"These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations everybody."

Those were the very very very special words of our President, Donald J. Trump, speaking at Mount Rushmore, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the 4th of July.

"And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants. And that's not easy to do, but we're going to do it. These men could only have been made in the USA. Their faces are engraved on these bluffs, not only because of what they did, but to remind us forever who we are. These heroes exemplify what is timeless, enduring, and eternal about the American character. And in the end, it has always been that character, our distinct and unique identity. It is a truly unique identity and it'll never change.... Liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it, and preserved it.... The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation. And America has a destiny like no other because we are a people like no other. For whatever reason, that's just the way it is.

"This winter, I’ll try to prune more gently, and I’ll probably fail. Perhaps the trees will begin to move incrementally back toward pre-human growth patterns."

"Maybe, decades from now, the next human occupant of this land will give up on them entirely and 'prune them with a spade,' as my dad likes to say. Until then, I’ll stand expectantly under the Belle de Boskoop, which by this time of year should be dropping dozens of big, russeted apples on the ground. It has vigorous, almost uncontrollable branches, and we’ve pruned it hard every year in an attempt at sculpting its form. But it reaches ever upward, each lateral proudly unburdened by fruit. If it never crops, it’ll still be here: the Bartleby of my garden, quietly, stubbornly, declining participation in the grind."

Writes Manjula Martin, in "The Rebellion of a Fruitless Apple Tree/As the rest of our culture thrives on overexposure, why shouldn’t a garden have the right to retain an air of mystery?" (The New Yorker).

I'm blogging this article simply because we have apple trees that don't bear fruit. It's a topic that hits close to home, but I was also delighted to see Bartleby, one of my all-time favorite literary characters. Now, I can't help but feel that commenters will zero in on the word "unburdened," which has been said way too many times in the 2024 election cycle. This post was supposed to be a break from all the election blogging. It's about apple trees.

"The world is in a permacrisis currently with the COVID-19 aftermath, the war in Ukraine, climate change issues, political instability, the energy crisis in Europe, recession and the cost-of-living crisis."

That's a quote that appeared in the Millennium Post Newspaper (Nexis) on 18 December 18, 2022 and that is one of 3 quotes the OED chose to exemplify the word "permacrisis," which, it announces today, it has just added to its dictionary.

The definition is obvious: "A situation characterized by constant and significant turmoil or instability; (now) spec. one that is widespread across a society and caused by an ongoing series of events such as war, economic recession, a pandemic disease, etc."

I think of "permacrisis" as as a political strategy to make people feel that we are always in special dire circumstances, justifying unusual emergency measures, and warranting the sacrifice of our personal pleasure and freedom.

I can't help thinking: "Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

"Could the governor who is battling to turn a progressive state college into a 'Hillsdale of the South' really be a tedious Establishment Republican who wants to cut the Social Security checks of righteous churchgoing Republican retirees?"

Asks Ed Kilgore in "Could Trump Run to DeSantis’s Left in 2024?" (New York Magazine).

He's reacting to the Rolling Stone article "Trump Is Plotting How to Kick DeSantis ‘In the Nuts.’ Here’s His Playbook, So Far/Team Trump is preparing to paint the Florida governor as an establishment hawk who'll put Social Security on the chopping block." Excerpt:

On a host of issues, Trump and his lieutenants are itching to portray DeSantis as the “establishment” figure — the one who is preferred by the supposedly squishy party bigwigs like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. One of Trump’s biggest impacts on the GOP was largely shelving the budget-slashing austerity economics of former Speaker Ryan and ushering in a free-spending, debt-ballooning era that combined tax cuts for the rich, with a rhetorical cease-fire on threats to the bennies of the masses — ranging from Social Security to Medicare.

I'm interested in that phrase "bennies of the masses." It's like "opium of the masses." That's got to be intentional — using "bennies" to mean benefits when "bennies" has been slang for benzedrine — i.e., amphetamine — since the 1950s.

From Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" (1957): "There’s another photo of Joan simpering over a cookpot; her hair is long and unkempt; she’s high on benny and God knows what she’s saying as the camera is snapped…'Don’t point that nasty old thing at me.'"

