An obstinate ostinato in a time of oligarchy


Yamaha P-225 digital piano

Though in my younger days I had a piano for many years, it had been 20 years since I owned a piano. A rather large organ console now occupies all the musical space downstairs (not to mention the ten speaker cabinets upstairs). To have a real piano again was out of the question for lack of space. But I finally acquired the next best thing to a real piano — a pretty good digital piano. I put it in my bedroom, the warmest and best-lit part of the house during the winter because of the big gothic windows.

Even when I was well practiced and at my best, I was a humble intermediate-level musician. My limit was in technique, not so much my musicality. That is, I can hear better than I can play. Many times in the past I’ve gone several years hardly playing at all, and my keyboard skills fall apart. Still, there is something to playing an instrument that is like riding a bicycle. The skills never completely go away. A few months of diligent daily practice will bring it back. Recovering rusted technique is much quicker than developing that technique for the first time. I went up to the attic and found my piano music. After a few weeks of playing scales, over and over, for at least an hour a day, I should be able to once again relearn the pieces that I learned years ago.

Computer nerd that I am, I’m very interested in letting a computer (or just an iPhone) play the piano, using the magic of MIDI. MIDI files are easy to find on the internet. However, most of those MIDI files are computer-generated. They sound mechanical and lifeless. They hurt the ears. There are MIDI files played by human beings, though, if you can find them. The MIDI files are created on special pianos that record what the pianist does with great precision. When played back on an instrument such as the Yamaha P-225, it does indeed sound like a real person is playing the piano.

Between 2002 and 2018, Yamaha had annual piano competitions in which the players’ performances were recorded on a special Yamaha grand piano. Those competitions produced thousands of human-played MIDI files. The MIDI files disappeared off the internet, though. But with some digging I found that the files still exist in an internet archive. Also, a few dedicated souls retrieved all the files and organized them. I was able to find them, and I now have the entire library on my computer. Those who might be looking for those files can start here, at the internet archive.

I made another very useful discoverty. ChatGPT can read, edit, and write MIDI files. For example, in the Yamaha archive is a performance of Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat Major, Op. 90, D. 899. The pianist — probably a young one — pretty much murdered the piece by playing it too fast and much too heavy with the hands, particularly the left hand. That’s the kind of thing that can happen when a pianist has great technique but mediocre musicality. I had a fascinating discussion with ChatGPT about improving this performance. ChatGPT and I went through about ten iterations, in which ChatGPT made the MIDI changes I requested, and we ended up with a performance that is at least 75 percent as good as this performance by Khatia Buniatishvilli:

Many people have written about how to try to stay sane while the world is spiraling downward into fascism. Pretty much all agree that keeping civilization alive — even in small ways in our own homes — is an act of resistance.

Trump

Every day, the horrors seem to get worse. The Trump administration is trying to sell out Ukraine to Russia, with scum such as Jared Kushner in the middle of it, with plans to get rich off of looting Ukraine. Apparently Pete Hegseth gave a war-crime order to kill the survivors of a ship that had been blasted out of the water. Now they’re denying that Hegseth gave such an order, and they’re trying to throw an admiral under the bus for it. The new outrages have been so outragous that the media have temporarily forgotten Epstein.

There may be an upside. Republicans are starting to think about their political survival after Trump is gone. Trump has more than a year for more atrocities before a third impeachment becomes an option. Republicans seem to be learning that the political gains from ignoring Trump’s atrocities are starting to diminish. If Republicans have a brain, they’d support impeachment as soon as a new Congress convenes in 2027, and get rid of Trump for good. I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, how about a sonata or two.

A musical note: The words ostinato (Italian) and obstinate (English) come from the Latin obstinātus. The Italian word dropped the “B” as Latin consonant clusters were simplified. In music, ostinato refers to a musical pattern that keeps repeating, obstinately, even though the rest of the piece may have moved on — for example, an ostinato bass note or bass line.

One of the best known examples of ostinato pattern is the bass line that repeats over and over all the way through Pachelbell’s Canon in D. Listen to the cello:

And here you can see these notes in the score:

And here is something from Philip Glass, the patron saint of ostinato, in this case obstinately repeating arpeggios:

What just happened? Is there a fix in the works?

