Monday, April 30, 2018

Last Week, There Was A Bizarre Attempt By The Current Occupant of The Oval Office To Demonstrate His Utter Stupidity To The Stupified Hosts Of "Fox & Friends"

Tom wrote in the the e-mail that brought today's 'toon:

This week’s inspiration provided by that unhinged phone interview Trump gave to his favorite television program, "Fox and Friends," last week, in which he managed to undercut one of his own legal team’s key arguments — that the material seized from Michael Cohen is protected under attorney-client privilege. I was also thinking about the interview with Lester Holt last year in which he openly admitted that he fired Comey because of the Russia investigation. He’s a criminal, but he’s a really dumb one, and can’t open his mouth without incriminating himself.

Dan

And that is that. If this is a (fair & balanced) finding of criminality, so be it.

[x TMW]
"Fox & Friends"
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2018 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)



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Sunday, April 29, 2018

This Just In — Stephen Colbert Nominates The Current Occupant Of The Oval Office For The Nobel Piece (Of Something) Prize

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd's nickname, courtesy of POTUS 43) reacted to the news ripple caused by the latest insane endorsement of the current occupant of the Oval Office by his devout followers — the Base. A base is the bottom of any object and the occupant's Base consists of 100% bottom-feeders. Q: How low can you go? A: The current occupant's Base. And speaking of base, the illustration in this post might may skirt the obscenity-boundary. If this is a (fair & balanced) response that the Base might understand, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump — Our Cartoon Nobel Laureate
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

created at TagCrowd.com

You can hear those heads exploding from here to Oslo.

Republican lawmakers are pushing Donald Trump, the most combative man in the universe, for a Nobel Peace Prize.

How unimaginable is this?

Just picture a wildly hirsute cartoon figure with a hair-trigger temper festooned with a medal of Alfred Nobel reading “Pro pace et fraternitate gentium” (“For the peace and brotherhood of men”).

“The guy who said he could be as presidential as any president except for Abraham Lincoln is instead about as presidential as Yosemite Sam,” says his biographer Tim O’Brien. “I really think of him as Yosemite Sam — just hopping around in anger, firing his gun wildly, sometimes at his own foot. He was so unhinged and ranting in that call to ‘Fox & Friends’ this week that even the hosts couldn’t wait to get him off the air.”

Yet Lindsey Graham, who once labeled Trump “a kook,” “crazy” and “unfit for office,” told Fox News on Friday: “Donald Trump convinced North Korea and China he was serious about bringing about change. We’re not there yet, but if this happens, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”

And here’s the part that would drive Trump haters into a frenzy: If he could pull off denuclearizing North Korea, he would deserve it more than Barack Obama did when he had that bouquet thrown at him seconds into his presidency.

And Trump certainly would deserve it more than Henry Kissinger, who won the prize in 1973 for his efforts to end the Vietnam War, after privately persuading Richard Nixon to keep it going for years and while secretly bombing Cambodia.

If he won, President Trump would be within his rights when he claimed it as a personal victory since he decimated the State Department to the point that we wondered if interns in Foggy Bottom were crafting North Korea policy.

It would be a paradox: The man so many Americans loathe as a villain taming a charter member of the Axis of Evil.

Of course, any Strangelovian thing could happen when Little Rocket Man and the Dotard actually get together, given that both Dear Leaders live in bizarro fantasy worlds with fawning courtiers, where lying and cheating abounds. (So far, Kim Jong-un has Trump beat in the fawning enforcement department since he had his uncle killed for, among other reasons, clapping halfheartedly for him.)

And even as Trump helped end the Korean War — does that call for a special episode of “M*A*S*H”? — he was vowing that Iran “will pay a price like few countries have ever paid” if it ever threatens us in any way.

But for the moment, President Trump’s peculiar form of diplomacy — a combination of belligerence, bluster, name-calling and ignorance of history — has somehow produced a possible breakthrough in North Korea that eluded his predecessors.

Heads are also exploding from Chappaqua to Hollywood as the unfathomable idea sinks in that, despite Trump’s lack of a moral or political core, despite the fact that he has tarnished the presidency with his nasty bullying, race-baiting, unmoored tweeting and authoritarian tendencies, he could get a second term.

Democrats are spun up all over the country, flocking to the polls in special elections with sky-high enthusiasm, buoyed by empowered women driven by disgust at the Groper-in-Chief who has so far escaped a reckoning.

They are sanguine that they can convert the Trump hatred into a big bad blue wave for the midterms and win back the House and maybe the Senate and get their revenge on the Orange Menace.

Strangely enough, though, a strong midterm for the Democrats could help Trump two years down the road if they take back the reins of Congress and go too far, as Democrats are wont to do.

Republicans paid a price in 1998 for pushing to impeach Bill Clinton, and Clinton regained popularity.

As far as the presidential race in 2020, the Democrats seem to be repeating the mistake that Hillary Clinton made: counting on the awfulness of Trump to do their work for them. (And the righteousness of Robert Mueller.)

They are not grooming a gleaming crop of presidential contenders or honing a seductive message that could win back the alienated voters who put Trump in just because he promised to shake things up.

Their leadership and top presidential prospects symbolize the past, not the future. They should be the éminences grises ushering in an exciting new generation, not the retreads and missed-their-moments dominating the field, as the entire party is leaping to the left — another complication in a national election where you have to appeal to a wide swath of voters.

The Democrats are counting on Trump to self-destruct. And certainly, he loves to light his own auto-da-fe and incriminate himself. But the Democrats’ delight in this distracts them from rising from the humiliating ashes of 2016 with some dynamic new ideas and messengers.

“We’re dealing with a person who’s psychologically and categorically different from any previous president,” says the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “He may be the most successful con man in history atop the most powerful nation in history. He has prevailed in a way no other spinner of tales has prevailed.

“He’s shaping the behavior of much of the world, getting inside people’s heads. He’s like Cambridge Analytica. He knows how to determine what people are interested in and like and dislike and respond to. Then he acts in a way that changes the course of things.

“And expecting him to be different or less crazy only makes us the crazy ones. His behavior gets more outrageous, out of control and florid as the pressure on him persists. And it’s only going to get worse.”

That’s comforting. # # #

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company



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Saturday, April 28, 2018

Bouncing Echos — From The US Frontier To Weimar Germany & Back To The 21st Century-USA

Alex Ross tells a story with frightening realities and possibilities. Why is the current occupant of the Oval Office so preoccupied with immigration? Look at German history (1939-1945) and note that government's preoccupation with immigration and undesirable people living in Germany and former German-held bordering areas. There are so many disturbing echos reverberating in the United States of 2018. If this is a (fair & balanced) illustration of the maxim that history teaches lessons but has no pupils, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
The Hitler Vortex — How American Racism Influenced Hitler
By Alex Ross


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

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“History teaches, but has no pupils,” the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it’s said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business: hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue includes I Was Hitler’s Pilot, I Was Hitler’s Chauffeur, I Was Hitler’s Doctor, Hitler, My Neighbor, Hitler Was My Friend, He Was My Chief, and Hitler Is No Fool. Books have been written about Hitler’s youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his relations with women, and his predilections in interior design (Hitler at Home).

Why do these books pile up in such unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand. Germany’s plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on Hitler’s undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his creation—finalized after “innumerable attempts,” according to Mein Kampf [translation: My Struggle.) Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism,” declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic, not only in S & M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag wrote, a “response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and, possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality.” Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler’s negative mystique.

Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.

Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in Mein Kampf, Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by “excluding certain races from naturalization.” Whitman writes that the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third Reich are commonly defined as “the nefandum, the unspeakable descent into what we often call ‘radical evil.’ ” But the kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.

