dreaminginthedeepsouth

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Old Man and the Nursery Garden | Carl Larsson

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LeG’s response to Tennessee Williams’s comment about the world being persistently on fire:

"It’s not enough to love something–or someone. Of course you love a person or art or music or the theatre. But you have to imagine that this person or this thing is trapped in a house afire, and the fire is apathy, and the fire is ignorance, and you have to go into the house all the time, day after day, year after year, and put out the flames and save the thing you love and rebuild the house in which it lives, and show it to others who will come to the rescue when you no longer can. Love is cheap and silly–a moron can love ice cream–but devotion is something worth talking about.“

–Eva Le Gallienne/Interview with James Grissom/ [Follies Of God]

[via "alive on all channels"]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

By Eugene von Bruenchenhein

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"Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to find myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Two or more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won't and I'm crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Here I sit, in any case, against a young pine, broken out in hives and waiting for the end of the world. Safe here for the moment though, flanks protected by the rise of ground on the left and an approach ramp on the right. The carbine lies across my lap.

Just below the cloverleaf, in the ruined motel, the three girls are waiting for me. Undoubtedly something is about to happen.

Or is it that something has stopped happening?

Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?"

-- the opening sentences to Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Friedrich August von Hayek

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It is in connection with the deliberate effort of the skillful demagogue to weld together a closely coherent and homogeneous body of supporters that the third and perhaps most important negative element of selection enters. It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program — on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off — than on any positive task. The contrast between the "we" and the "they," the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action. It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses. From their point of view it has the great advantage of leaving them greater freedom of action than almost any positive program. The enemy, whether he be internal, like the "Jew" or the "kulak," or external, seems to be an indispensable requisite in the armory of a totalitarian leader. That in Germany it was the Jew who became the enemy until his place was taken by the "plutocracies" was no less a result of the anticapitalist resentment on which the whole movement was based than the selection of the kulak in Russia. In Germany and Austria the Jew had come to be regarded as the representative of capitalism because a traditional dislike of large classes of the population for commercial pursuits had left these more readily accessible to a group that was practically excluded from the more highly esteemed occupations. It is the old story of the alien race's being admitted only to the less respected trades and then being hated still more for practicing them. The fact that German anti-Semitism and anticapitalism spring from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened there, but this is rarely grasped by foreign observers.

― Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Triptych: The Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch, Prado, Museum, Madrid, Spain.

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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

[Sandra Lynn Sparks]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Rolling Stones - Mother's Little Helper (Lyric Video)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

dave :: @roweafr :: the monkey

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Tell the stories of Trump's victims.

February 20, 2025

Robert B. Hubbell

It feels surreal reporting on the events of Wednesday. It is hard to believe that any one the developments occurred, but reporting on four “never-before-in-history” events is just unbelievable. But here we are. In the last 48 hours, Trump

“Switched sides” in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.

Promised “never” to reduce Medicaid, but hours later endorsed a House spending plan that could cut Medicaid by $800 billion.

Declared himself “King” after killing a highly successful NYC traffic control program without notice.

Assumed control over multiple independent agencies created by Congress to operate free of political influence by the president.

As if the above is not bad enough, a senior DOJ official argued that it would be acceptable for prosecutors to accept a political “quid pro quo” in exchange for dismissing criminal charges. (If the DOJ made such a bargain, it would also be known as a “bribe” and “obstruction of justice.”)

The most important question is, “What are we going to do about it?”

The answer is that we must continue to do what we have been doing—but with greater urgency, vigor, volume, and unity. Our leaders in the Democratic Party continue to play catch up, so we also need to keep up the pressure on them—every day.

In the meantime, tell the stories of every American harmed by the hatchet wielded by Musk. Explain the risks to our future security, health, and safety caused by dismantling our health, science, environmental, and educational infrastructure. Focus the intense light of negative publicity on every single elected Republican who is complicit in the destruction of federal expertise that took half a century to develop.

Tell the stories of people hurt by the surrender of the Republican party to a monster who is the antithesis of everything the GOP allegedly stood for a decade ago.

For today’s newsletter, I am opening the Comments to all readers to tell the stories of those injured by the malevolence and greed of Trump, Musk, and silent Republicans. Be an effective communicator so that your stories can be copied and shared, use paragraph breaks, and include details that personalize the harm suffered. (But please, protect the identity and privacy of those harmed by Trump’s cruel actions.)

All our energy must be focused on resisting the destruction and advancing solutions to repair the damage. Issue spotting, standing alone, is counterproductive. It takes no great skill or insight to identify obstacles to every proposed solution. Of course, we should discuss challenges to the way forward. But if we identify an obstacle, we must also assume the burden of identifying a way to overcome the obstacle and state our personal commitment to advancing our proposed solution. Be part of the solution!

Trump abandons Ukraine

Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC said on Wednesday evening that Trump had “switched sides during a war.” That is the most apt, succinct description of the events of Wednesday, but does not convey the depravity of what Trump did.

To recap,

On Tuesday, Trump blamed Ukraine for “starting” the war with Russia—a blatant lie. Russia invaded Ukraine without provocation. On Wednesday morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky asked for Trump's negotiating team to “be more truthful” and said that Trump was living inside a Russian-created “disinformation space.” See Associated Press. Trump then posted a lengthy screed filled with lies that called President Zelensky “a dictator” who had “talked” the US into giving Ukraine $350 billion (a lie) to fight a war that Ukraine cannot win without Trump. (See AP article, above.) A close friend and advisor of Putin posted the following note on Twitter after Trump called Zelensky a “dictator”:

The betrayal of Ukraine will forever damage US relations with Europe and may undermine the peace and security that has prevailed in Europe because of the strong NATO alliance. That will be a tragedy for Ukraine, Europe, and every American. A despicable, shameful outcome.

The comments by Putin's advisor are chilling and disturbing. But it is what Trump has wrought.

Benjamin Wittes, Editor in Chief of Lawfare, penned a moving article that captures the depravity and significance of Trump's betrayal of Ukraine. See Lawfare, The Situation: What America Stands For Now.

Wittes writes,

Today, let’s stare betrayal in the face. The United States has betrayed allies before. It has sponsored coups against democratic regimes. It has left people behind when it withdraws from conflicts it has come to regret. It has done its share of ugly things, and I’m not romantic about the history of American foreign policy. I cannot, however, think of a time when it has ever before turned against a democratic ally to side with a monstrous dictator pursuing a genocidal war of aggression. I cannot think of a time it has lurched so readily to side with evil against the values it purports to represent. I cannot think of a time it has so brazenly presented itself as running a protection racket for the democratic world—a pay-to-play, resource-extraction-oriented foreign policy designed to force other countries to pay tribute or risk predation from stronger powers. And I cannot think of a time when the most fundamental defense of such a global extortion scheme was a bald-faced set of lies about a country fighting for its continued existence.

Trump reverses position on cutting Medicaid over 24-hour period

Medicaid affects hundreds of millions of Americans. On Tuesday, Trump said he would “never” touch Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. On Wednesday, Trump endorsed a House spending plan that would cut $880 billion from the departments that administer Medicaid.

Medicaid is so essential to the healthcare system that even Steve Bannon is warning against cuts to the program. See The New Republic, Steve Bannon (Yes, Really!) Warns Republicans Not to Cut Medicaid.

As described by the NYTimes,

Medicaid covers nearly half of all births in the country, and around two-thirds of nursing home stays. In 41 states that expanded the program as part of the Affordable Care Act, it also covers millions of working-class Americans with incomes close to the poverty line.

But the only way for congressional Republicans to find the budget cuts to pay for Trump's extension of the 2017 tax cuts is to take a cleaver to Medicaid—cuts that will harm working-class voters in red states that voted for Trump.

Trump calls himself “King” after killing NYC congestion pricing

Against all odds, New York imposed a “congestion pricing” policy to reduce traffic in Manhattan during rush hour. It was wildly successful, reducing rush hour traffic beyond expectations. The number of vehicles decreased by 7.5% and commute times on bridges and in tunnels decreased by 34%. See Newsweek, Trump Kills NYC Congestion Pricing Despite Early Signs of Success.

Trump killed the program on less than 24-hours’ notice. He did so in a post that ended with, “Long live the King,” a reference to himself. Shortly thereafter, the White House released a knock-off of a Time Magazine cover showing Trump wearing a crown. See Rolling Stone, Trump on Himself: ‘LONG LIVE THE KING!'

Do we need any further evidence that Trump has lost contact with reality? If Barack Obama or Joe Biden had referred to themselves as “King,” there would have been a race between an impeachment trial in the Senate and an effort to remove them under the 25th Amendment. But Republicans have remained silent in the face of the obvious mental decline by Trump.

Trump's attempt to seize control of independent agencies

Remember that time—24 hours ago—when Trump illegally seized control of congressionally created independent agencies? I do. You should, too. It is a story that deserves more than one news cycle. Indeed, it is a story about a fundamental shift in the distribution of power under the Constitution.

Trump's assault on independent agencies has taken several forms—defunding, mass layoffs, and refusing to replace commissioners, thereby denying the governing commissions a majority necessary to conduct business. If Trump had attempted directly to shut down independent agencies by executive order, he would have been stopped by the courts. But by laying off all staff or freezing funds necessary to operate the agencies, Trump has effectively shut them down.

Trump's actions are unconstitutional (in my view). A thoughtful analysis of the unconstitutional nature of the hostile takeover of the agencies is set forth in National Law Review, Trump's Order Seizes Control of Independent Agencies.

