“Youth and sardines”

Jean, a painter (Daniel Gélin), and Joséphine, a model (Simone Simon), are breaking for lunch — some nice fish. Big fish? Jean asks. Joséphine replies from inside the house.



Jean is disappointed.



Joséphine is pragmatic.



Jean is doubtful.



Joséphine is more cheerful.



As they prepare to eat, Jean is rhapsodic. He never tires of looking at Joséphine, he says. “There’s the most extraordinary grace in your every ordinary gesture,” he tells her. “Leaning toward me, getting into a carriage, raising your arm, reaching out to me, eating sardines.” And:


[Le Plaisir (dir. Max Ophüls, 1952). Click any image for a larger view.]

It must be love.

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Brief debate thoughts

In her closing statement tonight, Representative Tulsi Gabbard spoke of “ushering in a new century,” &c. It's 2019. What century is she talking about?

Senators Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren seemed to me the plausible candidates in tonight’s debate. But Warren needs to stop prefacing her responses to questions with So. As for Bill de Blasio's self-presentation as an advocate for working people: LOL, LOL.

Literal cream

“It’s going to be interesting to see how the cream of the crop rises to the top”: a voter interviewed on the PBS NewsHour, commenting on the approaching Democratic debate. I like thinking about the metaphorical cream of the crop turning back into literal cream. And rising.

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No mistakes

Thinking about the typewriters in a typewriter exhibit, I asked my mom, What did you do to correct mistakes? In the 1950s she was an executive secretary. I was hoping to hear some story of office supplies in pre-Wite-Out days.

“To tell you the truth,” my mom said, “I didn’t make mistakes.” Indeed, she was an ace at stenography and typing, leaving the secretarial pool for more rarefied surroundings early on. No mistakes! And, in case you’re wondering, no harassment.

Bic

At an exhibit of typewriters, the typewriters looked like anybody’s typewriters, though they had belonged to Roger Ebert, Hugh Hefner, James Jones, and Carl Sandburg. One surprise: a Bic pen, which looked like anybody’s Bic pen. But it had belonged to Gwendolyn Brooks.

WWRCS

From Bloomberg:

The Trump administration official in charge of diplomatic protocol plans to resign and isn’t going to Japan for this week’s Group of 20 meetings, where he would have played a sensitive behind-the-scenes role, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sean Lawler, a State Department official whose title is chief of protocol, is departing amid a possible inspector general’s probe into accusations of intimidating staff and carrying a whip in the office, according to one of the people.

A whip! And now I imagine the voice of Richard Cohen: “Still, no one is being whipped and made to work until dead from exhaustion.”

[WWRCS: What would Richard Cohen say?]

Three mistakes

Richard Cohen, writing in The Washington Post, asserts that the “immigrant detention centers” on the southern border are not concentration camps:

The internment centers at the border are bad — granted. People have died in them, some of them children. Sleeping conditions can be harsh, and it was White House policy to separate children from their parents — an unconscionable cruelty so patent that even President Trump backed down. The president himself agreed Sunday that conditions at some centers are “terrible.”

Still, no one is being held for political, ideological or religious reasons. No one is being whipped and made to work until dead from exhaustion. There is no crematorium

— and I’ll stop quoting right there.

Cohen makes three mistakes. One is to insist that a place must match a particular historical instantiation of the concentration camp to be called a concentration camp. A second is to minimize the horror of a present reality by the use of the word still. A third is to use still to introduce the utterly fallacious assertion that “no one is being held for political, ideological or religious reasons.” Of course the people being held on the southern border are being held for political and ideological reasons. They have been conscripted as extras in a theater of cruelty whose purpose is to gratify the inchoate fear and hatred of a racist, xenophobic president’s so-called “base.” The cruelty, as many people have observed, is a feature, not a bug.

The Merriam-Webster definition of concentration camp:

a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.

And the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

a camp in which large numbers of people, esp. political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labour or to await mass execution.

Either definition is a fair description of our twenty-first-century American “detention centers.” If the best Richard Cohen can do is to say that no one is being whipped, no one is being worked to death, he has chosen to see what is not normal as already normal.

A related post
Masha Dessen on “concentration camp”

[And re: the internment of Japanese-Americans, Cohen says, ”Atrocious, but not a concentration camp.”]

#WithImmigrantChildren

There are many ways to help. Last year I gave money to The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights, and now I’m giving again.

The Young Center is too new to have a record at Charity Navigator, but I’ve heard from them just once, in a letter to acknowledge my donation, which makes me think that they don’t devote inordinate funds to further mailings. Their website must be overwhelmed — the only way to donate right now is by check. Fine.

Domestic comedy

“Do we really ‘take in’ exhibits?”

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“Also like a metaphor”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

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