WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN--FICTION(?)

William T. Vollmann, The Afghanistan Picture Show; or, How I Saved the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992) ("As long as they grow in the wild, principles of life and meaningful action do quite well, but when they are plucked and brought into our dreary world of imperfect results, they begin to wilt. Happily, our noses are so accustomed to the stink of our enemies' putrefying ideas that when our own give over wilting and commence to decay we can use them nonetheless." Id. at 174.).

William T. Vollmann, Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith (Volume III of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes) (New York: Viking, 2001).

William T. Vollmann, The Atlas (New York: Viking, 1996).

William T. Vollmann, Butterfly Stories: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1993).

William T. Vollmann, Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War (Volume IV of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes) (New York: Viking, 2015) (See Jane Smiley, "The Bluecoats Are Coming," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/2/2105.).

William T. Vollmann, Fathers and Crows (Volume II of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes) (New York: Viking, 1992).

William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt (Volume I of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes) (New York: Viking, 1990).

William T. Vollmann, The Rainbow Stories (New York: Contemporary American Fiction/ Penguin Books, 1992).

William T. Vollmann, The Rifles (Volume VI of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes) (New York: Viking, 1994).

William T. Vollmann, Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs (New York: Pantheon Books, 1991).

William T. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels (New York: Penguin Books, 1988).

PATRICK MODIANO

Patrick Modiano, After the Circus: A Novel, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press/The Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, 2015).

Patrick Modiano, Honeymoon, translated from the French by Barbara Wright (Boston: Verba Mundi Book/David R. Godine, 1995).

Patrick Modiano, In the Cafe of Lost Youth, translated from the French by Chris Clarke (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

Patrick Modiano, Missing Person, translated from the French by Daniel Weissbort (Boston: Verba Mundi Book/David R. Godine, 2005).

Patrick Modiano, The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l'Etoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads, translated from the French by Caroline Hillier, Patricia Wolf, & Frank Wynne, with a preface by William Boyd (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Patrick Modiano, Out of the Dark (Du plus loin de Poubli), translated from the French by Jordon Stump (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska, 1996, 1998).

Patrick Modiano, Paris Nocturne, translated from the French by Phoebe Weston-Evans (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press/The Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, 2015).

Patrick Modiano, Pedigree: A Memoirl, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press/The Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, 2015).

Patrick Modiano, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood: A Novel, translated from the French by Euan Cameron (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).

Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press/The Margellos World Republic of Letters Book, 2014).

Patrick Modiano, Villa Triste: A Novel  translated from the French by John Cullen (New York: Other Press, 2016).

Patrick Modiano, Young Once, translated from the French by Damion Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

SEEK AN EXIT FROM THE SELF

Noah Warren, The Destroyer in the Glass (Volume 110 in the Yale Series of Younger Poets),  foreword by Carl Phillips (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Noah Warren's taut poems explore the damage we do--to ourselves as to others--in our pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge. Restlessly seeking an exit from the self, his voice interrogates the dark logic of isolation and the ache for community, and tests the consolations of each. As he counterpoints a tendency toward form, rhyme, and allusion with a freer, more ruminative line, this exceptional poet charts the dawning of moral consciousness--the world breaking into us, despite us.").

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 8

Yusuf Al-Shirbini, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, Volume One (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translate by Humphrey Davies (New York: New York U. Press, 2016).

Yusuf Al-Shirbini, Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded, Volume Two (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translate by Humphrey Davies (New York: New York U. Press, 2016).

THE PARADOX OF IDEAL JUSTICE

Gerald Gaus, The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society (Princeton  Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society--with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives--have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be." From the text: "But if we really do need the ideal, then we must press: why should we forgo opportunities to create a more just social world so that we can pursue an uncertain ideal? Those who bear the cost of this pursuit will live in a less just world--their pleas must be discounted. The ideal theorist is convinced that we can give meaning to our political lives by pursuing an inherently uncertain ideal, turning our backs on the pursuit of mundane justice in our own neighborhoods. A tyrant rules in a manifestly unjust way; for us to be under the sway of an ideal theory is for us to ignore relatively clear improvements in justice for the sake of a grander vision for the future. And yet this grand vision is ultimately a mirage, for as we move closer to it, we will see that it was not what we thought it was, and in all probability we can now see that a better alternative lies elsewhere." Id. at 142-143.).

ATTICA PRISON REVOLT, 1971

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016) (If you believe the world divides into the "good guys" and the "bad guys," STOP! Even the best of us seem prepared to do some pretty bad things, even in our official capacities, when we think no one is watching, or no one really cares, or the public is on our side. In reading this book, ask not only whether the various state officials were negligent. Ask whether some of them committed (or at least condoned) essentially premeditated shooting, killings, torture, and abuse of Attica prisoners. Including the "Introduction," this book has 576 pages of text, plus 106 pages of endnotes. It is, at least for me, difficult reading as one see how the perversity of the criminal justice unfolds before one's eyes. Fortunately, the text is broken into 58 chapters, plus the "introduction" and "Epilogue." One will note many of the issues with the criminal justice system America is facing in the second decade of the Twenty-first century are the same, unresolved, chronic issues that were more than evident in late-1960s and early-1970s America. And, unsurprising, "race" is at its cornerstone. However, one will note the complicity of the press, the ever-present political "spin-doctors," the failure of critical thinking, and the reactionary "law-and-order" drumbeats. Moreover, back then, as now, the facts don't seem to really matter: of the facts don't jive with one's agenda, create facts (e.g., a hostage was castrated by the Attica prisoners, when in fact the hostage's injury and death was result of gun wounds inflicted by New York State Troopers and Correctional Officers). Time moves forward, people remain unchanged. And, few people read history, so there is little or no learning form the past."The troopers had removed their identification emblems--the badges affixed to their collars that indicated which troops they belonged to as well as their name and rank--just before they went in. Trooper Captain William Dillion not only took off his nameplate and his captain's bars. but as he later recounted, he 'told [his] people to take them off too . . . [because] we weren't stopping traffic where a citizen would have the perfect right to know who they're being stopped by . . . it was a different thing.' Trooper Gerald Smith explained it even more bluntly: 'Everybody started taking off their things . . . so they couldn't identify what troop or identity to pinpoint the  individual in case something happens'." Id. at 179. "Looking over the railing, Smith saw a trooper approach a prisoner who was lying still on the pavement and shoot him in the head." Id. at 183. "' I never saw human being treated like this,' another prisoner later recalled.He couldn't understand: 'Why all the hatred?' But is wasn't just any hatred--it as racial hatred. As one prisoner was told by a proper who had a gun trained on him: he would soon be dead because 'we haven't killed enough niggers,' Everywhere there were crises of 'Keep your nigger nose down! 'Dob't you know state troopers don't like niggers?' Don't move nigger! You're dead!'" Id. at 185. "Any white inmate who had stood with the black rebels in D Yard also suffered special abuse. Doctors from the National Guard reported hearing troopers and COs punctuate their beating of white inmates--the 'nigger lovers'--with bitter refrains of 'This is what you get for hanging around with niggers.'" Id. at 212. "One might well wonder why it has taken forty-five years for a comprehensive history of the Attica prison uprising of 1971 to be written. The answer is simple: the most important details of this story have been deliberatively kept from the public. Literally thousands of boxes of documents relating to these events are sealed or next to impossible to access." Id. at xiii. So, the question: who was/is being protected by preventing access to the documents?).