The media malpractice this morning is shocking. Yesterday the entire Congress voted almost unanimously to release the Epstein files. There is no way that such an event won’t end up as a major moment in American history. And yet, the New York Times’ web site this morning has the story way down below the middle of the page, with a small headline. Not only that, but the story is completely cowardly, all about politics in Congress without a word about what this means for the Trump presidency. The Times’ lousy, cowardly columnists, at least as of 7:30 a.m., were silent.

As usual these days, we have to look somewhere else for any helpful analysis. Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack post this morning was one of her history lessons, about Gettysburg. I had to do some digging around to discover that she posted a video late yesterday, before the Senate made its move. She pretty much covers what can confidently be said at this point.

I am a person who reads for information. It annoys the daylights out of me that the trends these days are more and more toward video. I detest video as a source of information. It moves too slowly. It can’t be quickly scanned for whether it contains anything relevant, the way text can be. Don’t people read anymore? It’s possible to download YouTube videos (with some special software), isolate the audio with an app such as VLC, then generate a transcript from the audio with an app such as MacWhisper — an awkward and time-consuming process. But at least it’s possible.

Anyway, in the video, Richardson discusses the question of whether it would be possible for Trump and his appointees to suppress or strip the Epstein files, if they actually are delivered. Her bottom line is that it would not be easy, because so many people know what’s in the files and because a unanimous Congress seems to be in no mood to tolerate any funny business. There probably are few people willing to be part of a cover-up for a president who is guilty as sin, who is weaker by the day, and who just might go down because of what is in the files. They can gamble on a Trump pardon, but now they know that a unified Congress (on the matter of the Epstein files, anyway) will subpoena as many people as necessary if there are any signs that the Epstein files have been tampered with.

I keep hoping that something of major importance happened yesterday. And yet Trump has slithered away from the law and the facts time and time again. Richardson says in the video that whatever happens, it’s going to take time. How sick are we of being patient for the spectacle of Donald J. Trump utterly destroyed, because of his own crimes?

Epstein aside, MAGA political calculus clearly is changing. Once the members of Congress calculate that Trump is more likely to cost them votes than to gain them votes, it will be every scumbag Republican for himself, every one of them. They don’t care whether Trump is a pervert and rapist. They’ve known that all along. All they cared about was riding the Trump wave — as long as that wave carried them up rather than down.

Update:

It took a while, but I transcribed the audio from the Heather Cox Richardson’s video (above) and asked ChatGPT to summarize it. Here are the results.

Summary of Heather Cox Richardson on the Epstein Files Bill

Heather Cox Richardson explains how the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill (427–1) to require the Department of Justice to release the FBI’s Epstein files, and what this reveals about Donald Trump’s weakening grip on the Republican Party and the difficulty of fully burying the Epstein story.

1. What the House just did

Shortly before Richardson went live, the House voted 427–1 to require the DOJ to release FBI files related to Jeffrey Epstein. These are not the same as the roughly 20,000 documents already released from the Epstein estate, which came via subpoena. The new bill targets the FBI’s investigative files, created after renewed scrutiny of Epstein around 2018.

2. How the bill got to the floor: the discharge petition

The key procedural tool was a discharge petition, which forces a vote once it has 218 signatures. After Democrat Adelita Grijalva was sworn in, she added the crucial signature, bringing the petition to 218.

Four Republicans signed the petition:

  • Nancy Mace
  • Lauren Boebert
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene
  • Thomas Massie

Trump and his allies put intense pressure on these Republicans to withdraw. They refused. Once a discharge petition is filed, it cannot be withdrawn, so the House was obliged to hold the vote.

3. Trump’s sudden reversal

Initially Trump fought to stop the bill. Then, on Sunday night, he abruptly announced that he didn’t care if the files were released, claiming he had nothing to hide and just wanted to “get it behind us.”

Richardson argues this is clearly tactical rather than sincere:

  • Trump has done everything possible to prevent disclosure of these FBI files.
  • The previously released estate documents already contain “career-ending” material, and he appears deeply implicated.
  • If he fears the FBI files more than the estate files, then those FBI materials are likely even more damaging.

The real reason for his reversal, she suggests, is that he had lost control of House Republicans. With rumors that up to 100 GOP members might back the bill and constituents demanding transparency, Trump tried to get in front of a vote he could no longer stop.

