When I grind out a big big post like the one I just wrote (see below) I have a very strong urge to say “that’s it; I’m done for the day.”
But I also have a strong urge to balance it with something on another topic besides Trump, Hillary, the Republicans, the stressful 2016 election. What topic? Any topic.
Like this one.
[NOTE: Part I can be found here.]
I can’t find the quote right now, but Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi—who wrote Survival In Auschwitz
That’s the human condition for most people; few are able to keep the contrast constantly in mind like the man in the Part I interview, and there’s no shame in that.
Levi was a scientist who wrote about the camps as though he were a scientist studying them: cool, dispassionate, analytical. He died as a possible suicide in a fall in 1987 at the age of 67. Whether he killed himself or died accidentally has been hotly debated and the answer is still unclear.
Levi is an author whose work I greatly admire, and I am hardly alone, as his biographer Carole Angier writes:
We feel we know and love him from his work, because we know and love his gentle, rigorous, witty, open mind. But the rest of him is completely closed. Primo Levi is, in fact, one of the most secretive writers who ever lived. And not only in his work. Though he gave hundreds of interviews, he used them not to lower the walls but to raise them still higher, by presenting a careful construct of himself almost to the end. He presented the same construct to most people throughout his life; even, as long as he could, to himself. That construct – the calm, rational, optimistic man – was his ideal: an ideal he managed to reach in much of his life, because it was both a moral imperative and a psychological necessity to him.
But it was not the reality. “I have no instincts,” he said, with his smile, “or if I do, I repress them.” But the more he repressed them, the more they resisted, and took their revenge. The man who loved and spoke to the whole of humanity found private, emotional life impossibly hard. And the man who chose optimism, because one must not spread despair, found he had locked the despair inside him; and more and more often it rose and drowned him.
Even though it is not known whether Levi killed himself, it is known that he suffered from depression. But his depression predated his Holocaust experience and represented a lifelong struggle. A different man, a different temperament, than the man interviewed in Part I. And yet Levi managed to live and work for about forty highly productive and creative post-Holocaust years until his death. If he did kill himself (and the preponderance of evidence is that he did; he certainly was depressed prior to his death) it was his own temperament, and his own unhappy family history, that probably led him to it:
…Auschwitz did not destroy him. It came very near at the time, and immediately afterwards. But after that it did almost the opposite, requiring him to understand and to communicate, the two things that kept him alive. “I am a talker,” he said. “If you stop up my mouth, I die.” When, in his last depression, he felt he could no longer communicate, he died. That is what killed him, not his memories of Auschwitz. Neither Alex the Kapo of If This Is A Man [the European title of Survival in Auschwitz], nor his heirs, should imagine they have that victory.
Angier also offers a few excerpts from Levi’s great masterpiece about the camps. Here is a passage that reflects with Levi’s usual brilliance and extraordinary clarity on the mindset in the camps that brought some small (very small, in this case) measure of optimism to a situation so full of nearly unfathomable misery:
Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.
The Detroit News is a Republican paper. Today the editors write:
Today this newspaper does something it has never done in its 143-year history: endorse someone other than the Republican candidate in a presidential contest.
Since its founding in 1873, The Detroit News has backed a Republican every time it has made a presidential endorsement (three times we have sat on the sidelines ”” twice during the Franklin Roosevelt elections and in the 2004 Bush/Kerry contest).
We abandon that long and estimable tradition this year for one reason: Donald J. Trump.
They go on to endorse Johnson.
See this (read the whole thing):
This mass destruction of evidence was known to Comey. It’s in his investigative case summary. Yet he couldn’t make an obstruction case?
“Any one of those in that long list says obstruction of justice,” Ratcliffe said. “Collectively, they scream obstruction of justice.”
Ignoring such evidence leads “not just reasonable prosecutors but reasonable people to believe that maybe the decision on this was made a long time ago not to prosecute Hillary Clinton,” he added.
And this, about how it was the DOJ and not the FBI that granted immunity in the emails case:
“The FBI doesn’t grant immunity to anybody, the Department of Justice is able to grant very different kinds of immunity,” Comey said. “If new and substantial evidence develops a witness lied [under immunity], of course the Department of Justice can pursue it. Nobody gets lifetime immunity.”
Comey told Rep. Ben Sasse (R-NB) that Mills needed the immunity “because without it, Mills would have fought investigators tooth and nail in an effort to withhold her computer.” But as Guy Benson points out, Hillary has claimed she and her team have fully cooperated. Well, doesn’t this declaration contradict her statement?…
Despite all of this, the FBI and DOJ allowed Mills to act as Hillary’s attorney and sit in on Hillary’s interview even though she was a witness.