Tom Wicker, A Time to Die: The Attica Prison Revolt (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1975, 2011) (From the "Afterword": "Long after A Time to Die was published in 1975, Governor Hugh Carey of New York pardoned everyone who had been concerned in any way with the Attica revolt ad the attack that ended it. That had the effect of canceling the indictments of sixty-one inmates who had been charged with everything from murder to sodomy. But Governor Carey's action also meant that no state policeman, correction officer, or any state official would be charged with anything that had contributed to the deaths of twenty-nine inmates and ten hostages in the deadly, six-minute fusillade fired into D-yard on Sept. 13. Nor would anyone be indicted or tried for the failure to provide adequate medical care for the wounded after the firing stopped, or for the repeated torturing and beating of inmates when the revolt had been crushed, or for prison officials' failure to put a stop to these reprisals." Id. at 311.).

HOW TO RESPOND TO WITNESSING ONE'S COUNTRYMEN (OR WOMEN) ENGAGED IN GOVERNMENT-SANCTIONED TORTURE?

Henri Alleg, The Question, with a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated  from the French by John Calder (London: John Calder, 1958) (From Jean-Paul Sartre's "Preface":"Appalled, the French are discovering this terrible truth: that if nothing can protect a nation against itself, neither its traditions nor its laws, and if fifteen years are enough to transform victims into executioners, then its behavior is not more than a matter of opportunity and occasion. Anybody, at any time, may equally find himself victim or executioner." "Happy are those who died without ever having had to ask themselves: 'If they tear out my fingernails, will I talk?' But even happier are others, barely out of their childhood, who have not had task themselves that other question: 'If my friends, fellow soldiers, and leaders tear out an enemy's fingernails in my presence, what will I do?'" Id. at 12. Written during the Algerian War, but still relevant . . . even to us Americans.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT AS WE TRY TO MAKE SENSE OF THE 2016 ELECTION RESULTS: IT IS THE (NEW CAPITALIST) ECONOMY, STUPID!

Richard Sennet, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998) ("[C]apitalism now acts on different productive principles. The short-term, flexible time of the new capitalism seems to preclude making a sustained narrative out of one's labors, and so a career. Yet to fail to wrest some sense of continuity and purpose out of these conditions would be literally to fail ourselves." Id. at 122."Yet I had an epiphany of sorts in Davos, listening to the rulers of the flexible realm. 'We' is also a dangerous pronoun to them. They dwell comfortably in entrepreneurial disorder, but fear organized confrontation. They of course fear the resurgence of unions, but become acutely and personally uncomfortable, fidgeting or breaking eye contact or retreating into taking notes, if forced to discuss the people who,in their jargon, are 'left behind.' They know that the great majority of those who toil in the flexible regime are left behind, and of course they regret it. But the flexibility they celebrate does not give. it cannot give, any guidance for the conduct of an ordinary life. The new masters have rejected careers in the old English sense of the word, as pathways along which people can travel; durable and sustained paths of action are foreign territories." "It therefore seemed to me . . . that this regime might at least lose its current hold over the imaginations and sentiments of those down below. I have learned from my family's bitter radical past; if change occurs it happens on the ground, between persons speaking out of inner need, rather than though mass uprisings. What political programs follow from those inner needs, I simply don't know. But I do know a regime which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one [an]other cannot long preserve its legitimacy." Id. at 147-148.).

HISTORY IDENTITY, HONOR

Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., 1997) (From "The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Awake": "It is open to question whether justice or truth actually heals. It is an article of faith with us that knowledge, particularly self-knowledge, is a condition of psychic health, yet every society, including ours, manages to function with only the most precarious purchase on the truth of its own past. Every city has a substantial psychological investment in heroes, To discover that its heroes were guilty of war crimes is to admit that the identities they defended were themselves tarnished. . . War crimes challenge collective moral identities, and when these denies are threatened,denial is actually a defense of everything one holds dear." Id. at 164, 184. From "The Narcissism of Minor Difference": "The narcissism of minor difference may not explain why communities of fear begin to loathe each other. It is not an explanatory theory. It is only a phrase, with a certain heuristic usefulness. Its virtue is that it doesn't take ethnic antagonism as a given; it doesn't accept differing histories or origins as a fate that dictates bloody outcomes. It draws our attention to the projective and fantastic quality of ethnic identities, to their particular inauthenticity. It suggests that it is precisely their inauthenticity that triggers violent actions of defense. It also helps us to notice their dynamic nature. Ethnicity is sometimes described as if it were skin, a fate that cannot be changed. In fact, what is essential about ethnicity is it plasticity. It is not a skin, but a mask, constantly repainted." Id. at 34, 56. "Globalism scours away distinctiveness at the surface of our identities and forces us back into ever more assertive defense of the inner differences--language [e.g., English versus Spanish and just about any middle eastern language?], mentality [e.g., conservative versus liberal, republic versus democrat?], myth [e.g., American exceptionalism?], and fantasy [e.g, America as leader of the free world, or president as most power person in the world?]--that escape the surface scouring. As it brings us closer together, makes us all neighbors, destroys the old boundaries of identity marked out by national or regional consumption styles, we react by longing to the margins of difference that remain." Id. at 58. "Let us pause here and draw some implications from what Freud is arguing. If intolerance and narcissism are connected [Are use listening Donald?], one immediate and practical conclusion might be this: We are likely to be more tolerant toward other identities only if we learn to like ourselves a little less. Breaking down stereotypical images of others is likely to work only if we also break down the fantastic elements in our own self-regard. The root of intolerance lies in our tendency to overvalue our own identities; by overvalue, I mean we insist that we have nothing in common, nothing to share. At the heart of this insistence lurks the fantasy of purity, of boundaries that can never be crossed." Id  at 62. In short, intolerance is about building a wall around oneself and those who are just like you. From the title essay, "The Warrior's Honor": "The problem . . . is that more and more warriors no longer play by the rules. Modern technology has steadily increased the distance, both moral and geographic, between the warrior and his prey. What sense of honor can possibly link the technician who targets the Tomahawk cruise missile [or the drone?] and the civilians of Baghdad a thousand mile away? At the other end of the scale, the global market in small arms is breaking up the modern state's monopoly on the means of violence. The disintegrating states of the world are literally flooded with junk weapons, old Kalashnikovs for the most part, which cn be bought in the marketplace for the cost of a loaf of bread. With weapons this cheap, violence becomes impossible for the state to contain. The history of war has been about the state's confiscating violence form society and vesting it in a specialized warrior caste. But if the state loses control of war, as it has in so many of the world's red zones of insurgency and rebellion--if war becomes the preserve of private armies, gangsters, and paramilitaries--then the distinction between battle and barbarism may disappear." Id. at 109, 157-158.).

