A Letter to the Church

Growing up, I was grateful to be in a church that by and large avoided prioritizing politics. The church is first and foremost the visible union of those in Christ, imperfectly signifying the ultimate union of, I sincerely hope, all people in Christ in eternity. Given this, I think it is important for churches to avoid becoming subsumed in the sturm und drang of political debate, because they need to minister to all souls and model a community in which even enemies are neighbors, and no neighbors are shunned.

We must love our neighbors in the reality in which they live, however, and throughout history lives are impacted in many ways by events, including those subject to political controversy. When a natural disaster falls on those around us, we should not ask their political views before helping them. In the same manner, when something akin to a natural disaster in its effect falls on our neighbors, we should not avoid helping them out of a desire to remain politically neutral.

We are presently living through a moment where those who carefully consider both history and the events of the day, from across the political spectrum of mainstream American politics that we grew up with (if you grew up at any point in the seventy years after 1945), recognize as just such a calamity. I do not want the church to endorse political candidates, or commentate on elections; but I think in a moment when institutions are collapsing into a nascent authoritarian lawlessness, and innocent human beings are being wrongfully imprisoned, abused, and discriminated against, we lose the right to act as if everything is normal. We have to either react like humans capable of love and with the capacity to perceive even a scintilla of the truth, or we completely lose our witness.

I realize many people who used to exist comfortably on one side of the political aisle have reacted to circumstance and shifted into a position of independence and great discomfort with both sides, which is a credit to them – this type of shift is difficult and challenging on a personal level. There is, however, a temptation that comes with it – the temptation to find a new way to rise above controversy by answering any wrongdoing by one side with a compensating example of wrongdoing by the other. This was perhaps once a wise and reasonable impulse, but in extreme circumstances it risks reifying a false equivalency. I fear we are too prone to this posture in the church, and that this does real, material harm to people we should protect, because a commitment to defining the middle as equidistant between the two poles cedes control of what is within the ambit of acceptable politics to whoever is willing to run the furthest from that center in their direction, and thus drags the center with them. Some things must remain beyond the pale for those who love justice and mercy.

I think in our case, we have a particular duty to avoid lending our silence as assent to what is currently transpiring around us. We have all seen the statistics on political opinions among Evangelicals, especially Southern Baptists; the head of our flagship institution of theological education and study uses the position the denomination has placed him in to actively, consistently, endorse and support an administration that is doing more violence to the freedoms Americans ask their soldiers to defend, and to the spirit of charity that Christians are called to live out, than any external enemy ever could. In short, to the reasonable member of the general public, we appear by our own association, complicit. Complicit in what? In kidnapping, torture, and murder by neglect. If we want to preserve our witness, and if in fact we want to obey Christ by loving our neighbors, we must not be silent when evil is transpiring in plain view, we must not act as if everything is normal, and go about our business as if all disagreements are simply that – disagreements, without responsibility. To quote Bonhoeffer, “We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing — for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’ — for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?”

But most importantly, we must act in love. I have no interest in the kind of political posturing so many churches do, without actually helping people or risking anything. I believe there is an absolute moral imperative to help those in peril.

When I was a child, I recall a young man from Sudan came to stay with a family in our church. He had walked out of a war, out of a famine, and out of his country to get to safety. He had no legal place to go. The church helped this man, and gave him a future – or rather, the church was merely the instrument passing along the blessing that was not originally theirs to give. Today, there are people like that young man all around us, even in our nearest communities – people with no good options, with nowhere to go – and some of these people are being scooped up by a machinery of evil that is operating not only in our name, claiming to act on our behalf, but also in the name of our God – they are being scooped up, and some of them are being dumped into places like that my refugee friend walked out of – in some cases, the exact same war zone, in fact.

If we are serious about ministering to the needs of our most vulnerable neighbors, we cannot simply stay within our comfortable walls and watch. And, as recent events have demonstrated that no one can have an expectation of safety in any place, if we take seriously the safety of those attending our church, as I know we do, we cannot simply hope or assume that nothing bad will ever happen to our community.

In short, we need two plans. We need a plan to reach out to those who are at risk of falling under the oppression of our own government, and to shelter, protect, hide, and succor them. They may not be safe at work. Their kids may in fact not be safe at school. How are they to live? They are among us, and we have the capacity to act; we must put ourselves at their service, and keep them fed and clothed and as safe as possible. I recommend we connect with other churches in this, regardless of denomination, as well as other charities, and legal counsel that has experience with these issues. We also need a revised safety plan for our church. If on Sunday, ICE appears at the door and tries to seize people, to take children who are in our care, for instance, we should not be caught by surprise; we should decide in advance what to do, and suffer the consequences for living by our Christian principles. I do not believe we should allow concern over what authorities may or may not do to us to intrude on our consideration of what God would have us do. Perhaps (hopefully) nothing will happen; perhaps there will be persecution; perhaps we will all die tomorrow in an earthquake, or in an atomic fire – as Lewis said when faced with that very fear: “If we are all going to be destroyed…let it find us doing sensible and human things: praying, working, teaching, reading,” etc. There is a world of moral difference between expecting retaliation for doing the right thing, and therefore refraining from doing it, thus allowing and assenting to the evil one would not prevent, and anticipating consequence, and doing what is right even if it is ineffectual, because you make the wrongdoer harm you in order to commit their sin. We should interpose ourselves between those who destroy themselves with violence toward others, and the actions they seek to commit. We cannot ourselves be harmed.

Music in February 2025

Highlights from my February playlist:

• Daniel Blumberg’s overture for The Brutalist is one of the best cases of musical magpiery and deconstruction, in this case of Gershwin on the centennial of Rhapsody in Blue, that I’ve ever heard.

• Doctor Eleven delivers precisely the sort of melancholy folk triumphalism that Dan Romer specializes in.

• Deb Talan continues her run of haunting all my listening, deservedly.

• KOURAKUEN has a wonderfully-specific background resonance that underscores ZOMBIE-CHANG’s mechanistic deadpan.

• Head Over Heels is the kind of big synthy ‘80s sound I never tire of.

• Rail Gaddi makes me want to dance an Irish jig on the roof of the Punjab Mail.

• Killing Time drops into what feels like a musical food processor at 2:40, which I always enjoy.

• Great Grandpa’s brand-new EP Ladybug has some of their most captivating work yet.  

• Something to Believe is one of the best tracks on Weyes Blood’s excellent Titanic Rising.

• Peter Gabriel is an oracle of the hidden soul.

• Bloodless actually is some of Andrew Bird’s “finest work yet,” but beyond the music, it is upsettingly momentous in its echo of the Spanish Civil War, the conflict that stalks our present discourse. And of course there is the implicit threat that it is only “bloodless for now.”

Shows I Watched in 2024

Now that we’re almost three-quarters of the way through 2025, it’s time to post my ranking of shows I watched last year. To be clear, these are just whatever I happened to watch in 2024, not shows that actually aired in 2024. I will be going in ascending order, starting with my least favorite:

14. Dune: Prophecy

Dune: Prophecy announces itself as a typical franchise-name : subtitle prequel, and in the marketing makes sure you know it’s set 10,000 years before the movies. Unfortunately, the quality of the show is about that far removed from what has so far been my favorite movie franchise of the 2020s. The writing is completely off-the-shelf, the production design apes the form of Villeneuve’s movies with no handle on what makes them visually grand, and the photography and VFX feel deliberately blurry in a way that feels cheap, rather than stylized. It’s also fundamentally misconceived as a prequel, just like every attempt at expanding the Dune universe beyond the original books. The entire universe only works by way of mystery – it’s no good if you see too much of how the Bene Gesserit actually operate, just like it would be a mistake to demonstrate how the Sardaukar train, or show the Axoxotl tanks, or explain how anything works on Ix. Dune is about awed silence in the face of the enormity of the scope of the universe. This show, on the other hand, is simply another slapdash attempt to greenlight anything vaguely Game of Thrones-shaped, and it may as well have been written by autocomplete.

13. Star Trek: Short Treks

There’s really nothing wrong with Short Treks – it just isn’t much of a show, as the name suggests. Most of these vignettes in the Star Trek universe are all right, if not terribly interesting. The great exception is, of course, the episode which deals with the creation of tribbles, which is hilarious.

12. Star Trek: Picard (Seasons 1 & 2)

As you can see from the shape of the list, I watched a lot of Star Trek last year. I rated the first two seasons of Paramount’s Picard legasequel separately from its third season, both because of the gap in quality and that fact that in many ways they feel like different shows. Taking the first two seasons on their own, both have a lot of issues, chiefly with the writing. It’s clear that they fell into the trap I struggle with, which is having cool ideas for scenes, and then having no organic way to get there, and instead contriving an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of a silly plot. Having said that, there’s also a great deal of Star Trek fun along the way, including the addition of Allison Pill to the cast, and the debut of Riker’s most powerful form, Pizza-Oven-Riker.

11. Dallos

Dallos, the early ‘80s anime classic, is very slow as science fiction which at times threatened to put me to sleep; however, it also contains the kind of haunting imagery you only get from classic anime, as well as a sturdy Gramscian narrative.

10. Zombieland Saga: Revenge

Zombieland Saga pretends to be a silly and relatively charming zombie-idol-comedy, but what in actuality it is perhaps the most elaborate and bizarre regional tourism commercial ever made.

9. Non-non Byori Nonstop

The real inaka.

For me, this was simply nostalgic vibes, reminding me of the kind of quiet country landscape I lived near in Japan.

8. Spy x Family

It’s sweet, it’s fun, and it has a nice dog in it.

7. Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is such an interesting show—it kept turning into very different shows from season to season and making choices that at times seem inexplicable. It successfully reviewed Star Trek on TV for the first time since Enterprise, and it reveled in the things which made Star Trek great, the wonder of exploration, the utopian optimism (despite an addiction to blow-up-the-world stakes); at the same time, the writing often felt a little askew, or unintentionally silly, which, I admit, is in the tradition of Star Trek. Some of its emotional reaches feel overwrought and don’t quite connect in the way that similar attempts in Doctor Who did for me; however, it also is unafraid of wearing its heart on its sleeve and grabbing at awe, and the fourth season, in particular, really gets what makes Star Trek distinct from other science fiction.

I love these uniforms.

And also these.

Discovery has a real appreciation for the kind of strange awe that was present in The Motion Picture.

6. House of the Dragon

Is the second season of House of the Dragon a bit self-indulgent? Yes. Do any of the decisions made by the characters on either side make much sense? Not really. Was Oscar Tully ghost-written by Aaron Sorkin? Possibly. Does every single piece of costuming appear richer than death-by-chocolate? Obviously! And do I enjoy being back in this world? Verily.

5. Star Trek: Picard (Season 3)

When you Frankenstein a series together almost entirely out of references, pure fanservice, and Return of the Jedi, it isn't supposed to work. But rules are meant to be broken. This is the most fanservicey thing I've ever seen - and I love it. I never thought we'd get a second golden age of Star Trek - I thought that was all behind us when I started getting deeper into the show in high school. I'm so glad to be wrong. Season 3 of Picard makes every obvious decision you would normally mock in a legasequel, but it does it with such frank unembarrassment, and so well, that it clears every hurdle. This feels like a show designed by  people who grew up on Wrath of Khan and TNG, and the fusion of those aesthetics produces some of the most gorgeous ship, costume, and production design in the franchise.

I can’t believe they made me nostalgic for a font.

4. Star Trek: Lower Decks

When an animated comedy Star Trek show was announced, I was nervous that it would err on the side of typical adult animation humor, and fail to respect the universe it was set in. Fortunately, I should not have been concerned. Lower Decks is made with such a devoted and nerdy love for Star Trek, without slipping into the kind of ossified reverence that many fans fall into—and on top of that, it’s genuinely hilarious from top to bottom.

3. Paranoia Agent

Paranoia Agent is an inexplicable masterpiece by the late great Satoshi Kon. It’s far too strange to sum up, and far too eerie to forget. The truth shall set you free.

2. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Strange New Worlds is the best Star Trek show in years, possibly ever. The writing dances with joy every episode (at one point even breaking into a full musical episode), and you get the sense that there’s nothing they won’t try, and nothing they can’t pull off. It also is gorgeous, from the best interior design in the franchise, fantastic costuming, and a stupidly attractive cast. Oh, and it’s also a cooking show.

1. Succession

Succession has probably the best written dialogue on television, delivered by better actors than any other show. Despite all the hype this show received, it was not overrated by one jot. Succession is a horrifyingly funny mirror to the type of clowns that hold power in our world, a show that utterly skewers its monstrous heroes, while also hugging them tight as human beings one can’t help but empathize with and feel compassion mixed with disgust. Matthew MacFadyen gives maybe the best performance in television.

Here’s the list: https://www.serializd.com/list/Watched-in-2024-161316

Music in January 2025

I am half a year behind as usual, but here is my first monthly playlist of the year. I’m not going to run through the list of all the songs like I used to—I think I have very little to add which isn’t already in the music itself, and that’s not the point of sharing it anyway. I will just point out a couple of highlights:

• I got Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes of the Brokenhearted stuck in my head for a good couple of weeks on account of its prominent use in the pilot of For All Mankind, a truly delightful show and one of the better uses of soundtrack in storytelling.

• I almost always end up putting America’s greatest lyricist, John Darnielle, on here, but this time I’ve managed to put him in under three different band names. It only seemed appropriate to begin 2025, a year that I was already tired of by the end of January, with the defiantly, cynically hopeful This Year.

• I have not yet watched the TV adaptation of Station Eleven, but I have read the novel, and the post-apocalyptic folk concocted for the show by Dan Romer actually does make me want to get up and dance, despite the dark.

• The Drip is just a real good rock song.

• Across My Jaw has an instrumental melody I am a little obsessed with.

• Magdalena Bay’s album Imaginal Disk is one of the best albums of last year, in a very spacy, brain-damaged way.

• I just came across Barrie and immediately loved their work.

• Exploding feels strangely encouraging in this stifling moment.

• Deb Talan and Steve Tannen’s band The Weepies, and their solo work, consistently delivers on the promise of their name. Their 2008 album, Hideaway, is well worth hearing in its entirety, but Orbiting and All This Beauty stand out, and Talan’s Growing Up is a brilliant case of a song becoming more sentimentally heavy by being up-tempo, which is not usually how I experience music. 

• Olsen olsen is a long, slow, echoey build, but it arrives at a melody piping in from Elysium, culminating in a triumphant march that disappears gradually around the corner of the clouds of glory.

