A Tale of Two Cummings
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Edward Hopper The long leg 1935 Last weekend, I noticed that two of the main newsmakers were both named Cummings, one in the US, the other in t
[See the full post at: A Tale of Two Cummings]Edward Hopper The long leg 1935
Reminds me of Northport, Long Island, N.Y.; one of my childhood homes where I went sailing for the first time with my dad…
V.Arnold what a lovely memory to for such a beautiful painting – the blue is gorgeous.
The gaff rigged sloop really sets it off; the north shore of Long Island was a fantastic place to grow up.
I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re certainly going there. No one’s steering the ship on these and a lot of other issues.
But human nature doesn’t need anyone in charge. Like a beehive, a lot of times self-organization, that organic, ground-up development works better. It’s messy and slow, but seeing the utter lack of imagination (and cooperation, hurtful stonewalling in these two news points) maybe it’s better to let history – or rather humanity, each party’s voters – push them along naturally until they can finally see where the parade is going and get in front of it and pretend to be “in charge” of the crowd that was going there anyway. …That’s politics.
These guys have been standing in front of the two parades, arms outstretched, saying “Stop! Stop!”, as if to a herd of Yellowstone Bison, and with similar results. They call us “cattle”, “stupid sheep” and so on, but you can only lead cattle in a way they want to go. You’re not free, and you’re not in charge, and you can’t lead them far too far, or in the opposite way that they wish. But hubris does not allow that. In Greek myth, Hubris is challenging the gods, the way, the natural order, the Tao perhaps. It is #AntiLogos.
Well, that’s a Liberal view, but here we are, with all the tin-pot dictators in charge, Merkel, The Guardian, Westminster, the secret DNC heads, and they ARE telling everyone what to do every minute, that the people’s every thought and act is bad and aren’t-you-ashamed-now-you-naughty-thing, and the people ARE ignoring them, and the world is spinning, they get up, food is delivered just as badly as yesterday, and out in the Sound, ships are sailing as they’ve sailed 300 years. If you institutionalized the lot of them, and I don’t mean the Institution of Parliament, we’d still get up and make breakfast for each other, sell bagels, sail ships, and hardly notice their passing, because they’re in charge of nothing and in general we don’t need them. For good or bad, Britain is going to just keep using the 100,000 existing laws out of sheer habit until somebody tells them otherwise, that’s human nature.
Ireland may be reunified over Brexit, and it’s hard to tell if that’s a good or a bad thing, but probably good in the 1,000 year view. And in 1,000 years will the drang and sturm look all that big? Not really, it will look like some ill-advised tin-pot, just like the tin-pots today, pushed colonists into Ireland, and later on over the years, some were re-located and some were absorbed until the natural order and boundaries were restored. The DNC will shatter, lose, split, perhaps change name, and reappear later under some other name and platforms, for they are the same people with the same priorities. History will mark them, but we won’t. And at 70, Donald will grow old and retire, leaving some different person in his place who will execute the public impulse he rode in on, but didn’t need him and would have anointed another, or two, or three, in his absence. So with Britain, it’s taking a few turns, but the national intent is established, the EU arc is pre-scribed, mapped, and set by time, and they will go their way. You see this in the time + trend people such as Martin Armstrong, or Strauss-Howe but the pivotal point is, they don’t need any leaders. History works despite them and their foibles. So, while entertaining, I wouldn’t worry all that much about it: ignore them and all their petty orders; they just don’t matter. …And saying so will drive them wonderfully mad.
I agree with the main point you make, which is that blind criticism of Trump defeats the purpose. Many examples abound, from Adam Schiff’s inane attack on Trump for calling off the attack on Iran to the Democrats trotting out Mueller yet again, the same official who insisted in 2002 that Iraq had WMDs. The DNC has increased tensions with Russia and continued to an increased the risk of nuclear war, all to divert tension from cheating in the primaries, and a glaring conflict of interest when Hillary was running the DNC from Brooklyn while she herself was a candidate. This behavior, combined with the scapegoating of Julian Assange and continued support for the surveillance state, is as reprehensible as anything the Republican Party has done.
