I told Lisa the librarian that I thought that all librarians should be named Marian. To my surprise, she did not know the reference.

Steve Bannon on his podcast said: “A lot of MAGAs on Medicaid. . . . Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.” How revealing. Bannon, and no doubt many like him, are not concerned about our healthcare system generally, and certainly not about healthcare for those in the country’s bottom economic quarter. (Almost 25% of Americans get assistance from Medicaid.) He is only concerned because many Trump supporters get Medicaid. (If they weren’t MAGA, would he describe them as on the government dole?) Otherwise, he would only want to destroy Medicaid.

Congressman Rich McCormick, a Republican from Georgia, said that the GOP could do a better job of showing “compassion.” Is there a compassion switch? Can you “show compassion” if you don’t have it in the first place?

“All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.” John Arbuthnot.

The fired government workers do get compassion from many, as they should. Most government employees, like most Americans, live paycheck to paycheck, and the sudden loss of a job for them and their families is a tragedy many of us can immediately comprehend. What we don’t see is the harm down the road. What are the consequences if weather forecasts become worse, or if waiting times at VA hospitals are longer? How do you measure what is foregone from lost medical research or the increase in waste, fraud, and corruption that results from fired IRS workers?

We may not know precisely what is lost from the firings, but we know that foreseeable losses will come. On the other hand, there are always unintended consequences that are not foreseen. I was reminded of that from Troy Senik’s biography, A Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland. Senik writes that the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 sought to eliminate patronage for appointment to government jobs. Under the patronage system, those who got employment were assessed a portion of their salaries to kick back to the political parties who secured the positions. Senik says that it was estimated that up to 75% of party funding came from such assessments. With that spigot turned off, parties turned to wealthy individuals and interest groups to fund electoral politics. Thus, job appointments based on merit had the unintended consequence of providing more power to the rich.

V13: Chronicle of a Trial, a magnificent book by Emmanuel Carrère (translated from the French by John Lambert), contains compassion, but also horror, inhumanity, humanity, bewilderment, and much more. On November 13, 2015, jihadists launched attacks in Paris. Luckily, if there was anything like luck that day, suicide bombers arrived late to a packed football game and could not get in. They blew themselves up outside where the crowds were thin. Others allied with them shot randomly at restaurant terraces and cafes killing more, but the major carnage was at the Bataclan theatre, a concert venue of 1,500 hosting apparently a mediocre American rock group, Eagles of Death Metal. Nearly a hundred people were slaughtered in the hall. Six years later a trial started, which took on the name V13, for Friday (Vendredi) the Thirteenth, the day of the attack. Carrère reported on the nine-month trial for a French magazine, and those columns form the basis of the book. At times extremely hard to read (“confetti of human flesh”) but always compelling, V13 is remarkable. Reading it now, I could not help but think about October 7 and its aftermath. One of those on trial in Paris (the defendants were all second stringers since all those who did the actual killing were dead) maintained that the massacres were in response to the loss of innocent lives in Syria from French bombings and said, “Everything you say about us jihadists is like reading the last page of a book. What you should do is read the book from the start.”