"It is often said that the fact that Trump was not seen to have won in 2020 was a blessing in disguise."

"Why? Because had he been allowed to take office in January 2021, he would have still been surrounded by swamp creatures. His great liability when he first took office was that he did not understand how Washington worked. ... how deeply embedded... the self-serving, globalist, neo-con mentality really was. It took his rustication in 2020 and the unhinged, unremitting tsunami of lawfare that washed over him for four years to school him in the ways of official Washington.... Impeachments, indictments, subpoenas, trials, convictions, and fines.... When none of that worked and he was on course to seal the GOP nomination, they tried to kill him—literally.... He learned how the octopus moved. He got to know what made the swamp habitable. He mastered its strategies, its tactics, and its weapons.... My main question at this point is when a large-scale Gestalt shift will take place.... I predict he will end his days as one of the most celebrated presidents in American history."

Writes Roger Kimball, in "Trump in Riyadh: A Rejection of the Globalist Gospel/Trump’s Riyadh speech rejected nation-building and globalist dogma, marking him as a bold champion of sovereignty over interventionism."

"'No reasonable prosecutor': remember him? He’s back! No, not James 'Higher Loyalty' Comey. He’s sitting in a corner somewhere..."

"... counting his doubloons. But like some inky creatures of the deep, he emitted lots of spawn. They’re maturing now and taking after dear old dad. Remember the original sitcom. Despite the best efforts of every one from the country’s 'intelligence' chiefs to its fawning media, news emerged that Hillary Clinton had essentially run the State Department from an insecure server in her home. On that server, it transpired, there were thousands of classified documents (along, of course, with yoga routines and plans for her daughter’s wedding). Presented with a subpoena to turn in the classified docs — there were some 30,000 of them. Hillary simply BleachBit the lot and dared Comey to do something about it. He didn’t, of course. 'No reasonable prosecutor,' you see would pursue such a case. Now James Comey’s spiritual heir has strode into the limelight. Meet Robert Hur...."

Writes Roger Kimball, in "The Justice Department won’t prosecute Biden? Color me shocked/Don’t we have trials precisely to establish the guilt or innocence of a defendant?" (The Spectator).

"It will be a while before the dust settles from this (to use Karl Marx’s evocative term) 'plastic moment.'"

"Matt Gaetz’s assault will probably not be good for House Republicans. By challenging their complacency, Gaetz may also undermine their authority. That is why Newt Gingrich, among others, was so exercised. The question is, though, whether the Republican status quo is beneficent or just a repackaged, lower-temperature version of what the Democrats have on offer: incontinent spending, foreign adventurism and capitulation to transnational globalist corporatism. Matt Gaetz may have sown the wind. I do not think we’ll know for sure about the whirlwind until November 2024."

Writes Roger Kimball, in "What hath Matt Gaetz wrought by tipping over the House apple cart?" (Spectator).

Here was Newt Gingrich 2 days ago, in The Washington Post: "Republicans must expel Matt Gaetz." Expel?!

I hadn't seen the old upset-the-apple-cart metaphor in a long time. According to the OED, its first appearance was in reference to American politics, in a letter written in 1788: "S. Adams had almost overset the apple-cart by intruding an amendment of his own fabrication on the morning of the day of ratification [of the Constitution]."

Searching for "plastic moment," I see it's more prominently a structural engineering term. But perhaps Marx used the term more evocatively. And yet, I couldn't find any Marx quotation with the phrase.

"The final phase of criticism’s arc began with the rise of a figure that Roger Kimball memorably described as the 'tenured radical'..."

"... and which we might think of as the Scholar-Activist. For her [sic], the proper task of criticism was to participate in social transformations occurring outside the university. The battle against exploitation, she claimed, could be waged by writing about racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism, using an increasingly refined language of historical context, identity, and power. Literary artifacts (poems, novels, and other playthings of the élite) could be replaced as objects of study by pop-culture ones (Taylor Swift, selfies, and other playthings of the masses)...." 