"Opium of the people" — also translated as "opium of the masses" — has its own Wikipedia article:

The full sentence from Marx translates (including italics) as: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."... 

In [Marx's] view, religion... reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions which gave them the strength to carry on.... [B]y focusing on the eternal rather than the temporal, religion turns the attention of the oppressed away from the exploitation and class structure that encompasses their everyday lives.... In Marx’s view, once workers finally overthrow capitalism, unequal social relations will no longer need legitimating and people’s alienation will dissolve, along with any need for religion. 

Assuming Rolling Stone intended to refer to Marx's analogy of religion to opium, we're prodded to think about whether government benefits are like amphetamine. Do things like Social Security and Medicare give us "euphoria, change in desire for sex, increased wakefulness, and improved cognitive control"? If we get too much, do we experience "psychosis (e.g., delusions and paranoia)"?

If they cut our "bennies," what do we do? Without "opium," in Marx's view, we'd have more clarity and energy, and maybe we'd revolt, but without "bennies," we have less energy and are less excited about crazy things.

In which case, what? What would we do in that newly dulled, enervated condition? Choose DeSantis over Trump? 

"Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment" was a very 60s film.

It's what I think of first when I think about David Warner, so let me put it here to memorialize the actor, who died yesterday at the age of 80. Here's the NYT obituary, "David Warner, Actor Who Played Villains and More, Dies at 80/He seemed destined for a major stage career but by the early 1970s was focused on film and TV. His credits included 'TRON,' 'Titanic' and hundreds more."

Here's the scene where he takes his mother to visit the grave of Karl Marx:

"The political philosopher Isaiah Berlin turned an obscure fragment by the ancient Greek poet Archilochus ('The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing') into..."

"... an intellectual’s cocktail-party game.... Karl Marx was a supreme hedgehog: Everything, for him, was about the conflict of economic classes. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a restlessly improvising fox. The world’s hedgehog population tends to expand in times of stress and change. Lately it has exploded in the U.S. Hedgehogs are thick on the ground, all of them advancing One Big Thing or another—each peering through the lens of a particular obsession. At the moment, the biggest One Big Thing is race—the key, it seems, to all of America, to the innermost meanings of the country and its history....  Beware a hedgehog claiming the immunities of an innocent victim. Beware when victimhood is his One Big Thing. The victim wants revenge, and who is more justified in committing any crime or injustice than a blameless victim acting in historic retaliation? Virtue, feeling vengeful and tasting power, grows manic—dogmatic, dangerous. Critical race theory ends by fostering the evil it professes to combat—racism and the hatred that comes with it. 'Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return,' W.H. Auden wrote. The 20th century taught the lesson over and over again, but it seems to be wasted on the 21st."

 From "The Hedgehogs of Critical Race Theory/They start with important truths—slavery was wicked—and get carried away into monomania," by Lance Morrow, who is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (WSJ).

Is the impeachment funny?

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." 

Is the second impeachment funny? 

My son John has a Facebook post reacting to the impeachment with jokes:

The most impeached president in American history! I wonder if Trump is tired of all this winning… 

Half of all impeachments of an American president have been of Trump!... 

We’re going to have impeachment, like you wouldn’t believe. A lot of people are saying he’s the best president ever at getting impeached. No one had ever heard of impeachment before Trump.

I said, "Is it funny?" 

John said, "Is it funny to turn the tables on the pompously powerful?" and I — copying the humor of "No one had ever heard of impeachment before Trump"* — said, "There are very pompously powerful people on both sides."** 

I don't want to be part of the that's-not-funny crowd, but I do wonder if those who are wielding the power — using the mechanism of government — are themselves clowning. I heard some of yesterday's speechifying, and I detected a lack of sobriety. There's a lot of political theater, and I'm wondering if this show is a farce.

Trump is almost out the door. He's being kicked as he leaves. And there's the prospect of conducting the impeachment trial after he's out of office.*** Farce?

____________________________ 

*   Last June, Trump asserted that "nobody had ever heard of" Juneteenth before he made it "very famous."

