Posted on by rjonakait

Don’t Let Them Shut Your Mouth

Responses to mass shootings have been predictable. Calls for better gun control go out, and conservatives respond: How dare you! You are terrible and callous for trying to make political points in this time of grief.

The conservative reaction to Charlie Kirk’s murder has been different: This particular “time of grief” is, apparently, the time to suppress and punish opponents and dissenters. Trump and his allies speak of plans to target liberal groups, monitor speech, and revoke visas. Government officials are considering criminal prosecutions of those who speak out against Kirkian and Trumpian policies. Officials threaten government actions against the media, teachers, school board members, and many others, and in advance of any actions by these people, have begun to shut down critics. Jimmy Kimmel is just the most famous of their targets. Some who want something from the government, such as approval of a merger, preemptively censor. Vigilantes have helped remove people who speak out from private jobs. (Notably, the MAGA folks did not seek the removal of a Fox News host who urged that the mentally ill homeless be given lethal injections. An apology was good enough.)

Not surprisingly, the movement to stifle opponents has been accompanied by misinformation, which in this case means lies or willful ignorance. It has been given as a fact that politically motivated murders primarily come out of leftist ideology. The fact is that study after study has shown that the majority of such killings have been by right-wingers. If we go back to 9/11, Islamic terrorists were responsible for the most political killings, but since then, according to the Cato Institute, the right-wing share of politically motivated terrorist murders have been 63 percent while the left-wing share has been 10 percent. (Cato says that the conservative killers have been “motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy [incels], and other right-wing ideologies.” This list should also include anti-LGBTQ ideology.) The Department of Justice had come to a similar conclusion, but you will have trouble finding that study since our government, which proclaims to be “the most transparent ever,” has removed the study from its website.

It does not matter to the President, of course, that we have seen nothing indicating that Kirk’s shooter was influenced by any extreme leftist or even liberal group. Instead, all we know is that Tyler Robinson has said that his motivation was the hate spewed by Kirk.

Until a bullet pierced his neck, Charlie Kirk was not on my radar. I had seen his name and that of his organization, but I knew little besides that. Now I know more, and I am amazed by his sanctification. Charlie Kirk may have been a loving, open-minded person, motivated by a true desire to foster legitimate debate, and he was undoubtedly a charismatic entertainer. Nevertheless, his religious, societal, and political views, which carried undertones, at a minimum of racism, ethnic bias, misogyny, frivolity, and stupidity, furthered hate and closed the minds of others. For example, Kirk said that “Jewish dollars” were funding Marxist ideas in education and policy and contributing to opening the borders.” Kirk said: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.'” Kirk said: “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.” Kirk said: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.” Kirk said about affirmative action and Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson: “Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” (Snopes.com is the source for these quotations.) This, of course, is only a small sample of Kirk’s tendentious statements.

Charlie Kirk was not a deep thinker, but he did know how to make money. Siri tells me that he was worth $12 million—not bad for a 31-year-old community college dropout. How much did he profit from those rallies and other activities whose stated purpose was merely to advance the political dialog?

Conservatives have said that millions “celebrated” Kirk’s death. I know none of them, and I doubt that number is true. Confirming evidence has not been provided.  An anecdote, even two, is not proof. Many, however, have come forward to criticize Kirk’s “teachings.” I would not be surprised if there have been millions, even tens of millions, of them. I certainly hope so. The attempt to honor Kirk has coincided with efforts to suppress and punish such critics of Kirk–a strange legacy for someone who supposedly stood for free speech and debate. If his ideas were sound, they should be highlighted. If they were sound, they would only benefit from critics. What are the Kirk supporters afraid of?

In these dangerous moments, I am reminded of another time when a supposed political murder was used to justify the suppression and oppression of those designated as enemies. On November 7, 1938, the Polish Jew Herschel Grynszpan shot the Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath. Two days later vom Rath died. Almost immediately, a pogrom against Jews was launched as a response to the murder. That event is now known as Kristallnacht. The murder by one person was used to suppress and oppress tens of thousands of others. Sound familiar?

As in 1938, many are seizing upon the murder by one person of Charlie Kirk to lead to oppression and suppression. Truly patriotic Americans should respond.

Don’t let them shut your mouth.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Snippets

I don’t know at what temperature my parents kept the childhood house, but I do remember that in winter, sheets, ironed by the mother, were very cold when I got between them at bedtime. I would lie as still as possible to warm the spot where I lay. I knew that if I moved, I would encounter those icy places that had not been warmed by my body. Even so, I never considered wearing socks to bed. That was just not done. Thus, my mortification when I had perhaps my only sleepover at John N.’s house. I walked across his room to the bed with my socks on. I was going to sit down and take them off, but before I got there, Johnny said authoritatively, “In this house, we don’t sleep with socks on.” I told him my intentions, which were true, but the protestation sounded lame even to me. That unjust shame has stayed with me ever since.

