Do the Wrong Thing

Don’t you wanna hang out with the Bleach Boys, baby?
In a land where ministers murder golf pros?
Don’t you wanna drink some bleach tonight?

“Bleach Boys,” the Dead Milkmen, 1988

The Republicans have become the party of self-harm. This kind of self-harm isn’t really about harming oneself—people who are very serious about that just kill themselves quietly and deliberately—it is, instead, about theater. Self-harm as a form of political theater has a long and sometimes proud tradition, from Mohandas K. Gandhi’s self-starvation to Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation. I admire Cato the Younger’s resolve to die with dignity by his own hand rather than live under Julius Caesar’s tyranny, though I generally do not approve of suicide. Cato’s was a good death, a concept increasingly difficult to hold on to in a society that values prestige over honor and pleasure above all.

Republicans took up self-harm as an ethos in the matter of COVID-19 vaccines (to take one example) not because they suddenly had an interest in mRNA technology—it was purely a case of what we would call, if we were talking about a surly teenager, “acting out.” The people Republicans hate (urban progressives, “elites,” etc.) made enthusiastic adherence to COVID-19 protocols (much of that was theater and hysteria, too) into a kind of moral test, one of the few situations in our national life that genuinely demands the much-abused term “virtue-signaling.” Rather than responding to pandemic safety excesses in a mature way—for example, by talking reasonably about the trade-offs involved in vaccinations and vaccine mandates or by dealing patiently but firmly with masking hysteria—Republicans just did what Republicans now do, i.e., they took up the opposite course of whatever the hated cultural enemy was doing. And so the kind of New Age health quackery that once was mainly associated with macrobiotic loonies in Park Slope became a shibboleth for right-wing populists and the cynical radio and cable-news entertainers who milk them for profit. Hence the ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and such, and the paranoid disdain for vaccines. Republicans are “doing their own research,” but that “research” is the dumbest kind: Look at what they’re saying on MSNBC and stamp their feet and insist on the opposite. They are the bleach boys. Thank goodness the so-called elites didn’t get all huffy about hand-washing or we’d have every nut-cutlet Trump voter in the country running around looking like Michèle Lamy. 

(The best line in Nick Haramis’ very entertaining New York Times profile of Rick Owens was the designer’s bemused assessment of his unconventional marriage to Mme. Lamy, one of the oddest of all the ducks: “Just when my parents got used to my being gay.”)

Democrats have at their disposal an almost foolproof (oh, but first let me meet the fool!) method for manipulating the most self-abasing Republican partisans: Just get sanctimonious about something, and they can be sure that Republicans will make a litmus test out of rejecting it. Nice for Democrats that there will be marginally less competition for spots in Ivy League schools or jobs in Silicon Valley as Republicans decide that the only authentic American life is being a sh-tkicking serf in Muleshoe, Texas. (Seriously: I know a politically active right-wing Christian couple scandalized that a friend’s child was seriously considering enrolling at … Harvard. God help them if he goes to work for Apple or Microsoft or Morgan Stanley.) Mostly, that kind of theatrical self-harm hurts the specific neurotic fart-whackers in question, and maybe their families, but, at times, it hurts the rest of the country, too—because some of these self-harming neurotic fart-whackers are in Congress. 

Take the bizarre case of Sen. Jim Lankford of Oklahoma and his recent immigration bill. The bill was the result of a bipartisan deal negotiated by Lankford, one of the Senate’s most conservative members, and would have given Republicans a great deal of what they wanted (including tighter asylum rules) in turn for giving Democrats approximately squat (to such an extent that the Congressional Hispanic Caucus howled that the bill was nearly exclusively about “enforcement,” as though it shouldn’t be). In spite of the package’s being stacked in Republicans’ favor, Lankford got most Senate Democrats to support it, a result of the fact that—and this part is key—Lankford is not stupid and he is not a petulant child. He knew that the increasing salience of border security in the runup to the presidential election had put the Democrats in an extraordinarily weak position, leaving them ready to sign off on almost anything that says “border security” at the top of the page, and that the window of opportunity closes in November. Lankford also knows there’s no reason to believe that the Trump-led clown show that couldn’t get the job done on immigration last time around is likely to get it done in a second administration if the benighted voters of this ailing republic should choose to endure one. Maybe the deal was only a 12-point buck rather than the 16-point trophy they were dreaming of, but Republicans were standing 25 yards away with the prize in the sights of their legislative .30-06, to overload a metaphor. Lankford did what smart politicians are supposed to do: He got his side a lot of what it wanted—not everything; review the part about his not being a petulant child—and he got the other side to support it. There was even funding for border barriers, which is to say: Lankford was ready to build a wall and get Democrats to pay for it.  

And, inevitably, Republicans turned against their own border-security agenda because Lankford got the Democrats to support it. In the brain-dead world of right-wing political entertainment, a bill that Democrats support by definition cannot be a good bill. Ipso f’n’ facto and Q.E.D., cupcakes. Clown-show understudies such as career government employee Dan Bongino made the argument in those terms explicitly: All we need to know about the Lankford bill, he sneered, is that there are Senate Democrats who supported it. In a multiverse of infinite parallel realities, where every possibility and permutation is realized in one dimension or another, that is the dumbest thing anybody said that afternoon. 

The nihilism in that is worth thinking about for a second. If nothing that Democrats support can be worth doing, then what is the point of engaging in basic governance and trying to do anything at all in 2024, when Democrats control the Senate and the White House and, hence, when nothing meaningful can get done without some Democratic cooperation? What will be the point after the election, when, however the vote turns out, it will remain the case—for the foreseeable future—that any major policy change will require at least some Democratic buy-in to be effective and stable over the long term? 

The answer, of course, is that Republicans by and large don’t give a damn about their supposed policy agenda. Elected Republicans hold their voters in richly deserved contempt, and they like having someone hold the door open for them when they get out of the car. Some of them really are dumb proles (Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc.) and some of them just play dumb proles on Fox News (Ted Cruz, etc.) because they don’t want to go back to working for a living. Which is a shame, really: Cruz was, by all accounts, a really good lawyer, but he’s a national laughingstock as a senator, a gutless punk shining the shoes of the man who called his wife ugly and his father a criminal. 

Republicans’ simian rage runs high, but it is disconnected from any fixed goal. And that makes for some weird politics.

But, again, this isn’t politics, conventionally understood. This is a kind of ritual pageant put on for the almighty “base.” These people are not looking for statesmen, and while they do vote, they aren’t exactly voters—they are cutters, unhappy, troubled, stunted people who engage in ritualized self-harm for attention. They’ll demand that Republicans sabotage everything from immigration reform to foreign policy and whip us toward fiscal Armageddon until—what, exactly? Until someone pats them on the head and tells them that it’s not their fault their sons sit around all day smoking weed and playing video games, that Bobby Lee died of a fentanyl overdose because he got snookered by sneaky inscrutable Chinamen and Becky Lou took off with the kids in search of greener marital pastures because of shadowy globalists with big Hebrew noses? They don’t want legislation, and they don’t even want revenge, exactly—they want validation. They are trying to get from politics what people used to get from religion, a context within which to understand their own lives and the long human arc of which their own personal timelines are a part. But politics isn’t very good at providing that, hence the delusional conspiracy kookery and outright make-believe. I suppose there’s some element of Chekov’s AR-15 in this: In a country with 400 million guns, somebody is going to be dying to use them, and a lot of these dopes have been praying for civil war since Timothy McVeigh was in flecktarn Huggies. 

Which brings us to the matter of Ukraine. 

History handed the United States an absolute lay-up in February 2022, when Vladimir Putin’s puffed-up and incompetent forces marched into what turned out to be a Ukrainian meat grinder. Russian forces can, of course, do a great deal of damage, and have—the Russians steal everything that isn’t bolted down and are raping Ukrainian children when they aren’t raping each other—but they already have failed in their main objective, which was to demonstrate how effortlessly Putin’s forces could swoop across a neighboring country and impose Moscow’s will on it. U.S. interests and Ukrainian interests here are not perfectly aligned—you can find much more sophisticated explanations from specialists, but the short version is that Ukraine needs to win to achieve its ends, while the United States really only needs to see Russia keep losing, the higher the cost to Moscow the better—but they are mutually reinforcing. At the more idealistic level, the United States has an interest in seeing countries such as Ukraine make their way, haltingly and stumblingly, into the family of advanced liberal democracies, which is good for them and good for us; at the more cynical level, every drop of blood and ounce of treasure Moscow pisses away in Ukraine is a win for Washington. 