** Reacting to the violent protests in Charlottesville in April 2017, Trump said there were "very fine people, on both sides."

***  Makes me think of this.

"The new anti-racism has a confessional, religious energy that the secular meritocracy has always lacked."

"But there is also something important about its more radical and even ridiculous elements — like the weird business that increasingly shows up in official documents, from the New York Public Schools or the Smithsonian, describing things like 'perfectionism' or 'worship of the written word' or 'emphasis on the scientific method' or 'delayed gratification' as features of a toxic whiteness. Imagine yourself as a relatively privileged white person exhausted by meritocracy — an overworked student or a fretful parent or a school administrator constantly besieged by both.... 'Wouldn’t it come as a relief, in some way, if it turned out that the whole 'exhausting "Alice in Wonderland" Red Queen Race of full-time meritocratic achievement,' in the words of a pseudonymous critic, was nothing more than a manifestation of the very white supremacy that you, as a good liberal, are obliged to dismantle and oppose? If all the testing, all the 'delayed gratification' and 'perfectionism,' was, after all, just itself a form of racism, and in easing up, chilling out, just relaxing a little bit, you can improve your life and your kid’s life and, happily, strike an anti-racist blow as well?"

Writes Ross Douthat in "The Real White Fragility/Does the white upper class feel exhausted and oppressed by meritocracy?" (NYT).

So it's sort of like the hippie movement all over again... but without the joy and the fun and the music and the flowers and the crazy clothes and the love of freedom and the willingness to say outrageous things. Instead there's grimness, guilt, pessimism, and the grueling realization that you do have to work, but it's not work at some job, it's work on yourself — you with the bred-in-the-bone racism problem.

Karl Marx wrote: "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." I'm seeing this repetition the other way around. We got the comedy first. The tragedy is now.

That last post finally pushed me over the line to create a tag I've been thinking about for a while...

... "the attack on individualism."

The pressure was building after yesterday's post about Seattle's effort to teach its employees about their own "Internalized Racial Superiority," which is "defined by" — among other things — "individualism."

What pushed me over the line into new tag creation this morning was a criticism of women who fall into the "trap" of talking about their individual struggle with motherhood.

I went back into the archive and added the tag to a few old things:

June 19, 2020 — This is a quote from a review of the book "White Fragility": "'I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,' DiAngelo explains. 'I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective.' It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. 'White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,' DiAngelo writes, a system 'we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves.'"

November 29, 2015 — I quoted the Tom Wolfe essay, "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening":

"In 2020, among political controversies, Elon Musk and several political figures, including Ivanka Trump made a reference to the red pill concept."

That's the last line of the Wikipedia article "Red pill and blue pill" — which is full of great stuff. In addition to explaining the original meaning in the movie "The Matrix," there's the earlier movie, "Total Recall," in which the Schwarzenegger character is offered a red pill and told "it's a symbol of your desire to return to reality." And:

The choice between taking a blue or red pill is a central metaphor in the 2011 Arte documentary film Marx Reloaded, in which philosophers including Slavoj Žižek and Nina Power explore solutions to the global economic and financial crisis of 2008–09. The film also contains an animated parody of the red/blue pill scene in The Matrix, with Leon Trotsky as Morpheus and Karl Marx as Neo.

Ha ha. I want to see that. Aha!



I love cartoons. Are they real life? Are they just fantasy?

Anyway, yesterday, Elon Musk tweeted: "Take the red pill." That's the whole tweet. What did he want to take the red pill about?

And Ivanka was right there:

Taken! https://t.co/Ng0S2OFC93

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) May 17, 2020

Does she know? I mean, there is no pill to take to get you exactly to reality. If you use the metaphor, you're simply insisting that YOU know where reality is and that other people are living in a fantasy world. It's just a pop-culture, cheeky way to assert that YOU know what is true and those other people are wrong. But Elon Musk's tweet doesn't specify the thing that is asserted to be true. And Ivanka is signaling that she's in on the truth and it's the same truth that Elon Musk is pushing.

