For some reason, this old post is the post of mine that got the most traffic in the last 12 months.

March 9, 2016

Elite media slowly absorbs the meaning of Donald Trump.

In the NYT this morning.

1. A photograph that exemplifies Donald Trump voters as they ominously approach a polling place. The sky is dark, the couple is old and funereal, the man is grim, the woman a clown.

2. A photograph that's mostly black space, with Donald Trump's face all the way over to the right, emerging from the gloom, and the shadows giving his neck the appearance of a scrotum.

3. The Editorial Board is "Trying to Read Donald Trump, in Translation." This is not — as I'd originally imagined — the NYT people translating Trump's simple statements into the language of the elite so they can understand it. It's attempting to imagine how Trump's statements are heard by people in other countries.

4. "Does Donald Trump represent a legitimate expression of the people’s will? Is his rise a manifestation of justifiable resentment among less privileged whites at their neglect by higher caste Republican leaders?" A columnist (Thomas B. Edsall) wonders.

"How Many People Support Trump but Don’t Want to Admit It?"

Asks Thomas B. Edsall, in the NYT (gift link).

Oh! Ha ha. I thought this was a new article.

Seemed to go along with today's episode of The Daily, "48 Days Until the Midterms: Is a Blue Wave Coming?" (gift link)[based on "A ‘Blue Wave’ May Be Building, but How High? A Times/Siena national poll suggests Republicans are reeling. Can they come back by depicting Democrats as too far to the left?].

But now I see that Edsall piece was published on May 11, 2016.

Ha ha ha. I guess we found out.

Edsall ends with: "[T]he simple fact that Trump has beaten the odds so far means that it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he could beat them again. If he does take the White House, much, if not all, of his margin of victory will come from voters too ashamed to acknowledge publicly how they intend to cast their vote."

"Open Fly."

Subliminal Headline of the Day:

From the NYT home page, linking to this article (about influencers' high jinks at the Open).

I don't know about you, but I take line breaks seriously. I saw and thought about "Open Fly" far too long before the headline congealed into the imprecation to "let your freak flag fly." Is that expression still alive after all these decades? I associate it with Jimi Hendrix. And, yes, I see the original appearance of the expression came in Jimi's 1967 song “If 6 Was 9”:

They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die
But I’m gonna wave my freak flag high

Then there was David Crosby, in 1970's "Almost Cut My Hair":

But I didn't and I wonder why
I feel like letting my freak flag fly
And I feel like I owe it to someone

But it's more than half a century later! Are we still saying that — I mean, other than jocosely and to refer to the trappings of hippiedom?

And I'm seeing it in the NYT now and then. For example, from 2022, there's "This Is What Happens When Election Deniers Let Their Freak Flag Fly." "Let your freak flag fly" seems to have come to mean "Be yourself" or "You do you," except that it includes the notion that what you are is weird. And not in a good way. For Crosby and Hendrix, it was good. Very good. 

This is like the way if you mock someone for making a typo, you'll make a typo.

But it's far worse:

The guys at @PodSaveAmerica laugh at JD Vance for not knowing what the academic definition of a blood libel is—and then immediately demonstrate that they know even less about it than he does...

Instant Karma. pic.twitter.com/LFN6HY6rAx

— H.A. Hazony (@HAHazony) September 3, 2026

There's so much blood in the old stories, so much blood to choose from. They ALL get confused. The term "blood libel" is specific, but there is seemingly very little awareness of what it refers too. Over time, where there is misuse, does the meaning broaden? Actually, it can. It's called "extended use."

And the OED entry for "blood libel" recognizes the original and the extended use: "The (unfounded) accusation that Jewish people use the blood of Christians in religious rituals, esp. in the preparation of Passover bread; an instance of this (cf. blood accusation n.); (also in extended use) an unfounded defamation."

That's enough to warrant circumspection with respect to what Vance said. Those Pod Save America guys veered right into ridicule. A big mistake... especially since the topic could not be more serious.

ADDED: Here's "The Ridiculous Hyper-Parsing of JD Vance" by Rich Lowry at National Review.

The Japanese Prime Minister and the possibly reincarnated cockroach.

