3.30 Manhattan grand jury indicts Trump on 33 counts of business fraud. Marc Fisher in the Washington Post: “For a half-century, Donald Trump has portrayed himself as the consummate dealmaker — and the ultimate escape artist, a serial entrepreneur turned politician who managed to avoid major consequences despite having been investigated in every decade of his adult life by federal and state agencies, by bankers and casino regulators, by legions of prosecutors and competitors. He’s been investigated over matters small and huge: over alleged lobbying violations in New York state and whether he played a role in the Russian government’s effort to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He was the only president to be impeached twice, yet he was acquitted both times. Now, 50 years after federal officials first accused Trump and his father of violating laws that barred racial discrimination in apartment rentals, the former president has been indicted.”
3.29 Freddie DeBoer, quoted in The Atlantic: “All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working from home driven by Adderall you got via Zoom from a pill-mill doctor, you order dinner through an app (so that you don’t have to talk to an actual person on the phone), masturbate to online porn, watch several dozen videos on YouTube, none of which you’ll remember even three days later, then take two Xanax to put yourself to sleep. That’s progress now, the steady accumulation of various tools to avoid other human beings, leaving people free to consume #content that is by design totally, existentially disposable, throw-away culture that asks nothing of us and which we don’t remember because neither creator nor audience wants to invest enough for remembering to make sense. Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when they’re gone. One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones. We all move in one direction or the other, from one day to another, certainly including me, but it feels to me as if our society is decidedly embracing the latter. Depth and intensity of feeling risk too much; Xbox and hard seltzer and HR culture anesthetize. Pop culture soothes and placates with a steady series of uncomplicated morality tales in predigested narratives where nothing ever really changes and so there’s no worry that the storyline will move in a way that hurts your feelings. Crowdsourced “content” is built on ephemerality. Ask a TikTok megafan, someone who’s totally unapologetic and proud about their love of the service: what’s a TikTok that you still come back to, a year later, two years later, three? I think the honest answer is “none.” Because like so many other things in our culture, those videos are designed to be thrown away. They can’t hurt you, but they can’t move you. They’ll never challenge you, and they’ll never inspire you. All they’re meant to do is help you pass the seconds that make up your life, a finite and precious resource.”
3.28 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: “Like a boxer who has never had an adequate sparring partner, DeSantis seems utterly unprepared for the flurry of insults from Trump. DeSantis tried ignoring him and then tried halfheartedly shoving back. But Trump, an aggressive potential opponent with a feral instinct for weakness, has consistently outplayed DeSantis. . . . During his governorship, DeSantis’s fights have been against politically weaker people: schoolchildren, LGBTQ youths, schoolteachers, African American historians and ex-prisoners. Even his tussle with Disney was against a corporation that couldn’t very well pick up and leave the state. One might say DeSantis is out of practice, but in fact he has never had to face off against someone of equal or greater political heft. And now, up against a bigger bully, he looks overwhelmed.”
3.28 Axios: “A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll exposes generational and political divides that echo loudly and transformatively across our culture, politics and governance. Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies . . . .told The Journal that the combined toll of political division, COVID and the lowest economic confidence in decades appear to be having “a startling effect on our core values. . . .Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans. . . .Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58%.” The findings:
- 🛍️ Asked to describe the state of the nation’s economy, 1% (not a typo) chose “excellent.”
- 🎓 56% said a four-year college degree is “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt.”
- 🎒33% said they have very little or no confidence in public schools.
Look at the tectonic shifts from 25 years ago, in 1998:
- 🇺🇸 Patriotism is very important: Dropped from 70% to 38%.
- 🙏 Religion is very important: Dropped from 62% to 39%.
- 🍼 Having children is very important: Dropped from 59% to 30%.
- 🙋 Community involvement is very important: Dropped from 47% to 27%.
- 💰 Money is very important: Rose from 31% to 43%.
3.28 Fintan O’Toole, on the investigation into Trump’s payoff to Stormy Daniels, in The New York Review of Books: “It is a lurid—and seductively entertaining—sideshow in the great circus of which he is the ringmaster. It is not just that using Stormy Daniels as the way to hold him to account plays dizzying tricks with perspective, zeroing in on a molehill of sleaze when the mountain of Trump’s criminal sedition continues to loom so large against the horizon of American democracy. It’s that all of this drags us back into Trump’s territory.”
3.27 Tyler Cowen in Marginal Revolution: “I take great care to spell out just how special recent times have been, for most Americans at least. For my entire life, and a bit more, there have been two essential features of the basic landscape: American hegemony over much of the world, and relative physical safety for Americans; and an absence of truly radical technological change. Unless you are very old, old enough to have taken in some of WWII, or were drafted into Korea or Vietnam, probably those features describe your entire life as well. In other words, virtually all of us have been living in a bubble “outside of history.” Now, circa 2023, at least one of those assumptions is going to unravel, namely #2. AI represents a truly major, transformational technological advance. Biomedicine might too, but for this post I’ll stick to the AI topic, as I wish to consider existential risk. #1 might unravel soon as well, depending how Ukraine and Taiwan fare. It is fair to say we don’t know, nonetheless #1 also is under increasing strain. Hardly anyone you know, including yourself, is prepared to live in actual “moving” history. It will panic many of us, disorient the rest of us, and cause great upheavals in our fortunes, both good and bad. In my view the good will considerably outweigh the bad (at least from losing #2, not #1), but I do understand that the absolute quantity of the bad disruptions will be high.”
3.27 Researchers fin the UK found that attending live sporting events amateur and professional— resulted in higher life satisfaction scores and lower loneliness scores. The study also found that live sports attendance leads to an increase in people’s sense that “life is worthwhile.” The size of this increase is comparable to that of gaining employment.
3.27 The Atlantic: “Leo Tolstoy, after publishing Anna Karenina, moved to Moscow, where the poverty he witnessed shocked him. The experience prompted the writer, who lived in a house full of servants, to contend with his complicity and shame. “I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means—except by getting off his back,” Tolstoy mused. “If I want to aid the poor, that is, to help the poor not to be poor, I ought not to make them poor.”
3.27 Helen Lewis in The Atlantic: “DeSantis is a politician who preaches freedom while suspending elected officials who offend him, banning classroom discussions he doesn’t like, carrying out hostile takeovers of state universities, and obstructing the release of public records whenever he can. And somehow Florida, a state that bills itself as the home of the ornery and the resistant, the obstinate and the can’t-be-trodden-on, the libertarian and the government-skeptic, has fallen for the most keenly authoritarian governor in the United States.’’
3.27 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “In Waco. . . .Trump proved he is still capable of doing shocking things. . .. As the Associated Press reported: `With a hand over his heart, Trump stood at attention when his rally opened with a song called “Justice for All” performed by a choir of people imprisoned for their roles in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Some footage from the insurrection was shown on big screens displayed at the rally site as the choir sang the national anthem and a recording played of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.’ In other words: A former president, a man once entrusted with the Constitution’s Article II powers as our chief magistrate and the commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world, an elected official who held our survival in his hands with the codes to our nuclear arsenal, considered it an honor to be serenaded by a group of violent insurrectionists who are sitting in jail for offenses against the government and people of the United States. Trump’s voice was not only featured on this song; he actually volunteered to provide a recording for it. I know that many people, after years of this mad-king routine, simply do not want to process anything with the words Donald Trump in it. I don’t blame you. But let’s not look away: In Waco, Trump embraced a creepy mash-up of the national anthem, “USA” chants, and his own voice, and then proceeded for some 90 minutes to make clear that he is now irrevocably all in with the seditionists, the conspiracy theorists, the “Trump or death” fanatics, the Vladimir Putin fanboys—the whole appalling lot of them.”