You can look at his Twitter feed and try to get a sense of what he's talking about. My previous post is about another Elon Musk tweet — one that rages against the extenuation of the coronavirus lockdown — but this "red pill" tweet isn't close to that in the feed. The lockdown protest was back on May 14th and this "red pill" business was on the 17th.

Now, maybe he's just saying, Let's all look at what's really real. Turn away from the fantasy life that might make you feel good, but the truth is better.

That makes me think of the Jesus catchphrase: "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

ADDED: The director of "The Matrix" responds to Elon and Ivanka: "Fuck both of you."

It's the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.

I'm not seeing a lot of celebrating, but here's Michael Moore:

Happy 200th Birthday Karl Marx! You believed that everyone should have a seat at the table & that the greed of the rich would eventually bring us all down. You believed that everyone deserves a slice of the pie. You knew that the super wealthy were out to grab whatever they could

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) May 5, 2018

The mainstream media stories I'm seeing tend to be about the Chinese statue: "Karl Marx’s German home town celebrates his 200th birthday with a Chinese statue — and a struggle" (WaPo):

The unveiling of a two-ton Chinese-funded sculpture to honor the German philosopher on the 200th anniversary of his birth brought scads of tourists to Trier, where his life began. While here, they took in Marx lectures, toured the Marx family home and bought vast quantities of marked-up Marx souvenirs....

The city is split over whether a democratic nation such as Germany should be erecting monuments that are paid for, designed and built by an authoritarian one such as China. The divide spilled into the streets Saturday with dueling demonstrations for and against the monolith, forming a noisy backdrop to the statue’s official dedication....

Not so long ago, Germany was tearing down statues of Marx. An icon of communist East Germany, his likeness was scrubbed from many a town square after the country’s reunification under democracy and capitalism in 1990....

I went back to Paul Johnson's book "Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky" and reread the chapter on Marx. Excerpt:

His angry egoism had physical as well as psychological roots. He led a peculiarly unhealthy life, took very little exercise, ate highly spiced food, often in large quantities, smoked heavily, drank a lot, especially strong ale, and as a result had constant trouble with his liver. He rarely took baths or washed much at all. This, plus his unsuitable diet, may explain the veritable plague of boils from which he suffered for a quarter of a century. They increased his natural irritability and seem to have been at their worst while he was writing Capital. ‘Whatever happens,’ he wrote grimly to Engels, ‘I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.’ The boils varied in numbers, size and intensity but at one time or another they appeared on all parts of his body, including his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, his bottom, which meant he could not write, and his penis. In 1873 they brought on a nervous collapse marked by trembling and huge bursts of rage.

"If ever there were a convincing case to be made for the dangers of philosophy, then surely it’s Marx’s discovery of Hegel, whose 'grotesque craggy melody' repelled him at first..."

"... but which soon had him dancing deliriously through the streets of Berlin. As Marx confessed to his father in an equally delirious letter in November 1837, 'I wanted to embrace every person standing on the street-corner.'"

From a NYT opinion piece titled "Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!" by Jason Barker, "an associate professor of philosophy at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and author of the novel 'Marx Returns.'"

Here's the Amazon link for "Marx Returns." From the description: "Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds...."

Calculus, eh? From the book:

Do the math! How do you get from horseshit to warm bath through calculus and dragon energy?

"There's an image I really want to do with that Trump orb thing."

I said earlier this morning, after starting the day with a post about the Trump orb and then a post about that statue of Karl Marx — you can see it here — that China gave to Trier, German (Marx's birthplace).

I still haven't taught myself how to photoshop 2 images together, but my complaint about how I was too lazy to learn somehow lit a fire under Rick Lee, and he made this:



Rick Lee is a professional photographer. You can see his website here.

And I know you might ask what that new image is even supposed to mean. Uh... late capitalism!

ADDED: Since Rick is a professional photographer, accepting this image made me think of something I saw yesterday that amused me: "Tired Of Being Asked To Work For Free, This Artist Started Drawing These Client Requests."

"Maybe a certain naïveté is not always bad if it prevents over-interpretation, so you don’t always dissect things in detail and suspect everything."

