Last night at the American Players Theater.

A play from the 90s about a man who spends $200,000 on a painting that's just basically all white and another man who takes umbrage at that and a third man who won't take a position but would dearly like it if they all could just be friends. Could be viewed as a political allegory. Many imprecations to "Read Seneca."

Elon as Braveheart.

Everybody dies, but not everybody lives https://t.co/rYtoq01ygH

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2025

AND: There's also this, from Seneca (at page 46-47 of this collection (commission earned)): 

"Welp. I'm cooked.... I was just bit on the leg by a diamondback.... Let's get some pictures of it first."

NEW: Florida man accepts his fate after being bitten by a diamondback rattlesnake, says he is "cooked" but at least it will make a good meme.

Gotta respect his commitment to the meme game.

Social media influencer David Humphlett told the snake "good game" (gg) before he was… pic.twitter.com/Vmwh4ve3RT

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 31, 2024

We're told that this young man, a "social media influencer" named David Humphlett, made it to the hospital, but not before swinging his camera around and complimenting the snake: "Let's get some pictures of it first. We're already screwed anyways. Cool snake! Big diamondback!"

They're saving him at the hospital. He received 88 vials of antivenin. You may think he's an idiot, but is he? Hearing his words called to mind Seneca's "How to Die" (commission earned) which I happen to be in the middle of reading:

There’s no life that’s not short. If you examine the nature of things, even the life of Nestor is short, or that of Sattia, who ordered inscribed on her tombstone that she had lived ninety-nine years. You see in her someone glorying in a long old age. But who could have endured her, if she had filled out a full century? Just as with storytelling, so with life: it’s important how well it is done, not how long. It doesn’t matter at what point you call a halt. Stop wherever you like; only put a good closer on it. Farewell.

 We're already screwed anyways. We're cooked. This is it. This is death. It came by snake. And you have the presence of mind to proclaim: Cool snake.

"I will... leave my memories, my reflections and I will cease to exist in this body... I don’t know when, but very soon..."

"... this long journey will come to an end. Death will find me worn down from having lived so much, but I want to meet it with a smile, feeling free and satisfied."

Said María Branyas Morera, quoted in "World’s oldest person, whose secret was avoiding ‘toxic people,’ dies at 117/María Branyas Morera, a U.S.-born Spaniard, died in her sleep. Her family said she recently spoke of nearing death and that she would miss daily mundanities like drinking coffee" (WaPo).

The quote made me think of these lines from Seneca, in "How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life" (commission earned):

Take this on faith from me: I won’t tremble, at the last moments; I’m prepared. I don’t think at all about the entire day ahead. Praise and emulate that man who does not disdain to die, though it’s pleasant to live; what virtue is there in leaving by being thrown out? Yet here too is a virtue: I’m being thrown out, but let me take my leave nonetheless. The wise man is never thrown out, for to be thrown out is to be expelled from a place that you leave unwillingly; the wise man does nothing unwillingly; he flees from necessity, since he desires that which it will force upon him. Farewell.

Terse texting is not misunderstood at Meadhouse.

Received in the middle of the night:

Meade intended to say: Please add that to our Audible account. But by hitting a share button, Amazon added the seemingly friendly generic message, "I think you might like this book." The book is "How to Die"! I think you might like How to Die....

In case you want to buy the book — and send us a commission — here's the Amazon link: "How to Die: An Ancient Guide to the End of Life (Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers)."

I'm glad to see that I already had a "Seneca" tag, and I like that this is the second post of the morning that reminds us that men are always thinking about the Roman Empire. 

Actually, I think the "Seneca" tag originated as a commenter name, here. Back in 2009, someone with the pen name Seneca helped me distinguish a butterfly from a moth (and another commenter made a comic animation out of my photograph of a rather moth-y butterfly).

To "shy" is "To take a sudden fright or aversion; to make a difficulty, ‘boggle’ about doing something; to recoil, shrink."

