"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Stop the presses! What shade(s) of orange do you suppose extraterrestrial Donald Trumps might be?
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"Now we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don't, whatever we find will be super interesting."
-- University of Liège "exoplanet researcher" Michaël Gillon
by Ken
So here I was, wrestling with a post that would take off from a cluster of one upcoming and two just-forgotten birthdays, and last night's Real O'Neals and The Middle, so good that you have to wonder how they survived interference by the Disney-ABC network suits, and the whole consuming business of "fitting in" or not.
That combined with -- as an afterthought or maybe overthought -- a piece by Nathaniel Rich in the March 7 NYRB, "Joan Didion in the Deep South" (copyright by the author, curiously; note that the full piece is available only to subscribers or purchasers) about Joan Didion's about-to-be-published book South and West, which apparently consists of her actual notes for never-written pieces gathered during a month traveling the Gulf Coast in summer 1970 and a 1976 visit to San Francisco (in, of course, her native California) covering Patty Hearst's trial for Rolling Stone.
I'd already decided that probably it would have been split into two sure-to-be-riveting posts, when whap!, along comes this breaking news, and naturally all that other stuff has to be put on hold. I know that these seven planets aren't in our solar system, or anywhere near (note that the description of Trappist-1 as an "ultracool dwarf" isn't a value judgment but a description of the 39-light-years-distant star's temperature and size), but still, seven "Earthlike" planets? Get out of here! Just think, somewhere out there in space there could be seven officially extraterrestrial Donald Trumps! Do you suppose they would all come in the same shade(s) of orange?
[SEE VIDEO CLIP ABOVE] Three planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system resemble Earth in terms of size, mass, and the energy they receive from their star. (Reuters)
A newfound solar system just 39 light-years away contains seven warm, rocky, Earthlike planets, scientists say.
The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, represents the first time astronomers have ever detected so many terrestrial planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying distant worlds and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth.
“Before this, if you wanted to study terrestrial planets, we had only four of them and they were all in our solar system,” said lead author Michaël Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium. “Now we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don't, whatever we find will be super interesting.”
The newly discovered solar system resembles a scaled-down version of our own. The star at its center, an ultracool dwarf called TRAPPIST-1, is less than a tenth the size of the sun and about a quarter as warm. Its planets circle tightly around it; the closest takes just a day and a half to complete an orbit, the most distant takes about 20 days. If these planets orbited a larger, brighter star they'd be fried to a crisp. But TRAPPIST-1 is so cool that all seven of the bodies are bathed in just the right amount of warmth to hold liquid water. And three of them receive the same amount of heat as Venus, Earth and Mars, putting them in “the habitable zone,” that Goldilocks region where it's thought life can thrive.
Still, “Earthlike” is a generous term to describe these worlds. Though the planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system resemble Earth in terms of size, mass, and the energy they receive from their star, there's a lot that makes our planet livable beside being a warm rock. Further observation is required to figure out what the TRAPPIST-1 planets are made of, if they have atmospheres, and whether they hold water, methane, oxygen and carbon dioxide — the molecules that scientists consider “biosignatures,” or signs of life.
“You can bet people will be rushing to take those measurements,” said Elisabeth Adams, an exoplanet researcher at the Planetary Science Institute who was not involved in the study. “That's going to be fascinating to see.”
An artist's conception of the view from the surface of the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1f. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) [Note: Click to enlarge. -- Ed.]
Whatever secrets it may harbor, the TRAPPIST-1 system will surely be a sight to behold. Though the star is small, its nearness to the planets means that, from their perspective, it appears about three times as large as our sun. The outermost planets enjoy the daily spectacle of their neighbors passing across the sky and in front of their shared sun, each world a large dark spot silhouetted against the salmon-colored star. Its dim glow, which skews toward the red and infrared end of the light spectrum, bathes the planets in warmth and paints their skies with the crimson hues of a perpetual sunset.
