“He will fail” (let’s hope)

Writing in The Atlantic, Eliot A. Cohen says that life under Trump will get worse, not better, “as power intoxicates Trump and those around him.” But, Cohen says, Trump will finally fail:

He will fail because however shrewd his tactics are, his strategy is terrible — The New York Times, the CIA, Mexican Americans, and all the others he has attacked are not going away. With every act he makes new enemies for himself and strengthens their commitment; he has his followers, but he gains no new friends. He will fail because he cannot corrupt the courts, and because even the most timid senator sooner or later will say “enough.” He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

I would disagree with Cohen (a vociferous advocate of war against Iraq and Iran) on nearly everything. But on this point I think he’s right. Let’s hope.

Wedding music?

The previous post prompts the question in this one. In the Gilmore Girls episode “I Can’t Get Started” (May 21, 2002), Sookie St. James walks down the aisle to a recording of Ella Fitzgerald singing “I Can’t Get Started” (music by Vernon Duke, words by Ira Gershwin). It’s a beautiful song (with a terrific bridge), but it’s a self-mocking lament, whose singer has triumphed in everything but romance: “The North Pole I have charted / But can’t get started with you.” It’s hardly a wedding song. Everyone in Stars Hollow says so. Except Sookie: “Oh, who listens to the lyrics?” Lorelai: “Anybody not hanging out with Annie Sullivan by the water pump.”

My question to you, reader: what wedding music have you heard (or heard of) that seems to you, well, less than appropriate to the occasion? I can name one song (heard of): Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” as an instrumental. Do its unheard words still matter? I’d say so.

Life imitates Gilmore Girls (and doesn’t)

Paris Geller is clearly considered to be the most qualified candidate for student-body president. The most competent too. Her minions Louise and Madeline have done the polling. But what else is there? Likability. And there, she falls short. And to a person, the students say that Paris’s lack of likability will influence their vote. And Paris doesn’t want to believe it. From the Gilmore Girls episode “I Can’t Get Started” (May 21, 2002):

“You mean people would rather vote for a moronic twink who they liked over someone who could actually do the job?”

The Internets figured out a Hillary Clinton–Paris Geller parallel a long time ago. I’m watching the Gilmore Girls for the first time and figured it out for myself. Spoiler: Paris is elected, with likable Rory Gilmore as her running mate. Too bad the United States isn’t the Chilton School.

Other Gilmore Girls posts
Escape to Stars Hollow : Shopping for supplies : “That bastard Donald Trump”

Orthodoxy

It’s Syme speaking. He’s a philologist, at work with many others on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak dictionary:


George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

See also Sean Spicer’s comment on dissenting State Department officials: “They should either get with the program or they can go.”

Related reading
All OCA George Orwell posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

“A Woman in the House” The actress Mary Webster, who appeared in one of the strangest (and best) episodes of Father Knows Best, has died.

Things to do

Contact your representative. Contact your senators. And for academics only: Sign this petition.

Shopping for supplies

Lorelai is helping her father get his new consulting business in shape. So she takes him shopping for office supplies. From the Gilmore Girls episode “Help Wanted” (May 7, 2002):

“Before anything else can happen, you need pens, you need paper, you need everything else, don’t you?”

Other Gilmore Girls posts
Escape to Stars Hollow : “That bastard Donald Trump”

[I’m exercising extreme restraint in quoting from this endlessly quotable series, which I’m watching for the first time.]

Quintessential Love

I’ve avoided Mike Love’s autobiography, but seeing it in a Barnes and Noble, I had to look. I was surprised to see that the copies were signed: Love [big space] Mike Love, no comma in between. I browsed the pages of photographs and noticed one that shows a group sitting crosslegged in meditation, amid candles, flowers, and teacups. The caption is quintessential Love:

This meditative gathering included my lawyer Mike Flynn, front left, who won my copyright suit against Brian.

Mike Love, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy, with James S. Hirsch (New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016).

Yep, that’s Mike Love. The settling of scores is never far from his meditative mind.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys posts (Pinboard)

Things to do

Join the American Civil Liberties Union.

Then and now

If the United States was the grail for many, the odds of actually getting in were infinitesimal. For all that Americans regularly spoke of their country being overrun with “millions of refugees,” the numbers who actually made it were astonishingly small. In fact, the difficulties of reaching America due to the war, the Depression, and bureaucracy-mired visa restrictions combined to make the number of immigrants to the United States between 1931 and 1945 the lowest they had been been in more than a hundred years. . . .

Nonetheless, through a combination of intentional propaganda and general paranoia, the perception gained traction that America was being swamped with exiles to the point where millions of jobs and democracy itself were at risk.

George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (New York: Other Press, 2014).

As Nicholas Kristof wrote in The New York Times, “Today, to our shame, Anne Frank is a Syrian girl.”