According to the OED, where I looked in an effort to understand the NYT headline "Who’s Going to Tell Him? Republicans Shy From Asking Trump to Concede." 

I get that Republicans are not telling Trump to concede, but I don't see the evidence that they are shying. Who's taking a sudden fright or aversion? Who's recoiling or shrinking?

You'd have to establish that there are Republicans who urgently desire to tell Trump to give up and just freaking out about it, like a horse spotting a snake. To "boggle" is "To start with fright, to shy as a startled horse; to take alarm, be startled, scared." The article identifies no one who's in this position. 

Are there even any Trump-allied Republicans who think it's past time for Trump to abandon his fight, when the votes are not yet fully counted and litigation routes remain open? Mitch McConnell acknowledged Trump's justification for continuing to question the results. Only 4 Senators have congratulated Biden, but all 4 are well-established in their antagonism toward Trump.

There's no suddenness, no fright and therefore no shying. Not that I can see from this article. Maybe somewhere in the dark indoor spaces of Washington, Republicans are cowering in fear, but even that has no suddenness about it. There's no shying. 

I'm going on about this because I am resisting getting drawn into the emotionalism. "Shying" is an absurdly overemotional word in that headline, and the appropriate assumption is not that emotions are raging everywhere among the Washington elite. It's that everyone is behaving strategically. The media's calling of the election when it did, the Biden supporters insisting on a concession now, the outrage that questions about voting are raised, the Trump's refusal to give up, the Republicans giving Trump his space to stir up his supporters — it's all cold, hard strategy. That's my assumption.

***

"It is no wonder, that men are generally very much unsatisfied with the world.... Either we are puffed up with pride, racked with desires, dissolved in pleasures, or blasted with cares; and, which perfects our unhappiness, we are never alone, but in perpetual conflict and controversy with our lusts. We are startled at all accidents; we boggle at our own shadows, and fright one another" — Seneca.

"You don't have to like it, but we don't go after people because we don't like who they voted for. We don't go after them that way."

"We can talk about issues and stuff, but we don't print out lists.... Think about it. Read about it. Remember what the blacklist actually meant to people and don't encourage anyone — anyone — to do it."

Whoopi Goldberg gets intense, pushing back Debra Messing (who talked about making a list of Hollywood people who attend a Trump fundraiser).

This clip from "The View" begins with a milder statement from Joy Behar who uses the joke that it should be called a "white list" not a "blacklist," but Goldberg — who, unlike Behar, is black — ignores the joke and uses the traditional term "blacklist":



Goldberg's intensity was excellent. I might fault her for 2 things, but the overall impression is so good, I almost don't want to say it. But I will:

1. Goldberg instructs Messing, et al., not to make a list "because the next list that comes out, your name will be on and then people will be coming after you," as if the morality in question is nothing but self-interest, but it's wrong even if you can feel certain that you'll never be on the receiving end.

2. Goldberg says that in the old Hollywood blacklist days "a lot of really good people were accused of stuff" and "nobody cared whether it was true or not." The "stuff" was left-wing politics, and these days it's the left-wingers who are trying to cancel the people they don't agree with. It's not so much that people back then didn't care about what was true or not, but more that those who made the blacklist had too much certainty and rectitude about their own political beliefs and — perversely — thought it was a good idea to frighten, destroy, and silence those who wanted to say something else. (I say perversely, because if you're so sure your ideas are right, you shouldn't be afraid to have them challenged and talked about by people who think something else and also because freedom of speech was part of the traditional values system they purported to defend.)

What was the premise of Behar's "white list" joke — that Trump supporters are white or that Trump supporters are white supremacists? I don't know, but I'm glad Goldberg stomped on it, because "white list" already has a meaning — a useful meaning. It's a list of what is good. Instead of naming the people or businesses you want to exclude, you name the ones you've checked out and approve of and want to reward with your business.

