SUGGESTED FICTION

Carlos Rojas, The Valley of the Fallen, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New Haven & London: A Margellos World Republic of Letters Book/Yale University Press, 2018).

Cillizza fact-checks Trump's Mueller claims

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #30

Georges Simenon, Maigret's First Case (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("Poor Le Bret! He could not get used to Maigret's transformation. He was like those parents who treat their child like a baby and then suddenly see before them a man reasoning like an adult." Id. at 129.).

READING URSULA LE GUIN

Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume One: Rocannon's World; Planet of Exile; City of Illusions; The Left Hand of Darkness; The Disposed; Stories, edited by Brian Attebery (New York: Library of America, 2017).

Ursula K. Le Guin, Hainish Novels & Stories, Volume Two: The Word for World Is Forest; Stories; Fives Ways to Forgiveness; The Telling, edited by Brian Attebery (New York: Library of America, 2017).

INEQUALITY AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2018).  From the book jacket:

     In a pioneering history of rights stretching back to the Bible, Not Enough charts how twentieth-century welfare states, concerned about both abject poverty and soaring health, resolved to fulfill their citizens' most basic needs without forgetting to contain hoe much the rich could tower over the rest. In the wake of two world wars and the collapse o empires, new states tried to take welfare beyond its original European and American homelands and went so far as to challenge inequality on a global scan;e. But their plans were foiled as a neoliberal faith in markets triumphed instead.
     Moyn places the career of the human rights movement in relation to this disturbing shift from the egalitarian politics of yesterday to the neoliberal globalization of today. Exploring why the rise of human rights has occurred alongside enduring and exploding inequality, and why activists came to seek remedies for indigence without challenging wealth, Not Enough calls for more ambitious ideals and movements to achieve a humane and equitable world.

WHEN THE RULE OF LAW IS FARCE

Michael Sfard, The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights, translated from the Hebrew by Maya Johnston (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2018) (From the book jacket: "Written with emotional force, vivid storytelling, and penetrating analysis, The Wall and the Gate offers a radically new perspective on a much-covered conflict and a subtle. painful reckoning with the moral ambiguities in the in the pursuit of justice.").

ARE YOU LESS THAN ETHICAL FOR FAILING TO ME (YOUR?) STANDARDS OF BODILY PERFECTION?

Heather Widdow, Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018). 

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #29

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Dead Man (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by David Coward (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("'. . . Well, he discovered that the dead man walked like a duck.'" Id. at 57.).

SUGGESTED READ

William R. Polk, Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2018).

Malcolm Nance: President Trump Did Not Speak For Americans In Helsinki |...

REVISITING "TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD"

Joseph Crispino, Atticus Finch: The Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of An American Icon (New York: Basic Books, 2018) ("With the publication of [Comes a] Watchman, however, we know now not only that the Atticus of Mockingbird was always too good to be true, but that Harper Lee knew it as well. She knew all the things that Jean Louise discovers in Watchman: that Atticus's' kindly paternalism covered ugly beliefs about racial difference; that his willingness to represent black clients was in service to the racial status quo; that Calpurnia and all of Maycomb's black population lived behind a veil; that what as a child she had assumed was genuine, reciprocal love and devotion across the color line was more like an elaborate act intended to ease, for whites, the guilt and, for blacks, the burden of racial injustice." Id. at 173.).

Tom Santopietro, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters: What Harper Lee's Book and the Iconic American Means to Us Today (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "As Americans yearns for a end to divisiveness, there is no better time to look at the significance of Harper Lee's book, the film, and all that came after.").

Trevor Responds to Criticism from the French Ambassador - Between The Sc...

Cuomo: Trump betrayed country as exercise in vanity

Erin Burnett: How stupid does Trump think we Americans are?

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Shep Smith Fox News calls Trump Shameful Disgraceful and a Traitor #MAGA

John King on Trump: Never seen president surrender to Russia

Vladimir Putin denies interfering in 2016 US election

Trump on election hacking: Don't see why it would be Russia

A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS!

Trump’s UK visit ends in controversy ahead of Putin meeting

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #28

Georges Simenon, Maigret's Holiday (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("'It wasn't mercy that stopped you.' 'No. I have no mercy.'" Id. at 193.).

