Gary.

How could you not name a heat wave “Gary” given that Garys are so hot? https://t.co/N1qEY7G1ot

— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) July 26, 2023

From the linked article:

"What Musk is doing is... like opening the gates of hell...."

Said one of the experts quoted — by Taylor Lorenz — in "'Opening the gates of hell': Musk says he will revive banned accounts/The Twitter chief says he will reinstate accounts suspended for threats, harassment and misinformation beginning next week" (WaPo).

Why would you want to keep people in Hell? 

 

Why not forgive — if only to give them a second chance? Musk knows that the process of condemnation wasn't fair. At the very least, we are worried that it was skewed against conservatives. It's efficient to wipe the slate clean — to default toward freedom — and to begin again, with a viewpoint neutral approach that is transparent and centered on protecting individuals from harm, not on helping one side over another.

Some who are released from Hell will be those who shouldn't have been condemned in the first place. Some will be those from whom the group does need protection, but these will either go on and sin no more or they will sin again, and they can be dealt with under the new, fair procedure.

And Musk isn't even talking about letting everyone back in. The question he asked in his poll was "Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?" He can say the people have spoken and there will be "general amnesty," but there's that proviso. Anyone who is already known as a danger can still be excluded. On the face of it, Musk isn't recklessly absolutist about freedom of speech. 

The hell the anti-Muskites are afraid of — isn't it just the loss of a political advantage they never should have had in the first place? Did the censorship they enjoyed only make them soft and fearful and stunt their capacity to debate?

"... this is presumably a caricature of the artist as the devil."

Noticed, this morning, in the lower right corner of a painting, as I was looking into the authorship of the Book of Revelation. The image appears over the artists signature. Nice feet, tail, wings, armor, and whatever that is on the head.

A strange image, from Joe Biden: "We got to stop pouring flames on the fire."

Pouring flames? On fire?

The context is his remarks yesterday to the US Conference of Mayors (transcript):

This moment we’re facing now, isn’t a partisan moment. It’s an American moment.... It’s a chance for us to overcome anger and division that has hold [sic] us back of late for far too long. We can emerge from these crises.... If I’m elected, you will have direct access to the White House. I want to thank you all because we need you to build back better. You are the foundation stone, not a joke. You’re the ones leading away.... We got to stop the hate and the division now, we got to stop pouring flames on the fire, we got to start talking straight to the American people.... I’ve never been more optimistic... The blinders have been taken off the American people. They understand what’s going on now. They understand.... They want to get things done... and I want to make sure that your ideas are the ones that are funneled up. They don’t have to go through a state legislature, go through a governor. They can go straight to the federal government, straight to me....

Funneled up? I'm trying to picture that. Don't funnels work only downward, through gravity? Oh, I don't know!



That's a detail from the Hieronymus Bosch painting "Cutting the Stone," which appears at the Wikipedia article "Funnel." There, I learn something about the idea of a funnel working upward instead of downward:

The inverted funnel is a symbol of madness. It appears in many Medieval depictions of the mad; for example, in Hieronymus Bosch's Ship of Fools and Allegory of Gluttony and Lust....

And in "Cutting the Stone." Michel Foucault, "History of Madness," had something to say about that doctor in an inverted funnel hat: "Bosch's famous doctor is far more insane than the patient he is attempting to cure, and his false knowledge does nothing more than reveal the worst excesses of a madness immediately apparent to all but himself."

There's also inverted funnel hat worn by the Tin Woodman in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."  It's not mentioned in the text of the book. It comes from the imagination of the the first illustrator,  W. W. Denslow:

Richard Cohen (the WaPo columnist) doesn't "quite know what a handbasket is, but the Democratic Party is heading in one to electoral hell with its talk of socialism and reparations."

He's got an image, but he can't picture it. I picture something like this:



But damn, I find it annoying, starting off a column so lazily.

I don't quite know what a handbasket is, but the Democratic Party is heading in one to electoral hell with its talk of socialism and reparations. Given a Republican incumbent who has never exceeded 50 percent in Gallup's approval ratings poll and who won the presidency thanks to a dysfunctional electoral college, the party is nevertheless determined to give Donald Trump a fair shot at re-election by sabotaging itself....

Yes, yes, I know, it's perfectly predictable, the point you're going to make. But you waste my time with a cliché, and you don't know how to use it. It pops in your head and you just start jabbering, padding out your column with the tedious news that you don't understand your own unfresh metaphor. How do you head anywhere in a basket? Is someone carrying the basket? Is it a basket with some automotive power? Is it a basket placed for some reason — by whom? — at the top of a slippery slope?

I'm so glad I stopped to ask, rather than to continue to read the scribblings of Richard Cohen (who is not, I hasten to add, the Richard Cohen to whom I once said, as quoted in the previous post, "Maybe it's not right to bring children into this world"). I presume the column continues to point out the obvious, which you're free to expound on in the comments. I want to talk about going to hell in a handbasket.

First, here's the fantastic Hieronymus Bosch painting, "The Haywain Triptych" (click to enlarge):



Wikipedia explains the painting:

The central panel features a large wagon of hay surrounded by a multitude of fools engaged in a variety of sins... An angel on top of the wagon looks to the sky, praying, but none of the other figures see Christ [in the cloud] looking down on the world. The rightward bow of the figures around the wagon provides the force for the viewer’s eye to move with them on their journey and the cart is drawn by infernal beings which drag everyone to Hell, depicted on the right panel.

So it's a hay wagon, and the movement toward Hell is generated by some nasty characters:



I found that through the Wikipedia article "To hell in a handbasket," but a hay wagon is not a handbasket. A wagon has wheels. So how does a handbasket — which doesn't sound like something with wheels — work as a coveyance to hell?

"Going to hell in a handbasket", "going to hell in a handcart", "going to hell in a handbag", "go to hell in a bucket", "sending something to hell in a handbasket" and "something being like hell in a handbasket" are variations on an American allegorical locution of unclear origin, which describes a situation headed for disaster inescapably or precipitately.

So apparently, not only doesn't Richard Cohen know, Wikipedia doesn't know! But it does offer this:

I. Windslow Ayer's 1865 polemic alleges, "Judge Morris of the Circuit Court of Illinois at an August meeting of Order of the Sons of Liberty said: "Thousands of our best men were prisoners in Camp Douglas, and if once at liberty would 'send abolitionists to hell in a hand basket.'"

That's the idea of sending and not simply going. Notice that in Cohen's locution, getting into a handbasket is a quick way to go to Hell. But why? If someone else puts you in a basket — Mrs. Gulch or the Sons of Liberty — then they've got themselves in good position to take you wherever they want, the nasty demons....



But Cohen imagines the Democrats getting into a handbasket on their own. Won't it just sit there, going nowhere?



Cohen hasn't thought this through, so I will. Once they get in the basket, they've made it easy for their antagonists to pick up the basket and throw it wherever they like. And it won't be the White House.



Oh! There's Trump, building his wall!