"These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations everybody."

Those were the very very very special words of our President, Donald J. Trump, speaking at Mount Rushmore, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the 4th of July.

"And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants. And that's not easy to do, but we're going to do it. These men could only have been made in the USA. Their faces are engraved on these bluffs, not only because of what they did, but to remind us forever who we are. These heroes exemplify what is timeless, enduring, and eternal about the American character. And in the end, it has always been that character, our distinct and unique identity. It is a truly unique identity and it'll never change.... Liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it, and preserved it.... The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation. And America has a destiny like no other because we are a people like no other. For whatever reason, that's just the way it is.

"And the Democrats aren't fighting back.... They didn't beat us, but they'd be victorious against the Communists."

"But they don't have the courage to do so. So, they're turning Communists themselves, becoming a Communist Party. These are not Social Democrats. These are hardcore godless Communists. They're godless Communists. All communists are godless. They don't believe in God. This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence... 250 years ago...."

"Holy f---, how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so f---ed up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?"

So wrote Graham Platner, the man who's leading in the polls to become the Democratic Party candidate to run against Susan Collins for the Senate seat for Maine.

I'm reading "Janet Mills and Graham Platner battle for female voters in Maine's key Senate race" (NBC News).

Platner’s online Reddit posts, which resurfaced last fall, included a slew of controversial comments, including calling himself a communist; saying white, rural Americans were racist and stupid; and writing that “all” police officers are “bastards” after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in 2020.

"Progressives within the federal bureaucracy, regardless of Democrat or Republican being in the White House, have been advancing left-wing racialist ideologies and DEI programs for decades."

 "And so I don't have any doubt in my mind that what we're doing is, is, is the right course of action. It's defensible intellectually. And certainly I think it is actually a minimal and very restrained response to a long standing problem.... You know, I would certainly like to see much more dramatic action. I would like to see, you know, if, if, if they, if they are anticipating this as a, as a shock, I could easily imagine, you know, 10 times, 20 times, you know, 50 times more dramatic action that is, you know, within the realm of possibility.... We'll see... One thing I've learned is that you, you want to keep the, the, the larger ideas close to the chest and you wanna work incrementally up to them. And so we're doing some A/B testing, we're doing some prototyping. And as those things gain traction, I think it'll open up new lines of action. But what we're doing is really a counter-revolution. It's a revolution against revolution. And so I think we are the responsible party in this. But responsible doesn't mean weak. It doesn't mean self-effacing, it doesn't mean playing nice. I think that actually we are a counter radical force in American life that paradoxically has to use what many see as radical techniques."

Says Christopher Rufo at the end of today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast — "The Conservative Activist Pushing Trump to Attack U.S. Colleges."

What "50 times more dramatic action" do you think he has in mind? Criminal prosecution?

That quote is from the end of the interview. At the beginning, Rufo establishes his left-wing credibility:

"[Trump] is fighting for the fundamental idea that this country belongs... not to the radical left Communists...."

"We are going to have to be on top of it every single day focused every single day, driving forward every single day with unrelenting focus and passion because God gave us this country our founding fathers fought and died for this country, generations of Americans have sacrificed and bled for this country and we are not going to let the radical left — the Communists — and the American haters take our country. It's not going to happen. Not now. Not ever. So I ask you all to send a message right now to all the bureaucrats, to all the radical left commies, to the criminal aliens... to everyone who threatens the future of this country...."

Stephen Miller — at CPAC yesterday — called America's left wing "communists" and even "commies."

I think this is the only serious current use of the word "commie" that I've recorded in this blog. I've quoted a couple comic deployments of the word — here and here.

And I quoted Rush Limbaugh describing the "Dr. Strangelove" character Buck Turgidson: He just loves war and hates the Russians, hates the commies."

And I've got John Wayne in a Playboy interview — back in 1971: 

It's January 19th. Do you know where your children are?

"Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling author, has an office on a quiet street in Hudson, N.Y., where he sits at a desk under a poster of Mao Zedong, the former communist leader of China."

"Why? Maybe to signal how ideas can be dangerous? Nope, no particular reason. There are two other Chinese communist posters on the wall, too. 'I found them online for like $10,' said Mr. Gladwell, 61. 'I just think it’s funny.'"

From "Malcolm Gladwell Holds His Ideas Loosely. He Thinks You Should, Too. As he releases 'Revenge of The Tipping Point,' the best-selling journalist talks about broken windows theory, Joe Rogan and changing his mind" (NYT).

What if he had a Hitler poster and said "I just think it’s funny" and they were really cheap? Before you answer, remember when Jordan Peterson "bought like 400 Soviet paintings on eBay."

"He who doesn't work, doesn't eat.

Soviet poster issued in Uzbekistan, 1920.

From the Wikipedia article, "He who does not work, neither shall he eat," which I'm reading this morning because Wikipedia linked to it under "See also" at the bottom of its article "No such thing as a free lunch," which, you can see in the previous post, came up in the context of trying to understand the Russian word "khalyava."

I started this new post to show you that excellent propaganda artwork, and let me quote a bit from the "He who does not work" entry:

A history of the weekend.

I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Workweek and weekend":

A continuous seven day cycle that runs throughout history, paying no attention whatsoever to the phases of the moon and having a fixed day of rest, was most likely first practised in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest.

In Ancient Rome (753 BC–476 AD), every eight days there was a nundinae. It was a market day, during which children were exempted from school and agricultural workers stopped work in the field and came to the city to sell the produce of their labor or to practice religious rites.

The French Revolutionary Calendar (1793–1805) had ten-day weeks (called décades) and allowed décadi, one out of the ten days, as a leisure day.

"We’re now in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, which is far worse. We’re a nation in decline."

"Our enemies are desperate to stop us because they know that we are the only ones who can stop them.... They know that we can defeat them. They know that we will defeat them. But they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you and I’m just standing in their way. That’s all I’m doing. I’m standing in their way. And that’s why I’m here today. That’s why I’m standing before you, because we are going to finish what we started. We started something that was America. We’re going to complete the mission. We’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We’re going to make America great again. With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers. They are people that don’t get it, although, in some cases, they get it. They get it for their wallets, but we can’t do that. We can’t let that happen. We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists. We will throw off the political class that hates our country. They actually hate our country...."

From the unabridged transcript of Trump's CPAC speech.

Reading it — after watching it live — I'm struck by the intense repetition of the word "they." It makes me think of the unforgettable Saul Steinberg image:

Find that image in Steinberg's "The Inspector."

"Musk doesn’t eat lunch, possibly because an unflattering picture in a swimsuit taken on a yacht in Mykonos went viral..."

"... over the summer. Since then, he has been on a diet. At Fonda San Miguel... he... orders a frozen margarita (he calls it a slushy with alcohol).... Musk is telling me that companies are like children when the first plates land on the table: the lamb chops in a pepper sauce, and shrimp with cheese and jalapeños.... Musk is capricious, but he sees himself as a problem solver, and the problem is everything from the potential end of life on Earth to climate change and even traffic.... Recently, he has dreamt up his own (rather unhelpful) peace plan for ending Russia’s war in Ukraine.... Musk is very exercised about population decline.... Some friends, he reveals, have indeed suggested he should have 500 kids, but that would be a 'bit weird.'... [H]e predicts that 'the current trend for most countries is that civilisation will not die with a bang, it will die with a whimper in adult diapers.' But he says ageing should not be solved. 'It’s important that people die. How long would you have liked Stalin to live?'... Musk has a dystopian view of the left’s influence on America, which helps explain his wild pursuit of Twitter to liberate free speech. He blames the fact that his teenage daughter no longer wants to be associated with him on the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists. 'It’s full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,' says Musk. 'It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can’t win them all.'"

From "Elon Musk: ‘Aren’t you entertained?’/The Tesla chief talks to Roula Khalaf about moving to Mars, saving free speech via Twitter — and why ageing is one ‘problem’ that should not be solved" (Financial Times).

"But once glasnost became official policy, once Soviet citizens could talk about whatever they wanted to talk about, factory efficiency was not their first choice of topic."

"Nor did they want to rescue the sinking ship of socialism. Instead, there was an explosion of debate and discussion about the past, about the history of mass arrests and mass murders, about the Gulag and Soviet political prisons. Historical accounts, memoirs and diaries that had been hidden in desk drawers, raced off the printing presses and became best sellers. Newspapers printed stories of sleaze and mismanagement in the economy, politics, culture, and everything else. Calls for the creation of a different kind of society, a more democratic society, a more law-abiding society, began immediately.... Contrary to the retrospective Putinist historiography now prevalent in Russia, the glasnost era was a creative, exciting, hopeful time for millions of people, even millions of Russians. Gorbachev seemed bewildered, and no wonder. Having lived much of his life at the top of the Soviet nomenklatura, he never understood the depth of cynicism in his own country or the depth of anger in the occupied Soviet satellite states, most of whose inhabitants rejected even the reformed communism of his youth: They didn’t want the Prague Spring; they wanted to join Western Europe...."

 
Writes Anne Applebaum, in "Gorbachev Never Realized What He Set in Motion/Almost nobody has ever had such a profound impact on an era, while understanding so little about it" (The Atlantic).

"[T]he Bolsheviks, under Vladimir Lenin, took control of this symbol of tsarist decadence" — The Imperial Porcelain Manufactory — and renamed it the State Porcelain Manufactory, "seeing surprising potential in it..."

"...  as a wheelhouse for artistic innovation and the production of propaganda. Stocks of unpainted, snow-white china became a tantalising canvas for avant-garde artists keen to express their utopian ideologies and rouse enthusiasm for the new socialist era, giving this delicate, bourgeois material an unexpected, almost contradictory, second life.... Agitation porcelain, as it became known, featured effigies of Lenin and was decorated with calls to action.... [C]rockery once intended for the lavish feasts of the Romanovs was now emblazoned with militant Reds trampling upon their white ermine furs (Adamovich, 1923). Danko's porcelain chess set (1923) used the same colour play, with a red army taking on a white skeleton king whose proletariat pawns are in chains. While the porcelain plates' blocky constructivist artwork conveyed energy, explosions and destruction, the requisitioning of the factory was part of a softer approach to demonstrate the communists' respect for Russian patrimony, and ingratiate the precarious new regime with the powerful upper-middle classes whose support they depended on in order to govern."

From "How teapots were used to spread Russian propaganda" (BBC).

"When Gramsci was four, a boil on his back began hemorrhaging, and he nearly bled to death. His mother bought a shroud and a small coffin.."

"... which stood in a corner of the house for the rest of his youth. As Gramsci’s latest biographer... reports...  Gramsci was buckled for hours each day into a leather harness contraption that hung from the rafters, intended to repair his spine. He hardened himself with tests of endurance, such as hammering his fingers with a stone until they bled. He kept a pet hawk, and idolized the Sardinian bandit Giovanni Tolu, who outfoxed the local Carabinieri. At school he was rebellious and insolent. Once, he had a dispute with a teacher who did not believe Gramsci had found a monstrous, snakelike lizard with feet. (He had: It was an ocellated skink.)"

From "The Unlikely Persistence of Antonio Gramsci/No one understood political battle lines better than a Communist politician from Sardinia" (TNR).

"One of the striking things about 'Western civilization' is that as an idea it is not particularly old."

“It came to the fore during World War I, when the fight against Germany and its allies — the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires — was conceived by Anglophone liberals as a war of Western civilization against Eastern despotism. John Maynard Keynes, a cosmopolitan liberal, was convinced there was a civilizational gulf even between Germans and Anglo-Saxons, while the Russians, though allied with the West, were well beyond the pale of Western modernity. In the wake of World War I, courses on 'Western Civilization' began to be taught at elite American universities. By the onset of the Cold War, the term 'Free World' supplanted 'the West' because American power demanded a more globally inclusive banner that could rally South Vietnamese, Indonesians and others in the war on Communist 'slave societies.' After the Cold War, however, conservative American thinkers, such as Samuel Huntington, revived the idea of 'Western civilization' as a way of dramatizing how a set of values was now under siege from new threats: migrants, terrorists and moral relativists."

From "Vladimir Putin Has Revived ‘The West.’ Is That a Good Thing?" by Thomas Meaney, who does not think it's a good thing.

"What makes this memoir so absorbing is that it traces China’s tumultuous recent history through the eyes of its most renowned twentieth-century poet, Ai Qing, and his son, Ai Weiwei, now equally renowned in the global art world."

"It guides us from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist era in the 1930s, through Mao Zedong’s revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, and on to the 'reform era' of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and Xi Jinping’s current Leninist restoration, explaining how, as Ai Weiwei writes, 'the whirlpool that swallowed up my father upended my life too, leaving a mark on me that I carry to this day.'... It does not take many pages of this memoir to leave one feeling drowned in toxic revolutionary brine. But even as readers will be repelled by the relentless savagery of China’s capricious revolution, they will be uplifted by this father-and-son story of humanism stubbornly asserted against it. Ai Weiwei reminds us that freedom is part of being human in the modern world: 'Although China grows more powerful, its moral decay simply spreads anxiety and uncertainty in the world.'" 

Writes Orville Schell, "The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei/Ai Weiwei’s memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure" (NYRB). 

The book — which I finished reading yesterday — is "1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows." 

I should add — on the subject of fathers — that Ai Weiwei has his own son, and, in the text, that little boy flows from his grandfather and father. I highlighted this:

"Ai Weiwei recounts how his father naively argued with Mao that literature and art cannot be 'a gramophone or a loudspeaker for politics' but must instead find 'expression in their truthfulness.'"

"Unfortunately he had no way of knowing that Mao was just then readying a major political 'rectification campaign (整风运动)' against 'incorrect thought (错误思想)' that would make self-expression among Communist intelligentsia as taboo in the arts as in politics. In fact, Mao’s 1942 treatise, The Yan’an Forums on Literature and Art, which formed the basis for this movement, has guided the party’s quest for ideological unity ever since its publication. Under its shadow, writes Ai Weiwei, 'everyone sank into an ideological swamp of "criticism" and "self-criticism"' in which the bourgeois tendencies of his father’s art marked him indelibly as being politically unreliable.... Then, like half a million other intellectuals, he was 'sent down (下放)' to the Great Northern Wilderness (北大荒)....

"After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1959 at 16 as class valedictorian, he studied mathematics at Harvard. A clean-cut supporter of Adlai E. Stevenson..."

"... he fell in love with a woman whose parents had been communists. She opened his eyes to folk music and to an outlaw culture that fascinated him, and he became involved with a peace group called Tocsin. Before he graduated in 1963, he met Tom Hayden and other leaders of what was then a tiny organization, Students for a Democratic Society. 'I wanted to be like them,' [Todd] Gitlin wrote in 'The Sixties.' 'These exalted, clear, somehow devout souls so loved the world.'"

From "Todd Gitlin, a Voice and Critic of the New Left, Dies at 79/He earned his stripes in the antiwar movement of the 1960s. In his later years, he was often critical of his erstwhile kindred spirits" (NYT).

Note the centrality of love. You have someone super-smart — valedictorian at Bronx Science at 16 — and studying math at Harvard, supporting the Democratic Party candidate, and he falls in love. He joins up with radicals because, in them, he perceives love. 

Or so his story is told in the NYT obituary.

I see I have a tag for Todd Gitlin, and I'm surprised to see that I've used it 9 times in the 18-year history of this blog. In 2015, I quoted something he'd written in 2003:

"My generation of the New Left — a generation that grew as the war went on — relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost — we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks."

"China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains—far less than in Europe or India."

"Through the centuries, waves of revolutionary iconoclasts have tried to smash everything old; the Red Guards, in the nineteen-sixties, were following an ancient tradition. The Chinese seldom built anything for eternity, anyway, nothing like the cathedrals of Europe. And what survived from the past was often treated with neglect.... As Jing Tsu, a scholar of Chinese at Yale, observes... China had long equated writing 'with authority, a symbol of reverence for the past and a talisman of legitimacy.' This is why mastery of classical Chinese used to be so important. To become an official in imperial China, one had to compose precise scholarly essays on Confucian philosophy, an arduous task that very few could complete. Even Chairman Mao, who incited his followers to destroy every vestige of tradition, proudly displayed his prowess as a calligrapher, establishing himself as the bearer of Chinese civilization.... The classical style of the language, elliptical and complex, was practiced by only a small number of highly educated people.... A linguist, Qian Xuantong, famously argued that Confucian thought could be abolished only if Chinese characters were eradicated. 'And if we wish to get rid of the average person’s childish, naive, and barbaric ways of thinking,' he went on, 'the need to abolish characters becomes even greater.'... Dictatorships shape the way we write and talk and, in many cases, think.... I still shudder at the memory of reading, as a student in the early nineteen-seventies, Maoist publications in Chinese, with their deadwood language, heavy Soviet sarcasm, and endless sentences that sounded like literal translations from Marxist German—the exact opposite of the compressed poeticism of the classical style."

From "How the Chinese Language Got ModernizedFaced with technological and political upheaval, reformers decided that Chinese would need to change in order to survive," by Ian Buruma (The New Yorker).

"There was a time I loved riding the Hudson River Bikeway, but the metal bollards dotting the path made me phobic."

"If you’re wondering when this dark terror took root, I can tell you exactly: The moment I slammed my bike into a metal barrier, shattering my wrist in five places. Some time after that — and after a collision with a cement Jersey barrier — I reluctantly gave up the Hudson River Bikeway. My once-relaxing path had become an obstacle course.... The great thing about New York, of course, is that there is no phobia for which you cannot find a therapist. My first was an instructor called Lance (really), who built me a set of Styrofoam bollards. I had absolutely no fear of hitting Styrofoam. Unfortunately, after the first lesson, Lance became unavailable.... An online search turned up someone promising, but her fee, for a 90-minute lesson, was a stupefying $475. I quickly moved on to Andrée Sanders, who bills herself as the Bike Whisperer.... She’s never had a client with a fear as specific as mine.... Her fee is $200..."

From "I Was Afraid of the Bike Path. So I Hired a Bike Coach. A nasty crash instilled a phobia of bollards. I called the Bike Whisperer" by Joyce Wadler (NYT).

Then a "food delivery guy" yells the piece of advice that I think most cyclists know: