SHOULD HAVE SOME SMALL REMINDERS OF THE ELECTION YEAR FROM HELL . . .

 and how it is not really all that different from the past.

Maureen Dowd, The Year of Voting Dangerously (New York & Boston: Twelve, 2016).

WALTER KAUFMANN

Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1982)("Philosophy, as Plato and Aristotle said, begins in wonder. This wonder means a dim awareness of the useless talent, some sense that antlikenss is betrayal. But what are the alternatives? . . . Philosophy means liberation form the two dimensions of routine, soaring above the well known, seeing it in new perspectives, arousing wonder and the wish toughly. Philosophy subverts man's satisfaction with himself, exposes custom as a questionable dream, and offers not so much solutions as a different life." "A great deal of philosophy . . . was not intended as an edifice for men to live in, safe from sun and wind, but as a challenge: don't sleep on! there are so many vantage points; they change in flight: what matters is to leave off crawling in the dust." Id. at 9-10.).

Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, revised and expanded, with an introduction, prefaces, and new translations by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Plume, 1975).

Walter Kaufmann, The Faith of a Heretic, with a foreword by Stanley Corngold (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("Heresy is a set of opinions 'at variance with established or generally received principles.' In this sense, heresy is the price of all originality and innovation. [] In law . . . heresy is 'an offense against Christianity consisting in a denial of some of its essential doctrines, publicly avowed, and obstinately maintained.' What keeps most men in 'Christian' countries from being heretics in this sense is that they do not publicly avow their disbelief: it is in better taste to be casual about lost beliefs, and a note of wistfulness generally ensures forgiveness. Obstinacy is rare. Millions do not even know that they deny essential Christian doctrines: they have never bothered to find out what the essential doctrines are. In extenuation they may plead that the evasiveness and the multiplicity of churches creates a difficulty; but to be deterred by this when one's  eternal destiny is said to be at stake bespeaks a glaring lack of seriousness." Id. at 1-2. "Far from viewing philosophy or heresy with suspicion, I believe that the enemies of critical reason are, whether consciously or not, foes of humanity." "For centuries heretics have been persecuted by men of strong faiths who hated non-conformity and heresy and criticism while making obeisances to honesty--within limits. In our time, millions have been murdered in cold blood by the foes of non-conformity and heresy and criticism, who paid lip service to honesty--within limits." 'I have less excuse than many others for ignoring all this. If even I do not speak up, who will? And if not now, when?" Id. at 13.

Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Essays on Shakespeare and Goethe; Hegel and Kierkegaard; Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud; Jaspers, Heidegger, and Toynbee (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1980) (From "Shakespeare: Between Socrates and Existentialism": It may seem fitting that pumpkins should grow on huge trees, and acorns on the ground, but that is not the way the world is. Wheat grows where the ground has been torn open and plowed; edelweiss, in the cracks of the Alpine rocks, over the precipice; and great prophets and philosophers, poets and artists generally grow in unsettled societies, on the brink of some abyss." "The modern world is a waste land, but the world never has been--and surely never will be--a flower garden. What we make of that is largely up to us. [] The fragmentation and ugliness of the modern world are undeniable. What needs to be denied is that the world of Dante and Aquinas was less ugly, crude, and cruel. Greatness is possible, but exceptional, at all times/" Id. at 1, 23.  From "Dialogue With a Critic": "Some things that now seem doubtful to you may well become certain in due course, while many more that had seemed certain should become problematic. Being right matters less than making people think for themselves. And there is no better way of doing that than being provocative." Id. at 25, 34. From "The Young Hegel andReligion": "Hegel always remained the heir of the Enlightenment, opposed to romanticisms and theology alike, insofar as he maintained until the end that there is one pursuit that is far superior even to art and religion: Philosophy." Id. at 129, 161. From "Jaspers' Relation to Nietzsche": "Those who suspect that existentialism may be right in some sense and that it is surely superior to analytic philosophy, hardly need encouragement to have a closer look. And those who are inclined to think that it would be a misfortune if existentialism made headway in the English-speaking world should realize that if they simply shut their eyes to it and concentrate more than ever on linguistic or logical analysis they will thereby help to insure the very development they hate to contemplate. For the potential audience for the existentialists consists of those who feel that, when they ask for  bread, the most competent English-speaking philosophers offer them a stone. . . . Many Anglo-American philosophers suspect that the writings of the existentialists are not stones but nut--hollow nuts. There is only one way to find out: to crack the forbidding shell and see what, if anything, it hides." Id. at 283, 284.).

Walter Kaufmann, ed., Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, with a new introduction by Paul Gottfried (New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers, 1993) (From William Kingdom Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief": "To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." "If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoid the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind." Id. at 201, 206.).

Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1979) ("We have been told that tragedy is dead, that it died of optimism, faith in reason, confidence in progress. Tragedy is not dead, but what estranges us from it is just the opposite: Despair." Id. at xx. "Thus some events are tragic not merely in the loose sense of undiscriminating speech but in the more judicious sense that they approximate Greek tragedy. The American involvement in Vietnam is tragic in the most exacting sense. The suffering it entails is immense and by no means merely incidental: the horror of it is magnified by the avowed intention of the American effort to spread death, destruction, and pain. In the two world wars the aim was for the most part to conquer or regain territory, though the bombing of cities in World War II introduced a new dimension. In the Vietnam war, the American daily communiques report, not incidentally but mainly, ow many human beings--called enemies, Communists, or Vietcong--have been killed, and the American Secretary of State announces as good news that 'they are hurting.' Although the daily reports of the numbers or people killed put one in mind of the Nazis' genocide, the rhetoric used to justify the American intervention is as noble, or rather self-righteous, as can be." 'We are bombing Vietnam at a rate at which  Germany in world War II was never bombed. although Vietnam, unlike Nazi Germany, did not begin the bombing--to prove to the people of North Vietnam and to e world that aggression does not pay and that we are the guardians of humanity, peace, and security. We intervened on a small scale, sure that a great victory for international morality could be won at very small cost; we stepped up our presence, certain that a slight increase would ensure a quick conclusion; we began to bomb, assured that this would bring a speedy triumph; and the troops, the bombing, and the terror have been inverse vastly, always in the false conviction that just one more increase would produce the victory that would justify all of the suffering, death, and terror. If we stop, our guilt is palpable: all thistle for nothing. Hence we must incur more guilt, and more, and always more to cleanse ourselves of guilt." "Here is a parallel to Macbeth; only the American tragedy has more of the elements of the greatest tragedies: not only the themes of power and guilt, and the ever-deeper involvement in guilt, but also the terrifying irony implicit in the contrast between lofty moral purposes and staggering brutality, and hamartia in its purest form. Is it mere error of judgment or a moral fault? [] What began as an error of judgment has been escalated into a moral outrage, and every step was based on a miscalculation. If now nevertheless sees some right on the American side, too, and does not deny the brutal deeds of the Vietcong--of one remains mindful of the humanity of both sides--the similarity to a great tragedy is only deepened." Id. at 316-317.).