[There's more, ohsomuch more, which all you astronomy nerds out there can read onsite. -- Ed.]
WHEW! HOW EXCITING IS THIS?
Now, maybe Friday we can get back to the business originally plann for today.
Sure, we say it every four years, but isn't THIS the craziest presidential election in memory?
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He-e-e-ere's Speaker Louie!DailyKos caption: "Now, doesn't this inspire confidence?" Yeccch! My proposed new Louie Rule: From now on, the only living Louie to be acknowledged publicly will be Louis CK.
"Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution -- the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it."
I mean, here we are watching the far-right-wing crazies defending -- as only far-right-wing crazies can, viciously and with a strong whiff of impending violence -- their boy the Billion-Dollar Loser, who isn't even a conservative. Unless you count where he sort-of-plays one for totally cynically selfish reasons on the, you know, campaign trail.
Step aside Paul Ryan, Hannity has announced your replacement as Speaker: Rep. Louie Gohmert
Fox News host Sean Hannity is all out auditioning to be chief correspondent of the loons once the new Trump-bart debuts. And first on the chopping block after Trump is roundly defeated by overwhelming majorities at the polls: Paul Ryan, whom Hannity called a "saboteur" of Trump's campaign. Allegra Kirkland writes:
Speaking to the Washington Post in the spin room after the final presidential debate, the devoted Donald Trump ally hinted that the intra-party war between far-right conservatives and their more moderate counterparts would continue regardless of who wins the presidential race on November 8.
Hannity told the Post that Ryan, who has offered only tepid support for the Republican nominee during the 2016 race, “needed to be called out and replaced.”
Nice! Ryan, who hasn't even had the guts to disavow Trump, is now responsible for the miserable failure of a campaign Trump has run. Sorry, Paul.
Hannity also had a lot of good ideas about members of the House Crazy Caucus who could unite the party (ahem) upon Ryan’s ouster: Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan (chair of the Crazy Caucus), North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows (who devised the wildly popular 2013 government shutdown), and Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert! LOL. Gohmert! The wackiest of the wack jobs, who has called Hillary Clinton "mentally impaired." Speaker Gohmert! ROFLOL.
REALLY NOW, WHERE TO BEGIN?
I mean, Sean Hannity threatening to take Paul Ryan down for being insufficiently conservative? PAUL RYAN??? Wouldn't you think that if there's one thing Speaker Paul doesn't have to answer for, it's being insufficiently conservative? Has anyone in our public life done more to drag us back to the 16th century? And I include Sean Hannity, who's all mouth, whereas Speaker Paul is the, er, "brains" of the Far Right politicos, providing a steady stream of actual legislative proposals to do the deed.
In fairness to Shifty Sean, what he lacks in brains -- which sure seems to be quite a lot -- he more than makes up for in savagery, uninhibitedness, dishonesty, and naked self-promotingness. Still, to plug some of the evident gap in ideological awareness, here's some of what David Bromwich has to say in a compendium of ten frequent contributors' thoughts "On the Election" running through the new (Nov. 10) issue of the New York Review of Books:
From the first debates of 2015, Donald Trump stood out because he wasn’t one of the usual suspects. He was the to-hell-with-it candidate. If you dislike politics generally, don’t study or understand them but are sure the country has declined and that the future looks worse than the past, Trump is your man. He doesn’t know politics any better than you do, but he says (reassuringly) that it is a mug’s game, and he ought to know. He comes from money, lives for money, and before he entered the race he was in the business of buying favors from the mugs.
Who better to avow that the system is rigged? Everyone admits that the Clinton Foundation has done good works. But anyone with a nose can tell that it uneasily mixes philanthropy and aggrandizement. Trump took his cue and blew it up and—since Hillary Clinton is known to have met with donors while she was secretary of state—he called the foundation itself a pay-to-play scheme. Trump the insider has the best and biggest nose for such things; and in the mood of perpetual disquiet these last two years in America, the undeniable blots on his character have made people strangely trust him more.
