"You did it all with such grace and class and cool that you made the hardest job in the world look like a walk in this beautiful park."

Said Michelle Obama, as "Mr. Obama looked down and wiped away tears."

She's quoted in "Presidents Line Up for Obama’s Long-Awaited Center in Chicago/Thursday’s opening drew four former presidents, as well as Bruce Springsteen, Bono and Jennifer Hudson. Chicago has seen years of planning and legal fights" (NYT).

Biden was there too, bearing with unbearable sorrow:

"I kissed Bryan, a gardener, on his red leather couch. I kissed Ray, a painter, in his lofted bed and smashed my head into his ceiling fan."

"Andrew 1 kissed me at the Met in front of a painting of hell. 'Sometimes I think this is hell,' he said, gesturing around us before putting his mouth on mine. Andrew 2 seemed confident over text but wary in person. He surprised me with a smooch on a street corner while we waited for the light to change.... Haden, a sommelier, met me to walk a friend’s dog. We kissed kneeling on the welcome mat while our hands fumbled to free the pug from her harness. Thomas, a surfer, walked me to the subway after playing pool at a dive bar. He planted one on me outside the C train.... When men asked why I was single, I told them it was because my partner of 20 years walked out on me with as much warning as one might get before an earthquake.... In return, the men were unexpectedly kind. I had heard so many horror stories about the emotional capacity of the male species, but these guys told me I didn’t deserve to be treated that way...."

Writes Erin Chack, in "From Kissing One Guy in 20 Years to 11 in a Month My husband leaving nearly broke me. I tried to put myself back together by dating for the first time in my life" (NYT)(gift link, because I think it's a well-written essay).

"Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah."

That's the way our President speaks.

Full context, at Truth Social: "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Hard to believe, but there it is.

"Actually, this season has led me to suspect these once tight-knit friends all hate one another and are doomed to stay in each other’s lives out of habit."

Writes Bindu Bansinath, in "And Just Like That …’s Finale Was Perfect, Actually" (NY Magazine).

Sitcoms put together characters that quite specifically do not belong together. The longer the show goes on, the more absurd it becomes. The "tight-knit" group was always a plot device. Each episode required conflict, and yet the group needed to stay together. That was the show. That is always the show. Why didn't Wally Cleaver tell Eddie Haskell to get lost? Why didn't Seinfeld lock Kramer out? It might as well be "No Exit":

Three damned souls, Joseph Garcin, Inèz Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, are brought to the same room in Hell and locked inside by a mysterious valet. They had all expected torture devices to punish them for eternity, but instead, find a plain room.... Garcin says that he was executed for being an outspoken pacifist, while Estelle insists that a mistake has been made; Inèz... realizes that they have been placed together to make each other miserable.... [SPOILER ALERT] This causes Garcin to abruptly attempt an escape. After he repeatedly tries to open the door, it suddenly and inexplicably opens, but he is unable to bring himself to leave. The others remain as well. He says that he will not be saved until he can convince Inèz that he is not cowardly. She refuses to be persuaded, observing that he is obviously a coward and promising to make him miserable forever. Garcin concludes that... "hell is other people."

Lex Fridman does a distinctive interview with Donald Trump...

... and even provides a transcript and a Table of Contents:

Why did Ted Cruz drag Pat Benatar into this?

Ted Cruz: “I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict.” pic.twitter.com/ysYei6Rr3E

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) June 15, 2023

Let's read "Pat Benatar roasts Sen. Ted Cruz after he suggests she’s demonic" (NY Post). Ah:

Cruz’s comment may have been a reference to the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer’s 1980 hit “Hell Is For Children.”

It's odd that Cruz assumes people know this song, which I see was the B side of "Love Is a Battlefield." This is a recording from 1980. I'm older than  most Americans, and I remember living through the songs of 43 years ago, but I only knew the A side.

Here are the lyrics. To quote a bit: "It's all so confusing, this brutal abusing/They blacken your eyes, and then 'pologize/You're daddy's good girl, and don't tell mommy a thing.... Hell is for children...."