THE POTENCY OF REACTIONARY IDEAS

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction (New York: New York Review Books, 2016) (From the book jacket: "We don't understand the reactionary mind. As a result . . . the ideas and passions that shape today's political dramas are unintelligible to us." "The reactionary is anything but a conservative. He is as radical and modern a figure as the revolutionary, someone shipwrecked in the rapidly changing present, and suffering from nostalgia for an idealized past and an apocalyptic fear that history is rushing toward catastrophe. And like the revolutionary his political engagements are motivated by highly developed ideas." "Ill begins with three twentieth-century philosophers . .  who attributed the problems of modern  society to a break in the history of ideas and promoted a return to earlier modes of grand historical narratives of betrayal to shape political outlooks since the French Revolution,, and shows how these narratives are employed i the writings of Europe's wrong-wing cultural pessimists and Maoist neocommunists, American theoconservatives fantasizing about the harmony of medieval Catholic society and radical Islamists seeing to restore a vanished Muslim caliphate." "The revolutionary spirit that inspired political movements across the world for two centuries may have died out. But the spirit of reaction that rose to meet it has survived and is proving just as formidable ta historical force. We live in an age when the tragicomic nostalgia of Don Quixote for a lost golden age has been transformed into a potent and sometimes deadly weapon. Mark Lilla helps us to understand why.").

THINGS TO READ IN TRYING TO APPRECIATE THE THREATS TO THE REPUBLIC OF THE DONALD J. TRUMP PRESIDENCY

It would be a grossly false-equivalency to equate Donald J. Trump to Adopt Hitler. Hitler was a fascist, ideologue, and totalitarian. Donald J. Trump is a "mere"authoritarian, with no hardcore values except self-interest, power, and money. Hitler probably did care about Germany and the German people, wanting to 'make Germany great again,' though in a misguided and perverse manner. Donald J. Trump could care less about America and the American people. "Make America Great Again" is just the marketing pitch for the great con. Hitler was evil. Donald J. Trump may not be evil, but has advocated for doing evil things (e.g., torture; breaching international law by taking the oil from countries to prevent funding of ISIS; committing the war crime of bombing and killing the families (that is, omen and children) of ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups; reinstating the constitutionally suspect policy of stop-and-frisk) and cause a great deal of harm to America. With Hitler, great dangers rested in the man himself. With Donald J. Trump, the danger rest less in the man himself, but with the people he is surrounded. Hitler was a thinker, murderous as his thoughts were. Donald J. Trump is not a thinker, not a reader, not an appreciator of nuance. He is simple-minded, He follows his guts, not his (mental) intuitions but his (bodily) guts. Yet, I suggest to you that an appreciate of the rise of Hitler and the way Hitler governed may well provide value insights into the rise of Donald J. Trump and his approach governance. To that end, read the books mentioned below as cautionary tales of the potential ramifications of Donald J. Trump and his presidential administration. Let me assert here and now,that if, as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "The arch of history is long, but it bends towards justice," then history will not be kind to Donald J. Trump. Notwithstanding his success in the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald J. Trump is on the wrong side of history.

Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev'd ed. (New York: Konecky & Konecky, 1962) ("In speaking of the Nazi movement as a 'party' there is a danger of mistaking its true character. For the Nazi Party's no more a party, in the normal democratic sense of that word, than the Communist Party is today; it was an organized conspiracy against the State. The Party's program was important to win support, and, for psychological reason which Hitler discussed quite frankly in Mein Kamfp, the programme had to be kept unalterable and never allowed to become a subject for discussion. But the attitude of the leaders towards the programme was entirely opportunist. For them, as for most of the old Party members, the real object was to get their hands on the State. They were the Catilines of a new revolution, the gutter elite, avid for power, position, and wealth; the sole object of the Party was to secure power by one means or another." "The existence of such an organization was in fact incompatible with the safety of the Republic. No state could tolerate the threat which it implied, if it was resolved to remain master in its own house. Why then were no effective steps taken by the German Government to arrest leaders of the Nazi Party and break up their organization? [R]ecommendations to this effect, with legal grounds for the action proposed, were submitted by the police authorities to the Reich Attorney-General even before the Nazis' electoral triumph of September 1930. Yet no action was taken." Id. at 176. Think of organizations associated with the Alt-Right. Not a "party" party, but a loose and informal affiliation of the like-minded intent on taking control of and, ultimately, undermining the America Republic from within. "Before he came to power Hitler never succeeded in winning more than thirty-seven per cent of the votes in a free election. Had the remaining sixty-three per cent of the German people been united in their opposition he could never have hoped to become Chancellor by legal means; he would have been forced to choose between taking the risks of a seizure of power by force or the continued frustration of his ambitions. He was saved form this awkward dilemma by two factors: the divisions and ineffectiveness of those who opposed him, and the willingness of the German Right to accept him as a partner in government." Id. at 253. Query: Will the Democrat Party, and liberal and moderate Republicans be divided and ineffective in opposing Donald J. Trump's administration?  Will the Republican Party, the Republican Establishment, the American Right, etc., accept Donald J. Trump and his administration as their partner in government? ""It does not lie within the scope of this study to present a picture of the totalitarian system in Germany, roof its manifold activities in economic and social policy, the liberation of the police State, control of the courts, the regime's attitude towards the Churches ad the strait-jacketing of education. Hitler bore the final responsibility for whatever was done by the regime, but he hated the routine work of government, and, once he had stabilized his power, he showed comparatively little interest in what was done by his departmental Ministers except to lay down general lines of policy." Id. at 313. Sound like this may well be Donald J Trump's approach to government except, I suspect, he will not even bother with basic policy. Rather, he will be manipulated by his immediate "advisers".).