The vast literature on Hitler and Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War? The second is sociopolitical: How did a civilized society come to embrace Hitler’s extreme ideas? The third has to do with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler’s rise are a particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better exemplar.

Since 1945, the historiography of Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an “opportunist entirely without principle.” German thinkers often skirted the issue of Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, 2004) suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the loneliness of the modern subject.

In the sixties and seventies, as Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis—the idea that Germany had followed a “special path” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop along healthy liberal-democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying that Nazism was something that he did to us. Mommsen outlined a “cumulative radicalization” of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned as a “weak dictator,” ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester’s 1968 book, The Arms of Krupp, ends with a lurid image of “the first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and waiting.”

The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became known as the Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Dispute”), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim Fest, who had published the first big German-language biography of Hitler (1974), also stood apart from the Sonderweg school. By portraying the Führer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure, Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to accept responsibility for the Nazi terror.

Outside Germany, many critiques of the Sonderweg thesis came from the left. The British scholars Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book The Peculiarities of German History, questioned the “tyranny of hindsight”—the lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform, public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair or the Tiszaeszlár blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also questioned whether élitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the Germans.

Ian Kershaw’s monumental two-volume biography (1998-2000) found a plausible middle ground between “strong” and “weak” images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of “working towards the Führer”: when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler’s leadership go back and forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated—and, for the moment, rejected—the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

People have been trying to fathom Hitler’s psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book Explaining Hitler, gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or—a personal favorite—that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the “lost safe-deposit box” mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a “man without qualities.” Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler’s private life. The first volume, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939, was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich’s Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. “The putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader,” Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler’s love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer’s psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann’s startling essay “Bruder Hitler,” the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title “That Man Is My Brother.” Aligning Hitler’s experience with his own, Mann wrote of a “basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity—based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing.”

People have been trying to fathom Hitler’s psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book “Explaining Hitler,” gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or—a personal favorite—that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the “lost safe-deposit box” mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a “man without qualities.” Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler’s private life. The first volume, “Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939,” was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich’s Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. “The putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader,” Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler’s love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer’s psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann’s startling essay “Bruder Hitler,” the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title “That Man Is My Brother.” Aligning Hitler’s experience with his own, Mann wrote of a “basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity—based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing.”

The claims of “Mein Kampf” notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment’s commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany’s “inner internationalism.”

to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.

People have been trying to fathom Hitler’s psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book “Explaining Hitler,” gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother’s death; that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment; that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that he was addled by drugs; or—a personal favorite—that his anti-Semitism was triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the “lost safe-deposit box” mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be solved in one Sherlockian stroke.

Academic historians, by contrast, often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a “man without qualities.” Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long associated with the weekly Die Zeit, felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler’s private life. The first volume, “Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939,” was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich’s Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the image he projects. “The putative void was part of Hitler’s persona, a means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician who completely identified with his role as leader,” Ullrich writes. Hitler could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery. His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts Hitler’s love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.

From adolescence onward, Hitler was a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men’s home. In Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer’s psychological intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found in Thomas Mann’s startling essay “Bruder Hitler,” the English version of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title “That Man Is My Brother.” Aligning Hitler’s experience with his own, Mann wrote of a “basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable, honorable activity—based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would cause people to break out laughing.”

The claims of Mein Kampf notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich. This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice. Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his regiment’s commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring an end to Germany’s “inner internationalism.”

The historian Thomas Weber, who recounted Hitler’s soldier years in the 2010 book Hitler’s First War, has now written Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi (2017), a study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful, though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the Army because, as Weber writes, it “provided a raison d’être for his existence.” As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was no sign of the Führer-to-be.

The unprecedented anarchy of postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine; politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles, which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End (2016), emphasizes the whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had “broken with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of Wilson’s Fourteen Points for a ‘just peace.’ ” The harshness of the terms of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric.