Of course, the Post headline is silly. Cruz didn't "suggest" that Benatar is "demonic." He created an exaggerated image of Joe Biden — something along the lines of Trump's "shoot a man on 5th Avenue" — as a way to say that nothing would be enough to turn Senate Democrats against Biden. Singing "Hell Is For Children" is a stray detail probably intended to add color and coolness, but of course, Benatar doesn't want her song thought of as celebrating the point of view of the child abuser. 

"Well, the funny thing is he can’t imagine any celebrities bigger than, like, people from northern Italy at the time. "

"You’re, like, Come on... what about the people who don’t die near the Tiber River? How are they going to get to Purgatorio? It never seems to occur to him. In all three of the Divine Comedy works, Dante’s always hanging out with the big names. Helen of Troy. Even in Hell, Virgil’s like, Boy, I wish I was baptized, but I know you love my work, so I’m going to show you around. And then, in Paradiso, he’s hanging out with the apostles and King David and the Virgin Mary."

Says Ken Jennings, quoted in "Ken Jennings Has Some Questions About Death/The 'Jeopardy!' host on the meaning of trivia, the awkwardness of personal anecdotes, and his new book—a travel guide to the afterlife" (The New Yorker).

"Flattery (also called adulation or blandishment) is the act of giving excessive compliments..."

"... generally for the purpose of ingratiating oneself with the subject....  Historically, flattery has been used as a standard form of discourse when addressing a king or queen. In the Renaissance, it was a common practice among writers to flatter the reigning monarch, as Edmund Spenser flattered Queen Elizabeth I in The Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare flattered King James I in Macbeth and Niccolò Machiavelli flattered Lorenzo II de' Medici in The Prince.... In the Divine Comedy, Dante depicts flatterers wading in human excrement, stating that their words were the equivalent of excrement, in the second bolgia of 8th Circle of Hell.... Plutarch wrote an essay on ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend.’ Julius Caesar was notorious for his flattery. In his In Praise of Folly, Erasmus commended flattery because it 'raises downcast spirits, comforts the sad, rouses the apathetic, stirs up the stolid, cheers the sick, restrains the headstrong, brings lovers together and keeps them united.'"

From the Wikipedia article, "Flattery."

I'm reading that because I was looking up "Flatter!," which I'm doing because I'm getting rid of the piano, and, emptying out the piano bench, I found this:

"I never watch anything foul smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting; nothing dog ass. I’m a religious person."

"I read the scriptures a lot, meditate and pray, light candles in church. I believe in damnation and salvation, as well as predestination. The Five Books of Moses, Pauline Epistles, Invocation of the Saints, all of it."

Said Bob Dylan, asked if he streams movies on Netflix to relax.

But that word "relax" did not resonate with him. He's already relaxed — "too relaxed... like a flat tire; totally unmotivated, positively lifeless." So he says. But that doesn't mean he's looking for things to stimulate him, because it "takes a lot to get me stimulated" and he's "excessively sensitive," so he's liable to go from totally inert to "restless and fidgety." There's no "middle ground." 

On or off. One extreme or the other. Maybe that works for someone who performs on stage and then must spend so much time in a travel routine. He can fall asleep "at any time." He also says "I can write songs anywhere at any time."

He muses — comically — about songwriters who have a routine: "I heard Tom Paxton has one. I’ve wondered sometimes about going to visit Don McLean, see how he does it."

"What Musk is doing is... like opening the gates of hell...."

Said one of the experts quoted — by Taylor Lorenz — in "'Opening the gates of hell': Musk says he will revive banned accounts/The Twitter chief says he will reinstate accounts suspended for threats, harassment and misinformation beginning next week" (WaPo).

Why would you want to keep people in Hell? 

 

Why not forgive — if only to give them a second chance? Musk knows that the process of condemnation wasn't fair. At the very least, we are worried that it was skewed against conservatives. It's efficient to wipe the slate clean — to default toward freedom — and to begin again, with a viewpoint neutral approach that is transparent and centered on protecting individuals from harm, not on helping one side over another.

