"I'll just say this once, Althouse. Abstaining from voting is neither courageous nor principled."

"You don't have to love a candidate or adhere a million percent to his political philosophy in order to vote for him. It is your duty, which you appear to wish to neglect, to decide which candidate is less bad than the other and cast your vote. Anything else is cowardly."

Writes Tyrone Slothrop in the comments to yesterday's post "Galumphing toward the apocalypse."

I saw that last night but did not respond. What's different about today? 

Maybe the fact that I'd just read this by Sarah Hoyt over at Instapundit: 

"Forget about his manners; stop stomping your foot about how crass he is; and for the love of heaven stop holding your nose up high and pretending you’re too good for this: a vote for Trump is a vote for the constitutional republic."

Both Hoyt and Slothrop are saying something about Us the People Who Abstain that might be true of some of us, but is not true of me. And this method of using insults to push people to vote is ugly. Are they doing it because they think it's effective? I don't yield to bullies. Are they doing it to display their own staunchness? Does it feel like humor from their side? It falls flat for me. 

Notice how Hoyt and Slothrop contradict each other. Slothrop appeals to my vanity as he insists that I be  a good person — not cowardly and neglectful of duty. Hoyt denounces vanity and insists that I not get involved in any sense of my personal goodness. Is this about me or isn't it? I can harmonize Slothrop and Hoyt by saying Hoyt is also appealing to my vanity because she portrays the abstainer as snooty — with her nose in the air, acting like she's "too good for this."

Slothrop is distinctly wrong when he says voting is a duty. No. It is not. Like speaking, like religion, like getting married, like having sexual relations, voting is a right, and a right entails the power to decline to exercise it. It is horrible to be forced to speak, forced to take on a religion, forced to get married, forced to have sex — these are loathsome impositions. 

Hoyt is wrong — in my case at least — to attribute a refusal to vote for Trump to taking offense at his personal style — his manners, his crassness. I happen to enjoy his personal style. You can see that if you've been reading my blog over the last 5 years. I love freedom of expression, and I feel that I get him. He's a New Yorker. He's a comedian. He's free and daring. I like all that.  I do have some concern about the wellbeing of my fellow citizens who hate him at some instinctual level, but I don't think they ought to be appeased for losing or threatening to lose their minds.

Trump has his style and I have mine. If it makes you want to stomp your foot, go ahead. You can keep "stomping your foot about" how cruelly neutral I am. You're free. You've got your right and I've got mine. 

"The title of the proposed amendment... 'Restore Democracy to the American People'... is nothing but a perversion of the English language."

Said the venerable First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. The proposed constitutional amendment is designed to overrule the Supreme Court's free speech doctrine that limits what legislatures can do to control spending on political campaigns.

The notion that democracy has already been lost, as we begin what will obviously be a hard fought election season in which virtually anything can and will be said, could be dismissed as rather typical Washington rhetorical overkill. But the notion that democracy would be advanced – saved, “restored” – by limiting speech is nothing but a perversion of the English language. It brings to mind George Orwell’s observation, in his enduring essay “Politics and the English Language,” that “[i]n our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” and that the word “democracy,” in particular, “has several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with each other” and “is often used in a consciously dishonest way.”  So let me say in the most direct manner that it is deeply, profoundly, obviously undemocratic to limit speech about who to elect to public office.

IN THE COMMENTS: Tyrone Slothrop said "Ted Cruz was similarly awesome yesterday":

"A chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sitting there...."

An old song, with new currency after the GOP convention. Here are the lyrics to "A House Is Not a Home," if you'd like to work on an election 2012 parody. And, by the way, Althouse is not a home.

IN THE COMMENTS: I was surprised to read Tyrone Slothrop's comment:

Tell me, Althouse, are you able to manipulate world events in order to provide fodder for your blog? Did Hal David pass away just to give you a segue to this post?

I didn't know Hal David had died the day this post went up. He was 91. I and maybe you thought: Burt Bachrach. But Bachrach wrote the music. "A chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sitting there" and many other memorable lyrics were written by Hal David.

I intended a comical reference to the Clint Eastwood incident, not anything mournful about an empty chair symbolizing death.

Remember the "Field Of Empty Chairs"?

"The worst thing I ever smelled was a 40-yard dumpster full of shrimp shells fermenting outside of a cannery in Kodiak."

"I came very close to losing my lunch. You could actually see a heavier-than-air fog of ammonia rolling out of the top of the bin, but I wasn't allowed to puke. I worked for the company that picked up all the cannery offal and recycled it into useful products. I actually deserve some kind of eco-medal."

Said Tyrone Slothrop at 8:33 PM in the comments on my post mocking the notion that it's romantic to roast lobster on a stick in your fireplace. That made me 1. wonder what's the worst thing I've ever smelled and 2. realize I'd never smelled anything truly awful. I remember one time, back in the 70s in NYC, we bought some expensive cheese at Dean & DeLuca, and it smelled exactly like shit. We thought we were sophisticated. At first. When we ate it. Then we thought we were stupid. And we stopped eating it. But if you want to compare notes with Tyrone Slothrop, you've obviously got to come up with something that smells worse than shit.

***

Don't criticize me for writing a blog post on this subject. Do you realize that I'm not allowed to work today? I'm literally forbidden by the state. There was something I wanted to do too!

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says: "I think furlough day is tomorrow??" Oh, that's true! It's Wednesday. I keep thinking it's Thursday. Okay, then. I'm all about transforming the syllabus!

The "ants on Jesus" video isn't blasphemy — it belongs in the tradition of Christian art.

S. Brent Plate explains. Excerpt:

Christianity itself has produced some of the most gruesome images of tortured, dying, suffering, and dead bodies, especially Jesus's own body. From Latin American Roman Catholic piety to German Protestantism, the dead and dying Jesus is a point of power, passion, and ultimately compassion. Take, for example, Matthias Grünewald's Small Crucifixion (early 16th century) in the publicly funded National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. ... mangled limbs, pocked skin oozing pus and blood.

That Christ on the cross is actually dead, and the body so dead that ants might eat it, is both the most orthodox Christian statement, and the most scandalous. But here is where the power of words and images begin to show their differences.

In Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot, the character Ippolit kills himself. In his suicide note he meditates on a reproduction of a 16th century painting by Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ:

The picture seems to give expression to the idea of a dark, insolent, and senselessly eternal power, to which everything is subordinated, and this idea is suggested to you unconsciously. The people surrounding the dead man, none of whom is shown in the picture, must have been overwhelmed by a feeling of terrible anguish and dismay on that evening which had shattered all their hopes and almost all their beliefs at one fell blow. They must have parted in a state of the most dreadful terror, though each of them carried away within him a mighty thought which could never be wrested from him. And if, on the eve of the crucifixion, the Master could have seen what He would look like when taken from the cross, would he have mounted the cross and died as he did?

Holbein's is an image, as Prince Myshkin says in Dostoyevsky's story, that could make one lose one's faith.... And yet, the image offers a profound meditation on the power of death, that "dark insolent, and senselessly eternal power." The picture becomes, like so many before and after, a point of great healing, compassion, and understanding about this central, paradoxical thing that Christians hold dear: Incarnation.

The artist who made the ants-on-Jesus video — which is really called "A Fire in My Belly" — was David Wojnarowicz. He died of AIDS in 1992, only 4 years older than Jesus was at the time of crucifixion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Tyrone Slothrop said..

It's the anty Christ.