"EMPATHY WALLS"

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York & London: The New Press, 2016) ("It was empathy walls that interested me. An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was." Id. at 5.).

A THEORY OF JUSTICE FOR THE GHETTO

Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/ Harvard U. Press, 2016) ("This book offers a normative nonideal theory of ghettos that emphasizes basic concerns of justice and highlights the political ethics of the oppressed. It is a liberal-egalitarian theory that takes economic fairness as seriously as it does individual liberty and formal equality. While my focus is on the plight of black people in the United States, this is not a book about race alone. I'm just as concerned about gender, class, and place. I discuss social structure and individual responsibility, avoiding the all-too-common tendency to emphasize one or the other, and I do so without devaluing the political agency of the ghetto poor. To that end, I advance a political morality of dissent appropriate to the ghetto context. [] I offer the resulting theory in the firm belief that careful philosophical reflection can assist in moving the public debate over black urban poverty in a more productive direction, pointing the way toward solutions that are fair to all concerned and that treat the truly disadvantaged among us with the respect they deserve." Id. at 14-15.).

NOBODYNESS IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY AMERICA

Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint, foreword by Todd Brewster (New York: Atria Books, 2016) ("The law is but a mere social construction, an artifact of our social, economic, political, and cultural conditions. The law represents only one kind of truth, often an unsatisfying truth, and ultimately not the truest of truths, The rush of public emotion that spilled into the streets after the killing of Michael Brown alerted the world to the existence of a multitude of other, competing truths. Whatever the facts may have shown in this instance--including the forensic evidence and the parade of witnesses who recanted earlier statements--Michael Brown's life was taken with disturbingly casual ease. This indifference unmoored race and class antagonisms long held in awkward restraint." Id. at 9. "This is a book about what it means to be Nobody in twenty-first-century America." "To be Nobody is to be vulnerable . . . To be Nobody is to be subject to State violence. . . To be Nobody is to also confront systemic forms of State violence. . . To be Nobody is to be abandoned by the State. To be Nobody is to be considered disposable . . . " "Without question, Nobodyness is largely indebted to race, as White supremacy is foundational to the American democratic experiment, The belief that White lives are worth more than others--what Princeton University scholar Eddie Glaude calls the 'value gap'--continues to color every aspect of our public and private lives. This belief likewise compromises the lives of vulnerable White citizens, many of whom support political movements and policies that close ranks around Whiteness rather than ones that enhance their own social and economic interests." "While Nobodyness is strongly tethered to race, it cannot be divorced form other forms of social injustice . . ." "Despite the centrality of race within American life, Nobodyness cannot be understood without an equally thorough analysis of class. Unlike other forms of difference, class creates the material conditions and relations through which racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are produced, sustained, and lived. . ." "This book is my attempt to tell the stories of those marked as Nobody." Id. at xvii- xx. NOTE: One form of a capacity for empathy is, in large part, the ability and willingness to see one's own potential vulnerability in others, to see one's own potential Nobodyness in others. Similar to the reality that each of us is potentially disable, potentially a disabled person--being a fall, a misstep, a car accident, an illness, etc. away from crossing the line from able to disable--, each of us is potentially vulnerable, potentially a Nobody. How confident are you that you are Somebody, and that you always will be such until the day you die? Food for thought.).

HATE SPIN AND THE ISLAMOPHOBIA INDUSTRY

Cherian George, Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and Its Threat to Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press, 2016) ("So far, we've lacked a vocabulary to deal with this double-sided use of offense by the forces of intolerance. I call it hate spin, a term that encompasses both hate speech and its 180-degree-flipped cousin. I define hate spin as manufactured vilification or indignation, used as a political strategy that exploits group identities to mobilize supporters and coerce opponents." Id. at 4. "Constitutional and legal frameworks shape the practice of hate spin. Laws protecting freedom of expression expand the space for hate speech, while those that prohibit incitement restrict it. When the state bans blasphemy or the wounding of religious feelings, this creates opportunities for hate spin agents to manufacture righteous indignation as a political weapon." Id. at 25. "Islamophobia has taken root within a sizable section of American society. [] The ground sentiments that Trump cynically exploited cannot be explained by jihadist terrorism alone. Six months after 9/11, the proportion of Americans who said that Islam is more likely than other faiths to encourage violence was 25 percent. A decade later, in 2011, it was 35 percent. The percentage with favorable views of Islam fell from 41 percent in 2005 to 30 percent in 2010. Oddly enough, therefore, anti0Muslim feeling increased during the lull period between 9/11 and the emergence of IS" [that is, the Islamic State]. "Hate watch groups attribute this rise to a misinformation campaign engineered by a small but identifiable group of agitators on the political right. . . The manufacture of offense and offends by far-right pundits and think tanks is so systematic and self-interested that analysts of intolerance have dubbed them the 'Islamophobia industry.' The term 'Islamophobia' refers to an unfounded fear of Muslims that operates at the individual, psychological level, but that can also be institutionalized as a set of policies and practices." Id. at 140-141.).

RETHINKING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY . . . OH. AND, AS IN POLITICS, MONEY TALKS IN RELIGION.

Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "Early Christian doctrine held that the living and the dead, as equally sinful beings, needed each other in order to achieve redemption. The devotional intercessions of the living could tip the balance between heaven and hell for the deceased. In the third century, money began to play a decisive role in these practices, as wealthy Christians took ever more elaborate steps to protect their own souls and the souls of their loved ones in the afterlife. They secured privileged burial sites and made lavish donations to churches. By the seventh century, Europe was dotted with richly endowed monasteries and funerary chapels displaying in marble splendor the Christian devotion of the wealthy dead." "In response to the growing influence of money, Church doctrine concerning the afterlife evolved from speculation to firm reality, and personal wealth in the pursuit or redemption led to extraordinary feats of architecture and acts of generosity. But it also prompted stormy debates about money's proper use--debates that resonated through the centuries and kept alive the fundamental question of how heaven and earth could be joined by human agency.").

Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 , Tenth Anniversary Revised Edition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) ("This is a book which attempts to set Western Europe itself against a wider world. It is most important that this should be so. [T]hroughout this period the Christianity of what we now call Europe was only the westernmost variant of a far wider Christian world, whose center of gravity lay, rather, the the eastern Mediterranean and in the Middle East." "Throughout this period, the East Roman empire--what we now call the 'Byzantine' empire--did not remain a remote and unchanging presence of little relevance to the emergence of Latin Catholic Christianity. [F]or centuries after the fall of the Roman empire of the West, the eastern empire remained a constant military presence in the western Mediterranean, as s was shown by the conquest of the empire Justinian and by the subsequent tenacity of the Byzantine holding in Italy, in African and even, for a shorter period, in Spain." "For the entire period between A.D. 535 and 800, Rome was a frontier city. It lay on the western periphery of a great, eastern empire. Every document which the popes issued, at that time, was dated according to the reigns of East Roman rules who rose and fell over 1,3000 miles away, in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), and whose careers were determined not by events in western Europe, but by what happened along the eastern stretches of the Danube on the steppe of the Ukraine, in Iran, and in the Arabian peninsula." "The eastern empire (and not Rome) lay at the hub of a worldwide Christianity, which stretched as far into Asia as it did into Europe. As in a great echo chamber,the theological issues which were debated most fiercely in Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch in the fifth and sixth centuries . . .  resounded for centuries in the West. They resounded, indeed, wherever Christians had occasion to think about the relation between God and humankind, whether this was in the monasteries of Ireland and southern Scotland, in the Caucasus, in Mesopotamia, or even in the western capital of the Chinese empire at Hsian-fu."  "And it is important to realize that Christianity of the eastern empire was not a static matter, I was in a state of constant Change." [] "Last but not least, the rise of Islam and the consequent conquest and conversion to the new faith of most of the Middle east, of North Africa, and even, for half a millennium, of southern Spain, seems to place an insuperable imaginative barrier between ourselves and an ancient Christian world where North Africa, Egypt, and Syria had been the most populous and crevice regions of the Christian world. But Islam did not come form nowhere. Nor did it instantly blot out all that had come before it. . . . Islam emerged in an Arabian environment thoroughly penetrated by Christian and Jewish ideas. Far from bringing the ancient world to an abrupt end, Islamic culture and Islamic theology developed in constant, mute debate with Jews and with Christians who remained in the majority among the inhabitants of the Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest." Id at 2-3.).

Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) (From the book jacket: "Jesus taught his followers that is easier for a camel to go through the eye of needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire . . . " "Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the lens of money and the challenges posed to an institution that espoused the virtue of poverty and called avarice the root of all evil. [] Brown examines the controversies and changing attitudes toward money cause by the influx of new wealth into church coffers, and describes the spectacular acts of divestment by rich donors and their growing influence in an empire best with crisis. He shows how the use of wealth for the care of the poor competed with older forms of philanthropy deeply rooted in the Roman world, and sheds light on the ordinary people who gave away money in hopes of treasures in heaven." "Thought the Eye of a Needle challenges the widely he'd notion that Christianity's growing wealth sapped Rome of its ability to edit the barbarian invasions, and offers a fresh perspective on the social history of the church in late antiquity.").

DAME BERYL BAINBRIDGE

Brendan King, Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means: A Biography (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2016).

VICHY FRANCE

Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2001) ("In 1940, after a battle lasting only six weeks, France suffered a catastrophic military defeat. An armistice was signed with Germany, and half of France, including Paris, was occupied by German troops. In the other half, a supposedly independent French government, headed by Marshall Petain, installed itself in the spa town of Vichy. The Vichy government liquidated France's democratic institutions, persecuted Freemason, Jews, and Communists, and embarked on a policy of collaboration with Germany. Eventually 650,000 civilians French workers were compulsorily drafted to work in German factories; 75,000 Jews from France perished in Auschwitz; 30,000 French civilians were shot as hostages or members of the Resistance; another 60,000 were deported to German concentration camps." Id. at 1. "The history of the Occupation would be written not in black and white, but in shades of grey. Vichy may have been a reactionary and authoritarian regime, but it enjoyed heterogeneous support, even from people who had backed the left-wing Popular Front in the 1930s." Id. at 2. "There seems little doubt . . . that at the beginning Vichy was both legal and legitimate. . . Quite apart form the glorious reputation of Petainm the regime had law on its side." Id. at 134-135. [Note: This is a good point to remember that the so-called "rule of law" is itself a very thin safeguard against tyranny. The tyrant's first moves are usually lawful and legitimate, though setting the stage for lawfully changing the laws to provide the tyrant with more power.] From the book jacket: "Julian Jackson examines French experiences of Occupation during the 'Dark Years' of 1940-44. Pulling together previously separate 'histories' of occupation, resistance, and collaboration he presents a definitive history of he period. This is a more complex history than the traditional dichotomy between 'collaboration' and 'resistance', one in which the ideological frontiers between Vichy and the Resistance were often blurred. The book ranges from the politics of Marshall Petain's regime to the experiences of the ordinary French people, from surrender in 1940 to the purges of liberation. The author restores the organized Resistance to a more central role than has been customary in recent years and presents a social history of the resistance which takes in the roles of foreigners, women, Jews, and peasants. He uncovers the long term roots of the Vichy regime in political and social conflict and cultural crisis stretching back to the Great War and concludes by tracing the lasting legacy and memory of Occupation since 1945.").

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IS DEAD IN AMERICA. MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS ARE IN CHARGE.

Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, foreword by Wendy Brown (Princeton & Oxford:Princeton Classics/Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("What name, then, would be more suitable than 'the world's oldest, continuous written constitution' for describing the nature of 'the world's oldest democracy.' its powers, and its ways of being in the world? It seems so compounded with other institutional forms, such as those of capitalism and the market, that we can no longer intelligibly describe its form without acknowledging their influence and incorporating them in its nature. The resulting form is a hybrid; and along with it comes new conceptions of who is political in it, and of what constitutes the special virtues of the ruling class (e.g., those of the CEO and the professional political operative). The appearance of a new ruling class reflects capitalism's political coming-of-age and with it a new corporate aspiration, not just to exert political influence but to absorb and 'incorporate' the political and transform it, tacitly abandoning the ideal of commonality. It is not unusual to encounter the term 'the imperial CEO' applied to business executives." "In its most powerful forms the corporation is no longer describable solely by economic criteria (such as market share, profitability). The meaning of economic has expanded to include objects of exploitation hitherto considered 'outside' the pursuit of profits. Capitalism has transformed itself, from a system of activities analyzable through economic categories to one that's adopted political characteristics and the qualities of a new constitutional blend devoid of democratic substance. The new economies created by technologically advance societies provide equivalents for democracy's values of participation (mass consumption), inclusion (work force), and mass empowerment ('consumer sovereignty,' 'shareholder democracy"). Those sublimations accord with a 'virtual' way of being in a world transformed by the technological revolution in communications, electronic technologies (computers, video, Internet) epitomize the combination of the illusion of individual freedom/power with the encapsulation of the individual in a cocoon from which escape seems an incoherent idea." "The changes in capitalism has weaken the authority of the state as the supreme power in society, Globalization is the euphemism for continuous expansion abroad and the constriction of politics at home, narrowing the points of entry so that only the pressure of money can gain political access. As the privatization of public power continues and the authority of the state diminishes, its boundaries become props to waves of cheap labor, Although the state continues to play a far from negligible role in an increasingly globalized economy, the power wielded by multinational corporations has made their cooperation and acquiescence indispensable. The cooperation of corporate power is now a vital element of domestic, foreign, and military policies. Competition and rivalry occur less between states and corporations and more between corporations vying for influence over the state or subsidies from it." "It is not only that the state and the corporate have become partners; in the process, each has begun mimic functions historically identified with the other. How does one describe the 'power' of a corporation such as Lockheed that once was engaged solely in the manufacture of aircraft but now also operate publicly funded welfare programs? Old-fashioned economic power may have enabled Lockheed to offer politicians the inducement necessary to procure contacts/contracts for its welfare operations, but a new mix of power and authority results from it. Corporations are extensively engaged in administrating penal institutions and operating health-care systems, and they have assumed important roles at every level of public and private eduction, undertaking to operate primary school systems, establish universities, and collaborate in joint project with academic researcher. (Appropriately, corporate centers have exchanged the name of 'headquarters,' with its military connotations, for 'campus.')" Id at 587-589. NOTE: The point I want to make in providing this lengthy passage by Wolin is this: Trump and his administration will not be providing a radical "new" way of governance; they are merely the next step in the corporatist-government that is replacing American democracy. Take a close look at the billionaire boy's club that Trump is staffing his administration (or is, Trump just a tool of the corporatist-powers?) Yes, Trump has his own perverted domestic agenda; but, in the larger political game, the multinational corporations are the real powers-that-be. Democracy is dead in America. Until we the people wake up, if we every do, elections, liberty, democracy are just another virtual reality games.)  

EPISTOCRACY ANYONE?

Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton  & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (Bad arguments for a bad conclusion! "From the book jacket: Most people believe democracy is a uniquely just form of government. They believe people have the right to an equal share of political power. And they believe that political participation is good for us--it empowers us, helps us get what we want, and tends to make us smarter, more virtuous, and more caring for one another. These are some of our most cherished ideas about democracy." [Stop there. Those may be true in the abstract as admonishments about democratic government, but not true as to what most of us really believe. So, from the beginning, Brennan sets up to debunk a 'presumption' we all know is false and not presumed by most people.] "In this trenchant book, Brennan argues that democracy should be judged by its results--and the results are not good enough. Just as defendants have a right to a fair trial, citizens have a right to competent government. [Not a very good analogy, period.] But democracy is the rule of the ignorant and the irrational [Is corporate America and the 1 percent ignorant and irrational? I don't think so. And they are the ones in real control.], and it all too often fails short. [But we don't live in a democracy. We live in a 'republic'.] Furthermore, no one has a fundamental right to any share of political power, and excreting powers does most of us little good. [??????] On the contrary, a wide range of social science research shows that political participation and democratic deliberation actually often to make people worse--more irrational, biased, and mean. [WOW!] Given this grim picture, Brennan argues that a new system of government--epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable--may be better than democracy, and that it's time to experiment and find out." [You have got to be kidding!] Also, see generally Alan Wolfe, "Voting Wrongs: The Republican war on democracy just got more ingenious--and nastier," New Republic, November 2016). ).

THE IMPORTANCE OF HUMANS' CAPACITY FOR SPEECH

Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech (New York: Little, Brown, 2016) (From the book jacket: "In The Kingdom of Speech, Wolfe makes the captivating paradigm-shifting argument that speech--not evolution--is responsible for humanity's complex societies and achievements." Also see Caitlin Flanagan, "The Gift of Language," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/4/2016.).

Peter Unger, Philosophical Relativity (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1984) ("Our use of language allows us to modify each other's behavior so that, typically, we all have a somewhat better time of things; our goals are attained; at least certain desires are satisfied. Adaptive behavior, we theorize, proceeds from adaptive, contextually relevant thinking and belief." Id. at 7.).

SAUL BELLOW

Zachary Leader, The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune: 1915-1964 (New York: Knopf, 2015) (This the first of two volumes.).

FREEDOM IS JUST A WORD

John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) ("There is no reason to expect technological innovation to stop or slow. As we are forever being reminded, the advance of knowledge is now an exponential process. Some believe computers will soon pass the Turing test . . . and display intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of humans. . . . " "The inherent tendency of this wave of technological innovation seems to be to render the human majority superfluous in the process of production. In a more remote future envisioned by techno-enthusiasts, human redundancy could be more complete. There is no way even a small elite will be able to keep up with the development of artificial intelligence. In the longer run the only rational course of action will be to reconstruct the humans that remain so that they more closely resemble machines. A technologically enhanced species will join in in the ongoing evolutionary advance. As for the remnants that are left behind, human obsolescence is a part of progress." Id. at 108-109.).

"SPECTER OF TREASON

Trump raises specter of treason - The Boston Globe

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/12/16/trump...specter-treason/.../story.html

Dec 16, 2016 - A specter of treason hovers over Donald Trump. He has brought it on himself by dismissing a bipartisan call for an investigation of Russia's ..

A DARK SIDE TO THE ENLIGHTENMENT: ITS CREATION, NOT OF RACIAL PREJUDICE, BUT OF RACISM.

John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) (From the book jacket: In Black Mass . . . John Gray explains how utopian ideals have taken on a dangerous significance in the hands of right-wing conservatives and religious zealots. He charts the history of utopianism, from the Reformation through the French Revolution and into the present. And, most urgently, he describes how utopian politics have moved from the extremes of the political spectrum into mainstream politics, dominated the administrations of both George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and, indeed, come to define the political center." "Far from having shaken off discredited ideology, Gray suggests, we are more than ever in its clutches. Black Mass is a truly frightening and challenging work by one of Britain's leading political thinkers." From the text: "Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion. The greatest of the revolutionary upheavals that have shaped so much of the history of the last two centuries were episodes in the history of faith--moments in the long dissolution of Christianity and the rise of modern political religion. The world in which we find ourselves at the start of the new millennium is littered with the debris of utopian projects, which through they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious myths." Id. at 1. "A number of Enlightenment luminaries were explicit in expressing their belief in natural inequality, with some claiming that humanity actually comprised several different species. [] Whether the disabilities of other peoples were innate (as was believed in the case of Africans) or due to cultural backwardness (as was supposed to be true of Asians), the remedy was the same. All had to be turned into Europeans, if necessary by force." "Beliefs of this kind are found in many Enlightenment thinkers. It is frequently argued on their behalf that they were creatures of their time, but it is hardly a compelling defence. These Enlightenment thinker not only voiced the prejudices of their age--a failing for which they might be forgiven if not for the fact that they so often claimed to be much wiser than their contemporaries--they also claimed the authority of reason for them. Before the Enlightenment, racist attitudes rarely aspired to the dignity of theory. Even Aristotle, who defended slavery and the subordination of women as part of the natural order, did not develop a theory that maintained that humanity was composed of distant and unequal racial groups. Racial prejudice may be immemorial, but racism is a product of the Enlightenment." "Many of those who subscribed to a belief in racial inequality believed that social reform could compensate for the innate disadvantages of inferior breeds. Ultimately all human beings could articulate in the universal civilization of the future--but only by giving up their own ways of life and adopting European ways. This was 'a form of liberal racism, making the best of European experience the model for everyone. . . '." Id. at 61-62 (citations omitted). "The belief that history has an underlying plot is central to the millenarian movements, secular and religious . . . . All who belong to these movements believe they are acting out a script that is already partly written. . . . [T]he demand for meaning is met by narratives in which each individual life is part of an all encompassing story." "The sense of having a part in such a narrative is delusive, of course." "Seeing one's life as an episode in a universal narrative is a fantasy, and while it is supported by powerful western traditions it has not always ben regard a a good thing." Id. at 204-205.).

RISE OF FAITH, DECLINE IN REASON

Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Knopf, 2003) ("This book deals with a significant turning point in western cultural and intellectual history, when the tradition of rational thought established by the Greeks was stifled in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. This 'closing of the Western mind' did not extend to the Arab world, where translated Greek texts continued to inspire advances in astronomy, medicine and science, and so its roots must be found in developments in the Greco-Roman world of late antiquity. This book explores those developments." Id. at xv. "The argument of this book is that the Greek intellectual tradition did not simply lose vigor and disappear. (Its survival and continued progress in the Arab world is testimony to that.) Rather, in the fourth and fifth century A.D. it was destroyed by the political and religious forces which made up the highly authoritarian government of the late Roman empire." Id at xvii-xviii. "So one finds a combination of factors behind 'the closing go the western mind": the attack on Greek philosophy by Paul, the adoption of Platonism by Christiana theologians and the enforcement of orthodoxy by emperors desperate to keep good order. The imposition of orthodoxy went hand and hand with a stifling of any form of independent reasoning. By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of 'mystery, magic and authority,' a substitute which drew heavily on irrational elements of pagan society that had never been extinguished. Pope Gregory the Great warned those with a rational turn of mind that, by looking for cause and effect in the natural world, they were ignoring the cause of all things, the will of God. This was a vital shift of perspective, and in effect a denial of the impressive intellectual advances made by the Greek philosophers." Id. at xviii-xix. "The struggle between religion and science had now entered a new phase. . . . What cannot be doubted is how effectively the rational tradition had been eradicated in the fourth and fifth centuries." Id, at xix. "I would reiterate the central theme of this book: that the Greek intellectual tradition was suppressed rather than simply faded away. My own feeling is that this is an important moment in European cultural history which has for all too long been neglected. Whether the explanations put forward in this book for the suppression are accepted or not, the reasons for the extinction of serious mathematical and scientific thinking in Europe for a thousand years surely deserve more attention than they have received." Id. at 340. Does one sense a closing of the American mind in the twenty-first century. Or, perhaps, it is more correct to suggest that, given American hyper-religiosity, the American mind has never really been open. "The impact of this fundamental change in approach on intellectual life was profound. One effect, noted by Averil Cameron, was the decline of book learning. 'Books ceased to be readily available and learning became an increasingly ecclesiastical preserve; even those who were not ecclesiastics were likely to get their education from the scriptures or from Christian texts.' And one contemporary observer, questioned on the state of philosophy in that former great centre of intellectual life, Alexandria, replied that 'philosophy and culture are now at a point of most horrible desolation.'" Id. at 316-317. "[I]t was not until the twelfth century that a newly emerging investigative spirit in the west (usually referred to as Scholasticism) began to rediscover the classical tradition as it had been preserved in the writings of the Islamic east. Id. at 326. "[Thomas] Aquinas restored the relationship between reason and fat,; to him, the one sustained the other." Id. at 332.).

