Jonah Goldberg:

Donald Trump lashed out at the democratically elected Ukrainian president today, calling him “a dictator.” 

Forget that this is a lie, just like Trump’s insinuation that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia—a claim that is the geopolitical equivalent of saying a rape victim started it by, well, being rapable. 

But I don’t want to talk about the lie. You can defend Trump by telling me that it’s sort of true because elections are overdue in Ukraine. They are! You know why? Because the entire country is mobilized for a war it didn’t start and about a fifth of it is occupied by a country led by an actual dictator who targets children’s hospitals and sanctions rape, child abductions, and mass slaughter by its troops. But if you don’t have something better than that, don’t even bother trying.

Elizabeth Bruenig:

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

… The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

One terrible thing about that “reshaping” is that it really doesn’t require much actual reshaping among those who cheer and champion this. The church that supports Trump and Musk — and it is a real segment of the church, at least as we here experience it — has long since shaped itself into this very mold, primed itself to despise the foreigner and love those who love us.

Vance’s priorities may not be Jesus’s priorities, but they are spot-on; he has astutely read the room nave.

Makes me all the more grateful for writers like Bruenig.

Jeremy Eichler (emphasis mine):

But whatever tensions ran through his philosophy and his life, it may be said that in a century of averting eyes, [Theodor] Adorno refused to look away. After the Second World War and the Shoah, like a structural engineer inspecting the wreckage of a collapsed building in order to account for its fall, he scanned the histories of art and artworks themselves—and even the central premises of the Enlightenment—for cracks in the foundation, premonitions of future failure. “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed,” he wrote. “That this could happen in the midst of the traditions of philosophy, of art, and of the enlightening sciences says more than that these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to take hold of men and work a change in them. There is untruth in those fields themselves.” … It might also be said that, for Adorno, this is the task of art. Certain works could reveal the “rifts and crevices” of a fallen world. They could carry forward the memory of loss, and with it perhaps the seeds of a melancholy hope.

Forced out of Nazi Germany just after earning his first professorship, Adorno eventually met [Thomas] Mann at an exile party [in Los Angelas] in the summer of 1943. Not long afterward, Adorno gave the novelist a copy of his own Philosophy of New Music, an audacious manifesto then unpublished yet later to become one of Adorno’s signature works. In it Mann discovered reflections that bore, he later claimed, a striking resemblance to his own, ideas he would weave into the intellectual fabric of his novel [Doctor Faustus, published in 1947]. Chief among these may have been the notion that works of art are, in Adorno’s words, “the hidden essence of society, summoned into appearance.” But that was just the beginning. As the scholar Rose Subotnik has described, Adorno was approaching music “not merely as an organization of sounds but as an embodiment of the truths perceived by human consciousness; and the purpose of his musical writings [was] to criticize not merely the technical workings of music but, above all, the human condition of the societies that give music life.“

Beethoven was a key figure for Adorno, a composer whose work both crystallized and anticipated dramatic shifts in European society. As he saw it, at some point in Beethoven’s middle period (roughly the first decade of the nineteenth century), a work of music could sound well rounded and affirmative even triumphant—in tone while still remaining “true,” because the progress of Western society had itself reached a moment of great possibility, a time when a forward-thinking artist like Beethoven could imagine the interests of the individual (freedom) as potentially reconcilable with those of society (form). This moment of promise, however, would be short-lived. The music of Beethoven’s final years, his late period, already anticipated that the eras lofty visions, its noble humanism, was a pledge society would not keep. This is why Beethoven’s late music, in Adorno’s terms, became more “negative,” its once-smooth surfaces now fracturing, the music’s levels of dissonance allowed to grow at times to the point where, as in Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the dissonance claims the music’s expressive core.

And here is where it gets really interesting… and more challenging.

Schoenberg’s art, in this story, essentially picks up where Beethoven’s late music left off. At the end of the nineteenth century, plenty of Schoenberg’s contemporaries were still writing conventionally beautiful music, but that art’s relationship to society was now increasingly “false.” History had called its bluff, in ways we do not need Adorno to illuminate. Under the nose of enlightened humanism, Napoleon had declared himself emperor. Slavery had persisted in America. Belgian colonial rule had ravaged the Congo. Germany had committed genocide against the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia. Beautiful art, in such a world, was like its own kind of opium for the masses, its charms serving to mask uglier truths about corruption, domination, repression, and moral rot. In this telling, then, Schoenberg’s own atonal revolution, as well as music’s turn toward harsh modern dissonance, was a kind of course correction, from an art that manufactured deceptive beauty to an art that conveyed existential truths—about life, about the suffering of humanity, about history, and about the possibility of a still-darker future. “Dissonance,” Adorno wrote, “is the truth about harmony.”

