“Just words”

More experienced aides had learned that “best practices” for success with Donald Trump* meant coming in with one point: “ONE POINT. Just that one point.” But not everyone listened:

I saw a number of appointees as they dismissed the advice of wisened hands and went in to see President Trump, prepared for robust policy discussion on momentous national topics, and a peppery give-and-take. They invariably paid the price.

“What the fuck is this?” the president would shout, looking at a document one of them handed him. “These are just words. A bunch of words. It doesn’t mean anything.” Sometimes he would throw the papers back on the table. He definitely wouldn’t read them.

Anonymous, A Warning (New York: Twelve, 2019).

“Don’t be surprised, be angry”

Don't be surprised, be angry. Show all of these GOP Senators treating Trump like a king that American democracy still works by voting them out. Every last one of them.

— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) January 31, 2020

Autocratic solipsism

“If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment”: Alan Dershowitz here advances a theory of what I’d call autocratic solipsism. The end justifies the means. And what justifies the end? A president’s estimate of his or her importance to the nation’s well-being. Dershowitz invites his audience to imagine a president who muses,

“I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. And if I’m not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.”

What follows from such thinking, Dershowitz says, “cannot be an impeachable offense.”

Notice that Dershowitz conflates the interests of president and nation — what’s good for me is good for the country. And notice that Dershowitz doesn’t stop to consider that what might be in a president’s interest or a nation’s interest might also be contrary to law. And notice that he doesn’t stop to consider the possibility of a candidate not yet elected engaging in this same specious thinking. Notice too that Dershowitz never stops to consider that a president with the conviction of being “the greatest president there ever was” would appear to be suffering from dangerous delusions of grandeur and perhaps be unfit for office. But we already know who Dershowitz is aiming to please.

Alan Dershowitz, I regret to say, is the Rudolph Giuliani of Stanley Fishes.

A Ravel Kaddish, arr. Fine

Yesterday, at the European Parliament in Brussels, the Karski Quartet and Naomi Couquet performed Elaine Fine’s arrangement of a Maurice Ravel setting of the Kaddish, originally for voice and piano. The performance marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27). Video available here. Elaine’s arrangement is available from the IMSPL. Click on the Arrangements tab.

In 2019 the Quatuor Girard and Clémence Poussin performed the same arrangement. Video available here.

What an honor for Elaine, aka Musical Assumptions, aka my spouse.

Distance learning

Herb Childress:

Good teaching and learning have always been labor–intensive processes. As one of my correspondents, a provost at an elite undergraduate college, said, “When the movement to MOOCs was at its rabid peak a couple of years ago and some members of our board were talking about starting to do more distance education, I regularly told them that at our school, distance education is the length of a table.”

The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

Childress offers a frank, clear-eyed analysis of what’s wrong with American higher education. And he has recommendations for improvement.

Related posts
“A fully realized adult person” : Colleges and bakeries : The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else : Offline, real-presence education

[MOOC: massive open online course.]

Small pleasures

House Manager Adam Schiff (D, California-18) today spoke the word copasetic on the Senate floor. And he referenced some famous phrasing from Casablanca : “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” casting Burisma as Rick’s Café Américain.

[My spelling follows that used by the Copasetics.]

Word of the day: gormless

From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847):

“I’ve tied his tongue,” observed Heathcliff. “He’ll not venture a single syllable all the time! Nelly, you recollect me at his age — nay, some years younger. Did I ever look so stupid, so ‘gaumless,’ as Joseph calls it?”

Joseph, you may recall, is a sour, pious servant at Wuthering Heights. He speaks a Yorkshire dialect — thus gaumless, or gormless.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains gormless as the union of the dialect word gaum, for gome, “notice, understanding,” and the suffix -less. To be gormless is to be “wanting sense, or discernment.” The dictionary’s first citation is given as ?1746. The question from Wuthering Heights comes second, followed by citations from 1861, 1881, 1883, and so on. It seems reasonable to speculate that Brontë’s novel led to more frequent use of the word. This Google Ngram shows use beginning to rise in 1854. Gaumless started to rise in 1853. Granted, the various editions of Brontë’s novel in Google Books might account for those initial spikes. The steep drop from 2011 to 2012 for both words is probably best explained by a lack of scanned books.

I always think of gormless and followed by wonder — the kind of insult people toss around in old movies. No gormless wonders in the OED though.

Prefix workout

From The Chicago Manual of Style: a prefix workout. That is, ten questions about prefixes. Hard! There are forty more Chicago workouts.

Thug life

This morning: “That reporter couldn’t have done too good a job on you, eh? I think you did a good job on her, actually.”

And there’s been further retaliation against NPR.

Pete Buttigieg and Seneca

A New York Times feature: “20 (More) Questions With Democrats.” I like Pete Buttigieg’s answer about the last book he read:

“I just finished a book by Seneca. Well, it was a very short book, with his commentary on the shortness of life. He says life is plenty long as long you know how to live it, something like that.”

I think Buttigieg must be describing the Penguin Great Ideas paperback On the Shortness of Life (2005). Look at the cover:



Says Buttigieg, “With all the noise going on right now, it’s a good time to go back to the Stoics.”

Like the Joycean title Shortest Way Home and the umpteen languages, the answer “Seneca” isn’t enough to make me want to vote for Buttigieg, but it’s an arresting answer. The folksy tone — “plenty long,” “something like that” — bugs me a little. Wear your learning lightly, sir, but don’t tear a hole in it to look more down-home. Other candidates’ answers: Malcolm Gladwell, a murder mystery, a history of World War I, the history of Sherrod Brown’s Senate desk, a book about ways to reduce carbon emissions.

It’s always a good time to go back to the Stoics, but this Senecan perspective baffles me. I think I’d say that life is short — too short — if you know how to use it and can. I side with Herbert Fingarette: “I still would like to hang around.”