If You Come at the King, You'd Best Not Miss

I almost -- that's ALMOST -- felt a little sorry for Donald Trump after he was safely out of office in 2021.  One factor that hurt him seriously was not his doing and out of his control, namely the COVID pandemic.  This time around, he's done the things that have undercut his popularity, and he has no one to blame but himself.  If he hadn't started a war with Iran, his popularity would have sagged anyway, but the spreading effects of that war, from gas prices in particular to inflation in general, have made things worse for him.  Not, you understand, that I care, let alone sympathize; he should be in jail instead of the White House, and every reverse he suffers is fine with me.

I'm not optimistic, though. I think there's a good chance that the Republicans will lose control of Congress in November, and there is backlash evident at all levels of government.  But I don't expect that the Democrats will get the veto-proof supermajority they'd need to impeach and convict him. Even if he were removed from office, JD Vance would take his place, and the Democrats who've collaborated with Trump would be all too happy to work with Vance. Maybe a wave of Democratic insurgents could knock Chuck Schumer out of his leadership position, which could help, but it would depend on who replaced him. It will take an immense effort to undo the damage Trump and his gang have done, and there will be fierce opposition to any such effort from wealthy and powerful people who may not like Trump all that much but are happy to benefit from his policies, and will continue to back them and politicians who support them.  The non-elite people I know and talk to don't know much of what he's done, and aren't any more interested in informing themselves than they ever were. 

Meanwhile, centrist news media are blundering along at their usual level of incompetence, even if you leave aside the overt and explicit moves by far-right billionaires to make them worse. NPR continues to waste time on "what we can expect" and false equivalence.  Today, for example, Morning Edition ran two items on Secretary of State Marco Rubio's mission to meet with Pope Leo. The reporter referred to a "spat" (twice!) between Trump and the Pope, as if it were personal on both sides instead of springing from Trump's usual fury at anyone who criticizes him; they even acknowledged that Popes have objected to wars before in the same terms without setting off an international crisis, if this is one instead of another Trump tantrum.  In the second, they talked to a former US Ambassador to the Holy See, who bloviated without saying anything of substance. That's the kind of commentator NPR likes.  (I'll add some details later, when the transcripts are posted.)

More liberal outlets have exaggerated how much Trump has been affected by the obstacles he has encountered.  Some like to say that he has been "humiliated," which to the extent that it's true means little.  He responds to "humilation" by lashing out, and as long as he's in office he has to power to do more than merely humiliate his enemies.  A popular question in these precincts is whether Trump's MAGA coalition is "starting to crack."  Maybe so, maybe not, but it is still holding together overall.  One or two Congressional Republicans have voted with Democrats against Trump's actions, but they've been balanced by Democrats who voted for Trump.  The resistance by some Indiana State senators to Trump's call for redistricting was brave and noble, but most of those Republicans were successfully primaried by MAGA agents this week.  So far the coalition is intact, and while Trump is behaving ridiculously in every public statement he makes, he hasn't suffered any real consequences yet.  Get back to me when that changes.

Let Your Yes Be Yes, and Your No Be No

Just a brief addition to yesterday's post.  On Sunday, Doonesbury's "Say What?" department posted this nugget from Sean Hannity:

This was supposed to be an outrageous idea.  My "say what?" reaction wss "Wait, doesn't the Pope get questioned?" I don't follow Vatican news, but what I remember are a lot of stories where Pope Francis had told reporters something that was taken to be highly liberal and inclusive, like pets going to Heaven, or that homosexuals have a right to be part of the family, or that in some lost video interview he'd endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples. In that last case it turned out that before he became Pope he offered to accept such unions in Argentina as a bargaining chip to stave off legal same-sex marriage. He failed to do so, but his fans (even non-Catholics) were ready to celebrate him as an ally anyway.  When he said we have a right to be part of the family, he immediately added "That does not mean approving of homosexual acts, not in the least."

As I wrote on this topic before, "many people scour Francis's statements for what they 'hint' or may  'imply' or 'suggest,' as if he were the Delphic Oracle and no one has any business pressing him to make himself clear.  Part of the problem of course is that even when he is reasonably clear, they still overinterpret him to suit their own fantasies.  Maybe that's it: if they got him to clarify, they wouldn't like what he'd tell them."

