It’s a footnote to a sidelight, but watching Trump speak this morning about the events in Venezuela last night, I almost felt a little sorry for the guy. He can barely read a text that’s been prepared for him, and when, perhaps impatient with his own bumbling progress, he freelances for awhile, the result is comically irrelevant asides that soon slink off into incoherence. At sea, he finds a place at random in the prepared remarks and restarts his unsteady way through them. Cycle through, repeat, repeat. Should probably be grateful that none of his diversions concerned the water pressure in shower heads or the flushing power of American toilets.
I feel that he’s declined considerably from his reality TV days, but then, he did in the prime of life bankrupt some casinos. No doubt “running” Venezuela will not be too big a task for him and the brain trust lined up behind him as he splutters along.
Shoveling snow. Watching sports on TV. Ubering teens to their New Year’s parties. Debating with myself whether to be asleep at midnight or stay up till my young reveler is delivered home by someone else’s dad. In short, living life all the way up. According to the actuarial charts, I have maybe 15 years left, so how could I do anything else?
The TV Guide counseled in favor of staying up as an obscure cable channel was airing Tarantino’s Jackie Brown starting at 10. In the event, my enjoyment was abated somewhat by the suppression of all the worst words. At least they didn’t dub in unobjectionable substitutes, which, considering the dramatic context, tends to have an effect of unintended and inappropriate hilarity. But sometimes I’d remember what someone–generally, the Samuel L. Jackson character–was about to say, and was relishing the prospect, and then didn’t get to hear him say it except in my mind’s ear, which I’m not even sure is a thing.
It’s as if they don’t know that the young impressionables are away having a good time and that it’s too late to fret about corrupting the superannuated losers watching TV alone at home on a holiday. And why, if “motherfucker” cannot be pronounced, did perhaps the least erotic sex scene in the history of cinema survive the cut? Maybe sex is okay to show so long as it doesn’t elicit envy.
I used to think that law school must be pretty boring, but maybe not. As for the reading, it seems that sometimes even the footnotes to judicial decisions are enjoyable. For example, here is the text of a footnote to an appellate court’s opinion in U.S. v Murphy, 406 F.3d 857, 859 n.1 (7th Cir. 2005):
The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”
My attention was directed to this nugget by a lawyer who criticized the followingactual tweet by Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice:
“Conservative” influencers, if you think you are “keeping the pressure on” or “winning” by spreading bullshit attacks on @realDonaldTrump’s hand-picked cabinet, you are NOT. You are earning money to spread disinformation. You are hoes. Learn an honest profession!
So there are at least a couple things “off” here:
The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department should be too busy with civil rights to take time to help the president with his political messaging. (I trust the division chief knows that white people are having a hard time getting ahead these days.)
Though presumably a law school graduate, the tweeter is unable to distinguish standard-issue conservative influencers from a common gardening tool used for weeding.
Got back this morning from running some errands and discovered a dog biscuit sitting atop my mailbox. My mailman–though it’s a she–loves dogs, and always has a treat ready when our ways cross on walks. It’s to the point that the dog gets excited when he sees those postal service vans, and can hardly be restrained when she gets out. If it’s the wrong postal worker . . . ears go down, and it’s how I learned the vocalization for disappointment. The mailbox is just to the side of the picture window, and I imagined them happily contemplating each other from opposite sides.
Happened upon the below short film on the dads of Swifties yesterday. Cuts kinda close to the bone for me. I have to agree–on limited knowledge, only the words to some of the banger refrains that come through–with the guy who says TS “puts out a good message for girls.” For example,
Players gonna play, play, play, play Haters gonna hate, hate, hate hate I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake Shake it off! Shake it off!
Reminds me that I’ve noticed how professionals in Elementary Ed often handle the tattle-tale problem: “It’s not that big a deal. You know what ‘resilient’ means? Be more resilient.” Anyway, so much wholesome good cheer that I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate It’s A Wonderful Life tonight. (It’s on TCM at 9 Central.)
Ah, made it to winter break, which means this year that I get a reprieve from overhearing 10-year-olds talk among themselves about ICE. Attendance is down and it’s not all the flu. People are lying low. Our weekly newsletter implores parents to keep sending their kids to school, and to contact the office with concerns–we will connect them to organizations that can help or, at least, advise. We have close to 600 kids enrolled and about half of them speak Spanish at home. By the law of large numbers, it seems certain that there are cases of the potentially heart-breaker scenario: kids natural born citizens of the US, at least one parent undocumented.
Lying in bed this morning, I heard Ayesha Rascoe, of NPR, interview Seth Lavin, an elementary school principal in Chicago.
Rascoe: Can you start by just telling us what you have been seeing and hearing in the classrooms at your elementary school?
Lavin: Sure. At my school and really schools all across the city, you see this tremendous and terrifying impact on children and families. Kids know. They feel it. They see it. They see the fear in their parents. They see the fear in their classmates. A third grade boy–an 8-year-old–at school, his teacher said he wasn’t eating. He said, well, I don’t want to punch in my lunch code. You know that’s the system here. You put in the number and get your lunch. He said, I don’t want to put in my code. I don’t want ICE to know where I am or to know where my family is. And so this third grader, in his 8-year-old brain, he had this misconception that his lunch code was going to show people where he was, put him at risk, put his family at risk. And so he was sitting at school not eating.
Rascoe: Well, what do you do in a situation like that? How does a school handle that sort of situation and that sort of fear from their students?
Lavin: That’s a really good and really difficult question, and it’s a question that our teachers ask. . . . There are kids who don’t want to come to school because they’re scared that if they come to school, something’s going to happen to their parents while they’re with us and that when they get out at the end of the day, there’s going to be nobody to pick them up and they won’t have been able to say goodbye. You can’t say that it’s all right, it’s going to be fine, because that isn’t all right. . . .
Rascoe: Were any students or families of your students at your school detained by ICE?
Lavin: You know, I want to be a little bit careful about specific situations or cases. I don’t want to draw attention to anything specifically. But there’s 600 schools in Chicago and more than 4000 people detained. And so yes. There have been impacts at my school, and at every school that I know, there have been kids who are living in this fear, and at many, many, many schools, this is a reality. Kids crying in a classroom, kids crying in the cafeteria. [We ask] what’s wrong. What’s wrong is that they took my dad. What’s wrong is that they took my mom. . . .
Rascoe: As a principal, obviously, there’s always politics involved in schools. At your school, there may be parents of students who maybe support what President Trump is doing. Maybe–I don’t know if you’ve heard from anyone who’s saying, look, he’s enforcing the law, fulfilling his mandate. What would you say to those parents?
Lavin: One of the things that was so shocking about this blitz in Chicago, about the way that it happened, I mean, trucks speeding down the street, people wearing masks and unmarked uniforms breaking car windows with batons and throwing tear gas–even people who say, I’m worried about the border or I’m worried about the distribution of resources, I don’t know anybody who looked at that, who saw that with their eyes and said, This is a good thing.
And I think sometimes people have this imagining that an immigration blitz is going to get somebody that they should be scared of or is somehow justice-oriented. But when it’s the mom of the kid in your class that you’ve seen every day for the last 10 years who’s just trying to have a good life, walking her kids to school–not because she’s trying to take, but because she’s trying to build something–when it’s that person who’s terrified, when it’s the kid in your kid’s class who doesn’t come to school because their parents are afraid to leave home, and when you’re seeing on the news tear gas in the street that you drive down every day to get to the store, nobody supports that.
Rascoe: That’s Seth Lavin. He’s a public school principal in Chicago. Thank you so much for joining us.
Lavin: Thank you.
So … winter break reprieve incomplete, news continues to happen. I’ve heard that immigrant businesses in the Lake Street corridor here in south Minneapolis have been suffering–sales down, foot traffic down. I therefore made a big sacrifice and had tacos for supper last night at Los Ocampo in the Midtown Exchange Market. Three tacos (pic below)–two chicken, one steak–cost less than eleven dollars, and were delicious. Then I wandered around buying desserts and beers at different spots. Lots of the stores display signs:
TODOS SON BIENVENIDOS MENOS ICE
ICE NO ES BIENVENIDO AQUI
LATINA MINNESOTANS KNOW ICE IS DANGEROUS & SLIPPERY, ALWAYS DE-ICE
I understand that some people, as a kind of morbid hobby, scan the obits and impulsively read the ones for fresh decedents younger than themselves. It occurred to me today, while hacking at the 2 tons of crusty snow the plow left at the bottom of my driveway, that the audience for mine is dwindling. For it seems I’ve reached the age at which dog walkers, having pronounced the normal pleasantries, feel obliged to advise “Well, take it easy with that” while nodding at the remains of the snow heap. Two out of the three of them who passed during the half hour or so I was at it thought to issue this advisory. Might as well have added an “old man” at the end: “Take it easy with the shoveling, old man.” Apparently I do not resemble the 6th-grader who in gym class had one of the top times in the 600-yard run.
Also, I recently noticed that an upcoming routine visit to the doctor was coded on MyChart as a “Medicare wellness check.” At the appointment I discovered what that entailed. After taking my blood pressure and asking whether I felt safe at home, the nurse said she was going to say three words and ask later whether I could remember them. She then uttered the words before giving me a piece of paper with a big circle on it and the instruction to fill in a clock with hands indicating 11:10. When I’d done that, she asked what the three words were. I feel I did well, but am a little nervous, because the nurse did not say that, based on my performance, I should be President of the United States.
People magazine understands that would be ridiculous but for some reason the news boys and girls seem surprised that the current occupant’s approval rating has fallen to 40 percent. That it’s north of 10 seems like a bad sign to this acer of the dementia screening test.
In Patriotic Gore, his book on literary figures of the Civil War, Edmund Wilson writes that, “with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe,” no American has been the subject of more “romantic and sentimental rubbish” than our sixteenth president. The villain here is Carl Sandburg, whose multivolume biography of Lincoln I dimly remember occupying an entire shelf in the school library. I didn’t check out any part of it, and according to Wilson, I wouldn’t have benefited if I had. Sandburg is the source for Honest Abe, the railsplitter and spinner of homespun yarns who was disappointed in love but nevertheless saved the Union, etc., and we’ve all already internalized all that. It’s a tribute, of sorts, to Sandburg. You don’t have to read his “sentimental rubbish” to believe in it, so diffuse is it in the cultural air.
Here is a taste of Wilson’s revisionist view, which is based on a close reading of Lincoln’s speeches, writings, and public utterances, augmented by the recollections of William Herndon, his law partner in Springfield, Illinois, and others who knew him well:
Now, aside from this self-confident ambition, what kind of man was Lincoln? . . . The amorphous and coarse-meshed Sandburg is incapable of doing justice to the tautness and the hard distinction that we find when, disregarding legends, we attack Lincoln’s writings in bulk. These writings do not give the impression of a folksy and jocular countryman swapping yarns at the village store or making his way to the White House by uncertain or awkward steps or presiding like a father, with a tear in his eye, over the tragedy of the Civil War. . . . The raw realities of Lincoln’s origins–the sordidness of his childhood environment, the boorishness of his first beginnings–are unflinchingly presented by Herndon, and the public has always found them repellent; but Herndon brings into the foreground Lincoln’s genius and his will to succeed as the more romantic writers do not. From those who knew Lincoln best, we learn that he was naturally considerate, but essentially cold and aloof, not really caring much, Herndon tells us, about anyone but his wife and children. He seems always to have had the conviction of his own superiority. The legend of the log-cabin, the illiterate father, the railsplitting, the flat-boat and all the rest has vulgarized Lincoln for the vulgar even in making him a backwoods saint. . . . John Hay, who was Lincoln’s secretary and observed him at close range all the time he was in the White House, insisted that it was “absurd to call him a modest man. No great man is ever modest. It was his intellectual arrogance and unconscious assumption of superiority that men like Chase and Sumner could never forgive.”
No law states that the truth will reside around the midpoint between antipodes, and I’m persuaded by Wilson’s case, which includes also a detailed account of Lincoln’s religious skepticism. If you’re interested, get Patriotic Gore and read one of the great works of nonfiction by an American. The chapter on Grant is possibly of even greater interest than the one on Lincoln, and I’m not sure that either of these is quite the revelation, at least for me, as the one on Alexander Stephens, who was the vice president of the Confederacy. But back to Lincoln. Probably on account of some of our current president’s recent speech acts, a personal letter he (Lincoln) wrote to a friend, Joshua Speed, a Kentuckian and supporter of slavery, in 1855, has been making the rounds on social media. The conclusion:
I do oppose the extension of slavery, because my judgment and feelings so prompt me; and I am under no obligation to the contrary. . . . I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty–to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].
Mary will probably pass a day or two in Louisville in October. My kindest regards to Mrs Speed. On the leading subject of this letter, I have more of her sympathy than I have of yours. And yet let me say that I am
Your friend forever
A. Lincoln
If this letter were to be entered as evidence in the dispute between Sandburg and Wilson, I’d say that the friendly aspect is a mere form and the actual content stern to the point of being haughty. It’s hard to miss the implication that his friend’s opinions on slavery are merely the convenient belief of a slave owner, and that the opinion of the author, being “under no obligation,” is the true one. Adopting the view of Wilson does not tend to make me love Lincoln less. I think I love the author of this letter as much as Carl Sandburg could have.
I’m kind of amused–a better person would probably be repulsed–by all the mincing words applied to the Trump administration’s crimes in the Caribbean. If (the details are as reported), then (there might be a legal problem), etc. Either we’re at war with Venezuela or we’re not. If as seems clear to me we’re not, then the targeted killings are straight-up murder. Maybe you could say “unadjudicated capital punishment for the crime of being suspected of drug trafficking”–yes, in other words, murder. If you take the implausible view that we are actually at war, then the normal laws of war apply, and we’re violating them. So, in that case, war crimes.
John Hinderaker, of the Power Line blog, says he’d like to see the law that we are said to have violated. I think the administration’s most recent position is that we did kill survivors of an attack who were clinging to boat wreckage in the sea, but that Trump didn’t know about that second strike, would not have approved it if he knew what was going on, and that Hegseth didn’t order it either. The details of what actions actually were done is thus not in dispute. The DOD has a document, called Law of War Manual, last updated in 2023, that explicitly states that illegal orders are not to be obeyed. In Section 18.3.2.1 it then takes up the question of what kinds of orders might be illegal:
The requirement to refuse to comply with orders to commit law of war violations applies to orders to perform conduct that is clearly illegal or orders that the subordinate knows, in fact, are illegal. For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.
Out of all possible examples of a clearly illegal order that must not be obeyed, the DOD plucks the very one–firing upon the shipwrecked–that the Trump administration performed last September. I fail to detect ambiguity, especially since, if you allow that we aren’t actually at war with Venezuela, the first strike was as illegal as the second.
If you read up on this subject just a little, you soon come to discussions of the Peleus case from World War II. The Peleus was a Greek ship chartered by the British Ministry of War Transport. On March 13, 1944, it was sunk in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean by a German submarine. Most of the crew survived the first attack and were floating on rafts when the sub surfaced. After conducting brief interviews concerning the ship’s intentions and destination, the Germans lobbed grenades onto the rafts and also fired on the helpless Brits with machine guns. A few of the crew survived this second event and were days later picked up by a Portugese ship and taken to port.
At a war crimes trial in Hamburg, in October of 1945, counsel for the five German defendants argued that the attack was “operationally necessary” and that the defendants were following the orders of superiors. The prosecutor argued that there was no duty to obey an unlawful order, adding:
It is quite obvious that no sailor and no soldier can carry with him a library on international law or have immediate access to a professor in that subject who can tell him whether or not a particular command is a lawful one. If this were a case which involved the careful consideration of questions of international law as to whether or not the command to fire at helpless survivors struggling in the water was lawful, you might well think it would not be fair to hold any of the subordinates responsible for what they are alleged to have done; but is it not fairly obvious to you that if in fact the carrying out of [the sub’s commanding officer’s order] involved the killing of these helpless survivors, it was not a lawful command, and that it must have been obvious to the most rudimentary intelligence that it was not a lawful command, and that those who did that shooting are not to be excused for doing it upon the ground of superior orders?
The Germans were convicted of having committed war crimes. One was sentenced to 15 years, another to life in prison, and the other three to death. The executions occurred at Hamburg on November 30, 1945.
I’ve been at Spanish Duolingo for long enough now that I feel sort of confident about being able to ask for directions to the museum, the train station, and the hotel. I’m to the point that Duo has me considering sentences that pertain as much to the human condition as that of a mere tourist. For example,
And:
Exciting! In another autobiographical bit, I went to the dentist and, for the first time in the last several visits, they did not request a return engagement to address this or that–just made a note of a couple “watch items” and said, See ya in six months. They take your blood pressure now. I asked what mine was, and she said it’s fine, maybe a titch high, but you did just walk back here from the waiting room. Right, I’m sure it was the long walk and not the sight of those miniature pick axes laid out neatly on a napkin that gave my nervous system a little boost.
Eric the Blue 