Bedeviled.

 

This is found art — wordplay that appears by chance.

I was doing a word search in the OED, looking up "bedevil," because it had come up in an article I just blogged. The NYT writer crafted this sentence: "Was [Trump] upset that [Melania] had single-handedly thrust this story that had so bedeviled him back onto front pages around the globe?" (Don't get me started on "thrust" and "globe.")

That blog post ends with a quote from Lord Byron, and I see the OED entry for "bedevil" also has a quote from Lord Byron — worrying about critics of "my poor, gentle, unresisting Muse, whom they have already so be-deviled with their ungodly ribaldry."

I like the word bedevil. It's vivid, perhaps too vivid. Are we to picture devils? Does anyone think of Jeffrey Epstein as literally The Devil? I know JD Vance seems to think the UFOs are devils — "I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a longer discussion."

Have I been casually summoning up The Devil over the years by using this word that I like? Checking the 22-year blog archive, I see I've quoted it a few times and I've used it twice. Both times came in 2014. Once, in July, on the topic of ObamaCare:

"When they start killing white women, the devil not only leaves the station, but he moves to the suburbs and puts on a badge."

"When they start killing white women, they see a minivan and call it a tank.... When they start killing white women, and I have to say it...."

Both VP nominees are now participating in the old tradition of responding to questions written on an orange that a reporter has rolled up the aisle of the campaign plane.

ABC reports.

Walz did it first, responding to the question "Dream dinner guest?" His answer (written on the orange and rolled back (more than a day later)): Bruce Springsteen.

(I struggle to resist re-telling the story of My Dinner With Bruce Springsteen.)

Vance's reporters wanted in on this orange action and rolled him the question "Fave Song." Under the circumstances, I would have chosen "Let Me Roll It"...

But Vance rolled back — immediately — "10 Years Gone":

Thank God something light-hearted is happening on this overwrought campaign.

Rivers always reach the sea/Flying skies of fortune, each a separate way/On the wings of maybe....

Why did it take Walz over a day to think up Bruce Springsteen? If you were going to workshop the most politically opportune answer, assuming you'd pick a pop star, wouldn't you pick a pop star affiliated with a battleground state? 

I see that Kamala Harris, on Steve Colbert's show last night — see "The high life: Kamala Harris cracks open a beer with Stephen Colbert" (Guardian)— chose Miller High Life as the beer for the little exercise in relatability" and...

Harris repeated the popular slogan “The champagne of beers”, while Colbert noted that it comes from Milwaukee, in the swing state of Wisconsin. He said: “So that covers Wisconsin. Let’s talk Michigan. Let’s appeal to the Michigan voters, OK? What are your favourite Bob Seger songs?”

Walz could have said Bob Seger! What're his politics?  

Vance answered quickly, and his choice is a bit idiosyncratic, but that doesn't free him of any suspicion of answering what he thought was politically advantageous. He's a quick thinker, and he knows the assignment. But he's chosen British pop stars, and "Ten Years Gone" is not near the top of obvious Led Zeppelin songs.  It's #40 on Vulture's "All 74 Led Zeppelin Songs, Ranked." So there's a good chance it really is his favorite Led Zeppelin song.

Is Led Zeppelin his favorite band? The name appears 4 times in "Hillbilly Elegy." Here are 2::

At the bobdylan subreddit this morning, somebody asks "Why doesn't Dylan speak out more about politics?"

Here.

And somebody quotes something that I track down to this 1984 Rolling Stone interview:

Do you follow the political scene or have any sort of fix on what the politicians are talking about this election year?

I think politics is an instrument of the Devil. Just that clear. I think politics is what kills; it doesn’t bring anything alive. Politics is corrupt; I mean, anybody knows that.

"The Satanic Temple of Iowa says a statue depicting the pagan idol Baphomet, part of its controversial display in the Iowa Capitol, had been destroyed."

The Des Moine Register reports.

The installation, permitted under state rules governing religious displays in the building, has come under debate and criticism of by Iowa and national politicians. Presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis on Tuesday joined a chorus of Republicans calling for its removal while others in the GOP said that, though it is offensive, it is a protected form of free speech....

Why did Ted Cruz drag Pat Benatar into this?