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that a Pope, like any other head of state, should have to face hard questions. While Hannity is technically correct that Donald Trump "takes questions all the time," Trump doesn't usually answer them: he lies, distracts, wanders off the subject, blusters; and if a reporter presses him, he turns nasty.  But then, the media don't know how to ask intelligent hard questions, and I don't believe Hannity would be any different.  Even secular US reporters would be too busy bowing and scraping and calling him "Your Holiness" to do their job properly. (I just thought of the time some US gay male activists were permitted to ask the Dalai Lama to clarify his position on homosexuality.  They were all Buddhists, if memory serves, and too thrilled at being in the Presence to push very hard; the DL was also less than forthcoming, and of course there was also the language barrier.  Yet the DL is much less pompous than most high-level holy men.  I should do a post on that encounter soon.)

I don't know, maybe Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, is a Catholic too. But the reaction to Hannity's suggestion was just another example of the weird authoritarianism that's common among American liberals, the idea that commoners shouldn't get above ourselves when we're allowed to be in the same space as royalty.

The title of this post comes from Matthew 5:37, which I think is good advice, even though Jesus himself liked to dodge hard questions like "What is your authority to say these things?" or "Should we pay tribute to Caesar?" Pope Leo likes to quote the Bible at times, but he also gets rather woolly at others. But it would be rude to quote Matthew 5:37 to him - who do I think I am, anyway?

Yahweh Sabaoth Would Like a Word

While I was reading right-wing Christians fuming that the Pope should stay out of politics, it occurred to me that such people usually insist that separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and that we need more voices of faith in the public square.  It wouldn't be fair to say that they've changed their minds, exactly, because the inconsistency would never occur to them.  They want what they want, and that's all that matters.

Still, it's clear that Trump's antics have made them uneasy, especially the Catholics among them. I happened on a Facebook comment thread this afternoon where the contradictions were heightened: I've been a Catholic all my life, but Pope Leo isn't my Pope!  He's a Communist and should be minding his own business! ... and so on.  I don't know how representative these people are. It does seem that there are some deep divisions among Roman Catholics at all levels, from the laity up to reactionary clergy.  Some of the latter have been disciplined.  They forget that the Church is not a democracy, it's a hierarchy.

On the other hand, liberals and even leftists -- Catholic and non-Catholic, theist and non-theist -- are reveling in that hierarchy, though they're confused about it too. Celebrity right-wing Catholics like J.D. Vance are being mocked for daring to criticize the Pope, especially when they're recent converts like Vance.  And it is funny that Vance would be so unself-conscious about it.  Luckily for him, he's not likely to have a date with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and even if he does he's not going to be tortured or executed. As the 19th-centurhy composer Hector Berlioz wrote, "Now that She [i.e., the Church] has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, Her creeds are charming."  I suppose Vance is aware of this somewhere in what's left of his mind.  I suppose his liberal mockers are too, but it feels to me like they actually believe that a mere layman has no business disagreeing with the head of 1.2 billion Catholics.  It's nicely summed up in this meme:

(If you'd like to see a buttload of baboon screeching and feces-throwing, here's the thread where I found the meme.)  If you think that religion is just a matter of book-learning, this makes sense.  But it isn't, and believers will be the first to insist that it isn't when it suits them. Of course the Roman Catholic Church has a lot of intellectual capital built up over two thousand years, and as a subject of that church, who joined it as an adult, Vance know that and should at least pretend to respect it.  It's his problem, not mine.

Derek Guy, whose timeline inspired that meme and that screeching, had a much more measured take.

Truly remarkable how many people have told the Pope, in some way or another, to "shut up and dribble." Or corrected him on the Bible, despite their thin education on theology. Or told him to stay out of US affairs, despite him being a US citizen. The hubris is amazing.

It's not just the Pope. I would never dream of correcting an Imam or a Harvard law professor about their fields of study using some bullshit I read using ChatGPT. Some people lack an appreciation for the depth of their own ignorance because they don't have expertise in anything.

I agree to an extent; after all, the same people who are telling Leo to shut up are telling him to defer to the political wisdom of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio - a bunch of clowns who have no wisdom at all, whose incompetence is plain to see every day. Or they tell him to focus on morality instead of politics, as if they were mutually irrelevant spheres, as if an illegal war and terror against civilians had nothing to do with morality.  And, as Derek mentions, Leo is an American citizen, though he doesn't need to be one to criticize the US or any other country. He's also a head of state, of the Vatican City, and as such is a politician as well as a cleric.