Instrument: Banjo

WILLIAM WALKER IN CENTRAL AMERICA

Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America  (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

THE BATTLE WORTH HAVING, AND THE HILL DEMOCRATS SHOULD FIND WORTHY OF DYING ON IF NECESSARY.

[T]he great challenge and promise of more radical and liberal visions of the nexus of cultural pluralism and democracy is to create societies, polities, and norms that allow all members of a given society to participate equally as members of the polity, to strip away barriers imposed by distinctions of gender, social class, religion, ethnicity, origin, and presumed racial distinction. Both Western and non-Western societies continue to struggle with the conflict between relatively recent egalitarian ideals and inegalitarian social and political orders designed by prior generations of government and leadership to maintain dominance of a particular ethno-national group, religion, or presumed race.
     The most durable and enduring democratic polities have nurtured an ethnos within them, often at the expense of minoritized and racialized groups. The United States, France, and Britain--but also contemporary Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, the Scandinavian nations, Ghana, South Africa, Indonesia, and many other countries classified as democratic--have exhibited this tendency. The larger number of studies of these countries and he likelihood of particular groups or subgroups attaining the most preferable positions in the economy, polity, and society attest to this bias in the most democratic and societies in the contemporary world. How to make societies less ethnocentric, and more ethos-centric, is one of the great challenges of balancing cultural difference and democracy in contemporary nation-states.

Michael G. Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), at 17-18.

     W. E. B Du Bois wrote about the problem of the twentieth century being that of the color line. It remains so today, both here in America and around the globe. In the United States, Trump and his supporters did not create the color line. He and they just exploited it, made it darker and deeper.

     The United facing numerous problems and challenges, from health care, to failing schools, forever wars, failing domestic and international institutions, gender issues, violence, drugs, guns, and on and on. However, when it comes down to it, there is one overarching problem or challenge that brings them all together: Racial Inequality. Not simply along black-white lines, but across the spectrum. And the question is whether America is going to be a country that truly believes in and, then  acts meaningfully to create true equality in a pluralistic society? Or whether America is going to continue to be, or revert to being, a White-Christian-Male Privileged Society (with a dash of model women and minorities tossed in here or there). Those who argue, for example, for universal health care are not going to achieve it as long as some members of society are deemed less than human, as less worthy of health services. Those who want gender equality are not going to get it as long as some women, mainly women of color and poor women, are viewed as less deserving of being treated both as women and equal. One is not going to get equal access to education if some children are not deemed worthy of the investment.

      So, the Democratic Party needs to be what the Republican Party has abandoned when it cease to be the--yes,  flawed--Party of Lincoln and became the moral corrupt Party of Trump. The Democratic Party has to get radical, not merely progressive but radical, and embrace and fight for equality across the board. If that means offending Establishment democrats, so be it. If it mean not winning over some independents, so be it. This is the battle to be fought. This is the hill democrats need to see as worth dying on. Are we to be a free and equal people? Or, are we to remain a people where some are more equal than others, where some are more free than others?

Again, THIS IS THE BATTLE WORTH HAVING. AND IT IS THE HILL DEMOCRATS SHOULD FIND WORTHY OF DYING ON IF NECESSARY.

Police called on boy delivering newspapers

Panelist cries discussing racism, republican party

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Shep Smith Fox News explains NATO — is he ‘berating Trump? #MAGA

Red Hot Congressional Strzok Fest 2018

Trump Baby Blimp Organizer: Moral Outrage Doesn’t Work On Trump | The Be...

ADRIENNE RICH

Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems, 1950-2012, introduction by Claudia Rankine (New York: Norton, 2012).  The following two poems, though written in the early1990s, reflect our troubled times in the late 2010s.

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled,

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light--

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know exactly already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in timess like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

1991

IN THOSE YEARS

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life and, yes, that was the only life

we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

along the shore, through the rags of fog

where we stood, saying I.

1991

Lawmaker yells at Gowdy: This is not Benghazi!

Strzok hearing erupts: You need your medication!

HATE in AMERICA: Attacks on Minorities

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Violin vs. Fiddle

What's the difference between a violin and a fiddle?

CNN TONIGHT WITH DON LEMON 7/10/2018

CNN ANDERSON COOPER 360 7/10/2018

MORNING JOE 7/11/18 TRUMP CONTINUES CRITICISM OF ALLIES AHEAD OF NATO SU...