Comparisons with Reagan are misleading. Reagan was intimate with politics and political interests as far back as his presidency of the Screen Actor’s Guild. He tricked his opponents into underrating him, right up to the election of 1980, but the reason wasn’t the lack of a consistent ideology or a coherent personality. Reagan was undeviating in his overall views: the people who supported him knew what they were getting. With Trump, they prefer not to know, and he panders to wishful ignorance by saying that whatever he does in his first days as president, he’ll do it good and do it fast. The vagueness, bloat, and feckless reiteration of the promises (the height of the wall with Mexico, the total ban on Muslim immigration, the vow to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”) go against the grain of a representative government based on checks and self-restraint.
Trump the post-political billionaire can seem refreshingly heterodox only if one performs a drastic curtailment of common judgment. The right-wing anti-imperialist Pat Buchanan thinks that Trump has the mind-set and stamina to extricate the US from our half-dozen wars in the Greater Middle East (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia). On the evidence, one would guess that Trump indeed has a less hearty appetite for wars than Hillary Clinton, but his solutions often sound like “Bomb them back to the Stone Age” rather than the reasoned noninterventionism this branch of apologists are looking for.
For the record, the other NYRB "On the Election" contributors are: Russell Baker, G.W. Bowersock, Mark Danner, Andrew Delbanco, Elizabeth Drew, Benjamin M. Friedman, Diane Johnson, Nicholas Lemann, Jessica T. Mathews, Darryl Pinckney, Marilynne Robinson, Garry Wills. (Yes, they're presented alphabetcially!) And to be clear, David Bromwich continues with a powerful takedown of Hillary Clinton, including this:
[H]er stated positions and political history leave her unequipped to repel [Trump's] charges against immigration, the American jobs lost through trade deals, and the scenes of disorder in American cities that followed the killing of black men by police and the killing of police by black men. Hillary Clinton is the reverse of a popular politician—she is more like an ideally dutiful chair of a committee—and it has been an odd feature of the campaign to advertise her as “the most qualified person ever to run for president.”
WHILE WE'RE AT IT, WE MIGHT JUMP
AHEAD TO BROMWICH'S CONCLUSION
Which is decidedly mournful:
The domestic state of the nation is so unpropitious in October 2016 that one may pity the winner of this election as much as the loser. We are living in a country under recurrent siege by the actions of crowds. There is the Tea Party crowd with their belief that global climate disruption is a scientific hoax; there is the Black Lives Matter crowd with their ambiguous slogan “No Justice, No Peace”; and there are more ominous developments, such as the acts of serial defiance of the federal government by the Bundy family in Nevada and Oregon. Whoever comes next will have the task of restoring respect for the law and a common adherence to the Constitution—the heaviest of burdens, even for a candidate prepared by training and disposition to carry it.
It will take more than right-wing nincompoopery to challenge a powerhouse religious terror-mongering state like ISIS
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Washingtonpost.com caption: National security correspondent Greg Miller discusses the impact of three terrorist attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait after an Islamic State leader called to make the month of Ramadan a time of "calamity for the infidels." Watch the clip here.
"The jihadists of ISIS may be terrorists -- to use an imprecise, catch-all term -- but as [author Abdel Bari] Atwan explains, they are both well paid and disciplined, and the atrocities they commit and upload on the Internet are part of a coherent strategy."
BEIRUT — Assailants beheaded, bombed and gunned down victims on three continents Friday, killing more than 60 people and raising fears that a global surge of terror strikes could be imminent.
There was initially no reason to believe the disparate attacks — at a factory in France, a beach resort in Tunisia and a mosque in Kuwait — were connected.
But then the Islamic State asserted responsibility for two of them, first the bombing in Kuwait in which 25 died and later, in a separate statement, the assault on the beach in Tunisia, which killed 39.
The second statement contained a warning that more attacks soon will follow: “Let them wait for the glad tidings of what will harm them in the coming days, Allah permitting,” it said, referring to the “apostates” who had been the target of the assault.