I'm an atheist, though, and while I'll acknowledge Leo's learning, I'm not bound to defer to it.  His claims about his god and war are simply absurd.  The Bible contains many instances where Yahweh orders war, orders the massacre of entire populations and the enslavement of others.  But Leo doesn't care about that any more than Trump cares about his own falsehood.  He's laying down doctrine on his authority. (He's not declaring it ex cathedra, so he's not even claiming to be infallible - not that he would be.)  But only Catholics are bound by his authority.  Derek's reference to Harvard law professors is unfortunate too, since prominent Harvard law professors have made wildly false claims about the law.  I'm thinking, for example, of Obama's "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Nor do I feel any obligation, or even temptation, to defer to Leo's positions on homosexuality, abortion, contraception, women in the clergy, or other matters. I know that the Pope, or any other learned Catholic, can churn up a flurry of learned arguments to support those positions; I don't care.  These are not matters to be settled by scholastic discourse, and the justifications for them change as the church's positions change. Think of slavery, which the church not only used to justify but practiced.

Another response to Vance's insubordination has been some version of this:

QuoProQuid is a queer Catholic game designer whose posts I read regularly.  Mason Mennenga is a nice liberal Christian whose posts I see only intermittently.  His picture of lifelong Latin American Catholics is as much of a caricature as his picture of adult American converts. Most of not all of the worst right-wing Latin American dictators were lifelong Catholics; it didn't keep them from killing and raping and torturing - nor did it keep previous Popes (and American presidents) from being good buddies with them.  

I'm glad that Leo is opposing Trump and the war, but that means he's on my side (and the side of many other non-Catholics), not that I'm on his.  It's certainly a PR problem for Trump, and will further erode his already slipping support.  His base will stand fanatically firm, but not everyone who voted for him is in his base. I'm not indignant, as many atheists are, that Trump is attacking "an American Pope," as NPR's anchor people keep putting it - his nationality makes no more difference than his religion.  These details make it harder for Trump's insults to land. I don't mind Vance's insubordination against his religious superior, only that his criticisms are so inept; but who would expect any better from him?  Leo's low-key delivery of his criticism is pleasant too, but I don't make the liberal mistake of confusing moderation of tone with moderation of content.

The flip-flopping works both ways, as usual.  The same liberals who cheer Leo's denunciation of war were mostly silent when Obama bombed wedding parties and turned Libya into a slave market.  Many of them supported George W. Bush's wars too, and many embraced Israeli atrocities until they began to hurt their own chances of election or re-election.  The quality of mainstream discussion on these matters is, as usual, abysmal; and getting worse.

Theater of the Absurd

CECILY.
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

[Enter Algernon, very gay and debonair.] He does!

[The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde] 

We live in interesting times, don't we?  It has been entertaining to watch the fuss over Pope Leo's opposition to war and the MAGA Right's fury over it, with JD Vance (a Roman Catholic convert) and other Trump toadies joining Trump in his outrage at Leo.  It's been less entertaining to see various non-MAGA non-Catholics cheering Leo on, expressing their outrage that anyone should dare to oppose the Holy Father.

Then, during the night, Trump posted another incoherent rant against Leo on his social media platform, adding an AI-generated image of himself in conventional Jesus robes, laying hands on a sick bedridden man who could be Uncle Sam or possibly Jeffrey Epstein.  Someone deleted the image soon afterward, but by then it had been copied and gone viral.  Trump later told reporters that he thought the image showed him as a doctor, and he was paying tribute to the Red Cross.

Naturally, many in Trump's base rallied to defend him, saying that obviously the image didn't depict him as Jesus, but it seems that he'd finally managed to upset a good number of his fans. The word "blasphemy" was flung around.  Trump's advisor Laura Loomer pointed out correctly that the US doesn't have blasphemy laws, advising Trump's critics to move to an Islamic country where the charge would have legal consequences. Nice try, but numerous Christian countries also have laws against blasphemy.