I have mocked the spouse many times for wearing socks to bed. But, in one of my many acts of marital devotion, I have always allowed her to warm her icy toes and heels on me. However, I have now seen stories, which must surely be fake, that wearing socks for sleeping is a good thing. Of more concern: there have been a few nights when my aging feet would not warm up under the covers, and I have had to put on socks to sleep. I have not yet said as a result, “Death Take Me Now,” but, really, this is totally unacceptable.

Perhaps it is still too early, but I would like to see a good study of the varying responses to the Covid pandemic, not just assertions by ideologues. States and localities differed in mask, social distancing, vaccination, and other requirements and practices. How did these correlate with outcomes such as hospitalizations and deaths? The rates of vaccinations varied. How much, if at all, did hospitalizations and deaths also vary? Different localities had different school policies. Have school test results varied in sync with the different policies? What side effects correlate with vaccinations? How frequent and severe are they? I would like good information on these topics, but it is sad but true, I don’t expect our present government to provide any.

Patrick McGee in his thought-provoking book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company (2025), explains how Apple became enmeshed in China. Apple did not outsource in a traditional sense. It did not simply contract with Chinese companies for a product or a service. Instead, Apple, obsessed with quality and efficiency, sent design engineers and product designers into Chinese suppliers’ facilities often inventing new production processes and designing new custom parts in the process. The Chinese gained new practical know-how that they now use for more than Apple products.

McGee’s book follows in the footsteps of Erich Schwartzell’s, Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy (2022). Schwartzell documents how American filmmakers took things out of movies and put things in to satisfy the Chinese. The practices became so important and internalized that Americans were willing to change their product without being told to or being asked. Meanwhile, the Chinese film industry was being built and strengthened with America’s unwitting help.

More than the film and tech industry have tried to satisfy China. Many enterprises abide by Chinese censorship rules. For example, the NBA apologized when a team executive tweeted support for Hong Kong protesters who had been kicked out of an NBA exhibition game in China. A reporter was not allowed to ask the players how they felt about this. There are many more examples of U.S. companies kowtowing to the vast Chinese market, but these shall remain for another time.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Weaponization

Trump is trying to fire Lisa Cook. Ironies and questions abound. And chutzpah.

Lisa Cook was confirmed by the Senate as a Governor of the Federal Reserve in 2022. The Fed is supposed to be independent of the President, and Governors can only be removed “for cause.” The provision does not define “cause” or who determines it or how.

Trump’s claimed cause? According to allegations from the Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, Cook committed mortgage fraud by claiming two different homes as her primary residence in 2021. Trump claims these allegations as the cause for firing. Questions abound. Can allegations be “cause”? Even if true, does this constitute cause if it is unrelated to Cook’s performance on the Fed? Is it cause, even if true, if the conduct occurred before her confirmation and was not considered disqualifying by the Senate? Many Senators surely were looking for reasons to prevent her from getting the position. Her confirmation vote was at first deadlocked at 50-50 with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.

Some of the ironies. Or chutzpah. Trump claims the allegations by themselves constitute cause. This is from a man who has been convicted of fraud for falsifying business records to hide payments made to Stormy Daniels. She got hush money payments to keep her tryst with Trump out of the news during his first campaign. Moreover, Trump was found to have committed something closely akin to mortgage fraud in a separate civil suit. He set high values on properties when seeking loans and lower values on the same properties for tax purposes. These adjudications, not mere allegations, have not disqualified him from the presidency.

A different irony: Many Trumpistas labeled these New York legal actions as dangerous political persecutions. For example, a conservative pundit on a “news” channel said that it is dangerous when prosecutors target individuals, and New York prosecutors had campaigned on the promise to “get” Donald Trump. They had a point, but they are notably quiet about targeting now. Cook, of course, is being targeted by federal officials. Their concern is not mortgage fraud. Instead, Trump wants to control the Fed. In other settings–the Labor Statistics Bureau comes to mind–Trump has simply fired those who promulgate data that he dislikes. If he were able to fire Cook as easily, he would, but with the Fed he must find “cause,” but any cause will do.

There are several ways in which prosecutions occur. Most take place because a crime is committed, and law enforcement sets out to find the bad guys. If the purported criminals are caught, they are prosecuted. A convenience store is robbed; a person is murdered; or someone is assaulted. If there is an arrest, a prosecution follows.

What might be called investigatory prosecutions are different. The authorities have reasons to believe that a person has committed a crime which is not publicly evident—stock fraud or loan sharking, for example. The authorities investigate to see if indeed the crime was committed and to collect evidence for the prosecution of the stock fraud or loan sharking.

Targeted prosecutions are different. In a small number of instances, authorities determine that a person is “bad.” They investigate to find a crime that he has committed and prosecute him for that even though the crimes are not the ones the authorities were truly concerned about. In this setting a crime is not targeted; a person is. This happened to Al Capone a century ago. Prosecutors knew that Capone was a bootlegger who used unprecedented violence to protect and extend his operations. However, apparently because witnesses could not be found to testify to these activities, they could not prosecute him for those crimes. Instead, after an extensive investigation, Capone was prosecuted for income tax offenses. Prosecutors convinced a jury that Capone lived well beyond the means possible on the income he reported. Therefore, he must not be paying all the tax he owed. Thus, Capone went to prison not for murder or other violent crimes, but for income tax evasion.

Trump and his supporters claimed that legal actions in New York had targeted Trump. That seems to have been true. New York prosecutors, who are elected, had made campaign pledges to “get” Trump. The Trumpistas maintained that such targeting is dangerous. Is it? Trump in fact committed the illegal actions he was charged with, or so the adjudications showed. How, then, can the commentator claim that targeting an individual is dangerous?

A certain kind of moralist may simply say, “If he did the deed, punish indeed… let him bleed.” But let’s combine some theology with the law. If you are of the Original Sin disposition, we all do things that are wrong. And even if you don’t subscribe to Genesis, you might know that we have many, many laws with blurry boundaries. (Almost) all of us have committed illegal acts, but stealing a pencil from work, overstating a charitable deduction, or slapping an acquaintance is almost never prosecuted. Our justice system would be overwhelmed if it had to handle every violation of the law. However, if the authorities want to “get” someone, and they have enough resources to investigate that person thoroughly, they will almost always be able to bring some sort of criminal or civil prosecution. And, yes, that is a scary power.

The Trumpistas, however, no longer proclaim prosecutorial targeting as dangerous because they would then have to denounce Trump’s actions. Lisa Cook’s criminal referral is not an attempt to enforce mortgage fraud. It is an attempt to find a reason, any reason, to remove her as a Fed governor. The problem is not that she is a criminal. Her problem is that she has not bent to Trump’s will. Letitia James, NY State’s Attorney General, and Senator Adam Schiff are being investigated for mortgage fraud not as a deterrent for loan shenanigans, but because they have opposed Trump. This is clear when news reports tell us that right-wing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has listed three homes as primary residences. Yet he is not being investigated for mortgage fraud.

Prosecutors targeted Capone for his horrendous crimes. Trump and his supporters are now targeting people not for crimes they may have committed, but simply because they don’t kowtow to Trump and his demands.

And yes, that is scary.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Raw fish has had cultural significance in Japan. I highly recommend the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but sushi dreams have now spread. Little League World Series players were recently asked questions about their favorite athlete or their dream job. (Retirement was the best answer.) When favorite food was the topic, a surprising number from all over the world replied sushi. That certainly would not have been my answer when I was twelve. Recently I went to a Japanese-named restaurant touted for its sushi, and it was, indeed, very good. The sushi master (do you say sushi chef? Surely not sushi cook.) was named Jesus Hernandez. He hailed from a Mexican town famed for its traditional mole. Go figure.

In Death Comes for the Fat Man by Reginald Hill a character whose family emigrated to the UK after World War II says, “I am glad my family ended here, not the States. They have no rules over there, just laws.”

I am ahead of my time. For decades I have walked around with my shirt tucked in the front for about eight inches with the rest of garment flapping about me on the sides and back. Of course, this was just sloppiness. But I must have been attractive because now I see this look on models and high school and college kids. I am taking credit for the new fashion trend.

Sports seasons often overlap. At this moment, the football season is beginning while baseball still has a long way to go before the World Series. I am reminded of an overlap between the two sports that I encountered on an unusual trip. Phil and I had gone to grade and high school together and played on the same sports teams. In his thirties, Phil went to theological school and became ordained. When he became the minister of a church in the outer reaches of Queens in New York City, he called me. We invited him for Thanksgiving dinner a few times, and he and I got together several other times, but as he became settled in the church and got to know more people there, we drifted apart. Then one day he called and said that he had won a contest. The prize was a trip for two to travel to ballparks around the East Coast. He asked if I would go with him. The invitation was not particularly flattering. He didn’t want to ask anyone from his church because the contest’s sponsor was a beer company, and his (Dutch) Reformed Church frowned on alcohol. Phil continued that he had two brothers, and he did not want to choose between them. And, thus, the invitation descended to me. I accepted. Phil and I were together with about a dozen others from around the country and Canada for five or six days going to major league ballparks. It was great fun. One of our stops was to what then was called Jacobs Field in Cleveland. During the game we chatted with some young guys who were, shall we say, heavily into beer. They insisted again and again without too much slurring that we go to a bar with them near the stadium after the game. We went. I was surprised that upon entrance I saw a picture of Max McGee. And then I saw pictures of Bart Starr, Jerry Kramer, Willie Wood, and Ray Nitschke, all Green Bay Packer players from my youth. Packer memorabilia, mostly jerseys but also some cleats, covered the walls. I saw nothing about the hometown Cleveland Browns, who also had great teams, or any other. I was puzzled and asked one of our new friends about this. He looked at me as if he wanted to say, Duh, and then did say, “This is a Packers bar.” Apparently, that explained everything.

Posted on by rjonakait

Ava the Magnificent

Elizabeth McGovern, whose career spans a teen-age role in Robert Redford’s Ordinary People to Cora Crawley, the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey to the recordings of Sadie and the Hotheads, is on the New York stage in Ava: The Secret Conversations. The play, written by McGovern, is about the interplay between Ava Gardner and her would-be biographer Peter Evans, who was eventually dismissed by Gardner. After Evans’s death, his notes and tapes of his interviews with Gardner were published, and this book form the basis for Ava: The Secret Conversations. The play interests me because for a long time I had a fascination with Ava Gardner, or really with the Ava Gardner Museum.

The spouse and I have driven south from Brooklyn on I-95 many times heading to South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida. We always wanted to get at least five hundred miles in before stopping for the night. Smithfield, North Carolina, is the first town after that mark, and over the years we often found a nearby hotel for the night.

The first time, the spouse and I drove into town and found a surprisingly good restaurant. At other stops in or near Smithfield, I sought out that eating place again. The restaurant was memorable not only because the food was much better than I had expected in this town of ten thousand or so, but also because one time after we had left, we went to our car and found a host of barbecue rigs set up in an adjacent park. These were not your backyard Weber grills, but the kind that attached to the back of a truck. I had only before seen such monstrous grills and smokers on television.

I quickly learned that the next day was the annual Johnston County barbecue competition and that I was witnessing competitive pit masters. (I later saw a taste test of spiral hams on a cooking show. Johnston County Spiral Ham was considered by far the best.) The fifteen or twenty participants would smoke meat during the night, and their results would be judged the next morning. Many of them displayed trophies from previous competitions. I learned about a circuit that many of them traveled. The pit masters and tenders were friendly and talkative except for one man. He had nothing to say and bullied me away from what he was doing. He somehow thought I was going to steal his secrets. He eyed me as if I, the Brooklyn boy, was a spy for another participant.

I went to bed thinking that we might come the next day and taste the wares even though I am not much of a central North Carolina barbecue fan; I don’t like that vinegar base. It started pouring after midnight and was still coming down the next morning. I thought about how miserable the night must have been for all those nice but competitive people, and I decided to continue down the interstate without another visit to all those smokers.

Smithfield, however, always stuck in my mind primarily because going to and coming from the restaurant, I would see on a side road—I believe it was Third Street–the Ava Gardner Museum. The thought of a museum dedicated to the glamorous Ava Gardner in this dinky town amused me. I would joke about going there, but we only passed it in the evening when the museum was closed.

One trip south, however, had a different timing, and the spouse and I were going to pass Smithfield at noon. We decided to make the detour. The Ava Gardner Museum was now in a different location. It was on the main drag in a modern facility unlike its previous home in a slightly seedy building that had once been a house.

The museum itself was carefully and tastefully laid out with well-written, informative placards accompanying the displays of letters, posters, photographs, and costumes. I was never an Ava Gardner fan and knew little about her other than she had a striking face, a beautiful body, and had been married to both Mickey Rooney and Frank Sinatra, who remained a devoted friend even after their divorce. I learned that she had also been married to Artie Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader. I only knew of Shaw because he was an amusing guest on late night talk shows, often talking about his many wives, and, at least according to him, his many more girlfriends. It was only because of these TV appearances that I recognized Shaw as I entered a New York Appellate Division courtroom one day to argue a case. I was given to understand that he was there to hear an argument about litigation stemming from one of his divorces. True to his image, Shaw was surrounded by stunning women. (I have no memory of what case I was arguing, but I’m pretty sure that it did not involve any beauties.)

From what I learned at the Ava Gardner Museum, Shaw tried to improve twenty-five-year-old Gardner’s education in their year-long marriage, and as a result she took English courses at a Los Angeles college. This made me think about the trajectory of her life as I learned it at the museum.

She was born near Smithfield in 1922 to farmers who lost their property when Ava was young. Her mother then ran boarding houses. Her father died when Ava was fifteen. This was a poor family in depressed times. I wondered how many outdoor toilets she had used, and whether she had been behind a horse in a cart more often than in a car. I would not have been surprised that when she graduated from high school she had never been in an elevator or through a revolving door.

Gardner attended a local college for a year studying to be a secretary. During that summer, she visited her sister, who somehow had made it to New York. The story then goes that she had her picture taken there, which was displayed in the window of a photographic studio. People noticed. Soon she had a screen test in New York. MGM signed her to a contract, and at the age of nineteen, she moved from little Smithfield to glamorous Hollywood.

Within a decade she was one of the screen’s major stars. Besides her husbands, she had a long-time relationship with Howard Hughes and was a close friend with Gregory Peck. Later in her life, she moved to Madrid where she knew Ernest Hemingway and had Juan Peron as a neighbor. At least according to the museum, however, she never forgot Smithfield and came back even after she had achieved international fame. She is buried in Johnston County.

Yours truly cannot think about Ava Gardner without thinking about her body. The Ava Gardner Museum in Smithfield, North Carolina, displayed costumes from several of her movies, and the placard near one said that she was 5’6’’ tall and wore size six shoes. The dress indicated nothing more than an average bust size, but the waist of one gown was remarkably small. It seemed to define the term “wasp-waisted.” The card said that the dress measured eighteen inches at the waist. That might certainly explain why her breasts appeared bigger on the screen than the dresses indicated.

She did have an hourglass figure, but I still could not imagine a grown woman with that small a waist. That led me later to Google and found websites listing measurements of Hollywood stars. (How they know these things I do not know.) One site says she wore a size eight shoe and a size six dress and had measurements of 36-24-37 inches. Another site takes an inch off her waist and says she was 36-23-37, but that her bra size was 34B. (I don’t really understand these things, but doesn’t that contradict that 36-inch measurement?) Looking at her photographs and the clips of her in movies, however, I realized it did not matter what her sizes were. She was a completely beautiful woman. (I clicked on a recent popup on my computer for the 15 most gorgeous women, and there she was.)

I am not sure that I could have named a single movie Ava Gardner was in before going into the Museum. She appeared in none of the movies I would have listed as my favorites, and I have little concept of her acting ability. I now seem to have some memory of her from the iconic film noir, The Killers, which made her a star and launched Burt Lancaster’s career. I may watch that again, and I might see The Night of the Iguana, which also starred Richard Burton and Deborah Kerr. I have heard that it is good. The posters in the museum indicated, however, that she was in many movies with some of the most famous actors and actresses.

The visit to the Ava Gardner Museum made me think not only about her but about the museum itself. It made sense that it was near her birthplace in Smithfield, but I found it unlikely that the town or county had spent the money to collect all those memorabilia or to produce the film about her that was being shown in the museum. I thought that the origins of the museum must be due to someone’s obsession. The strange novel, The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish writer who won the Nobel Prize, came to mind. In that novel, the protagonist Kemal starts collecting objects that relate to his obsessive love of an unattainable woman. He eventually creates the Museum of Innocence from this compulsive collection. And to my surprise, I found that the novel had a reference to the Ava Gardner Museum.

I did not have to wonder long about the obsession that was the origin of the museum. The Ava Gardner Museum itself told me that the museum originated in the collection of one Tom Banks, who had met Gardner when he was twelve and she was eighteen and in her only year of college. The adolescent boys teased the college girls, and one day Ava chased Tom and gave him a kiss. (If I had met Ava Gardner when I was twelve and she was eighteen, there is a good chance I, too, would have been obsessed with her for the rest of my life. And perhaps I still would not have washed the kissed cheek.) He, not surprisingly, noticed when she did not return for her second year and then saw a newspaper article about her Hollywood contract. He immediately started collecting all the memorabilia he could find about her, and later, after he was a psychologist, he even bought Gardner’s childhood home, the site of the first museum. He started a part-time Ava Gardner Museum, and after he died his wife, who apparently joined her husband in collecting anything related to Ava Gardner, donated the collection to Smithfield.

Whatever obsession I had with Ava Gardner was sated by my visit to the Ava Gardner Museum. Even so, I would like to see Elizabeth McGovern in Ava: The Secret Conversations, but it has a limited New York run, and I will be out of the City until after the production has departed for other cities. If any of you have seen it, however, let me know what you think.

Posted on by rjonakait

Labor Day

On this Labor Day I am not going to labor over another witty, charming, and insightful post. Instead, I am going to reflect on the many people who, by their labor, have made my life better. They are such an essential and routine part of my life that I take them very much for granted. This Labor Day I plan to remember their contributions with grateful thanks.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

If It Feels Right, It Is Right.

Near the end of his book Madoff: The Final Word, written shortly before our president won his second term, Richard Behar asks comparative questions about the con man Bernard Madoff and Donald Trump, including: “Do the 2020 presidential election deniers have anything in common with investors who blindly followed Madoff? And can denial be contagious and transmissible across huge segments of society?”

It may seem that Madoff investors have much in common with the election deniers and others who accept Trump’s falsehoods, but there are different dynamics at work for each. With Madoff, many have said that the investors should have known that their returns were too good to be true. Gains of fifteen percent or more every year, every quarter no matter if the market or the economy was up or down were beyond belief, so how could anyone believe them? The question ignores human nature. Few challenge something that is benefiting them. Human nature and history have produced relevant adages. Don’t kill the goose that lays golden eggs. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Madoff apparently delivered golden eggs. Such a goose is unbelievable, but if I had one, I would not probe it to see how it was constructed in case the eggs would no longer come.

Behar tries to find out why the Securities and Exchange Commission was not on to Madoff much earlier than it was. The SEC does not have enough resources to monitor closely all the investment businesses in the country. Their investigations are invariably triggered by complaints, and those invariably come from those who lose money. No one complained about Madoff. Investors only thought that they were making gains.

There are reasons that since the time of Charles Ponzi over a hundred years ago (and no doubt before), humans have been willing to believe the promises of Ponzi and related pyramid schemes. That is human nature for many of us.

Unlike Madoff investors, Trump supporters who accept his falsehoods do not get a direct material reward. But many of them have a sense of grievance. They feel that their lives are not as good as they should be, and America is not as great as it should be. It does not matter if Trump is divorced from factual truth as long as what he says feels true about their grievances. After all, what are facts compared to what I honestly feel?

Think back, if you are old enough, to Ronald Reagan when something similar happened. Reagan was politically popular even though polls often showed widespread disagreement with many of his specific proposals and policies. Even so, Reagan was able to project an overall message that resonated with many. Ethan Bronner in Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America examines the phenomenon and finds this lesson: “People would go with you if they were attracted to the feel of your campaign, even if they disagreed with many aspects of it.”

The roots of these dynamics predate those Republican presidents. Sources can be found in the academy of a generation ago. How to read a novel was debated in graduate schools. Was the goal to find the author’s intentions? The response increasingly became that the readers should seek individual significance, what a book meant to them. Since each reader had unique experiences and perspectives, a book had no single meaning, and all the meanings discovered in the literary piece were equally valid. A novel did not have a single, objective “truth” but many subjective ones. Meaning was “contingent” depending on the reader’s perspective. This was said to be a “postmodern” reading.

Such thinking jumped the literary fence into other disciplines. Some maintained that societal truth varies depending upon your experiences and perspectives. Your viewpoint shapes what is true for you. There are multiple truths that should be respected. From the path seeking to broaden understanding of why people hold different opinions and viewpoints, this broadened into the assertion that there is no objective reality and that truth and morality were only “contingent.” This led to the conclusion that all opinions should be considered and analyzed, and that all opinions must be respected. However, this respect morphed for some into the idea that all opinions were of equal validity. If something were true for you, then it was true. Facts were always subjective. There was no objective truth.

This philosophy became associated with lefties who maintained that not only was history written by the winners, but that the winners, the privileged, controlled societal “reality” and “truth.” Their reminder that things looked different depending on where you stood in the societal hierarchies was valuable. “Truth” and “reality” were contingent, but conservatives lashed out and mocked those who could not tell right from wrong or could not tell there was a recognizable, firm truth.

We have had a switch. Now “conservatives” say something similar to what leftists said in the past. Rudy Giuliani, for example, stated that truth is relative. Other conservatives have spoken of “alternative facts.” Conservatives deny evidence about climate change suggesting that science, too, is relative–that it is only political. Conservatives seem to have adopted postmodernism, but they have gone beyond it.

In this postmodernistic world, we don’t have to go to the trouble of ascertaining what is true because what matters is what is true for me. Many of his supporters surely know that what Trump says is not only false but errant bullshit, but he says what the Trumpistas want to believe. The important thing is that what he says feels true to his audience. And if it feels true to them, then it is true.

The appeal and power of accepting falsehoods because they feel right, because they are true for me, should not be underestimated. We might think that when everybody has their own truth individuals are separated from each other and the world is atomistic. It is true that in the postmodernist world I don’t have to engage with those who hold other truths. I can remain segregated from them, but believing in falsehoods also brings people together. What Lawrence Wright in Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief wrote about a new religious movement has broader applicability: “Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.”

Wright’s insight helps explain our modern world. Many who believe that we should distinguish truth from non-truth to formulate policies and action have their own faith in rationality. They are surprised that as the breadth, depth, and frequency of Trump’s bullshit becomes increasingly apparent that Trumpistas have not fallen away. These rationalists see the falsehoods as a negative for Trump, but in fact they are a source of the president’s strength. His falsehoods have produced a feeling that such utterances must be true, ought to be true, are at least emotionally true. As a result, they have bound his supporters together, helping to define a needed barrier with the rest of society.

In this world, it is enough to say that it could be true, it might be true, or it has not been disproved to my personal satisfaction. This world does not have to abide by the standards of good historical, scientific, sociological, or anthropological inquiry. Acolytes don’t have to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of sets of data. Well, yes. Life is a lot easier without that hard work. Others can foolishly spend their time looking for facts and truth, but we don’t need to. The truth is what we want it to be. And this prevents Trumpistas from having to change their views. They never have to confront what T.H. Huxley said about science: “The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” Leisure increases and life is simpler without a responsibility for discerning or establishing facts. I can just stop with my inquiry once something feels right for me. I don’t have to uncomfortably confront information or views I don’t like and the conflicts, external and internal, that they can cause. My belief is as true as yours. Discourse, analysis, and research are all a waste of time. My life is easier.

A sizeable portion of the population does not care whether what Trump says is true or not, much less whether he believes what he says is true or that he knows, like the liar, that it is not true. A sizeable audience is indifferent to how things really are. In words of Harry Frankfort (see post of August 22, 2025 “Trump versus Madoff”), this group is content to be fed bullshit, and that, alas, almost guarantees that bullshit will proliferate.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

Snippets

Like many of us, I have had a lot of insect bites. Most are only aggravating—the itching of mosquito bites. But sometimes they are more serious. I got what I thought was a wasp bite on a sandal-shod foot. It felt as if a cigarette was being put out on me. The calf ballooned. The doctor gave me an antibiotic that in due course brought back my lovely looking leg which — in days of yore — drew compliments. Years later I got a bite on my elbow, which did not seem to be anything important. But I developed a fever and soon the temperature was hitting levels that I had seldom had. The elbow became more and more tender, and when it was bumped and I let out a little scream, I finally went to the doctor, who again prescribed an antibiotic. This time it did not work, and I went back to the doctor. He said he was sending me to the hospital. I needed an antibiotic that had to be injected for several days in a row or delivered by an IV drip. He could not do it because his office was closing for summer vacation. I said that I did not want to go to the hospital. The spouse, who was with me, spoke up, “Couldn’t I inject him?” The doctor looked askance, but the spouse told him that she had gone to medical school and had gotten a Ph.D. She continued that she ran a research lab and regularly injected animals. He did not ask with what. He did say, “Maybe it’s possible.” The spouse: “Where does the injection go?” The doctor: “In the ass.” Saucers. The spouse’s eyes became as big as saucers. “Ohhhhhh, I can do that,” she convincingly said, and the doctor consented. She injected me over the next few days, and I got better. The injections hurt, but not much. When they were through, the spouse said, “That was FUN.”

A character in Death Comes for the Fat Man by Reginald Hill gives marital advice: “Never give your wife a surprise she doesn’t know about.”

Our president said recently that Benjamin Netanyahu is a war hero and continued, “I guess I am, too.” His act of martial bravery in his estimation was ordering the bombing of Iran. In the eyes of many including the prosecutors of the International Criminal Court, Netanyahu is a war criminal for Israel’s actions in Gaza. And Trump, who has supported those actions?

A recent article in The New Yorker by David K. Kirkpatrick quotes an ethics expert who says that “when it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.” Another presidential observer concludes that the Trumps “have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.” But while Trump’s monetization of public office may far outstrip all others, other presidents have benefited from their presidential actions, including our first chief executive. The Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania sought to prevent taxes on whiskey. George Washington personally led troops to suppress the insurrection. Easterners, including the first president, had long speculated in western lands. Land values soared after Washington’s actions; properties were sold; and profits were taken. Brady J. Crytzer in his book The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis states, “Later, when speaking of the insurrection in terms of his personal wealth, the president admitted, ‘this event having happened at the time it did was fortunate.’”

Posted on by rjonakait

Trump versus Madoff

Near the end of his book Madoff: The Final Word, written shortly before our president won his second term, Richard Behar asks comparative questions about the con man Bernard Madoff and Donald Trump:

“Should there be an attempt at an analysis and comparison of Madoff and Trump—arguably the greatest fabulists of (for Madoff) the contemporary business world and (for Trump) the political world? Do they know when they lie? Do the 2020 presidential election deniers have anything in common with investors who blindly followed Madoff? And can denial be contagious and transmissible across huge segments of society?”

There may be intriguing comparisons between the two, but the fabulists were of different sorts. To effectuate his Ponzi scheme, Madoff faked stock trades. Of course, Madoff knew that he was not making the trades. He lied about them. Lies require an understanding and concern for the truth. Lying calls for a degree of craftsmanship that weaves in the truth in order to get the lie accepted. Harry G. Frankfort in his marvelous little book, On Bullshit, says: “In order to invent a lie at all, [the liar] must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.” Thus, Madoff made up the trades, but not the prices for the supposed transactions. He backdated the “trades” and then could pluck out real stock prices to make it seem that his funds had made profits. If someone had checked his trading ledgers, they would see entries that Madoff bought a security for x dollars on a certain date, and indeed the stock did sell for that amount then. The business record would also show that on another date, Madoff sold the shares for more than x dollars, once again a valid price for that date. The prices were real; the trades were a lie, but in hopes of being believed, he lied under the guidance of truth.

Frankfort makes a distinction between the liar, who has a concern for the truth, and the bullshitter who does not. A bullshitter’s “statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.” And since our president does not seem to craft lies as much as utter falsehoods with an indifference to the truth, he is, by this definition, not a liar.

The bullshitter has more freedom than the liar. The bullshit artist “does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a certain point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared, as far as required, to fake the context as well.” Frankfort continues, “He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” The bullshitter is not rejecting the authority of truth, as the liar does. Instead, “he pays no attention to it at all.”

Many wonder how Trump can tell so many falsehoods, or how he can repeat falsehoods that have been repeatedly debunked, or how he can assert things that on their face are blatantly false. They haven’t recognized that while a liar and truth-teller are on opposite sides of the same contest, the bullshitter is not even in this game. Trump does not grapple with the authority of truth, as the liar does. Instead, as with any bullshitter, “he pays no attention to it at all.”

If Trump lied, he would not be as dangerous. Frankfort writes, “By virtue of [not paying attention to the truth], bullshit is the greater enemy of the truth than lies are. . . . Through excessive indulgence in [bullshit], which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost.”

There may be many causes for Trump’s bullshit—his narcissistic ego is a prime reason, but there is at least another one. “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.” Those of us concerned with the truth should give up the notion that Trump will learn what is true and what is not and that the falsehoods will decrease over time. As long as Trump continues to talk about things he knows little to nothing about, the bullshit will continue.

Posted on by rjonakait

First Sentences

“How are new art forms born?” Questlove (with Ben Greenman), Hip-Hop Is History.

“I am your maid. I’m the one who cleans your hotel room, who enters like a phantom when you’re out gallivanting for the day, no care at all about what you’ve left behind, the mess, or what I might see when you’re gone.” Nita Prose, The Maid.

“You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets.” Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson, Abundance.

“People don’t tap their watches anymore; have you noticed?” Anne Tyler, Three Days in June.

“A certain grim but familiar pattern typifies reports from the Holy Land.” Oren Kessler, Palestine 1936: The Great Revolt and the Roots of the Middle East Conflict.

“The phone rang. Again. It was the fourth time in eight minutes.” Louise Penny, The Grey Wolf.

“It is twenty minutes past midnight on the morning of Wednesday, May 7, 1986, and the Senate Finance Committee has been working almost nonstop since early the previous morning.” Jeffrey H. Birnbaum & Alan S. Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform.

“When the train stopped I stumbled out, nudging and kicking the kitbag before me.” J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country.

“In the beginning the door was open. The Founding Fathers celebrated the multiplicity of difference in their young republic and recognized that filling the country’s vast, open spaces with newcomers was necessary for securing its future.” Michael Luo, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.

“Louisa is a teenager, the best kind of human.” Fredrik Backman, My Friends.

“If you stand outside the wall, it is impossible to gauge the size of the city.” Stephen R. Platt, Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.

“The heat moved like a feral thing through the streets, fetid and inescapable.” Tim Mason, The Darwin Affair.

“The first time that history’s greatest fraudster contacted me was in January 2011, a month after his eldest son, Mark, hung himself from his dog’s leash on the second anniversary of his father’s arrest.” Richard Behar, Madoff: The Final Word.