I Rely On You

I have a growing concern for the future of our most basic freedom, the core of what it means to be an American – the right to have our own beliefs and to express them. People are waiting, perhaps, for Trump to declare himself dictator, before they acknowledge the threat of authoritarianism. In reality, it rarely announces itself so boldly. In most dictatorships, elections are still held, and average people often feel themselves to be free, as long as they have nothing objectionable to say, or they do not say it too loudly and publicly. And there are many means of political repression. ICE has arrested and detained people specifically because of their political speech; the Department of Justice has been weaponized against those who are prominent critics of the President; criminals whose violence is aimed at Trump’s enemies are pardoned or not investigated with the vigor now reserved for immigrants and his personal enemies; companies are capitulating to even a little pressure from the administration, cutting deals—how long until they become willing to fire outspoken employees in order to retain contracts? Now, the National Guard has been deployed to our capital city as a show of force. This week, Trump sent the Border Patrol, in masks, to stand around with guns outside Governor Newsom’s press conference as an act of intimidation; the administration floated a plan for a military ‘Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force’ to rapidly deploy against protests anywhere in America; and when he took direct control of DC police, Trump said that now they will be “allowed to do whatever the hell they want” to protesters.

In this context, I do worry what will happen at the next protest, or the one after that. What guarantee of safety is there? In truth, you can never guarantee your own safety in this life, try as we might to convince ourselves we have that power. All that we can control are our own actions; we are not responsible for what anyone else does. I do know that quiescence in the face of nascent oppression is a mistake. If you believe you can guarantee your own safety by keeping your head down, I would remind you that regimes which care only about power and not truth or justice are wild animals and they will bite the hand that feeds them; you are never safe with them, even if you are neutral, even if you are on their side at first. All that quiescence does is destroy your own integrity at the cost of your neighbor’s safety; those who refrain from speaking out of fear are spiritually broken, those who speak anyway are exposed and vulnerable because the mass of people do not stand with them. But I hope that will not be the case.

Our rights are ours, individually. They are written in the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence tells us that these are not made up by men, but they are a part of our nature as creatures made by God with free will. I have the right to speak, and I will continue to use it; I do not need to know what anyone else, or what the Trump administration, is going to do in response—that does not enter my calculus. It should not enter yours. There is no good endgame where we keep our heads down and go quietly into authoritarianism; I simply will not live at peace with an authoritarian America. But I do not believe I am alone. Our rights are ours, individually; but all we can do individually is exercise them, in spite of threats and intimidation. For these rights to be protected, we are all reliant on each other. I am relying on you, my friends, family, community, everyone who affirms the Pledge of Allegiance and with it the idea that liberty is the essence of America, to keep the promise of the First Amendment to me, to protect me as I speak, even if we disagree, by exercising your own right to speak, and not standing by and letting a gaggle of bullies threaten or assault free citizens.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

I recently finished reading Hannah Arendt’s famous work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. I came away with too many pages flagged to quote or mention, more than I possibly have the patience or time to review. I also came away with a much deeper appreciation for the undercurrents of late European empires in the lead-up to the Great War. And, of course, I also came away with what I expected, and what prompted me to read the book now, though it has sat on my list for so many years: a sickening sense of recognition, where history becomes a mirror.

I don’t want to oversell that. Obviously, I am now years-deep into a bias (one I think justified, but still a bias) against the current trend of far-right politics in both the United States and around the world. Having used so much stark rhetoric for so long, I am invested, so to speak, in establishing a resemblance between, say, the Trump administration, and whatever historical regime you think worst. The resemblance is real; yet, Arendt, who does not share my bias simply by virtue of having lived in another time, is very conservative in her definition of totalitarian politics, limiting it strictly to the Stalin’s premiership of the USSR and to the Third Reich, with the acknowledgement that Mao’s China seemed set on that same path (an intuition that would sadly be confirmed by events). I personally would not use the term totalitarian to describe the present state of the world’s regimes, outside of North Korea – though the deployment of fine-grained mass surveillance technologies in China, and, increasingly, in this country, or the burgeoning ideological rhetoric of the many culture-warring nationalist regimes may contain its seeds. Still, politics is not an exact art, and like Aristotle, taxonomy can be imprecise yet still useful. So, I want to share some loose impressions, things which struck me. But I am not going to write a book report or an essay – I have gotten too tired and sluggish for that. Instead, I want to simply share a smattering of quotes and fragments which struck me, either for their eloquent profundity, their historical insight, or because, in some cases, they hit too close to home.

As for my review, it is very simple: Read this book.

The book begins, however, with an unintentional reminder to hope, as Arendt reveals in the preface to the first edition, written in the summer of 1950, the bleak anticipation of an Armageddon which seemed inescapable, and yet, in hindsight, did not appear.  And, at the same time, the preface carries within it so much that feels snatched from the pallid air of the present, seventy-five years later, that the breadth of years feels collapsed into two dimensions.

[All Emphases Mine]:

Vii: “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.

               Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest–forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.

               On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism.”

Viii: “The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden which our century has placed on us – neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may be.”

To me this feels like the war against each day, the living in this world of death, while trying to insist it must make sense, somehow, because it has to. The only relief I have is provided by a more incomprehensible world than that of earth, and the hope and fear that our sad world will dissolve into some Other Thing.

Viii: “The trouble is that our period has so strangely intertwined the good with the bad that without the imperialists’ “expansion for expansion’s sake,” the world might never have become one; without the bourgeoisie’s political device of “power for power’s sake,” the extent of human strength might never have been discovered; without the fictitious world of totalitarian movements, in which with unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our time have been spelled out, we might have been driven to our doom without ever becoming aware of what has been happening.”  

I find this speaks to my own complicated relationship with history – how does one appreciate the development of the United States in the ways it was a good achievement, without denying the guilt of those ground under manifest destiny? Or apply that to almost any chain of events in human history. That God brings good from and through evil, we all understand from testimony and experience; but how we should feel about this is hidden.

And Arendt continues: “We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”

This speaks so aptly to what we have seen in the proliferation of harmful ignorance metastasized into deadly conspiracy through the disrespected parts of society and the internet, through the self-selecting out of all those who would know better: xv: “What is true for the history of antisemitism, that it fell into the hands of non-Jewish crackpots and Jewish apologetics, and was carefully avoided by reputable historians, is true, mutatis mutandis, for nearly all elements that later crystallized in the novel totalitarian phenomenon; they had hardly been noticed by either learned or public opinion because they belonged to a subterranean stream of European history where, hidden from the light of the public and the attention of enlightened men, they had been able to gather an entirely unexpected virulence.”

Xxvii: “Decisive in our context is that totalitarian government is different from dictatorships and tyrannies; the ability to distinguish between them is by no means an academic issue which could be safely left to the “theoreticians,” for total domination is the only form of government with which coexistence is not possible.”

I cite this quote only because it provoked in me the fearful self-recognition of that seeming contradiction, a totalitarian liberal – because in my totalized worldview of universal rights which must obtain despite all local conditions and cultures, I recognize a kind of similarly boundless political claim, which, if believed, must assert itself over the entire earth. The answer to the horror any sort of such human cause, even inspired by justice, must produce, is of course not the abandonment of a universalizing cause and order, but a transposition of that hope into the eschatological Gospel of the New Jerusalem of peace, supplanting the present Jerusalem which has itself become the ultimate symbol of bitter division and unending spite.

A footnote sums up an aspect of the present American administration quite well, the destruction of our own state and economic capacity in the service of purely political ends (with no material prize at their end): xxxiv: “Instability is indeed a functional requisite of total domination…substantial power, the material strength and well-being of the country, is constantly sacrificed to the power of organization, just as all factual truths are sacrificed to the demands of ideological consistency.”

6 “A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a mean to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor…it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.”

22 “When the catastrophe came, the fate of the Jewish people was considered a “special case” whose history follows exceptional laws, and whose destiny was therefore of no general relevance. This breakdown of European solidarity was at once reflected in the breakdown of Jewish solidarity all over Europe. When the persecution of German Jews began, Jews of other European countries discovered that German Jews constituted an exception whose fate could bear no resemblance to their own. Similarly, the collapse of German Jewry was preceded by its split into innumerable factions, each of which believed and hoped that its basic human rights would be protected by special privileges – the privilege of having been a veteran of World War I, the child of a veteran, the proud son of a father killed in action. It looked as though the annihilation of all individuals of Jewish origin was being preceded by the bloodless destruction and self-dissolution of the Jewish people.”

I think of the way in which Americans seem convinced that brutality against a special exceptional category of person, the illegal immigrant, will not somehow expand to touch them, and that the breach of trust will not dissolve our own social bonds until there is only flotsam and jetsam.

41 “They [the Left] were not only unprepared to integrate the Jewish issue into their theories, but actually afraid to touch the question at all. Here, as in other international issues, they left the field to the supranationalists who could then seem to be the only ones who knew the answers to world problems.”

I cannot help be struck by the parallels to the problem facing every center-left governing party in Europe, who for years have lost ground because they seem afraid to even speak about any problem related to immigration, ceding the ground entirely to rightist xenophobes; and at the same time, the comparison reminds us of the problem – there was in fact no justification to treat Jews differently, neither is there any to treat immigrants differently. But the populace perceives a problem – how then can one speak to it without doing harm?

There is a footnote summarizing Marcel Arland’s criticism of a crackpot antisemitic conspiracy author which puts a name to the phenomenon of conspiracy theories up to our own present: 49 “Celine…has succeeded in painting not the reality but the very hallucination which reality provokes.”

Quoting the great Zola, we see a glint of the fate I so greatly fear: 94 “We hear on all sides that the concept of liberty has gone bankrupt. When the Dreyfus business cropped up, this prevalent hatred of liberty found a golden opportunity… Don’t you see that the only reason why Scheurer-Kestner has been attacked with such fury is that he belongs to a generation which believed in liberty and worked for it? Today one shrugs one’s shoulders at such things… ‘Old greybeards,’ on laughs, ‘outmoded greathearts.’” I fear this whenever I encounter those too young to remember a politics before Trump, and who regard all this as simply normal, acceptable, even.

101 “The Catholic Church then owed its popularity to the widespread popular skepticism which saw in the republic and in democracy the loss of all order, security , and political will. To many the hierarchic system of the Church seemed the only escape from chaos. Indeed, it was this, rather than any religious revivalism, which caused the clergy to be held in respect. As a matter of fact, the staunchest supporters of the Church at that period were the exponents of that so-called “cerebral” Catholicism, the “Catholics without faith,” who were henceforth to dominate the entire monarchist and extreme nationalist movement. Without believing in their other-worldly basis, these “Catholics” clamored for more power to all authoritarian institutions.”

There has been much made recently in some circles of a stabilization of religious decline, or even of the recovery of religious identification particularly in young men. I am a Christian, and think that without faith the world cannot be borne, so I should welcome at least some of this return to church; but my fear, anecdotally, is that much of what is happening in certain rightist circles is not a conversion to a recognizable Christianity of love, but the appropriation of esoteric religious symbols by the ‘based’. This is troubling; but it is also a reflection of our social collapse into total atomization, for which true religious community is the core of the real answer. I only hope that it will not accrete like rust to the magnetic antipole of rightist machismo touted by the ‘tradcons’. There is even in some rightist influencer circles open discussion of the social utility of religion without real faith. One may as well drive a car with no battery or gasoline.

106 “There was only one basis on which Dreyfus could or should have been saved. The intrigues of a corrupt Parliament, the dry rot of a collapsing society, and the clergy’s lust for power should have been met squarely with the stern Jacobin concept of the nation based upon human rights – that republican view of communal life which asserts that (in the words of Clemenceau) by infringing on the rights of one you infringe on the rights of all.”

This naturally appeals to my desire and thus, perhaps, biased intuition that the only argument which actually holds water is not any contrivance of political convenience drawn from the study of focus groups, but the honest assertion of what one truly believes is moral, as an entreaty to persuade, even in the face of public opinion. Otherwise we are simply trying to either trick people or find new ways to count up votes to 51%, without actually changing any minds.

112 “What was new in all this was not the activity of the mob; for that there were abundant precedents. What was new and surprising at the time—though all too familiar to us—was the organization of the mob and the hero-worship enjoyed by its leaders. The mob became the direct agent of that “concrete” nationalism espoused by Barres, Maurras, and Daudet, who together formed what was undoubtedly a kind of elite of the younger intellectuals. These men, who despised the people and who had themselves but recently emerged from a ruinous and decadent cult of estheticism, saw in the mob a living expression of virile and primitive “strength.” It was they and their theories which first identified the mob with the people and converted its leaders into national heroes. It was their philosophy of pessimism and their delight in doom that was the first sign of the imminent collapse of the European intelligentsia.”

113 “At last Clemenceau convinced Jaures that an infringement of the rights of one man was an infringement of the rights of all. But in this he was successful only because the wrongdoers happened to be the inveterate enemies of the people ever since the Revolution, namely, the aristocracy and the clergy. It was against the rich and the clergy, not for the republic, not for justice and freedom that the workers finally took to the streets. True, both the speeches of Jaures and the articles of Clemenceau are redolent of the old revolutionary passion for human rights. True, also, that this passion was strong enough to rally the people to the struggle, but first they had to be convinced that not only justice and the honor of the republic were at stake but also their own class “interests.” As it was, a large number of socialists, both inside and outside the country, still regarded it as a mistake to meddle (as they put it) in the internecine quarrels of the bourgeoisie or to bother about saving the republic.”

138 “Imperialism must be considered the first stage in political rule of the bourgeoisie rather than the last stage of capitalism…[they] had developed a set of behavior patterns which are expressed in all those proverbs—“nothing succeeds like success,” “might is right,” “right is expediency,” etc.—that necessarily spring from the experience of a society of competitors. When in the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and “thought in continents,” these private practices and devices were gradually transformed into rules and principles for the conduct of public affairs. The significant fact about this process of revaluation, which began at the end of the last century and is still in effect, is that it began with the application of bourgeois convictions to foreign affairs and only slowly was extended to domestic politics. Therefore, the nations concerned were hardly aware that the recklessness that had prevailed in private life, and against which the public body always had to defend itself and its individual citizens, was about to be elevated to the one publicly honored political principle.”

154 “The truth was that only far from home could a citizen of England, Germany, or France be nothing but an Englishman or German or Frenchman. In his own country he was so entangled in economic interests or social loyalties that he felt closer to a member of his class in a foreign country than to a man of another class in his own. Expansion gave nationalism a new lease on life and therefore was accepted as an instrument of national politics. The members of the new colonial societies and imperialist leagues felt “far removed from the strife of parties,” and the farther away they moved the stronger their belief that they “represented only a national purpose.” This shows the desperate state of the European nations before imperialism, how fragile their institutions had become, how outdated their social system proved in the face of man’s growing capacity to produce. The means for perseveration were desperate too, and in the end the remedy proved worse than the evil—which, incidentally, it did not cure.”

157 “If it should prove to be true that we are imprisoned in Hobbes’s endless process of power accumulation, then the organization of the mob will inevitably take the form of transformation of nations into races, for there is, under the conditions of an accumulating society, no other unifying bond available between individuals who in the very process of power accumulation and expansion are losing all natural connections with their fellow-men. Racism may indeed carry out the doom of the Western world and, for that matter, of the whole of human civilization. When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.”

174 “Ideologists who pretend to possess the key to reality are forced to change and twist their opinions about single cases according to the latest events and can never afford to come into conflict with their ever-changing deity, reality. It would be absurd to ask people to be reliable who by their very convictions must justify any given situation.”