I want to add a thought to this, something from a pianist and survivor of the Theresienstadt Nazi propaganda camp. But I’ll come back to that another day.

Nick Catoggio:

Implicit in the Madisonian scheme is the assumption that Americans would never knowingly trust the Constitution to a full-spectrum miscreant like Trump who would aggressively test separation of powers. We’re about to find out if there’s anything left to Madison’s contraption once that assumption proves false.

We chose to become an unapologetically predatory nation on November 5, believing that we might suffer “a little pain” in the process. Instead we’re going to suffer a lot, and we’ll deserve it.

Just highlighting this line from Jonathan Chait

the wish masquerading as calculation that Democrats can gain vote share without compromising with the electorate.

Revisiting Rowan Williams:

No one is sure what Blake meant by mentioning “dark, Satanic mills” as part of what Jesus would have seen and moved among, but the candidates include early industrial sites, Druidic temples and (I’m afraid) Anglican parish churches. The point, though, is that we are being asked to imagine that the incarnate God moved and worked even in the middle of the cruelty, hypocrisy and exploitation that are an inseparable part of every human community’s history. “Jerusalem” is being built, even while all the signs in society around us seem to negate the vision. 

What we need is the rekindling of desire – the sheer passionate longing to see a social order at which the Holy Lamb of God might look without heartbreak. Arrows of desire; the courage and endurance of mental fight; the struggle to keep this imagination alive and burning – this is what we pray for. The poem looks back to an imaginary past and forward to an imagined future, but at its heart is the question: “do you truly want to live in Jerusalem? Because if you do, you need to remember that it is always already here and now; because even where justice and love seem to be defeated, the Holy Lamb of God is present.”

Nick Catoggio:

It seems chaotic, little more than haphazard fan service for his populist base, but there’s a common thread to many of the actions he’s taken. The impoundment nonsense is the latest example of Trump striving to make all federal policy subject to executive discretion and all exercises of that discretion subject to compliance with his wishes. We’re a government of “friends and enemies” now, and the more power he wields in his discretion, the more friends he’s going to have.

Also:

It is insane that a 25 percent tax on imports from America’s two closest trading partners could be imposed on the whim of one man rather than by a vote of Congress, but our feckless legislature spent many years gradually ceding authority to the president in this area and lacks the nerve to dare claw it back. And so, for Trump, tariffs have become a form of unilateral sanctionshe can impose to apply pressure internationally on weaker powers whenever there’s something he wants. […]

Is it any surprise, then, that he would look for ways to gain similar financial influence over adversaries here at home?

Impoundment is the way. If it’s within the president’s discretion to release or not release the enormous gobs of cash Congress sends out the door every year to domestic entities, practically every stakeholder in American society will need to kneel before him to stay afloat. Some people’s “loyalty” is compelled with a stick but others’ is purchased with a carrot. Trump, the man who insisted on putting his name on stimulus checks issued during the pandemic, wants the power to dole out the carrots. You want your appropriation from Congress? Then ask nicely, and explain what you’re prepared to do for him as a “favor” in return.

Wendell Berry:

What we are up against in this country, in any attempt to invoke private responsibility, is that we have nearly destroyed private life. Our people have given up their independence in return for the cheap seductions and the shoddy merchandise of so-called “affluence.” We have delegated all our vital functions and responsibilities to salesmen and agents and bureaus and experts of all sorts. We cannot feed or clothe ourselves, or entertain ourselves, or communicate with each other, or be charitable or neighborly or loving, or even respect ourselves, without recourse to a merchant or a corporation or a public-service organization or an agency of the government or a style-setter or an expert. Most of us cannot think of dissenting from the opinions or the actions of one organization without first forming a new organization. Individualism is going around these days in uniform, handing out the party line on individualism. Dissenters want to publish their personal opinions over a thousand signatures.

… In this state of total consumerism – which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves – all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.…Most of us, for example, not only do not know how to produce the best food in the best way – we don’t know how to produce any kind in any way. Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato. And for this condition we have elaborate rationalizations, instructing us that dependence for everything on somebody else is efficient and economical and a scientific miracle. I say, instead, that it is madness, mass produced. A man who understands the weather only in terms of golf is participating in a chronic public insanity that either he or his descendants will be bound to realize as suffering. I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.