"Blacklist" is a strong word with a precise meaning: "A list of the names of people, groups, etc., who have incurred suspicion, censure, or displeasure, and are typically therefore subject to a ban or other punishment." That's the OED, which has examples going back to the 17th century. "White list," as a play on "blacklist" has been around since at least 1842. From Christian Remembrancer:

In the black list of Ludovicus Vives were ‘Amadis de Gaul’, ‘Torante the White’, ‘Lancelot de Lac’, ‘Paris et Vienne’..cards, dice, and gay dresses. In the white list were Cyprian, Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose, Plato, Cicero, Seneca's maxims and tragedies..and portions of Horace.

"In reaction to the growing globalization of the Roman Empire, elite corruption, the banality of bread-and-circuses, and the end of the agrarian Italian Republic, the Stoics opted out..."

"... choosing instead a reasoned detachment from contemporary life. Some, like the worldly court philosopher Seneca, seemed hypocritical; others, such as the later emperor Marcus Aurelius, lived a double life of imperial engagement and mental detachment. Classical impassiveness established the foundations for the later monastic Christians, who in more dangerous times increasingly saw the world around them as incompatible with the world to come — and therefore they saw engagement as an impediment to their own Christian belief. More and more Americans today are becoming Stoic dropouts. They are not illiberal, and certainly not reactionaries, racists, xenophobes, or homophobes. They’re simply exhausted by our frenzied culture.... Monastics are tuning out the media.... When everything is politicized, everything is monotonous; nothing is interesting... For millions of Americans, their music, their movies, their sports, and their media are not current fare. Instead, they have mentally moved to mountaintops or inaccessible valleys, where they can live in the past or dream of the future, but certainly not dwell in the here and now...."

Writes Victor Davis Hanson in "Monasteries of the Mind," which I'm reading because because it was recommended in the comments to a post I'd put up earlier today. The commenter, Jeff Kuebler, said:

Standing off, interesting--I clicked here right after reading Victor D Hanson's column on people tuning out.

What I'd written was:

Speaking of very, very ugly,* I feel myself drifting away from politics. In the early years of this blog, I had a subheading under the blog title "Althouse" that read: "Politics and the aversion to politics, law and law school, high and low culture, and the way things look from Madison, Wisconsin." The aversion to politics had kind of been the story of my life, and blogging had me just dabbling in actual political opinion. The opinion has always been tinged with the aversion. I'm standing off at some distance observing how other people are political.

_______________________

* The post began with a quote from Joe Biden imagining the world turning very ugly, very, very ugly.

"We have done everything possible to make the presidency less venerated."

Says José Mujica, the president of Uruguay, who lives "a run-down house on Montevideo’s outskirts with no servants at all... never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor." That leaves him with $800 a moth.

Quoting the Roman court-philosopher Seneca, Mr. Mujica said, “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, who is poor.”...

Before Mr. Mujica became a gardener of chrysanthemums, he was a leader of the Tupamaros, the urban guerrilla group that drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution, carrying out armed bank robberies and kidnappings on Montevideo’s streets....

He spent 14 years in prison, including more than a decade in solitary confinement, often in a hole in the ground. During that time, he would go more than a year without bathing, and his companions, he said, were a tiny frog and rats with whom he shared crumbs of bread....

Mr. Mujica rarely speaks about his time in prison. Seated at a table in his garden, sipping his mate, he said it gave him time to reflect. “I learned that one can always start again,” he said.

At the Closer Look Nightclub...

... let's talk intimately.

AND: Here's the more distant view of the butterfly (moth?). [Thanks to commenter Seneca: "Butterfly. Moth antennae are fluffy."] And, from the same beautiful herb garden, a hummingbird.

ALSO: Thanks to Instapundit for linking. By the way, when my titles designate a post as a "nightclub," "café," "tavern," "restaurant," or some such place, it means you can use the topic thread to talk about anything you like. It's an open thread, so don't think anybody in there is hijacking the thread or disrespecting my photography.

AND: Chip animates my first photo: