"If you find out that an artist whose work you consume is a terrible person, and you still choose to consume it, are you a terrible person?"

Asks Will Leitch, in "The terrible Michael Jackson movie exposes a central cultural question. The film is indefensible. The impulse to see it is deeply human" (WaPo).

I don't know who wrote the headline, but I don't see Leitch attributing deep humanity to the millions of people who are seeing and loving "Michael" — which he and all the critics know "is a bad movie."

Those people who love "Michael" are, in Leitch's words, those who "generally don’t see mass culture as a moral issue, or a political one, or really as having much practical, tangible effect on their lives at all. They go to the movies, listen to music, watch television or read books, not to make some sort of statement about the world but to take a break from it. For most people, art and entertainment are just something that gets you out of the house for a while — and might even make you dance."

In short, they are the very opposite of deep. 

I would have liked to hear a sophisticated analysis of why it is deeply human to want to see Michael again, in his glory, without the ugliness of the accusations. It is deeply human to long for a return to feelings of joy and love that enveloped you when you were young. You're not a nitwit to want that.

"It begins in 1976. Epstein is a teacher at the Dalton School in Manhattan, and he gets invited to a reception at an art gallery, and he goes kind of grudgingly...."

"And at the reception, he bumps into the parent of one of his students who is impressed with his math chops. And the parent suggests that maybe he is wasting his time being a teacher and instead should consider a career in Wall Street. And the parent then introduces Epstein to a guy named Ace Greenberg.... a top executive at Bear Stearns, which is this scrappy Wall Street investment bank. And one of the ways in which it's scrappy is that it is not going to hire Ivy League MBAs. It is looking for what Ace Greenberg likes to call PSDs, which stands for poor, smart, and deeply desirous of being rich. And Epstein goes in to meet Greenberg for a job interview, and Epstein fits the bill. Greenberg is bowled over by the guy's charisma and charm and apparent math prowess and offers him a job. So he arrives at Bear Stearns and he quickly becomes the protege to some of the firm's top executives. One is Greenberg, the guy who hired him, who is so taken with Epstein that he introduces him to his own 20-year-old daughter and they start dating, which affords Epstein something akin to protected status at the firm...."

From today's excellent episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast, "The Origins of Jeffrey Epstein."

So: a scrappy executive enamored of the idea that there are PSDs out there — that's the explanation....

"The medical profession of the twentieth century was a hegemon; today, it is a regional power. When a hegemon loses status..."

"... it can take a few paths. It can aim for restoration—bringing back the empire—which in this case would probably focus on gatekeeping. It can retreat, which might mean abdicating medicine’s broad public role, perhaps in favor of a narrow focus on earnings and technical skills. The last—and, in my view, the best—path is reinvention. Doctors can remake their profession by embracing the multi-polar medical landscape they now inhabit, and by acting as a kind of system stabilizer: working with other powers to help shape rules, norms, and relationships. A superpower may act as though it can stand alone, but middle powers know the value of diplomacy and coalition-building. Reinventing the medical profession will require greater engagement with the world outside of hospitals and clinics. Many physicians are taking to social media.... A growing number of doctors seem interested in leading health-care companies themselves or in running for office.... Diplomacy also requires a willingness to stand in opposition to others.... A few weeks ago, a dozen former F.D.A. officials, all of them physicians, wrote that they were 'deeply concerned' about 'the latest in a series of troubling changes'...."

Writes Dhruv Khullar, in "The Role of Doctors Is Changing Forever/Some patients don’t trust us. Others say they don’t need us. It’s time for us to think of ourselves not as the high priests of health care but as what we have always been: healers" (The New Yorker).

Did Trump drop those papers out on purpose to make Starmer bend over?

Headline at The Guardian: "Starmer says he picked up Trump’s dropped papers to avoid security scare/UK prime minister says it ‘would not have been good’ for anyone else such as member of media to try to help" ("I mean, look, there weren’t many choices with the documents and picking it up, because... as you probably know there were quite strict rules about who can get close to the president.I mean, seriously, I think if any of you [the media] had stepped forward other than me – I was just deeply conscious that in a situation like it would not have been good for anybody else to have stepped forward, not that any of you rushed to. There’s a very tightly guarded security zone around the president, as you would expect").