We cannot forget Trump's actions on Tuesday. Those actions were unconstitutional, using brute bureaucratic force to seize control of agencies that were designed by Congress to be independent. But it appears that most members of Congress will simply accept the takeover as the new normal. It is a coup, plain and simple. But the lack of resistance in Congress is completely unacceptable and bewildering.

Other stories

There are other stories that deserve comment, but I have run out of time. Feel free to add color and detail about the following stories in the Comment section.

Acting Deputy US Attorney Emil Bove said in court today that it would be acceptable for the Department of Justice to engage in a “quid pro quo” transaction in which a dismissal of a criminal case was exchanged for political support for the president’s policies. See ABC News, Emil Bove denies 'quid pro quo' in dropping Eric Adams charges during court hearing. See also @mollycranegoodman@bsky.social quoting Bove during the hearing on Wednesday as saying, “I don’t concede that even if there was a quid pro quo, there would be a problem with the motion [to dismiss].”

The Independent, Pete Hegseth orders Pentagon to cut 8 percent of budget for each of the next five years.

Concluding Thoughts

Clueless Democratic Senators are now expressing regret for having voted for Trump cabinet nominees who immediately broke their promises to behave like reasonable appointees bound by the rule of law. See The Huffington Post, Senate Democrats Regret Voting For Some Trump Cabinet Nominees.

Senate Democrats are wondering why their constituents are furious that the Senators are failing to mount scorched-earth opposition to nominees picked for their absolute loyalty to Trump's illegal agenda. Let’s hope that the Senators have learned their lesson. If they haven’t, they don’t deserve our support in future elections.

It is impossible to pick a group of federal employees or a program that best exemplifies Trump's cruelty and greed in indiscriminate cuts to the federal government. But cutting support for Americans suffering from Alzheimer’s disease is among the worst domestic cuts. See The New Republic, Oops: Trump-Musk Cuts Just Wrecked an NIH Org Championed by GOPers.

Per The New Republic,

According to people familiar with the situation, approximately one-tenth of the workers have now been let go at the NIH’s Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias, or CARD, including its incoming director, a highly regarded scientist credited with important innovations in the field. “These people are experts and are irreplaceable,” the CARD employee told me. “It’s devastating for us—and for anyone who is worried about getting Alzheimer’s, or has already gotten Alzheimer’s, and is hoping there will be better treatments in the future. It’s a huge blow.”

Alzheimer’s has affected nearly every family in America at one time or another. It is a particularly cruel disease that can overwhelm a family emotionally, physically, and financially. The fact that Musk and Trump have chosen to weaken the program by firing its incoming director is a callous, cruel decision that will be immediately understood by anyone who learns of the action. Tell your friends, family, and complete strangers what Trump is doing.

Speak up in the Comment section, which is open to everyone for this newsletter. Remember,

Be an effective communicator so your stories can be copied and shared, use paragraph breaks, and include details that personalize the harm suffered. (But please, protect the identity and privacy of those harmed by Trump’s cruel actions.)

Thanks to all who choose to share their stories.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.

A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong.

And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want."

- Hannah Arendt, (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German historian and philosopher.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

Arendt's extensive body of work includes many nuanced discussions on truth, lies, and the nature of totalitarianism, and this quote reflects themes from her writing on totalitarianism and the nature of truth.

Rebecca Solnit

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Dave: creepy puppet :: @FinancialReview

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 19, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Feb 20, 2025

The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.

A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.

Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.

Hegseth’s biggest concession to Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump’s social media account posted that the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.

In a press conference on Thursday, the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S. military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.

Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to “change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.

While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president comes and creates peace.”

Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun to better understand our position.”

Yesterday evening, from his Florida residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating, when in fact it is about 57%.

Today, Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed out loud.”

“Be clear about what’s happening,” Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally.”

To be even clearer: under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.

The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all.

The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia.

In 2004 it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over.

To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.

Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.

Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska] operation seen?”

Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland.” In exchange for weakening NATO and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s campaign.

Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S. policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused, Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

Trump swung U.S. policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.

But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.

When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe.

When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took office.

Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. “We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,” a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”

This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.” Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed." Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in controlling Ukraine.

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine.

In The Bulwark, Mark Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes: nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.

“And we are negotiating with them,” Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.

For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones.