Writes Merve Emre, in "Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism? Literature departments seem to provide a haven for studying books, but they may have painted themselves into a corner," (The New Yorker).

"Is there such a thing as 'Trumpism without Trump'?... I understand those who argue that asking for Trumpism without Trump is a bit like asking for sunshine without the sun...."

"I understand the concern about Trump’s vaunted 'divisiveness.' But... [t]he tsunami of hatred and vitriol that washed over Donald Trump since before he assumed office until the present moment was nothing if not 'divisive.'...  We now know that the whole Russia collusion delusion was invented lock-stock-and-barrel in the fetid skunkworks of the Clinton campaign. We know, too, that it was seized upon and pumped up by an irresponsible media and the rancid outposts of the administrative state and its so-called intelligence agencies. Trump was cooked before he set foot in the Oval Office.... I think it likely that, should Trump be the nominee, and should he be reelected in 2024, the forces arrayed against him will suffer a nervous breakdown that will make the anti-Trump hysteria of 2016-2020 look like an Oxford Union debate.... [J]ust a week or so back, [Liz] Cheney said an important goal of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol protest was to demonstrate that Donald Trump is 'clearly unfit for future office, clearly can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.'... There might be some positive good achieved if the Left and the NeverTrump neither-Left-nor-Right were to suspect that they might themselves be the object of the sort of hysteria they have visited upon their opponents. There might be something salutary in making that sort of intimidation reciprocal."

Writes Roger Kimball in "Trump in 2024? Maybe! What’s certain is not too many Americans will be willing to hand over the honor of choosing the next president to Liz Cheney and her smug, entitled, and repellent confrères" (American Greatness).

Personally, I'd prefer way less craziness — from both sides. But I understand the idea of rejecting unilateral disarmament.

Goodbye to Christo... the art saint.

Christo passed away today, on May 31, 2020, at his home in New York City. Christo and Jeanne-Claude have always made clear that their artworks in progress be continued after their deaths. L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (Project for Paris) is still on track for Sept. 18–Oct. 3, 2021. pic.twitter.com/xHPURw60w2

— Christo and Jeanne-Claude (@ChristoandJC) May 31, 2020

From the NYT obituary:

His grand projects, often decades in the making and all of them temporary, required the cooperation of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of landowners, government officials, judges, environmental groups, local residents, engineers and workers, many of whom had little interest in art and a deep reluctance to see their lives and their surroundings disrupted by an eccentric visionary speaking in only semi-comprehensible English.

Again and again, Christo prevailed, through persistence, charm and a childlike belief that eventually everyone would see things the way he did.

At his side, throughout, was his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who, like her husband, used only her first name. In the mid-1990s she began sharing equal billing with him on all their projects, formalizing what the couple insisted had been their practice all along. She died in 2009.

Click on my "Christo" tag. I've written about him many times. At first, he annoyed me. Based on news articles about wrapping large buildings, I thought of him as arrogant. But watching Albert Maysles's series of 5 documentary films about him — showing his personal interactions with bureaucrats and citizens — completely changed my view.

As I said back in 2005, when he did his "Gates" project in Central Park:

Roger Kimball reprints a Spectator piece from mid-January. He's quite negative:

Christo and his wife are geniuses at self-promotion. They have gulled municipalities around the world into letting them stage their pranks, and the result is celebrity and riches.

I must admit that's what I thought of Christo for decades, as I read about his projects in various news reports. But I completely changed my mind about him when I watched the Maysles Brothers documentaries ("5 Films About Christo and Jeanne-Claude"...). I was won over and came to believe that Christo is an art saint.

"But that didn’t stop the New York Times, reprising their gambit with Brett Kavanaugh, from shouting that a second anonymous 'whistleblower' had been found who was just about to come forward and spew more malign anti-Trump gossip into the cloaca maxima of the effort to rid the world of Donald Trump."

There's the sentence of the day. Diagram that!

