No Soap

The year 2022 has started slowly for courtroom watchers after 2021 ended with a splash. The biggie in December was the verdict in the sex abuse trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was found guilty on 5 of 6 counts, including sex trafficking of a minor. 

I, like many (most? all?) of you, eagerly followed the daily dispatches coming out of the courtroom. The final summings-up by reporters who daily attended the trial indicated that they believed that the jurors had correctly found Maxwell guilty. For example, Naomi Fry in The New Yorker stated, “The government’s case . . . was damning.”* And this was the view of Choire Sicha, who followed the trial for New York magazine:

A full not-guilty slate would have been shattering. What if four women had presented coherent, believable, similar, interlocking stories about abuse that was, at very best, facilitated by Ghislaine Maxwell — and a jury hadn’t agreed she was at fault? Awful.**

My reading of the case agreed.

*

But I have no interest in discussing the case itself here. What I latched onto in Fry’s article was the view of Maxwell’s character Fry determined from observing her courtroom demeanor. Fry cited Maxwell’s “brand of chilly hauteur.”

Maxwell remained sphinxlike throughout the trial, expressing no frailty and certainly no regret. 

And for Fry, worst of all,

[w]hen the jury announced its verdict, Maxwell, who was wearing a black mask and dark clothing, sat very still. According to the Times she took a sip of water and touched her face briefly, before being ushered out of the courtroom. At no point did she betray any emotion.

Sicha called her, “A reactionless Ghislaine Maxwell.”

*

While the Maxwell trial was proceeding in New York City, on the left coast another fascinating courtroom case was taking place: the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the blood-testing company Theranos, who was accused of fraud. A few days after the New York jury found Maxwell guilty on 5 of 6 counts, Holmes was found guilty on 4 of 11 counts of fraud, not guilty on another 4, while the panel could not agree on a verdict on the other 3 counts.***

While the verdict was being read, the Times tells us, Holmes

sat motionless. Then she gathered her belongings and whispered to her lawyer. She went down the row of family and friends in the court gallery behind her, hugging each one before leaving through a side door.

*

In both cases, the defendant, when found guilty, did not exhibit any emotion—no soap opera histrionics, rending of garments, tears or shrieks. For Fry, Maxwell’s demeanor was a display of what the title of her article called Maxwell’s “relentless ego.” 

This was a woman [Fry wrote] who has long acted, and has continued to act, as if she had absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

Fry even found fault in Maxwell’s contention that she need not testify, because 

"the government has not proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and so there is no need for me to testify."

While we may never know whether that refusal hurt her defense, certainly Maxwell was within her rights to challenge the government to make its case. Perhaps it was legal judgment (or gamble), not ego, that persuaded Maxwell to decline.

*

One who does show his feelings (of grief) is Hamlet. Clad in an “inky cloak” and “suits of solemn black” and emitting sighs and tears, he, nevertheless, asserts that what he is really feeling no one can know: “I have that within which passeth show.” 

Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'

'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play:

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(Act I, Scene 2)

The lesson that Naomi Fry and others should take away from Hamlet is the old saw “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” The lack of emotional display by Ghislaine Maxwell (and Elizabeth Holmes) was not necessarily due to ego or hauteur (it might even have been stoicism). 

Find the women guilty of their crimes, if you wish, but don’t claim to read people's minds or to determine their inner emotions through their outward demeanor. They may have "that within which passeth show."

***

 *  https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-relentless-ego-of-ghislaine-maxwell

**  https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-it-doesnt-matter-why-she-did-it.html   

***  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/03/technology/elizabeth-holmes-guilty.html

(What impressed me about the verdicts in both cases was that the jurors obviously took great pains to consider the implications of each accusation, and did not just toss a blanket guilty or not guilty judgment over the cases. It made me feel good about my fellow citizens.) 

My New Job

I’m confident that I will be starting a new job soon.

Justice Stephen Breyer has announced that he is retiring from the highest judicial panel in the country. I have tossed my hat into the ring as a candidate for the position. 

I will explain below why I am confident that I will get the nod, but first let me go back in time. After I retired from college teaching at the end of 2000, I was content to sit back and perform no other job. But after some time passed, I began to get antsy. I had to do something. However, it seemed that the only job available was as a greeter at Walmart. My ego would not let me take that job; it would have been a great comedown after having achieved the highest academic rank of full professor. I needed something at the top of the heap.