Peter Fritzsche, An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 2016) (From Chapter 8, The Destruction of Humanity: "At a conference at Wayne State University in 1970, a young rabbi angrily asked, 'How is it possible to believe in God?' He directed the question to Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and author of the autobiographical novel Night, who replied, 'That is not the question. After Auschwitz, the question is how can one believe in man?' Wiesel's response suggested that the focus of any consideration of the Holocaust must be the collective moral compass of Europeans in the 1940s. Could human beings be trusted, and their compassion relied upon, when the powerless were persecuted? Wiesel insinuated that the crimes of the Germans in occupied Europe could not be understood in terms of the Germans or Nazis alone. Both Germans' actions and the response of civilians across Europe, both Jewish and Christian, to those actions challenged basic assumptions about what it meant to be human. It was not difficult to demonize German perpetrators and dwell on the 'yawning gap' that separated 'a Gestapo man from myself,' as French critic Leon Werth admitted in 1942. But such an easy exercise displayed 'the sin of pride.' Werth contemplated that 'the distance was perhaps no greater than the greatest differences imaginable between any two men.' The fact that the positions might be reversed 'is what is frightening.' Werth's line of inquiry into the reversal of positions became pertinent fifteen years later when France's counterinsurgency campaign in Algeria transformed former 'victims into executioners." Id. at 237 (citations omitted).).

Konrad Heiden, The Fuhrer, translated from the German by Ralph Manheim, introduction by Richard Overy (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1944, 1999) (From the "Introduction": Konrad Heiden 1901-66 was Adolf Hitler's first serious biographer. There have been many other fuller, scholarly biographies since, but Heiden shaped the whole biographical approach to the subject, form Hitler's early life in Austria to the political trump of 1933 and the establishment of a harsh dictatorship. Moreover, he did so as a witness to the events he was describing. Unlike more recent accounts, The Fuehrer was written by someone who watched Hitler's meteoric rise and felt moved to explain to contemporaries how it was possible." "Heiden was a young socialist student in Munich when he first saw Hitler speak. It was 1923, the year of inflation and political chaos in Germany. Heiden was not impressed by what he saw: a self-centered demagogue at the head of what he called the 'any of Uprooted and Disinherited.' Yet ten years later this same Hitler was German Chancellor and Heiden was forced into exile. . . " "Above all Heiden wanted to explain how it was possible that a man he found laughable and contemptuous in 1923 could exert such extraordinary power over others--''the greatest mover of the masses in world history'. This is a question that has been asked many times since. Heiden's explanation is as powerfully imaginative and intellectually convincing as anything produced since the war. He was keenly aware that Hitler's political triumph had no been preordained. Hitler may have been 'the man of the hour', as Heiden put it, but that did not necessarily mean it was the 'hour of the man'. He shows how much Hitler depended on chance and opportunity, on the feebleness or self-interest or ambition of other German politicians, in order to win power." Id. at 5. So with Hitler, so with Donald J. Trump? How feeble will the Democrats and right-minded Republicans be? How impotent will be the America people? How high will they jump to serve their leader?).

David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich (New York & London: Norton, 1997).

Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent 1899-1939, translated from the German Jefferson Chase (New York: Knopf, 2016) ("The Frankfurter Zeitung wrote of an 'election of embitterment,' in which the majority of voters had articulated their dissatisfaction with 'the methods of governing or rather non-governing, the indecisive parliamentary palaver of the past few years.' The journalist also believed that economic hardship had pushed many desperate Germans into Hitler's waiting arms. [] Another Die Weltbuhne writer tried to explain Hitler's success as the result of a 'deep depression' that had gripped 'the apolitical segments of society' in particular: 'They were beyond salvation, Kessler thought, although they could 'bring unspeakable misery upon Europe as they resist their demise.' But interpretations of Nazism that viewed the phenomenon as a sociological by-product of the decline of this or that class ignored what was new about the movement: its diffuse character as a populist party enabled it to integrate heterogeneous interests and subordinate them to the charismatic figure of the Fuhrer." Id. at 234 (citations omitted).).

PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS, ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHERS, AND YOGIS

Justin E. H. Smith, The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("The more recent incarnation of the Courtier is the 'sell-out.' or, to put it in somewhat more euphemistic terms, the 'public intellectual,' who  unlike the Gadfly is out their in society, not in order to change it, but in order to advance himself and his own glory." Id. at 17.  "Ironically, one of the mechanisms by which universities are destroying themselves, or at least are seeking to remove their own humanistic hearts, is by forcing philosophers to conceptualize their own work on the model of the positive sciences: by forcing philosophers to apply for large grants, for example, with explicit 'methodologies' (which can no longer be simply reading several books and thinking about them) leading to concrete research 'results' (which can no longer be simply interesting and compelling observations about the world and our place in it). But what the administrators and the faculty alike miss in their mutual misunderstanding is the depth of the historical relationship, indeed the identity, between what is now being called 'science' and what has for a much longer time been called 'philosophy.' It cannot be that philosophers must retain their independence from the sciences, for it is a simple historical fact that this independence is a recent invention, and not necessarily a justified or useful one. Science, too, use to be motivated by impulses other than grant seeking. . . . " Id. at 234-235. "Given that there seem to be some expectations about what the body must be doing in any given philosophical tradition, we might suggest that Yoga is but the fullest development of an expectation that is always there in some degree in any tradition of philosophy. Yet at present, in academic philosophy, this expectation is minimal. Ironically, today many academic philosophers will, at the end of a workday, go off to a yoga session in order to not do philosophy. They contrast the physical exercise of philosophy with the mental labor that is by definition, their profession. What an impoverishment of both sides! Philosophy as a job is now balanced by yoga as a lifestyle, and the millennia-long history that has united contemplation with a strict discipline of the body is scarcely recalled in other segment of the day." Id. at 169.).

