Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable.
- Christopher Howse: 'A Pilgrim in Spain*
The Bloody Virus - We see more confirmation that Covid-19 transmission is primarily an indoor phenomenon. An interesting article highlights the use of "open air" treatment in the 1918 flu pandemic. In one report, it is said that this therapy reduced deaths among hospital patients from 40 to about 13 percent. . . In terms of this pandemic, we have already seem that much of the infection is passed between family groups (where one can also take care homes to be analogous of family groups). . . . We can see many of the points made earlier being reinforced, where we also see some emphasis on time of exposure. The fleeting contact assumes less and less importance. . .All of this suggests that the simplistic policy of the UK government, telling people to "stay at home" is precisely the wrong thing to do, unless it is backed up by an aggressive policy of tracing, testing and isolation – which so far has not been in force.
- Essential reading if you're thinking of stepping into water. Though perhaps not if it's only in your bath at home.
- I was surprised to read last night, firstly that the 'elderly' aren't allowed to meet with other folk during Phase 1, and, secondly, that 'elderly' is defined in Spain as 65+. In contrast with the WHO's age of 80. One wonders how much this will be observed in private homes. And how on earth it can be policed
- María's Chronicle: Day 56. Good riddance to El Niño.
- I'm told by the (nice) lady who produced the video cited here yesterday that it has been revised and will be up again soon. Possibly by the time you read this.
- The reputation of the USA has taken a big hit during the coronavirus crisis, according to a new survey. Just 28%of Brit polled in late April and early May said they now trusted the U.S. "to act responsibly in the world," down 13 percentage points since January. The drop was most notable among [right wing] Conservative Party voters, who were previously more likely to have faith in Washington. Jilted, it seems.
- My god! Things just be bad for Fart if even the execrable Piers Morgan turns against him. Changing his own image in the British media overnight.
- I asked the other day if Fart's re-election would suggest that the USA was effectively a Third World country. This was echoed in the book review I included yesterday . . . If the American people decide to re-elect Trump, Drezner writes, then they, not he, are the real toddlers. They would be proving that they have become infantilised: “developmentally delayed”.
- Two more book reviews below. I really wish I could jump ahead 50 years and read a history written then of the Fart years. And those that followed. How much and how fast will the American empire have declined by then?
- New word for me: videographer.
- Nice to see - for the first time as I recall - a couple of what I thought were pied wagtails in my garden yesterday, though research suggests they might well have been the mainland Europe (paler) version - the white wagtail.
The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers— is Trump beyond parody?
It’s hard to satirise the US president but this tale entertains reviewer Johanna Thomas-Corr
Is satire possible, or even useful, in the Donald Trump era? The 45th president of the USA ought to represent a comedy windfall — the hands, the skin, the hair — but there’s so much low-hanging fruit, it can leave you feeling a bit queasy. Howard Jacobson said that he regretted rushing out his 2017 novella Pussy, a scabrous tale of a vulgar, pampered Trump surrogate. Few other fiction writers have since tried. How do you parody that which is beyond parody?
Dave Eggers’s solution is to fight funny with funny. If the commander-in-chief is a product of the entertainment industry, let’s bring him down entertainingly, he seems to be saying. In The Captain and the Glory, he charts the oceanic lunacy ofthe Trump presidency with a hugely enjoyable parable about a clownish, calamitous, cheeseburger-chomping captain who steers a noble ship towards disaster. “When there was no reason to lie, he lied. He lied about the time of day while standing under a clock,” Eggers writes. You could call it a satire but this 114-page novella reads more like a nautically themed summary of the past three years.
Boats are inherently hilarious. They just are. I don’t know about you, but even the word “dinghy” makes me laugh. And the writing works because Eggers doesn’t try to be too sly or cerebral. The tone is cartoonish and naive and the illustrations by Nathaniel Russell are childlike, but sinister, reminiscent of a Hilaire Belloc story.
The book opens as the good ship Glory bids farewell to its “kind and unflappable” old captain and a “large and lumpy” ignoramus with a yellow feather in his hair pushes himself forward for the job. He has no qualifications, but many of the passengers think it would be “refreshing” to have a “known moron” take charge of the 300,000-ton vessel. It would prove that any old imbecile can grow up to be captain in this classless society.
And he really is a man with no class: a groper, a fantasist, a coward. When the Glory comes under fire, he hides in its bowels, flicking through pornographic magazines and fantasising about his enterprising young daughter. When she suggests they consult the ship’s manual, he lobs it into the sea. Instead, he relies on a band of thieves and confidence tricksters known as “the Upskirt Boys” (“Paul the Manafort” and “Michael the Cohen” among them). They believe that all truths are “elitist lies” perpetrated by enemies who read books. Book readers are people who can’t get erections, according to the captain’s most trusted adviser, a voice that emerges from an air vent in his bedroom.
The voice (which sounds a lot like Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to Trump) tells him that clouds filled with chemicals reduce sperm count and that most forks are covered in pubic hair. He also convinces him that the Glory is overcrowded and can pick up no new passengers. “The ship’s most essential passengers are you and your daughter and your daughter’s doll, and also cops and soldiers, and pornographic models, and your lawyers. That’s pretty much it, and everyone else can go f*** themselves.”
The captain soon becomes bored (“Where the whales? He saw no whales”) so he starts shaking things up. Starboard becomes port and port starboard. Enemies get thrown into the sea. “Shaking things up held the promise, however irrational and unproven, that everything shaken, or tossed randomly into the air, might come down better. Somehow, in the flying and falling, steel might become gold, sadness might become triumph, what had been good might become bad.”