178 “The doctrine of the necessary survival of the fittest, with its implication that the top layers in society eventually are the “fittest,” died as the conquest doctrine had died, namely, at the moment when the ruling classes in England or the English domination in colonial possessions were no longer absolutely secure, and when it became highly doubtful whether those who were “fittest” today would still be the fittest tomorrow. The other part of Darwinism, the genealogy of man from animal life, unfortunately survived. Eugenics promised to overcome the troublesome uncertainties of the survival doctrine according to which it was impossible to predict who would turn out to be the fittest or to provide the means for the nations to develop everlasting fitness. The possible consequences of applied eugenics was stressed in Germany in the twenties as a reaction to Spengler’s Decline of the West. The process of selection had only to be changed from a natural necessity which worked behind the backs of men into an “artificial,” consciously applied physical tool. Bestiality had always been inherent in eugenics, and Ernst Haeckel’s early remark that mercy-death would save “useless expenses for the family and state” is quite characteristic. Finally the last disciples of Darwinism in Germany decided to leave the field of scientific research altogether, to forget about the search for the missing link between man and ape, and started instead their practical efforts to change man into what the Darwinists thought an ape is.”

[Here Arendt echoes the atavistic framing of “going native” familiar from the work of Conrad and others, which reflects a degree of racism from the period I obviously don’t endorse. The issue is not with the description of levels of economic and technological advancement, but with the essentializing of character in derogative fashion. This is still a very insightful description of how the process of colonization led to degeneracy among the colonizers.]:

194 “The Boers were the first European group to become completely alienated from the pride which Western man felt in living in a world created and fabricated by himself. They treated the natives as raw material and lived on them as one might live on the fruits of wild trees. Lazy and unproductive, they agreed to vegetate on essentially the same level as the black tribes had vegetated for thousands of years. The great horror which had seized European men at their first confrontation with native life was stimulated by precisely this touch of inhumanity among human beings who apparently were as much a part of nature as wild animals. The Boers lived on their slaves exactly the way natives had lived on an unprepared and unchanged nature. When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life, they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin.”

195 “Racism as a ruling device was used in this [Boer] society of whites and blacks before imperialism exploited it as a major political idea. Its basis, and its excuse, were still experience itself, a horrifying experience of something alien beyond imagination or comprehension; it was tempting indeed simply to declare that these were not human beings. Since, however, despite all ideological explanations the black men stubbornly insisted on retaining their human features, the “white men” could not but reconsider their own humanity and decide that they themselves were more than human and obviously chosen by God to be the gods of black men. This conclusion was logical and unavoidable if one wanted to deny radically all common bonds with savages; in practice it meant that Christianity for the first time could not act as a decisive curb on the dangerous perversions of human self-consciousness, a premonition of its essential ineffectiveness in other more recent race societies. The Boers simply denied the Christian doctrine of the common origin of men and changed those passages of the Old Testament which did not yet transcend the limits of the old Israelite national religion into a superstition which could not even be called a heresy. Like the Jews, they firmly believed in themselves as the chosen people, with the essential difference that they were chosen not for the sake of divine salvation of mankind, but for the lazy domination over another species that was condemned to an equally lazy drudgery. This was God’s will on earth as the Dutch Reformed Church proclaimed it and still proclaims it today in sharp and hostile contrast to the missionaries of all other Christian denominations.”

197 “Early British rule in South Africa, with its missionaries, soldiers, and explorers, did not realize that the Boers’ attitudes had some basis in reality. They did not understand that absolute European supremacy—in which they, after all, were as interested as the Boers—could hardly be maintained except through racism because the permanent European settlement was so hopelessly outnumbered; they were shocked “if Europeans settled in Africa were to act like savages themselves because it was the custom of the country,” and to their simple utilitarian minds it seemed folly to sacrifice productivity and profit to the phantom world of white gods ruling over black shadows. Only with the settlement of Englishmen and other Europeans during the gold rush did they gradually adjust to a population which could not be lured back into European civilization even by profit motives, which had lost contact even with the lower incentives of European man when it had cut itself off from his higher motives, because both lose their meaning and appeal in a society where nobody wants to achieve anything and everyone has become a god.”

206 “Less immediately but of greater importance for totalitarian governments was the other experience in Africa’s race society, that profit motives are not holy and can be overruled, that societies can function according to principles other than economic, and that such circumstances may favor those who under conditions of rationalized production and the capitalist system would belong to the underprivileged. South Africa’s race society taught the mob the great lesson of which it had always had a confused premonition, that through sheer violence an underprivileged group could create a class lower than itself, that for this purpose it did not even need a revolution but could band together with groups of the ruling classes, and that foreign or backward peoples offered the best opportunities for such tactics. The full impact of the African experience was first realized by leaders of the mob, like Carl Peters, who decided that they too had to belong to a master race. African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite. Here they had seen with their own eyes how peoples could be converted into races and how, simply by taking the initiative in this process, one might push one’s own people into the position of the master race. Here they were cured of the illusion that the historical process is necessarily “progressive,” for if it was the course of older colonization to trek to something, the “Dutchman trekked away from everything,” and if “economic history once taught that man had developed by gradual steps from a life of hunting to pastoral pursuits and finally to a settled and agricultural life,” the story of the Boers clearly demonstrated that one could also come “from a land that had taken the lead in a thrifty an intensive cultivation… [and] gradually become a herdsman and a hunter.” These leaders understood very well that precisely because the Boers had sunk back to the level of savage tribes they remained their undisputed masters. They were perfectly willing to pay the price, to recede to the level of a race organization, if by doing so they could buy lordship over other “races.” And they knew from their experiences with people gathered from the four corners of the earth in South Africa that they whole mob of the Western civilized world would be with them.”

207 “Of the two main political devices of imperialist rule, race was discovered in South Africa and bureaucracy in Algeria, Egypt, and India; the former was originally the barely conscious reaction to tribes of whose humanity European man was ashamed and frightened, whereas the latter was a consequence of that administration by which Europeans had tried to rule foreign peoples whom they felt to be hopelessly their inferiors and at the same time in need of their special protection. Race, in other words, was an escape into an irresponsibility where nothing human could any longer exist, and bureaucracy was the result of a responsibility that no man can bear for his fellow man and no people for another people.”

209 “The author of the imperialist legend is Rudyard Kipling, its topic is the British Empire, its result the imperialist character (imperialism was the only school of character in modern politics). And while the legend of the British Empire has little to do with the realities of British imperialism, it forced or deluded into its services the best sons of England. For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst. No doubt, no political structure could have been more evocative of legendary tales and justifications than the British Empire, than the British people’s drifting from the conscious founding of colonies into ruling and dominating foreign peoples all over the world.”

209 “The fact that the “white man’s burden” is either hypocrisy or racism has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism. As real in England as the tradition of hypocrisy is another less obvious one which one is tempted to call a tradition of dragon-slayers who went enthusiastically into far and curious lands to strange and naïve peoples to slay the numerous dragons that had plagued them for centuries.”

213-4 “In the following years, Cromer reconciled himself to the “hybrid form of government”; in his letters he began to justify it and to expound the need for the government without name and precedent. At the end of his life, he laid down (in his essay on “The Government of Subject Races”) the main lines of what one may well call a philosophy of the bureaucrat.

               Cromer started by recognizing that “personal influence" without a legal or written political treaty could be enough for “sufficiently effective supervision over public affairs” in foreign countries. This kind of informal influence was preferable to a well-defined policy because it could be altered at a moment’s notice and did not necessarily involve the home government in case of difficulties. It required a highly trained, highly reliable staff whose loyalty and patriotism were not connected with personal ambition or vanity and who would even be required to renounce the human aspiration of having their names connected with their achievements. Their greatest passion would have to be for secrecy (“The less British officials are talked about the better”), for a role behind the scenes; their greatest contempt would be directed at publicity and people who love it.

               Cromer himself possessed all these qualities to a very high degree; his wrath was never more strongly aroused than when he was “brought out of [his] hiding place,” when “the reality which was only known to a few behind the scenes [became] patent to all the world.” His pride was indeed to “remain more or less hidden [and] to pull the strings.” In exchange, and in order to make his work possible at all, the bureaucrat has to feel safe from control—the praise as well as the blame, that is—of all public institutions, either Parliament, the “English Departments,” or the press. Every growth of democracy or even the simple functioning of existing democratic institutions can only be a danger, for it is impossible to govern “a people by a people—the people of India by the people of England.” Bureaucracy is always a government of experts, of an “experienced minority” which has to resist as well as it knows how the constant pressure from the “inexperienced majority.” Each people is fundamentally an inexperienced majority and can therefore not be trusted with such a highly specialized matter as politics and public affairs.”

214-5 “Nobody will ever pretend that Cecil Rhodes suffered from a lack of vanity. According to Jameson, he expected to be remembered for at least four thousand years. Yet, despite all his appetite for self-glorification, he hit upon the same idea of rule through secrecy as the overmodest Lord Cromer. Extremely fond of drawing up wills, Rhodes insisted in all of them… that his money should be used to found “a secret society…to carry out his scheme.” … Rhodes opened the society at once to all members of the “Nordic race” so that the aim was not so much the growth and glory of Great Britain…as the expansion of the “Nordic race” which, organized in a secret society, would establish a bureaucratic government over all peoples of the earth.

               What overcame Rhodes’s monstrous innate vanity and made him discover the charms of secrecy was the same thing that overcame Cromer’s innate sense of duty: the discovery of an expansion which was not driven by the specific appetite for a specific country but conceived as an endless process in which every country would serve only as stepping-stone for further expansion. In view of such a concept, the desire for glory can no longer be satisfied by the glorious triumph over a specific people for the sake of one’s own people, nor can the sense of duty be fulfilled through the consciousness of specific services and the fulfillment of specific tasks. No matter what individual qualities or defects a man may have, once he has entered the maelstrom of an unending process of expansion, he will, as it were, cease to be what he was and obey the laws of the process, identify himself with anonymous forces that he is supposed to serve in order to keep the whole process in motion; he will think of himself as mere function, and eventually consider such functionality, such an incarnation of the dynamic trend, his highest possible achievement. Then, as Rhodes was insane enough to say, he could indeed “do nothing wrong, what he did became right. It was his duty to do what he wanted. He felt himself a god—nothing less.” But Lord Cromer sanely pointed out the same phenomenon of men degrading themselves voluntarily into mere instruments or mere functions when he called the bureaucrats “instruments of incomparable value in the execution of a policy of Imperialism.””

218 “Somehow it was not the fault of the born adventurers, of those who by their very nature dwelt outside society and outside all political bodies, that they found in imperialism a political game that was endless by definition; they were not supposed to know that in politics an endless game can end only in catastrophe and that political secrecy hardly ever ends in anything nobler than the vulgar duplicity of a spy. The joke on these players of the Great Game was that their employers knew what they wanted and used their passion for anonymity for ordinary spying. But this triumph of the profit-hungry investors was temporary, and they were duly cheated when a few decades later they met the players of the game of totalitarianism, a game played without ulterior motives like profit and therefore played with such murderous efficiency that it devoured even those who financed it.”

230 “While consciousness of nationality is a comparatively recent development, the structure of the state was derived from centuries of monarchy and enlightened despotism. Whether in the form of a new republic or of a reformed constitutional monarchy, the state inherited as its supreme function the protection of all inhabitants in its territory no matter what their nationality, and was supposed to act as a supreme legal institution. The tragedy of the nation-state was that the people’s rising national consciousness interfered with these functions. In the name of the will of the people the state was forced to recognize only “nationals” as citizens, to grant full civil and political rights only to those who belonged to the national community by right of origin and fact of birth. This meant that the state was partly transformed from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation.”

235 “The tribalism of the pan-movements with its concept of the “divine origin” of one people owed part of its great appeal to its contempt for liberal individualism, the ideal of mankind and the dignity of man. No human dignity is left if the individual owes his value only to the fact that he happens to be born a German or a Russian; but there is, in its stead, a new coherence, a sense of mutual reliability among all members of the people which indeed was very apt to assuage the rightful apprehensions of modern men as to what might happen to them if, isolated individuals in an atomized society, they were not protected by sheer numbers and enforced uniform coherence.”

235 “The appeal of tribal isolation and master race ambitions was partly due to an instinctive feeling that mankind, whether a religious or humanistic ideal, implies a common sharing of responsibility…Even the insistence on the sinfulness of all men…by no means suffices for an understanding of the fact—which the people understood only too well—that the idea of humanity, purged of all sentimentality, has the very serious consequence that in one form or another men must assume responsibility for all crimes committed by men, and that eventually all nations will be forced to answer for the evil committed by all others. Tribalism and racism are the very realistic, if very destructive, ways of escaping this predicament of common responsibility.”

And footnote from pre-Nazi German chauvinist Daniel Frymann typifies the right of our own America First moment: “We know our own people, its qualities and its shortcomings—mankind we do not know and we refuse to care or get enthusiastic about it. Where does it begin, where does it end, that we are supposed to love because it belongs to mankind…? Are the decadent or half-bestial Russian peasant of the mir, the Negro of East-Africa, the half-breed of German South-West Africa, or the unbearable Jews of Galicia and Rumania all members of mankind?... One can believe in the solidarity of the Germanic peoples—whoever is outside this sphere does not matter to us.”

It is literally anti-Gospel – I refuse to care for my neighbor, I refuse to be my brother’s keeper, I refuse to know God.

248 “Although idolization of power played a less articulate role in Pan-Germanism, there was always a certain antilegal tendency which for instance comes out clearly in Frymann, who as early as 1912 proposed the introduction of that “protective custody” (Sicherheitshaft), that is, arrest without any legal reason, which the Nazis then used to fill concentration camps.”

264 “…both movements [the extreme Right and Left] could count on the loyalty of a membership and leadership which would not be disturbed by a sudden switch in policy. This was dramatically exposed in the German-Russian nonaggression pact, when the Nazis had to drop their chief slogan against Bolshevism and the Communists had to return to a pacificism which they always had denounced as petty-bourgeois. Such sudden turns did not hurt them in the least.”

267 “It is almost impossible even now to describe what actually happened in Europe on August 4, 1914. The days before and the days after the first World War are separated not like the end of an old and the beginning of a new period, but like the day before and the day after an explosion. Yet this figure of speech is as inaccurate as are all others, because the quiet of sorrow which settles down after a catastrophe has never come to pass. The first explosion seems to have touched off a chain reaction in which we have been caught ever since and which nobody seems to be able to stop. The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done. Inflation destroyed the whole class of small property owners beyond hope for recovery or new formation, something which no monetary crisis had ever done so radically before. Unemployment, when it came, reached fabulous proportions, was no longer restricted to the working class but seized with insignificant exceptions whole nations. Civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace were not only bloodier and more cruel than all their predecessors; they were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth. Nothing which was being done, no matter how stupid, no matter how many people knew and foretold the consequences, could be undone or prevented. Every event had the finality of a last judgment, a judgment that was passed neither by God nor by the devil, but looked rather like the expression of some unredeemably stupid fatality.”