Trump is such a master of showmanship... no? Or do you think the paper-dropping was mere happenstance and Starmer was the only one in the Very Tightly Guarded Security Zone who could pick up the papers? The press could have photographed those papers. And no one could expect the President of the United States to pick up what he dropped. He was holding the Very Firmly Bound Leather Folder, and Starmer was the one with his hands free and ready to serve.

"When will the press tell us that Democrats 'assert, without evidence,' that Biden has withdrawn?"

Glenn Reynolds quips darkly, linking to something I wrote earlier this morning.

ADDED: Speaking of evidence, Kamala Harris is a first hand witness:

"I am first hand witness that everyday, our president, Joe Biden, fights for the American people, and we are deeply, deeply grateful for his service to the nation."

She is quoted in "Harris: ‘We are deeply grateful’ for Biden’s service/Harris spoke on the South Lawn of the White House for a celebration of NCAA championship teams, filling in for Biden as he recovers from Covid" (Politico).

So she's filling in for him and simultaneously attesting to his daily work, his "fight" for us. The last time we saw him, he was fighting to keep his place as the nominee. KH is a "first hand witness," that is, we're stuck with hearsay.

I have a tag for the word "deeply," and she just said it twice in a row. She must really mean it.

AND: Here's the original post where "deeply" became a tag: "Deeply... it's such a poser word." That's from 2014. There, I made a list of earlier examples of the use of "deeply" in the blog archive. And look what's #1 on the list!

1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."

Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' was, of course, Kamala Harris. 

"How I laughed at The Times headline yesterday that said, 'siblings are a source of teenage stress.'"

"Apparently, the more siblings you have, the more stress you experience in teenage life because, claimed Professor Douglas Downey of Ohio State University in the Journal of Family Issues, 'siblings are best understood as competitors for resources' and the more of them you have, the worse the effect of this on your mental health. What tosh. I had a sibling in my teenage years (and still have one) and cannot see how she had anything but a positive effect on my mental health. While I was away at boarding school between the ages of 13 and 17, for example, being bullied, cold-showered and rogered senseless by the prefects, she was at home in the bosom of our Cricklewood family, hanging out with my parents and their famous friends.... What do you think I was, jealous or something?... If what these Yankee boffins are postulating is true, such an experience would have turned me into an angry, thwarted, attention-seeking little man....."

Writes Giles Coren, seeking attention in "I’m so lucky my sister never came to anything" (London Times).

Here's the article he's commenting on: "Why siblings are a source of teenage stress/An adolescent with more brothers and sisters is more likely to feel depression, anxiety and low self-esteem."

"The former president believes he can fight or talk his way out of most situations. "

"Frequent visits to the courtroom have also given Mr. Trump familiarity with the unwieldy proceeding, where he projects control, often whispering in his lawyers’ ears, prompting their objections to the attorney general’s questions. Yet Mr. Trump is deeply, personally enraged by this trial — and by the fact that his children have had to testify, several people who have spoken with him said — and he may not be able to restrain himself on the stand. The testimony will push Mr. Trump far outside his comfort zone of social media and the rally stage, where he is a master of mockery, a no-holds barred flamethrower who relishes most opportunities to attack foes. He leveraged that persona during his days as a tabloid businessman and fixture of New York’s tabloids and found that it worked just as well in the 2016 presidential race. He has since taken control of the Republican Party, and his style has become a defining influence in contemporary politics. The witness stand is a different venue. It’s a seat that requires care and control, where lying is a crime and emotional outbursts can land you in contempt of court.... Mr. Trump, 77, has been showing signs of strain and age on the campaign trail.... The test of the former president’s credibility, coherence and self-control could supply his opponents with ammunition on the campaign trail...."

 
I'm reading "Trump’s Credibility, Coherence and Control Face Test on Witness Stand/The former president will testify Monday in a trial that threatens the business empire that created his public persona. He will be out of his element and under oath" in the NYT.