Still, it's been weird watching religious liberals and even atheists, like Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta, in a snit over Trump's "blasphemy."  It doesn't seem that they're just pointing out Trump's hypocrisy.  Many of them seem to be sincerely outraged by his cloaking himself in religious imagery, as they are by his daring to speak harshly to the leader of a billion Catholics.

I approve of Leo's stance in this case, but since he's still the head of an antigay hate group, it's not because I recognize his moral authority.  This declaration of his, for example, is as laughable as anything Trump has spewed online: 

Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood" (Is 1:15). 

(Offer not good during the Crusades, the Spanish Armada sailing to England, or the Spanish invasion of the New World.)

I also support Leo's refusal to be cowed by Trump's ranting against him.  He's one of the few European heads of state who hasn't tried to make nice with Trump, hasn't offered him a shiny gold trinket to appease him.

Anybody has the right to disagree with, criticize, or protest a Pope or a President.  It's depressing, indeed infuriating, to see so many people who aren't Catholic or even theists demanding that Trump respect the Pontiff's autoritah. I must say, though, I wonder what is going through Melania Trump's mind today. She's a Catholic, though she married Trump in an Episcopal ceremony. Coming so soon after her tirade against Jeffrey Epstein, today's circus must be putting some strain on her determination to stand by her man.

All Animal Farm Adaptations Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

I've been hearing about Andy Serkis's animated version of George Orwell's satirical fable Animal Farm for some time now.  Apparently it's been in development for a long time, but the time is now fulfilled, and the release is at hand.  I barely remember the two previous versions (from 1954 and 1999), except that they were pretty bad, toning down the book's anti-capitalist assumption.  I say "assumption" rather than "message," because the story takes for granted that capitalism (represented by the human farmers) is evil.  The remarkable thing about its mainstream reception is that its anti-communist fans completely missed that assumption.

So I didn't expect much from this new adaptation.  The occasional reports I saw didn't say much about its fidelity to the original.  But this weekend the Algorithm recommended a story about it from Deseret News, a Latter-Day-Saints newspaper.  It was even more clueless about Animal Farm than the book's Cold War boosters:

In the final scene of George Orwell’s 1945 satirical novella “Animal Farm,” animal workers watch through a window as their ruling pigs and the human farmers drunkenly play cards, and they can no longer tell them apart. The moment is grim and impactful.

The image exposes the cracks beneath Marxism’s utopian promise. 

... The upcoming animated adaptation of “Animal Farm,” directed by “Lord of the Rings” actor Andy Serkis, transforms Orwell’s sharp critique of communism into a lighthearted, family-friendly story — and casts capitalism as the villain.

Wait, what?  Capitalism is the villain in the original tale, but I can't remember encountering such blatant denial about that before.  It's not the only villain, of course: Napoleon and the other pigs, who happily embrace greed and ultimately become indistinguishable from their human neighbors, are also villains, but is it really so hard to grasp that there's more than one group of bad guys involved?  If Orwell thought capitalism benign, that final scene would be the happy ending this article's writer claims Serkis imposed on his version.  Nobody makes that mistake - everybody knows the outcome is bad - but it seems to be almost impossible to recognize why it's bad.  Similarly, the writer of an introduction to a print edition of Animal Farm (I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge) wrote that already in 1946, when the book was first published, "it was becoming brutally clear that wartime hopes of peacetime cooperation between the West and Russia had been dangerously naive."  Orwell coined a word for this sort of ideological self-discipline in his later novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: "doublethink."

I learned from the Deseret article that Serkis invented a new human character who seduced Napoleon into embracing sinful luxury; also that [SPOILER ALERT] when Napoleon first stands on his hind legs, "flatulence erupts, amusing the kids and reminding adults how low Serkis will go to get a laugh" according to Variety. Well, kids and not a few adults love fart jokes, so I suppose this is what Serkis meant when he said he'd tried to make the film more "family-friendly."

Deseret quoted "One commenter [who] criticized Hollywood, writing, “Hollywood is incapable of critiquing anything other than capitalism.”  Have any of these people ever read Animal Farm?  Do they know anything about Orwell and his politics?  As I said earlier, he didn't explicitly "critique" capitalism in the story, he took for granted that it was exploitative and generally immoral. I think I can safely skip watching this film.

Swing Battuh Battuh Battuh, Swing

 

This sort of slop isn't the product of partisan thinking. It's a product of not being able to think at all.  When news outlets assign sports reporters who see everything through the lens of elite corporate sports to cover serious news, this is what you get.

I'd already heard NPR's Scott Simon and Franco Ordoñez do a more restrained version of the same thing on Weekend Edition today:

ORDOÑEZ: ... And again, as you noted, it comes as American and Iranian teams are meeting in Pakistan for peace talks led by the vice president, Vance. You know, they kicked off this morning between the U.S., Iran and Pakistan, which of course is serving as host and intermediary for the talks.

SIMON: To state the obvious, I suppose, this seems like a huge test for Vice President Vance.

ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, very much so. I mean, perhaps the most significant of his political career. I mean, it'll be a defining factor as he looks ahead to a, you know, possible run for the White House himself. 

But there is no joy in Mudville, mighty JD has struck out.  Does this mean he'll be sent back to the minors, or will he just be benched for awhile?

 

An Elephant's Faithful, One Hundred Percent

Some people are still trying to defend liberal / centrist Democrats for being angry that Trump didn't annihilate Iran. You know, they didn't really want the war, they were just angry because he didn't have a plan.  Trump never has a plan; he's always just winging it, he can't remember what he said from one end of a sentence to the other, and he just expects everyone else to have the same convenient amnesia.

But not having a plan is not these Democrats' main complaint.  The core is that Iran hasn't been crushed yet.  As Senator Shaheen complained, "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out." What does one have to do with the other?  Under international law, Iran has the right of self-defense (hence the missiles), and also the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes (despite all the bipartisan alarmism, there is no evidence that Iran has enriched uranium for weapons).

Senator Chuck Schumer used the same talking points: "Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated". Because Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA, and Biden didn't rejoin it, Iran is no longer bound or "checked" by the limitations it imposed. Its leaders may well have decided that getting nuclear weapons for self-defense, like so many other countries, is a good idea (though to repeat, there still is no evidence that they were doing so). Nor does the US have any right under international law to bomb Iran to make it  comply with our imperial demands.

As one online weirdo put it, "if i was a prominent democrat politician i would be saying stuff like 'Israel is fucking up your amazing peace & ceasefire deal on purpose mr. president! they think you're a sucker, show them who's boss!' instead of like 'He didn't even nuke iran lol. Is he gay??' but whatever [i guess]" It's true, as Senator Chris Murphy complained, that Trump is incompetent - but so is the Democratic leadership.  This is an old complaint of mine, going back at least to the Obama years, that these cute, supposedly media-savvy solons -- at least they have hired media-savvy staff -- are so tin-eared, so clueless, so unprepared.  Obama was consistently surprised that the Republicans wouldn't play nice, and instead of thinking creatively about how to stymie them, he would just let them have their way.

But like, you know, "by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility."  I mean, the President promised to wipe out Iran, and it looks really bad if he doesn't keep his promise.  It's not that these people want war, though they do, it's that a promise is a promise and America's word is its bond.

I suddenly remembered the biblical book of Jonah, because we atheist leftists can quote scripture to our purpose.  Everybody knows about Jonah being swallowed by a big fish and then being vomited up onto dry land, but how many remember the context?  Briefly, Jonah was a prophet, which was a thing in those days, and Yahweh told him to go to the non-Israelite city of Nineveh and threaten it with destruction if it didn't repent.  Jonah ran away, because if the Ninevites repented the prophecy would be falsified, and in the course of his flight he ended up in the belly of the great fish, which brought him to Nineveh and spewed him out.  So Jonah went in and proclaimed, "Yet thirty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"

The King of Nineveh heard, and commanded general repentance, so Yahweh changed his mind and didn't destroy Nineveh.  Jonah was very upset by this.  He left the city and built himself a booth in whose shadow he sulked.  Yahweh caused a gourd plant to grow up overnight and give him some shade, then made it wither and made Jonah uncomfortable.  Drama queen that he was, he said he wanted to die.

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle? 

This is obviously out of character for Yahweh, who would ordinarily be perfectly happy to kill 120,000 heathen children plus adults and "also much cattle," so you know this story is a fable.  But it's a good one, and its point is relevant today.  Don't worry, I'm not getting religion.  But I'll use any material that is pertinent.