On February 28, 2013, I saw my opportunity: Pope Benedict resigned as leader of the Catholic church. Surely, the Roman folks would recognize my great administrative skills—as exemplified by my terms as English Department chairman. 

Alas, it was not to be. The church’s cardinals elected Jorge Mario Bergoglio, an Argentine member of the Society of Jesus. While Bergoglio, I was sure, had fine credentials, I viewed his election as rank discrimination—specifically, ageism. Bergoglio was chosen because he was exactly four days younger than me! At first, I vowed to fight the appointment on the grounds of discrimination, but, after due consideration, I could not determine where to file my lawsuit; certainly, my case would have no standing in any United States jurisdiction, and fighting it in Vatican City seemed like a lost cause from the start. 

No other job opening appealed to me until Justice Breyer’s announcement. I should be a member of the Supreme Court. (I could explain why, but I am too modest to boast of my fairness and judgment.) I admit that at 85 years of age I am two years older than the retiring justice. However, by nominating me, President Biden would be striking a blow against the vicious bigotry of ageism. And for that reason alone, the world—and the Court—would be better places.

And I am ready to pay for my own robe!

 

Into the Wilderness

I have just discovered why I have had lack of success in my life; I have never had anyone on whom I could blame my lack of success. I have not had a scapegoat.

Consider Novak Djokovic. A great tennis player but also a great schmuck.* He has just been booted out of Australia, where he wished to pursue his tenth men’s singles title at the Australian Open, for not being vaccinated and for (let’s be nice and call them) “misstatements” on his visa application. And who was to blame for the errors on the application? Certainly not Djokovic. It was his “agent” and his “support team.”

Novak Djokovic has blamed his agent for an “administrative mistake” when declaring he had not travelled in the two weeks before his flight to Australia and acknowledged an “error of judgment” by not isolating after he tested positive for Covid.

The world No 1 released a statement on Wednesday in a bid to address what he called “continuing misinformation” about his activities in December before he came to Australia in a bid to retain his Australian Open crown. . . .

Djokovic said the incorrect pre-travel declaration of 1 January was “submitted by my support team on my behalf”.

“My agent sincerely apologises for the administrative mistake in ticking the incorrect box about my previous travel before coming to Australia. This was a human error and certainly not deliberate.”**

So, there’s the support team thrown under the bus.

*

Five years ago to the day, I wrote a blog post about plagiarism and the excuses that are forthcoming when the stealing is outed.*** I did not at that time directly cite instances when the convenient scapegoat was produced. He/she was usually a hired researcher, go-fer, or typist who allegedly practiced one-handed shuffling with the author’s file cards. And the anonymous scapegoat, bearing the sins, was released into the wilderness, while the author him/herself attempted to remain in the tabernacle.****

*

You remember the story (apocryphal, of course) about young George Washington and the cherry tree. If George were alive today, the dialogue about the tree would go like this:

Washington Senior: Who chopped down the cherry tree?

Georgie: I cannot tell a lie. It was the gardener.

***

* "There was his encounter with Dr. Igor Cetojevic, a Bosnian Serb, who, while watching Djokovic on TV during the 2010 Australian Open, became convinced that the player’s need for medical time-outs had nothing to do with asthma, as some thought, but with too much gluten in his diet. Not long after, Cetojevic met Djokovic in Croatia, during the Davis Cup, where he asked Djokovic to raise his right arm twice, once while holding, in his left hand, a slice of bread to his belly; the exercise convinced Djokovic that his muscles were weaker when proximate to wheat. There was also, in 2016, his hiring of Pepe Imaz, a Spanish coach who evangelized about the transformative power of long hugs. More recently, there was Djokovic’s friendship with the wellness entrepreneur Chervin Jafarieh, who talks of having lived in jungles and among shamans, sells supplements and elixirs, and, in May of 2020, listened approvingly during an Instagram Live conversation as Djokovic explained that polluted water can be purified by human consciousness, because water molecules 'react to our emotions, to what is being said.'”

https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/djokovics-strange-australian-odyssey

** https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jan/12/novak-djokovic-statement-blames-agent-for-australia-paperwork-mistake-covid-positive-test-result

*** https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-dog-ate-my-file-cabinet.html

**** [H]e shall take the two goats, and present them before the Lord at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation.

And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.

And Aaron shall bring the goat upon which the Lord's lot fell, and offer him for a sin offering.

But the goat, on which the lot fell to be the scapegoat, shall be presented alive before the Lord, to make an atonement with him, and to let him go for a scapegoat into the wilderness.

Leviticus 16

Stars and Stripes

I have just finished reading The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, an account of the creation of the renowned Oxford English Dictionary. The “Professor” was James Murray, the editor of the work, the “Madman,” Dr. William Chester Minor, an American army surgeon who killed a man in London and, having been found not guilty by reason of insanity, spent all save the last year of his life thereafter in mental asylums, but who contributed many citations to the project.

Reflecting on the book, I discovered that I had no real talent for fashioning dictionary definitions. Thus, I am at a complete loss to engage in a lengthy debate with those personages who are advocating that schools in the United States teach “Americanism” in a battle to combat the alleged nefarious instruction accompanying new looks at American history.

There are those who seemingly would put “Freedom” foremost in their definition of Americanism. On the one hand, the term has been appropriated by the worst reactionary politicians of the Republican Party (the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives, for example). On the other hand, while the American national anthem boasts of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,” the anthem of our northern neighbors, who stuck with King George, asserts that they are “The True North, strong and free.” Since both North American countries claim the same thing, I dismiss “Freedom” (however interpreted) as a defining factor of Americanism.

What I have come up with as the essence of Americanism (my limited ability could take me only so far) is the concept of Government by Consent of the Governed, which means fair elections open to all citizens who are to be ruled by the elected. (Somehow, it seems that many of the advocates of “Freedom” are working to subvert this concept.) In a fair election one person’s vote counts as much as the next person’s. They are unintimidated by outside forces, and their vote is unimpeded by political contrivance. The vote count is supervised by impartial observers. The person with the most votes wins; the loser concedes, maybe to prevail the next time. For Americanism, there must be a next time.

*

I once lost an election by one vote. It turned out, however, that two ballots had arrived in the mail after the set deadline. I was urged by someone who had a personal dislike of the other candidate to appeal, to try to make the late ballots be counted. I refused. The rules were the rules. And according to the rules, I lost. End of story. 

Let Them Eat Cake!

I think of libertarian tech engineers, and there are plenty, who separate ideas into categories, making command paths through logic, feeling quite freed up to do so. Then, politics seem to follow: Do this, get that. Don’t do this, don’t get that. Clean and simple. In America, they’d call it the Rush Limbaugh effect, typically displayed in tenth-grade boys. Someone doesn’t work? The state shouldn’t give him money. If he doesn’t work, there are no entitlements. Oh, he’s disabled? Well, too bad. Oh, he’s a war veteran? Well, that war is over now.

Frances McCue*

*

I have just finished reading the single best article of the year: “In the Shadow of the Poor Law” by Stewart Lansley. Published in the January 2022 issue of History Today,** the article analyzes Great Britain’s laws dealing with the poor and their poverty and eviscerates the attitudes and thinking that lay behind the failure to improve their lot. As the subtitle of the article states, “Britain has been a high inequality, high poverty nation for most of the last 200 years.”

There was a decades-old quote that went either “Thatcherism is Reaganomics with knobs on” or “Reaganomics is Thatcherism with knobs on.” I don’t remember which way it went (and a Google search didn’t help). But the important point is that what Lansley shows about Britain’s callousness toward the poor was similar to the policy of the American government that flowered during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and has led to the gross inequality we experience today in this country.

I will not attempt to quote from Lansley’s article; it would take up the rest of this post. Instead, I urge you to read the article itself (the link is below). And see if you agree with me on its importance.

*

Let me end this brief post with Steven Nadler’s summation of Spinoza’s view of religion:

Being truly religious is not a matter of what you believe or how or where or even if you pray. Rather, it consists only in following the simple moral precept to love your neighbour, to act towards all with justice and charity.***

***

* https://www.thesmartset.com/what-yeats-has-to-do-with-it/

** https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/shadow-poor-law

***  https://literaryreview.co.uk/letting-go-of-god

   

Hammer and Tongues

As the saying goes: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 

Republican and fellow rightwing hammerheads have been busily banging away at imaginary nails. Take Ronny Jackson, for example. An MD who once claimed that Trump was the paragon of physical fitness, Johnson is now a Member of Congress representing (where else?) Texas. Seeing the Democratic party as a nail head, Johnson brought his tool down mightily: 

Here comes the MEV - the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election . . . ,

he tweeted.*

Somehow this alleged man of science (aren’t doctors supposed to be men of science?) didn’t give a logical explanation of why his claimed bogus COVID variant needed to take a route from South Africa to Europe before being sprung on gullible US voters. Or why it is that non-bogus people are dying from a bogus disease. I wonder in what medical school class one learns to finesse such questions.

