"Has anyone else seen the political cartoon depicting Judge Kavanaugh's child praying for her father. It's really despicable."

Asks Andrew in the comments to yesterday's café. He adds: "The Democrats are crossing one line after another. I can only hope they rue the day." His link goes to a Rod Dreher post at The American Conservative, "When They Came For Kavanaugh’s Kid," which shows this cartoon by Chris Britt that was published in the Illinois Times:



Dreher asks: "How can a man do this to another man’s child? How can editors allow this to pass? What corrupt and wicked hearts they have." Dreher has to update and expresses puzzlement:

For some reason, this image is being passed around to some people as if I approved of its message. If you’re going to send it around, please point out that I *abhor* this image.

I think I can help Dreher with his puzzlement, because when I first saw the cartoon — fully knowing that Andrew thought it was despicable — I thought of asking the question: Which way does this cartoon cut? You can go 2 ways:

1. Kavanaugh is presumed to be an angry, lying, alcoholic man who really did sexually assault Ford, and the daughter knows it and asks God to forgive him.

2. Kavanaugh's daughter has heard what is being said about her father, believes it, and asks God to forgive him.

In the second reading, the cartoonist would be criticizing the politicians and the press for going after Kavanaugh in a way that hurt that child, destroying her understanding of him as a good man, and the child turning to God to help her in her devastation.

Look again at Dreher's question, "How can a man do this to another man's child?" What was done to the child and who did it? In interpretation #2, we see a child to whom the attack on Kavanaugh has done something terrible, and the cartoonist is showing us that. That message is the same one Kavanaugh himself delivered: You have destroyed my family. Look what you did, you fiends! Kavanaugh also said that his child was so wise that she knew, in her religion, that she should pray for "the woman." That same sincere religious belief would bring her to pray for her father, if she thought he was all those things people were saying. The cartoon shows the child possessed of that belief and still following her religion.

Understanding the cartoon in those terms, Dreher's readers could think he approved of it. Since the first interpretation is the easier one to make, I can see why he doesn't want to be associated in a positive way with the cartoon, but with a bit more reflection, he might see how the second interpretation, though harder to reach, is really more sound. And I'm saying that even though I would guess that the cartoonist had the first interpretation in mind.

On the subject of using children in politics, Dreher's question is also complex: "How can a man do this to another man's child?" I'd like to keep children out of politics, but does that mean images of children don't belong in cartoons? The child isn't the intended audience for this cartoon. We, the adults, are seeing an image of a child and it may move us, because children draw out emotion. They represent innocence and vulnerability. That's why the second interpretation jumped out at me. I feel protective of the child whose tender, impressionable mind has been invaded by ugly images of her father.

Dreher seems to be tapping into some old rule: Don't attack the children! But the cartoon isn't an attack on the child. It's a flip of the way Kavanaugh himself used the child: She's so beautiful and valuable that she prayed for the woman who is accusing her own father. If Kavanaugh can use his child that way, and a cartoonist may not counter that with another point of view, it's a lot like the way Christine Blasely Ford was able to make her accusations and escape cross-examination. Don't attack the woman!

"Canada agrees to join trade accord with U.S. and Mexico, sending new NAFTA deal to Congress."

WaPo headline. First 2 sentences of the article:

Canada agreed late Sunday to join the trade deal that the United States and Mexico reached last month, meeting negotiators’ self-imposed midnight deadline designed to allow the current Mexican president to sign the accord on his final day in office and giving President Trump a big win on trade.

The new treaty, preserving the three-country format of the original North American Free Trade Agreement favored by business groups and congressional Republicans, is expected to be signed by Trump and his Canadian and Mexican counterparts in 60 days, with Congress likely to act on it next year.

NYT headline: "U.S. and Canada Reach Trade Deal to Salvage Nafta." First 2 sentences of the article:

The United States and Canada reached a last-minute deal to salvage the North American Free Trade Agreement on Sunday, overcoming deep divisions to keep the 25-year-old trilateral pact intact.

The deal came after a weekend of frantic talks to try and preserve a trade agreement that has stitched together the economies of Mexico, Canada and the United States but that was on the verge of collapsing. 

In WaPo, it sounds like a new deal. In the NYT, it sounds like what we're getting is the preservation of the old deal.  The NYT makes it seem like a close call with disaster, and WaPo says the deadline is self-imposed and designed to make Trump look like he has a big win.

I suspect that both newspapers wanted to make Trump look like less of a success and they chose different approaches to diminishing him.

WaPo credits Trump with a "big win" in the first sentence. The NYT forefronts the stress. In the first few paragraphs: "a year of tense talks and strained relations," "frenetic Sunday." You'll have to wait for paragraph 6 to see "a win" for Trump:

The deal represents a win for President Trump, who has derided Nafta for years and threatened to pull the United States from the pact if it was not rewritten in America’s favor. Overhauling trade deals has been one of Mr. Trump’s top priorities as president and he has used tariffs and other threats to try and force trading partners to rewrite agreements in America’s favor. 

It's a "win" not a "big win," and maybe the Times isn't even conceding that it's a win. It only "represents a win." And Trump created all the disorder and threat on his own. He didn't critique NAFTA for any real problems. He "derided" it.

At the Best Date Night Café...

... you can talk all night.

Kanye West wore a "Make America Great Again" cap on SNL, and he said some pro-Trump things and got booed and cut off.

People reports:

He started off by singing, “I wanna cry right now. Black man in America, you’re supposed to keep what you feel inside right now. And the liberals bully you and tell you what you can and cannot wear, where you and they can’t not stare. And they look at me and say, ‘It’s not fair. How the hell did you get here?’ Well…”

Wearing a Make America Great Again hat, he then delivered an unexpected speech in front of SNL performers like Colin Jost and host Adam Driver as some audience members booed. “Actually, blacks weren’t always Democrats,” he started. “It’s like a plan they did to take the fathers out the homes and promote welfare. Does anybody know about that? That’s the Democratic plan.”

Trump weighed in:

Like many, I don’t watch Saturday Night Live (even though I past hosted it) - no longer funny, no talent or charm. It is just a political ad for the Dems. Word is that Kanye West, who put on a MAGA hat after the show (despite being told “no”), was great. He’s leading the charge!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2018

"They know they got a problem tomorrow."

Jesus Aguilar, after the Brewers won today and (assuming the Cubs win today), speaking about tomorrow's tiebreaker game for winning the National League Central Division.

The Cubs are up 10-5 in the 8th inning. If somehow they lose, the Brewers win the division outright. That seems unlikely, and the game tomorrow will be at Wrigley Field (because the Cubs have the better record against the Brewers this season). [UPDATE: 10-5 is the final score.]

A closer look at my sense of humor.

As you can see in the previous post, I saw a George Bernard Shaw play — "Heartbreak House" — at a lovely outdoor theater yesterday. The excellent cast gave a fine performance and got quite a few laughs. I laughed. It was a comedy, based on the style of Anton Chekhov and also inspired by the 1874 painting "The North-West Passage/It might be done and England should do it."



Anyway. Though I laughed a sort of abstracted intellectual laugh during the play and appreciated it silently much of the time, there was something I saw and thought after the play that reduced me to flat-out hysteria.

I was walking down the path from the theater in the woods on the hill, down toward the parking lot with the rest of the crowd, and in front of me was a young man in a leather jacket that has 2 words painted on the back of it. He had a blanket or something slung over he shoulder. (It was a bit cold, and many people had blankets.) So I couldn't read the entire words, just the ends of the words. I saw "-ORM" above "-OW." I tried to think of what he might have written there, and I figured that "-OW" was "NOW," and it was a political slogan. He wanted something, and he wanted it now. Like Jim Morrison:



So what was it he wanted with this primal urgency? "-ORM"? I thought: REFORM. And the idea of "REFORM NOW" as a political slogan cracked me up to the point of insanity. It's like shouting "Give me moderation or give me death!" "Reform" is just too dull of a wish to demand it NOW!

I was lost in hilarity when the man whipped the blanket off his shoulder and revealed the 2 words. Suddenly the impossibly dull political demand was a blatant, far-off mistake, which only made it funnier to me, especially in contrast to the real words, which were for me nonsense — "STORM CROW." Nonsense is funny too.  You don't get nonsense when you always have the internet at your fingertips, but I did not have it there as I was dissolving in laughter on that hill. To me STORM CROW was just a new way to shout REFORM NOW!

In the clear light of morning, internet at my fingertips, I see the boring information that Storm Crow is a character in "Magic: The Gathering," and "Magic: The Gathering" is a trading card game. There are over 20 billion "Magic: The Gathering" trading cards out there. That's all news to me.  Maybe if you saw "-ORM/-OW" on a young man's leather jacket, you'd figure right off it was "STORM CROW." But I had my 2 minutes of high amusement trying to think what sort of person would get so intense about reform, that he might caterwaul — in the Jim Morrison mode — We want reform and we want it... NOW!!!!!

"But how can you love a liar?"/"I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world."

Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday.



The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.

Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says:  "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."

Hector explains his behavior:

HECTOR. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest....

Mangan reaches a breaking point and declares he's getting the hell out of the house, "Heartbreak House," where all the action takes place. Hector makes a move to go too and to turn it into a ridiculous romantic escapade:

HECTOR: Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.

MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.

ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.

I thought you might enjoy those lines. There's much more, of course. Shaw was writing a play deliberately in the manner of Anton Chekhov. Note the seagull on the set in my photograph (at the middle of the right edge).

Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" (and "The Seagull" is the Chekhov play with the last-act gunshot). So when Captain Shotover brought out a box of dynamite to tinker with in Act One, I figured Shaw meant us to see the Chekhov joke and to expect an explosion in the next act. We're expected to anticipate the whole lot of them blowing up and to contemplate, throughout, whether that isn't what they all deserve.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?

"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.

Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?

Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:

ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. [Hector]'s tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about [Mrs. Hushabye] but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.

Was Lindsay Lohan simply mistaken in believing she needed to save these children from sex trafficking?

I'm reading "Lindsay Lohan gets punched in the face after accusing refugee parents of trafficking, trying to take the kids" (Fox News)(video of the incident at the link). I know it's easy to make fun of Lindsay Lohan, but what does she know, and shouldn't we care?

“Guys, you’re going the wrong way, my car is here, come,” Lohan is heard yelling at the children who continued to follow their parents as she chases them down the street.

How do we know the adults are their parents?

“They’re trafficking children, I won’t leave until I take you, now I know who you are, don’t f--- with me.”

How does she think she knows they are sex traffickers?

While trying to get the children's attention, the actress, who spent a few years living in Dubai, can also be heard shouting Arabic phrases in a what sounds like a Middle Eastern accent.

Lohan speaks Arabic, apparently.

“You’re ruining Arabic culture by doing this. You’re taking these children they want to go,” she said before yelling at the boys, “I’m with you. Don’t worry, the whole world is seeing this right now, I will walk forever, I stay with you don’t worry.”

Lohan tries to take a child's hand, and, in the middle of her own live-stream video, gets punched in the face.

I do not know what is going on there. I also don't know what if anything happened with Christine Blasely Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, decades ago in a Maryland house. But we're spending weeks peering into the distant past of 2 hyper-privileged Americans, and some unknown number of children right now are, it is said, dragged into sex slavery, and we let that be merely a passing tale of celebrity weirdness. That Lindsay Lohan. What was she thinking? But it's not really a story about 2 children arriving in Moscow from Syria and a laughable actress punched in the face. It's a story of thousands of children, all over the world. Do people even care if Lohan was wrong or right? Why are things so distorted and out of proportion?

"The Queen's first openly gay footman has stood down after reportedly being demoted for 'courting publicity.'"

The Daily Mail reports. What a fantastic job:

Ollie Roberts, 21, was required to accompany Her Majesty on all her carriage rides and carry out other duties like collecting her mail at Buckingham Palace and walking the Corgis.

But you're not allowed to call attention to yourself in this fantastic job!

The former airman was told he would be bumped down to an ordinary footman after the palace became concerned about his increasingly high profile, with several articles in gay publications.

"And the Chicago Cubs have company at the top of the National League Central."

First place mood. #LetsGo pic.twitter.com/4fwwlDgwMO

— Milwaukee Brewers (@Brewers) September 30, 2018

"Saturday Night Live" does a fantastic cold open with Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh.

I've watched this and I still have not read what anyone is saying about it, so let me sketch out a few thoughts before I read what people are saying.

1. Matt Damon was great. For a moment there, I thought he was channeling Chris Farley, with the idea of raging and amping up the rage, but that association left my mind as Damon continued and used a lot of the details observed in the hearing: turning the pages angrily, drinking water, sniffling.

2. Yesterday, I was predicting that "SNL" would do a Kavanaugh cold open, and I pictured lines like "I like beer, do you like beer," and I got them.

3. The character of the prosecutor Rachel Mitchell was very well observed, conveying apt criticisms that I myself have about how she was used. The SNL castmember, Aidy Bryant, did a nice job of playing the bland professional who found herself in a place where she didn't belong, asked to do something she wouldn't be permitted even to begin to do.

4. The Lindsey Graham part was a complete disaster. Kate McKinnon will get credit for suppressing any vanity and dressing as a man, but there were 2 things wrong. First, Graham was the loudest, angriest person in the room last Thursday, so McKinnon needed to top Matt Damon, and Damon set a high baseline. McKinnon has a less powerful voice than Damon, unsurprisingly, so the loudness may have been physically impossible, but she also couldn't begin to match him in conveying intense anger. Second, the writers gave her a script premised on the idea that Graham is a gay man. Some of the lines were like lines in a dating ad, saying he's 5'11" and "uncut," and the part ended with "This right now, this is my audition for Mr. Trump's cabinet and also for a regional production of 'The Crucible,' and let me tell you, queen, I was good." Queen???!!! Did I mishear that? I replayed it 10 times, and we turned on the closed captioning, which simply omitted the word (after pausing, so apparently the closed captioner didn't know what to do).

"Sorry, Democrats, but America is unlikely to have a Democratic president before 2025...."

"[I] you look at historical patterns from the end of the 19th century to now, you’ll see that a party (Republican or Democratic) almost always holds the presidency for at least 8 years. Notice I’m saying a 'party,' not a 'president.' For example, Ronald Reagan was a Republican president for 8 years, followed by another Republican president, George H.W. Bush, for 4 years; that’s 12 continuous years of Republicans, so that whole time follows the 8-year minimum rule, even though one of those presidents was in office for only 4 years. There’s been only one exception since 1897 (when the first 20th-century president took office).... Jimmy Carter...."

Writes my son John (at Facebook).

It sounds like a very strong rule, but there is that one exception.

"Her neon mouth with the blinkers-off smile/Nothing but an electric sign/You could say she has an individual style/She's part of a colorful time..."

The colorful time was the 1960s and Marty Balin was a transcendent voice...



Marty Balin, dead at 76. Here's the the NYT obituary by Jon Pareles.

[Grace] Slick was often singled out for attention, and she sang lead on “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love,” the 1967 hits that made the band national headliners. “I always let everybody else take the credit,” Mr. Balin told High Times magazine in 2000. “Grace was the most beautiful girl in rock at the time, so they gave her credit for everything.” In the documentary film “Monterey Pop,” when Mr. Balin sings his ballad “Today,” the camera instead shows Ms. Slick, who was mouthing the words with him. Mr. Balin quit Jefferson Airplane in 1971....

At the Saturday Café...

... don't get lost in the weeds.

Now, I am getting email from the Democratic Party soliciting donations based on Brett Kavanaugh.

Yesterday morning, I blogged about getting an email solicitation from the party, under the name of Cory Booker, that didn't mention Kavanaugh. I speculated about what that might mean. But yesterday evening, I got this email, from the party, with the subject line "Brett Kavanaugh" (signed by Seema Nanda, the CEO of the Democratic National Committee). Since I blogged about the Kavanaugh-free email. I've got to share the text of this:

After watching Republican senators' shameful performance in this week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, I'm more certain than ever that it is a moral imperative for Democrats to take back control of Congress this November and the White House in 2020.

Shameful? What was shameful?

The University of Wisconsin won a big patent case against Apple in 2015, but it has now lost in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals.

"We hold that no reasonable juror could have found literal infringement in this case" said the unanimous court, reported in U.S. News.