WHY INTERMARRIAGE IS THREATENING TO SOME

Susan Jacoby, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2016) ("Whatever the proportions of religious toleration and religious persecution at any point in history, it is never possible to eradicate the evidence that people of very different beliefs, given sufficient propinquity and proximity, often engage in sexual relations and adopt different religious loyalties as a result of those unions. 'Ethnic cleansing' can never fully succeed, because it is impossible to kill or exile everyone before men and women leave their unique genetic mark on the future. Absent force and violence, intermarriage has always been one of the most important secular causes of religious conversion. I say 'one of' only because mixed marriages have also been entangled, in proportions that vary greatly according to the level of tolerance within a society, with purposeful social climbing that leads to better financial and educational opportunities. Intermarriage really is a threat to unity of faith as well as purity of blood, if one cares about either." Id. at 99. "The issues raised today by either the frequency or the scarcity of religious conversions in the United States and Europe may be of critical concern to religious institutions, but they are luxury problems insofar as the progress of human liberty is concerned. Even from a devoutly religious standpoint, does it really matter if God appears dead to some, as long as others are perfectly free to reach a different conclusion? Are conversions of convenience--motivated more by some social need, including the desire for community, than by any deep spiritual conviction--harmful to either society or individuals? Can conscious and conscientious secular humanism offer coherent moral precepts that will be recognized in the public square by those who insist that only religion can serve as a basis for both private and public morality? How are we to educate children about the historical role of religion when fewer and fewer people are being exposed to a  serious education in their own faith--much less any other? None of these questions, debated with varying degrees of respect and rancor by theologians, politicians, and academics, mean as much to people's daily lives as persecution for choosing the wrong faith once did in the West, and still does in societies where people must continue to live with the knowledge that they may be thrown out of their homes, imprisoned, tortured, raped, or murdered for what they believe--or do not believe--about God!" "Although knowledge about religion, encompassing differences as well as commonalities among faiths, is essential from a cultural standpoint, concentration on the fine points of dogma does little to shed light on more important issues involving ethical values. . . . I am certain, though, that responsible citizenship in every democracy, on every continent, require knowledge and understanding of the long, tortuous battle for the liberation of men and women from religious compulsion. Both the modern American dream of absolute religious tolerance and the more limited ideal of toleration that emerged from the carnage of seventeenth-century Europe remain just that--dreams--in societies blind to the vision of a free conscience as a human right." Id. at 395-396.).

POLITICAL MURDER

Greg Woolf, Et Tu, Brute?: A Short History of Political Murder (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007) ("[T]here are at least two reasons why it is wrong to see the world of liberal democracy as an embattled refuge from violence. First, liberal democracies are deeply implicated in the violence that dogs many other states. Indirectly, the success of capitalist market economies has contributed to the impoverishment of many of the parts of the world where liberal states repeatedly fail, and in others the collapse of imperial systems has created conditions in which democracy found it hard to take root. There is, after all, a grim geography of political violence today, and it is not a geography of distance from liberalism and democracy. The military dictatorships of the Far East and parts of Latin America; the poorest post-colonial successor states of the British, French, Belgian and Soviet empires; communist China and North Korea and some parts of the Arab world: in all these regions western governments have been too involved, not too far removed. Directly, the operation of the arms trade, the Cold War militarization of other societies, the deliberate destablisation of some regimes and western support for some despotic governments have combined to create conditions in which terrorism thrives. The notion of the autonomy of sovereign nations, a key tenet of liberal democratic thought, provides a convenient pretext for non-intervention. None of this excuses political murder, but it gives some reason to see these states not as under-developed democracies so much as part of a global division of violence." Id. at 56-57. "Assassination has always been used sparingly by civil societies. It is, after all, murder, and no government wishes to convey the opinion that this is more than exceptionally legitimate. Yet faced with certain kinds of threats that seem to admit no other solution, removing a key enemy by any means possible has had its attractions.  . . . Today the motivation is to remove a key dictator or a terrorist mastermind. Liberal governments try to balance the guilt incurred by one act of dubious morality against the possible good of a greater number. But this is not merely principled utilitarianism. Distance sanitises. Killing a European leader or a political opponent in the US would seem a much greater crime than eliminating the ruler of a different kind of state. Classifying terrorists as enemy combatants or Middle Eastern presidents as despots puts them conveniently beyond the moral pale. The language of wartime evokes the specter of temporary and extraordinary license. These are unusual times, we don't normally behave this way, desperate situations call for desperate measures. We don't kill people like us, and so it is important that their difference be recognized. Perhaps this reassures those who give the orders more than it does any member of the public who might discover what has been done in our name." Id. at 65-66.).

EMILY R. WILSON

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Six Tragedies, translated with an introduction by Emily Wilson (Oxford & New York: Oxford World's Classics/Oxford U. Press, 2010).

Emily R. Wilson, The Death of Socrates (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 2007) ("Alternatively, Socrates believed that human beings can count as 'wise' in a third, limited sense: if they understand their own ignorance in comparison with divine enlightenment. Socrates, in this interpretation, viewed himself as the only person in the world who came anywhere near to divine wisdom." "Perhaps, as Robert Nozick has argued, Socrates genuinely did not know how to define many evaluative terms, such as courage, holiness, or justice. But he knew more than most people, because he had at least rejected some common false beliefs about these concepts, such as the idea that holiness simply means making the guilty suffer, or doing the things the gods like. He knew that most people are wrong or misguided in thinking they know anything about their own systems of belief and value." Id. at 37.).

Emily R. Wilson, Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving From Sophocles to Milton (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) ("This book argues that there is a central thread in the tragic tradition that is concerned not with dying too early but with living too long, or 'overliving'." Id. at 1. "People have always wondered whether life is worth living, and tragic narratives have always included a suspicion that life goes on too long, and that never to be born is best." Id. at 23.).

STEP OUT OF YOUR 'BANGED-IN' CULTURE

Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir (New York & London: Liveright, 2015) ("In a clear way, we are bound to our culture. We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see. That's why we become Americans, we become Indians, we become Eskimos. We see that world because that's what was installed, almost banged, into our heads when we were very, very young. But it's also possible to step our of that world." Id. at 196.).

DONALD TRUMP, ADOPTING HITLER'S PLAYBOOK, IS AMERICA'S PROPAGANDIST-IN-CHIEF

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside our Heads (New York: Knopf, 2016) ("In Mein Kampf [Hitler] suggests that propaganda need be like advertising, and seek first to attract attention" 'A poster's art lies in the designer's ability to catch the masses' attention by outline and color,' he writes. It must five 'an idea of the importance of the exhibition, but it is in no way to be a substitute for the art represented by the exhibition.' Similarly 'the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses towards certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses' filed of vision.' Those who are 'already scientifically experienced or  . . . striving towards education and knowledge' are not the subject." Id. at 111. QUERY: Has not Donald Trump, as America's propagandist-in-chief, directed his message (his tweets) to an uneducated, or ill-educated and unknowledgeable mass? "Hitler also intuited a few other basic truths about how we process information: since everything can be ignored, imprinting information in the memory requires a constant repetition of simple ideas. 'The great masses' receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans until even the very last man is able to imagine what is intended by such words.' Nuance was nonsense; complexity was a risk:  'As soon as one sacrifices this basis principle and tries to become versatile, the effect will fritter away, as the masses are neither able to digest the material offered nor to retain it.' One couldn't overstate the intensity of the effort required, for the masses 'with their inertia, always need a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and they will lend their memories only to the thousandfold repetition of the most simple ideas.'" Id. at 111. QUERY: Did not Donald Trump, as propagandist-in-chief, his surrogates, Fox News, etc., understand and use this throughout the presidential campaign, during the transition, and, probably, during the actual administration. Simple concepts, repeated over and over and over and over again, by Trump and all his minions? Build that wall." "Lock her up." "Make America Great Again." All simplistic. All void of cogent argument of justification. Have not at least 40 percent of the American people demonstrated that they either cannot or will not engage in nuanced and critical thinking, preferring the simple to the complex? "Finally, Hitler understood the demagogue's most essential principle: to teach or persuade is for more difficult than to stir emotion. And far less welcome: what the audience most wants is an excuse to experience full the powerful feelings already lurking within them but which their better selves might lead them to suppress." Id. at 111. QUERY: Did not Donald Trump. as propagandist-in-chief, appeal to the anger of, mainly but not exclusively, white working-class American, the "I-am-being-cheated" Americans, the xenophobic, racialist-thinking, if not racist, segment of America? He appealed to, and engaged in, dog-whistle politics. "'The psyche the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak. Like the women, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who, consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a wailing, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine , tolerating no other beside itself.'" Id. at 111-112. QUERY: Perhaps Donald Trump, as propagandist-in-chief,' views American political as a harlequin romance novel. That is, viewed--and still views--a sizable portion of the American masses as just some love-starved old maids wanting some man, any man, to come along and just fuck them. If so, the masses are getting what they wanted. Donald Trump is going to fuck America through the ass. Enjoy.). 

REFLECTIONS and IMPRESSIONS BY RICHARD COBB

Richard Cobb, Paris and Elsewhere: Selected Writings, selected and with an introduction by David Gilmour, preface by Julian Barnes (New York: New York Review Books, 2002).

SOME SIRI HUSTVEDT ESSAYS

Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016).

IS THERE NO INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY?

David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002) ("But what thinking person can take seriously the idea that there is any such thing as the international community? Where are the shared values uniting the United States and China, Denmark and Indonesia, Japan and Angola, that make such talk anything more than an exercise in self-flattering rhetoric? Of course, there is an international order, dominated by the United States, and there are international institutions, like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. But the reality is that the international community is a myth and a way to conceal the bad news about the present in septic sheets of piety about the future. This should be clear to anyone who considers the question of force. As Sir Brian Urquhart, one of the key figures of the first four decades of the UN's existence, once put it, 'If there is a world community, then who is the sheriff?' Does anyone imagine that the United States will act in the altruistic way such a mandate implies? And if not the United States, then who? The Russians? The Chinese? The reality is that the moment one taps on the idea of the international community it falls apart like a child's broken toy." Id. at 8-9. Still, as an individual, one ought think globally and internationally, and not nationalistically or tribalistically as many Americans are tragically prone to do.).

TRAVELLERS, OR CAN YOU GET THERE FROM HERE?

Jean-Paul Clebert, Paris Vagabond, Photographs by Patrice Molinard, Translated from the French by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Foreword by Luc Sante (New York: Classics/New York Review Books, 2016).

Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan (New York: Picador USA, 1999).

Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Though Time in China (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007).

Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportag, translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet (London & New York: Seagull Booksm 2016).

Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years, translated from the German by Michael Hoffmann (New York: New Directions, 2015) (See George Prochnik, "Days of Observance," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/6/2015.).

Teffi, Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea, translated from the Russian by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson, & Irina Steinberg, introduction by Edythe Haber (New York: New York Review Books, 2016).

Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zone Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).

Paul Theroux, Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China (New York:  G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1988).

HOLOCAUST AND RELATED WRITINGS: "LITERATURE OF ATROCITY"

Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2011) ("So, sixty years after Adorno, we are caught in a paradox. We have yet to sate our voracious cultural hunger for novels, films, plays that might somehow help us understand the Holocaust--which, whether one believes it was a unique event or not, is beyond question one of the most obscene catastrophes in history. If we look to literature, even in this age of lapsed humanism, to teach us about life, then it is no wonder that we desperately desire it to teach us also about the Holocaust. And yet we cannot quite get over our suspicion that there is something shameful in this desire. We worry that we are insulting the dead. A phenomenon such as the Holocaust evokes a kind of reticence of expression--a fear that to speak openly and bluntly about such matters is somehow improper or simply vulgar. And it evokes a more general anxiety about the ways in which we respond to and value the uses to which we are prepared to put it." Id. at 5.).

Affinity Konar, Mischling: A Novel (New York: A Lee Boudreaux Book/Little, Brown, 2016).

Lucette Matalon Lagnado & Sheila Cohn Dekel, Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz  (New York: William Morrow, 1991) ("There is nothing in Josef Mengele's early life that would have prepared him for the notoriety that was destined to engulf him. As a youth,he was charming and carefree and not especially studious. No one who remembers Mengele growing up in his picturesque Bavarian town ever saw a hint of the pathology that would make him a killer, or a sign of the obsessions that wold make him a concentration-camp doctor. There was an innocence and a sweetness to your Josef that would lead Gunzberg's citizens to shake their heads in disbelief when they heard, years later, of  his savage deeds at Auschwitz. The fiendish death-camp physician had nothing in common with the lovable youngster they all had known. The Nazi professor brutally experimenting on young towns could hardly have been the same playful little scamp they affectionately called 'the Beppo,' years after he had grown out of the childish name." "Even as he grandly swept through the barracks at Auschwitz years later, he was like a vision, this handsome, genteel German officer in his impeccable SS uniform, shiny boots, and white gloves. He looked less like a Nazi official than a Hollywood version of one--Tyrone Power in the role of SS captain. Dr. Josef Mengele would maintain this beautiful facade throughout his tenure at Auschwitz. [QUERY: Why is it a 'facade' and not who he is? Can not he be both without one or the other being a facade? Don't we all known countless individuals who are, say, tyrants at work and loving spouse/father at home, or good beloved co-worker, mentor, boss at the office, while abusive spouse/parent at home? A lot of people are very good compartmentalizers.] None of the bewildered new arrivals wold discern the murderer, or even the sadist, in the polite young SS doctor until it was too late. Mengele would decide who lived and who did with a smile and an airy wave of his elegant white-gloved hand. He would charm the women of Auschwitz-Birkeneau even as he sent them to the gas chambers. The Gypsies would love him as one of their own to the very end. But Mengele would be at his best with the young twins he moved form the selection line for use in his medical experiments. With the, he could be as warm and affectionate as he had been as a little boy growing up in a small Bavarian farming town. Did he see something of his old self in the children, innocent and doomed? For what better symbol, after all, of Mengele's own dual nature--the angel and the monster, the gentle young doctor and the sadistic killer--than a twin." Id. at 31-32. [QUERY: Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that one can engage in the greatest cruelties and, more important, dupe one's victims, if one does it all with a smiley face or the appearance of good character. Is not that the nature of a con-artist?).

Lawrence L. Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1975) ("The existence of Dachau and Auschwitz as historical phenomena has altered not only our conception of reality, but its very nature." "The challenge to the literary imagination is to find a way of making this fundamental truth accessible to the mind and emotions of the reader. The uniqueness of the experience of the Holocaust may be arguable, but beyond dispute is the fact that many writers perceived it as unique, and began with the premise that they were working with raw materials unprecedented in the literature of history and the history of literature. The result is a body of writing that forms the subject of this study, what I call the literature of atrocity. . . At a time when technology threatens more and more to silence the rich resources of language, it seems singularly appropriate, and perhaps even urgent, to explore ways in which the writer has devised an idiot and a style for the unspeakable, and particularly the unspeakable horrors at the heart of the Holocaust experience." Id. at xii.).

H. G. Adler, The Wall: A Novel, translated from the German by Peter Filkins (New York: Random House, 2014) (See Cynthia Ozick, "Alive to the Past," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/21/2014.).

Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird, 2d ed., with an introduction by the author (New York: Grove Press, 1976). 

Piotr Rawicz, Blood from the Sky: A Novel, translated from the French by Peter Wiles, with an introduction by Lawrence Langer (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2003).

George Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.: A Novel, with a new afterword (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1979, 2009) (From the "Afterword": "But when one tries to think through these unthinkable paradoxes, when barbarism mouths statistics beyond our imaginings, let alone reasoned explanations, the mind sickens and grows numb." "This, I venture, is the point." "The Portage of San Cristobal of A. H. is a a parable about pain. About the abyss of pain endured by the victims of Nazism. Endured by those being 'ethnically cleansed' in a ravaged habitat in Amazonia. It tries to instance language, and with it the fragile chances of truth, when words are racked into rhetoric and madness.  First and foremost, this fable engage the pain of remembrance, the imperative but unendurable pain pf recall. It was written in pain. I will have failed if this fact is not palpable to its readers." Id. at 174-175.).

Volker Weidemann, Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Pantheon, 2016).

TRUMP'S "EROTIC AESTHETICS OF FASCISM," OR WHAT TYPE OF ASSHOlE IS HE?

Aaron James, Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump (New York: Doubleday, 2016) ("We are not asking whether Trump is, in fact, an asshole. On this much there seems to be a broad consensus. (Can you think of a better one-word name for him?) Indeed, to many of his supporters, this may be his primary selling point." "The question, instead, is what kind of asshole could pull off such a feat so spectacularly, which is to say, it is a question of assholeology. Among the many species in the asshole ecosystem, what exactly is Trump's type? And should it, or should it not qualify him for high office?" Id. at 3-4. "When Trump say the chaotic rally scene is 'beautiful.' he doesn't mean the beauty of democratic protest, of the rule of reason over violence. He seems to be invoking the erotic aesthetics of fascism, the arousing sensual excitement of mass unity in the hatred of others and the worship of the supposedly glorious past. To me, it is the modern  version of execution for public entertainment; it is the dynamic  of crowds ad power that, with the help of technology, made the twentieth century the bloodiest in human history." Id. at 89.).

CRITICALLY THINKING ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE INDIVIDUAL'S RESPONSIBILITY IN STATE-SPONSORED CRIMES

Lawrence Douglas, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("In the following pages, we will explore the elaborate and strange story of Demjanjuk's legal odyssey. But for all its extraordinary twists and turns, the Demjanjuk case also places deeper, more persistent claims on out attention. It asks us to think critically about the justice of trying old men for superannuated crimes. It invites us to reflect on the nature of individual responsibility in the orchestration of state-sponsored crimes. It demands that we think carefully about the nature, causes, and possible justifications of collaboration in the perpetration of atrocities. And it provides a crucible in which three distinct national legal systems--the American, the Israel, and the German--sought to create legal alloys potent enough to master the legal challenges posed by the destruction of Europe's Jews." Id. at 3.).

LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA

James Ker, The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009) ("This book's aim has been to show what Seneca contributed to Western discourses on death and dying, and also how the conversation about Seneca himself has more often than not become a conversation about his death." Id. at 359.).

James Romm, Dying Every Day: Seneca At the Court of Nero (New York: Knopf, 2014).

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Anger, Mercy, Revenge (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca), translated by Robert A Kaster & Martha C. Nussbaum (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) (From "On Anger": "Without a doubt, we must at some point die, since a decrepit dwelling place is our lot." Id. at 53.).

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Hardship and Happiness (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca), translated by Elaine Fantom, Harry M. Hine, James Ker, & Gareth D. Williams (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2014).

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca), translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Margaret Graver & A. A. Long (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2015) (From Book Seventeen, Letter 101: "You should now admit that nature is very kind in making our death inevitable. 15 Yet many people have been ready to make much worse bargains than Maecenas--even betraying a friend, in order to prolong life, or voluntarily giving up their children into prostitution, to have the chance of seeing a daylight that is cognizant of their many crimes. We have to shake off this passion for life. We need to learn that it makes no difference when you suffer, because you are bound to suffer sooner or later. What matters is not how long you live by how well. And often, living well consists in not living long." Id. at 401, 404.).

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Natural Questions (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca), translated by Harry M. Hine (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2010) (From Book 2 [Originally Book 8] "On Lightning and Thunder": "People only ever fear the lightning-bolt they have escaped." Id. at 163, 192.).

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On Benefits (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca), translated by Miriam Griffin & Brad Inwood (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2011) From "Book 7 (28.1)": "Reflect on whether you have returned the favor to those to whom you are indebted, whether you have ever allow a responsibility to die in your hands, whether you live constantly with an awareness of all the benefits you have been given." Id. at 166, 187.).

Emily Wilson, The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2014).