Ted Cruz: “I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict.” pic.twitter.com/ysYei6Rr3E

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) June 15, 2023

Let's read "Pat Benatar roasts Sen. Ted Cruz after he suggests she’s demonic" (NY Post). Ah:

Cruz’s comment may have been a reference to the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s 1980 hit “Hell Is For Children.”

It's odd that Cruz assumes people know this song, which I see was the B side of "Love Is a Battlefield." This is a recording from 1980. I'm older than  most Americans, and I remember living through the songs of 43 years ago, but I only knew the A side.

Here are the lyrics. To quote a bit: "It's all so confusing, this brutal abusing/They blacken your eyes, and then 'pologize/You're daddy's good girl, and don't tell mommy a thing.... Hell is for children...."

Of course, the Post headline is silly. Cruz didn't "suggest" that Benatar is "demonic." He created an exaggerated image of Joe Biden — something along the lines of Trump's "shoot a man on 5th Avenue" — as a way to say that nothing would be enough to turn Senate Democrats against Biden. Singing "Hell Is For Children" is a stray detail probably intended to add color and coolness, but of course, Benatar doesn't want her song thought of as celebrating the point of view of the child abuser. 

Outrage was predicted, and I said "Predicted outrage, the stupidest form of outrage."

And: "I suspect most Christians know not to get triggered by every celebrity jackass who announces they're going to yank your chain tonight. Sam Smith will be dressed up as Satan. Why, that's as outrageous as a 5-year-old on Halloween!"

But the theater of outrage had to go on. I'm just making a screen shot, not linking to the predictable noise from public figures. I think silence and restraint are the better response, but the temptation is so intense:

At the Grammy Awards tonight, there will be a performance that will "make a lot of people very upset" and "I guarantee there will be calls to CBS from outraged Christians."

The "I" is an unnamed source, presumably someone with an interest in jacking up ratings for the show.

I'm reading "Sam Smith, Kim Petras 'Unholy' Grammy Performance Expected To Spark Outrage: 'I Guarantee There Will Be Calls to CBS From Outraged Christians'" (Decider).

Predicted outrage, the stupidest form of outrage. I suspect most Christians know not to get triggered by every celebrity jackass who announces they're going to yank your chain tonight.

Sam Smith will be dressed up as Satan. Why, that's as outrageous as a 5-year-old on Halloween!

ADDED: I listened to the song on Spotify and read the lyrics at Genius. It's about a man having sex with a prostitute, and we're told that this sex is "unholy" and that the man is a "dirty, dirty boy." 

AND: It seems as though Sam Smith has embraced the old Woody Allen answer to the question "Is sex dirty?"

"Evil, be thou my good."

Said Satan, in "Paradise Lost," quoted in "Bad is Good and Good is Bad" (TV Tropes).

Sometimes it isn't enough for a villain to be evil. They have to prove their evilness by eschewing all that is good and embracing all that is bad. They'll eat foods that disgust the good guys and laugh at funerals. They may also carry this over to their speech, making sure to only use negative phrases when most people would use a positive one, and correcting themselves if they "slip" ("Oh, goody! I mean, 'baddy.'")....

Compare Above Good and Evil and What Is Evil? Villains whose strong point is not logic will sometimes use both tropes to justify this. See also Bizarro Universe, Mirror Universe, Blue-and-Orange Morality, and Naughty Is Good. Not to be confused with So Bad, It's Good.

The most obvious law school hypothetical when teaching the Good News Club case has come to life with the After School Satan Club.

I'm reading "Parents slam school’s ‘sick’ Satan Club for children as young as 5: ‘Disgusting’" (NY Post).

I got there via Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit:

WHOSE CHILDREN DO THOSE PARENTS THINK THOSE KIDS ARE? Parents slam school’s ‘sick’ Satan Club for children as young as 5: ‘Disgusting’.

Sorry, but this is exactly what was bargained for when by anyone who supported the after-school Christian club, approved of by the Supreme Court back in 2001.

Either you have a special rule excluding religion or you don't. In Good News Club, a Christian after-school club had been excluded and the Supreme Court saw that as discrimination against religion. Once you get that far, you can't have viewpoint discrimination. Viewpoint discrimination is worse than discrimination against religion in general. So there now you can't exclude the Satanist club.

I used to teach a Religion & the Constitution course, and I was teaching it when the Good News Club case came out. The first hypothetical that springs to mind is an After School Satan Club. Legal decisions have consequences, and sometimes they are perfectly obvious.

 

You think that's disgusting? Some people think all after-school religion clubs are disgusting, but they lost in the Supreme Court in 2001. And some people think government viewpoint discrimination is disgusting? Get your values in order and try to be consistent.

"This is speed metal without the embarrassment of Spandex and junior high school devil worship."

Writes Bob Dylan, in "The Philosophy of Modern Song."

What recorded performance is he talking about? This:

"[T]he dictatorship of the Western elites is directed against all societies, including the peoples of the Western countries themselves."

"This is a challenge for everyone. Such a complete denial of man, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, the suppression of freedom acquiring the features of a 'reverse religion' – outright Satanism. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ, denouncing the false prophets, says: By their fruits you shall know them. And these poisonous fruits are already obvious to people – not only in our country, in all countries, including many people in the West itself...."

Said Vladimir Putin, in his speech at the "annexation ceremony." I'm reading the full transcript, here.

"The Dutch like to say, 'Acting normal is crazy enough.' And we think that rich people are not acting normal."

"Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think 'Be average.' That’s good enough...”

Said Ellen Verkoelen, "a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners," quoted in "The Country That Wants to ‘Be Average’ vs. Jeff Bezos and His $500 Million Yacht/Why did Rotterdam stand between one of the world’s richest men and his boat? The furious response is rooted in Dutch values" (NYT).

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’” 

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.”...

"Well, that game's over! 74 years is enough of that!"

Announces Meade, channeling the mindset of Gallup, after reading "Did Gallup End 'Most Admired' 74-Year Polling Tradition to Avoid Trump Placing First?"

Yes, the admiration of human beings is a dangerous business. Why not back off? I remember when The Ladies Home Journal used to produce lists of the 10 "favorite heroes and heroines" of boys and girls, something I blogged about back in 2005, with a photograph from my copy of the 1977 best-seller "The Book of Lists":

Henry Kissinger! And yet:

The first page of "The Book of Lists" is a set of seven lists of "The Most Hated and Feared Persons in History" for the years 1970-1976. Hitler comes in Number 1 for all the years except 1972 and 1973, when Nixon comes in first! In fact, 1972 was a good year for Hitler, when he made it all the way down to fourth place. Idi Amin and Mao Tse-tung were, along with Nixon, more hated and feared. Satan was in fifth place that year. Amusingly, by 1976, Nixon is off the five-person list altogether, and Jimmy Carter is on, tied for fourth place with Count Dracula.

How could Nixon be worse than Hitler? And yet he was. Things near in time seem more important. How will Trump look as he fades into the distance? But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I don't know if he's in the process of fading right now or the process of bouncing back. He is very bouncy.

"Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice."

"It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."

A quote by G.K. Chesterton that I bumbled into this morning as I attempted to research the hypothesis: Seriousness is not serious. But what is the source of this hypothesis?, you may ask. Ha ha. You probably have many other questions, and yet you have no reason to think I will answer them.

"I feel like it’s fucked up they have so much power they can get shoes cancelled. Freedom of expression gone out the window."

Said Lil Nas X, quoted in "Lil Nas X Satan Shoes will be recalled as part of settlement with Nike/Nike sued MSCHF Product Studio for trademark infringement over the black-and-red, devil-themed sneakers" (The Guardian). 

Can't you make shoes out of shoes — decorate them, bedazzle them — and then sell them? We won't get an official legal answer, because Lil Nas settled the case. Nike retains the threat of litigation over anyone who tries to use their shoes as a foundation for a fashion/art project. 

Lil Nas loses nothing other than the opportunity to fund litigation to establish the principle he speaks as though he cares about. But the shoes that were made — all 666 pairs of them — were sold in the first minute, and anyone who bought the shoes can now get a refund of the purchase price — $1018 — but no one will do that, because they're notorious, and they are clearly more valuable now that they've become so famous.  I see on eBay that a pair recently sold for $5,000, so only an ignoramus would participate in the recall.

Did anyone ever really believe that devil-themed sneakers were outrageous? Kids wear devil costumes at Halloween. The devil is not a big enough villain to make anything edgy in 2021... or in 1951. 

But Big Sneaker put its foot down, and ooh!, it's almost illicit to possess these things.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"Russian riot police stormed into a monastery Tuesday to detain a rebel monk who has castigated the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church leadership and denied the existence of the coronavirus...."

"Authorities charged [Father Sergiy] with inciting suicidal actions through sermons in which he urged believers to 'die for Russia.'...  When the virus arrived in Russia early this year, the 65-year-old monk denied its existence and denounced government efforts to stem the pandemic as 'Satan’s electronic camp.' He has described the vaccines being developed against COVID-19 as part of a global plot to control the masses via chips.... The monk chastised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a 'traitor to the Motherland' who was serving a Satanic 'world government.'...  In his fiery sermons, he... glorified Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II."

AP reports.

"... 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.

"She told us he would never be able to get a job, and that teachers wouldn’t want to teach him. 'I tried to explain that we are not religious people, and Lucifer in Greek means "light-bringer" and "morning" but she wouldn’t listen.'"

Says a father quoted in "HELLUVA NAME/Couple win battle to name son Lucifer after registrar tried to bar them because it is another name for the devil" (The Sun).

[Dan Sheldon] 37, a plant hire company boss, lodged an official complaint over how he and Mandy, 32, were treated at their local office in Chesterfield, Derbys. He said: “We were really excited to go and get him registered but the woman looked at us in utter disgust.... She even told us that it was illegal to name a child that in New Zealand and that maybe we could name him something else but refer to him as Lucifer at home....”

Chesterfield is in England.

“We were gobsmacked with her behaviour. Eventually she did it, but it was through gritted teeth. Honestly, we just thought it was a nice name . . . a unique one. We didn’t expect to get so much grief about it.”

Derbyshire County Council said: “We apologise if they were offended but it is the job of our registrars to advise in these matters as sometimes people are not aware of certain meanings or associations around certain names.”

So the problem here is not that the parents wanted to name their child Lucifer, but that the government official gave them any friction at all. The name was registered, the parents made an official complaint against the government worker, and the county council apologized.

From the Wikipedia article, "Lucifer":

The motif of a heavenly being striving for the highest seat of heaven only to be cast down to the underworld has its origins in the motions of the planet Venus, known as the morning star. The Sumerian goddess Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar) is associated with the planet Venus.... A similar theme is present in the Babylonian myth of Etana...

Kanye West is running for President as the candidate of "the Birthday Party," Elon Musk is advising him....

... and he's not for Trump anymore — "I am taking the red hat off, with this interview."

Here's the interview — in Forbes. Other high points:

... he’s ok with siphoning off Black votes from the Democratic nominee, thus helping Trump. “I’m not denying it, I just told you. To say that the Black vote is Democratic is a form of racism and white supremacy.”
... he’s never voted in his life.
... he was sick with Covid-19 in February.
... he’s suspicious of a coronavirus vaccine, terming vaccines “the mark of the beast.”
... he believes “Planned Parenthoods have been placed inside cities by white supremacists to do the Devil’s work.”
... he envisions a White House organizational model based on the secret country of Wakanda in Black Panther.

ADDED:

His running mate? Michelle Tidball, an obscure preacher from Wyoming. And why the Birthday Party? “Because when we win, it’s everybody’s birthday.”...

A few weeks after he ended two separate text chains with me with the message “Trump 2020” and a fist raised high, he insists he’s lost confidence in the president. “It looks like one big mess to me,” he says. “I don’t like that I caught wind that he hid in the bunker.”...

That said, he won’t say much more against Trump. He’s much less shy about criticizing Biden, which certainly won’t tamp down the idea that the Birthday Party is a ruse to help re-elect Trump. “I’m not saying Trump’s in my way, he may be a part of my way. And Joe Biden? Like come on man, please. You know? Obama’s special. Trump’s special. We say Kanye West is special. America needs special people that lead. Bill Clinton? Special. Joe Biden’s not special.”...

Kanye West is very good at saying interesting things. So's Trump. They're special.