The day after Germany ratified the treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a “tired stray dog looking for a master.” Having noticed Hitler’s gift for public speaking, Mayr installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers’ Party, a tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks. Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich’s Hitler: Biographie,”a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career. At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first part of Mein Kampf, in which he completed the construction of his world view.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic (2018). Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself. At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.” The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title. On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.” Yes, it does.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier. It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means. This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr (The Artist as Politician and Commander) [1968], one of the most striking recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels’s propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it. “Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple,” he wrote.

The true artist does not compromise. Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at.... I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler’s “prophecy” was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion. This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter [of Ukrainians] in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, Bloodlands, which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. [James] Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model (2017), with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s The American West and the Nazi East (2011), a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s The Nazi Connection (1994), which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the US Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars (2016), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of [the New World and the] US territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.” Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type. Race Law in the United States, a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major difference between American and German racism.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in The Great Gatsby (1925, 2018). (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.” Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on SS guards.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Leading Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim’s Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (2017) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges [R-NH] proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.”

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter. As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material. She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.” When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color!”—the British production “Hitler in Color.” A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When Trump was asked about it, he said, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.” Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting. # # #

[Alex Ross is a music critic who has been on the staff of The New Yorker magazine since 1996, and he has written the books The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007) and Listen to This (2011). Ross received an AB (English summa cum laude) from Harvard University. He also received a MacArthur Fellowship (Genius Grant) in 2008.]

Copyright © 2018 The New Yorker/Condé Nast Digital



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Friday, April 27, 2018

Heard Of The Latest Dance Craze? Try The Septuagenarian Strut At Your Favorite Club

Every time this blogger goes to the NY Fishwrap online site on two Friday each month, it is with a growing dread that Eags (Timothy Egan) soon will be gone from the Opinion page for good. The NY Fishwrap now has a new head honcho, Arthur Gregg "A.G." Sulzberger, who may be eager to shake things up so that the minions will think that the new kid isn't the same ol' Sulzberger. In the meantime, twice monthly is better than no Eags at all. If this is (fair & balanced) whistling past the editorial graveyard, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
To Beat Trump, Build A Better Biden
By Eags (Timothy Egan)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

created at TagCrowd.com

If the election were held today, Joe Biden would crush President Trump. Almost any other Democrat — including one named Generic Democrat — would also beat the man who runs an administration of kooks, quacks, criminals, drunks, wife-beaters and grifters.

Sadly, there remains a sizable constituency for incompetency on this scale — the look-the-other-way evangelicals, the get-yours-while-you-can corporate class, the-ditch-your-principles Republican office holders. They’re with Stupid, no matter how much Trump debases the office.

But you can’t beat nothing with better-than-nothing. Not-Trump is not enough. Quick: What are Democrats for? Continuity With Change? Stronger Together? A Better Deal? Two of those are actual slogans of the national party, and one is from the feckless politician on “Veep.” [Presidential candidate Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) advocated "Continuity with Change."]

Surprisingly, the Democrats are thinking big for once. The ideas being tossed around are risky enough to be called bold: a guaranteed-jobs program, universal health care, a public option for banking, free community college.

But the best-known carriers of that message have problems. Nancy Pelosi is toxic in many a targeted red-to-blue district. Chuck Schumer sounds too much like a party hack. The presidential contenders all have weaknesses.

If you were to go into a lab and create a perfect candidate for 2020, along with a popular policy prescription for this anxious decade, what would that look like? It would be a big-hearted, progressive person whose appeal crosses class lines. It would be someone very much like Biden — a younger Biden. Let’s ignore the age issue for now.

Your candidate would need to be ethically clean — no Wall Street speeches, no foundations that serve as backdoor ways to do well while doing good, no sexual misconduct. This is vital, because Trump has filled the swamp with odious creatures, taking their cues from him.

People were sick of it in 2006 — when Democrats won the House in part on campaigning against the “culture of corruption.” They were sick of it in 2016, when Hillary Clinton could not shake the stink of big finance-connected profiteering. And they are sick of it today, when more than half of Trump’s cabinet has engaged in questionable behavior.