4. Trump’s weakening political position

Richardson stresses that many Republicans now fear being caught in a cover-up more than they fear Trump himself:

  • His mental acuity appears to be slipping in a way visible to the public.
  • His tariffs are economically damaging and may be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
  • His deportation raids are deeply unpopular.
  • His and his allies’ flirtation with open white nationalism (e.g., Nick Fuentes) is splintering the party.

Republicans are increasingly calculating based on their own political survival, rather than automatically aligning with Trump.

5. The Senate becomes the key arena

The bill now goes to the Senate. To move forward, it will almost certainly need 60 votes for cloture.

  • Democrats are expected to support it.
  • The question is whether enough Republicans will join them.

Some early signals are telling. Senator Tommy Tuberville, for example, has said he will vote for the measure now that Trump has publicly blessed it. Tuberville, eyeing a run for governor of Alabama, clearly fears that voting against the release would hurt him politically.

In short, Senate Republicans face the same dilemma as House Republicans: stay loyal to Trump or avoid being seen as complicit in hiding whatever is in the Epstein files.

6. Trump’s real bet: Senate obstruction and DOJ stonewalling

Richardson suggests Trump’s apparent openness is a stall tactic:

  • He is plainly hoping the Senate will bottle up the bill.
  • If not, he has already signaled he will insist that Congress receive only what it is “legally entitled to,” setting up battles over how much the DOJ actually releases.

His Truth Social language, she argues, is basically a “neon sign” that he intends to fight over the scope of any disclosure.

7. Why a full cover-up is unlikely

Drawing on her historian’s experience, Richardson argues that fully erasing the Epstein story will be extremely difficult, for structural and practical reasons:

  • Epstein operated among wealthy, high-profile elites using modern technologies: bank accounts, flight records, security cameras, digital communications, and so on.
  • The FBI seized many thousands of hours of video from Epstein’s New York mansion.
  • At least $1.1 billion moved through his accounts; bank records exist and are not easily destroyed.
  • There are more than 1,000 survivors, who know names, dates, and events.
  • Members of Congress can read their stories into the record under the Speech and Debate Clause, making defamation lawsuits impossible.

Her broader point: in a modern, highly documented world, powerful people leave trails. Burying a story like this requires silencing a very large number of institutions and individuals. It is possible, but historically the odds favor eventual leakage.

8. Why Republicans fear delay

Richardson notes that many Republicans are terrified of a delayed scandal:

  • The longer the issue drags on, the greater the risk that a major document dump hits in 2026 or 2028, right before key elections.
  • Some believe they must “rip the bandage off” now, rather than face an electoral catastrophe later.

As Trump’s ability to deliver votes diminishes and his toxicity grows, more Republicans begin to see him as an electoral liability rather than an asset.

9. Overall takeaway

Richardson’s core conclusions are:

  • Nobody yet knows precisely what is in the FBI’s Epstein files.
  • Trump’s own frantic behavior suggests that the files contain seriously damaging material.
  • Given the scale of the network, the number of survivors, and the density of modern financial and digital records, it will be very hard to keep the truth permanently hidden.
  • The Senate’s handling of this bill will be a key test of the Republican Party’s willingness to keep protecting Trump versus protecting itself.

From her historian’s perspective, Richardson argues that in a case like this it is ultimately harder to hide the story than to find it, especially once enough people decide they want the truth.

The unenchanted travel of the here and now


A medieval inn. Source: ChatGPT 5.1. Click here for high-resolution version.

It’s an odd paradox — to very much want to know what’s happening in the world, but very much not to want to be in that world. When you’re both introverted and old, like me, then all the more does one want to be away from the world. It’s why I live in the woods now. This almost certainly has something to do with why I no longer read stories set in the here and now.

It wasn’t always that way. Back in the 1970s, Armistead Maupin’s series of Tales of the City novels changed my life. They were very much set in the here and now, in San Francisco. Those novels were a big factor in my deciding to move to San Francisco back in the late 1980s. And by the way, by an unplanned stroke of fortune, I ended up at the San Francisco Chronicle, where Maupin wrote those novels in serial form in the Chronicle. I even, at last, met Maupin at an office Christmas party. By that time Maupin was rich enough from the novels that he no longer had to work at the Chronicle.

Still, the urge to travel has never completely left me, and I hope it never does. I’ve seen most of the places that I ever wanted to see, so it’s Scotland now that best suits my anything-but-the-here-and-now attitude. In Scotland, especially in certain places, the realities of today’s world can easily be imagined away — pubs, little villages, farmland that probably looked very little different 400 years ago, moors and bogs, castles, and the sea crashing against rocky cliffs. San Francisco suited me well when I was younger, but not anymore.