3.26 Chris Christie in New Hampshire: “You know what Donald Trump said a couple of weeks ago? ‘I am your retribution.’ Guess what, everybody? No thanks.”
3.26 For the first time in men’s and women’s NCAA tournament history, the Final Four will not feature any No. 1, No. 2 or No. 3 seeds.
3.26 Bill Zehme dies at 64.
3.24 Fort Pickett renamed Fort Barfoot.
3,21 Willis Reed dies at 80.
3.20 According to the 11th World Happiness Report, Finland is the happiest country in the world. The top 15: Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Israel, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Austria, Australia, Canada, Ireland.
3.20 Axios: “America’s distraction addiction is numbing us into inaction and acceptance. That’s a sign of far more than America’s short attention span, people who have tried to confront the nation’s social illnesses tell us. It’s a signof a country that’s become indifferent to tragedy, and unable to have a national conversation long enough to prevent the next one.”
3.19 Jerusalem Demsas, on the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” by W. H. Auden, in The Atlantic: “The author is reacting in part to the painting Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, in which Icarus (from the Greek myth) is drowning. The only part of him you see is his legs flailing above the water right before he dies. The majority of the painting is made up of an indifferent world—ships sailing, workers continuing about their day. The sun shines brightly, and no one knows about the boy’s death.
“Musée des Beaux Arts,” by W. H. Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
3.19 Washington Post: “The newly-released 2022 supplement to the PRRI Census of American Religion — based on over 40,000 interviews conducted last year — confirms that the decline of white Christians (Americans who identify as white, non-Hispanic and Christian of any kind) as a proportion of the population continues unabated. . . .As recently as 2008, when our first Black president was elected, the U.S. was a majority (54%) white Christian country.” By 2014 the number had dropped to 47 percent, and in 2022 it stood at 42 percent.
3.18 Clifton Park chain gang.
3.17 In NCAA play, No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson upsets No. 1 Purdue
3.17 Lance Reddick dies at 60
3.12 Everything Everywhere All At Once receives Oscar for Best Picture. Brendan Fraser receives Best Actor. Michell Yeoh receives Best Actress award, the first Asian actress to win the award. “For all the little boys and girls who look like me, watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities,” she said. Jamie Lee Curtis receives Best Supporting Actress. Ke Huy Quan wins Best Supporting Actor. Said Quan, a Vietnamese refugee who spent a year in a camp in Hong Kong before coming to the US, “And somehow, I ended up here, on Hollywood’s biggest stage. They say stories like this only happen in the movies. I cannot believe it’s happening to me. This — this is the American Dream.”
3.11 Mike Pence at the Gridiron Dinner: “Donald Trump was wrong. I had no right to overturn the election, and his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know that history will hold Donald Trump accountable. What happened that day was a disgrace. And it mocks decency to portray it any other way. For as long as I live, I will never, ever diminish the injuries sustained, the lives lost, or the heroism of law enforcement on that tragic day.’’
3.9 Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal: “Ron DeSantis carries a vibe that he might unplug your life support to re-charge his cellphone.’’
3.9 Tom McNichol in The Atlantic: “The American right now uses elitist to mean “people who think they’re better than me because they live and work and play differently than I do.” They rage that people—myself included—look down upon them. And again, truth be told, I do look down on Trump voters, not because I am an elitist but because I am an American citizen and I believe that they, as my fellow citizens, have made political choices that have inflicted the greatest harm on our system of government since the Civil War. I refuse to treat their views as just part of the normal left-right axis of American politics. (As an aside, note that the insecure whining about being “looked down upon” is wildly asymmetrical: Trump voters have no trouble looking down on their opponents as traitors, perverts, and, as Donald Trump himself once put it, “human scum.” But they react to criticism with a kind of deep hurt, as if others must accommodate their emotional well-being. Many of these same people gleefully adopted “Fuck your feelings” as a rallying cry but never expected that it was a slogan that worked both ways.)’’