Eggers launched himself sensationally on the literary world in 2000 with his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Since then, the San Franciscan author of many books, including the dystopian tech novel The Circle, has become one of our era’s best chroniclers of unease.
The comedy of the latest book is broad. Like The Cockroach, Ian McEwan’s Brexit satire, The Captain and the Glory risks coming over as smug and condescending. Here the Trump voters chant “Drown the Brown” and dress in chicken outfits — they are literally foul. I also wasn’t convinced by the 13-year-old Greta Thunberg-like orphan, Ava, whose plea to restore dignity is a bit cheesy after so much black comedy.
Most satire preaches to the converted. As Jonathan Swift said: “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” But Eggers shows better comic timing than McEwan, and greater moral clarity too.
He knows you can’t just lampoon the culprit, you need to hold up a mirror to the whole society. His real target is moral hypocrisy. Many of the captain’s supporters see what a despicable human he is. But he serves their interests. And Eggers doesn’t miss a chance to take a dig at the Democrats either. Known as “the Kindly Mutineers”, they dither about putting themselves on the line to save the Glory. Eggers doesn’t have to exaggerate, he just has to pick and choose his details. The Captain and the Glory is funny because it’s true.
2. Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits: by James D. Zirin
How Trump is using the law as a tactical tool for his own advantage: Reviewer Jonathan Mance
A life in the law means continual variety. After briefly flirting with journalism, James Zirin served for three years as an assistant US attorney in New York under Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney.
Zirin then practised law for more than four decades in commercial and securities litigation. He has a prolific public role: on the Council for Foreign Relations and other bodies; as a legal and policy commentator; as a television interviewer; and now as an author of three intensely researched books.
The first, The Mother Court, introduces us to Roy Cohn, the brilliant but twisted US prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (who were executed in 1953 for espionage) and chief counsel to Senator McCarthy’s investigations in 1953-54. Censured in 1954 for “unduly persistent or aggressive efforts” to favour a friend, Cohn survived numerous acquittals in criminal proceedings during his fractious career, before finally being disbarred for unethical conduct, five weeks before his death in 1986. Donald Trump gave character evidence on his behalf.
Zirin’s second book, Supremely Partisan, published in 2016, warned presciently that the Republicans would have big fish to fry on the Supreme Court under a Trump administration.
Three years into a Trump administration, Zirin’s third book, Plaintiff in Chief, focuses on another aspect of the relationship between the president and the legal system: his deployment of the law as a tactical tool. It highlights the extraordinary enduring influence of Cohn’s attitudes over President Trump. Cohn’s was an attack-dog approach. Zirin writes: “Admit nothing, deny everything, lie, dissemble and prevaricate. Make false and scurrilous accusations to demonise your adversary. Drag it out as long as the courts will let you . . . [And] then settle for the best deal you can. Seal the settlement papers so that no one will know. Declare victory, bragging that you will never settle — and go home.”
Before becoming president, Trump had racked up more than 3,500 pieces of litigation, not to mention innumerable cease-and-desist letters. Zirin cites examples ranging from property development, casino ownership and operation, to the size of a flag and pole at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort, which he sought to convert into an issue about free speech.
The law for Trump, Zirin concludes, is not a system of rules to be obeyed and ethical ideals to be respected in the orderly pursuit of justice and truth. It is a potent weapon to be used against his adversaries or a hurdle to sidestep when in his way.
Cohn’s first advice to Trump in relation to a housing discrimination issue in 1973 was apparently: “Tell them to go to hell, and fight the thing in court.” Cohn’s attitude was “F*** the law, who’s the judge?”
In Trump’s eyes, the “Mexican heritage” of Judge Gonzalo Curiel, an Indiana-born American, disqualified him from deciding whether Trump University was “a basically fraudulent endeavour” and explained a number of “horrible rulings” against Trump. All because Judge Curiel might oppose Trump’s policy to build a wall.
Such attitudes have heightened relevance if one happens to have a role in selecting judges, occupies the highest executive office in the land and makes controversial decisions likely to be challenged in court.
As Zirin points out, Trump’s present problems, in the form of impeachment proceedings, will not be resolved judicially. They will be resolved politically, first by the House and Senate and in due course perhaps by the electorate at large.
However, plenty of opportunity remains in the meantime for battles in the federal courts about presidential powers and issues such as non-disclosure of records and tax returns. The latter might be a significant test for that court.
Trump has already been able to appoint two of the nine US Supreme Court justices, 43 of the 179 US Court of Appeals judges and 110 out of the 673 US district judges. There can be no doubt that he is, so far as he can, making full use of his power to shape a judiciary that he at least perceives as being in a favourable mould. How far it will so prove is another matter.
In the UK we have had media descriptions of judges as “enemies of the people” and recent calls for greater political involvement in judicial appointments.
Of course, individual judges do differ in their philosophy or approach, or in the way they evaluate competing values or interests. But as Lord Neuberger and Baroness Hale, successive presidents of the Supreme Court, emphasised in each of the Gina Miller cases, the judges’ role is to apply the law.
Judicial independence and the constraints of common training, precedent, peer influence, institutional loyalty and careful deliberation coupled with the requirements of explicit reasoning, open to public and peer review, are powerful limiters. To distort the system by seeking to elicit predilections in the form of a political “beauty parade” and to appoint accordingly would be to step back about 100 years. The US experience should be a cautionary warning.
Zirin is to be commended on a fully referenced and readable book in which his own sense of commitment to the rule of law, and disapproval of what he describes, are palpable. The roots and resilience of US institutions and culture are under test. It is in all our
interests that they stand firm.
*A terrible book, by the way. Don't be tempted to buy it, unless you're a very religious Protestant
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