But: one has to get there from here. From where I am in the Appalachian foothills, that’s 24 hours or more of the most miserable sort of immersion in the here and now — the noise and discomforts of airports, being packed into airplanes, paying through the nose for a taxi or Uber ride, and sometimes an ugly and time-wasting layover in an airport hotel. No doubt this is inevitable in an era when people travel by the millions, requiring great efficiency. The economics of travel today, it seems, have been fine-tuned to keep the level of misery just short of the level at which people will refuse to bear it. The misery is twice as great on the way home, because everything that one was looking forward to is now behind rather than ahead. Though, to be sure, being home at last is awfully nice, too.

I was unable to find any new fiction that interests me, so once again I’m re-reading The Lord of the Rings. My favorite parts, really, are the traveling parts, especially in Book 1 when Frodo and friends set out from Hobbiton and travel cross-country to Bree and to the inn named the Prancing Pony.

I’ve often been curious about what travel was like in medieval times. There were Roman roads, of course, going in all directions from Italy into the heart of Europe as well as into Britain. There were a good many people on those roads, which means that there had to be a support system for travelers. For what reasons did people travel? How safe was it? Were there a great many inns, or too few? Who walked, and who rode? What kind of wagons and other conveyances did they use? Did they travel much during the winter?

It seemed very likely to me that scholars have a great deal of information about medieval travel, so I asked ChatGPT for suggestions. I’ve ordered a 1997 reprint of Norbert Ohler’s The Medieval Traveller. It’s an English translation of the original German, Reisen im Mittelalter.

I’m hoping the book will provide some fuel for my imagination — staying right here in the woods while traveling in my imagination, and not in the here and now.

The media are totally blowing it on Epstein

It’s not just the Washington Post and the New York Times. Even fringy online media such as Huffington Post, as well as has-been online media such as Salon, are afraid to touch the Epstein document dump. Their main excuse is that the documents were “largely” already publicly available. When they do write about it, they prefer to make it a story about Democrats vs. Republicans in Congress, rather than what we know (and don’t yet know) about Trump’s involvement with Epstein because of a completely obvious government coverup.

The best place I’ve discovered so far where people are actually doing real sleuthing is in a Reddit forum, https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/. Some of the posts there will turn your stomach. I’ve appended an image of one such document below. The media’s excuse for ignoring the Tiffany Doe deposition is that it’s not new. But of course the media also ignored it several years ago when it was new. In the deposition Tiffany Doe says she witnessed Trump raping a 13-year-old and threatening to kill her family if she ever told anyone. Old news! Still nothing to see here! As usual, Trump managed to keep it out of court.

If I correctly understand the muddy pieces in the media, the recent document dump by a House committee is just a small sample of what the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department have on Epstein.

This is one of those times when it is very useful to see what is being said in foreign publications with anti-American agendas. With a completely corrupted U.S. government, and with an American media that is increasingly corrupted and increasingly timid, a huge amount of power both inside of government and outside of government is trying to keep Americans in the dark. Here’s a straightforward piece in Al Jazeera: Trump, Congress, and the Epstein files: What happens next?

It’s interesting that Russia Today, though, is working as hard to ignore the Epstein files as the American media are. There are many mentions of Russia and Russians in the Epstein files, so corrupt elements in Russia and corrupt elements in the U.S. are well aligned on this. The Russia Today story that totally tracks the U.S. coverage is here: Newly released Epstein email claims Trump ‘knew about the girls’.

It seems pretty apparent that, since Trump and his minions are so desperate to prevent any more disclosures, that they know how damning it will be. I keep wondering and wondering: When will the Republican Party, now that Trump has become so weak and is such a lame duck, come to its senses and cut Trump loose?

If and when Trump is destroyed — as seems very possible with the Epstein files — then throwing Trump under the bus would be the first priority of trying to save the Republican Party. But then, if they had any sense, they wouldn’t be Republicans. They’re still acting as though it’s impossible to remove them from power and bring them to justice. Though maybe, just maybe, some of them realize that the Epstein documents could bring them down and deliver a setback to American fascism that would last for a hundred years.

The above is an image of a part of the document dump. Here is the link.