3.8 George Packer in The Atlantic: “We’re now living in a golden age of fatalism. American culture—movies and museums, fiction and journalism—is consumed with the most terrible subjects of the country’s history: slavery, Native American removal, continental conquest, the betrayal of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, colonialism, militarism. In scholarship, works whose objective is to puncture our hopeful but misguided myths dominate, and titles such as Unworthy Republic, The End of the Myth, Illusions of Emancipation, and Stamped From the Beginning claim prestigious prizes. This mode of analysis doesn’t just revise our understanding of American history, illuminating areas of darkness that most people don’t know and perhaps would rather not. It also draws a straight line from past to present. In a country world-famous for constant transformation, historical fatalism believes that nothing ever really changes. Mass incarceration is “the new Jim Crow”; modern police departments are the heirs of slave patrols. Historical fatalism combines inevitability and essentialism: The present is forever trapped in the past and defined by the worst of it. The arrival of the first slave ship on these shores in 1619 marked, according to The New York Times Magazine, “the country’s true birth date” and “the foundation on which this country is built.” Cruelty, inequity, and oppression endure in the American character not only as elements of a complex whole but as its very essence. Any more ambiguous view—one that sees the United States as a flawed experiment, marked by slow, fitful progress—is an illusion, and a dangerous one.”
3.7 Evidence from the Dominion lawsuit include emails from Tucker Carlson. On January 4, he wrote “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.. . . . I hate him passionately. … What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.” In another note, he wrote, ” “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for [the last four years], because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
3.6 Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: “Amusing as it is to listen to President von Munchausen. . . I also want to turn attention from Trump’s evident emotional issues to consider a more unsettling question: How, in 2023, after all we know about this man and his attacks on our government and our Constitution, do we engage the people who heard that speech and support Donald Trump’s candidacy? How do we turn the discussion away from partisanship and toward good citizenship—and to the protection of our constitutional order? . . . In 2016, Trump supporters could lean on a slew of hopeful arguments: Trump is just acting; he’ll hire professional staff; the “good” Republicans will keep him in line; the job will sober him up. All of these would be disproved over time. (It didn’t help that the alternative at the time was Hillary Clinton, for whom I voted but whose campaign was a tough sell to many people.) But by 2020, Trump, along with his enablers at Fox and other right-wing outlets, had created a kind of impermeable anti-reality field around the GOP base. This shell of pure denial defeated almost any argument about anything.. . . And now Trump has kicked off his attempt to regain office with a litany of lunacy. . . . This is a former president whose pitch included “I am your retribution.” Retribution for what, exactly, was left unsaid, but revenge for being turned out of office is likely high on the list. The Trumpian millennium turned into a tawdry four years of grubby incompetence and an ignominious loss. If Trump wins again, there will be a flurry of pardons, the same cast of miscreants will return to Pennsylvania Avenue, and, this time, they won’t even pretend to care about the Constitution or the rule of law. Imagine an administration where we’ll all be nostalgic for the high-mindedness of Bill Barr.”
3.6 Axios; A study in the Harvard Business Review found that if even a relatively minor social stress is experienced within two hours of a meal, your metabolism of that meal is disrupted. The effect is equivalent to adding 104 calories to that meal. If that happens every day, it adds up to 11 pounds in a year.
3.5 Historian Michael Beschloss on Gov. Ron DeSantis on MSNBC: “[He’s become] a local Mussolini in Florida with the book banning and the brutal tactics and even this week this suggestion that bloggers have to register with the state for the honor of writing about the governor and other political leaders. We have to call this what this is. This is fascism and authoritarianism that goes even beyond what Trump has talked about. That’s what he thinks is going to work in that party and in a way that’s the scariest thing of all.”
3.4 Trump at CPAC: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”
3.3 Tom Sizemore dies at 61.
3.1 Lunch with Kelly Cummings at The War Room.