Running Commentary

Dystopia Minus One

I was a guest at the year-end party of the New York Institute for the Humanities on Wednesday, where I got into a conversation with a couple of Brits now marooned as ex-pats in the benighted US. These are both learned men, world-weary you might even say, one a novelist, the other an author and editor of many books. They agreed that the possibilities residing in Trump’s lawless drive to establish the authoritarian powers of a unitary executive could well be “worse than fascism.” Hello?

I had suggested that the resistance would prevail, eventually, because Americans are so fiercely attached to their rights, both “natural” and those enumerated in the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Their response was, Yes, but that attachment makes violence in the streets more probable than not, and thus accelerates our arrival at a point of no return. Whew.

I’m headed for the “No Kings” demonstration tomorrow, of course, even though I do believe it’s long past time for marching in the streets. It begins again in Bryant Park, and I’ll be sure to share the pics with you again. I have to wonder what Eric Adams has in mind about how to police this gathering. Last time out the cops were few and friendly; this time they’ve almost certainly been encouraged if not instructed to look for “violent insurrectionists” to arrest.

Anyway. Here’s my running commentary at Facebook from the last two days:

Today, June 13. Israel can't "win" this war without troops or international authorities on the ground to verify the destruction of Iranian nuclear capability. That doesn't happen without US engagement. Israel is now fighting on three fronts with military personnel that are deductions from civilian productivity and materiel that is bought from the US. These are finite, irreplaceable resources. So the only plausible war aim we can ascribe to Israel is to complete the erasure of any distinction between its national interest and that of the US, a campaign begun by the ADL's denial of any difference between anti-Zionist and anti-semitic attitudes, programs, or utterance, and now being conducted in the specious attack on higher education. So the stupid, feckless "anti-war" candidate is drawn into a new forever war that can't be won, not even by pulling the nuclear trigger.

Thursday, June 12. It seems the Democratic leadership thinks that Trump's illegal and unconstitutional provocations in LA are a "distraction" from the so-called Big Beautiful Bill: Jeffries and Schumer want the attention focused on the basic "economic" issues raised by that legislation because they assume this is the only language working class people understand. That assumption is ridiculous, and politically suicidal, but not surprising. It is consistent with the notion that such people are uneducated deplorables from flyover country, louts and hillbillies who don't care about the abstractions inscribed in the Constitution. Sen Jim Banks of Indiana, a MAGA Republican moron, understands the vicious coherence of his party's message better than the sophisticated opposition from the coasts: "Indiana families are counting on those of us here in Congress to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill so that ICE has the resources it needs to continue deporting illegal aliens. We cannot let them down."