PHILOLOGY, THE CRISIS OF THE HUMANITIES, AND A COMMENT ON "ANGLO-SAXON" IDENTITY

James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) (From the book jacket: "Many today do not recognize the word, but 'philology' was for centuries nearly synonymous with humanistic intellectual life, encompassing not only the study of Greek and Roman literature and the Bible but also all of other studies of language and literature, as well as religion, history, culture, art, archaeology, and more. In short, philology was the queen of the human sciences. How did it become little more than an archaic word? In Philology, the first history of Western humanistic learning as a connected whole ever published in English, James Turner tells the fascinating, forgotten story of how the study of language and texts led to the modern humanities and the modern university. . . . The humanities today face a crisis of relevance, of not of meaning and purpose. Understanding their common origins--and what they still share--has never been more urgent." Let me suggest that law as an intellectual discipline faces the same crisis of relevance, meaning and purpose, as does the humanities. Law as a practicing profession faces its own crisis, but not ones of relevance, meaning and purpose: as long as people disagree and decide to settle their disagreement other than by mortal combat, lawyers will have a purpose, some relevance, and some meaning. But law as a practicing profession (including the bulk of what is taught in law schools) is not law as an intellectual discipline. The former being pretty much non-, if not anti-intellectual, the latter being very much grounded in the intellectual life. From the text: "Once again nationalism field philology; and, once again, language, race, and fanciful identities ran together. In King Alfred's day lay the time-shrouded origins of English future, society, polity. In 1849 'Anglo-Saxon' Kemble told Jacob Grimm, 'We Englishmen, tho' we do not read Anglo[-Saxon] much, are beginning to feel very proud of our Teutonic element.' The last three words were key. In the nineteenth century a stronger stress fell on Germanic ancestors as foundation of Englishness. Nor were imagined Angles and Saxons the only Teutonic for in English genealogy. (Few historians today would bet on Angles and Saxons ever having existed as distinct peoples swarming into England.) Vikings--irresistibly bold, blond, and berserk--had conquered northern and eastern England in the ninth century. They settled in large numbers in this so-called Danelaw (i.e., where laws of the Danes ruled); and they contributed to England's vocabulary as well as its gene pool. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles despised the pagan Vikings. Victorians loved them. (Vikings also founded Dublin but without elevating English opinion of the Irish.) Well-educated English people added Norsemen to their national lineage, adopted eddas as an honorary Anglo-Saxon literary genre."  "Many 'old-stock' white Americans, too, started to see 'Anglo-Saxon' as a badge of identity (Viking not so often). Anglo-Saxon fervor rose in the 1840s, in the face of two antitypes: hungry Celtic immigrants pouring in from Ireland and Mexican soldier fighting in the Mexican-American War. . . ."  Id. at 154.).

DECLINE OF AMERICAN POWER?

Gideon Rachman, Zero-Sum Future: American Power in An Age of Anxiety (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011) (From the book jacket:"Successive presidents have welcomed globalization and the rise of China. But with American unemployment stubbornly high and U.S. power facing new challenges, the stage is set for growing rivalry between America and China, The European Union is also ripping itself apart. The win-win logic of globalization is giving way to a zero-sum log of political and economic struggle." "The new world we now live in, an age of anxiety, is less prosperous, less stable world, with old ideas overthrown and new ideologies and powers on the rise, Rachman shows how zero-sum logic is thwarting efforts to deal with global problems from Afghanistan to unemployment, climate change to nuclear proliferation." What this 2011 book did not adequately forecast was the rise of reactionary, nationalism, not so much in Europe, but in the United States. However . . .  From the Text: "What Joseph Stiglitz and Naomi Klein put their finger on was a feeling that globalization was a project that benefit elite more than ordinary people. [] The link was a complaint that the faster growth associated with globalization has been bought at the expense of rising inequality--that it was Russian oligarchs, Chinese factory owners, and bankers on Wall Street who had creamed off most of the benefits and used some of the proceeds to buy consent from political elites. [] But while Stiglitz lamented the lack of a 'world government,' a different wing of the antiglobalization movement was terrified by precisely this prospect. For Stieglitz it was the economics of globalization that were open to criticism. But for conservatives in Britain and the United States, it was the political of globalization that were most alarming, They believed that power was being drained away form nation-states by undemocratic supranational institutions acting in the name of economic rationality or world peace." "In Britain so-called Eurosceptics focused on the ever-increasing power of the European Union. [] In the United States it was the United Nations that was the focus of conservative suspicion and paranoia." Id. at 160=161.).

TOO MANY LAWYERS ARE PLAYING THE WRONG GAME

Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016):

"The Game of Law versus the Game of Life

" 'To a lawyer, nothing beats a good game of law.

"It stands to reason: law is the game lawyers are trained to play. In law school, the pedagogic emphasis is on 'learning to think like a lawyer,' and law students quickly come to understand that law and justice are two quite different things: the law is about rules and precedents, and the careful parsing of words and phrases. Often, the law is precisely what the International Criminal Tribunal's Appeals Chamber said it shouldn't be: 'the product of or slave of logic or intellectual hair-splitting.

" 'Justice' is a far messier and more dangerous concept: mention justice, and emotions quickly start running high. This give lawyers even more incentives to stick to law.

"When lawyers talk about war, they like to talk about 'armed conflict,' the legal distinctions between international and noninternational armed conflicts, and the legislative definition of 'traditional military activities.' Lawyers like to talk about 'collateral damage' and 'proportionality' and 'incidental harm,' and debate the quantum of activity that constitutes 'direct participation in hostilities.' To buttress their arguments, lawyers cite other lawyers and legal scholars and judges. They argue by syllogism and analogy, citing past cases and commentaries to prove that the concept of co-belligerency can be mapped onto the newer notion of 'associated forces,' or that the newly articulated 'unwilling or unable' doctrine merely restates older rules about neutrality.

* * *

"Somehow, lawyers have come to dominate Washington debates about war, and that's a shame. Legal categories should reflect a society's deepest moral beliefs.  But ask a lawyer if something's a good idea, and odds are he'll tell you instead whether he thinks it's legally permissible. If we live today in a world in which everything has become war and the military has become everything, it is partly because far too many top decision makers have spent the last fifteen years playing the game of law, instead of the game of life.