The three incidents followed an appeal Tuesday from the Islamic State’s spokesman, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, for Muslims to mark the holy month of Ramadan by carrying out acts of “jihad,” or holy war. . . .
And so, apparently, another coup for ISIS. Which sent me back to "Inside the Islamic State," an essay by Malis Ruthven in the July 9 New York Review of Books taking off from the book Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate by Abdel Bari Atwan (to be published by University of California Press in September), "based on visits to the Turkish-Syrian border, online interviews with jihadists, and the access to leaders he enjoys as one of the Arab world’s most respected journalists." Ruthven describes the "convincing picture" drawn by Atwan of ISIS, with its network of interconnections spread far, wide, and deep, as "a well-run organization that combines bureaucratic efficiency and military expertise with a sophisticated use of information technology."
Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s official successor as leader of “al-Qa‘ida central,” looks increasingly irrelevant. Bin Laden’s true successor is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadowy caliph of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State. As “Commander of the Faithful” in that nascent state he poses a far more formidable threat to the West and to Middle Eastern regimes—including the Saudi kingdom—that are sustained by Western arms than bin Laden did from his Afghan cave or hideout in Pakistan.
One of the primary forces driving this transformation, according to Atwan, is the digital expertise demonstrated by the ISIS operatives, who have a commanding presence in social media. A second is that ISIS controls a swath of territory almost as large as Britain, lying between eastern Syria and western Iraq. As Jürgen Todenhöfer, who spent ten days in ISIS-controlled areas in both Iraq and Syria, stated categorically in January: “We have to understand that ISIS is a country now.”
Not that this "country" is any less ruthless than we have come to know -- if anything it's more so, as we come to understand that all the ruthlessness and terror is deliberate, conceived and acted out with a careful view to the impact it will have on friends, enemies, and perhaps most important those in between. "Far from being an undisciplined orgy of sadism," Ruthven writes, "ISIS terror is a systematically applied policy that follows the ideas put forward in jihadist literature," and he duly takes us through that.
I wish I could neatly summarize what took Atwan a book to set out and Ruthven a lengthy NYRB essay to encapsule. "Atwan explains," for example,
how the Islamic State’s media department employs an army of journalists, photographers, and editors to produce slick videos with high production values that are disseminated on the Internet without their source being detected. Activists use “virtual private networks” that conceal a user’s IP address, in conjunction with browsers—including one originally developed for US Navy intelligence—that enable the viewer to access the “dark Internet,” the anonymous zone frequented by child pornographers and other criminals.
Unfortunately the subject as laid out even by Ruthven, is too long and complex for reasonable representation in a few sentences. Which also means that the case is beyond both the attention span and interest level of right-wing foreign-policy ideologues who are looking for arguments that, in a couple of sentences, press their ideological hot buttons. The process reminds me of nothing as much as the way we're always told that TV and movie projects to studio execs whose principal qualification is total ignorance of and lack of curiosity about the world around them.
"The obvious question that arises," Ruthven writes, "is, where will all of this end?" And the answer appears to be even scarier than one might have thought, because Baghdadi seems to be positioning ISIS as a rival in the Sunni world to what Atwan describes as the Saudi kingdom's "quasi-caliphal claim to lead the Muslim world as 'Guardian of the Two Holy Shrines' (Mecca and Medina)." ISIS, he points out, makes much of "the royal family’s love of luxury and acceptance of corruption which, it claims, renders its members ideologically and morally unfit for the task."
"By appropriating Wahhabism’s iconoclastic rhetoric," Ruthven begins his wind-up, "along with its anti-Shia theology, ISIS challenges the legitimacy of the Saudi rulers as guardians of Islam's holy places far more effectively than any republican movement." He began this piece with a vision conjured in The Guardian in November 2001 (i.e., two months after 9/11) by novelist James Buchan, a former Middle East correspondent: "the triumphant entry into Mecca of Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist." Now, Ruthven writes, "with Iraq and Syria falling apart and the US caught between conflicting impulses (fighting alongside Iran in Iraq while opposing it in Syria), it may only be a matter of time before the nightmare imagined by James Buchan becomes a reality."