I read that passage out loud here at Meadhouse. Lots of laughter. I said the NYT is milking this for all its worth, really straining to make testifying seem as dangerous as possible. Meade said: "Hey, NYT, this is your one chance to write that purple prose."

By the way, NYT should have edited out the phrase "supply his opponents with ammunition on the campaign trail." Remember when the NYT was involved in blaming Sarah Palin for causing a political shooting because her campaign used a map marked with an image that looked something like crosshairs?

Anyway, the idea that Trump will lose his cool and become enraged on the witness stand is funny. Sometimes he seems like a fictional character, but you sound naive and absurd imagining that he's going to behave like a character in a courtroom drama. I know there will be movies about him some day, but I bet there won't be a single one with anything about this New York case about puffing the value of his real estate.

But go ahead, now's your big chance to act as though Trump will Al Pacino it up....

The loving husband and daughter.

This photograph of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s daughter and husband looking on lovingly during the intense, politically charged proceedings has resonated deeply on social media. https://t.co/clO6AGe8qX

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) March 25, 2022

The star of my all-time favorite TV sitcom has died.

I'm sad to hear that Bob Saget has died. He was only 65. But this post is about Dwayne Hickman, who died yesterday at the age of 87.

His show, "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," was on TV from 1959, when I was 8, to 1963, when I was 12.

From the NYT obituary:

For all its well-scrubbed chastity, the series marked a quietly subversive departure from the standard television fare of the day. It was among the first to place the topical subject of teenagerhood front and center by recounting the story from a teenager’s point of view. It broke the fourth wall weekly, opening with a monologue in which Mr. Hickman, seated in front of a replica of Rodin’s “Thinker,” gave viewers a guided tour of his gently angst-ridden soul.

Many well-known actors received early exposure on the series, notably Bob Denver as Dobie’s best friend, Maynard G. Krebs, a scruffy junior beatnik who yelps “Work!” at the merest suggestion that he seek gainful employment.... Tuesday Weld was seen regularly as the beautiful, avaricious Thalia Menninger, the financially unattainable object of Dobie’s affections; Warren Beatty had a recurring role early in the run as a blue-blood classmate. 

Dobie’s cantankerous, tightfisted father and sweet, harebrained mother were played by the characters actors Frank Faylen and Florida Friebus. His deeply intellectual classmate Zelda, aflame with unrequited love for Dobie, was portrayed by Sheila James. (Under her full name, Sheila James Kuehl, she became, in 1994, the first openly gay person to be elected to the California state legislature.)

They forgot to mention Chatsworth Osborne Jr., the ridiculously snobby rich kid. 

And why did they call Zelda "deeply intellectual"?! Seems to me Zelda was sexually harassing Dobie, failing to accept that no means no, insisting that he'd end up with her because their names on the alphabetized class roster were right next to each other — Gillis and Gilroy. Thalia was at least as smart — and much more rational. 

I really don't think anyone on that show was intellectual, and certainly not "deeply intellectual." Deeply! Where does the NYT get that? From the fact that the actress turned out to be gay? Here's the Wikipedia article on Zelda:

Zelda especially irritated Dobie by wrinkling her nose at him. He always wrinkled back; he claimed it was a reflex action (often admonishing her "Now cut that out!"), while she took it as proof that he loved her but didn't realize it yet. Zelda assured Dobie that he would eventually come to realize his love for her through the influence of "propinquity": because he was Gillis and she was Gilroy, they were always going to be seated together through high school and college and would eventually fall in love.

Here's a full episode — complete with opening theme, musing by "The Thinker," and plenty of Thalia:

What was "deeply good" about Harry Reid?

"Few people have done more for this state and this country than this driven, brilliant, sometimes irascible, deeply good man from Searchlight, Nevada."

Said Barack Obama, quoted in the Washington Post account of yesterday's memorial service for Reid.

It's the "deeply" that gets you. It draws so much attention to "good." We might have let it go — was Harry Reid good? — if "deeply" hadn't forced us to stop and stare.

I haven't used my "deeply (the word!)" tag since last May.

Here's the original post — in 2014 — where I created the tag.

There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition."