Update:

This afternoon Harry Litman posted, at Substack, the first thorough and fearless piece I’ve seen about the Epstein document dump: Ten Things We Now Know — or Can Fairly Surmise — From the Epstein Emails.

Litman is a lawyer and law professor with a sterling résumé.

Vietnam: Quo Vadis? — the full text


Wallace Carroll interviewing young Royal Air Force pilots during the Battle of Britain. Source: Wake Forest Magazine, Wake Forest University.

Histories of the Vietnam War always refer to an editorial in the Winston-Salem Journal published on March 17, 1968, arguing for an end to the war. The editorial was written by Wallace Carroll, then editor and publisher of the Journal. In Wallace Carroll’s obituary, published July 30, 2002, the New York Times wrote:

“On March 17, 1968, he published a signed editorial in Winston-Salem under the headline “Vietnam — Quo Vadis?” that argued that United States policy in Southeast Asia was misguided and irrelevant to the goal of thwarting Soviet expansion.

“Dean Acheson, the former secretary of state and an adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, showed the editorial to Johnson and stood by while the president read it. Later that month, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election and would begin peace negotiations with North Vietnam. In an article about events leading to Johnson’s announcement, the Washington Post reported that Mr. Carroll’s editorial had influenced his thinking.”

Who was Wallace Carroll?

In 1939, Carroll became editor of the United Press International Bureau in London. He covered both the London Blitz and the Battle of Britain. From Wikipedia: “From 1942 to 1945 he headed the European division of the United States Office of War Information, charged with all propaganda efforts aimed at Nazi-conquered Europe during World War II.” In 1955, he became head of the Washington Bureau of the New York Times. In 1963, he moved to Winston-Salem to become editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal, which, under Carroll, won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1971.

Mary Llewellyn McNeil, who was in one of Carroll’s classes at Wake Forest University and who later published a biography of Carroll, wrote for Wake Forest Magazine:

“Wallace Carroll was not just the editor and publisher of the local news­paper. He was present and reported on most of the major events of the 20th century. He knew, befriended or advised nearly all the mid-century’s key decision-makers — from Winston Churchill to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhow­er. As a correspondent for United Press he covered the League of Nations in the mid-1930s, sent dispatches on the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, interviewed Field Marshal Ber­nard Montgomery following the British army’s narrow escape from Dunkirk and reported nightly from his office rooftop on the bombs falling on London during The Blitz. He was on the first convoy into the Soviet Union following the Nazi in­vasion in 1941 and remained to cover the Nazi’s initial assault on Moscow. Barely making it out, on his way home via Persia (now known as Iran), Singapore and the Philippines, he landed in Hawaii seven days after the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack and filed among the first reports from the field. He eventually became the first director of the U.S. Office of War Information in London, specializing in psychological warfare operations during World War II.”

Carroll wrote a book about his work for the U.S. Office of War Information, Persuade or Perish.

I was too young then to really appreciate someone of Carroll’s stature, but I knew Carroll when I was only a whipper-snapper summer intern at the Winston-Salem Journal, and, later, a rookie copy editor.

Online at last

Until now, the text of this editorial existed only on microfilm. A few years ago, I had facsimile made from microfilm with the intention of keying in the editorial so that it would at last exist in digital form. I never quite finished that job until recently. I uploaded the page image to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT helped me with the transcription. Update: May Llewellyn McNeil includes the text of “Vietnam: Quo Vadis” in her 2022 biography of Carroll, Century’s Witness.

Here is the link to the full text of Vietnam: Quo Vadis


Carroll introduces Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State. I believe this photo is from Shirley Auditorium at Salem College in Winston-Salem. Source: Wake Forest Magazine, Wake Forest University.

At last, a new novel by John Twelve Hawks


To be published in April 2026

I’ve posted several times in the past about John Twelve Hawks, who, as soon as I read him, became my favorite living science fiction author. His most recent novel until now was published in 2014, so his fans have been waiting for a long time.

The new novel is Certainty, to be published by Penguin Random House/Doubleday in April 2026. The Penguin Random House page is here, and the Amazon page (you can pre-order it) is here.