And I found this in the comments at Legal Insurrection:
““because without it, Mills would have fought investigators tooth and nail in an effort to withhold her computer.””
Physically when the FBI executed the search warrant? Because I’ve never heard of a witness/target/whatever setting the terms for what evidence FBI investigators were entitled to have and under what conditions. If this had been anyone else the FBI would have simply seized the evidence. Cheryl Mills nor her attorneys could have done nothing about it. Getting a judge to sign off on a search warrant is not an adversarial procedure.
Basically Comey is admitting that Mills was in charge of this investigation , on behalf of Clinton. That’s been clear from start to finish. When Mills was interviewed, she and her attorneys set the parameters for what the investigators were allowed to ask. When investigators asked about Clinton’s email procedures Mills et al shut down the interview. And at the end, when Clinton was interviewed Mills, and immunized target in the investigation herself, sat in as Clinton’s attorney.
This is despicable, but it’s clear that Obama and his court toadies and throne sniffers such as Comey don’t have to lie well. In fact, the more obvious the lie the better because it just serves to highlight the fact that they’re giving Congress and the American people the finger and telling us that they’re above the law.
Which pretty much sums up my reaction.
So, all you have to do to get immunity is Just Say No?
But it’s that last part of the LI comment I quoted that strikes me as especially true and very insightful. One of the things I’ve noticed during the entire Obama administration is how clear it is that there is no objectivity and no impartiality in institutions we used to think were both—the press, long long ago (although I believe that was always an illusion); the FBI; the DOJ; the IRS. The lies of elected officials during the Obama administration have become more blatant, and that’s because the people involved feel immunized (usually metaphorically speaking, although in the case of the emails it’s a literal immunization) in advance. They know they will not be held accountable. They know that a press that’s almost wholly on their side will not turn on them. They know the American people won’t be able to figure it out on their own, or if they do figure it out they will be powerless to stop them.
[NOTE: And in connection with the last paragraph of this post, please see this post of mine that counters the popular meme on the right that the GOP ever “took impeachment off the table.”]
Why? Because I like them, that’s why.
And because they have nothing to do with politics (although I’m sure someone creative can come up with a tie-in).
Here’s one that’s more subtle than some of the others, but still quite transformational:
Commenter “Ann” has helpfully provided this link that corroborates the story I had reported yesterday about Terence Crutcher, one that’s gotten surprisingly little attention—the fact that he had one fake eye. And it adds another surprise:
“One thing that people don’t know about my brother ”” my brother has a very severe hearing issue in his right ear, and a prosthetic eye,” she said…
Crutcher also ripped the unidentified officer caught on video calling her brother “a bad dude” while riding a helicopter over the scene.
“He knew nothing about my brother,” she said. “I’m not even sure why a helicopter was there versus a tow truck. That’s what I’m trying to understand. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
A helicopter was there because Crutcher was acting in a way that aroused Officer Shelby’s suspicions that he was on PCP and might have a gun. That’s a separate issue from whether those suspicions were justified, and a very separate issue from how Shelby and the rest of the team should have proceeded and might have proceeded if they did suspect it.
But it also raises a larger question I’ve thought of before in the wake of police shootings and the publicity about them: what about a disabled person when confronted by the police? What about a hearing-impaired person in particular?
Here’s a report of an incident that involved a white deaf man and a black police officer. Not that the race of each participant really mattered here, but it shows that this particular issue transcends race.
What’s a deaf person to do if he (or she, but I’ll stick with “he”) doesn’t hear the command to get his hands up? If the person tries to get a card saying “I’m deaf” out of his pocket, that’s a move towards the pocket and can be dangerous. Sign language is also a movement of the hands, and that can be dangerous, too.
Here is a very helpful video that tells deaf people what the pitfalls are and how to deal with them in order to minimize trouble. As you can see, though, there’s a lot of information to learn, and I wonder how many people could remember this and properly execute all of it when under stress. That’s true of all of us, but for a deaf person it’s especially hard and especially important. Note also, the part about the dangers of just walking away without getting permission. How many people—deaf or hearing—know how extremely risky that can be? And of course, a person under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol would have special trouble remembering all of this and being able to do it even if that person wanted to:
For a person who hardly watched it, I certainly have a lot to say, don’t I?