(Inspired by Sarah Hendren’s recent, wonderfully loaded post, “On Choosing”)

An excerpt from Mark Schwen and Dorthy Bass’s book Leading Lives That Matter — specifically, the introduction to the section titled “How Shall I Tell the Story of My Life”:

We’ve read about the reasons for choosing one kind of life over another one, about whom we should heed when we are making decisions, and about how and why so many of the things that shape our identities are at one and the same time free and constrained. Leading a life that matters surely involves making good choices.

Though these deep and legitimate concerns about the place of free choice in our lives may explain why “The Road Not Taken” has been “taken” to be about choice, the poem is not mainly about choice at all. It instead explores the shape of the stories we tell to ourselves and others about ourselves over the course of our lives. The poem is also about how and why these stories change. The poem teaches us that there are two things of roughly equal importance in determining the quality of the lives we lead: the choices we make and what we make of those choices. Our interpretations of what we have chosen to do and of what has happened to us often take the form of stories, and these narratives in turn constitute our inner sense of ourselves, which includes feelings of meaning, purpose, and significance. To put this a bit differently, our imagination is just as important as our reason in shaping our identities and in making for lives of significance and substance. The widespread misreading of “The Road Not Taken” may indicate that as a people we do not rightly appreciate the importance of the imagination in shaping our efforts to lead lives that matter.

When we come to Frost’s poem with these latter ideas in our minds, we notice right away that the whole poem consists of two very different stories of the “same” event. The first story is relatively long (the first fifteen lines), quite indecisive about whether the two roads encountered by the speaker on an autumn morning differed from one another at all, and concluded by a resolution to keep one of the roads for some other time. The second story is much shorter (the final three lines), much more resolute about the differences between the two roads, and concluded by a resolution to take that one “less traveled.” The speaker tells the first story sometime soon after the event and then imagines how he will tell the story differently “ages and ages hence.” The speaker knows that his perspective on life will change over time and that he will be a different kind of person in old age than he was when he first came upon the two roads. He (or she) even knows how he will be different: he’ll be surer in his judgments and more dramatic in narrating certain particular choices in his life. Memory, the thread of continuity in his identity, will serve to some extent his sense of himself even as the changing shape of his life’s story will serve to change his sense of the significance of his past. One choice will have made “all the difference,” and his literally “self” serving memory will move him to claim that he once chose a “less traveled” way, even though he was not at all clear about this matter in the immediate aftermath of the moment of choice.

Like the speaker in this poem, all of us revise our own life stories all of the time. Unlike the speaker in the poem, many of us are not as aware of this as we should be. Sometimes we revise our stories depending on our audience. Would not most of us tell the story of an embarrassing experience somewhat differently to our parents, our siblings, our lovers, and our emplyers? But we undertake our work of revision more often for the sake of our primary audience, ourselves. The readings that follow “The Road Not Taken” will help us to understand the complexities and the vital importance of this constant process of “composing our lives.”

And this is their brief, thought-provoking intro to Frost’s poem itself:

The life and work of Robert Frost (1874-1963) spanned the entire first half of the twentieth century. As we noted in the introduction to another one of his poems, “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Chapter 2), the deceptive simplicity of much of his work has tempted many readers to offer interpretations that are superficial at best or altogether mistaken at worst. To avoid such interpretations here, it is best to begin thinking about this poem by comparing the two accounts of the “same” event that exist within the poem. We have indicated some of the differences between the two stories in the general introduction to this chapter above.

For our purposes in this chapter, we want to use the poem to help us understand the process by which we ourselves revise our own life stories. So we need to ask ourselves what kind of person the speaker is, based upon the kind of story that he tells and the way in which he tells it in lines 1-15. For example, he seems constantly to second-guess himself and his judgments. How else would you characterize him?

When the speaker imagines what he will be telling about the same event many years later, he offers an account interrupted by a sigh (that dash at the end of line 18). Is this a sigh of regret or resignation or fatigue? The feat that the speaker accomplishes is quite remarkable. To see how and why this is so, think of the story you would now tell about why you made a certain decision — for example, about why you chose to attend one college rather than another one. Now try to imagine how that story will be different when you tell it again “ages and ages hence.” Now compare the two. What does that comparison teach you about how you expect to develop over time?

And why not include the poem as well:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.