It's from Roger Kimball's "Anti-Trump Fraternity and NeverTrump Sorority Collude in Impeachment Scam/Donald Trump asked President Zelensky to help with the Justice Department’s investigation of efforts to subvert the 2016 election. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. It is part of his responsibility to see that our elections are open and fair. Bottom line: not much to work with there for the anti-Trump fraternity."

I had to look up "cloaca maxima." Wikipedia:

The Cloaca Maxima (Latin: Cloaca Maxima, lit. Greatest Sewer, i.e. Main) has constituted one of the world's earliest sewage systems. Constructed in Ancient Rome in order to drain local marshes and remove the waste of one of world's most populous cities, it carried effluent to the River Tiber, which ran beside the city.

"In order to understand the shattering surprise that gripped team Obama, it is necessary to appreciate the sensation of absolute moral superiority that wafted them along."

"This was no mere election. It was a fight between good and evil. And they were in no doubt that they were the good guys. 'Cuba, climate, Iran,' Rhodes says, what will happen to those things now that Donald Trump is in charge? Note that he puts forward those items as if they were triumphs for the Obama administration and not disastrous missteps. 'The irony of the Obama years,' Rhodes mused, 'is going to be that he was advocating an inclusive global view rooted in common humanity and international order amidst this roiling ocean of growing nationalism and authoritarianism.' Got that? 'Inclusive' and 'common humanity' on one side versus 'nationalism' and 'authoritarianism' on the other.... The fascinating thing of 'The Final Year' is the glimpse it affords into the engine room of a certain species of elite bureaucratic presumption. It is earnest, articulate, educated, well-meaning, and utterly, dangerously naïve. When you review the series of foreign policy disasters over which Obama presided—the names Libya, Syria, and Iran offer a good start—and then contrast it with his warmhearted rhetoric, you begin to understand why Graham Greene could warn that 'innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.'"

From "A Clueless 'Final Year'" by Roger Kimball.

And yet Google used "tackle," a football metaphor. I call sexism on Google.

One of the reasons I hate Google. “Gender bias,” forsooth. pic.twitter.com/ntwrUYwXY3

— Roger Kimball (@rogerkimball) May 16, 2017

Kimball's screen shot is of the main Google search page, and that line "See how machine learning is helping us tackle gender bias in movies" is hot linked by Google to a Google article titled "The women missing from the silver screen and the technology used to find them/New research offers hard data on gender disparities in film. How might the characters we see on-screen affect the roles we play in society?"

In "Is the Gig Economy Working?" The New Yorker digs up "The Greening of America."

I love seeing that crazy 1970 book pop up — click on my Charles Reich tag to see other posts about it — and here it is in a new article — by Nathan Heller — about how the gig economy is working:

In 1970, Charles A. Reich, a [Yale] law professor who’d experienced a countercultural conversion after hanging with young people out West, published “The Greening of America,” a cotton-candy cone that wound together wispy revelations from the sixties. Casting an eye across modern history, he traced a turn from a world view that he called Consciousness I (the outlook of local farmers, self-directed workers, and small-business people, reaching a crisis in the exploitations of the Gilded Age) to what he called Consciousness II (the outlook of a society of systems, hierarchies, corporations, and gray flannel suits). He thought that Consciousness II was giving way to Consciousness III, the outlook of a rising generation whose virtues included direct action, community power, and self-definition. “For most Americans, work is mindless, exhausting, boring, servile, and hateful, something to be endured while ‘life’ is confined to ‘time off,’ ” Reich wrote. “Consciousness III people simply do not imagine a career along the old vertical lines.”...

Exponents of the futuristic tech economy frequently adopt this fifty-year-old perspective. Like Reich, they eschew the hedgehog grind of the forty-hour week; they seek a freer way to work. This productivity-minded spirit of defiance holds appeal for many children of the Consciousness III generation: the so-called millennials....