I went back into my own archive to see how I had used it over the years and, funnily enough, the first thing on my list was about something Obama famously said about Kamala Harris:

1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."...

Oh, what's not a gaffe these days? 

But back to the memorial service. Biden and Pelosi spoke too, and both of them told a joke premised on the reputation Reid had for being untalkative. 

Here's Biden joke : "Harry and I both liked to talk a lot... I’m just testing whether you’re asleep yet."

Here's Pelosi's: "He was a man of few words — and he wanted everyone else to be a person of few words."

They kept it light. There was an opportunity to go much lighter on the man-of-few-words theme — man of even fewer words now, ha ha — or to go much more deeply....

But I won't end with the end of Hamlet. I will lighten up and give Chuck Schumer the last word, because who doesn't love kissing and because I have a "saliva" tag that I get a kick out of using:

It was election night 2006, when Democrat Claire McCaskill won her race in Missouri, a victory that gave control of the Senate to Democrats, and Reid rushed over and kissed McCaskill through the television screen.

“His lips remained attached to the TV screen for a full 10 seconds,” Schumer said. “I had to get up and wipe the copious spittle off the TV screen.”

"Musk, dressed in all black, began with an admission: 'I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL—or at least the first to admit it.'"

"'So, I won’t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight. But don’t worry, I’m pretty good at running "human" in emulation mode.' (Though a brave admission, Musk is not the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL—Dan Aykroyd, a former cast member, also has Asperger’s and returned to host the show in 2003.)" 

From "Elon Musk’s Deceptive and Deeply Awkward SNL Monologue" (The Daily Beast)(video of the monologue at the link). 

Wow! That's some shocking disregard for Dan Aykroyd, but The Daily Beast seems to slough that off, even as it purports to show that the monologue was "deceptive and deeply awkward." 

The silly use of the word "deeply" was noted on this blog in 2014, in a post titled, "Deeply... it's such a poser word."

Here's the 2013 article in The Daily Mail: "'I have Asperger's - one of my symptoms included being obsessed with ghosts': Under the microscope with Dan Aykroyd." 

I was diagnosed with Tourette’s at 12. I had physical tics, nervousness and made grunting noises and it affected how outgoing I was. I had therapy which really worked and by 14 my symptoms eased. I also have Asperger’s but I can manage it. It wasn’t diagnosed until the early Eighties when my wife persuaded me to see a doctor. One of my symptoms included my obsession with ghosts and law enforcement — I carry around a police badge with me, for example. I became obsessed by Hans Holzer, the greatest ghost hunter ever. That’s when the idea of my film Ghostbusters was born.

Whenever you talk about Tammy Duckworth, you must talk about her legs.

I wasn't going to blog this headline I saw this morning — "Tucker Carlson suggests Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs in Iraq, hates America."

But then I saw this:

Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America?

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) July 7, 2020

From the WaPo article:

“You’re not supposed to criticize Tammy Duckworth in any way because she once served in the military,” Carlson said Monday night. That didn’t stop him from calling Duckworth, a contender to be presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate, “a deeply silly and unimpressive person” and suggesting that she and other Democratic leaders “actually hate America.”...

Duckworth’s combat experience has helped her ascend a list of Biden’s potential running mates... In 2004, she lost her legs when insurgents shot down the Black Hawk helicopter she was co-piloting with a rocket-propelled grenade....

It's terrible that she suffered this injury, and we owe her great respect and empathy, but if she's going to be the VP candidate, it better not be because we're not allowed to criticize her ideas and her political intentions.

Here's the entire Tucker Carlson monologue. The part about Duckworth begins at 11:45 as he notes, "You're not supposed to criticize Tammy Duckworth in any way because she once served in the military" (that is, he doesn't specify the grievous injury):



What Carlson holds up as "deeply silly" is Duckworth's answer to the question whether monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson should come down. Duckworth gives the bland answer: "We should start off by having a national dialogue on it." That's dull and maybe deceptive, but it's not "deeply silly" (or even shallowly silly).