"For lawyers, the game of law is safe and rule-bound: he who hews to the law can do no wrong. Whatever is not prohibited is permitted, we reason: if indefinite detention and mass surveillance aren't clearly illegal, they must be legal. If U.S targeted killings are not manifestly unlawful, they must be lawful, and if they're lawful, they needn't keep us up at might, dreaming of dead and broken bodies.

Id. at 362-363. Powerful, and sad, critique of lawyering by a Georgetown law professor. 

RACE AS "AN EVALUATIVE NOTION MASQUERADING AS A NATURAL KIND"

Justin E. H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("Given, then, that we now know that the identity groups in modern multicultural states are plainly constructed on ethno-linguistic and cultural grounds, rather than on biological-essential grounds, why, again, do so many people remain normatively committed to racial identities? Sometimes it does happen that the removal of a social kind's natural undergirding in turn causes that category to largely wither away. Thus at least in the European cultural sphere, the category of 'witch,' surely a social kind and not a natural one, has, like phlogiston, largely withered away as a result of broad convergence by sometime in the eighteenth century upon the view that the term has no referent in the world. So, again, if witches can go the same way as phlogiston, why not race? Part of the answer to this question . . .  may come from recent empirical work in the cognitive anthropology of race. Francisco Gil-White, Edouard Machery and Luc Faucher, and others have argued that the categorization of human subgroups is grounded in a natural disposition of the human mind. On this account, we are cognitively predisposed to perceive different between biological kinds as rooted in something essential." Id. at 47. "With race, then, we are dealing with the seemingly paradoxical case of what might be called natural construction. Naturally construction, we might say, are those entities or categories that do not fade away when human inquiry finds that they are not in fact robust features of the natural landscape, and that linger as a result of a natural propensity of the human mind to organize the world by means of them. While it is certainly difficult to establish unambiguously the existence of such a thing, we may nonetheless cautiously hypothesize that race is just such a natural construction, to the extent that it enables us to understand why racial thought has had such a long history, in spite of the continual variation in the way racial classifications are made, and in spite of the fact that, today, such classifications continue to have normative significance even for many who are fully aware that they have no firm ground in nature." Id. at 50. "Race, it seems, is in the end really just an evaluative notion masquerading as a natural kind." Id. at 54.).

THE GULF IS WIDE BETWEEN OUR PRINCIPLES AND OUR ACTIONS.

Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind 189-1715, translated from the French by James Lewis May, introduction by Anthony Grafton (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2013) (Pierre Bayle "began with a soft note. Atheists are no worse than idolaters, whether in heart or mind. Then, following up the train of thought thus suggested, he went on to insinuate that Atheists were no worse than Christians. Ah! If one were to say to a man from some other planet that there were people on earth endowed with reason and sound sense, God-fearing people, believing that Heaven would reward their merits and Hell their vices, the man from another world would expect to see them performing works of mercy, showing kindness to their neighbours, forgiving trespasses, and, in a word, striving to attain to an eternity of happiness. Alas! it is not thus that things happen in reality. We must needs see to believe what the spectacle of human life brings out into startling relief, namely, that between what people believe and what they do, the gulf is wide. Principles have no effect on our behaviour. Pious words are followed up by wicked deeds. We pretend to worship God, but we think only of ourselves, and of gratifying our own passions." Id. at 284.).

ANTI-SEMITISM: THE MYTH Of RITUAL MURDER

R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1988) (From the book jacket: "'In the year of Our Lord 1470, Elias, Jew at Endingen, was held and questioned as to what he knew of the murder committed some years ago in Endingen by the Jews, because one knows well, that nobody else but the Jews had committed the murder.'--Frieburg record of the Endingen ritual murder trial that resulted in the execution of three Jews and the expulsion of the rest of the Jewish families in the city.' "Between the mid-fifteen and the beginning of the seventeenth century, German Jews were persecuted and often brought to trial for the alleged ritual murders of Christian children, whose blood purportedly played a crucial part in Jewish magical rites. In this engrossing book). R. Po-chia Hsia traces the rise and decline of ritual murder trials during this period. Using a wide variety of sources ranging from Christian and Kabbalistic treatises to judicial records, popular pamphlets, woodcuts, and folk songs, Hsia sifts through the tales of ritual murder, examines the religious sources of the idea of child sacrifice and blood symbolism, and reconstructs the political context of ritual murder trials against the Jews." "Hsia explains that legends of ritual murder coalesced with stories of Host desecration to create a powerful myth of Jewish magic. However, says Hsia, Reformation theologians undermined medieval beliefs in blood magic, and the Holy Roan Emperors vigorously condemned ritual murder trials, These developments, along with the evolution of a professional legal corps and the efforts of the Jews themselves, contributed to the gradual suppression of ritual murder trials. Nonetheless, the discourse of ritual murder persisted well past the sixteenth century, and the blood libel bequeathed a most ambiguous legacy for the Jews of Germany.").

R. Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1992) (From the book jacket: "Setting the trial and its documents in the historical context of medieval blood libel, Hsia vividly portrays how fact and fiction can be blurred, how judicial torture can be couched in icy orderliness and impersonality, and how religious rites can be interpreted as ceremonies of barbarism.").

GENOCIDE, CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, AND A LAWYER IMMORALITY

Phillippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity" (New York: Knopf, 2016) (From the book jacket: "East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men [Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht] who simultaneously originated the ideas of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity,' both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, 'the little Paris of Ukraine,' a city variously called Lemberg, Lwow, Lvov, or Lviv. [] And the author writes  of a third man, Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer, a Nazi from the earliest days who destroyed so many lives, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942, in which the entire Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank, who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and, weeks after becoming the governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the transfer of 133,000 men, women, and children to the death camps." From the text: "The cell was unforgiving, and so was Niklas [Frank] on the subject of his father's actions. 'My father was a lawyer; he knew what he did.'" Id. at 4.).

THE SPIRAL OF SILENCE

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion--Our Social Skin (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1984) (From the book jacket: "In this lively and timely work, first published in German in 1980, Noelle-Neumann contends that public opinion is dominated by a 'spiral of silence.' Most people avoid expressing their beliefs openly unless assured of support among their hearers. Silence is more comfortable--but it may suggest, falsely, that a position has few adherents. Conversely, those who receive widespread support for their opinions tends to voice them more often, creating reinforcement which, in turn, portrays such opinions as stronger than they actually are and ultimately leads to a change in public opinion. Marshaling evidence from her own research, polls, and opinion questionnaires and from historical, philosophical, and political sources, Noelle-Neumann asserts that recognition of this effect is the best defense against manipulation by it." Perhaps not only food for thought, but a much needed reminder of what we must do to protect ourselves (and others) in the age of hyper social media, polling, talking-heads, and the dawning authoritarian age in American politics.).