Culture and Zeitgeist Watch: Everywhere you look, it's Cromwellmania! (Or, what makes Thomas C a man for our time?)
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[1] Peter Kosminsky and Mark Rylance on Wolf Hall
[2] Mark Rylance on creating his Thomas Cromwell
In the longish first clip Mark Rylance, who plays Thomas Cromwell, and director Peter Kosminsky talk about their TV miniseries Wolf Hall, in an interview in the Tower of London which was aired on BBC the night before the series' final episode. In the shorter second clip, Mark talks about creating his Cromwell.
"To all the qualities that make him such a remarkable actor, we must now add that Mark Rylance is a great lurker. . . . [As Cromwell] Rylance can watch proceedings in so many ways -- anxiously, quizzically, with an air of quiet satisfaction or wry amusement or detached contempt -- that shots of him looking are often as intensely dramatic and as informative as any scene of scripted dialogue. They tell us who Cromwell is -- a man who makes his way in a vicious world by observing more sharply, scrutinizing more carefully, creating scenarios and watching how those he must please or destroy will act them out. The cliché is vindicated: Rylance’s eyes are windows through which we catch glimpses of Cromwell’s soul."
I guess it was only to be expected: the Cromwell T-shirts, mugs, and tote bags; the bobble-head dolls, and action figures; the lunchboxes, video games, and theme parks. Everywhere you go it's Cromwell, Cromwell, Cromwell.
Personally, I hadn't paid much attention to Wolf Hall either in book form, onstage, or on-screen. I had in fact read a couple of glowing reviews of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the historical novels Hilary Mantel has completed to date chronicling the world of Henry VIII up to the execution of Queen No. 2, Anne Boleyn -- the first of Henry's queens who didn't have the sense to go quietly. I guess by now I'd been Tudor-ed out by Showtime's The Tudors, which seemed to be the Henry VIII story if it had been written by Jacqueline "Valley of the Dolls" Susann, except much tackier -- and I suspect much faster and looser with the facts than Ms. Susann would have been if she'd written it. And The Tudors itself was just the latest in a long line of film and TV retellings of various parts of the Henry VIII story, which Fintan O'Toole, literary editor of the Irish Times, recaps in the above-referenced NYRB piece. The story, he says,
has always been too rich to let lie between the covers of history books. It has everything: sex, violence, and religion; the lurid, the tragic, and the grotesque.
At least I knew about the Hilary Mantel books. Beyond that, though, I was fairly confused by the arrivals of a two-part six-hour stage version by the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose landing on Broadway was being announced even as a six-part TV adaptation came on PBS. I kind of guessed that they weren't the same thing, but I didn't care to find out more about them -- until I got around to reading the amazing Fintan O'Toole piece -- just in time to catch the last two episodes of the series. On the basis of which I can tell you that O'Toole's perspective on Mark Rylance's performance is as brilliant as the performance itself.
An immediate point O'Toole makes is that what Rylance is able to be seen doing on-screen isn't possible onstage, no matter how fine the actor -- and he allows that the RSC's Ben Miles is a "fine" one.
The stage has no place for lurking. There is no camera to draw us away from the main action and toward the drab figure standing almost in the wings. We are the watchers -- we are not interested in having someone do our looking for us. If sumptuously dressed couples are dancing a gavotte, our eyes feast on them and miss the still man on the margins. If a queen is about to be beheaded, we are not interested in the bureaucrat half-hidden in the curious crowd. If we are ever to know what is going on in that figure’s mind, he must, at some point, tell us directly or else we must be allowed to overhear him confiding in someone else.
But neither of these strategies would really work for a stage version of Cromwell. Having him address the audience would make a man whose essence is discretion and self-containment far too up-front.