Said Wolfram Leibe, the mayor of Trier, Germany, where Karl Marx was born. He's talking about the town's acceptance of a gift, a 18-foot-tall statue of Karl Marx, to be erected in a public square, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of Marx's birth. Leibe asserts that “It was a gesture of friendship and has nothing to do with ideology,” and yet he recounts the statement of the sculptor, Wei Weishan, on seeing the square: "This square is too small and cramped. Karl Marx was a great man and we can’t put him in a small square." 

The NYT reports, noting that "[m]illions* died in Communist political campaigns after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and in a famine precipitated by an effort to collectivize agriculture in the late 1950s," but "Marx is officially revered in China."

The article also quotes Chang Ping, "a Chinese journalist who has lived in exile in Germany since 2011":

“This is not just a question of commemorating a historical figure. It’s also a question of how to deal with the Chinese government’s ambition to shine on the world stage. I think that I can see better than ordinary Germans the hideous grin behind the statue that is to be erected in Trier, and the threat it represents to the civilized political cultures of the world.”

And Geremie Barmé, "a founder of the Wairarapa Academy for New Sinology in New Zealand, the sculpture is an expression of party power":

“The Germans’ suggestion was for an early, humane, humanist Marx, a source for change in China — not the heroic, sclerotic, formalized Marx used for party purposes that Wu offered. Since we’re the only one that’s been successful and adapted Marxism to state leadership, we’ll tell you what it’s about.”

Meanwhile, in America, we're not putting up statues of heroes — revered or rejected — we're taking them down.

_________________

* "Millions" is not an adequate way to express what is something more like 45 or 65 million.

Things not believed: "I'm looking forward to voting Democrat again."

That "Democrat" is a tell. Someone actually looking forward to voting for Democrats would say "voting Democratic." But I don't trust the transcription in the Washington Examiner, because it also identifies the speaker of this line as "the acclaimed philosopher."

Camille Paglia is a philosopher?

Here's a 2005 article by Camille Paglia: "Ten great female philosophers: The thinking woman's women/Radio 4's 'Greatest Philosopher' poll yielded an all-male Top 20. But is philosophy really a female-free zone? On the contrary, insists Camille Paglia - and here are 10 to prove the point." In the note identifying the author, she's listed as a "Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia." If she had any claim to being considered a philosopher, I think we'd have seen it there. She said:

I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole - and there are obvious exceptions - are more drawn to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated....

Paglia loves to personalize things, so you can bet she'd have said but not me! if she could.

A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard.

Obviously, Paglia does not meet her own definition of philosopher. She likes to talk about ideas in connection with art — high and low art of all kinds. 

Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers....

But: 

The term philosopher is passé, anyhow, and should be abandoned. The thinker of modern times should be partly abstract and partly practical. Karl Marx, the winner of the Radio 4 poll yesterday, was indeed a truly major thinker.

A "major thinker" — which is what Paglia probably thinks she is — but not a "philosopher," because:

He was not a captive of abstraction and always kept his eye on society and its evolution...

Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre.

Who wants to be a philosopher anyway? Nobody good, certainly not Paglia:

This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity.... Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.

Man, I know the feeling! I had to stop at this point and listen to "Life During Wartime":



Why stay in college? Why go to night school?/Gonna be different this time/Can't write a letter, can't send no postcard/I ain't got time for that now... We got computer, we're tapping phone lines/I know that ain't allowed... Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks?....

Anyway, back to the I-don't-trust-it Washington Examiner article I've been trying to read as the sun comes up here in Madison, Wisconsin, where nobody I know is manipulating terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard, and I am thrown back to 1979, when I was trying to be a law student and The Talking Heads were distracting me with word of impending chaos and the futility of further education. I was writing in notebooks — what good are notebooks? — and nobody I knew got computer.

But speaking of chess, have you ever seen this picture?



That's "A Jew and a Muslim playing chess in 13th century al-Andalus." I found that in the Wikipedia article "Al-Andalus," which I clicked through to from "Alcázar," which I'd looked up because it was the hardest answer in the Friday NYT crossword.

Change 2 letters in chess, and you get the opposite of chess: Chaos! And chaos is what made me want to blog that Washington Examiner fragment about whatever it was Camille Paglia may have said. The key line for me wasn't Paglia's spurious expressing of hope to vote Democrat, but her assertion about what's going on with the attacks on Trump:

"Democrats are doing this in collusion with the media obviously, because they just want to create chaos... They want to completely obliterate any sense that the Trump administration is making any progress on anything... I am appalled at the behavior of the media... It's the collapse of journalism....  I feel that the media has so utterly lost its credibility that I think people are going to vote against the media again."

I wanted to quote that because I agree with it. A partisan plot to cripple the American President, to make it as difficult as possible to accomplish anything? "Chaos" is a fun-loving term compared to "treason," but we don't say "treason" anymore, do we?

In the 1790s, opposition political parties were new and not fully accepted. Government leaders often considered their opponents to be some sort of traitors. Historian Ron Chernow reports that Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and President George Washington "regarded much of the criticism fired at their administration as disloyal, even treasonous, in nature." When an undeclared Quasi-War broke out with France in 1797–98, "Hamilton increasingly mistook dissent for treason and engaged in hyperbole." Furthermore, the Jeffersonian opposition party behaved the same way. After 1801, with a peaceful transition in the political party in power, the rhetoric of "treason" against political opponents diminished.

Oh, but these days, part of the chaos-making is calling treason on Trump.

Weiner's wiener is back in the news.

It's just another phallic Monday:

While his wife, Huma Abedin, travels the country campaigning for Hillary Clinton, the disgraced ex-congressman has been sexting with a busty brunette out West — and even sent her a lurid crotch shot with his toddler son in the picture, The Post has learned....

Weiner was clearly aroused by his conversation with the 40-something divorcee when he abruptly changed the subject.

“Someone just climbed into my bed,” Weiner wrote.

“Really?” she responded.

Weiner then hit “send” on the cringe-inducing image, which shows a bulge in his white, Jockey-brand boxer briefs and his son cuddled up to his left, wrapped in a light-green blanket.

“You do realize you can see you[r] Weiner in that pic??” the woman wrote.

Moments after forwarding the photo, Weiner freaked out over the possibility he had accidentally posted it publicly — just as he did during the infamous episode that forced him to resign from Congress in 2011.

“Ooooooh . . . I was scared. For half a second I thought I posted something. Stop looking at my crotch,” Weiner wrote back....

Carlos is into the danger. Have a little empathy. You know I do. It's his sexual orientation. And it's safe sex. Except the part where you humiliate your wife, whose name I'd put right next to the word "humiliate" if a thousand writers hadn't already done that juxtaposition. It's not a new humiliation, just another iteration of the old humiliation.

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

But this is Anthony Weiner's third time.

The first got him bullied out of Congress by who knows exactly which forces within the Democratic Party — Hillobaschumer? Tragic!

The second was when he was running for major of NYC, the comical repeat documented in the movie "Weiner," which we were just watching the other day. Yes, truly: farce. 

And now, again. Once more, with feeling. Once more, with the child in the picture. Once more, with open discussion of the excitement he gets from risking fucking his wife again. Fucking — I mean that metaphorically.

I'd say the third time is the modern psychological novel — inviting us to explore the complications of a modern marriage.

UPDATE: I put up a new post about Huma finally separating from Anthony: here.

"There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which capitalists won’t sink if they think they can make money out of it."

A young political activist finds it "disgusting" that he should have to pay £4 (≈ $6) to visit the popular tourist attraction in London's Highgate Cemetery, the grave of Karl Marx. But Highgate Cemetery is private property, it's not making money burying new bodies (it's full), and the place had gone into decline. It was "a favorite hangout of occultists" and there was vandalism, "including two attempts to blow.. up" the giant bronze head of Marx that tops his tomb.

Not even all Marxists are against the fee. That includes Alex Gordon, chair of the trustees of the Marx Memorial Library & Workers’ School, a charity that helps look after the grave.