¶

This is what people say to me: he doesn’t represent science, he represents Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps.

Thus, Fox Nation host Lara Logan offering a comparison between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.**

Logan’s playing of Whack-a-mole, using her hammer on the pate of the distinguished director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a very advanced example of weaseldom. Note that she doesn’t say that she herself  is making the comparison; she is allegedly only repeating “what people say to me.” She claims, “People all across the world are saying this.” I haven’t heard that in my part of the world, but, then again, I don’t have much to do with crazies. Apparently, Logan does, but don’t blame her for what she hears and repeats—because, weaselly, she doesn’t dare say it directly.

¶

Tucker Carlson is not a man who is going to be outflanked by the likes of a Lara Logan. He gets out his hammer for Fauci’s noggin and disdains any weaseling. He will own up to his whacking. 

If you haven’t checked in on Tony Fauci lately, you may be a little surprised to discover what he’s become . . . . After two years of being nonstop media adulation, Tony Fauci has morphed into an even shorter version of Benito Mussolini.***

(Whether it is worse to be banged on the head for being a Mengele or a Mussolini, I leave up to you.)

Carlson subtly engages in a cute bit of anti-Italian bigotry here (and, considering his record on immigration, perhaps something of a warning against southern Europeans in general). 

¶

Time, I think, to take away the toolbox from the wingnuts. Though I think someone should first take a monkey wrench and tighten the screws that are loose. 

***

*  https://news.yahoo.com/white-house-doctor-raved-trumps-024430725.html

**  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/fox-news-lara-logan-compares-015448939.html

***  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tucker-carlson-makes-unhinged-comparison-123650608.html

   

Get Real

Sixty years ago, the Oscar for best short subject (cartoon) went to a Yugoslavian filmmaker named Dušan Vukotić. The winning film called “Surogat” (re-named in the US “Ersatz”) was a cartoon fantasy in which the whole world was unreal—it was brought to life by a bicycle pump. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjWXxfZ252I

I think we can thankfully say that over the last six decades there has been some room for the true and the beautiful to breathe, though it seems that space continues to narrow. 

The latest massive effort by the fake and artificial to conquer the world has been evident in the aisles of our favorite supermarkets: the un-meat movement. Fake food is not a new phenomenon. Imitation crabmeat, for example, elbowed its way some time ago into the fish department of the markets. But that was equivalent to Claudius’s sorrows coming in “single spies”; now we have his “battalions.” 

The new fake meat movement seems to pride itself on being “plant-based.” My reaction to that is to proclaim that if God had meant for me to dine on grass, He would have made me a cow. And as a cow, I would have doted on the grassiness of the grass, and not cared a jot that it didn’t come to my feedbox in the costume party disguise of a hamburger or a pork chop. 

*

The man with the hammer treats everything as a nail, the saying goes. Something like that seems to be afflicting Eleven Madison Park in its new vegan incarnation. The restaurant’s chef and owner, Daniel Humm, is using the skills he brought to meat and seafood to whack away at vegetables.

Thus began Pete Wells in his New York Times review* [Take it from me, the whole review will be your best entertainment of the month.] of the $335 menu offerings at the above-referenced eating place. 

Almost none of the main ingredients taste quite like themselves . . . . Some are so obviously standing in for meat or fish that you almost feel sorry for them.

A beet is made to stand in for a duck; the result being something that “tastes like Lemon Pledge and smells like a burning joint.” Wells wonders if a the summer-squash dish he was served was a stand-in for a lobster. 

The ingredients look normal until you take a bite and realize you’ve entered the plant kingdom’s uncanny valley.

*

I confess that today I ate radishes, scallions, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, and onions—and guess what? They tasted like radishes, scallions, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, and onions. And the chicken tasted like chicken.

*

The other day I was assaulted by a network promo for a show called, if I remember correctly, “Battle of the Tribute Bands.” That has to rate in the 800s on the FICO scale of ersatzness. If the show is, as I presume, a crap contest like so many others on the telly, one’s mind boggles at the attempt to determine which of the fake acts is most unersatziest.   

*

Over a century-and-a-half ago, Lewis Carroll put the mock on the mock, with his particular logic:

Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to Alice, “Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?”

“No,” said Alice. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is.”

“It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,” said the Queen.

 

***

* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/dining/eleven-madison-park-restaurant-review-plant-based.html?searchResultPosition=6