That opportunity wasn’t cost-free—nothing worth having is—but the costs were pretty reasonable. Mainly, what the United States needed to do was to clear out stockpiles of older munitions and equipment (older doesn’t mean outmoded or worn-out—just older) and then replenish those stockpiles with money that we call “foreign aid” even though almost all of it gets spent in the United States with U.S. firms and U.S. contractors. There were other things to do, too, and Washington has, unfortunately, half-assed some of those, including the economic sanctions. (The Wall Street Journal is right about this: We should, at the very least, seize those $300 billion in iced Russian reserves.) But there also were ancillary benefits to be had, including working through some issues with NATO and collecting real-world intelligence on the performance of Russian and U.S. assets in the field. A good deal for us all around. According to my English-major math, the U.S. commitment to Ukraine comes out to about $500,000 per dead Russian or $135,000 per dead-or-injured, a bargain compared to the $37 million per dead guy it cost us to kill al-Qaeda & Co. in Afghanistan.

And, so, where are we? House Republicans are sitting on Ukraine aid because they are in thrall to a middling game-show host and quondam pornographer and because Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson of La Jolla Country Day School wandered into a French-owned Moscow supermarket and went bug-eyed like one of those furry primitive humanoids awed by the obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Radicalized,” he calls himself after the experience. “Lobotomized,” you’ll call yourself after listening to him talk about it. Imagine what this ass-kissing country-club invertebrate would make of the Central Market on North Lamar in Austin. 

On the second anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Lithuanian foreign minister spoke to the United Nations on behalf of some of the countries with reason to look fearfully toward Moscow—the Baltic states and the Czech Republic. Bear in mind that Prague is about as close to Moscow as New York City is to Miami, while there is less real estate between Lithuania and Russia than there is between New York and Boston. Via the Cosmopolitan Globalist:

Today we, the Baltic States and Czechia, come to this Council to address the entire international community with a very simple message:

For all our sakes, wake up. 

Madam President, I speak on behalf of Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, and my own country Lithuania. Today and tomorrow, many will yet again call on Russia to end its brutal war against Ukraine.

Many will say that Russia’s unprovoked aggression goes against everything these United Nations stand for. Some will question the credibility of this Council to defend the rules-based international order.

But however loud and eloquent we are, our protests and outrage will barely register in Moscow and rockets will continue to rain down on Ukrainian homes, hospitals, and schools.

Today we are facing choices that might well define this century, just as the choices in the 1930s defined the previous century. Do we continue to appease the aggressor who is patient and meticulous in his attempts to turn everything this organization holds dear into a mockery? 

Do we once again allow him to escape responsibility for his aggression? Do we continue to feed him with lives and land, misled by our fear of escalation and naïve hopes that this time he will be fully satisfied? 

Today we come to this Council to address the entire international community with a very simple message:

For all our sakes, wake up.

Stirring stuff. But can you really trust a man if he isn’t trying to sell you doggie vitamins? If he hasn’t at least been indicted over financial hanky-panky deployed to cover up the hush money he was paying to the porn star he was having sad hotel sex with while he was getting ready to be the champion of the “cross of Christ” in these United States? 

Words About Words

My friend Jay Nordlinger is a serious word guy, and he recently mentioned “cigarette boats,” noting that a boat that once belonged to George H.W. Bush was recently sold. 

I wonder whether the speedboat is a “cigarette boat.” I first heard that term during the Bush 41 administration. I don’t think I’ve heard it since. I also remember that he went marlin fishing — he liked to fish for marlin. Sounds like something you don’t do from a cigarette boat?

