Must be read to be believed

Here is a transcript of Donald Trump’s remarks and exchanges with reporters at a news conference this afternoon. Must be read to be believed.

Trump has obviously been given some additional talking points. He now says that his statement on Saturday was non-specific because it was too early to say more: “Before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.” (A gift to late-night hosts, that line.) Everyone thought the statement was “beautiful.” There were “very fine people on both sides” of Saturday’s events. (Back to “on both sides.”) And Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were slave owners: “So will George Washington now lose his status?” To shift from Robert E. Lee to Jefferson and Washington is a pretty daring instance of whataboutism. And when Donald Trump speaks of slavery, it’s not to mourn the original American sin: it’s only to proclaim that everybody did it.

Most remarkable to me: the casting of those who oppose neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “the alt-left.” As if opposing neo-Nazis and white supremacists is itself a form of extremism.

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A resignation Now with more resignations from Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council.

Gui, c’est toi?

[Detail. Adolf Dehn, The Battery. Casein on panel. 29 × 60 inches. 1953.]

Adolf Dehn (1895–1968) was an American lithographer and painter. The Battery was part of a recent exhibition at Terre Haute’s Swope Art Museum, Adolf Dehn: Midcentury Manhattan. This stroller, from the painting’s bottom left corner, bears a marked resemblance to Guillaume Apollinaire, so marked that it immediately announced itself to me.

The Battery, or Battery Park, is a park on the southern tip of Manhattan. This image, not nearly large enough, gives an idea of the entire painting.

Words from Whitman

[As seen in May.]

A detail of the New York City AIDS Memorial, designed by Jenny Holzer, at the intersection of Twelfth Street, Greenwich Avenue, and Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village. The memorial includes excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, arranged in a spiral and narrowing to a triangle: “Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

Password advice

From All Things Considered: Paul Grassi of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, offers advice for creating good passwords: simple, long, and memorable. “If you can picture it in your head, and no one else could, that’s a good password.”

A resignation

“America’s leaders must honor our fundamental views by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal”: Kenneth Frazier, chairman and chief executive officer of Merck & Co., in a tweet announcing his resignation from Donald Trump’s American Manufacturing Council. Trump’s response is crass and predictable.

Who else will have the good sense to step away from Trump?

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8:42 p.m.: The Times reports that another member of this council has resigned:

Kevin Plank, the founder of Under Armour, announced on Twitter that he was resigning from the American Manufacturing Council, saying, among other things, that his company “engages in innovation and sports, not politics.” He did not refer to the president, though.

*

10:49 p.m.: And another, Brian Krzanich, chief executive of Intel. From his statement:

I have already made clear my abhorrence at the recent hate-spawned violence in Charlottesville, and earlier today I called on all leaders to condemn the white supremacists and their ilk who marched and committed violence. I resigned because I want to make progress, while many in Washington seem more concerned with attacking anyone who disagrees with them. We should honor — not attack — those who have stood up for equality and other cherished American values. I hope this will change, and I remain willing to serve when it does.

*

August 15: Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, has also resigned.

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9:22 p.m.: Two more, Richard Trumka, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff:

“We cannot sit on a council for a president who tolerates bigotry and domestic terrorism,” Mr. Trumka said. “President Trump’s remarks today repudiate his forced remarks yesterday about the KKK and neo-Nazis. We must resign on behalf of America’s working people, who reject all notions of legitimacy of these bigoted groups.”

*

August 16: Following two more resignations from the American Manufacturing Council (Denise Morrison of Campbell Soup and Inge Thulin of 3M) and an agreement by members of the Strategic and Policy Forum to disband, Donald Trump has dissolved both councils.

[Elon Musk resigned from this council in June.]

“School supplies and fun”

[Life, August 31, 1953. Click for a larger view.]

Notice the date on this Life advertisement: it’s almost September, and there’s still time to buy school supplies. Perhaps you tarried after reading last week’s full-page Pedigree ad? No rush. And speaking of “no rush”: do click for a larger view of the pencils and cases, the cheerful copy, the reference to last week’s ad, and the spritely figures scampering about the page.

Related reading
Back-to-school shopping : Pedigree pencil

“Cheaper buy the dozen”

[Life, August 24, 1953. Click for a larger view.]

Oh, they’re clever, what with their puns and their pencil named after the largest of the British Virgin Islands. And with their not even mentioning s-c-h-o-o-l by name. But school is around the corner: why else would there be a full-page advertisement announcing that Pedigree pencils are on sale?

Notice the date of this Life: August 24. When I was a boy in Brooklyn, school began after Labor Day. School in New York City and other northeastern places still begins after Labor Day. In downstate Illinois and many other places, school begins in mid-August. In 2015 CNN offered some explanations of “why August is the new September.”

Back to pencils (briefly): I have never liked Pedigree. But I always loved shopping for school supplies with my children, even for “1 box tissues” and the elusive “oilcloth.” I’m not sure we ever figured out that one.

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)
Pedigree pencil (With a photograph of an old one)

Mandela via Obama

Barack Obama’s response to the events in Charlottesville, in three tweets, two hours ago, is a passage from Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994):

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.

[I’ve added two commas to match the source.]

Charlottesville

Michael Eric Dyson, writing in The New York Times about “Charlottesville and the Bigotocracy”:

It is depressing to explain to our children that what we confronted as children may be the legacy they bequeath to their children as well.

It is more dispiriting still to realize that the government of our land, at least in the present administration, has shown little empathy toward victims of white bigotry, and indeed, has helped to spread the paralyzing virus of hatred, by turning a blind eye to what is done in their name.

Now is the time for every decent white American to prove he or she loves this country by actively speaking out against the scourge this bigotocracy represents. If such heinous behavior is met by white silence, it will only cement the perception that as long as most white folk are not immediately at risk, then all is relatively well. Yet nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing could more clearly declare the moral bankruptcy of our country.

All is not well at all. The horror of the events in Charlottesville is compounded by the response of our president, whose words, tweeted and spoken, reveal his inability to grasp that horror (“So sad!”) and his absolute lack of moral clarity (“on many sides, on many sides”).

Here, via Cameron Glover, are six organizations in Charlottesville deserving of support: Beloved Community Charlottesville, Charlottesville NAACP, Charlottesville Pride, Charlottesville Solidarity Legal Fund, Legal Aid Justice.