"Even after moving to the official residence, I carefully wiped down the floor under the dining table, put food scraps in a sturdy lidded garbage can, and washed and sorted plastic containers, so I was shocked when, one day, a cockroach suddenly scurried past my feet."

Writes Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, at X. 

"But I’ve loved Osamu Tezuka’s *Firebird* since I was a child and have read it over and over many times. *Firebird* depicts the idea of reincarnation, that 'life is connected, changing forms,' and it had a huge impact on me even as a child. Maybe because of that, even now as an adult, I can’t bring myself to kill insects, cockroaches included. For the cockroach that ran through the official residence, I thought things like, 'Maybe this life is also part of that long cycle of reincarnation,' and for a while, I endured it, hoping it would somehow leave on its own—but when I told my secretaries about it, they were appalled. 'It’s unclean. I’ll handle it,' one of the secretaries said firmly, and arranged for Operation Combat. After that, the cockroaches stopped appearing. I felt relieved, but also a little lonely, or maybe sad…"

That got picked up in Western media with headlines like "Japanese PM Says She Felt ‘Lonely, or Maybe Sad’ When Staff Got Rid of the Cockroach in Her Home" (People) and "Japan’s PM: I’m so lonely I befriended a cockroach" (The Telegraph).

They seem to miss everything elegant and evocative about what Takaichi is trying to say through her carefully written vignette. Did they, at least, read Tezuka’s "Firebird"?

Old and new media: The same non-news story, presented by People Magazine and TikTok.

1. People: "QVC Host Keeps Her Composure After Guest’s Hilarious NSFW Slip While Talking About Blowouts/'Gotta love live-TV!,' Brattin joked in one Instagram post about the incident."

2. TikTok:

"A country pursuit. Many of us do it around here in Hereford."

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bruce Robinson (@brucerobinsonofficial)

AND: "Do you like clocks?"

I saw a young woman with magenta hair bicycling in Madison, Wisconsin, a tote bag slung over one shoulder.

What was the slogan on the tote bag? "NOW MORE THAN EVER." What?! A Nixon fan?!!

What slogans of today will lose the association with a particular political cause or candidate and — half a century or so in the future — become usable for other causes by people who would hate that cause or candidate if they knew what the hell he/she/it was?

Yes We Can... Stronger Together... Change We Can Believe In... Make America Great Again...

There's background on Nixon's slogan in a WaPo article dated March 15, 2017: "Now, more than ever, ‘now more than ever’ needs to go/The phrase's resurgence is historically inappropriate":

I don't believe Nina Totenberg's explanation for why she reported that Justice Alito was retiring.

I'm reading "'I am so, so sorry': NPR reporter explains SCOTUS retirement error" (CNN):

"I rushed out of the courtroom after the opinion announcements, and when I realized that the usual rush of folks after a few minutes had not happened, I asked somebody [what] was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the ‘s’ on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed something no reporter should ever do, that you were retiring."

I don't believe she would report specific news about Alito based on a passing 2-word remark in answer to her question about why people are hanging back. Wasn't it already obvious that there could be a retirement announcement that day and therefore that there was reason to hang back and find out? If someone said "retirement announcements" — or "retirement announcement" — you couldn't assume it meant anything more than that people are waiting to hear if there are going to be any retirement announcements.

“It was the worst professional mistake of my more than 50 years in journalism,” she wrote to Alito. “I could go on, but I don’t know what else to say except that I am so, so sorry.”

Say what really happened,  

It often leads to the trivialization of serious subjects...

Writing the previous post and trying to get to Meade's YouTube page, I googled the name of the page, Meadeification, and got this:

Here's more of Meade's trivialization of a serious subject:

West Wing?

I'm reading this Axios piece: "Ex-Biden aides give Jill's new book a frosty review":

View from the West Wing!

I know Trump has demolished the old East Wing, so there's no taking a view from it right now, but Jill Biden purports to give readers a "View from the East Wing." That's the title. (And that's a commission-earned link.)

I understand the Axios slip, because who would read a book about what went on in the East Wing? I'm sure Jill's view was what Melania articulated so well: "Who gives a fuck about the Christmas stuff and decorations?"