Actually, I happened to watch that monologue on TV last night, and the next thing Carlson said made me imitate him and laugh and laugh: "They're not looking for any kind of colloquy. What they want is a soliloquy." Why did I find that so funny? It was just the sudden turn to elevated vocabulary and rhetoric. That came out of nowhere. Caused me to look up where Carlson went to college! (Answer: Trinity College (in Connecticut).)

"I’d just like to say Woody Allen is a great, great filmmaker and this cancel thing is not just Woody. And I think when we look back on it..."

"... we are going to see that — short of killing somebody — I don’t know that you can just erase somebody like they never existed."

Said Spike Lee on the radio on Friday, New York Magazine reports.

On Saturday, he was all: "I Deeply Apologize. My Words Were WRONG. I Do Not And Will Not Tolerate Sexual Harassment, Assault Or Violence. Such Treatment Causes Real Damage That Can't Be Minimized.-Truly, Spike Lee."

Deeply!

So he thought when he would look back on it, he'd see that you can't really just erase somebody who's done some great work, but the looking back happened the very next day and he looked back and saw that he was WRONG. That is, the new position, which he feels very deeply, is that you can just erase somebody like they never existed. And "this cancel thing" really can be just about Woody. Isolate that one man and erase him. It won't have a wider effect. It can be as if he never existed!

"As a bookish indoor kid who hadn’t figured out his sexuality, I was a firm supporter of the middlebrow legal thriller."

"I eschewed bike riding, kissing girls (uh, see above), and learning how to smoke cigarettes for the clearcut satisfaction of a well-executed courtroom monologue, or Julia Roberts cryptically intoning that everybody she’s told about the brief is dead. The characteristics of the middlebrow legal thriller dovetailed so well with the tastes of a teen who imagined himself to be quite smart and sophisticated — they didn’t so much require a familiarity with the law but with the three or four legal concepts that particular film decided were important. In The Firm, the concept was 'billable hours.' In A Time to Kill, it’s 'change of venue.' Once you’ve got the concept down, the movies tend to be about chase scenes and tense cross-examinations. With Grisham, the Mob is very often involved, or else the government acting like the Mob. By the end, the two characters we care most about arrive at an understanding about each other. It ain’t Tolstoy, but it is deeply enjoyable."

From "The Death of the Middlebrow Legal Thriller" by Joe Reid (The Vulture), written on the crushingly boring occasion of the 25th anniversary of the movie "The Client."

I saw part of that movie. I was on a plane and I watched enough to decide this is a type of movie I hate and will never watch again: a plot based on putting a child in danger with many shots of the mother maternal woman worrying and anguishing.

[T]he real gem at the heart of this movie is Susan Sarandon, who milks her star turn for all its worth. Her scenes opposite Tommy Lee Jones as they face off over the fate of this young boy are the kind of crackling movie-star showdowns that rarely appear outside the action drama.... 

Could they please go crackle somewhere else and not inside the aluminum tube I'm trapped in? For me, that was most certainly not — to use Reid's phrase — "deeply enjoyable." I'm irritated by the notion that we're expected to enjoy children put in danger. In real life, it would be horrible, but having our emotions artificially leveraged because of our primal love of children, that's pleasure.

ADDED: I've corrected this post. Originally, I'd written "The Firm" for "The Client." The one I saw and the one marking its 25th anniversary is "The Client." "The Firm," also discussed in the linked article, came a year earlier. ALSO: I don't think Sarandon was the mother, just the lawyer and a woman (and therefore, conventionally, experiencing maternal pangs).

"Sanders’s Speech About Socialism Was Deeply Unserious/In the senator’s view, the threat of autocracy comes exclusively from the right."

Writes Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic:

If Sanders was coy about the details of a “socialist” economy, he was downright disdainful of the notion that a speech on socialism and authoritarianism should seriously grapple with the long history of socialist movements that have ended in dictatorship. In his view, the threat of autocracy comes exclusively from the right. Just as in the 1930s, “America and the world are once again moving towards authoritarianism.” This danger is driven by “right-wing forces of oligarchy, corporatism, nationalism, racism, and xenophobia.” The only answer that will stave off fascism is, you guessed it, “democratic socialism.”