The first thing is that what pundits and political junkies are looking for in a debate is not necessarily (and maybe not at all) what the undecided or LIV voter is looking for. I’m not going to say I know what undecided or LIV voters are looking for, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not what policy wonks care about.
Sometimes what undecideds and/or LIVs are looking for is a sound bite, and sometimes just a feeling. Whether that reaction of theirs is rational or irrational I don’t really know, either—or at least, whether it’s more or less rational than what the better-informed go on. After all, paying attention to what a candidate says he/she will do in terms of policy (that’s what the better-informed do—or say they do—right?) is paying attention the promises of politicians. And is that especially rational either, particularly this year with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as our candidates?
Permit me a just a moment of non-nostalgic looking back to the 2012 campaign. One of the things that so frustrated me at that time was the number of conservatives who profoundly distrusted Mitt Romney. Now granted, he’s a politician. But as politicians go, the guy comes from the island of the truth-tellers. But he wasn’t good enough for a lot of people, and Obama was re-elected; perhaps in part because of that.
But hey, let’s look forward, right? Upward and onward; excelsior!
As far as Monday’s debate went, one thing that puzzles me is that a lot of very smart people seem surprised at how badly Trump did. My guess is that ever since Trump has become the nominee and relied on the teleprompter much more, he has seemed more coherent than he did back in the days of the Republican debates. So perhaps a combination of wishful thinking and forgetfulness (accent on the former?) caused a great many people to hope that he had actually changed and improved rather than that the difference between after his nomination and before consists of the difference between his scripted speeches written by someone else and the extemporaneous emanations of Trump’s own mind.
I’m not happy about Trump either. I would very much like to have seen a different Trump than emerged (or re-emerged) Monday night, but I didn’t expect one, and that’s one of the reasons I couldn’t bring myself to watch most of it. Had he turned his back to the audience and mooned them it would not have surprised me (okay, it would; but you know what I mean). That’s how little I thought of his previous performances during the Republican debates and how much they relied on vile and often mendacious insults—as well as the hugeness of the field—to effect his nomination.
Back then, Trump’s most rabid supporters supported his every move. By now, many of his reluctant supporters have either forgotten what he did then, or (understandably) rationalized his approach and/or decided he has changed his act. But during those Republican debates he was inarticulate, easily rattled, emotional, repetitive, garrulous, and anyone with a modicum of debating ability could—and did—debate rings around him in terms of logical debating points. And Hillary Clinton has more than a modicum of debating ability.
However, the Republican primaries weren’t decided on logical debating points. And maybe the general election won’t be, either. The post-debate polls are contradictory so far about the debate’s effect, which is no surprise either. What are a majority of voters looking for? Darned if I know.
Oh, and I very much wish that Gary Johnson had been allowed to participate.
[NOTE: On a somewhat-related issue, Scott Johnson of Powerline reports on how the news of the FBI’s immunity offers and President Obama’s involvement in the email scandal has surprised people who believed that the FBI and Comey were above this kind of thing. Seems you can’t get too cynical these days.
Well, I was already that cynical. I have long felt the stakes were too high and the fish too big for this investigation to really go anywhere.]
Just a quick note before I try to post anything else today—
I’ve been having trouble all morning getting to my page. It seemed to be hosting problems, which now seem to be resolved. We’ll see; hope so.
Apologies if you’ve been having any difficulties getting to the blog too.
[Hat tip: Open Blogger at Ace’s.]
[NOTE: Part II can be found here.]
Here is a fascinating interview with an elderly concentration camp survivor. If you’ve read or heard many camp survivors’ tales, the horrors he faced will not surprise you. But that’s not why I’m linking to the interview, because I assume you’re all familiar with the almost unimaginable type of brutality this man experienced.
No, I’m linking because of statements such as these:
Q: In those dark days how did you find the strength to survive? Did you ever want to give up so the suffering would end?
A: Well, the answer to that question is simply that it’s human nature to overcome most of the atrocities and difficulties that are thrown at them.
But I didn’t think that I was any different than any other person. At least at that time, I didn’t give it any thought. I just wanted to survive – to get by every day, to stay out of the way, not to be as visible, because these – I don’t know what to call them – these monsters just look for any kind of reason to pull someone out to kill them, to set an example…
And I was always very – don’t know how to say it? I was always very enthusiastic about life itself.
I hadn’t had a life, until that point, and whatever I did have, at this point, was sort’ve blocked out of my mind. I didn’t remember the good years any more. So to me, life was very important, and I had to do everything humanly possible to survive, not to give them a reason or a cause to pull me out, and kill me.