Bush did, indeed, own a cigarette boat, one built by the man most associated with the term, Donald Aronow, who (so Wikipedia tells me) numbered the shah of Iran, Charles Keating, and Lyndon Johnson among his clients. “Cigarette” ended up becoming a brand name, and people now talk instead about “go-fast” boats, which is much less evocative. There is some debate about whether “cigarette” referred to the long, slender shape of the boats (unlikely, in my view—they don’t actually look anything like cigarettes) or to their use in smuggling untaxed tobacco products and other black-market commodities—smokable,  snortable, and otherwise ingestible. It was all very Miami Vice. 

Aranow lived a very colorful life that ended in his murder, a contract killing ordered by a former business associate who was both a boat racer and a drug smuggler. Aranow’s story is dramatized (and fictionalized) in the John Travolta film Speed Kills. 

In Other News …

New York Times headline: “U.S. Lands Spacecraft on Moon for First Time Since 1972.”  Well, no. The United States didn’t do anything of the sort. The spacecraft was Odysseus, and the mission was carried out by Intuitive Machines, a private firm. All the U.S. government did was write a check. The headline was subsequently revised: “A U.S.-Built Spacecraft Lands on the Moon for the First Time Since 1972.” Intuitive Machines is indeed a U.S.-based company, and in some ways a typical one: One of its three founders (and current chairman) was born in Iran, its chief scientist was born in the United Kingdom, etc.  

Economics for English Majors

Here is a rookie stock-vs.-flow flub from MarketWatch: “Nvidia is now worth more than the GDP of every country except these 11.” When you are making comparisons for scale or perspective, you want to compare like things; otherwise, you end up with meaningless comparisons. One of the things to avoid is comparing a stock (a definite amount of something) to a flow (a stream over time). 

You could say, for example, “Bob makes $250,000 a year, but Tom has four times that much in the bank,” without really getting an idea of who is financially better off. You’d want to know what Bob has in the bank and what Tom earns and compare the apples to the apples and the oranges to the oranges. Nvidia’s worth in this case is its market capitalization, i.e., the value the market assigns to all of its shares–a stock. But GDP is a flow, a kind of statement of national income. The more meaningful comparison would be between national GDPs and Nvidia’s revenue (or, if you prefer, its income) or between Nvidia’s market cap and countries’ wealth. In which case, you get a rather less dramatic headline: If Nvidia’s revenue were a country’s GDP, Nvidistan would come in 108th place, somewhere down there with Iceland, Senegal, and Georgia. If its market cap were national wealth, the Republic of Nvidia would be down in the mid-to-lower 20s, with Singapore and Denmark. 

Market capitalization vs. GDP is kind of interesting in a way—it is one of those arresting things that grabs your attention even if it doesn’t mean as much as it seems to mean. I’m sure I have used the comparison myself—and been corrected, which is why I pass it on. 

Let Me Take a Crack at This One: No

“As Trump romps to wins, anti-Trump Republicans wonder: Do I still have a political home?”

In Closing

I was surprised by how much pushback I got for my observation last week that using houses of worship as tourist destinations is kind of gross. One of the arguments I heard from several correspondents goes like this: “If people feel peace and reverence in a cathedral or temple, shouldn’t we welcome that, inasmuch as it offers an opportunity to draw them closer to God?” 

I understand why people think that way, but it is, in my view, an error. From my point of view (as what you might call a Puritan-curious Catholic convert), Christianity (I don’t consider for this purpose any other religion) either has to be truth or it is the worst kind of silliness. The worst thing that has happened to American Protestantism is that the magisterium-shaped hole at its center has been filled with sentiment and sentimentality, and Christian sentimentality is to Christianity what “Disco Duck” is to “Les Jeux D’eaux à  la Villa D’este.” The problem is that it places one’s feelings at the center of things, and one’s feelings are an insufficient basis for a religion that demands that we take up the cross and follow—which doesn’t feel very good at all.

Reverence—and I mean reverence, not admiration—for a building, even a very beautiful one, is only another kind of idolatry. And we have more than enough of that in the world at the moment. What matters is what is taught and preached and worshiped inside the building. Whether the building is the beautiful St. Paul Outside the Walls or St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Clarendon, Virginia—surely one of the ugliest church buildings in Christendom—the architecture isn’t the thing.