277  “Much more stubborn in fact and much more far-reaching in consequence has been statelessness, the newest mass phenomenon in contemporary history, and the existence of an ever-growing new people comprised of stateless persons, the most symptomatic group in contemporary politics. Their existence can hardly be blamed on one factor alone, but if we consider the different groups among the stateless it appears that every political event since the end of the first World War inevitably added a new category to those who lived outside the pale of the law, while none of the categories, no matter how the original constellation changed, could ever be renormalized.”

283 “The real trouble started as soon as the two recognized remedies, repatriation and naturalization, were tried. Repatriation measures naturally failed when there was no country to which these people could be deported. They failed not because of consideration for the stateless person (as it may appear today when Soviet Russia claims its former citizens and the democratic countries must protect them from a repatriation they do not want); and not because of humanitarian sentiments on the part of the countries that were swamped with refugees; but because neither the country of origin nor any other agreed to accept the stateless person. It would seem that the very undeportability of the stateless person should have prevented a government’s expelling him; but since the man without a state was “an anomaly for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law”—an outlaw by definition—he was completely at the mercy of the police, which itself did not worry too much about committing a few illegal acts in order to diminish the country’s burden of indesirables. In other words, the state, insisting on its sovereign right of expulsion, was forced by the illegal nature of statelessness into admittedly illegal acts.”

286 “The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights. For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to regain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. As a criminal even a stateless person will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else. Only as an offender against the law can he gain protection from it. As long as his trial and his sentence last, he will be safe from that arbitrary police rule against which there are no lawyers and no appeals. The same man who was in jail yesterday because of his mere presence in this world, who had no rights whatever and lived under threat of deportation, or who was dispatched without sentence and without trial to some kind of internment because he had tried to work and make a living, may become almost a full-fledged citizen because of a little theft. Even if he is penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers, and he will be listened to respectfully. He is no longer the scum of the earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be tried. He has become a respectable person.”

Does this not resemble the present moment in which an illegal immigrant who is being charged with a serious crime receives more due process of law than one who, apprehended by ICE, is imprisoned without remedy?

289 “The notion that statelessness is primarily a Jewish problem was a pretext used by all governments who tried to settle the problem by ignoring it. None of the statesmen was aware that Hitler’s solution of the Jewish problem, first to reduce the German Jews to a nonrecognized minority in Gemrany, then to drive them as stateless people across the borders, and finally to gather them back from everywhere in order to ship them to extermination camps, was an eloquent demonstration to the rest of the world how really to ‘liquidate’ all problems concerning minorities and stateless. After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people. Since the Peace Treaties of 1919 and 1920 the refugees and the stateless have attached themselves like a curse to all the newly established states on earth which were created in the image of the nation-state. For these new states this curse bears the germs of a deadly sickness. For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality, which originally was destined to replace the older laws and orders of the feudal society, the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals. Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states. The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

295 “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. Only in the last stage of a rather lengthy process is their right to live threatened; only if they remain perfectly ‘superfluous,’ if nobody can be found to ‘claim’ them, may their lives be in danger. Even the Nazis started their extermination of Jews by first depriving them of all legal status (the status of second-class citizenship) and cutting them off from the world of the living by herding them into ghettos and concentration camps; and before they set the gas chambers into motion they had carefully tested the ground and found out to their satisfaction that no country would claim these people. The point is that a condition of complete rightlessness was created before the right to live was challenged.”

299 “A conception of law which identifies what is right with the notion of what is good for—for the individual, or the family, or the people, or the largest number—becomes inevitable once the absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature have lost their authority. And this predicament is by no means solved if the unit to which the ‘good for’ applies is as large as mankind itself. For it is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof. Here, in the problems of factual reality, we are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy, which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say: “Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things””

301 “The more highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice—the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that is merely and mysteriously given them. The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is mysteriously given us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great an incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.”

306, quoting Nazi Hans Frank speaking of Hitler’s rise to power, “This was indeed “the first large revolution in history that was carried out by applying the existing formal code of law at the moment of seizing power.””

307 “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones. The Nazis “were convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,” Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda, and experience has proved time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.”

311 “Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions. Potentially, they exist in every country and form the majority of those large numbers of a neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls. It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been ‘spoiled’ by the party system. Therefore they did not need to refute opposing arguments and consistently preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction.”

315 “They [the parties] had lost, moreover, without being aware of it, those neutral supporters who had never been interested in politics because they felt that no parties existed to take care of their interests. So that the first signs of the breakdown of the Continental party system were not the desertion of old party members, but the failure to recruit members from the younger generation, and the loss of the silent consent and support of the unorganized masses who suddenly shed their apathy and went wherever they saw an opportunity to voice their new violent opposition. The fall of protecting class walls transformed slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent. It was of no great consequence to the birth of this new terrifying negative solidarity that the unemployed worker hated the status quo and the powers that be in the form of the Social Democratic Party, the expropriated small property owner in the form of a centrist or rightist party, and former members of the middle and upper classes in the form of the traditional extreme right.”

317 “The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons.”

322 “The lovers of ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ aptly compared by their liquidator with the lovers of ‘art for art’s sake,’ are not yet absolutely atomized elements in a mass society whose completely heterogeneous uniformity is one of the primary conditions for totalitarianism. From the point of view of totalitarian rulers, a society devoted to chess for the sake of chess is only in degree different and less dangerous than a class of farmers for the sake of farming. Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.”” And then the footnote: “The watchword of the SS as formulated by Himmler himself begins with the words: “There is no task that exists for its own sake.”… The pamphlets issued by the SS solely for internal consumption emphasize time and again “the absolute necessity for understanding the futility of everything that is an end in itself.”

I am personally fascinated by the directness with which Himmler’s framing is the precise opposite of a theme I have been growing more attached to in Christian thought, of people and things being ends in their own right – of the intrinsic value of living.

324 “Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”

330 “No single element in this general intellectual climate in postwar Europe was very new. Bakunin had already confessed, “I do not want to be I, I want to be We,” and Nechayev had preached the evangel of the “doomed man” with “no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own.” The antihumanist, antiliberal, anti-individualist, and anticultural instincts of the front generation, their brilliant and witty praise of violence, power, and cruelty, was preceded by the awkward and pompous “scientific” proofs of the imperialist elite that a struggle of all against all is the law of the universe, that expansion is a psychological necessity before it is a political device, and that man has to behave by such universal laws. What was new in the writings of the front generation was their high literary standard and great depth of passion. The postwar writers no longer needed the scientific demonstrations of genetics, and they made little if any use of the collected works of Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which belonged already to the cultural household of the philistines. They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade. If they believed at all in universal laws, they certainly did not particularly care to conform to them. To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy.”

332 “The pronounced activism of the totalitarian movements, their preference for terrorism over all other forms of political activity, attracted the intellectual elite and the mob alike, precisely because this terrorism was so utterly different from that of the earlier revolutionary societies. It was no longer a matter of calculated policy which saw in terrorist acts the only means to eliminate certain outstanding personalities who, because of their policies or position, had become the symbol of oppression. What proved so attractive was that terrorism had become a kind of philosophy through which to express frustration, resentment, and blind hatred, a kind of political expressionism which used bombs to express oneself, which watched delightedly the publicity given to resounding deeds and was absolutely willing to pay the price of life for having succeeded in forcing the recognition of one’s existence on the normal strata of society. It was still the same spirit and the same game which made Goebbels, long before the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany, announce with obvious delight that the Nazis, in case of defeat, would know how to slam the door behind them and not be forgotten for centuries. Yet it is here if anywhere that a valid criterion may be found for distinguishing the elite from the mob in the pretotalitarian atmosphere. What the mob wanted, and what Goebbels expressed with great precision, was access to history even at the price of destruction.”

333 “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one consistent picture.”

333 “To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s and Hitler’s skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.”

334 “What the spokesmen of humanism and liberalism usually overlook, in their bitter disappointment and their unfamiliarity with the more general experiences of the time, is that an atmosphere in which all traditional values and propositions had evaporated (after the nineteenth-century ideologies had refuted each other and exhausted their vital appeal) in a sense made it easier to accept patently absurd propositions than the old truths which had become pious banalities, precisely because nobody could be expected to take the absurdities seriously. Vulgarity with its cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories carried with it a frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage and a new style of life. In the growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions—which were actually the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy—those who traditionally hated the bourgeoisie and had voluntarily left respectable society saw only the lack of hypocrisy and respectability, not the content itself.”

335 “At that time, nobody anticipated that the true victims of this irony would be the elite rather than the bourgeoisie. The avant-garde did not know they were running their heads not against walls but against open doors, that a unanimous success would belie their claim to being a revolutionary minority, and would prove that they were about to express a new mass spirit or the sprit of the time. Particularly significant in this respect was the reception given Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper in pre-Hitler Germany. The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann dommt die Moral,” was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun. The effect of the work was exactly the opposite of what Brecht had sought by it. The bourgeoisie could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy, whose popularity proved they had been right all along, so that the only political result of Brecht’s “revolution” was to encourage everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.”

336 “Closely related to the attraction which the mob’s lack of hypocrisy and the masses’ lack of self-interest exerted on the elite was the equally irresistible appeal of the totalitarian movements’ spurious claim to have abolished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a mysterious irrational wholeness in man. Since Balzac revealed the private lives of the public figures of French society and since Ibsen’s dramatization of the “Pillars of Society” had conquered the Continental theater, the issue of double morality was one of the main topics for tragedies, comedies, and novels. Double morality as practiced by the bourgeoisie became the outstanding sign of that esprit de serieux, which is always pompous and never sincere. This division between private and public or social life had nothing to do with the justified separation between the personal and public spheres, but was rather the psychological reflection of the nineteenth-century struggle between bourgeois and citoyen, between the man who judged and used all public institutions by the yardstick of his private interests and the responsible citizen who was concerned with public affairs as the affairs of all. In this connection, the liberals’ political philosophy, according to which the mere sum of individual interests adds up to the miracle of the common good, appeared to be only a rationalization of the recklessness with which private interests were pressed regardless of the common good.” 

Our one remaining weapon is sincere conviction, not stratagems.

339 “The consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity by the new mass leaders springs from more than their natural resentment against everything they cannot understand. Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

350 “This method, like other totalitarian propaganda methods, is foolproof only after the movements have seized power. Then all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive—since by killing the person in question the murderer can promptly provide proof of the correctness of his statement. The only valid argument under such conditions is promptly to rescue the person whose death is predicted. Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.”

351 “The spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.”

351 “The effectiveness of this kind of propaganda demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses. They do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears but only their imaginations, which may be caught by anything that is at once universal and consistent in itself. What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because fo the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important only because it convinces them of consistency in time.”

352 “In other words, while it is true that the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects, it is also true that their longing for fiction has some connection with those capacities of the human mind whose structural consistency is superior to mere occurrence. The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist, since coincidence have become its supreme master and human beings need the constant transformation of chaotic and accidental conditions into a man-made pattern of relative consistency. The revolt of the masses against “realism,” common sense, and all “the plausibilities of the world” (Burke) was the result of their atomization, of their loss of social status along with which they lost the whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense. In their situation of spiritual and social homelessness, a measured insight into the interdependence of the arbitrary and the planned, the accidental and the necessary, could no longer operate. Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices—and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.”

367 “The sympathizers [of totalitarianism], who are to all appearances still innocuous fellow-citizens in a nontotalitarian society, can hardly be called single-minded fanatics; through them, the movements make their fantastic lies more generally acceptable, can spread their propaganda in milder, more respectable forms, until the whole atmosphere is poisoned with totalitarian elements which are hardly recognizable as such but appear to be normal political reactions or opinions.”

382 “A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

384 “The result of this system is that the gullibility of sympathizers makes lies credible to the outside world, while at the same time the graduated cynicism of membership and elite formations eliminates the danger that the Leader will ever be forced by the weight of his own propaganda to make good his own statements and feigned respectability. It has been one of the chief handicaps of the outside world in dealing with totalitarian systems that it ignored this system and therefore trusted that, on one hand, the very enormity of totalitarian lies would be their undoing and that, on the other, it would be possible to take the Leader at his word and force him, regardless of his original intentions, to make it good. The totalitarian system, unfortunately, is foolproof against such normal consequences; its ingeniousness rests precisely on the elimination of that reality which either unmasks the liar or forces him to live up to his pretense.”

435 “The totalitarian movements which, during their rise to power, imitate certain organizational features of secret societies and yet establish themselves in broad daylight, create a true secret society only after their ascendancy to rule. The secret society of totalitarian regimes is the secret police; the only strictly guarded secret in a totalitarian country, the only esoteric knowledge that exists, concerns the operations of the police and the conditions in the concentration camps.”

436 “For a considerable length of time the normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against the disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes. “Normal men don’t know that everything is possible,” refuse to believe their eyes and ears in the face of the monstrous, just as the mass men did not trust theirs in the face of a normal reality in which no place was left for them. The reason why the totalitarian regimes can get so far toward realizing a fictitious, topsy-turvy world is that the outside nontotalitarian world, which always comprises a great part of the population of the totalitarian country itself, indulges also in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity just as much as the masses do in the face of the normal world. This common-sense disinclination to believe the monstrous is constantly strengthened by the totalitarian ruler himself, who makes sure that no reliable statistics, no controllable facts and figures are ever published, so that there are only subjective, uncontrollable, and unreliable reports about the places of the living dead.”

438 “Just as the stability of the totalitarian regime depends on the isolation of the fictitious world of the movement from the outside world, so the experiment of total domination in the concentration camps depends on sealing off the latter against the world of all others, the world of the living in general, even against the outside world of a country under totalitarian rules. This isolation explains the peculiar unreality and lack of credibility that characterize all reports from the concentration camps and constitute one of the main difficulties for the true understanding of totalitarian domination, which stands or falls with the existence of these concentration and extermination camps; for, unlikely as it may sound, these camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power.”

440 “Not even concentration camps are an invention of totalitarian movements. They emerge for the first time during the Boer War, at the beginning of the century, and continued to be used in South Africa as well as India for “undesirable elements”; here, too, we first find the term “protective custody” which was later adopted by the Third Reich. These camps correspond in many respects to the concentration camps at the beginning of totalitarian rule; they were used for “suspects” whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law. All this clearly points to totalitarian methods of domination; all these are elements they utilize, develop and crystallize on the basis of the nihilistic principle that “everything is permitted,” which they inherited and already take for granted. But wherever these new forms of domination assume their authentically totalitarian structure they transcend this principle, which is still tied to the utilitarian motives and self-interest of the rules, and try their hand in a realm that up to now has been completely unknown to us: the realm where “everything is possible.” And, characteristically enough, this is precisely the realm that cannot be limited by either utilitarian motives or self-interest, regardless of the latter’s content.”

445 “All three types [of concentration camps] have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of any interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death before admitting them to eternal peace.”