BLUEGRASS AND BEYOND

Craig Harris, Bluegrass, Newgrass, Old-Time, and Americana Music (Gretna, La: Pelican, 2018).

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Doc Watson performs "Deep River Blues" in the DVD "Doc's Guitar: Fingerp...

John McWhorter: Trump First President To Give Statements He Hasn’t Thoug...

SUGGESTED READ ON AMERICA'S ANTI-CHINESE IMMIGRANT HISTORY

Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communicates throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. Beth Lew-Williams shows how American immigrants policies incited this violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, Lew-Williams argues, Chinese explosion and exclusion produced the concept of the 'alien' in modern America.").

Charles Pierce: President Trump SCOTUS Pick Puts Voting Rights Act On Th...

Joe: Rudy Giuliani Made President Donald Trump Look Foolish | Morning Jo...

Raw Craft with Anthony Bourdain - Episode Nine: Rachel Rosenkrantz

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #27

Georges Simenon, Maigret in New York (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("They had stopped automatically on the front step, and were both looking at the shop across the street--and at the tailor, old Angelino's son, working at his steam press, because the poor do not have time to dwell on their grief." Id. at 87.).

THE ROTS OF TURKEY'S TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DESCENT INTO SICK POLITICS

Hans-Lukas Kieser, Talk Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018) ("In the 2010s, Turkey has become post-Kemalist. It is a risk of losing not only its post-World War II orientation but also its new, more incisive, fundamental compass from the beginning of the twenty-first century: accession to the European Union and implementation of the EU standards, allowing democratic ideals of the 1908 Ottoman spring to resume. In the aftermath of recent loss, Turkey is again, and perhaps more than ever, haunted by fatal departures of a hundred years ago. [] A combination of power, corruption, and imperially biased national-religious appeal ('neo-Ottomanism") has presently--in the late 2010s--made politics sick again." Id. at 426-427.).

Ana Navarro ANGRY DESTROYS Trump On His Immigrant Policy & Comments On S...

Brooks and Klein on Trump’s Supreme Court shortlist, Scott Pruitt’s scan...

READING TACITUS

Tacitus, Volume I: Agricola, translated by M. Hutton, revised by R.M.Ogilvie; Germania, translate by M. Hutton, revised by E. H. Warmington; Dialogus, translated by W. Peterson, revised by M. Winterbotton (Loeb Classical Library, 35) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1914, 1970).

Tacitus, Volume II: Histories, Books 1-3 (Loeb Classical Library, 111), translated by Clifford H. Moore (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1925).

Tacitus, Volume III: Histories, Books 4-5, translated by Clifford H. Moore; The Annals, Books 1-3, translated by John Jackson (Loeb Classical Library, 249) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1931).

Tacitus, Volume IV: The Annals, Books 4-6, 11-12 ( Loeb Classical Library, 312), translated by John Jackson (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1937).

Tacitus, Volume V: The Annals, Books 13-16 ( Loeb Classical Library, 322), translated by John Jackson (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 1937).

Irish Banjo Music Maid behind the bar on a Deering tenor banjo.

Scott Ainslie's SUGAR BABE gourd banjo

Michael Eric Dyson: Trump talks like a racist, thinks like a racist

IS IT TIME TO MOVE BEYOND PRIVAE PROPERTY?

Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl, Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton University Press, 2018). It would be inappropriate for me to even try to summarize the book here. One will just have to decide whether one is willing to invest the time and intellectual energy in reading it and grappling with its argument(s). However, to quote from the text: "Even if we don’t sell you on all our ideas, we hope this book will open your mind to a new way of imagining the economy and politics. This challenging moment, when long-held assumptions are being overturned, is ripe for radical rethinking." Id. at 29. Obviously Trump and his followers are engaged in radical thinking of the harmful and counterproductive kind. It would be wise and prudent to at least consider some radical thinking of a more positive and productive kind.

SUGGESTED SUMMER FICTION

Peter Carey, Along Way From Home: A Novel (New York; Knopf, 2018).

Bethany C. Morrow, MEM: A Novel (Los Angles: The Unnamed Press, 2018).

Tom Rachman, The Italian Teacher: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2018).

Lionel Shriver, Property: Stories Between Two Novellas (New York: Harper, 2018).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #26

Georges Simenon, Maigret Gets Angry (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2015) ("'Despite everything, he had the soul of a book-keeper!'" Id. at 151.).