Also, see Jacob Shamir & Michal Shamir, The Anatomy of Public Opinion (Ann Arbor: U. of Michigan Press, 2000).

WHERE HAS ALL THE HONOR GONE?

James Bowman, Honor: A History (New Your: Encounter Books, 2006) (Has honor been disparaged and dismissed as obsolete in the America? The book seems to have adopted the "cash of cultures" paradigm, with Islamic east versus Judeo-Christian west. I do not embrace that paradigm. Still, it is worth questioning whether the West, and American in particular, has become a less honor-bound society. Have sincerity and authenticity replaced honor? Being true to oneself is not unimportant, but it pales against binding oneself to one's god. one's country, one's community, one's family . . . and requiring that these, in turn, hold themselves to high or sacred standards. The American Declaration of Independence ends with a pledge of our sacred honor. Sadly, no one talks in terms of 'sacred honor" these days . . . except Islamic warriors.). 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, JULY 4, 1776--NOVEMBER 8, 2016

The greatest democracy ever has turned authorization and fascist. Let the nightmare begin.

WAR, WAR, WAR. . . AND MORE WAR: PEACE DOES NOT STAND A CHANCE

Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French and Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians and the End of New France (Ithaca & London: Cornell U.Press, 2014).

Yasmin Kahn, India at War: The Subcontinent and the Second World War (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2015).

Raghu Karnad, Farthest Field: An India Story of the Second World War (New York & London: Norton, 2015).

Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

ELECTION DAY: WHO WILL SPEAK OUT FOR AMERICA?

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

The best-known versions of the speech are the poems that began circulating by the 1950s.^[1] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum quotes the following text as one of the many poeticversions of the speech:^[2]

“

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

”

Niemöller created multiple versions of the text during his career. The earliest speeches, written in 1946, list the communists, incurable patients, Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses, and civilians in countries occupied by Nazi Germany. In all versions, the impact is carefully built up, by going from the "smallest, most distant" group to the largest, Jewish, group, .... and then finally to himself as a by then outspoken critic of Nazism. Niemöller made the cardinal "who cares about them" clear in his speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946, of which this is a partial translation:^[1]

MY QUERY: Who might they come for in America now? If not for you, will you nonetheless stand up and speak out? Is that not the question one has to ask oneself this election?

REFLECTIONS ON LONELINESS

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (New York: Picador, 2016) (From the book jacket: ("What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we're not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens?").

WOMAN WHO LOVES HER WORK, CHALLENGING AS IT (AND/OR LIFE) IS AT TIMES

Hope Jahren, Lab Girl (New York: Knopf, 2016).

WE ARE FUCKED!!

• Bill Maher: There’s a Right-Wing Coup Going On, "I'm Sh*tting In My Pants" November 4 2016ImYourDad13,346 views

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AMERICAN DEMOCRACY AT RISK

Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (London & New York: Verso, 1991) (Though somewhat dated, what Chomsky writes about post-Cold War American remains relevant and provides much need food for thought for post-9/11 America. From the book jacket: "Reviewing the military intervention in the Gulf [that is, the first Gulf War] and the invasion of Panama which preceded it, Chomsky highlights the success of American politicians in replacing fear of an old enemy, the Soviet Union, with new threats. He argues that it is only in this way that the Pentagon preserves its most vital domestic role of providing public subsidy to high technology industry."  From the text: "We can . . . identify a period form World War II, continuing into the 1970s, in which the US dominated much of the world [NOTE: Thus, globalization was, essentially, Americanization.], confronting a rival superpower of considerably more limited reach. We may adopt conventional usage and refer to this as the Cold War era, as long as we are careful not to carry along, without reflection, the ideological baggage devised to shape understanding in the interests of domestic power." "There is a striking imbalance in the 'post-Cold War' international system: the economic order is tricolor, but the military order is not. The United States remains the only power with the will and the capacity to exercise force on a global scale--even more freely than before, with the fading of the Soviet deterrent. But the US no longer enjoys the preponderance of economic power that had enabled it to maintain an aggressive and interventionist military posture since World War II. Military power not backed by a comparable economic base [NOTE: The American economy and standard of living is fueled by DEBT!] has its limits as a means of coercion and domination. It may will inspire adventurism, a tendency to lead with one's strength, possibly with catastrophic consequences." Id. at 2-3. Thus, for example, the quagmire of the endless American wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and against Terror.  On another point: "We should also bear in in mind that the right to freedom of speech in the United States was not established by the First Amendment to the Constitution, but only through dedicated efforts over a long period by the labor movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, and other popular forces. James Madison pointed out that a 'parchment barrier' will never suffice to prevent tyranny. Rights are not established by words, but won and sustained by struggle." "It is also worth recalling that victories for freedom of speech are often won in defense of the most depraved and horrendous views. The 1969 Supreme Court decision was in defense of the Ku Klux Klan from prosecution after a meeting with hooded figures, guns, and a burning cross, calling for 'burying the nigger' and 'sending the Jews back to Israel.' With regard to freedom of expression there are basically two positions: you can defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you can reject it in favor of Stalinist/Fascist standards." Id. a 400-401.).