“Marx believed that labor should be rewarded, he didn’t believe that you could achieve a classless society simply by refusing to pay for things,” he said. “He wasn’t a hippie, let’s put it like that.”

"Once a marker of a business with suspicious tax practices, the phrase 'cash only' has come to signify hipster entrepreneurialism at places like Stumptown Coffee at the Ace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan or the Emerson Bar in Brooklyn."

"... Many of the new alternative currencies have the look and feel of the regular legal tender accepted at such places. Most include anticounterfeiting measures like holograms and serial numbers. But they are more eye-catching. At the Effra Social, a Brixton pub, Ewan Graham, 31, an architect, was impressed upon examining one of the district’s special pound notes for the first time. 'I’d be more inclined to save money if it all looked like that,' he said. The back of the note displayed a Karl Marx quote about capital and its 'occult ability to add value to itself.' The £10 note, meanwhile, pictured David Bowie, a Brixton native (stardust, or other powdery substance, not included). It’s easy to imagine such notes being fetishized as audiophiles do vinyl...."

And it's easy to imagine suspicious tax practices... even by "hipsters"!

The article — in the NYT — is "Do You Have Change for a Bowie? The Advent of Artisanal Cash."

Why did Newsweek put the face of Karl Marx on Michelle Obama's apple?

Look!

Here's a closeup of the apple with some iPhoto'd sharpening (no lines redrawn or retouching, just contrast, sharpening, and increasing the "highlights" and "shadows):

For comparison, here's the standard image of Karl Marx:

Now, the Anchoress — first link, above — has become "convinced that it’s simply a matter of the apples’ shading and the lighting." Absurd! It can't be just the lighting and the pattern of the apple peel. A magazine cover is carefully constructed and attention would have to be paid to any accidental imagery. The apple was chosen to be exactly the intended apple and subject to Photoshop tweaking and strategic placement of the lights to attain just the right level of perception and deniability. A good subliminal image must be seen and not seen. It must slide past the average person's conscious defenses and make anyone who insists it is there seem delusional. The Anchoress has retreated.

And so I say: To Newsweek! A toast!

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says the image that might or might not be there was intentionally put there as "Tea Party bait":

I hear Chris Matthews now. "Marx? They see Marx? Wow, see how crazy they are?? They see socialists EVERYWHERE."

"Stem selves."

Amba coins a phrase and opines about "the one true thing Karl Marx ever said" ("The conditions of existence determine consciousness"):

[W]hen I think about marriage I think of stem cells. No, not because of anything to do with reproduction, but because stem cells, like unattached selves -- "stem selves?" -- are "pluripotent," they have the potential to become many different things. Once a stem cell is assigned a role in the developing embryo, the rest of its potential is suppressed, and it becomes one kind of tissue in a larger organism....

[M]y marriage was not a "normal" one (if there is such a thing; actually, I doubt it). It demanded much more self-sacrifice, which I long resisted (becoming stronger but barer in the process, like a tree that's all trunk and no branches), but it also forced me down to qualities I might otherwise never have found in myself. Unmarried or divorced I would have achieved more, and chased burnin' love more, and made a more manic-depressive, creative life...

If this is a good analogy, divorce is disastrous. You develop into the marriage, then you lose it, and you're crippled by having a self that grew to work inside a marriage.

In fact, you are always a human being and can always grow and evolve in a new situation (and you can grow out of shape for your present condition).

The single you after marriage is different from the single you that would have been if you had never married, but I think perhaps the post-married single person has even more potential then a never-married single, because you have real knowledge of the condition that, before, you could only imagine. The question whether you want to do something again is more complex than the question whether you want to try something once. "Anything once" is a phrase that doesn't need coining.

And I don't agree that the single person chases and burns and goes up and down more than the married person. The solo life can be more serene, stable, and coherent. But married or single, human beings are going to concoct an explanation of why where they are is the sensible place to be, unless they are really concocting the explanation for going somewhere else.

Makeweight argument: Agree with me and Karl Marx is wrong about the one thing Amba thinks he got right.