For a good twenty years, it has been hard to find the kind of science fiction (new science fiction, anyway) that I like. Please pardon my political incorrectness, but trends in the publishing industry have not been favorable for writers who are straight white males whose writing is lucid and vigorous (as opposed to literary) and whose themes are something other than social themes. Maybe John Twelve Hawks had a 12-year fallow period. But I can’t help but wonder, actually, whether those trends in the publishing industry shut him out for a while as too male, insufficiently literary, and too political.

When I say, “insufficiently literary,” that, to me, is a compliment to John Twelve Hawks’ writing. To me, the story is the point, not the writing. So it’s clean, transparent, cinematic writing that I like, writing that lights up our visual circuits rather than putting heavy demands on our language circuits. That such writing is facile is just plain wrong. It’s actually very hard to do.

John Twelve Hawks has occasionally posted on his Facebook page during the past 14 years. His official web site has rarely been updated. He remains anonymous (John Twelve Hawks is, of course, a pseudonym) and reclusive. I’m sure I’m not the only fan hoping that, when this next book is published, he’ll do more interviews, publish more articles, and become more heard in the marketplace of ideas during these nightmare times in which we’re all living.

Who’s having the nightmare now?


Source: Wikimedia Commons

And just like that, overnight, a thousand lies fell apart. And it wasn’t just Republican lies that fell apart. Horsewash centrist narratives fell apart, too. Democrats are losers, are they? Democrats are too far left and have to move to the right, do they? Democrats will commit suicide if they play hardball? Democrats were silly to fret about threats to democracy when they should have talked about “abundance”?

But Democrats weren’t losers last night. From coast to coast, they won with drop-dead margins guaranteed to rip the rugs right out from under the triumpalism of Republicans and the barren lectures of the high-perch centrists.

It was a 34-year-old democratic socialist who won in New York, while a 67-year-old centrist (Andrew Cuomo) went down in flames. Californians gave Gavin Newsome, by a nearly two to one margin, the permission he needs to let Republicans know that if they try to gerrymander their way out of a Republican bloodbath in 2026, Democrats won’t just stand by and mewl while they get away with it. In Virginia, the new Democratic governor won by 15 points, and the new governor of New Jersey by 13 points.

Everybody knows that Republicans lie. That’s just a given. But I’m particulary amused by how the centrists (whether center-left or center-right) will now have to come up with some sneaky new ways of gilding a phony middle to dignify Republican lies.

At the New York Times, the idiot savant Ross Douthat has already started rolling out his new line: “Mamdani’s Victory Is Less Significant Than You Think: New York’s next mayor won’t save the Democrats.”

I can’t wait to hear what Ezra Klein, another idiot savant at the Times, comes up with. But I will be very surprised if it doesn’t boil down to a cautionary rather than celebratory “Yes, but” with a large serving of cunningly centrist sleight of hand formulated to keep him in good graces with New York Times management. Klein has, for far too long, gotten away with the deceit that has gotten him so much attention — claiming to want to help Democrats, even as, again and again, he undermines Democrats so that he can keep his perch and troll for attention.

But even as we celebrate this turnaround for Democrats, I am strongly of the opinion that Democrats didn’t have all that much to do with it, other than not being Republicans. Rather, Republicans did this, not only by what they already have done in the past year, but also by showing the world what they intend to do.

A year ago, it was easier to get away with lying (abundance and lower prices!). That was just talk, after all. But foolish people fell for it. Now that Republicans own all the power, the lies are being exposed (except for the full truth about Jeffrey Epstein), and they don’t have to keep a lid on even the Hitler-lovers among them, or the greed . They can have a Great Gatsby party for the super-rich while millions go hungry, not just flaunting but celebrating the fact that they just don’t care, never did, and never will.

Update 1, Krugman:

I had finished writing this post by 7 a.m., but I was waiting to put it up until Paul Krugman’s daily column arrived. Krugman usually posts around 6:30 a.m., but he was late today, no doubt because there was so much to write about. As expected, Krugman gets it right: Which Party Is in Trouble, Again?

Update 2, Looking ahead:

What will Republicans do now? A normal party, after such ominous losses, would look for ways — ways more or less in keeping with the party’s principles — to change course. But Republicans can’t do that. For one, the entire party is enslaved to Trump, and Trump won’t let them. For two, all the behind-the-scenes money and power that control the party is never going to back down on the real agenda — making the rich richer and the poor poorer, while killing off functions of government that stand in the way of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. There are no doubt a few Republicans in Congress who would like to see some changes of course. My guess, though, is that they are more likely to join those who already have been driven out of the party than to succeed in getting Republicans to change.