O'Toole quotes a note provided by Mantel for Ben Miles, included in the published version of Mike Poulton's script:
No one knows where you have been, or who you know, or what you can do, and these areas of mystery, on which you cast no light, are the source of your power…. People open their hearts to you. They tell you all sorts of things. But you tell them nothing.
So Cromwell doesn’t have confidants. His beloved wife Liz dies of the “sweating sickness” early in the story, along with his two daughters, and he does not replace her. He will not be exposed by personal intimacy and he knows all too well that he lives in a world where confidences are betrayed. He spends too much time filching other people’s privacies to risk exposing his own. He trusts his ward Rafe Sadler and his son Gregory but his attitude toward them is paternal and protective. He does not burden them with his doubts or his yearnings, which means that we are not allowed much access to them either.
"Some of the most memorable images in the books," O'Toole writes, "are formed in Cromwell’s head: his reflections, his plotting, his private anguish, and, most of all, his barely contained laughter." In the screen version, he says, adapted by Peter Straughan, "we can get "some notion of what is in Cromwell’s head by tracing the flickers of fear or triumph or humor that the camera catches on Rylance’s long, melancholic, and otherwise impassive face." But you can't do that onstage.
O'Toole examines differences between all aspects of the TV and stage versions, then tells us that the difference can encompass "the way they are written, acted, and directed," and offers the example of "a superbly conceived scene that is, on paper, very similar in both adaptations."
Cromwell has been sent by Henry to tell Katherine that the king is to be declared head of the church in England, giving him the power to annul their marriage. Katherine is seated but her frail daughter Mary, who is to be made a bastard, is standing beside her chair. Cromwell sees that Mary is ill and suggests that she sit on a stool. Katherine, wishing to show their resolve, insists that Mary stand. After some bitter dialogue, Mary faints. Cromwell is ready for this -- he reacts instantly and gets her safely onto the stool.
What is going on in this small scene? The story is progressing, of course -- we are learning of Katherine’s unflinching determination to insist on her royal rights and of the problem of what to do with Mary. But we are also learning about Cromwell. The underlying dramatic question is how much we are learning. On stage, we are learning two things -- that Cromwell is essentially kind and that he anticipates what is about to happen. Ben Miles takes hold of Leah Brotherhead’s tiny, fragile Mary and sets her gently onto the stool. It is a straightforward act of decency.
On screen, the scene tells us many other things. Yes, Cromwell is being kind to Mary. But he is also in a battle of political wills with her mother, who is still a queen and who still expects to be obeyed. On stage, Cromwell asks Mary gently, “Won’t you sit, Lady?” On screen, he addresses not Mary but his adversary, her mother: “Madam, your daughter should sit.” Before Mary actually faints, he moves decisively to grab the heavy stool and places it next to her. He more or less commands her: “Will you not sit down, Princess Mary?” And then, to allay her embarrassment, he says gently, “It’s just the heat.”
In the way Rylance plays this scene, we see not just that Cromwell’s instincts are kind, but that his kindness has come to be wrapped up in political strategy. He is controlling the room, asserting himself against the queen, and he is being nice to a princess who may be down today but who, in this topsy-turvy world, may have power over him someday. On screen, this one small scene has layers of motivation and psychological drama that it lacks on stage.
I don't think this PBS preview will really give you a full idea of what O'Toole is talking about, because at minimum you would need to see how he builds and sustains a scene, but it gives us something.
BUT WHY THOMAS CROMWELL, AND WHY NOW?
Contrary to the impression created by columnist Jim Dwyer in a NYT piece ("Suddenly, after 500 years of infamy and obscurity, here comes Thomas Cromwell"), says O'Toole, Thomas Cromwell is hardly new to us. He has figured, after all, in all those film and TV adaptations of the part of the story where he is ascendant, and generally considered the second most powerful man in England, behind the king -- and effectively the man who is running the country, subject of course to overruling by the king, overruling that is all to apt to take the form of extinction, as Cromwell has seen happen to his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey (a reality that seems always in the consciousness of Rylance's Cromwell).
Cromwell has certainly been a hate figure for Catholics -- the schemer who took England away from the true faith and the killer of the saintly Thomas More. In the protest culture of the 1960s, it was easy to see More as the brave dissident and Cromwell as the evil apparatchik: Cromwell is More’s persecutor in A Man for All Seasons and an utterly unscrupulous upstart in Anne of a Thousand Days.
But precisely because he was a villain to Catholics, he has also long been a hero to Protestants. . .&. .
And he tracks us through some of the pro-Cromwell treatments of the story, reminding us how much the view of all of these characters depends on the viewpoint of the person doing the looking. The sainted Thomas More, for example, is a heroic martyr to Catholics, his "relentless pursuit of heretics" made him far from a universally loved figure. This too seems to me a terrific takeaway, the way in which the sympathies of the chronicler affect the shape and manner of the chronicle.
There's no question that Hilary Mantel likes Cromwell -- and again, both the RSC stage version and the Masterpiece TV version are retelling her story of these events. But this, O'Toole argues, surely isn't a matter of religious sympathies. "There is no religious shortcut to engagement with these dramas," O'Tooole says, "no assumption that Catholics will hiss Cromwell and cheer More and that Protestants will do the opposite. Some other connection must be forged."
THIS CROMWELL IS, MORE OR LESS, ONE OF US
This is the part I really wanted you to read.
What makes Mantel’s Cromwell appealing to readers, audiences, and TV viewers is that he is rather like most of them. He is a middle-class man trying to get by in an oligarchic world. Thirty years ago, Mantel’s Cromwell would have been of limited interest. His virtues -- hard work, self-discipline, domestic respectability, a talent for office politics, the steady accumulation of money, a valuing of stability above all else -- would have been dismissed as mere bourgeois orthodoxies. If they were not so boring they would have been contemptible. They were, in a damning word, safe.
But they’re not safe anymore. They don’t assure security. As the world becomes more oligarchic, middle-class virtues become more precarious. This is the drama of Mantel’s Cromwell -- he is the perfect bourgeois in a world where being perfectly bourgeois doesn’t buy you freedom from the knowledge that everything you have can be whipped away from you at any moment. The terror that grips us is rooted not in Cromwell’s weakness but in his extraordinary strength. He is a perfect paragon of meritocracy for our age. He is a survivor of an abusive childhood, a teenage tearaway made good, a self-made man solely reliant on his own talents and entrepreneurial energies. He could be the hero of a sentimental American story of the follow-your-dreams genre. Except for the twist -- meritocracy goes only so far. Even Cromwell cannot control his own destiny, cannot escape the power of entrenched privilege. And if he, with his almost superhuman abilities, can’t do so, what chance do the rest of us have?
STILL TO COME: THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF?
Of course, as we all know (don't we?), Cromwell's streak didn't last forever. And as director Peter Kosminsky and Rylance note in the first clip up top, Hilary Mantel is still at work on a third volume in her series. O'Toole notes that The Mirror and the Light "will take Cromwell to his own execution." In the clip, we can see Kosminsky all but salivating over the prospect of directing an extension of the story which culminates in that dramatic event. I'm guessing that Rylance would make himself available for such an enterprise -- and we can have one further burst of Cromwellmania.
"Where else in our weak economy are there so many good job opportunities as in racketeering?" (Charles Simic)
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Relax, Mr. Crook! If you're big and powerful
enough, there's no need to hide your face!
"It ought to be obvious by now that if we ever become a genuine police state, it will not arise from an authoritarian ideology necessarily, but as the end result of that insatiable greed for profit that has already affected every aspect of American life from health care to the way college students are forced into debt."
Earlier tonight Howie pointed out ("Corruption At The Top -- In China They Punish It . . . For Real") that the People's Republic of China is becoming known for seriously prosecuting corruption at the upper levels of government and Communist Party ranks, in rather stark contrast to certain other economic powerhouses, including one whose initials are U.S.A. This might be a good time to look back at the jolly little blogpost I've cited above, served up for Thanksgiving by the poet and trenchant essayist Charles Simic.