446 “Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open. These analogies, repeated in many reports from the world of the dying, seem to express more than a desperate attempt at saying what is outside the realm of human speech. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgment: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope. Unable as yet to live without fear and hope, these masses are attracted by every effort which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had longed for and the Hell they had feared. Just as the popularized features of Marx’s classless society have a queer resemblance to the Messianic Age, so the reality of concentration camps resembles nothing so much as medieval pictures of Hell. The one thing that cannot be reproduced is what made the traditional conceptions of Hell tolerable to man: the Last Judgment, the idea of an absolute standard of justice combined with the infinite possibility of grace. For in the human estimation there is no crime and no sin commensurable with the everlasting torments of Hell. Hence the discomfiture of common sense, which asks: What crime must these people have committed in order to suffer so inhumanly? Hence also the absolute innocence of the victims: no man ever deserved this. Hence finally the grotesque haphazardness with which concentration-camp victims were chosen in the perfected terror state: such “punishment” can, with equal justice and injustice, be inflicted on anyone.”

455 “To destroy individuality is to destroy spontaneity, man’s power to begin something new out of his own resources, something that cannot be explained on the basis of reactions to environment and events. Nothing then remains but ghastly marionettes with human faces, which all behave like the dog in Pavlov’s experiments, which all react with perfect reliability even when going to their own death, and which do nothing but react. This the real triumph of the system: [and quoting David Rousset] “The triumph of the SS demands that the tortured victim allow himself to be led to the noose without protesting, that he renounce and abandon himself to the point of ceasing to affirm his identity. And it is not for nothing. It is not gratuitously, out of sheer sadism, that the SS men desire his defeat. They know that the system which succeeds in destroying its victim before he mounts the scaffold…is incomparably the best for keeping a whole people in slavery. In submission. Nothing is more terrible than these processions of human beings going like dummies to their death. The man who sees this says to himself: ‘For them to be thus reduced, what power must be concealed in the hands of the master,’ and he turns away, full of bitterness but defeated.””

In the face of the despair produced by this possibility realized on earth, I am reminded that Christ rose from even this very fate.

468-9 “The word “ideology” seems to imply that an idea can become the subject matter of a science just as animals are the subject matter of zoology…if this were true, an ideology would indeed be a pseudo-science and a pseudo-philosophy, transgressing at the same time the limitations of science and the limitations of philosophy. Deism, for example, would then be the ideology which treats the idea of God, with which philosophy is concerned, in the scientific manner of theology for which God is a revealed reality. (A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals)…The ‘idea’ of an ideology is neither Plato’s eternal essence grasped by the eyes of the mind nor Kant’s regulative principle of reason but has become an instrument of explanation. To an ideology, history does not appear in the light of an idea (which would imply that history is seen sub specie of some ideal eternity which itself is beyond historical motion) but as something which can be calculated by it. What fits the ‘idea’ into this new role is its own ‘logic,’ that is a movement which is the consequence of the ‘idea’ itself and needs no outside factor to set it into motion. Racism is the belief that there is a motion inherent in the very idea of race, just as deism is the belief that a motion is inherent in the very notion of God.”

477 “What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one’s own self which can be realized in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of my equals. In this situation, man loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experiences at all. Self and world, capacity for through and experience are lost at the same time. The only capacity of the human mind which needs neither the self nor the other nor the world in order to function safely and which is as independent of experience as it is of thinking is the ability of logical reasoning whose premise is the self-evident…but this ‘truth’ is empty, or rather no truth at all, because it does not reveal anything. (To define consistency as truth as some modern logicians do means to deny the existence of truth)…that thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logicality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection with loneliness was once noticed by Luther (whose experiences in the phenomena of solitude and loneliness probably were second to no one’s and who once dared to say that ‘there must be a God because man needs one being whom he can trust’) in a little-known remark on the Bible text “it is not good that man should be alone”: A lonely man, says Luther, ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.’”

478 “The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms. Their danger is not that they might establish a permanent world. Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction. Just as fear and the impotence from which fear springs are antipolitical principles and throw men into a situation contrary to political action, so loneliness and the logical-ideological deducing the worst that comes from it represent an antisocial situation and harbor a principle destructing for all human living-together. Nevertheless, organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it—a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end—before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to assert itself…But there remains also the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only ‘message’ which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut esset homo creates est—“that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.”

The Murder of Gaza

Starvation is a slow, painful, and thorough killer. Its symptoms include

·        The visible wasting away of the flesh

·        The slowing of the brain

·        The loss of ability to digest food as the gut muscles vitiate

·        A host of complications and related conditions, such as pancreatitis

·        The collapse of hormone production and with it the weakening of bones

·        In cases of extreme starvation, when food suddenly becomes available, patients can die from refeeding syndrome, taking in too much food too quickly, outside of a medically-controlled environment

·        Permanent brain development impacts in infants who survive the period of famine

·        Immune system collapse leading to the patient succumbing to secondary infections like gastroenteritis, which causes the body to expel any remaining food it can

·        An ongoing and eventually terminal decrease in heart function, blood pressure, and pulse

·        Bloating, nausea, and vomiting, especially in children, who are subject to severe protein deficiencies which are eventually fatal

·        With time, inevitably, death

Today, there are two million people in Gaza, and many of them – hard numbers are impossible to get – are now in the final stages of starving to death. Many will not recover even with intervention; many have already died. Between the bombings, shootings of civilians, and the enforced blockade of the strip by the IDF, and the prevalent attitude and statements made by senior members of the government of Israel, and by what they permit their citizen settlers to get away with, it has long been clear that another Holocaust is being committed openly in front of the world. It is being committed by Israel with the support of the United States.

The New York Times writes: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/middleeast/gaza-starvation.html

The Associated Press writes: https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-starvation-children-malnutrition-baby-baf865b861c9a2fd9c75068936062146

The AP reports that Gaza is now passing a tipping point and entering a population death spiral: https://apnews.com/article/gaza-palestinians-starvation-famine-israel-children-3a7403d4f6ec483a03d6cbb0c45fd06a

The AP reports that since May, over a thousand people seeking aid have been killed by Israel: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-war-palestinians-07-22-2025-8eb90d73c1b7499d3dbc8b8d95da65cc

The Guardian reports that over a third of the recorded starvation deaths during the course of the war happened in the three days before their article was published, revealing a terminal stage of the famine; the article was published on Wednesday, and it is now Saturday: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/we-faced-hunger-before-but-never-like-this-skeletal-children-fill-hospital-wards-as-starvation-grips-gaza

NPR reports: https://www.npr.org/2025/07/25/nx-s1-5478382/gaza-children-starving-aid-agencies

The Atlantic reports on the sordid involvement of American capital and the Trump administration: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/food-aid-gaza-israel-ghf/683658/

Also the Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/gaza-humanitarian-foundation-failure/683053/

The Atlantic reports on the settlers eagerly awaiting the chance to move into Gaza, once all the people are gone: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/settlers-theroux-documentary/683152/

More from the Atlantic on the responsibility of America in this matter: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/trump-gaza-mistakes/683651/

How did we let this happen? I am writing as an American in the mainstream of the traditional political establishment. Many of us in that part of the political culture have become mired in a moral paralysis, for a range of reasons – and I am not referring to the people in the administration, their supporters, or the special interests with a personal pecuniary interest or a warped religious fetish that makes them actively support a genocide.

·        We tune out news of distant atrocities and evils because it seems overwhelming, because people cannot necessarily cope with the curated bad news of the entire world at once, because we are doubtful we can do anything, or because we are afraid of what we might have to do. Our screens make real Stalin’s dictum, and flatten a million deaths into a statistic we scroll past in a half-regarded glance.

·        We identified with the innocent victims of Hamas’s attacks on Israel, either because of some perceived historical affinity, or simply because their middle-class lives remind us of our own, and we imagine ourselves in their shoes.

·        We are reticent to adopt any solid view, out of an awareness of an impossibly complicated history and a desire to avoid making a misstep, in a conversation where missteps often feel the only possible contribution to those not wholly partisan, or those averse to conflict and rabid ire.

·        We are skeptical of or put off by a protest movement associated with the type of activist we often disagree with and mutually mistrust, and who are represented to us by the worst examples of people breaking into genuine antisemitism or collapsing reality into a caricature which does not afford their ‘enemies’ the dignity of being judged and treated as individual persons.

And yet, that last crime becomes the same excuse used by Israel and the United States to commit an atrocity beyond all proportion or excuse. Our hesitation has in part allowed the metastasization of the feigned inability to morally distinguish among those pre-determined to be ‘other’ as a category, whose lives are not assigned the value given to our own. The involvement of some Evangelicals in this is in itself an abomination, as what is now transpiring in Palestine is the total antithesis of the Gospel of self-giving that Christ once preached there.

Today we are living in what seems fated to become an example of how historical atrocities play out in time before a numb audience, and people later ask how we could have let this happen – only for the atrocities to repeat, again and again, as each generation’s Cassandras are shunned as so many Chicken Littles. If there is a lesson, it is not to wait until an atrocity or any injustice has taken, in the media available to us, the same unmistakable form of the full historically-documented aftermath of the genocides we read about in textbooks. If we don’t want to functionally abet the repetition of such evils, we cannot simply wait and see, we must rather read the signs of injustice, the patterns of offenses proffered with a fig leaf of deniability or excuse, and conclude that these are already the beast of genocide assuming once again its all-too-familiar lineaments.

Music in 2024

Belatedly, my playlist of music I liked in 2024.

The Tip of the Iceberg

The Topography of Terror, Berlin

1.      The families of Los Angeles

As ICE rushes to fill quotas of arrests, they detain untenable numbers of people: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jun/23/trumps-deportation-machine-hits-stride-ice-arrests-detention-set-new/

 They are well beyond their capacity to fulfil their duty of care for them – including for families with children, the elderly, and the infirm: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/11/la-ice-raids-immigration-conditions

They are also breaking the law by refusing to allow members of Congress to inspect their facilities.

Customs and Border Protection are participating in stops and arrests, highlighting the long-known travesty of the law which allows them to conduct warrantless searches within a hundred miles of the border – which, including the coasts, encompasses an enormous percentage of American’s homes. One wonders what basis their stops are made on; it is hard to imagine it can be anything but racial profiling, clear-cut discrimination.

2.      Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Garcia has been returned to the US from El Salvador, but the matter of his case is now working its way through the courts. In a response to the government’s motion to stay his release order, we find this remarkable admission from the Department of Justice, in which they ask Garcia not be released, because ICE might deport him, preventing the prosecution of DOJ’s case against him. In effect, the Department of Justice is claiming that its work will be sabotaged by the Department of Homeland Security, as if these are somehow not two agencies in the same executive branch, and capable of coordinating. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.tnmd.104622/gov.uscourts.tnmd.104622.54.0.pdf  

In an order written by the judge in Garcia’s case, the DOJ is further humiliated, as its accusation, sourced by promising early release to convicted criminals if they testified, is dismissed as bordering on physical impossibility.

3.      Narciso Barranco and burgeoning brutality

Narciso was beaten, pepper sprayed, injured, and arrested and held without food, water, or medicine. We know this from the testimony of one of his three sons – all of whom are American Marines. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-shock-and-awe-deportations-will-get-worse-supreme-court-trump-israel-iran

Here is an article from a local paper: https://santanero.org/2025/06/21/landscaper-violently-detained-by-agents-has-three-marine-sons/

There are many other cases of federal agents behaving with a rapidly increasing disregard for basic human decency.

Abandoning its duty to justice, the Supreme Court has chosen rather to blindfold itself, allowing the administration to rapidly deport migrants to countries which they are not from, without a hearing – in effect, without the chance to make the point that they may not be safe in these countries to which they are sent (the first country on the list of recipients is South Sudan).

4.      Sae Joon Park

A legal permanent resident had his status abruptly terminated, using the excuse of charges related to drug possession and failure to appear in court 15 years ago – but this man is hardly what Trump described when he painted a picture of dangerous gangster invaders. Sae Joon Park came to the United States when he was 7 years old, 48 years ago. He served in the US Army and was shot in the spine in Panama in 1989, for which he received the Purple Heart. After this he struggled with a drug addiction related to his untreated PTSD. He served his brief time in prison for his offense, and otherwise has been an upstanding member of the community. But now, he has been forced to leave his home and his family and return to a country he barely remembers.  https://www.npr.org/2025/06/24/g-s1-74036/trump-ice-self-deportation-army-veteran-hawaii

5.      Ward Sakeik

Ward was brought to the United States from Saudi Arabia when she was 8 years old. Her family were from Gaza, but she is legally stateless – she has no citizenship anywhere, and thus, through no fault of her own, has no other country to which she can claim the right to reside. She recently married an American citizen, but on the way back from their honeymoon, she was arrested and detained for months. Last week, the government attempted to deport her and dump her at the Israel border – thankfully she was not ultimately sent to that war zone, but only because the flight was cancelled due to the outbreak of aerial war between Israel and Iran. https://abcnews.go.com/US/newlywed-brides-honeymoon-ends-months-ice-detention-prospect/story?id=123036280&cid=social_twitter_abcn

Before going on their honeymoon, the couple checked with ICE to make sure that it was legal for her to travel, and confirmed that they would be allowed to re-enter. However, the Department of Homeland Security now blames Ward for believing the lie they told her.  

 6.      Paola Couatre

Adrian Clouatre is an American citizen and a veteran of the Marine Corps. He has two children, a 2-year old son, and a 3-month old daughter who was still breastfeeding – until his wife, their mother Paola, was taken by ICE. She was brought to the country as a child, and was in fact arrested when she was at an appointment, with her husband, to secure a green card. The order for her removal was issued years ago, without her knowledge and not because of anything she had done, but because her mother, who brought her to the US, had missed an immigration hearing. https://apnews.com/article/ice-detains-marine-veteran-wife-clouatre-802305fe0a364ef86a7cb61805129ee1

In fact, the government is now actively betraying our troops, turning the instruments used to help them earn legal status for their loved ones against them:

You will note again the typical callous response from DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, who over the past few months I have become unfortunately aware of as one of the cruelest and most evil people on this planet.

7.      Andry Hernandez Romero

Andry, a Venezuelan makeup artist living in the US was sent to the brutal concentration camp run by the El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele. It has now been over a hundred days since Andry was taken, and we have not heard from him. There is no way of knowing if he is alive or dead. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/28/americas/romero-venezuela-deported-us-salvador-intl-latam

I ask myself, has America forgotten? You should ask yourself, have you thrown someone in a cell, and then forgotten about them? If you are an American, what exactly are you doing to save this man imprisoned in your name.

8.      Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus, and her unborn child

Iris was arrested and detained by ICE. For three days, she begged for medical help which ICE refused her. Then her baby died. https://nashvillebanner.com/2025/05/27/iris-monterroso-pregnancy-loss/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

ICE Agents, the Department of Homeland Security, the entire Republican Party, and, ultimately, the United States of America destroyed this family, tortured this woman, and murdered her baby. And none of the people responsible have yet been brought to justice, not that that can ever repair what they have done.

If you supported Trump, how will you wash this child’s blood from your hands?

9.      The American Citizens

It will take longer to get all the information pieced together in the wake of the terror now spreading across the United States; but, in the absence of hearings and other administrative due process, and at the direction of a rabidly aggressive and slapdashedly unprofessional administration, determined to juice deportation numbers as high as possible, we should expect more, not less, mistakes than ICE has made historically – and they have made mistakes. If we look at the information we do have available, a Government Accountability Office report confirms that in the five years between 2015 and 2020, 70 people who in all probability (per the government) were US citizens – not illegal immigrants, not permanent residents, but US citizens – were deported. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-487

In a time when deportation could mean a surprise beating, mistreatment, the refusal of medical care, detention without a phone call or a lawyer, no hearing of any kind, and then a quick flight to a warzone or a brutal concentration camp – if citizens can be deported in these conditions, then no person now inside the United States is safe from the Department of so-called Homeland Security.

If you want to follow a couple of sources who have done the Lord’s work bringing these stories to the public eye on social media, I recommend https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick and https://x.com/David_J_Bier.

What is the Department of Homeland Security now?

Hannah Arendt, writing in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1950, and thinking of the very present fresh memory of both the Third Reich’s Gestapo and Stalin’s still-existent NKVD, presents us with a description of what role the secret police, in particular the paramilitary secret police, comes to play in a totalitarian society.

“Neither dubious nor superfluous is the political function of the secret police, the ‘best organized and the most efficient’ of all government departments, in the power apparatus of the totalitarian regime. It constitutes the true executive branch of the government through which all orders are transmitted. Through the net of secret agents, the totalitarian ruler has created for himself a directly executive transmission belt which, in distinction to the onion-like structure of the ostensible hierarchy, is completely severed and isolated from all other institutions. In this sense, the secret police agents are the only openly ruling class in totalitarian countries and their standards and scale of values permeate the entire texture of totalitarian society.”

“Criminals are punished, undesirables disappear from the face of the earth; the only trace which they leave behind is the memory of those who knew and loved them, and one of the most difficult tasks of the secret police is to make sure that even such traces will disappear together with the condemned man.”

“In totalitarian countries all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces of former existence as a body and a grave.”

“They [the Nazis] could change overnight the whole structure of German society — and not just political life — precisely because they had prepared its exact counterpart within their own ranks. In this respect, the task of the paramilitary formations was finished when the regular military hierarchy could be placed, during the last stages of the war, under the authority of SS generals…If the importance of paramilitary formations for totalitarian movements is not to be found in their doubtful military value, neither is it wholly in their fake imitation of the regular army. As elite formations they are more sharply separated from the outside world than any other group. The Nazis realized very early the intimate connection between total militancy and total separation from normality; the stormtroopers were never assigned to duty in their home communities, and the active cadres of the SA in the prepower stage, and of the SS under the Nazi regime, were so mobile and so frequently exchanged that they could not possibly get used to and take root in any other part of the ordinary world.  They were organized after the model of criminal gangs and used for organized murder.”

In Berlin, at number 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, there is a large field of gravel filling the ruined foundations of a former hotel, demolished by the Soviets just after the war. In the center of this field is a museum, the Topography of Terrors, which exists for the sole purpose of explaining the story of how the German public came to accept the development in their midst of an instrument of evil unparalleled in world history. The names and the locus of power of this instrument shifted over the course of the Reich. At first the power of armed street thugs beating up the Party’s enemies resided in the SA, the Sturmabteilung; then in the  SS, the Schutzstaffel; then finally, within the SS, in the Security Service, the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst. These organs, and the Gestapo with them, were integrated into the Reich Security Main Office, which occupied the address which has now become a permanent ruin.

My claim is not that the same degree of evils have transpired, or that history will take the same course; but once the state begins organizing an unaccountable secret police, which ignores legal guardrails and the moral limits which we rely on to keep it from metastasizing into something far worse, then the only sane course of action is to act as if we are indeed in the early, and hopefully as of yet indeterminate stages of a catastrophe the precise scope of which we cannot know in advance. All we can know is that it beginning, that it is serious, and that it is wrong – and that we have a responsibility to put an end to it. Otherwise, perhaps we shall one day have to make a ruin of the Department of Homeland Security’s main office, and build a memorial over it’s desecrated bricks.

Walk With Me

Six days ago the federal government began another round of immigration raids aimed not against the hardened criminals and gang members that the President founded all of his campaigns on seeking to deport, but instead rounding up ordinary workers, all to meet a predetermined arrest quota (something which appears strange in the USA, but which saw widespread use in Stalin’s USSR). This followed three full months in which administration repeatedly had masked agents grab people off the street and, instead of deporting them in the normal, legal way, they rushed them out of the country in chains before the courts had a chance to order the administration to stop. When these orders did come down, the administration hemmed, hawed, and then finally said that it could not and would not bring people back for their day in court – a day which was no longer about their immigration status and whether or not they got to remain in the United States or had to return to their home country, but rather was about their very lives, because some of these people had not been put a plane back to their home country, but instead imprisoned in a jail so inhumane, dangerous, and with no plan to ever release any of the imprisoned (imprisoned without trial, I might add), that it fits the textbook definition of a concentration camp. The administration says these people are gangsters and criminals, the worst of the worst; but it won’t try to prove that in court. What it did say in court, however, was shocking: the Trump administration admitted that it had sent multiple people to this concentration camp by mistake, and in the same breath said that they would nevertheless stay there, and it has repeatedly ignored court orders to the contrary.

For the past three months, then, Americans have been living in a country in which the government disappears people off the street into an oubliette where they are cast to be tortured and forgotten, without so much as a phone call to their families. And because it has done this to people it admits it did not mean to and was not allowed to, Americans have been living with the reality that the government could do this to anyone, and therefore, morally, has.

So the Los Angeles into which ICE went on Friday was already living under the cloud of threatened imprisonment, brutalization, and quite plausibly, death, for anyone the administration cast an unkind eye on. It is understandable then that people were already incensed, afraid, and ready to resist. While doubtless some of the usual suspects showed up to vandalize and be as inflammatory as possible (in every sense), most people who showed up to protest were there to try to protect their neighbors from the fate that had already befallen others. And because the administration has repeatedly spirited people away without outside contact or legal representation into a foreign prison, and defied court orders to bring them back, the opportunity for defense provided by due process of law, or even the administrative immigration status review process, or the fact that normal deportations can usually be revisited and reversed, no longer existed – there was, in fact, no time and no opportunity but the present, as people were being dragged away. So, in some ways rightly and in others wrongly, people protested.

Since Friday, the administration has taken every opportunity to stoke the fires now burning in Los Angeles, hoping to provoke more strident resistance which they can use as an excuse to use force against their political opponents, and thus intimidate an entire country into submission. Most recently this has taken the form of something many political experts had long warned about as a dire extremity – the deployment of active-duty military into an American city for the purpose of quelling protests and intimidating the public. Today is Wednesday; as of today, we do not know what will come of this deployment, or what the next stage of escalation from the administration will be. But there is one thing we can reasonably anticipate the timing of.

On Saturday, the 14th, President Trump’s birthday, a gargantuan military parade is being held in his own honor in Washington, D.C. For several months, concerned citizens all around the country, people who like me have busy lives, who have to go to work every day, to take care of the kids, to pay the bills – have marked that Saturday on our calendars as a day of coordinated, peaceful protest, in response to everything Trump has done, on the occasion of this parade. Yesterday, the President announced that anyone who shows up to protest on Saturday will “be met with very big force.” He did not elaborate on what exactly he meant, but he has deployed Marines to Los Angeles and has announced plans to deploy troops to other cities where he expects protests. There are only so many things troops can be used for. I think the simplest understanding of the President’s words and actions is that he means to have the military threaten to shoot political protesters – or actually do it.

I have attended very few protests in my life. Many of the ones that make it on the news seem frightening to me; some of them upset me, and not in a way that persuades (activists defacing art in museums, people blocking ambulances, lighting buildings on fire). The only one I actually showed up at during the first Trump administration was in response to his discriminatory travel ban a couple weeks into his term. I was at another a couple of months ago – an altogether ordinary, peaceful, wholesome event, with families who brought their kids and walked their dogs, there on a nice sunny day instead of doing all the myriad things Alaskans rush to do outdoors on the precious few sunny days that we get, because they were genuinely alarmed, and because they cared about being Americans, and living in a free country.

I don’t know what Trump is planning to do to the people who show up to protest on Saturday. I worry something bad may happen. I’m a risk-averse person: I make three rights rather than one difficult left turn across traffic; I leave the trail to put trees between me and a perfectly calm moose; I always double-check the burner is off. But I had Saturday marked on my calendar as a day for another protest, and if I decided not to go and say my peace because the President threatened me, well, then it just wouldn’t be a free country anymore.

So on Saturday at around 11:30 or so, I’ll be taking my sign and walking over to 510 L Street. I’m not going to get in anyone’s face, break anything, and I’m certainly not going to fight anyone – I’ve never fought anyone in my life. I’m just going to go speak, and walk, because it’s a free country and I’m a free American. I make no preparations for anything unreasonable to happen, because I don’t think I should have to. I certainly hope nothing does – I have plans later to go see Tom Cruise punch bad guys and jump out of airplanes, and I don’t want to be late for my showing. But we can’t know the future. All we can do is show up.

Won’t you come and walk with me?

On Getting Out of Bed

I just took a brief nap.

It’s the late afternoon, and I’ve come home ready to pursue my list of plans, and yet I just feel so sleepy that it’s hard not to make myself think a nap will help, even though now, as always, I feel sleepier still. As I’m typing, I feel constantly distracted by the thought of lying down again, and it is difficult to repeatedly cast about for a reason to be uncomfortable.

Fatigue and afternoon naps are not really the meat of what Alan Noble’s book On Getting Out of Bed is about, but there is some small resemblance, at least in the actual matter of putting one foot in front of the other. I found Noble’s book deeply encouraging because of the openness with which he writes about his own struggle to meet the day, in a way that I am only occasionally able to twist in my own head into the kind of admonition to responsibility that I feel so anxious of.

I haven’t resolved all my trepidations about God and all the roots of motivational paralysis; I am scared of accepting that we can’t solve all of our problems, and instead just receiving life as a gift, because I worry about what I imagine that might leave out. And I am troubled by the idea that we can waste our lives, moment by moment, because that is the very pressure of anxiety that so often troubles me – the persistent weight of feeling that I should be doing something else right now. The idea of choosing to live each day is compelling, but the implication that one can passively destroy one’s life through paralysis upsets me, because it feels like an ultimatum, when what I want is the safety of knowing all shall be well no matter what I do or don’t do – and yet I also want what I do to matter, paradoxically. And even the encouragement to simply do the next thing feels like a sleight of hand one does to oneself, trying to forget the cumulative weight of responsibilities beyond the moment. In short, my various complaints to God are unresolved. But part of the strength of the book is that it doesn’t try to resolve every problem I might have with it, or arrive at every answer, but rather to simply take the next step to live, regardless:

“If you take away one truth, the one thing in this book I know with certainty, let it be this: your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway.”

Thirty-Five

By Robert Service:

Three score and ten, the psalmist saith,
And half my course is well-nigh run;
I've had my flout at dusty death,
I've had my whack of feast and fun.
I've mocked at those who prate and preach;
I've laughed with any man alive;
But now with sobered heart I reach
The Great Divide of Thirty-five.

And looking back I must confess
I've little cause to feel elate.
I've played the mummer more or less;
I fumbled fortune, flouted fate.
I've vastly dreamed and little done;
I've idly watched my brothers strive:
Oh, I have loitered in the sun
By primrose paths to Thirty-five!

And those who matched me in the race,
Well, some are out and trampled down;
The others jog with sober pace;
Yet one wins delicate renown.
O midnight feast and famished dawn!
O gay, hard life, with hope alive!
O golden youth, forever gone,
How sweet you seem at Thirty-five!

Each of our lives is just a book
As absolute as Holy Writ;
We humbly read, and may not look
Ahead, nor change one word of it.
And here are joys and here are pains;
And here we fail and here we thrive;
O wondrous volume! what remains
When we reach chapter Thirty-five?

The very best, I dare to hope,
Ere Fate writes Finis to the tome;
A wiser head, a wider scope,
And for the gipsy heart, a home;
A songful home, with loved ones near,
With joy, with sunshine all alive:
Watch me grow younger every year --
Old Age! thy name is Thirty-five!

Is Gives Way to Ought

How can we know everything will be all right?

This is a child’s question I have refused to outgrow. As I’ve written before, I struggle greatly with anxiety about not only the future, but the certain assurance of my faith, and exactly what the hoped-for eternity actually will be like. A large measure of this feels tied to ways I might be unwilling to change, the so-called nonfungibility of aesthetics – the idea I struggle to write off that, if people can refuse repentance because they love what is wrong, then there must be some uniqueness to the wrong, the love of which is not present in the perfected soul – and that frightens me, both because of the prospect of having seemingly alien preferences, the idea of any particularity being lost, and probably as a sort of defensive excuse to explain my reluctance to grow. I fixate on this anxiety about the Christian eschaton more than others, because its concerns still obtain in any sort of theology I find convincing, and because it feels more selfish and less defensible than any other objection one could have, so I need to make it visible. Whether this is more out of a fear of misleading people into jumping too quickly to reassure me, or out of a desire to extract some stronger form of encouragement that will allow me to feel safer with less change, I am not sure.

Thankfully as I get older I begin to be grateful for the ways in which I am changing, even those areas I feared to grow in in the past. I cannot myself resolve the seeming contradictions in my faith. On the one hand, the insistence that everything has to be all right in order for the promise news to be Good, which immediately splits into the question of how can everything seem all right to me and also be all right from God’s perspective, given my warped lens. I want not only to have and eat cake, but also to have the experience of not eating it; to not miss any possible permutation of experience, and yet to only live one meaningful life; to taste every substance, and yet not taste the foul or poisonous. When people are cruel and hurtful, I want them stopped and brought to justice; but I also fear the idea that anyone would be punished, and I often feel that no one should suffer, and everyone should by rights be able to have an assurance of safety. And even my righteous indignation is a contradiction, because I am dimly cognizant of my own wrongdoings in the same vein.

I ramble. I apologize for the vague confusion. In plain terms, I put my hope in Christ, but still worry in doubt that some sanctifying sacrifice will be required to emerge from even the Christian universalist George MacDonald’s purifying fire and fully enjoy God. I keep looking for the catch. I don’t think I can firmly resolve all of this here, now; all I can do is live in spite of the doubt, traveling in the way of trust even when it is absent. But I do think there is a way out, in the symbols of this holy season. In the inescapable death on the Cross and the seemingly impossible emptying of the tomb, things which seem contradictory find reconciliation; the circle is squared, what Is collapses into what Ought to be, as we round the corner into eternity.

The Moral Limits of Professionalism

I want to do something unusual for me, and write about work; not my work specifically, which I feel very lucky in, but professional norms in the United States generally. This isn’t a response to any particular experience, but to the weather around us all growing increasingly stormy of late. Organizations with a culture that is stable and successful over the long-term have a healthy aversion to sudden changes in direction, and generally avoid counterproductive catastrophizing. This is far preferable to the alternative, which is a kind of manic chaos, but it does have limits. For those with the right attitude, the attitude selected for by successful businesses, there may be no bad weather, only bad gear; but if a tornado touches down, it’s important to sound the alarm.

I’m speaking, of course, about politics, which carries with it a stronger set of professional norms, and for very good reason. Over the course of my life, I have changed my mind about many issues, and have been in offices, classrooms, and churches where I was well to the right of the room, or well to the left of the room, and as a socially sensitive person with a strong need to be liked, I value the norm of professional political neutrality and tact on a deeply personal level, despite not always perfectly embodying the same consideration in my own life. I can recall specific instances where someone either in a position of authority or of greater social status made off-hand remarks or jokes that clearly showed me I was the political-cultural minority in that context, and this did feel isolating, not so much because of the difference of opinion, but because of the uneven imposition of tact in order to avoid drama, and because it sowed doubt as to whether or not colleagues or classmates would respect the real version of myself, and not a neutral facsimile. All that is to say, I sympathize with the feelings of those quietly holding unpopular opinions, and appreciate the importance of our professional norms against being overtly political, especially where senior leadership is involved.

The difficulty with nearly any good value, principle, or heuristic, is that it is easy to follow it too far. With the exception of the commandments to love God and our neighbor, there are almost always limits beyond which a good rule begins to undermine more than it upholds. If we tell the truth when we express our core values, our desire to make the world better in some way, then integrity demands we speak truthfully about what is happening in this country. To remain silent when the subject arises, when the consequences confront us, does actual harm.

The first objection many will have is to disagree about the nature of what is transpiring. This is not the place for me to rehearse all of the facts, or to argue fruitlessly over their significance. I will only say that we have now reached a moment in which the Executive has arrogated to itself the power to seize any person off the street, cut off all communication between them and their families, deny legal counsel, a trial, or a hearing, and place them in a prison where torture and brutality are built into the physical structure itself, and then leave them there for the rest of their lives, regardless of what any later judicial process determines. If you disbelieve this, I urge you to avail yourself of the facts; if you are unbothered by this, I encourage you to spend time in prayer. I am not writing this for the unconvinced, but for those who see that the emperor has no clothes, but feel unable to say anything because of a lifetime of otherwise virtuous professional tact.

The second objection I anticipate is the charge of simple naïveté about the purpose of professional norms. After all, everyone jokes about how, despite whatever corporations say, the bottom line is ultimately the Bottom Line. And there are of course good reasons for this – without profit, without growth, people are ultimately impoverished. There is a moral dimension to economic productivity, which dovetails with the social need for people of widely differing views to live and work together in peace. But we need to consider the possibility that if we take the business case for or against any action as the final arbiter of what we should do, we remove the faculty of moral choice, the freedom which makes us human. A sufficiently-advanced intelligence could, in that paradigm, map out what decisions we should all inevitably make to maximize shareholder value into the future; but this would likely produce a society in which one could not enjoy these economic gains because such a total prioritization would foreclose all other freedoms. I say this as someone who really does care about shareholder value, who closely watches all of my investments, especially the stock I own in my own employer. But I refuse to be cynical about human decision-making, even if that appears naïve. I am never surprised when rational actors prioritize the bottom line regardless of whatever stated values they have expressed, but up until that point I think I owe everyone the respect of taking them at their word, and make decisions assuming others will act as they should. Anticipatory cynicism may be a strategy for self-defense, but it corrodes social trust and quickly robs us of any higher moral telos.

The third objection is probably foremost in your mind if you’re a professional in America, and it’s the idea that it’s simply not the role of business to ever be political in a way that is at all controversial. I generally agree with this; I have not been a fan of large companies feeling the need to be performatively woke in a way that always seemed both less-than-sincere and also insensitive to the nuances of sincere religious conviction; nor do I want to polarize the economy such that people are further sorted and separated by ideology in all spheres of life – that’s done enough harm already. Obviously politics can be very bad for business, and in the long run profit is a prerequisite of success. And most importantly, there’s the risk of making employees feel socially excluded, or worse, pressured to agree with stances they do not share. These are all good reasons for professional neutrality to remain a strong norm, nine times out of ten.

But I think we are in that tenth time.

In a moment where electoral and legal guardrails are disregarded by those controlling the apparatus of state, with all its physical power and authority, the one crucial arena of contestation is the simple question of what is true. If any injustice can be made to appear normal, necessary, or warranted to enough people, then there is no safety in the law. What is needed now is to simply reject attempts to redefine the nature of reality, and the terms of what is acceptable and normal. In this, large institutions, including businesses, are unfortunately part of the struggle for the soul of the nation, even if they do not want to be. To win, authoritarians need to create a state of generally-accepted unreality, a kind of fictitious normality maintained by polite society, where people pretend not to see things they otherwise would have been appalled by. The ultimate means to power they seek is to have a critical mass of society make themselves personally hypocrites by voluntarily acting as if things are fine when they aren’t. This is a part of a strategy of cutting out and isolating the vulnerable targets of repression in the way a sheep dog cuts a lamb out of the flock.

In this process, the administration has predictably started by bullying large institutions with a lot to lose: universities, law firms, the civil service, and big business, especially federal contractors. These institutions have a small number of leaders who, because of their social class, may simply not be as cognizant of the degree of threat experienced by those more vulnerable. On top of this, they tend to be older and thus to have been formed longer by the professional neutrality of managerial culture and the historical normal of an America with normal political disputes within a sort of general bipartisan constitutional consensus. I am at the tail end of people who grew up in such an America, and I desperately miss it, but I am unable to pretend it is the America of today. Beyond this, leadership has a duty to their shareholders, employees, students, and the public to try to steer their institutions successfully through political storms without running aground on conflict, so there is an understandable desire to find some way to protect themselves, batten down the hatches, and wait for everything to blow over.

The problem is that once large institutions managed by the social elite begin to demonstrate a willingness to be pushed around, not only will the administration push further and demand more, but the pressure will then roll downhill onto individual Americans, the employees, students, and citizens, who do not all have the means to feel they can take principled stands if the institutions they are part of do not have their backs.

This is why, in this moment, it is regrettably necessary for leaders and social institutions to speak honestly about what they see happening. I am not calling for a widget-factory to become an editorial board; but wherever changes that would in any other context seem irrational, abnormal, or unjust intersect with your operations or your immediate community, react honestly, rather than glancing first at the political debate and dissembling, or retreating into a bashful silence. This is an economic risk, and it carries with it social risks as well, including the danger of inadvertently harming professional unity. We should not speak carelessly or in haste; but saying nothing at all is worse, under the circumstances. And worst of all, is to acknowledge that people feel anxious, and to try to reassure them, only by encouraging them to remain calm as in other times of difficulty. People should remain calm, but when that is the sole reassurance given by leaders, it signals that they do not see, or are not willing to say, just how abnormal and perilous our situation is. This leaves their audience to feel they are each individually alone facing whatever pressure comes from a would-be authoritarian, and that is precisely how people come to preemptively silence themselves, freeing the enemies of liberty to carry out any crime without the outrage that should confront them.

We need to speak now, and not later. If we try to preserve for ourselves the flexibility of reserved judgment, if we try to wait and see, if we follow the usual good practice of continuing a steady course and being tactful, then soon we will all be so isolated by the caving of others that we will increasingly fear to say anything, no matter what happens. Therefore it is necessary now, proactively, to cut off our own retreat by taking a clear position, not only stating our principles honestly, but doing so in such a way that we cannot later redefine them to allow us to retreat to a compromise that we would call immoral today.

Perhaps this all sounds extreme, inappropriate, or unprofessional to you. In that case, all I would ask is that you consider the role of the leaders of social institutions and businesses in Germany in the early 1930s, understanding that they may have been in denial about how far things could go, and ask with hindsight if you want to risk continuing business as usual like so many of them did.

Remove Trump From Power Now

I want to make all of this as simple as possible. The Trump administration admits, in court, that they seized (I’m not sure ‘arrest’ is the right word if you don’t get Mirandized or a lawyer) at least two people by mistake. These innocent people were legally present in the country. For the past month they have been held in inhumane conditions and tortured in a prison in El Salvador from which no one is ever released. When the courts, including the Supreme Court, ordered the administration to bring them back, the administration said they could not do so, and did not have to. The stated legal position of the Trump administration today is that they have the right to grab any person off the street – and I say any person, because recall that they admitted they grabbed the wrong people and it didn’t matter to them – and imprison them for life without trial, without appeal, to be tormented in a foreign concentration camp, and that they cannot and will not obey any court order to rescue them. In plain terms, today, the administration claims the power to have you, American Citizen, arrested, shackled, flown to El Salvador without a lawyer or a phone call, and thrown into a cell crushed in with hundreds of criminals, and they’ll never bring you back even if your family sues and wins in court. The plain truth that so many do not wish to see, because it is so horrifying, is that as of now, Donald Trump is a fascist dictator, and his administration is implementing a police state.

Under this circumstance, Trump cannot be allowed to serve out the remainder of his term, nor can his Vice President be allowed to succeed him, nor any cabinet official who has enacted, excused, or countenanced this abuse of power. Legally, the remedy is impeachment and removal of all of the above. The only reason this is not happening is because Republicans in Congress – your normal, average, run-of-the-mill Republicans, such as they are in 2025 – refuse to act, and in doing so they betray their oaths to the Constitution and become party to the theft of every right and liberty the signers of the Declaration of Independence were willing to die to procure for you. Therefore, we must protest, impeach, and remove every official with the power to bring Trump to justice who refuses to act, and if we cannot reach them directly, we must start with whoever is nearest and lowest in the political structure that can be reached – start wherever you have to start, and move up. But understand this: we cannot make peace with the criminals presently running our government, we cannot allow them to serve out their terms, and we cannot allow them to retire privately without facing justice. Remove them from office legally, and remove them physically from power; and begin now.

Music in December 2024

I finished my last monthly playlist for 2024 weeks ago, and then life intervened and actually posting it became a very low priority. It is encouraging that things are now stabilized to the point where I’m getting around even to this again.

German duo Grandbrothers’ 2017 album Open is a wordless work of chilled pulses of light vanishing toward the horizon. Honey stands out as a methodically emotionally dawn, like crocuses breaking out of the snow. Tierras de Fuego, The Bubble in the Wine Glass, and Flight all claw their way into the vertical, albeit in different ways.

Kaho Nakamura’s Their Lives was captivating enough before I looked it up and realized that, translated, it begins with the line “Oh, God! The end of the wilderness with no way out, So bright!” and continues in that vein. It’s an endless chanted injunction to live and to go forward, despite the wilderness. Za Ninngenn’s sound is more of a pop-symphonic metal, slickly dramatic.

Oh No is a parable about how miserable we make ourselves through our phones; it’s also a good demonstration of Wet Leg’s droll humor; also I just like that Pizza Rat is mentioned. Pop It is more easy-listening Nintendo synthpop from Anamanaguchi. Singin’ In The Blue Sky has school marching band energy in a very endearing way.

Rostam continues to consistently toss out fascinating nasal tracks with an eclectic mélange of ingredients. Rufus Wainwright seems to be almost a throwback, orchestrating like a big band, belting like a ballad singer, but the actual music is unmistakably 21st-century in its complex melodic ferocity.

apathy is an interstitial tone poem; Lately is a stripped-down ramble; Only The Strong has precisely the sort of gently grim outlook I gravitate toward musically. Tomberlin’s happy accident embeds plaintive guitars in a mass of warm bleeding sound that delaminates as it peaks. Bess Atwell’s Love Is Not Enough expresses the genuine wistful doubt, expressed on Twin Peaks, that dares to name the ultimate fear: the possibility that love is not enough. The Fear of Losing This has all the muted frailty that Florist can muster packed into it.

Courtney Barnett never disappoints, and the chorus of Fear Is Like a Forest grabs your ankles like the Pacific undertow, and pulls hard. At the River feels like a particularly relaxing dream, dancing its way down the beach. Skullcrusher’s You are my House weaves a sad, sparkling tapestry out of a lonely room. The back half of Ethel Cain’s Sun Bleached Flies breaks out into a majestic elegy that feels like late-afternoon sunlight pooling on the floor by the window. Manami Kakudo’s album oar sneaks by one quietly, as if trying not to wake the listener; Fuyumi Abe’s poets has a live wire of warm synth propelling it gently along.

I listened to a lot of Charlotte Church when I was growing up, and her recording of Bizet’s Habanera holds up well, dripping with the coolness of a tropical night. Jimmy Fontana’s Il Mondo is everything I like in a grand old big Italian number.

Mannheim Steamroller’s take on Good King Wenceslas throws the curtain up on the Christmas season with synthetic bravado; Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s An Angel Came Down is perhaps corny and self-indulgent, but I just like a big unembarrassed swing. Maria durch ein’ Dornwald ging is an appropriately reverent advent hymn in which the theotokos passes through a wood of thorns, and causes it to flower. Rest Your Head is a minimalist painting of a frozen field and a quiet wood in the fading dusk.

The Mountain Goats’ 2004 album We Shall All Be Healed is another of Darnielle’s confounding lyrical contraptions, and like many of them it runs doggedly, head-down, straight toward Apocalypse, and find a humor in resignation that feels like some kind of rebel triumph. Labrador is one of the most emotionally and melodically potent songs from the great Aimee Mann, which is high praise. I really love this one.

ghostpia is Homecomings waving farewell through a wall of golden seafoam; Hanare Gumi also says a heartfelt goodbye, complete with tributary horns. Yujiro Kudo’s Kokoro has a childlike humility in its scope. Finally, Humbert Humbert continues to release heart-plucking folk music in 2024.

You Are Hurting People

I address this specifically to the supporters of the Trump administration and the Republican Party, not as it was a decade ago, not as it is in theory, but as it actually is now. Whether or not you mean to, there are innocent people suffering, and you are responsible.  

As the Atlantic reported yesterday (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-administrative-error-sends-a-man-to-a-salvadoran-prison/682254/), the Trump administration itself admitted in a court filing that it had seized and deported a man with protected legal status, by mistake. They did not simply deport him, though: they have sent this man (again, taken by mistake) to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, where for two weeks he has been kept in abusive conditions. Having admitted that this was a mistake, instead of remedying the situation, the administration has said that courts have no power to compel it to return this wrongfully imprisoned man, because he is not currently on American soil – and the administration does not intend to free him.

Here you can read some of the most debased and spineless legal verbiage ever submitted to a court:

This is merely the latest and one of the most egregious human rights violations perpetrated as part of the administration’s immigration gulag, which has already swept up large numbers of people with no due process and thrown them in a foreign prison. And a plain reading of what the administration’s lawyers are now saying in court reveals exactly what this means for you and me.

It doesn’t matter if someone is here legally or illegally, if you committed a crime or are innocent – it even doesn’t matter if you’re an American citizen. The administration is grabbing people and imprisoning them in conditions none of us could likely stand, without even a hearing or a lawyer, and then arguing that no court can review this sentence. Any of us could be next.

 This man was taken while he was picking up his non-verbal 5-year-old on his way home from work. His wife and son are American citizens, and they have not been able to speak with him sense he was kidnapped. His family discovered he was in El Salvador because he appeared in a photograph of prisoners released by Salvadoran caudillo and Trump lackey Bukele as he deliberately and cruelly taunted an American judge who had ordered a cessation of deportation flights to the country.

After this story was published, the Vice President who went to Yale Law and surely knows better, took to social media to defend the administration’s illegal disappearing of this man. To do this, he attacked his reputation by twisting the facts to claim the deportee was illegal and had been found to be a gang member. The former is untrue because of his protected status, which is a legal status, and the latter was based on exaggerating an unfounded claim. But more importantly, the Trump administration itself already admitted that he was not supposed to have been deported, that this was a mistake, and, in their view, this simply does not matter. Vance also cited the man’s traffic violations. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think running a stoplight should result in being indefinitely tortured without trial in a foreign prison.  

And that is what this really comes down to. The Trump administration is claiming that illegal immigrant criminals do not get due process. The problem with this is that due process is precisely how we determine whether or not someone is legal, or a criminal. Without that, any of us can be taken simply by the bureaucratic whim of whoever is giving the orders at ICE, or in this case, by whoever is mistakenly bungling their execution.  

Court papers (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/us/politics/us-deportations-tren-de-aragua-deportation-guidance.html?searchResultPosition=1) in other cases indicate that other people have been seized and deported with no process of law simply because the government decided they were in a gang because they had tattoos or dressed a certain way or looked a certain way.

 An innocent makeup artist with a tattoo dedicated to his mother has been disappeared to El Salvador, something even influential right-wing blogger close Vance associate Rod Dreher was appalled to see (though clearly not all on the right share that human reaction):

 The transcript of a prominent Fox talk show is instructive as to the level of seriousness the administration’s propaganda apparatus treats the prospect of someone innocent languishing in a Salvadoran gang prison:

 What, you may be asking, is this prison like? It is not like a normal American prison (which, incidentally, one is meant to get a trial before going to). Here is what we know: https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-trump-prison-immigrants-4ab3fc3c0474efb308084604b61f8a37

Here’s NBC: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/venezuelans-deported-el-salvador-detention-abuses-rcna197125 

Here’s The Guardian’s interview with an expert: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/trump-deportations-venezuela-prison

This is not a place anyone, even a guilty person, should be sent. Yet what now faces all of us here in the U.S. is the possibility that we could be taken by ICE without warning, with no hearing, no phone call, and thrown into this crush of suffering prisoners, and our families would not even know where we are. If you say that’s a ridiculous thing for me to say because I’m an American citizen, well, the government has no process in place to ensure that only citizens are deported, and has admitted to making mistakes it won’t remedy; and if you say it’s hyperbolic for a white middle class person like myself to make such a statement, that only concedes the racism of the administration and the peril to people who are my legal and human peers.

 This is what the Trump administration is doing, in your name; this is what the Republican Party has enthusiastically worked to bring about. To those responsible, I can only say – Repent.

Repent, and fix what you have done.

Jack Roos, 1932-2025

In the early hours of March 19th, 2025, Jack Roos, my Grandfather, passed on. In a way, it is a relief that he is released from the gradual decline toward the end; for those of us who trust that he is now at Peace in a sense greater than what we can understand, it certainly is a comfort. And of course I miss him dearly, as I have grown to miss him more and more over the many years of goodbye. In a sense, all grieving is already done, and there is only a quiet calm as we wait for reunion. Still, I feel unequal to writing anything about him. Any effort seems too little, yet even a great effort might strike no closer to the truth. Tennyson spent seventeen years writing a fitting eulogy for his best friend; I am not Tennyson. I had always imagined I would have eloquent words on the occasion; but when the time came to share at his funeral, I found the notes I had scribbled down on the plane seemed self-indulgently digressive and abstruse, and I couldn’t read them.

Of course I remember my Grandfather first from my childhood, teaching me to play chess with the seriousness of a man who found our games to be the most intellectually engaging activity in the world, when in hindsight I realize this must have been far from the reality. In the early morning we would slip out of his cabin on Whidbey Island, and walk down to the strand, and there he would flip over the largest rock he could find, to show us the bullfish burrowed in the muck beneath. I remember him persisting, even in these final months, to remain himself in spite of everything: sincere, kind, and mischievously funny, like a little boy. I think often of that little boy that he once was, growing up in Ballard in the 1930s and 40s, sleeping in his drafty attic room, slipping out early mornings to fish on the Sound. That wasn’t very long ago, yet that world and this are very strange to each other already. It will not be very long before the world I know is just as far receded, and things are stranger still. It is a hard thing for humans; even if one were to remain always in the town of one’s birth, the space between moments inexorably grows, and there is no way home again, except by dying.

Jack knew this better than most, I suppose. He was, professionally and passionately, a student of the salmon, who never forget the stream of their rearing in their days as fry, parr, and smolt. They return only the in hour of their dying, changed beyond all recognition. It is a great labor, reaching their end at the beginning, and I do not know if they find any joy in it.

I read his book, once – Restoring Fraser River Salmon: A History of the International Pacific Salmon Fisheries Commission, 1937-1985 – his account of a life’s work. I admit it was a tome, especially for one like myself, who lacks the single-minded, patient intellectual doggedness of the scientist. I’m unlike him in that respect, for my grandfather was a great scientist, possessed of the utmost quiet patience. I don’t understand how he lived for months alone in the wilderness tagging fish, or spent year after year in the slow, difficult, tedious – and, at the end, frustratingly political and ungrateful – work of protecting those precious fish. But I think I understand why he was able to do it all, and be a loving parent and grandparent, and a good neighbor, and a man of God, all to boot. It was all of it an act of love; not merely the affection of a fisherman for the sport, or the inquisitive affection of the scientist for his subject, but the long, meandering, unglamorous life of one man poured quietly out in care for his little corner of this world. Where does this river find its source? My grandfather’s love was, in fluvial terms, a distributary channel of the love of his Creator for the creation. And that is the gravel to which he has returned, in the same faith of those fish who, knowing not what will come after them, expend themselves in the inarticulate hope of new life rising with the spring meltwater.

I am not a strong swimmer; I am no salmon. Yet I will, I trust and hope, one day reach the head of that same stream, and die, and rise in the spring, and I will meet Jack Roos again where the river becomes one with the sea.

Music in November 2024

November begins with a grim defiance to which I am growing all too used, with I Won’t Lie Down and Still Waiting. Final Hour and Save Me are both broad strokes at the epic, but the latter swings so hard at melodic melodrama that it successfully sells itself without a shred of nuance whatsoever.

Termites is a frothy sonic tsunami that I wish were longer, but it probably is best for its own intensity that the wavelength is short. Next are two tracks from different albums by The Mountain Goats, and like so much of John Darnielle’s work, I find encouragement in the bitter injunctions to live, and melancholy in warm reminiscences.

Regina Spektor’s 2009 album Far features the aching Laughing With, aimed directly at humanity’s primal wound, our Lack; One More Time with Feeling provides a kind of template for hopeful persistence in the face of how we feel.

Holly Humberstone’s Can You Afford To Lose Me? drops its piano notes into a puddle of reverberating synths and filters that is so satisfying it overcomes the glumness of England. Under the Bridge is of course a Red Hot Chili Peppers standard, but this cover by Scala & Kolacny Brothers gives the chorus in particular an auroral height and a weight to match.

Where Are You Driving? matches Laura Veirs’ raw voice with a fascinating instrumentation to produce something with a searching emotionality. Rufus Wainwright’s Oh What A World is a strange composition, a sort of plodding, mounting march that builds into a bounding deployment of Ravel.

Your Ex-Lover Is Dead by Stars is one of the most beautiful pieces of alternative rock left to us by its heyday in the first decade of the century. So is Maps, which rolls in like waves under a stormfront. Souvenir is a soft-edged susurration; Naomi and Me & Suspended From Class both cheeky little ditties.

Zmi, Sigure Ros, and Saho Terao form a bridge of reflective sound into the exuberance of OFFICIAL HIGE DANDISM’s Traveler. Smooth Operator swings with such aplomb that you can’t help but let it lead the dance; Inner Smile has a different sound but the same chutzpah. Tom Jones, of course, really knew how to belt it out with the best of them, and Blondie just keeps turning the dial up as well.

I’ve become  a yacht rock guy, only without the yacht; there’s something about this lubricated jazzy odd corner of musical history that gives it power; it wraps itself so fully in its own silliness that it becomes Teflon, impervious to any scorn. And ELO’s 1977 Out of the Blue is plenty silly in its own fun way, as is, I suppose, David Bowie’s Suffragette City. George Harrison, on the other hand, is quietly quite emotionally serious in this strange song of detachment.

I’m not sure how I came across the work of Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, but I am certainly glad I did. Likewise with the Punjabi folk music of Hans Raj Hans, which is hard to not nod along with incessantly.

In 2015 Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur, English composer Johnny Greenwood, and the Indian ensemble The Rajasthan Express, collaborated to produce Junun, an utterly remarkable album which is perhaps impossible to properly describe. I strongly recommend just listening to it. And Khan is a bizarre collision of bagpipes and throat singing.

Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham’s collab album has all the lilting, wistful tartness one might expect. Comrade reaches a point where it begins ascending an escalator and doesn’t come back down. Finally, See Her Out (Thats Just Life) by Francis and the Lights shimmers like a prism.

Music in October 2024

October begins with the eerie sirens of Susumu Hirasawa, the inimitable futuristic composer. Scala & Kolacny Brothers’ Self-Fulfilling Prophecy builds in ominous beauty; a far more uplifting chorale piece is Quindon Tarver’s Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good). Also from the Romeo+Juliet soundtrack, Craig Armstrong’s original score conveys more longing than it says by virtue of its restraint. And Humbert Humbert’s comforting voices will always find their way home to my ears.

Minnie Riperton’s 1970 album Come To My Garden begins with the gently yet insistently lovely Les Fleurs. Crash Test Dummies’ 1993 masterwork God Shuffled His Feet includes a whimsically atavistic camper’s daydream of primordial life. More importantly, it features Afternoons & Coffeespoons, a song whose chorus I chant inwardly like a mantra, redeeming the anxiety of the future by baptizing inevitable retirement in the hope of “afternoons…measured out in coffeespoons & T.S. Eliot.” The song is an anthem of triumphant defiance spitting in the face of time. And everyone already knows that Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill is one of the greatest albums of the ‘90s – what more is there to say?  

Ada Lea’s what we say in private is a sort of bleary, wall-eyed, yet quite pleasing little record. I wasn’t previously aware of The Beaches, but Desdemona is a very crushable cacophony, as are the bouncy technopunk of Reol and the beautifully bizarre 2992, by a band whose name I can’t copy because it’s Spotify, and cannot search because it appears to be written in a kind of runic wingdings I can’t even identify. Miya Folick is a reminder that we live in an age of abundance in terms of great musical artists to keep stumbling across, to the extent that it’s impossible to ever run out. A Pill to Crush feels like sinking into citric acid; jumping back two decades, Garbage puts so many interesting sounds in their music, from the bells in Cherry Lips to the hard-driving warped choral melody in Supervixen. Tripping Me Up is a sunkissed cat; Handle This this Sum 41 with a more resolute purpose than usual.

Money Changes Everything is one of those well-loved classics that is always worth revisiting to appreciate just how many elements get taken for granted. Come Undone  is ‘90s Duran Duran, and it feels closer to the smooth pop of that decade than to their earlier work. Hamilton Leithauser’s The Loves of Your Life is defiantly messy, hopeful, and loud. Rostam’s In a River has a slightly more folksy, reflective tenor. Tintinnabulum is classic Adiemus, warm nonsense with a spoonful of sugar. Never Understand is Asobi Seksu rushing to catch up to itself; Pocky & Sake is Sissy Bar experimenting with a lovely, weird instrumental interlude. Chapterhouse is not a band I really know, but I shall have to know them better going forward.

Marginalia #48 has all you want from Takagi’s musical drafts: diegetic weather, piano that feels at once muted and suspended, and the simplest core of a melody that feels like peace. Asirrera’s chorus is plaintive and dovelike; Echo Sax No.4 seems like noodling around on a saxophone, but it somehow conveys a great depth of feeling in its deceptive simplicity.

The Feminine Urge has an incredible melodic climbing line in the chorus, where it feels as though the voice is being plucked like a guitar string. One Kiss Ends It All might be from 2013, but Saturday Looks Good To Me’s album feels like it escaped from the late ‘90s, and is all the better for it. I Won’t Run From It uses its vocal heights to great emotional effect, as Volcano Choir’s Byegone does with its lick that feels like an anchor being suddenly drawn up from the sea. Ohashi Trio put out a new album last year that feels like they were soaking in the folk of half a century past.

Speaking of the past, Billy Joel is an American bard I have underrated and neglected relative to his talent and fame. The Stranger is so insistently compelling, and Scenes from an Italian Restaurant is the sort of song Millennials like me are supposed to hate – a sprawling, indulgent Boomer elegy – and I love it, even if it is the musical equivalent of Grease.

P.S. Eliot’s name is perfect for this mumblecore rock, as is the title of their 2009 album Introverted Romance In Our Troubled Minds. Gillis Mountain is one of my favorite songs from the great Canadian folk singers the Rankins. The evocation of both the sunny day in the present and the nostalgic memory of settlers just a few generations earlier is so strong and keening that I can feel the sunburn and taste the blueberries. The next couple of tracks are windswept fantasy tropes I found on the soundtrack to Riddle of Fire. John Williams’ score to Lincoln is a musical distillation of the longing I feel for a nostalgic childhood love of American history, which calls up both my patriotic fondness for Fourth of July concerts on the National Mall, and my aching for an America where we felt as though we were growing in character, despite our faults. Kazahana resounds with the joyful life only Takagi can release on the stage, and 2.3 Courante has an urgent beauty glimpsed in passing and then lost.

Big Time is Angel Olsen achieving a new kind of mastery encoding settled sentimentality into big sound that doesn’t feel melodramatic. Holly Humberstone’s Paint My Bedroom Black contains a kind of breathy autotuning that is far more compelling than it has any right to be.

Say I Am You is the second record from The Weepies, and I can’t believe I made it 19 years without hearing it, because it is precisely my speed of melancholic encouragement to persist at life, to simply persist, regardless of how awful one might feel. Finally, John Williamson’s 1986 Mallee Boy is one of the greatest pieces of art produced by Australia. Nothing makes me homesick for a foreign land quite like Williamson’s wistful tone.