Many dreamy young people... see unrealized opportunity wherever they go. Some, in their careers, end up as what might be called hedgers. These are programmers also known as d.j.s, sculptors who excel as corporate consultants; they are Instagram-backed fashion mavens, with a TV pilot on the middle burner. They are doing it for the money, and the love, and, like the overladen students they probably once were, because they are accustomed to a counterpoint of self. The hedged career is a kind of gigging career—custom-assembled, financially diffuse, defiant of organizational constraint—and its modishness is why part-time Lyft driving or weekend TaskRabbit-ing has found easy cultural acceptance. But hedging is a luxury, available to those who have too many appealing options in life. It gestures toward the awkward question of whom, in the long run, the revolution-minded spirit of the nineteen-sixties really let off the leash.

Read the whole thing. I'd click through just to gaze at the very nice illustration, by Janne Iiovonen.

ADDED: I highly recommend Roger Kimball's 1994 article (published in The New Criterion), "Charles Reich & America’s cultural revolution/A reconsideration of The Greening of America on its 25th anniversary." Excerpt:

Legal Insurrection, your headline is embarrassingly misleading.

The headline is: "Young Americans for Freedom Labeled ‘Hate Group’ at UW Madison."

I thought maybe something new had happened here at my school, but it's just a link to a College Fix story about how a student group, The Student Coalition for Progress, is petitioning the UW to label Young Americans for Freedom a hate group.

I doubt if there's any chance that the UW will respond positively to this petition. It's ridiculously deceptive to make it look as though the UW had "labeled" YAF a hate group.

Yes, you've covered your ass with that "at" (instead of "by"), but few readers will resist jumping to the conclusion that the University took some action against the conservative group. Things happen at universities all the time. It's called freedom of speech. It's utterly dull and hardly worth mentioning that a group called The Student Coalition for Progress wants to stifle Young Americans for Freedom.

The College Fix story is new, but the petition is 3 weeks old. I blogged it here (on December 23rd.) Nothing new has happened. In fact, if you read past the first 5 paragraphs cut and pasted into Legal Insurrection — you'll have to get all the way to paragraph 17 over at College Fix — you'll see that a UW official is quoted saying:

"I do want to clarify that the petition itself does not represent the university position on the group or constitute a formal complaint against YAF."

Come on, Legal Insurrection! How many people are writing over there under a brand I associate with Cornell lawpro William A. Jacobson? The misleading article is by someone identified by first name only: Aleister. What's going on?

ADDED: And here's Roger Kimball, fooled by the headline and switching the preposition to "by":

YAF labelled “hate group” by UW Madison. What they hate is the despicable PC campaign against freedom on campus. https://t.co/8h6xVLXaN4

— Roger Kimball (@rogerkimball) January 7, 2017

Glenn Reynolds also passed along the Legal Insurrection headline, but fortunately a commenter over there caught the problem. The most up-voted comment, by willbilson, is:

Um... somebody started a petition. YAF was never 'labeled as a hate group' by UW Madison. I mean, come on. Don't publish misleading headlines. I get clickbait, I guess, but come on...

Kim Du Toit pushes back forcibly:

Feel free to take remedial reading lessons. The headline states that the YAF was labeled a hate group AT the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Not by.

Would Kim Du Toit like to speak that nastily to the estimable Roger Kimball? The headline invites misreading, and we all need to keep our bullshit detectors tuned up.

And I suspect that Glenn himself read the headline to mean "by" and not just "at," because he introduces it with "TAXPAYER-FUNDED MARGINALIZATION."

AND: There's some debate in the comments here about how much Aleister simply passed on bad text written by College Fix and how much he contributed. In the course of that debate, Meade points out that Aleister begins with his own words: "This would be the same UW Madison which is currently offering a program about the problem of whiteness."

Aleister says that as if the UW were favoring the left over the right. But there is no inconsistency. Allowing a professor to teach a race studies course that examines what he chooses to call the problem of whiteness demonstrates UW's commitment to academic freedom. That commitment is consistent with support for the free speech of YAF and the rejection the Student Coalition for Progress's request that YAF be punished for its speech.