That's a "commission earned" link for the book, by the way. It comes out tomorrow. It's #1 at Amazon in the category "Sociology of Marriage and Family" and look at the competition:

Crazy stuff, no? Betty Friedan is still hanging on, there's something called "The Ethical Slut," and it's fits in "Marriage and Family," and why is orange the color of marriage? "Fair Play" is up there twice — once as a book and once as a deck of cards — but there's also "It Begins with You" and — clicking around — I'm confronted with....

"[Jill] Biden is a longtime English professor who casually uses the correct group noun for starlings ('murmuration')."

"She quotes many writers here — Albert Camus, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, James Salter — but the author the book recalled most vividly to me, in its careful catalog of small details, was William Carlos Williams, who in his epic poem 'Paterson' wrote 'no ideas but in things.' This tracks, because Biden acknowledges the help of Ada Calhoun, the author of [a book] about Frank O’Hara. Indeed, Biden’s description of being hustled for security reasons through the service entrance to hotels made my O’Hara stand on end, so cleanly could it be broken into stanzas, if you’ll forgive the liberty: 'right by garbage cans/ reeking of rotting room service leftovers/mixed with discarded mini shampoos/ — an odor so sour and pungent/that it almost knocks you down.'"

So writes Alexandra Jacobs in "Jill Biden’s New Memoir Shows Off a Sharp Eye, if Not a Sharp Elbow/Beyond a few pointed digs at her husband’s successor, 'View From the East Wing' largely sticks to the head-spinning details of first lady-hood" (NYT).

Speaking of "no ideas but in things," we're told that, in her new memoir, her second, Jill Biden "marvels at the perks of the office, the masses of flowers, attentive staff and fine art, such as 'Morning on the Seine, Good Weather,' the oil painting that Angela Merkel said Trump called 'my Monet.' ('Our Monet,' Biden corrects, meaning the American people’s.)"

I looked it up. Here's "Our Monet":

According to The White House Historical Association's Facebook page: "On December 4, 1963, the family of John F. Kennedy donated the painting 'A Morning on the Seine; Good Weather' to the White House collection in memory of the late president." That was 2 weeks after the assassination. I'm only noticing this painting now, because I'm reading about Jill and Donald verbalizing possessively about it. And now I feel as though I can see, in that fuzzy image, 2 profiles yelling at each other. And both look like Trump.

Oh! The derangement! An odor so sour and pungent....

ADDED: Did Trump say "my Monet"? It's hearsay — at least double hearsay. Jill Biden is asserting that Angela Merkel said that Trump said something. There's room for mishearing, misquoting, misinterpreting, and lying from Merkel (supposedly hearing Trump) and Biden (supposedly hearing Merkel) and from anyone else who's passed this statement along.

Interestingly, Trump has used the phrase "my Monet," but not to refer to an artwork by Claude Monet. Trump has called one of his golf courses "my Monet": "I have friends who buy Monets. Turnberry is my Monet and it’s far more beautiful." But that quote too is hearsay. Eric Trump wrote it in a book, it says here: "Donald Trump: Turnberry is my Monet — and it’s more beautiful/US president ‘obsessed’ with details about his golf courses in Scotland and continually makes suggestions to improve them, according to his son Eric’s book" (London Times).

Googling for more reporting of Trump's use of the phrase "my Monet," I got a good laugh:

 

I'd like to hear the "Apprentice" theme song with "Monet!" taking the place of "Money!":

Mistranscription of the day.

Meade memorialized this morning's sunrise in a video with a soundtrack of one of my favorite recordings. It displayed on my computer with closed captioning:

Here's my screengrab:

Here's the full "home recording" of "Deep Blue Sea" by Grizzly Bear. The mistranscribed line should be: "Dig his grave, darling/With a silver spade." And here's a playlist I made on Spotify: "Deep Blue Sea Night."

"Colleagues in the operating room 'had concerns that Dr. Shaknovsky did not have the skill level to safely perform this procedure'...."

"After Dr. Shaknovsky removed the organ, 'The staff looked at the readily identifiable liver on the table and were shocked when Dr. Shaknovsky told them that it was a spleen,' the state documents said. 'One staff member felt sick to their stomach.'"

From "Surgeon Who Removed Wrong Organ From Patient Is Charged in His Death/Dr. Thomas Shaknovsky tried to persuade his colleagues in the operating room that the liver he removed from a 70-year-old patient was a spleen, according to Florida’s Health Department" (NYT).

