep well.

An excellent discussion of the latest Hillary Clinton email problem on "Fox News Sunday."

This is a bit long and starts slow, but the different commentators bring different perspectives that I'll try to highlight, so stick with me:

CHRIS WALLACE:   In 2011, when an aide was having trouble sending her material by a secure fax, she sent these instructions: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper with no identifying heading, and send nonsecure." Bob Woodward, why is this important?