The speaker (who is not named in the excerpt) seems to think he wasn’t unusual. But I would say he is quite unusual. In fact, since most people did not survive the camps he was in (Auschwitz and Dachau), there is no question he had unusual mental and physical strength. He says it is “human nature to overcome most of the atrocities and difficulties that are thrown at them”—and that’s true, up to a point. But some people in the camps did give up, and it hastened their deaths (that is, if they had been spared to work in the first place; most people who arrived at death camps were killed on arrival).
The speaker had been a young man during the war, probably in his early-to-mid-teens. He was smart; he figured out that keeping a low profile would be a good thing under those circumstances, and that helped. But I think the most revealing statement he made in that passage was “I was always very enthusiastic about life itself.” He had a vigorous and naturally optimistic life force that held him in good stead throughout some of the most trying circumstances human beings can ever experience.
Perhaps he was born that way. Continue reading →
You knew there’d be some, didn’t you?
I listened to maybe the first third of the debate, and then I turned off the audio. I’d planned to turn it back on within a few minutes, but as time went by I realized I’d had it with both of them and never turned the audio back up again, although I kept thinking I should.
So I’m probably not the greatest authority on what happened during this debate.
But from what I did see and hear, and from what I’ve read around the blogosphere, I don’t think the event will have very much effect on the polls one way or the other. Trump merely needed to avoid sounding like a disjointed lunatic, and I think he succeeded. Hillary needed to keep standing and seem to have physical endurance, and she succeeded.
We knew he’d be volatile, and he was. We knew she’d be smug and fake-smiley, and she was. What surprises me, though, is how surprised some people were at any of this. I’ve read comments on other blogs that indicate that quite a few of Trump’s supporters were uncharacteristically disappointed in him. “He didn’t go in for the (metaphorical) kill!” “He didn’t hammer her enough on (fill in the blanks)!” “He wasn’t coherent enough!” He didn’t do his homework!” “He was too defensive!” Have they not ever taken a look at the man they’ve been cheering for over a year? Most of those characteristics have been fully in evidence since the start, and certainly were clear during the Republican debates. The only one that was a bit different from back then was that the failure to insult Hillary quite as viciously as he did his fellow Republicans, and even that is something a lot of people predicted would happen.
I see it as another example of people seeing only the Trump they wanted to see for way too long. Last night some of them were looking at the Trump that is. Nothing in Trump’s previous debate performances should have indicated he’d be good at this particular activity. In fact, I was surprised he did as well as he did, and I think his debating skills have improved since last year.
But his debating skills still stink. However, fortunately for Trump, I don’t think people are going to make a decision about him based on his ability to make a rhetorical point with flair and polish. I think many people are still put off by Hillary Clinton—in part by her personality—and I don’t think she did herself any favors on that score last night. However, anyone who was counting on her falling down or having some other obvious physical difficulty during the debate last night has been dreaming. Anyone who watched the Democratic debates knows that Hillary has enough stamina to stay alert and feisty during a longer debate than this one was.
What a long year it’s been, though. And in November one of these people will have been elected president.
In reports on the Crutcher case, I couldn’t help but notice a certain detail I haven’t seen anyone else remarking on, which is that some of Betty Shelby”s distrust of Terence Crutcher appears to have been based on his lack of eye contact, on his shifty eye-gaze:
Wood said that Shelby then said to Crutcher, “Hey, is this your car?”
Crutcher didn’t respond, simply dropping his head while continuing to look at Shelby, “kind of under his brow,” (“which she thought was unusual” according to the video at the link) Wood said. Crutcher then began to put his hand into his left pocket,
Another description of the same exchange is this:
Her attorney said the man’s head lowered but he locked his eyes on Shelby “so he’s looking right out underneath his eyebrow which she thinks is really weird.”
“It’s like a thousand-mile stare,” Wood said his client recalled.
Later:
Shelby tried to get Crutcher to talk to her, but he simply mumbled something unintelligible and stared at her, Wood said. He then turned and walked to the edge of the roadway and turned to look at her, his hands still in the air, Wood said…
The eyes are one of the ways we judge people’s character—the way they look at us is a basic part of human interaction. Is their gaze straightforward or evasive? If the latter, maybe they’re hiding something. We respond to a thousand cues, subtle and not-so-subtle, often without even realizing it, and they help shape our view of someone’s character and our ability to predict what they might do next.
We now learn of Crutcher, about a previous traffic stop in 2013 (for speeding and DUI):
Once confronted, Crutcher was slurring his speech and had “the extreme odor of an alcoholic beverage” on his breath, the affidavit states. The patrolman found an open can of Steel Reserve beer in the vehicle’s center console.
The cop also noticed one of Crutcher’s eyes did not appear to be functional, according to the police report.
When pressed, Crutcher confirmed “that he had a fake eye.”
The trooper proceeded to book Crutcher, citing the “very droopy, heavy eyelids” of “Crutcher’s good eye” and noted that he “seemed to be disoriented and confused,” the affidavit states.
I haven’t seen the fact that Crutcher had a false eye reported elsewhere—and maybe I’m the only one who finds it possibly relevant anyway. And I’m certainly not saying that this is the whole reason that Officer Shelby became so suspicious almost from the start. But it probably didn’t help, and she probably never realized that Crutcher had a false eye that may have affected his gaze and his “thousand-mile stare.”
Well, it’s been a long time coming hasn’t it? But here we are at last, about to be treated (?) to a spectacle many thought would be highly unlikely to happen: Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump, the first debate.
I plan to watch as long as I can bear it. I have no idea how long that will be. My usual distaste for debates is compounded by my distaste for both participants, but offset at least somewhat by the hideous fascination of the thing.
A few observations. Despite their differences, Hillary and Trump share certain somewhat unusual characteristics for presidential candidates. To begin with, they’re both of a certain age, and that age is pretty old for the job. They’re both from the greater New York metropolitan area; Trump’s a native of the city and Hillary’s more of a latecomer to the region, but she’s been there a long long time now. I seem to recall that in recent decades the conventional wisdom has been that successful presidential candidates can’t come from New York, especially anywhere near the city; that heartland America just won’t tolerate it. Well, 2016 seems designed to upset conventional wisdom.
I was going to try to do a riff on the phrase “Thrilla in Manila” for the title of this post, using the location of the debate instead of “Manila” and then looking for a good rhyme. The debate’s being held at the Hofstra University’s David S. Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex on Long Island. “Hofstra” doesn’t really lend itself to rhymes (Kafka? Cosa Nostra? No, not quite). “Long Island” isn’t easy, either. This USA Today article does pretty well with “Smackdown at the Mack.” But it’s not exactly a rhyme, either. So I offer the rather weak sauce of “Yackety-Yak and Flak at the Mack.”
Later on in this thread I’ll try to liveblog the debate.
9:10 PM: It occurs to me once again, as the two come out and shake hands, that these people know each other. Not exactly friends, certainly not ex-lovers, but they know each other better and over a longer time than most presidential opponents ordinarily do.
They both have their game faces on.
9:20 PM Trump’s refrain seems to be “you’ve been thinking about this for 30 years, why haven’t you done more about it?”
9:23 PM The male/female dynamic presents an interesting balancing act for both of them. Trump has to be careful not to be too relentlessly browbeating, while Hillary has to not seem too schoolmarmy and defensive. Of course, they’re attempting to appeal to different constituencies, but there’s always that “undecided” group in the middle where elections are often decided.
Hillary calls on the fact-checkers. Recall that that was the meme du jour of the MSM.
9:33 PM Can they both lose?
I keep having to turn the sound off for a few minutes and then I turn it on again. Sorry, I just hate debates. Just looking at the visuals, right now she looks very smug, he looks serious.
9:55 PM I keep turning the sound off and on, but my strong impression is one I often get from debates (and one of the reasons I tend not to like them)—seems to me the winner is in the eye/ear of the beholder. I don’t see anything here that would change the mind of anyone who already favored either of these candidates. My gut feeling (right or wrong) is that most people, even the “undecideds,” are quite familiar with Hillary Clinton, and less familiar with Trump in his role as politician and would-be statesman. That means the bar for him is low. If he sounds reasonably intelligent and reasonably sane, I think he gains more than Hillary does by anything she can do in this debate.
10:30 PM Since I turned off the audio about twenty minutes ago, I thought I’d check up on the comments section of various blogs to see what people think of how it’s going. I had it in mind to go to a blog where the majority of commenters don’t lean one way or the other, but of course such a blog doesn’t exist. The only real way to tell how this debate has gone is in the post-debate polls. And then, whatever has happened in the polls, subsequent events will intervene which can change things.
What a long strange trip it’s been.
10:37 PM I’m not the least bit surprised at how well Hillary has held up. In the Democratic primaries, she debated Sanders for hours in several debates without flagging, and I saw no reason it should be any different here, engaged in the fight of her lifetime.