That being said, Raul, I think you overreact to legitimate criticisms of Trump. The racism is real. I, more than most people, should be angry at false accusations of racism because the “r” word was thrown at me when I complained about drug dealing in my own apartment building–forcing me to move. Yet, since the Nixon administration, the racist “dog whistle” has been employed dozens of times by Republicans and many Democrats to justify policies that erode the quality of life for millions regardless of race. From Bush Sr.’s Willie Horton ads to mass incarceration from Biden’s crime bill, to the “shithole countries” that Trump references, politicians have used racial innuendo instead of actual racist statements as a political tool to stoke feelings of racism that people still have, while providing political cover for the politician claiming they are not racist.
Trump himself has alternated between the dog whistle and the bullhorn–the bullhorn being explicit racist statements that, for example, say that Mexican immigrants are murderers, rapists, and drug smugglers. In doing so, he has encouraged acts of violence as evidenced by race-based physical attacks whose perpetrators cite Trump as an inspiration.
The attack on Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore is a perfect example of dog-whistle racism. Cummings, as a Congressman, has little influence on the well being of Baltimore citizens. Life there is probably as ugly as Trump says, but whose fault is that? Baltimore is 63.7% Black, and one common tactic used against such cities is to blame its citizens for the conditions, when it very well may be poverty, lack of sustainable paying jobs, racism and other factors. You don’t know what causes it, and Trump’s not smart enough to know or care what causes it, but at the end of the, the unspoken message is that “these black people cannot govern themselves.” Essentially, Baltimore joins the list of “shithole countries.” Furthermore, the full statement was an effort to compare Baltimore to the conditions at the border, when he said “As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”
Raul, you’ve done an amazing job educating me about the EU’s treatment of refugees. I find it notable that I haven’t heard as much about it recently, and Italy’s role in it when they are governed by a coalition of the Northern League and the Five Star movement, the latter of which you’ve praised in the past (and admittedly, I don’t know to what extent Five Star has a role in Italy’s current refugee policy, if any). For you to be more silent about the refugees on the US border than you had been about the EU’s treatment simply doesn’t make sense. It’s true that Trump is essentially building on what Presidents Clinton and Obama started (with Obama earning the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief”), but it’s also true that under Trump, conditions have reached a new level of inhumanity that needs to be spoken against.
I am a big fan of this blog and have learned a lot, but I have to wonder if your defenses of Trump are themselves an overreaction to the hypocrisy, corruption, and anti-democratic nature of the so-called Democratic Party. The DNC, MSNBC, and people who reflexively put down everything Trump says or does deserve to be called out, but there is, at the same time, good reason to be worried about the precedents that Trump is setting.
Thank you for this blog and all the good work you continue to do.
“The dysfunctional political systems Elijah Cummings and Dominic Cummings are part of may appear to be dysfunctional for different reasons. But the role of the media in both cases is very similar. The media wants to be -and define- the message, because that’s where the money is, and the power.”
My mind immediately moved on to e e cummings and then Ezra Pound.
“…Angered by the carnage of World War I, Pound lost faith in Great Britain and blamed the war on usury and international capitalism. He moved to Italy in 1924 and throughout the 1930s and 1940s embraced Benito Mussolini’s fascism, expressed support for Adolf Hitler, and wrote for publications owned by the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley. During World War II, he was paid by the Italian government to make hundreds of radio broadcasts criticizing the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Jews, as a result of which he was arrested in 1945 by American forces in Italy on charges of treason. He spent months in detention in a U.S. military camp in Pisa, including three weeks in a 6-by-6-foot (1.8 by 1.8 m) outdoor steel cage, which he said triggered a mental breakdown: “when the raft broke and the waters went over me”. The following year he was deemed unfit to stand trial, and incarcerated in St. Elizabeths psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., for over 12 years.”
And then my mind drifted to James Forrestal and Julian Assange….
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