For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”

The British tabloid The Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the president of the United States.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies

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“Climate change has become such a familiar term that we tend to read past it- it's part of our mental furniture, like urban sprawl or gun violence.” ― Bill McKibben, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Andrei Tarkovsky, Zerkalo (The Mirror), 1975

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“They touched; with the gentle clarity of dream,”

— Robert Penn Warren, from section V “The Return,” in “Kentucky Mountain Farm,” New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 (Random House,1985)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In northern New Mexico/southern Colorado, the monsoon season which normally commences in July instead started at the end of May... with the result that a normally fairly arid region has been turned very green. The gorge of the Río Grande del Norte between Taos and the Colorado-New Mexico border. Photo: Elijah Rael (June 5, 2023)

[Robert Scott Horton]

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“One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Poetic Outlaws :: [@OutlawsPoetic]

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“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”

― Stephen Mallarme

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Creator: Josef Koudelka | Credit: ©Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos:: Copyright: ©Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos

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“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Ain’t Nobody – Leonid & Friends (Chaka Khan and Rufus cover)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Today's PUNCH Cartoon Classic. “Shortly, Henry, our immigration spokesman, will be talking to you.” No comment... Tony Husband 1989

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Sadism for Its Own Sake

by Andrew Egger

The Trump White House is itching to ramp up its cartoonishly cruel immigration policy to industrial scale. But they’re finding the sledding frustratingly slow.

The Economist noted this week that “so far, mass deportation has been more rhetoric than reality.” Daily ICE arrests are up just a tick from the Biden years—from a few hundred a day to just over a thousand. “ICE stopped releasing a daily arrests number in early February,” the Economist notes, “which may be because the agency would rather nobody kept count.”

If you’re Trump, this is no good. He’d promised instant gratification: “the largest deportation operation in history,” beginning on Day One of his presidency. His fans, longing to see footage of migrants getting hustled into ICE vans by the thousands across the country, might be getting a little twitchy.

So the administration is taking a new tack: emphasizing quality over quantity. The White House is spotlighting the leering cruelty with which they carry out the deportations that are happening. Deporting former designees of temporary protected status back to countries where they face prosecution: check. Deporting migrants to countries they’ve never even visited: check. Holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay: check.

And yesterday, releasing the single most viscerally disturbing piece of deportation propaganda to date: A short video, posted to the official White House X account, titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.”

ASMR videos, which became popular on YouTube in the 2010s, use specific audio cues to stimulate feelings of relaxation and euphoria in the viewer. The White House video perversely mimics the style: lovingly lingering on the revving engine of an airplane waiting to take off; the jingling of chains as they are laid out in rows on the ground, then used to shackle deportees’ arms behind their backs; the shuffling of chained feet up into the plane. No faces are ever seen. The idea is not just that viewers should approve of the footage. It invites them to take sensual pleasure from it.

Plenty of Trump’s people were happy to oblige. The tweet quickly induced hooting replies—memes of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman blissfully vibing on his headphones in a MAGA hat, exhortations to “let the clanging bar sounds of Guantanamo Bay whisk you away to your happy place,” speculation about when “some of our corrupt politicians” would be going the same way.

You can’t say Trump doesn’t know his audience. These people would love to see mass deportations, of course—but all they really need to get their rocks off is a big dollop of content of the government dehumanizing and humiliating migrants served up in the algorithm.

Not long ago, you’d mostly see this sort of open cruelty framed as a sort of bankshot—a posture, in theory, adopted partway in jest to trigger overly censorious Democrats or protest a culture that’s gone too woke. You know: owning the libs.

What’s amazing to witness now is how that bankshot permission structure has mostly vanished. Trump’s biggest fans are no longer styling themselves as half-ironic transgressors against liberal speech codes. The libs no longer enter into it. The guys cheering on deportation ASMR videos aren’t trying to trigger anybody; the guys identifying with Patrick Bateman aren’t pretending to occupy any moral high ground. As with their newfound love for using slurs like “retard” or their consistently cruel rhetoric toward trans people, they’re openly, unapologetically luxuriating in sadism for its own sake.

Many people have interpreted this sort of thing in the language of uncovering a rot that’s always simmered beneath the surface. Commentators speak of right-wingers taking the mask off, or saying the quiet part out loud. Obviously this is partially true: Sadists and racists and political deviants of all kinds long found it convenient to slipstream under the language of more respectable right-wing politics.

But it seems to me that this analysis misses the ways in which the Trump years have genuinely made so many right-wing people worse. What they have undertaken has been a long, slow, corrosive education in vice: from giving themselves permission to rationalize away Trump’s cruelty, to indulging in it in a quasi-performative way themselves, to realizing—almost to their own surprise—how much they liked the taste.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Beatus a Liebana, Commentarius in Apocalypsim. Illumination: Adoration of the Beast. Navarre, c 1090 CE .

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“If greed were not the master of modern man--ably assisted by envy--how could it be that the frenzy of economism does not abate as higher "standards of living" are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? How could we explain the almost universal refusal on the part of the rulers of the rich societies--where organized along private enterprise or collective enterprise lines--to work towards the humanisation of work? It is only necessary to assert that something would reduce the "standard of living" and every debate is instantly closed. That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done--these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence--because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”

― E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered