A bubble-wrapped President protected by a chimera in a mirage in an alternate universe.

I'm trying to read "The Tragedy of Joe Biden" by Maureen Dowd:

By the end, when he was bubble-wrapped in 2024, he trusted only his family and his closest aides. And they protected him with a damaging chimera. Sugarcoated interpretations of polls that were not reflected elsewhere. Extreme efforts to redesign the presidency to adapt to his ever more fragile state. Trashing Robert Hur for telling the truth. Refusing to do the cognitive testing that might have established a diagnosis....Tapper and Thompson show how Biden and his inner circle created an alternate universe that they tried to sell to the media and the public — the sort of corrosive mirage of unreality that Trump excels at building....

Trump! How did Trump get into that metaphorical mishmash?

I do like this part, which names names:

It was not just Joe and Jill who wanted to hang on to power, with all the perks and trips and, for Jill, glamorous Vogue covers. It was also their advisers, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini. The “palace guard,” as Chuck Schumer derisively dubbed top Biden advisers, slid from sycophancy to solipsism. The more Biden was out of it, the more his hours and responsibilities were curtailed, the more of a vacuum there was at the top, the more power the advisers had...

They bubble-wrapped the President, put him in a mirage in an alternate universe, and set up a chimera to do whatever it is chimeras do. So they fooled him and they also fooled us, they being Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Anthony Bernal, Ron Klain and Annie Tomasini... and who else? Where was Maureen Dowd and the rest of the press — among the foolers or the fooled? And she's saying Joe Biden is a tragedy? Too many fools. Too many villains. It's a comedy. 

Instead of "The Tragedy of Biden," write a column titled "The Comedy of Biden." Use Shakespeare as your model of tragedy and comedy and tell me why we, the audience — we the People — experience Trump as Falstaff and — for all his faults — love him.

At the Mudface Café...

... you can talk all night.

I had already decided on the title "At the Mudface Café" for my day-ending open thread post using that photo of the seeming face I saw in the mud on the trail today. 

And after that pedestrian pareidolia, as I kept walking the muddy path, I was struck to hear this passage in my audiobook:

"Like the ouroboros, I believe Big Tech is eating itself alive with its component companies throwing more and more cash at investments in each other that are most likely to generate less and less of a return...."

"[T]hese companies... will one day disappoint those who view them as safe assets. And the self-cannibalization will not just reveal itself to be a mediocre investment but a shaky bet on an illusion propagated by a mythical and messianic belief in technology and these companies.... One need not look at ancient folklore to find depictions of the ouroboros. The economist Joseph Schumpeter...wrote of a cycle of industrial mutation' that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.'"

Writes Harvard law and business professor Mihir A. Desai, in "The Future of A.I. May Not Be as Revolutionary as We Thought" (NYT).

"very shocking & disrespectful to make light of the Feast of Dionysus; deeply offensive to those who have devoted their lives to feasting, drinking, & salacious behavior."

Writes Joyce Carol Oates, tweeting in response to this:

ADDED: "Paris Olympics organisers apologise to Christians for Last Supper parody/Apology follows anger among Catholics and other groups at opening ceremony segment that resembled biblical scene" (The Guardian).

"The mythological couples provided ideas for conversations about the past and life, only seemingly of a merely romantic nature."

"In reality, they refer to the relationship between the individual and fate: Cassandra who can see the future but no one believes her, Apollo who sides with the Trojans against the Greek invaders, but being a god, cannot ensure victory, Helen and Paris who, despite their politically incorrect love affair, are the cause of the war, or perhaps merely a pretext. Who knows? These days, Helen and Paris represent us all: each day we can choose whether to focus solely on our own private lives or whether to explore the way our lives are entangled with the broad sweep of history...."

Said Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the Director of the Archaeological park of Pompeii, quoted in "Pompeii: a dining room decorated with characters and subjects inspired by the Trojan war has emerged from the new excavations" (pompeiisites.org).

"If everyone would walk to the public library with an empty pack and come home with books for the whole family we’d be smarter, healthier and happier."

A comment on the NYT article "This Full-Body Workout Fits in a Backpack/Rucking, which is simply walking with a weighted backpack, is a great way to combine strength training and cardio without setting foot inside a gym."

The commenter's visualization is short-sighted. After the first time, you can walk both ways with a full pack. You can also just be a student/teacher, walking with the same textbooks, back and forth to school.

When I was a law professor, though, I used to cut up my casebooks into cover-free booklets so I could walk to school without carrying any significant weight. I thought that was the smart way to make getting to work healthful and pleasurable. I'd see the occasional ROTC student with a big knapsack or an earnest runner with weight plates in his backpack, but I'd never noticed the word "rucking."

"Smith has a herculean task before him. He must present a persuasive narrative that Trump and his henchmen and women (yes, you, Ginni Thomas) were determined to pull off a coup."

The prose of Maureen Dowd, in "The Moment of Truth for Our Liar in Chief" (NYT). 

I saw the headline first and thought "Our Liar in Chief" might be a reference to the current President, but what are the chances?

I wondered whether convincing a jury that Trump attempted a coup is what we ought to call "a herculean task." Why did Hercules perform his tasks? Was he some sort of prosecutor, accusing somebody else? No, he stood guilty of murdering his wife and children and needed to atone.

Also, his tasks were much harder than persuading some human beings to view a set of facts as falling within a particular formulation of words.

If a prosecutor's task really looked as difficult as any of the 10 Hercules had to perform, the prosecutor shouldn't be charging, since prosecutorial ethics demand a belief that it's more likely than not that an unbiased jury will find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

We shouldn't look to prosecutors for tricky superhuman feats, and if you catch yourself doing that, you may atone by reading Robert H. Jackson's 1940 address "The Federal Prosecutor."

French Impressionism explained at long last: It was the air pollution.

From "Scientists confirm long held theory about what inspired Monet" (CNN).

I thought it was going to be cataracts, but, no... air pollution.

"In general, air pollution makes objects appear hazier, makes it harder to identify their edges, and gives the scene a whiter tint, because pollution reflects visible light of all wavelengths" [said Anna Lea Albright, a postdoctoral researcher for Le Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at Sorbonne University].... 

The team looked for these two metrics, edge strength and whiteness, in the paintings — by converting them into mathematical representations based on brightness — and then compared the results with independent estimates of historical air pollution.

Don't you love it when something you thought was a human being's inspiration turns out to be an outside force, something that happened to him? It's especially demoralizing when it's some malady or misfortune.

Taiwanese social media, Nancy Pelosi is depicted as the Taoist deity Wangmu Niangniang — the Queen Mother of the West.

That's from The London Times. 

"Several years back, you offered a stunning reading of the Rapunzel story. You looked at the beginning, in which a pregnant woman..."

"... so craves the parsley growing in a witch’s garden that she steals some, and the witch punishes her by taking her baby. The baby grows up to be Rapunzel, the girl with long hair who is locked in a tower. I’m thinking of the story now because our Supreme Court seems poised to strike down Roe v. Wade."

Said Katy Waldman, recently, interviewing Marina Warner, in "Marina Warner Sees the Myths in Our Moment Warner has spent decades studying how our oldest stories speak to modern life, from the lure of fake news to the politics of abortion" (The New Yorker). 

Warner answers:

"Fish leather is here, it’s sustainable – and it’s made from invasive species..."

The Guardian reports.

Actually the full headline is "Fish leather is here, it’s sustainable – and it’s made from invasive species to boot," but I didn't like "to boot." The "and" already carries the meaning of adding one more thing, and "to boot" has nothing to do with a boot — yet boots are made of leather. That's just annoying.

The word "boot" in "to boot," going back to Old English, means "good, advantage, profit, use" (OED). It has a Germanic origin. The "boot" that is the footwear originates in French. It's a different lineage.

Anyway:

Lionfish... devour[] an estimated 79% of young marine life within five weeks of entering a coral reef system.... So Chavda and a team of ecologically aware fellow scuba enthusiasts decided to act by establishing Inversa, which turns lionfish into a new product: fish leather.... 

Inversa does not hunt the lionfish itself. Instead, it relies on educating and encouraging largely poor fishermen and women in often remote places to catch them....

So the ecological goal came first. Whether a commercially viable enterprise can be made out of lionfish leather is another matter. I doubt it! These are pretty small fish. How are you going to manufacture that into saleable leather goods? It's not like making a sharkskin suit.

That's a joke. A sharkskin suit is made out of wool (or silk), but it's called "sharkskin" because it looks like a shark's skin. And yet, when Herman Melville refers to sharkskin in "Moby-Dick," it seems to be real shark skin:

Kellyanne Conway "depicts Trump as a feminist who repeatedly supported and promoted her, allowing her to make history as the first woman..."

"... to manage a winning presidential campaign. 'Donald Trump had elevated and empowered me to the top of his campaign, helping me crack glass ceilings that had never even been dinged before,' she writes, adding that 'angry feminists' should “have at least once in their lives a "girl boss" as generous, respectful, engaging, and empowering as Donald Trump was to me and my other female colleagues.'"

From "In new book, Kellyanne Conway takes aim at many targets — except Trump Part personal chronicle and part political journey, the book is filled with the sorts of barbed one-liners and bon mots that she dispensed on cable news" by Ashley Parker (WaPo). 

Also:

In the waning days of his presidency, Conway also writes that, during a discussion with Trump on pardons and clemency, he turned to her and asked, “Do you want one?” 

“Do you know something I don’t?” Kellyanne asked Trump, she writes. “Why would I need a pardon?” 

“Because they go after everyone, honey. It doesn’t matter,” Trump replied, according the book.

They go after everyone....

The top-rated comment over there is:

"Why would anyone care what this lying harpy has to say? An admitted dispenser of 'alternative facts' her screechy voice made her an assault on both eyes and ears."

That gets some feminist pushback: 

"I detest her but your comment reeks of ugly misogyny. The term harpy and pointing out her voice for special loathing. It's possible to find someone detestable without venting sexism." 

And:

"Logged on to say the same thing. Harpy and screechy voice are sexist as hell. Men do this often. I’m no fan of hers, but it’s because of her placating TFG and being a phenomenal hypocrite. Stay away from physical attributes next time."

I had to google "TFG." The first hit is a Gail Collins column in the NYT, published February 17, 2021 — "Trump’s Dreaded Nickname": 

Sitting in disgraced, double-impeached political purgatory, Trump has been trying to retrain the world to refer to him as “the 45th president” during his unwelcome retirement. (If you are lucky enough to get a mass email from him, the return address will be “45 office.”) How cool would it be if he had to sit in front of the TV listening to people talk about “the former guy?” 

D.J.T. = T.F.G.

Perhaps the "dreaded nickname" caught on in some quarters, but I don't remember hearing it before. Collins's dream of what would be cool was not to be. We still hear Trump, Trump, Trump, and it's only going to get louder as we move into the 2024 election season which the disgraced, double-impeached Trump already dominates.

"The F.D.A. said it expected Abbott to restart [infant formula] production in about two weeks... at the plant in Sturgis, Mich."

"It has been shut down since February after several babies who had consumed formula that had been produced there fell ill and two died. The agreement stems from a U.S. Department of Justice complaint and consent decree with the company and three of its executives. Those court records say the F.D.A. found a deadly bacteria, called cronobacter, in the plant in February and the company found more tranches of the bacteria later that month. According to the complaint, the same Sturgis factory had also produced two batches of formula in the summer of 2019 and 2020 on different production equipment that tested positive for the bacteria. Abbott staff 'have been unwilling or unable to implement sustainable corrective actions to ensure the safety and quality of food manufactured for infants,' leading to the need for legal action, the documents state. In a release, Abbott said 'there is no conclusive evidence to link Abbott’s formulas to these infant illnesses.'" 

"F.D.A. and Abbott Reach Agreement on Baby Formula to Try to Ease Shortage/The company said production could resume in about 2 weeks and store shelves would be restocked several weeks later" (NYT).

Here's the Wikipedia article on cronobacter: 

Cronobacter was first proposed as a new genus in 2007 as a clarification of the taxonomic relationship of the biogroups found among strains of Enterobacter sakazakii.... 

Cronobacter (Cro.no.bac'ter) is from the Greek noun Cronos (Κρόνος), one of the Titans of mythology, who swallowed each of his children as soon as they were born, and the New Latin masculine noun bacter, a rod, resulting in the N.L. masc. n. Cronobacter, a rod that can cause illness in neonates.

"The surrealists, that group of Paris-based painters and writers who reached deep into the newly fashionable unconscious for inspiration..."

"... were eager to claim the most famous artist of the day for themselves. The figurative but distorted forms that Picasso was producing resonated powerfully with the dreamscapes that paid-up surrealists such as Salvador Dalí and André Breton were producing. While Picasso was not generally a joiner, he agreed to design the cover for the first issue of Minotaure, the influential magazine of the movement that was launched in 1933. The mythical figure of the minotaur – part-man, part-bull – functioned more personally as an alter ego for Picasso, representing all his lasciviousness, guilt and despair."

From "A Life of Picasso: Volume IV by John Richardson review – stranger things/The final volume of biography by Richardson, who died before finishing it, is a thrilling survey of Picasso’s surrealist era" (The Guardian).

ADDED: The unconscious was once "fashionable," but it's rare these days — isn't it? — to hear anyone talk about the unconscious. And yet, in some ways, we're inclined to give priority to our dreams.

This is, perhaps, the freakiest coincidence in all my years of blogging.

1. This morning, before going out for my sunrise run, where I planned to continue listening to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Crossroads," I opened up the NYT review, "Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Crossroads,’ a Mellow, ’70s-Era Heartbreaker That Starts a Trilogy." I wanted to read a review, and I selected that one, just because it's in the NYT (and written by Dwight Garner, a reviewer I like).

2. After the sunrise, with that tab sitting open on my browser, I sat down for my usual morning blogging session, and what caught my eye and set the tone for the morning was Donald Trump's participation in the tomahawk chop at the World Series game in Atlanta last night.

3. As I wrote in the previous post, that "jogged my thinking about gestures and chants that mimic the real or imagined traditions of indigenous people and I thought, remember drum circles?" That led me into a 1991 WaPo article about the men's movement 30 years ago, which entailed drumming and other "Native American" inspired rituals, much of which came from the musings of the poet Robert Bly. 

4. I click various windows out of my way and uncover that "Crossroads" review. It begins:

Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Crossroads,” is the first in a projected trilogy, which is reason to be wary. Good trilogies rarely announce themselves as such at the start. And the overarching title for the series, “A Key to All Mythologies,” may be a nod to “Middlemarch,” but it also sounds as if Franzen were channeling Joseph Campbell, or Robert Bly, or Tolkien, or Yes.

5. And don't even get me started on Joseph Campbell. That was so last week.

"We have not even to risk the adventure alone for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known... we have only to follow the thread of the hero path."

"And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a God. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outwards, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

Wrote Joseph Campbell, in a popular "hero's path" quote that is printed on the wall of the Soho gallery showing "The Journey Home’ a Hunter Biden Solo Exhibition," visible in photographs at "Hunter Biden’s wife seen at SoHo gallery as controversial art show opens" (NY Post).

The gallery wall contained a quote from author Joseph Campbell’s book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” about the hero’s adventure in mythology. Campbell, a literature professor at Sarah Lawrence College in Westchester, coined the phrase “Follow your bliss.”

Here's the Wikipedia entry on Campbell's famous book so you can refresh your memory of this thing you must have learned at one point in your life (I know I did, 50 years ago).  Campbell looked at the  stories of Osiris, Prometheus, the Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, and Jesus and decided that they were enough alike that they could be boiled down into what he called "the monomyth" (or "hero's journey"):

Amazon's "Cinderella."

That has a 41% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. I scanned the reviews. Nothing worth quoting. 

The preview is enough. I looked it up after reading this comment on the review that appears in WaPo: "I watched the preview and was struck by the whole message that Cinderella's new dream is to get to work MORE. Feed into the capitalistic machine, Cinderella! You have no value unless you dream of WORK."

Yes, there's a male fairy godmother, not that he's called a "fairy"! He's referred to as "Fabulous Godmother." 

At this stage in the woke evolution of the language "mother" is fine, "fairy" is not. Will that ever change? It seems to me, in the history of the mythology of fairies, there was a land of Fairy, and it wasn't an all-female realm:

"The museum appeared at first to be a collection of capitalist artifacts. A large figure of the Jolly Green Giant flanked Poppin’ Fresh, of Pillsbury fame... shared space with... the Michelin Man."

"But Ms. Weis’s intent was to link our conceptions of these pop-culture figures to the human need to mythologize; she asserted that our Fates, Furies and giants were not left behind in Greece or Egypt, but rather transposed to our own culture.... One of her favorite pieces in the museum was a plastic model of Elsie the Cow, the character used to sell dairy products in advertisements for the Borden Dairy Company, which later branched out into chemical products, including glue. Elsie then acquired a husband, Elmer, who sold the well-known white glue named after him. Their domestic squabbles formed the background of 20th-century ad campaigns selling Borden products. Mr. Whiting compared their dynamic to that of Hera and Zeus in Greek mythology, the archetypical contentious marriage. 'We’re not saying they’re deities,' Ms. Weis said... 'But the same relationship holds. They will live beyond their generation because people revere their character by buying the product.'"

From "Ellen Havre Weis, Whose Museum Put Pop Into Mythology, Dies at 64/The Museum of Modern Mythology, in San Francisco, which she helped found, posited that advertising figures have emerged as the pre-eminent mythical figures of our time" (NYT).

As I mentioned on this blog in its first year, there's a member of my family who, when he was rather young, believed for quite a while that the image on the cans of Green Giant peas and corn in the cupboard was God. I had to ask him why did you think that was God? It's not as if anyone ever encouraged him to think the Jolly Green Giant was God, and he'd never questioned the adults about who this laughing green entity is supposed to be. The image itself conveyed the sense that this is God. 

Which image? It was the 1980s, so pick out 1980s Giant:

Yes, he's depicted with a scarf there. I'm going to presume that's the image for frozen vegetables. The "God" impression came from cans. I believe the giant stood spread-legged above a sunny farm field, wearing only his leafy tunic, crown of leaves, and elf shoes. Does that say "God" to you?

By the way, I fear for the human woman he took up with in 1945. The God Giant needs to stay in his heaven, presiding over the crops, and not consort with mortals. Those ears of corn and pea pods are far too large for the lady, whose head is the size of one of those peas.

And the 1970 giant is so 1970s, clearly influenced by the hippie movement. Imagine a God who follows transitory, regional human trends... and who's squirmily bashful about his achievements. A modest God!

"There were a number of prominent theologians during the years that I was going through the seminary who watered down the Resurrection, arguing that it was a symbol..."

"... for the conviction that the cause of Jesus goes on, or a metaphor for the fact that his followers, even after his horrific death, felt forgiven by their Lord. But this is utterly incommensurate with the sheer excitement on display in the Resurrection narratives and in the preaching of the first Christians. Can one really imagine St. Paul tearing into Corinth and breathlessly proclaiming that the righteous cause of a crucified criminal endures? Can one credibly hold that the apostles of Jesus went careering around the Mediterranean and to their deaths with the message that they felt forgiven? Another strategy of domestication, employed by thinkers from the 19th century to today, is to reduce the Resurrection of Jesus to a myth or an archetype. There are numberless stories of dying and rising gods in the mythologies of the world, and the narrative of Jesus' death and resurrection can look like just one more iteration of the pattern. Like those of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis and Persephone, the 'resurrection' of Jesus is, on this reading, a symbolic evocation of the cycle of nature. In a Jungian psychological framework, the story of Jesus dying and coming back to life is an instance of the classic hero's journey from order through chaos to greater order.... Declaring a man's sins forgiven, referring to himself as greater than the Temple, claiming lordship over the Sabbath and authority over the Torah, insisting that his followers love him more than their mothers and fathers, more than their very lives, Jesus assumed a divine prerogative. And it was precisely this apparently blasphemous pretension that led so many of his contemporaries to oppose him. After his awful death on an instrument of torture, even his closest followers became convinced that he must have been delusional and misguided. But when his band of Apostles saw him alive again after his death, they came to believe that he is who he said he was...."

From "Recovering the Strangeness of Easter/For Christians, the holiday is about recapturing the surprise and excitement that the Resurrection brought to Jesus' first followers" by Bishop Robert Barron (Wall Street Journal).

The OED Word of the Day is an obsolete word, "Titanolatry."

Is the OED suggesting that we bring it back to life? We could use it: it means "Worship of, or excessive respect for, power." The mythological Titans represent power in this concoction with the familiar "-olatry" ending.

What's the worst Titanolatry going on today? Is the OED obscurely nudging us about Trump, whose crowds these days chant "We love you"?

Here's "The Fall of the Titans" by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1596–1598). I love the placement of the dragonfly (and the overall it's-raining-men effect):