It might help if your candidate was not from the political class. Oprah? She’s not interested, so she says. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook showed some promise until we all realized that social media had been weaponized to destroy democracy. The entrepreneur Mark Cuban? Haven’t we had enough of a reality show star playing at being president?

This gets you to the bench of elected officials. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, the junior senator from New York, is a whirlwind of Big Ideas of late. She just unveiled a financial first step for paycheck-to-paycheck Americans: a plan to require every post office to offer basic banking services — an alternative to predatory payday loans.

She is coldbloodedly #MeToo, having shoved her former colleague Al Franken and the Clintons under the bus. And she has gotten ahead of the one-note socialist Senator Bernie Sanders on the idea of a job guarantee for everyone who wants to work. The problem there is cost (up to a half-trillion dollars, by some estimates) and the bureaucratic nightmare it could create. Gillibrand is swinging for the fences, even if she did the least well of major Democrats against Trump in recent polling.

Much of the party’s energy is coming from the Sanders wing; Sanders himself will be 79 on Election Day 2020 and is not getting any less cranky. But don’t overlook the enthusiasm generated by the Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke or Governor Steve Bullock of Montana. They’ve stood up for the basic right of health care, and against the wrong of more tax cuts for the rich — foundational positions favored by a majority of the country.

Another prospect is the Senate’s resident vegan, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. He’s got some Wall Street problems and is less populist than the mood of the country. But he has terrific political skills; he wouldn’t need a slogan like Stronger Together.

In the same class is the rookie Senator Kamala Harris of California. She’s sharp, dynamic, with the right balance of ego and intellect. But how would a California liberal play in Scranton, PA.?

That brings us back to Scranton-born Biden. A new study suggests that fear of cultural displacement was a greater driver for Trump voters than economic anxiety — identity politics for aging white males. It would seem to take some of the working-class-savior reasoning out of Uncle Joe’s candidacy.

But that analysis still doesn’t adequately explain the millions of people who voted for both Barack Obama and Trump. That’s where Biden comes in, and why he cleans up against Trump [PDF] in early matchups. The problem is that he will be 77 on Election Day.

Trump will be 74. He’s old and he’s angry, and will only get older and angrier. Build a better Biden, from our political lab, and you win. But maybe the current Biden is built to last, with just enough septuagenarian strut to end the dark age of Trump. # # #

[Timothy Egan writes now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company



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Thursday, April 26, 2018

Today — Rhetorical Guerrilla Warfare?

Long ago, this blogger began his so-called career at the Collegium Pro Populo on the eastern bank of the Big Muddy. Sitting in the faculty lounge, the blogger was doing — what he believed to be — his killer, standup version of chitchat. A woman who taught in a different department spoke to the witty young blogger: "S.(last name), if it wasn't for sarcasm, you wouldn't have a personality." Talk about "deer in the headlights," The blogger skulked out and returned to his desk in an office bullpen. That was the end of the standup routine (for awhile). If this is (fair & balanced) proof that words have conswquences, so be it.

[x The Conversation]
Why Is Sarcasm So Difficult To Detect In Texts And Emails?
By Sara Peters


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

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This sentence begins the best article you will ever read.

Chances are you thought that last statement might be sarcasm. Sarcasm, as linguist Robert Gibbs noted, includes “words used to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning of a sentence.” A form of irony, it also tends to be directed toward a specific individual.

However, it’s not always easy to figure out if a writer is being sarcastic — particularly as we march ahead in a digital age that has transformed the way we communicate, with texting, emailing and online commentary replacing face-to-face chats or phone conversations.

In writing, the signal of sarcasm can be muddied. For example, say you’re texting with a friend about meeting at the movies:

Friend: I’m waiting at the front. Movie starts in 5.

You: I’m on my way now. Should be there in 10.