Some who are released from Hell will be those who shouldn't have been condemned in the first place. Some will be those from whom the group does need protection, but these will either go on and sin no more or they will sin again, and they can be dealt with under the new, fair procedure.

And Musk isn't even talking about letting everyone back in. The question he asked in his poll was "Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?" He can say the people have spoken and there will be "general amnesty," but there's that proviso. Anyone who is already known as a danger can still be excluded. On the face of it, Musk isn't recklessly absolutist about freedom of speech. 

The hell the anti-Muskites are afraid of — isn't it just the loss of a political advantage they never should have had in the first place? Did the censorship they enjoyed only make them soft and fearful and stunt their capacity to debate?

"Nobody really understands Hieronymus Bosch."

So begins the essay "What's So Contemporary About Hieronymous Bosch" by Dean Kissick (at Spike), which I'm reading after blogging about an illustration about Elon Musk by Cold War Steve.

I found Cold War Steve's Twitter feed and messaged this other illustration of his to Meade:

"'There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other."

A quote I blogged here, in February 2016, which I'm reading now as I review my posts with the Madeleine Albright tag.

Albright died today at the age of 84. Here's the NYT obituary, "Madeleine Albright, First Woman to Serve as Secretary of State, Dies at 84/She rose to power and fame as a brilliant analyst of world affairs before serving as an aggressive advocate of President Bill Clinton’s policies."

The obituary does include the women-in-hell quote:

In 2016, Ms. Albright again supported Mrs. Clinton for the presidency. At a campaign stop for the New Hampshire primary, Ms. Albright told a crowd, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” The line went viral. She had used it previously without objections. But some voters now found it offensive, taking it as a rebuke to younger women who supported a Clinton rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

An ardent feminist, Ms. Albright apologized in an opinion article in The Times. “I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based on gender,” she wrote. “But I understand that I came across as condemning those who disagree with my political preferences. If heaven were open only to those who agreed on politics, I imagine it would be largely unoccupied.”

"Someone must explain why celebrities running for office is a recurring nightmare we cannot seem to shake. The Rock, Caitlyn Jenner, Matthew McConaughey, Randy Quaid."

"They all have suggested lately that when it comes to running the country, they have what it takes. And they do: malignant narcissism," said Bill Maher on his show Friday night: 

"The last four years was a warning, not an inspiration. You were supposed to see that and think, 'I guess high-level government jobs should go to people who have trained for it and know what they're doing.'..." 

The problem with that is that we don't think people in politics know what they are doing. 

"Let me put it bluntly to you and all of these show biz candidates. You're not good enough, you're not smart enough, and, doggone it, it completely doesn't matter that people like you. They like you now because you're an entertainer and thus largely uncontroversial. Governing is the opposite. If you think you can unite the country, you're delusional."

I didn't personally transcribe that. I relied on the transcription at The Hill, but I made one correction: "doggone it." The Hill has "dog on it," which made me laugh... then made me wonder what "doggone it" represents. Are we supposed to see the word "gone"? It's not as though "dog gone it" makes sense. 

Grammarphobia writes: 

The new Murakami book is out today.

"First Person Singular" — a story collection. I put the text in my Kindle and the audio in my iPhone. It was already a great afternoon for a walk, and now....

Here's an interview with Haruki Murakami (at NPR). Excerpt:

When I'm really focused on writing, I get the feeling that I shift from this world to the other world, and then return to this world. Kind of like commuting. I go there, and come back. Going is important, but coming back is even more important. Since it'd be awful if you couldn't return.

At the beginning of the ninth century there was a nobleman in Kyoto named Ono no Takamura. During the day he worked in the imperial palace, and it was rumored that at night he'd descend to hell (the underworld) and serve there as secretary to Enma Daio, the ruler of hell. Commuting, as it were, every day between this world and the other. His passageway to travel back and forth was an old well, and it still exists in Kyoto. I love that story. Though I don't think I'd ever like to climb down inside that well.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email. I'll use only your first name unless you let me know you want something else.

The NYT's Frank Bruni says Trump replacing RBG will put us in "a special hell" — because the Court "won’t represent what most Americans believe."

He says those words — "won’t represent" — and he must immediately back and fill. He knows it's not right, but... but what?!

Sure, the court isn’t supposed to be beholden to public opinion, but...

But what?!!!

... Americans’ faith in their institutions and feeling that their voices are heard might be strained even further by what seem to be lurches backward by a court forged in the hottest flares of partisan passion.

Reread that. I love the way the word "strained" appears in the most strained sentence I've read all year. I mean really read. Mostly when I encounter strained prose, I'm disgusted and find something else to consume.

But I get sucked into this crazy sentence. It's full of colorful words but mind-bending if you try to picture what's going on. Let's see. Faith and feeling... might be strained... by lurches backward. Lurches backward might strain faith and feeling. And then there's a forge... so the Court is likened to metalwork of some kind.... yet it's capable of lurching. Backwards! Seemingly....

Bruni goes on to list questions of law that the new Court "could well" revisit — abortion, gay rights, voting rights, affirmative action. He presents this as a problem because the President who appointed the new justices doesn't have "deep-seated convictions" — or "a genuinely felt vision" — like some idealized liberal President who aspires to use the Supreme Court to achieve advances that are traditionally the work of legislatures. Bruni characterizes Trump as "the most brazen of opportunists" because he'd pick a nominee that would win him favor from voters.

That is, Bruni first complained that the Court won't be "representative" of Americans, then complained that Trump would not advance his personal political preferences but would think about what voters want. I suspect that Bruni's real point is that the Court ought to be political and liberal.



This picture of Hell is a detail from a fresco in a church in Bulgaria — found at the Wikipedia article "Hell." I chose it because of Bruni's "Hell" metaphor and his phrase "forged in the hottest flares of partisan passion" and because of the scales of justice in the upper left-hand corner.

"If you are between the ages of 18 and 29, I mean hell, even a little bit older. If you’re between the ages of 18 and 35, 40, you have the ability to turn the outcome of this election. Period. Period."

I mean, hell! I'm about to turn 70. My son is about to turn 40. My son is in her I-mean-hell zone. He barely counts anymore. Too old! Oldies step aside. The young ones are taking over, and they know what's what. Period. Period. Period.

And by "her," I mean Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from "AOC Speech Transcript on RBG Death & What Democrats Should Do Next."

People say, “Oh my gosh, why is everyone in our government so old?” I don’t want to be ageist or anything like that, but we want a government that’s diverse....

So get out and vote for 77-year-old Joe Biden. Old white man Joe. It's your only choice. For diversity!

... I understand why people say, “I don’t vote. What’s the point?” I really empathize with it. I’m not here to dismiss you. I’m not here to poo-poo you. I’m not here to say you’re wrong or that you’re a bad person. What I’m here to say is that this year, this election, voting for Joe Biden is not about whether you agree with him. It’s a vote to let our democracy live another day. That’s what this is about....

You  have no choice.

"Residents at a Chinese housing complex who looked forward to living in a verdant 'vertical forest' found themselves in a veritable hell..."

"... with mosquitoes swarming their eco-paradise, according to a report. The experimental green project at Chengdu’s Qiyi City Forest Garden attracted buyers for all 826 apartments, but it also attracted the pesky insects that gave the towers a post-apocalyptic facade...."

The NY Post reports.

This is why you need to test your ideas of paradise.

By the way, aren't there a million stories where people think they have found paradise and then they realize it is hell?

But what I don't understand is — it's China — why don't they just fumigate like mad? I know it's supposed to look like an eco-paradise, but do they really care about the use of insecticide? That surprises me. I'm suspicious of this story. Please entertain me by concocting a conspiracy theory.