Republicans have two basic options: Better lies capable of deceiving voters again, or a surefire (and criminal) way to stay in power after the 2026 midterm elections. MAGA Republicans have no problem at all with the criminality. After all, their pardons depend on staying in power. My guess is that Republicans will blend these two options.

This year, Republicans had total control of what we call “the narrative.” The media were cowed, Democrats were powerless. Next year will be different. It can’t be long before Gavin Newsome declares that he is running for president. The media will have to pay attention, and Newsome will scoop up and dispose of the Republican narrative like clumps of kitty litter. Next year, it should be fun again to be a Democrat and a liberal.

Burlap! Camellias! Verdi!


Click here for high-resolution version.

I regularly order wheat berries and hulled barley from Amazon, five pounds at a time, to grind into flour. This time the wheat came in a beautiful burlap bag. It’s a tiny burlap bag, but I haven’t seen a burlap bag in years.

My camellias are blooming. Camellias in bloom always make me think of La Dame aux Camélias, the 1848 novel by Alexandre Dumas fils, which I read in French some years ago. Verdi turned the story into an opera, La Traviata. It’s a tragic story, but Verdi included a happy piece, which also is a waltz.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism


Click here for high-resolution version.

The Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, 1951. There is now a new edition from The Library of America, 2025, 880 pages.

As the United States spirals downward into fascism, we come across more and more references to Hannah Arendt’s classic The Origins of Totalitarianism. I decided to have a go at reading it.

It is dense reading. The book is too long for many readers (including me). I scanned quickly through parts of it in which I found (to me) excessive detail in areas with less application to the situation in which we find ourselves today. Even so, there is much to be gained in historical perspective and political philosophy.

I asked ChatGPT to write the briefest possible summary of the book, with attention to how her themes are relevant to what is happening today:

⸻

1. Antisemitism, Imperialism, and the Roots of Totalitarianism

Arendt begins by tracing antisemitism and imperialism in 19th-century Europe—not as isolated prejudices but as structural forces that eroded political equality and civic belonging. She argues that racism and economic domination abroad habituated Europeans to hierarchy and dehumanization at home.

→ Relevance: In the U.S., decades of racial hierarchy and overseas militarism have similarly normalized seeing groups of people—immigrants, minorities, political opponents—as “less real” citizens.

⸻

2. The Decline of the Nation-State and the “Right to Have Rights”

With World War I and the collapse of empires, millions became stateless refugees, losing legal protection because “the Rights of Man” depended on belonging to a political community. Arendt called this loss “the right to have rights.”

→ Relevance: When U.S. officials strip voting rights, demonize migrants, or create categories of people effectively outside the law, they reproduce this condition of rightlessness within a nominal democracy.

⸻

3. The Rise of Mass Society and the Collapse of Truth

Totalitarian movements arose not among fanatics alone but from atomized, isolated individuals who had lost trust in shared reality. The destruction of class, community, and factual discourse left people craving certainty and belonging, which demagogues supplied with ideology and conspiracy.

→ Relevance: The disintegration of civic trust, online propaganda, and “alternative facts” in today’s America are textbook examples of Arendt’s insight that loneliness and meaninglessness breed authoritarianism.

⸻

4. Ideology and the Logic of Total Domination

Totalitarian ideologies (Nazism, Stalinism) claim to explain all events through one “scientific” process—race or history—reducing individuals to functions of that logic. Once accepted, facts no longer matter; only ideological consistency does.

→ Relevance: The MAGA movement’s self-contained mythology—“the deep state,” “stolen elections,” “invasion at the border”—illustrates this same replacement of reality with narrative necessity.

⸻

5. Bureaucracy, Violence, and the Banality of Evil

Arendt’s later notion (developed from this groundwork) is that totalitarian systems rely less on monstrous villains than on ordinary people performing evil through obedience and routine.

→ Relevance: The bureaucratic enforcement of cruelty—family separations, deportations, targeted disenfranchisement—shows how moral numbness within institutions can sustain authoritarian power without overt tyranny.

⸻

6. Her Core Warning

Totalitarianism, for Arendt, is not a foreign aberration but a modern temptation: the desire to escape freedom and uncertainty through ideology, conformity, and the worship of strength. It emerges when citizens stop caring about truth, abandon solidarity, and let politics become spectacle.

→ Contemporary parallel: When a public tolerates lies, applauds humiliation, and trades citizenship for tribal identity, the preconditions of total rule are already present.

⸻

In brief:

Arendt’s central message is that freedom depends on truth, plurality, and political participation—and that when these erode under loneliness, propaganda, and cynicism, democratic societies drift toward totalitarian habits long before the camps or purges appear.

It was propaganda, not politics, that got us here


No Fox News, no Facebook, responsible media, and decency in politics. They even cook from scratch! Source: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Once again, Ezra Klein, one of the smartest fools in the American media, is telling Democrats what’s wrong with them. The piece is “This Is the Way You Beat Trump — and Trumpism.”

Mainstream pundits like Klein would not be able to keep their jobs unless they kept to the now-standard centrist narrative. According to that narrative, Trump is in power because Democrats “lost touch” with voters. Here one can fill in the blanks about why that happened — “too preachy,” too far left, etc., etc. The pundits all have different answers according to their pre-existing politics.

But the question is not what’s wrong with Democrats and liberals. The question is: What’s wrong with voters? How does someone like Trump actually win a fair national election?

People are not more stupid than they used to be. But many things have changed since the days families gathered around their radios in the evening and tried to understand what was happening in the world. I would name four critically important — and I think obvious — things that help to explain where we are.

1. The world is much more complicated, much harder to understand, and changes ever faster.

2. The dark arts that are used to deceive people have made huge advances, and technologies have made the cost of deceiving people vastly cheaper than it used to be.

3. Changes in the world have eroded the privileges and status of millions of people. They’re not happy about that, they don’t really understand how it happened (because it’s complicated), and they are vulnerable to deceptions that offer easy answers that play on their prejudices and ignorance.

4. Those on the right are willing to do whatever it takes to get, and to keep, power and wealth. Deception, scapegoating, destruction and perversion of any institution that stands in their way — they don’t care. First they broke through the norms. Now they’re breaking through the law.

Though there are roots in the Reagan and Gingrich eras, this really began with Fox News in 1996. Fox News wasn’t a mere conservative outlet. It intentionally practiced deception. It featured rage as entertainment. It monetized anger. It drove moral panics. It fused right-wing politics and identity for white Americans, who had real grievances because of changes in the world. Back in cable days, academic studies found that voting patterns shifted to the right in counties where Fox News became available on cable.

What Fox News pioneered, social media industrialized. It weaponized the grievances of susceptible white people with deception fueled with rage. It enabled terrible people to win fair elections.

Now we need to ask: Who was not susceptible? Klein helpfully reminds us who that was in the piece I linked to above: “The only major group in which Democrats saw improvement across that whole 12-year period [2012-2024] was college-educated white voters.”

Why might that be? Again, I think the answer is obvious. Education exposes people to multiple ways of seeking and testing knowledge — scientific reasoning, media literacy, probabilistic thinking, openness to complexity. Aggrieved people with modest educations were never able to gain the tools needed to see through the right-wing deceptions. They were, and very much still are, systematically and intentionally misinformed. Their prejudices, their ignorance, and their religiosity make them eager believers, blind to another thing that is obvious to those who are not susceptible — that the right-wing centers of power and wealth that developed new ways to control the little people actually don’t give a damn about them.

Where we are today did not come about because of failures by the Democratic Party. Sure, the Democratic Party has made mistakes and might have done better. But some mistakes are inevitable in a fragile coalition with a faulty and self-blaming understanding of why right-wingers have been winning elections. Where we are today is, rather, the success of a decades-long project of epistemic capture by an unprincipled and ruthless right wing. Klein’s centrism is nothing but a comforting fable for elite moderates who don’t want to admit that one side has been waging cognitive war while the other kept insisting on reality, civility, fairness, policy.

No one in the mainstream punditry is anywhere near saying what I think is rather obviously true: There can be no real solution until the people who are being deceived somehow start caring whether what they believe is true. Right-wing centers of wealth and power are not going to stop lying and refining the industry that delivers the lies.

So here’s the problem, and it’s a huge problem: How do you teach people who have been taught otherwise that the solution to their grievances is the solution that Democrats propose: Reality, civility, fairness, and policy. Education can manage that. Propaganda can only tear it down. Education is hard, and expensive. Propaganda is dirt cheap.