It’s never been such a good time to be a crook. In what other country of laws does one enjoy so much freedom to defraud one’s government and fellow citizens without having to worry about cops showing at the door? Small-time crooks sooner or later end up in the slammer, but our big-time con artists, as we’ve come to learn, are now regarded as the untouchables, too well-heeled and powerful to lock up.
What's more, he notes, "the most famous among them" rouse the admiration, not just of "peers and politicians on the take" but by such worthies as the president, "who, six years after the worst financial crisis since the Depression, calls them good businessmen." And so our best and brightest come out of prestigious schools boasting of their intention to follow in their footsteps. "Besides," he adds, "where else in our weak economy are there so many good job opportunities as in racketeering?" And, he notes, the career white-collar crminal now faces "so few risks."
Everyone knows about Wall Street bankers having their losses from various scams they concocted over the years covered by taxpayers. But now, even when bankers lose billions for their bank by making bad or reckless deals, or have to pay regulatory penalties, as Jamie Dimon, the current chairman, president, and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase did earlier this year, they are more likely to get a 74 percent raise, as he did, than to lose their jobs. As for the federal agencies that are supposed to watch over them and the Justice Department that is supposed to haul these hucksters into court, if they so much as bestir themselves to confront the banks, they simply ask them to pay fines, thereby avoiding a judge or a jury and making sure that the details of their swindles can remain secret from the public.
And that's nothing comparied to "the kind of thievery that went on in Iraq and Afghanistan," which also seems to have lost its once-deadly stigma. (He recalls President Abraham Lincoln's admonition during the Civil War, "Worse than traitors in arms are the men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the Nation while patriotic blood is crimsoning the plains of the South and their countrymen mouldering in the dust," and President Franklin Roosevelt's declaration with the U.S.'s entry into World War II, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.") He contrasts this with the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting's finding regarding Iraq and Afghanistan that "somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion of US government money has been lost through contract waste and fraud," not to mention the more than $400 billion shelled out "to companies that had previously been sanctioned in cases involving fraud," the very same companies, by and large, that continue to suck at the teat of "the new homeland security–industrial complex."
"However shocking," Charles insists, "these revelations don’t really come as a surprise."
Can anyone imagine a candidate for office talking about war profiteering and demanding accountability from both the military and civilian contractors and those who hired them? I cannot. Nor can I imagine a reporter asking Presidents Bush and Obama what happened to all that taxpayer money. The days when the subject could be raised are long gone. We now live in a country whose political system is too corrupt to defend itself from crooks. Should some senator or congressman have a sudden attack of conscience and blurt something out, “dark money” brings them to their senses and reminds them that their job is to facilitate the transfer of public funds into the pockets of the few and to not ask too many questions. Almost $4 billion was spent on this year’s midterm election and out of that $219 million on dark money, all with the blessing of the Supreme Court, which in its 2010 Citizens United decision made bribing men and women running for office legal and turned politicians who could not be bought into an extinct species.
Finally, Charles recalls Mark Twain, "while pondering by what process our own republic may turn into monarchy," recalling being taught in school: "Rome's liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little."
It ought to be obvious by now that if we ever become a genuine police state, it will not arise from an authoritarian ideology necessarily, but as the end result of that insatiable greed for profit that has already affected every aspect of American life from health care to the way college students are forced into debt. Huge fortunes are also made from spying on us and coming to regard every American as a potential enemy. They are right to think that way. If we ever as a nation grasped that criminality on such an immense scale is bound to lead the country into ruin, there might be serious consequences for the perpetrators. At the present time, the only ones likely to get in trouble are the leakers who want to let the rest of us know what goes on behind our backs. No doubt about it, in the coming holiday season our crooks will have a lot to be thankful for and a lot to celebrate.