Friend: I’m glad you were watching the clock today.

Was the friend being sarcastic or sincere? The later you are, the more upset they’ll likely be, and the higher the probability their response is a sarcastic jab. But if your friend knows you’re usually much later, they could be sincere.

So there’s one thing to look for: How well does the attitude the writer is conveying agree with the situation and the person?

Nonetheless, the struggle to interpret written sarcasm is real.

Studies have shown that people realize that they have a tough time interpreting sarcasm in writing. Studying the use of email, researchers found writers who think they’re being obviously sarcastic still confuse readers.

Sarcasm thrives in ambiguous situations — and that’s the main issue.

When delivered in person, sarcasm tends to assume a cutting, bitter tone. But written messages don’t always get that attitude across or give you much else to go on. We still need more information.

Signals that go missing in texts

Studies have examined the use of sarcasm in a variety of everyday situations, whether it’s at work to give criticism or praise, or in situations where social norms get violated. (Be on time to movies, people!)

The problem is that a lot of previous studies of sarcasm have been done on spoken sarcasm, which tends to give listeners cues.

When you have a conversation with someone face-to-face (or FaceTime-to-FaceTime) and they say something sarcastic, you’ll see their facial expression, and they may look slightly bemused or tense. Equally or more helpful, the tone of their voice will likely change, too — they may sound more intense or draw out certain phrases.

You’ll also be firmly grounded in the real-time context of the situation, so when they say, “Man, nice job ironing your clothes,” you can look down — and see your wrinkled shirt.

All of these cues have been researched, and we know enough about them that we have the ability to artificially make a sincerely spoken statement sound sarcastic.

And yet when we text, a lot of that information goes missing.

There are no facial cues, no vocal tones and maybe even a delayed response if a person can’t text you back immediately. And if you don’t know the person all that well, there goes your last potential cue: history.

Emojis to the rescue?

So after what you thought was an unexceptional first date — exactly how do you interpret the following flurry of texts?

Date: I had a great time. (12:03 AM)

Date: That was the most fun I’ve had in years. (12:05 AM)

Date: Really, it could not have gone better. (12:30 AM)

Was the date really that good? Did they really seem like they had that much fun? Or are they just a jerk lamenting the wasted time? All valid questions. And the recipient could come to a lot of conclusions.

Fear not. The digital age has developed some ways to mitigate some of the tortuous ambiguity. You can probably include an emoji to make it clearer to a reader something was meant sarcastically.

Date: I had a great time. (12:03 AM)

Date: That was the most fun I’ve had in years. 😂 (12:05 AM)

Date: It really, could not have gone better. 😑 (12:30 AM)

Ambiguity reduced, and facial expression taken care of. Probably not headed for date #2.

If we’re talking about email, we also have modifications that that can be made to text. We can italicize or BOLD words to change the way that a reader interprets the message.

Lastly, social media platforms like Twitter have given writers even more tools to allow people to communicate their intent. A study that included sarcastic tweets found that tweeters who include the hashtag #sarcasm tend to use more interjections (wow!) and positive wording for negative situations in their sarcastic tweets.

Algorithms have actually been built to determine the presence of sarcasm and rudeness in tweets, user reviews and online conversations. The formulas were able to identify language that’s outright rude pretty easily. But in order to correctly detect sarcasm, researchers found that algorithms need both linguistic (language) and semantic (meaning) information built in.

In other words, sarcasm’s subtlety means that the algorithms require more specification in their coding — unless you #sarcasm, of course.

With so many options to choose from, it’s time to make sure that text you send at 2:30 AM really gets your point across 😉. # # #

[Sara Peters is an assistant professor of psychology at Newbury College (SC). Her research focuses on the processing of sarcasm in spoken language. Peters received a BA (experimental psychology), an MA (experimental psychology), and a PhD (experimental/quantitative psychology) from the University of South Carolina at Columbia.]

Copyright © 2018 The Conversation US



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