"My reaction was pure confusion, sarcasm and not ill intended. Could have handled it better! Now I know what a Zaghrouta is! I welcome all cheers and yodels from here on out."

Said Sabrina Carpenter, quoted in "Sabrina Carpenter Apologizes for Mistaking Arabic Celebration Call With Yodeling During Coachella Performance: 'Could Have Handled it Better'" (Variety).

Here's how it looked and what she said at the time: 

Sabrina Carpenter is currently at the mercy of cancel culture after this exchange at Coachella last night.

Fu#%ing based Sabrina. 😎 pic.twitter.com/QzmggohvPQ

— Amiri King (@AmiriKing) April 12, 2026

ADDED: Notice that she says "I don't like it" when she misreads it as yodeling. Why the hostility to yodeling? But showing disrespect to Arabic culture is another matter. From the NYT article:

Fans appeared divided over Carpenter’s response on social media. One user called it “insensitive and Islamaphobic.” Another wrote: “She’s not obligated to like anything, but after receiving the information that it was part of the person’s culture, the least that is expected is respect.”

AND: Does yodeling seem... too country and somehow right wing?

"Mr. Crofts and Mr. Seals, who as adherents of the Baha’i faith imbued their music with religious themes, started as a duo in 1969..."

"... and stayed together until 1980. They produced the jazzy, upbeat 'Diamond Girl,' the quirky, naturalistic 'Hummingbird,' the feathery, soulful 'Get Closer' and the wistful 'We May Never Pass This Way Again' — all reaching the Top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. But it was 'Summer Breeze,' which peaked at No. 6, that proved the most lasting, with its memorable opening guitar lick, gentle melody and simple, reassuring refrain: 'Summer breeze makes me feel fine / Blowing through the jasmine in my mind.'... In a 2022 ranking of the greatest summer songs of all time, Rolling Stone magazine listed 'Summer Breeze' at No. 20. It described Seals & Crofts as one of the 'signature soft-rock groups' of the early 1970s...."

From "Dash Crofts, of the Soft-Rock Duo That Sang ‘Summer Breeze,’ Dies at 87/Seals & Crofts had a number of Billboard Top 20 songs in the 1970s before their chart topper brought them global fame" (NYT).

What were the Baha'i elements in this music? I hope it is not disrespectful to use A.I. to sketch out the beginning of an answer. Oh! It's much more extensive and explicit than I realized.

"[O]ne server... has watched diners grapple with a layered dessert consisting of honeycomb semifreddo covered in a tundra of shaved Comte cheese"

"'We get a lot of people who will take a couple bites and be like, "Well, I just thought it was way too much cheese,"' he says. 'I will have sat there and watched you just scoop right off the top, which is quite literally all cheese.' Now, he provides a bit of gentle parenting, making sure diners reach their spoons to the bottom of the dish and get semifreddo in each bite. In a world of Yelp Elites and TikTokers and Beli-trackers and, yes, restaurant critics like myself, it makes sense to leave nothing open to interpretation. Only, interpretation is half the fun...."

From "It’s time to retire the restaurant monologue/When did dinner out start to feel like a TED Talk?" (Eater).

Have you misinterpreted any food lately? 

Have you provided fun through food interpretation? All I can think of is the David Sedaris diary entry where he talks about a restaurant's use of foam: "I had a foie gras soup that looked as if it had been pissed on. Hugh had sea urchins, the shells emptied out and filled with what looked to be dirty bubble bath... [S]hould the trend continue, you’d never again be able to tell if the waiter had spit in your food." From "Theft by Finding" (commission earned).

"Cow Licking."

I've been a huge admirer of Georgia O'Keeffe since I first saw the Life Magazine article "Georgia O'Keeffe, on the Ghost Ranch." That was 1968, and I was 17. I've looked at so many of her pictures, in person and in books, but I had never seen "Cow Licking" until this morning. 

I love it. Don't you? But let me tell you how I happened to run across it this morning. It was 5:43 a.m., and I'd been downstairs in breakfast-and-blog mode for a while when I got this text from upstairs:

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

I know what that is. It's Meade, sending me a Bob Dylan lyric and boldfacing the part about a small dog licking the face of whoever "you" is. Who is this person whose only teachers — law professors — are Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the jungle, and the sea? He rode in on a white horse, he's buff and handsome, and now he's lolling about in a field with a small dog licking his face. Maybe you remember being told that this song, "Jokerman," is about Jesus.