And it should be noted that The Student Coalition for Progress is engaging in free speech when it calls YAF a "hate" group and when it petitions the authorities to do something about YAF. The Student Coalition for Progress has important free speech rights. But we should observe and criticize what is bad about the speech of The Student Coalition for Progress, and that is the idea that government authorities should suppress speech.

Students in the Coalition should think harder about free speech, throw off their repressive enthusiasm for government control, and switch to using substantive arguments about whatever it is they don't like about what YAF is saying.

I am trying to encourage them to do this. The left used to be very enthusiastic about free speech. That's something that was likable about the left. The Student Coalition for Progress may think the way to win support for their ideas is to suppress other ideas.

That's not going to work, and they shouldn't want it to work. I predict that as long as they keep trying to make that work, they will fail to win much serious support from other people, even if they succeed in eliciting some genuflection when they bullshit about "hate."

"More and more, we doubt not just the explanations and rationalizations and imprecations and animadversions directed at the phenomenon of Donald Trump's election."

"The scales have fallen from our eyes and we find that we don't care about almost anything they have to say about any subject. That subtle unspoken contract of implicit trust — between news providers and news consumers, between pedagogues and students, between experts and the rest of us — that bond has been broken, that trust shattered."

Writes Roger Kimball, encountering a question asked by me.

My question was: "The experts got blindsided by what happened on Election Day, so why should we care how they try to explain it now?"

Kimball thinks the Trump election is dissolving "the smug, 'progressive' (don't call it 'liberal') dispensation that had insinuated itself like a toxic fog throughout our cultural institutions — our media, our universities, our think tanks and beyond."

Kimball also talks about an article in Elle that I've noticed but avoided blogging. But I'm going to make a separate post for it.

Whoa! Chris Hughes, having radically disrupted The New Republic, is now walking away from it.

Wow! What a media villain!

The New Republic, the century-old magazine that was rocked a year ago by the mass exodus of its staff following an effort by its owner to make it more digitally focused, is being put up for sale. Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who purchased a majority stake in the struggling title in 2012, said in a staff memo Monday that he had underestimated “the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate,” and would seek to find a new owner.....

ADDED: My son John posted about this on Facebook, I commented there, and Timothy Noah (late of TNR and now of Politico) responded. I said I was interested in what he had to say, and he wrote this:

New owner should take a leaf from the supposedly market-worshipping right and not expect TNR to return a profit. If that's good enuf for National Review and the Weekly Standard why can't it be good enough for a magazine put out by people who are far less reverent about the virtues of untrammelled free enterprise? Plus the one GOOD thing about this golden age of income inequality is that it's produced a lot of rich people who can easily afford to subsidize a modest annual deficit. Hughes's mistake--a common one--was to pour a lot of money into the thing that he was never going to get back. Hence $20 million in losses over only four years. Also, the magazine should stop doing "long form" journalism because it's too expensive and it isn't really what TNR's been about all these years anyway. It should do lots of 1500- to 2000-word politicalreportage flavored with judicious opinion and wit, and it should do longer literary essays. In other words, it should be like the TNR of the 1980s only online and without the Cold War hawker. New owner should recapture its audience of political junkies, academics, and the intelligentsia, all of whom, I get the sense, have abandoned the magazine since Hughes took over.

AND: Roger Kimball: "ANYONE WANT TO BUY A CORPSE? YOURS FOR A BUCK."

"I wrote something very salient and important and probably not politically correct, but I don’t care."

Said Donald Trump.

I read that out loud and Meade — who really did not know I was reading a quote — said "Something has gotten into you."

I would never use "salient" in spontaneous speech.

ADDED: The oldest meaning of "salient" is leaping or jumping, notably said of animals that move by leaping, such as "Salient Mackrel." The second oldest meaning (this is all from the OED) refers to water jetting forth or "leaping upwards":

1669   R. Boyle Contin. New Exper. Physico-mech. iv. 17   We could take notice of the Lines describ'd by the Salient water, as the ejaculation of that Liquor grew still fainter and fainter.