"THE ALLURE OF FASCISM"

Ian Kershaw, Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (New York: Viking, 2016) ("Some of the movements of the extreme, radical Right explicitly copied the methods, symbols and language used by the followers of Mussolini and Hitler, and proudly called themselves 'fascist' or 'national socialist'. Others shared some, even most, of the ideas of the openly fascist movements while rejecting the label for themselves. The issue is largely one of definition--and trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall. Each of the myriad movements of the extreme Right had its distinctive features and emphasis. And since each of them claimed to represent in 'true', 'real' of 'essential' form a specific nation and based much of their hyper-nationalist appeal on the presumed uniqueness of that nation [Note: each nations' version of "exceptionalism"!!], there could be no genuine international organization representing the radical Right, equivalent to the Comintern on the Left. When an attempt was made , at a meeting of representatives of the extreme Right from thirteen countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Switzerland) in December 1934 on the shores of Lake Geneva, to establish a framework for collaborative action, the most important country, Nazi Germany boycotted the gathering--which found itself unable to agree even on the basis of a common doctrine." [Note: This is why, for example, even though an American politician might self-describe himself as an "admirer of Mussolini," it may be difficult for others to label him a "fascist" given how poorly defined the concept is.] "Some common ideological features of the extreme Right, whether or not a movement called itself 'fascist', nonetheless existed: hyper-nationalist emphasis on the unity of an integral nation, which gained its very identity through the 'cleansing' of all those deemed not to belong--foreigners, ethnic minorities, 'undesirables'; racial exclusiveness (though not necessarily biological racism like Nazism's variety) expressed though insistence in the 'special', 'unique' and 'superior' quality of the nation; radical, extreme and violent commitment to the utter destruction of political enemies--Marxists quite especially, but also liberals, democrats and 'reactionaries'; stress upon discipline, 'maniliness' and militarism (usually involving paramilitary organizations); and belief in authoritarian leadership. Other features were important, indeed sometimes central, to the ideology of a specific movement, but not omnipresent. Some movements directed their nationalism towards irredentist or imperialist goals, with devastating effect, but not all were intrinsically expansionist. Some, though not all had a strong anti-capitalist tendency. Often though not invariably, they favored reorganizing the economy along 'corporatist' lines, abolishing independent trade unions and regulating economic policy by 'corporations of interests directed by the state." Id. at 228-229. [NOTE: In reading the previous passage, one can readily understand how difficult, at least from a historical perspective, for 'some form of fascism to take root in American as a populous movement. Americans are, or at least believe themselves to be, too individualistic and independent to willingly subject themselves to an authoritarian leadership. However, since 9/11 Americans have quite willingly given up or comporomised, much of their constitutional liberties for what they take for greater security. How has that worked out for us? Moreover, what if the choice were between, on the one hand, a authoritarian leadership that promises to "make America great again!', promises to defeat terrorism next week, promises to bring back those manly manufacturing jobs,promises to return America to being a White, Gun-totting, Christian power structure, etc., and, on the other hand, a liberal, small "d" democratic leadership that acknowledges that change is inevitable and the old ways are gone forever? Might those individualistic and independent Americans, fearing change, fearing the unknown, fearing the loss of exceptionaism, opt for the authoritarian turn?  Especially when so few Americans are actually willing to do what they need to do to maintain America as a representative democracy. American democracy has dodged a few political bullets over the years. Will it, will we, continue to be so lucky? GIMME SHELTER! WAR, RAPE, MURDER AND, YES, FASCISM, IS ALL JUST A SHOT AWAY.] Food for thought!).

IS TRUMP AMERICA'S BERLUSCONI? HAVE CITIZEN-VOTERS BEEN REDUCED TO AUDIENCE, SUSPENDING BELIEF?

Elena Ferrante, Fantumaglia: Papers: 1991-2003; Tesserae: 2003-2007; Letters: 2011-2016, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (New York: Europa Editions, 2016) ("If the great work of the entrepreneur Berlusconi is what we have before our eyes every evening, how could it happen that half of Italy believed that he really could, as he says, fix the nation? [] It's the credulity not of citizens but of the audience that I find narratively interesting. If I were capable of writing about our Berlusconian Italy not through allegories, parables and satires, I would like to find a plot and characters that could represent the mythology within which the symbol Berlusconi is dangerously encysted. I say symbol because the man will disappear, his personal troubles and those of his management have their power, one way or another the political struggle will remove him from the scene, but his ascent as supreme leader within democratic institutions, the construction of his figure as a democratically elected economic-political-television duce, will remain a perfectible, repeatable model." "A model that naturally has a history . . . Berlusconi, for me, is the most garish expression (for now) of the traditional illusionism of politicians, of their capacity to pretend, even within the democratic institutions of which they should be the willing servants, that they are benevolent divinities on some Olympus from which they govern the fates of wretched mortals. That illusionism (which has fed both democracies and totalitarians: I think among other things of the of the invention of the body of the leader, of the macho, of the best, the body like a saint's reliquary, of a heavenly nature) unfortunately for us has been definitely welded, thanks to a bold propriety relationship, to the fictions of what is today the most powerful means of mass communication: television, that factory of characters and protagonists, as the media call them, justly adopting the terminology of products of the imagination. And the characters, the protagonists of social-television mythology, are experienced by the audience just a characters are in novels, by suspending disbelief, accepting, that is, an agreement on the basis of which you are willing to take as true everything you are told." Id. at 92-93 Also see generally Elaine Blair, "Ferrante's World," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/6/2016. QUERY: Trump the Berlusconi of the United States. What construction of Trump's figure rendered the ascent of Trump America? Are forty million-plus American voters an audience willingly suspending belief regarding Trump and his claim that only he can fix it and make America great again?  Politics as entertainment? Unfortunately, many will be hurt by the election results. Food for thought.).

THE CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN LIBERALISM'S RHETORIC AND LIBERALISM'S APPLICATIONS.

Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999) ("In its theoretical vision, liberalism, from the seventeenth century to the present, has prided itself on its universality and politically inclusionary character. And yet, when viewed as a historical phenomenon, the period of liberal history is unmistakably marked by the systematic and sustained political exclusion of various groups and 'types' of people. The universality of freedom and derivative political institutions identified with the provenance of liberalism is denied in the protracted history with which liberalism is similarly linked. Perhaps liberal theory and liberal history are ships passing in the night, spurred on by unrelated imperatives and destinations. Perhaps reality--and, as such, history-- always betrays the pristine motives of theory. Putting aside such possibilities, something about the inclusionary pretensions of liberal theory and the exclusionary effects of liberal practices needs to be explained." "One needs to account for how a set of ideas that professed, at a fundamental level, to include as its political referent a universal constituency nevertheless spawned practices that were either predicated on or directed at the political marginalization of various people. More specially, one must consider whether the exclusionary thrust of liberal history stems from the misapprehension of the generative basis of liberal universalism or whether, in contrast, liberal history projects with greater focus and onto a larger canvas the theoretically veiled and qualified truth of liberal universalism. Despite the enormous contrariety between the profession of political universality and the history of political exclusion, the later may in fact elaborate the truth and ambivalence of the former." Id. at 46-47. In short, liberalism's ideals and rhetoric may have been bigger than liberalism's reality and actions. Certainly food for thought in reconsidering liberal thought in America.).