I don't know about that. I see that Dylan said it was something "mystical" that came upon him down there in the Caribbean — something "inspired by these spirits they call jumbis."

I didn't get far into that because Meade texted "What is that famous painting?" And he didn't mean that Dürer painting that is the first image in the "Jokerman" video, that image that just about everyone thinks is Jesus but is the artist himself, Albrecht Dürer:

Meade was thinking about something else: "Black man, lying supine on desert sand with stars above and a small dog."

I immediately thought of Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy":

Yes, that's not a dog. It made me think of this scene in a Chaplin movie I'd watched upstairs last night while Meade was watching basketball downstairs:

Texting this morning from upstairs, Meade thought it might be a different Rousseau painting. I found "La Noce," which has a "comically oversized and awkward" dog that, we're told, takes "the eye deep into the composition" and asserts the artist's "position as the master of spatial paradox."

I text-typo'd "that’s the only rousseau with a god that i found."

I asked Grok, "What's that famous painting with a dog licking a person's face." And then "Is there ANY famous painting showing any kind of tongue-licking?" and "Dog or person or other animal — now I'm just looking for licking. I'm thinking licking isn't seen as something worth painting — too in-the-moment and active to be frozen into a still image. But maybe somebody did it. All I can think of is that Rolling Stones logo."

And that's how I found "Cow Licking."

UNANSWERED QUESTION: Why did Meade send me that Dylan lyric and boldface "with a small dog licking your face"? I think it had something to do with the rumor that Mayor Mamdani has a secret plan to run all the dogs out of New York City.

Juiciest dog rumor since "They're eating the dogs."

Fresh muffins and steaks.

somehow, this so-casual, cutesy references to "fresh muffins" & "steaks" is among the most obscene emails in what we have seen of the Epstein files.
to learn that the emailer is a woman named Susan Hamblin who'd founded an adoption charity is overwhelmingly disgusting. https://t.co/qDp2UBU0fl

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) February 3, 2026

If I'm reading this right, both victims and predators were conceptualized as food to Epstein and whoever Susan Hamblin is.

Many of the commenters over there at X seem to think they are talking about actual food.

Can you think of any examples — beyond this possible one — where a non-metaphor was read as a metaphor? Sex is often talked about using food metaphors, so there could easily be a mixup where talk about food is misread as sex talk. Famous example from 10 years ago: Pizzagate. The words "cheese pizza" were said to mean "child pornography."

Looking up "Pizzagate" this morning, I see what was 10 years old is new again:

"DO NOT make the mistake President Biden made for not firing a grossly incompetent DHS Secretary."

Writes Senator John Fetterman to President Trump, quoted in "Fetterman calls on Trump to fire Noem: 'Americans have died'" (The Hill).

When I first read that line — "Americans have died" — I thought he meant to say the entire nation has lost its soul.

But he meant the simpler, concrete reality: Renee Good and Alex Pretti have died.

There's also this: "Trump Holds 2-Hour Meeting With Noem Amid Backlash to Minneapolis Shooting" (NYT): "The meeting came after Ms. Noem requested to see the president.... Ms. Noem has been the face of the administration’s immigration crackdown, and she has been among the most vocal in spreading false accusations against Mr. Pretti, including labeling him a 'domestic terrorist.' The Oval Office meeting also included several of Mr. Trump’s top aides.... The meeting came the same day Mr. Trump announced he was sending Tom Homan, his border czar, to oversee the operation in Minneapolis. The move was seen as a way to elevate an official who is steeped in Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s longstanding practice of prioritizing targeted arrests, rather than the kinds of sweeping raids that the Trump administration has carried out in cities across the country."

The referenced "grossly incompetent" Biden DHS Secretary was Alejandro Mayorkas, who oversaw the 10+ million illegal border crossings. Why didn't Biden fire him? A cynic would say Biden approved of what was happening. And yet even if he approved, he should have signaled that he did not approve, and firing the Secretary is a showy way to express disapproval.