The best way to campaign is "the face-to-face, handshake, a hug and being able to hold up the children so they can take pictures with you, to ask a question, to do a pinky promise."

Said Elizabeth Warren, quoted in "'Don't tell me it doesn’t matter': Impeachment trial hurts presidential campaigns/Democratic senators seeking the White House will be stuck in Washington rather than Iowa at a critical moment" (Politico).

The pinkie promise! So that's the secret!

Wikipedia:

To pinky swear, or to make a pinky promise, is the locking of the pinkies of two people to signify that a promise has been made.

In the United States, the pinky swear has existed since at least 1860, when Dictionary of Americanisms listed the following accompanying promise:

Pinky, pinky bow-bell,
Whoever tells a lie
Will sink down to the bad place
And never rise up again.

Pinky swearing presumably started in Japan, where it is called yubikiri (指切り, "finger cut-off") and often additionally confirmed with the vow "Finger cut-off, ten thousand fist-punchings, whoever lies has to swallow thousand needles." (指切拳万、嘘ついたら針千本呑ます, "Yubikiri genman, uso tsuitara hari senbon nomasu")....

That's rather harsh! Should Warren be doing this with children? I note the suggestion that promise-breakers go to Hell. Trump recently got raked over the embers for suggesting that a man had gone to Hell:



Are we taking Hell seriously today or not?

I don't have a tag "promises." I'm using "contracts." Warren taught the law school course "contracts," you know. Would you do a pinkie promise with a contracts professor? Better a contracts professor than a religionist. Whoever tells a lie will sink down to the bad place and never rise up again.

Contracts answer: It's not a contract.

Trump toys with the notion that Congressman John Dingell — who died recently — is in Hell!

At the end of this clip, Trump jokes about Rep. John Dingell being in hell after his wife, Rep. Debbie Dingell, voted for impeachment pic.twitter.com/i72Qnn49GM

— Brandon Squall (@Walldo) December 19, 2019

"Everything! I gave him everything. That’s okay. I don’t want anything for it. I don’t need anything for anything. [His widow] calls me up, 'It’s the nicest thing that’s ever happened, thank you so much, John would be so thrilled, he’s looking down, he’d be so thrilled. Thank you so much, sir.' I said that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Maybe he’s looking up, I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe."

Up. Down. Who knows which way Heaven is? Maybe Heaven is down and Hell is up, and Trump was toying with the directional mysteries of the afterlife. But no sense denying it. He was goofing around with the idea that a dead person may be watching not from Heaven but from Hell.

The widow is Debbie Dingell, who now occupies her late husband's seat in Congress. Olivia Nuzzi writes in NY Magazine:

"Looking around lately, I am reminded less often of Gibson’s cyberpunk future than of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical past, less of technology and cybernetics than of magic and apocalypse."

"The internet doesn’t seem to be turning us into sophisticated cyborgs so much as crude medieval peasants entranced by an ever-present realm of spirits and captive to distant autocratic landlords. What if we aren’t being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past? In my own daily life, I already engage constantly with magical forces both sinister and benevolent. I scry through crystal my enemies’ movements from afar. (That is, I hate-follow people on Instagram.) I read stories about cursed symbols so powerful they render incommunicative anyone who gazes upon them. (That is, Unicode glyphs that crash your iPhone.) I refuse to write the names of mythical foes for fear of bidding them to my presence, the way proto-Germanic tribespeople used the euphemistic term brown for 'bear' to avoid summoning one. (That is, I intentionally obfuscate words like Gamergate when writing them on Twitter.) I perform superstitious rituals to win the approval of demons. (That is, well, daemons, the autonomous background programs on which modern computing is built.)... Stuck in a preliterate fugue, ruled by simonists and nepotists, captive to feudal lords, surrounded by magic and ritual — is it any wonder we turn to a teenage visionary [Greta Thunberg] to save us from the coming apocalypse?"

From "In 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants" by Max Read (in New York Magazine).

Simonists, eh? Hint: They're in the 8th Circle of Hell. Looks like this: