"In the vacuous tumult of the Trump era, I was looking for something durable: a stiff shot of no-nonsense spirituality."

"I’m a skeptic by profession, an Irish Catholic by baptism, culture and upbringing — lapsed but listening, like half of all Americans of my family’s faith. But I was no longer comfortable in the squishy middle; it was too easy. I’d come to believe that an agnostic, as the Catholic comedian Stephen Colbert put it, 'is just an atheist without any balls.'"

Nugget extracted from "One Cure for Malnutrition of the Soul" (NYT) by searching the page for "Trump." The column, by Timothy Egan, is subtitled "We are spiritual beings. That’s why I joined the millions of people who make some form of religious pilgrimage." We're told Egan has a forthcoming book “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith.”

I also searched the page for "global warming," "climate change," and "environment," because why does the cure for malnutrition of the soul have a big carbon footprint? Why not take your pilgrimage beginning at your own front door and walking to some American shrine?

Hey, I like my idea! What would your pilgrimage be? Egan's classic walk is 1,000 miles. Start at your door and walk a distance long enough to count as a "pilgrimage" that ends somewhere that you can conceptualize as a spiritual destination. Where do you go?

Maybe what explains Trump is sleep deprivation.

NYT columnist Timothy Egan talks about it. I found that column because Meade and I had, independently, been toying with that theory.

Trump has informed us that he gets very little sleep — claims not to need more. But look at his puffy eyes. Sometimes you can't even see his eyes. And often, when asked a question, he lurches as if hit with a soft, invisible punch, causing me to wonder if he's actually somehow sleeping in these intervals. That might explain the oddness of his response in that Jake Tapper interview on Sunday, when he didn't immediately respond and disown David Duke (as he had done, easily, just 2 days before). Is he able to check out while appearing awake? He's an unusual man, with special powers, and I'm theorizing that one thing he can do is weave tiny intervals of sleep into his seemingly waking hours.

Egan relies on the symptoms of sleep deprivation listed by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and his subjective opinion that Trump has them all:

His judgment is off, and almost always ill informed. He has trouble processing basic information. He imagines things. He shows a lack of concentration. He’s easily distracted.....

Egan adds:

In addition, Trump is given to sudden, inchoate bursts of anger and profanity. He creates feuds. In his speeches, he picks up on the angry voice in the mob and then amplifies it.

When I see his puffy eyes and face, I don’t see a man who will carefully weigh all the facts and consequences of an action that could affect everyone on the planet. I see an impulsive, vainly insecure person who cannot shut his mind down for a night.

"Obama is no socialist. A socialist would have nationalized General Motors, instead of returning it to capitalistic solvency."

"A socialist would not have presided over a doubling of the stock market, without adding significant new taxes to Wall Street’s biggest beneficiaries. For true socialism in action, look to the billionaire Trump. As a developer, he’s tried to use eminent domain — 'state-sanctioned thievery,' in the words of National Review Online — to get other people’s property. There’s your communist. He has no problem taking from others to serve the public 'good.'"

That's Timothy Egan in a NYT op-ed called "Guess Who Else Is a Socialist?"

The NYT deploys a National Review Online quote — presumably for corroboration, conservative opinion backing up liberal — but doesn't bother to give us a link. Here's the article, from April 2011, "Donald Trump and Eminent Domain." Excerpt:

The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment allows the government to take private property for “public use,” so long as “just compensation” is paid. In the infamous 2005 Kelo decision, the Supreme Court held that “public use” could include, well, private use, so long as the new property owner paid more in taxes than the previous one. In other words, it allowed developers and the government to gang up on homeowners. The developer gets more land, the government gets more tax money. The only losers are the original owner and his property rights.

A decade and a half ago, it was fresh on everyone’s mind that Donald Trump is one of the leading users of this form of state-sanctioned thievery. It was all over the news. In perhaps the most-remembered example, John Stossel got the toupéed one to sputter about how, if he wasn’t allowed to steal an elderly widow’s house to expand an Atlantic City casino, the government would get less tax money, and seniors like her would get less “this and that.” Today, however, it takes a push from the Club for Growth to remind us of Trump’s lack of respect for property rights....

The "this and that" link goes to a John Stossel 2004 article at Reason.com titled "Confessions of a Welfare Queen/How rich bastards like me rip off taxpayers for millions of dollars." Excerpt:

It looked to me like the government was robbing Vera Coking to pay off Donald Trump. The government officials wouldn’t talk to me about it, but Trump did.

Stossel: In the old days, big developers came in with thugs with clubs. Now you use lawyers. You go to court and you force people out.

Trump: Excuse me. Other people maybe use thugs today. I don’t. I’ve done this very nicely. If I wanted to use thugs, we wouldn’t have any problems. It would have been all taken care of many years ago. I don’t do business that way. We have been so nice to this woman.

"Nice" is Trump's favorite word. People think it's "huge," but it's actually "nice."

Trump: Do you want to live in a city where you can’t build roads or highways or have access to hospitals? Condemnation is a necessary evil.

Stossel: But we’re not talking about a hospital. This is a building a rich guy finds ugly.

Trump: You’re talking about at the tip of this city, lies a little group of terrible, terrible tenements -- just terrible stuff, tenement housing.

Stossel: So what?

Trump: So what?...Atlantic City does a lot less business, and senior citizens get a lot less money and a lot less taxes and a lot less this and that.

Sadly, claims that people will be deprived of "this and that" can now be used by politicians to condemn your house. It didn’t seem right to Vera Coking. "This is America," she said. "My husband fought in the war and worked to make sure I would have a roof over my head, and they want to take it from me?"

Stossel goes on to say that Trump lost that case: "Vera Coking got to keep her home. She still lives there, surrounded by Trump’s hotel." That was written back in 2004. I looked up Vera Coking to see how she's doing these days, found a Wikipedia article, and it had this picture of her house:



That's one of what Trump called "terrible, terrible tenements." I guess if you say the adjective more than once it seems more true.

(The structure built around Coking's house in the picture isn't Trump's. It's an erection of Bob Guccione's that never achieved completion and got torn down later as Trump was building his hotel in 1993 and offering Coking a quarter of what Guccione had offered in the 1970s. Trump wanted to put a parking lot in that area. Trump built his hotel, which went out of business in 2014, which was also the year Coking finally sold her house. She got twice the amount Trump had offered in 1993, half what Guccione had offered in the 1970s.)

"Can we blame the mother of Adam Lanza... Can we blame the mother of the Oregon shooter...?"

Asks Timothy Egan in the NYT.

What about the fathers? Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said the Oregon shooter’s father, divorced and absent for some time from his son, was “a failure” who “owes us all an apology.” Fathers certainly have an equal responsibility. But it’s the mothers, in most cases, who know the names of their children’s teachers, who understand their deepest fears, who have a unique relationship.

Hmm. The "unique relationship" the mother has is a consequence of the father's failure. If the point is to stop future harm, then all causal factors matter.

But Egan is doing gender politics and advocating for gun control. He's getting the NYT reader's attention by beginning with something transgressive. He dares to blame the woman. But then he drives a wedge, the wedge that men have driven through the ages: There are good women and bad women.

A group, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, was formed after the Newtown carnage. It’s a good counter to the creepy cultists of the gun culture. Their best appeal is likely to be one of reason to the hearts of fellow mothers, rather than to heartless politicians at the legislative level.

The bad women consort with the dirty men, the "creepy cultists." The good women have "hearts" — they are the wholesome bulwarks of goodness.

When a man makes an appeal to the womanhood of women, to the motherhood of mothers — be a good woman, be a good mother — that is patriarchy speaking.

"Exactly 50 years ago Thursday, in Alaska, the second largest earthquake in recorded history, magnitude 9.2, remade the Last Frontier State."

"What had been gravel beaches rose to become 30-foot cliffs. What had been forests at sea level were submerged, leaving only the ghostly silver tips that you can still see. In Anchorage, 42,000 people were left homeless."

From a column by Timothy Egan titled "A Mudslide, Foretold," which is mostly about the recent mudslide in the Stillaguamish Valley in Washington.

Timothy Egan's NYT column "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings" requires fisking...

... and I'm relieved to see that John Hinderaker has already done the grisly task.

"Class war is forbidden in the Republican playbook."

"But Huckabee, despite an inept last week of campaigning, has forced the Republican party to face the Wal-Mart shoppers that they have long taken advantage of. He’s here. He’s Gomer. And he’s not going away."

Writes Timothy Egan.