So when you hear "salient," think: ejaculating. Of course, an ejaculation is a part of speech. Trump frequently ejaculates. It's true!

I was reading this aloud and Meade said: "More ejaculate from the non-wimp." The reference is to the notorious Carter era headline: "More Mush from the Wimp." (Side note: How good it is that Jimmy Carter is now cancer free.) I googled to get to a link for "More Mush from the Wimp," and it took me to an essay Roger Kimball published yesterday, "More Mush From the Wimp." I immediately assumed he was talking about Obama's Oval Office speech, but it was about Peter Salovey, the President of Yale. Here's one sentence written by Kimball, and it's the opposite of an ejaculation, which is a verbal expression of a word or 2 or 3, though it does contain an erection:

At Yale, the ursine circus culminated (as of this writing) in a late-night march to Salovey’s house where “traumatized” students presented a long list of demands, including abolition of the title “Master” for the heads of Yale’s residential colleges, the erection of a monument in a prominent public space acknowledging that Yale had been built on land “stolen” from “indigenous peoples,” renaming Calhoun College because its namesake, the Congressman, Senator, Vice President, and Secretary of War, had also been a strong advocate of slavery, a mandatory “ethnic studies” requirement for all students, and more attention, money, and privileges for Yale’s “students of color.” 

That's a very long sentence — 103 words — and I was going to ejaculate "Diagram that!" but it's actually pretty easy to diagram, the length mostly attributable to a long list. Did you enjoy "ursine circus"? I like the look and the sound, but I would never choose to ridicule students with an animal metaphor and, worse, the poor bears who are exploited in circus work don't deserve the comparison to Ivy League college students choosing to devote themselves to pushing for greater attention to racial matters. Perhaps someone could compose a fable about circus bears getting the idea of protesting their dismal condition and deciding that the crucial problem was race consciousness. Why is it always the black bear? You never see a polar bear forced to jump through a hoop of real fire!

"I have one very specific reason I have a relationship with Bill Clinton: I admire what he does, and I want to be part of it."

"But I’ve never asked him for a damn thing," said Frank Giustra, who has given the Clinton Foundation over $100 million. He's described — in WaPo's "The Clintons, a luxury jet and their $100 million donor from Canada" — as a "Canadian mining magnate and onetime Hollywood studio owner.

Last week, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged that an affiliated Canadian charity founded in 2007 by Giustra kept its donors secret, despite a 2008 ethics agreement with the Obama administration promising to reveal the New York-based foundation’s donors.

The foundation said the arrangement conformed with Canadian law. But it also opened a way for anonymous donors, including foreign executives with business pending before the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, to direct money to the Clinton Foundation.

For Giustra, the partnership with Bill Clinton provided an introduction to the world of international philanthropy at the highest levels — a feel-good, reputation-enhancing effort that he said he finds more personally satisfying than amassing wealth.

At the same time, Giustra continued to expand his business empire, closing some of the biggest deals of his career in the same countries where he traveled with Clinton.

According to Giustra, you can believe that Bill Clinton didn't get involved in any of those business dealings, because Bill Clinton is utterly bored by that sort of thing: "He doesn’t care about that stuff. His eyes would glaze over." Even if that is to believed, Giustra could still have used the appearance of connection to the ex-President to leverage his business dealings.

As for Giustra's believability, consider that he also says that when Bill Clinton saw that that Giustra was carrying a biography of Julius Caesar, Clinton not only began talking about the book, he began "quoting whole passages of it from memory."

ADDED: By chance, there's a nice, big new essay about Julius Caesar by the great Roger Kimball in The New Criterion. Excerpt:

Alexander Hamilton once told Jefferson that Caesar was “the greatest man who ever lived.” Hamilton might have been tweaking his humorless rival. He knew that his own political opponents often compared him to Caesar, and deep down he probably shared their suspicion, not to say their loathing, of the dictator. But everyone acknowledged Caesar’s military genius. He was a master strategist whose tactics are still studied by generals. In Gaul, through the instrumentality of his legions, he killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Yet he brought stability and a semblance of the rule of law to those rude provinces. He greatly enriched himself at the expense of those he conquered. Yet he also greatly reformed provincial governance, sharply limiting the extent of “gifts” a Roman governor could (legally) help himself to.

"When it comes to writing about anorexia, the only truly radical move, as far as I can tell, would be to show clearly just how profoundly boring it is..."

"... not sad or prurient or overdetermined," writes Alice Gregory in "Anorexia, the Impossible Subject," in The New Yorker (reviewing "How to Disappear Completely: On Modern Anorexia").

The very premise is an unappealing one: we’d like to believe that such unhinged myopia would have psychological roots in trauma or in some sinister personal history, but usually it doesn’t.... [A] voluntarily isolated person choosing not to eat until she’s addicted to not eating doesn’t make for a very good story....

If we really wanted to protect our supposedly susceptible youth, we’d paint anorexics as they are: slowly suicidal obsessives who avoid other people and expend ninety-five per cent of their mental energy counting the calories in green vegetables. We wouldn’t see them as worth reading about at all.

But readers choose books because they are interesting, and so whatever is written about well enough to attract readers is going to make the subject absorbing, exciting, glamorous. What things other than anorexia are actually quite boring but written about in books as if they were not boring? When else do we worry that readers will be tricked into doing things they should not do because the book failed to depict the activity as boring?

And yet... isn't Gregory is falling prey to the imitative fallacy?

"What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all..."

"... everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?"

A Kafka quote begins Roger Kimball's op-ed "This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit/Sandy wrecked our house, but bureaucrats are keeping it broken."

Kimball also quotes Hayek:

[T]he power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.

And Tocqueville:

"[A] network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules"... reduces citizens "to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Books:

Franz Kafka, "The Trial"
F.A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"
Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"
Roger Kimball, "The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia"

Finally! "The Greening of America" is out on Kindle.

Got it!

[CAVEAT: The Kindle version is newly abridged, "compressing the original 125,000 words to an Internet-friendly 24,000 words and eliminating most of the sections on "Consciousness III." Updated? Charles Reich wrote a new preface and final chapter." Damn. As you see below, I'm most interested in the stuff that is outdated and embarrassing!]

[From the first link:]

In 1970, The New Yorker Magazine ran a 39,000-word excerpt of ‘The Greening of America' -- the longest in its history. Then the book was published. It caused a firestorm. Written by Charles Reich, a distinguished professor at Yale Law, it showed how a once-free America had become a Corporate State that made no one happy. And then it suggested a remedy.

The way out? It wasn't political change — for Reich, politics came last. The first and most important thing: Consciousness. As he saw it, America had outgrown "Consciousness I," which had helped form a nation of free individuals. It had outgrown "Consciousness II," which was corporate and heartless. Now it was time for "Consciousness III," in which people would turn away from the quest for traditional success and forge a new, personal path to satisfaction.

In short: Change the way you think, help others do the same, and soon the system has to change.

Ah, soon the system has to change. Hope and change, baby. It's 42 years later and look at all this change. It's change as far as the eye can see.

I love reading these pop culture books of the past, that is, my past. Especially circa 1970.

I also got the Kindle version of Roger Kimball's "The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America," which I have already read and enjoyed, because I wanted to be able to cut and paste a little something of what Kimball says about "The Greening of America," which he memorably savages:

Obama says "it’s clear we are on the precipice of achievement..."

"... that’s eluded Congresses, presidents for generations — an achievement that will touch the lives of nearly every American."

On the precipice? Great! Plunge onward, then, o wise one!

"The real story has as much to do with journalistic irrelevance as journalistic integrity."

Roger Kimball on WaPo's Pimpsalongate.

I made up "Pimpsalongate." It's just a placeholder coinage. Help me out here!

IN THE COMMENTS: Curtiss has "All the President's Pimps."