Thus Sanders name-checked Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini but remained silent about Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. And while he rightly decried the autocratic tendencies of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, he neglected to mention leftist autocrats such as Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, Cuba’s Raúl Castro, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, or North Korea’s Kim Jung Un. Indeed, the only connection between socialism and autocracy that Sanders was willing to acknowledge is the one that exists in the feverish imagination of the ignorant right: He decried the “red-baiting” in which Republicans have long engaged.

The implication was obvious. Anybody who was hoping for a clear account of the differences between Sanders’s political ambitions and those of autocratic socialist regimes is a fellow traveler of Richard Nixon, Newt Gingrich, John Boehner, Donald Trump, and the Heritage Foundation....

The speech Sanders gave was not serious.

It's enough (and it's better) to say "not serious." The headline writer came up with "deeply unserious," and you may know I have a thing about the word "deeply" (click the tag). The headline writer must have felt pressure to bump it up to "deeply unserious," which seems snazzy and contemporary and (ironically) less serious. "Deeply" especially annoys when it modifies something that lacks depth — unless humor is intended, but this isn't a subject for humor. We're talking about the oppression and murder of millions. To deploy humor would be... deeply shallow. See what I mean?

"Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site."

"As an open platform, it’s crucial for us to allow everyone–from creators to journalists to late-night TV hosts–to express their opinions w/in the scope of our policies."

Tweeted YouTube, quoted in "YouTube is refusing to punish a star with millions of fans after he hurled homophobic slurs at a journalist" (Business Insider).

Thanks to YouTube for taking the strong free-speech position. Let us hear and decide for ourselves what we think of insults. Don't overprotect us, or we will become children.

ADDED: I was running off as I wrote this post, so I didn't get to 2 topics that commenters are talking about:

1. YouTube doesn't just allow people on and kick people off; it also monetizes and demonetizes. Different considerations arise, and I understand advertisers not wanting their product juxtaposed with, say, homophobic slurs. I used to work in an ad agency in the 1970s, and I remember putting it in the contract that an ad for an airline wouldn't run next to a story about an airplane crash. Placement of ads matters, and YouTube is selling ad space and needs to be able to present advertisers with places where they want their ads, not just flow money to video providers based on the size of the audience. Nasty speech can grab a lot of eyeballs. There need not be an automatic cash reward for that.

2. The use of the word I've been talking about for 2 days — here and here — "deeply." I think "deeply offensive" is the worst of the deeply phrases. And frankly, I don't think the purported deep offense here and elsewhere is that deep. In fact I think it's damned shallow. Deeply shallow.

Trump is "really unpopular" and "deep underwater" in some states he needs for 2020.

According to Vox.

Did Vox read my attack on the word "deeply" (here, yesterday)? Well, "deep underwater" does seem to fit with the childish "really unpopular."

And the truth is, "deep" is an adverb, which is one more reason to be irritated by "deeply." The OED finds "deep," the adverb, all the way back to the year 1000. Chaucer used it — "And swore so depe to hire to be trewe." Shakespeare used it — "That Fooles should be so deepe contemplatiue." Pope used it — "A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring." Let's keep going! There's Oliver Goldsmith — " To tie him up..from playing deep." Sir Walter Scott — "An hundred dogs bayed deep and strong." Charles Lamb — "The reason..scarcely goes deep enough into the question."

And yet the OED itself calls "deep," the adverb, obsolete when qualifying an adjective (which is what is going on with "deep underwater"). There's an exception for adjectives for colors. It sounds wrong to say "She wore a deeply blue dress" and right to say "She wore a deep blue dress" (even though we might logically think that the dress was deep). "Deep" as an adverb modifying a verb isn't wrong. Would you say "We went deep into the forest" or "We went deeply into the forest"? "Deeply" has pretty much taken over, but John Milton wrote (in "Paradise Lost"):

Oh, conscience! into what abyss of fears
And horror has thou driven me; out of which
I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged!

Yes, Trump is still President, still not impeached, and still — don't we all know? — likely to win in 2020. He's gathering strength there in the abyss, deep underwater, whatever those paltry polls have to say.

Tune in, turn on, drop out — with Hillary Clinton. Listen to the colors of your mind.

I'm reading Architectural Digest's Step Inside Bill and Hillary Clinton's Deeply Personal Washington, D.C., Home." Deeply personal? Is that even possible

Ms. Clinton’s mother, Dorothy Rodham, partnered with her daughter in selecting most of the furnishings and landing on just the right paint and patterns... “Both my mother and I love color, and you can see, we have a lot of color in the house that came from our collaboration.”... “I have to say, it was a very nice refuge from my life in the Senate,” says Ms. Clinton of the process. “I’d come home or I’d get sent color samples, or fabric swatches, or pictures of furniture, and it was a nice way to turn one part of my brain off and turn the other on.”

Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

From the slideshow...

An anteroom ahead of the kitchen, this nook is used for informal meetings.... The space has a little desk that Ms. Rodham had used for correspondence and paying bills.

We're calling her "Ms. Rodham now? And I'm supposed to picture her sitting at a little desk paying her own bills and doing "correspondence"? What is it, the 19th century all of a sudden? Is she still selling the idea that she doesn't know anything about email? [ADDED: Sorry, "Ms. Rodham" must be the mother Dorothy.]

[The decorator Rosemarie] Howe experimented in order to find just the right red for these walls, something coral and not too blue. She landed on Benjamin Moore Bird of Paradise 1305. The painting over the love seat is by Virginia artist Barbara Ryan. “It was something I saw and admired so long ago,” says Ms. Clinton. “We’ve had it for many years. Someone who looked at it remarked and laughed: If you look at the cloud or smoke in the back, it looks like a comic profile of my husband. But that’s not why I bought it.”

Not why I bought it but I enjoy telling people the puff of nothingness in the background looks like my husband... who used to have a little nook next to the Oval Office for informal meetings.

I'm sorry! Am I going too deeply personal? All right then, I'll turn that part of my brain off and turn the other one on, the one that thinks somebody has some D.C. real estate to unload and a glitzy magazine to assist in reeling in a credulous buyer.

But listen to the color of your dreams/It is not living, it is not living/Or play the game "Existence" to the end/Of the beginning...

ADDED: Here at Meadhouse, the word "deeply" is considered deplorable. Read the 2014 post, "Deeply... it's such a poser word."

Said Meade... It made me wish I'd had a tag on the word "deeply" all along. It's a metaphor, creating an image of abstract concepts in space. Where are you when you are "deeply in love"? There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition." But I'm interested in seeing how is "deeply" is deployed in various political and cultural statements, so I've searched this blog's archive, and here's the best of what I found....

There's a list of 12 items, and it deserves a new one, the unlucky 13th: "Step Inside Bill and Hillary Clinton's Deeply Personal Washington, D.C., Home." Interestingly enough, 2 of the items on the old list have Hillary:

5. Last May [2013[, Tina Brown said: "Now that Chelsea is pregnant, and life for Hillary can get so deeply familial and pleasant, she can have her glory-filled post-presidency now, without actually having to deal with the miseries of the office itself..."...

8. "Clinton’s interest in global women’s issues is deeply personal, a mission she adopted when her husband was in the White House after the stinging defeat of her health care policy forced her to take a lower profile." 

"Deeply" — in the Hillary Clinton context — seems like a cloud or puff of smoke in the shape of defeat.

"Deeply... it's such a poser word."

Said Meade, reading the previous post "The NYT poll reports terrible numbers for Democrats, but calls the Republcian Party 'deeply unpopular.'" It made me wish I'd had a tag on the word "deeply" all along. It's a metaphor, creating an image of abstract concepts in space. Where are you when you are "deeply in love"? There are so many trite usages — deeply in love, deeply disappointed, deeply religious, thinking deeply, deeply troubled, deeply concerned, deeply offended, deeply regret — and "deeply" is deeply embedded in constitutional law doctrine with the phrase "deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition." But I'm interested in seeing how is "deeply" is deployed in various political and cultural statements, so I've searched this blog's archive, and here's the best of what I found:

1. "Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded," wrote Garace Franke-Ruta, explaining "Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe."

2. "During the period when [Althouse] rose to blogging prominence, conservatism as an ideology was deeply discredited and unpopular.... But if you look at her whole body of work, you can't escape the conclusion that she's deeply conservative."

3. Sarkozy said "I deeply enjoy the work" (of being President of France), and I said: "Wouldn't it be amusing if some day, a President resigned because he just wasn't enjoying the work — not deeply, anyway?"

4. Talking about libertarians, I said: "I am struck... by how deeply and seriously libertarians and conservatives believe in their ideas. I'm used to the way lefties and liberals take themselves seriously and how deeply they believe. Me, I find true believers strange and -- if they have power -- frightening. And my first reaction is to doubt that they really do truly believe."

5. Last May, Tina Brown said: "Now that Chelsea is pregnant, and life for Hillary can get so deeply familial and pleasant, she can have her glory-filled post-presidency now, without actually having to deal with the miseries of the office itself..."

6. This John Stuart Mill passage came up in the context of a discussion about free speech: "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

7. Something President Bush said in 2006: "It is deeply troubling that a country we helped liberate would hold a person to account because they chose a particular religion over another. I'm troubled when I hear, deeply troubled when I hear, the fact that a person who converted away from Islam may be held to account. That's not the universal application of the values that I talked about."

8. "Clinton’s interest in global women’s issues is deeply personal, a mission she adopted when her husband was in the White House after the stinging defeat of her health care policy forced her to take a lower profile." [SEE ALSO: the use of "deeply personal" to refer to Sonia Sotomayor's dissent in a case about affirmative action. I find it deeply interesting when a woman's interest in an important issue is called "deeply personal." I'm reminded of the old feminist slogan "The personal is political," which I'm inclined to jocosely reword: "The deeply personal is deeply political."]

9. Somebody called Dahlia Lithwick "deeply frivolous" for what she said about the Supreme Court case known as "Bong Hits 4 Jesus," and I said: "I mean, if I were stoned I might be fascinated by the phrase 'deeply frivolous,' but I don't think Carney meant to divert us into contemplating an oxymoron."

10. A sociologist said: "I live on puns and snide, sarcastic asides. I don't look too deeply into myself or anyone else...  I drink a lot, take recreational drugs, don't care about much except being clever. I recently broke up with my girlfriend, and while I am eager to have sex, which I do often given the zillions of available women in New York, the sex is not especially fulfilling, and emotions rarely enter the picture. I am deeply shallow. And I know it."

ADDED:

11. One of Hillary Clinton's most famous quotes: "This video is disgusting and reprehensible.  It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose, to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage."

12. A self-professed liberal says: "the liberal commitment to Roe has been deeply unhealthy — for American democracy, for liberalism, and even for the cause of abortion rights itself....  Roe puts liberals in the position of defending a lousy opinion that disenfranchised millions of conservatives on an issue about which they care deeply while freeing those conservatives from any obligation to articulate a responsible policy that might command majority support...."

The NYT poll reports terrible numbers for Democrats, but calls the Republican Party "deeply unpopular."

Check out all the numbers and consider the wording of the intro to the poll:

A New York Times/CBS News poll shows that President Obama’s approval ratings are similar to those of President George W. Bush in 2006 when Democrats swept both houses of Congress in the midterm elections.

A deeply unpopular Republican Party is nonetheless gaining strength heading into the midterms, as the American public’s frustration with Mr. Obama has manifested itself in low ratings for his handling of foreign policy and terrorism.

I'm thinking that the NYT loathes the GOP so much — the GOP is "deeply unpopular" at the NYT — that even when the poll numbers show the unpopularity of the Democratic Party, it feels compelled to say that the GOP is deeply unpopular, even though saying that raises the inference that the Democratic Party must be really unpopular to be more unpopular than the deeply unpopular GOP. And yet there's still some hope that the unpopularity of the Democratic Party is, perhaps, not deep.

Maybe the unpopularity of the Democratic Party is a transitory surface phenomenon, like some very itchy rash, while the unpopularity of the Republicans is more like arthritis, bad, but this rampant rash is driving us crazy, so if you ask us right now what's bothering us, it's that damned rash, but the rash will clear up and the arthritis will never go away.