"I do love revenge, I will say that,' adds Meeropol, 57, taking a sip from an iced Americano... 'I’d always loved revenge movies."

That's from "The woman behind E Jean Carroll: I do love revenge, I will say that/Ivy Meeropol has made a film starring one of Trump’s biggest foes. And she has her own beef with the president — dating back to her grandparents’ execution" (London Times).

Meeropol = Ivy Meeropol, the documentarian who made a movie about the man, Roy Cohn, who "helped to send her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, leaving her father orphaned at the age of ten." Now, Meeropol has a movie about E. Jean Carroll.

A few days ago, Carroll finally received the $5.6 million she won in her lawsuit against Trump, and Meeropol said: "This historic moment shows that our legal system — established almost 250 years ago to serve as a check against absolute power — still works. E Jean used to sign off from her television show in the mid-Nineties saying, 'Fate loves the fearless,' and it couldn’t be more appropriate today...."

Much has been made of the fact that Carroll is not a perfect MeToo victim.

"For four months... the Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins woke up every day before dawn, brewed coffee and sat down at her dining table to copy out Herman Melville’s 'Moby-Dick' (1851) with a nib pen."

"Writing in midnight blue acidic ink on onionskin paper, she made her way through the book’s 900-plus pages 10 at a time. The resulting work, 'Or, the Whale, Vol. I-III,' is housed in three black clothbound binders. 'It felt ritualistic,' says Collins, 41, of the project, 'like meditation.'"

From "Why One Artist Transcribed All 900-Plus Pages of ‘Moby-Dick’ by Hand/For Bethany Collins, Herman Melville’s novel is rife with centuries-old political anxieties that still resonate today" (NYT).

If you were to do a similar art project, based on someone else's writing, what book would you choose?

This sort of thing has been done before. In 1974 the conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg copied "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by hand. Collins acknowledges this inspiration.

We've also heard that Hunter S. Thompson typed out "The Great Gatsby" and "A Farewell to Arms." I don't think he presented that as conceptual art.

"[H]is policies ranged from ripping up the streets and replacing car transport with bicycles, to putting dishonest drug dealers in the stocks because 'no drug worth taking should be sold for money'..."

"...to disarming police because street violence was usually down to 'some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy.' He also cut his hair off so he could refer to his Democratic rival in debates as 'my long-haired opponent.' This might have seemed a satire of politics, populism as a joke, but Thompson was very serious. 'There is common sense in the apparent madness of my campaign,' he told an audience ahead of polling day. 'I am not running for sheriff in the traditional sense, but to help get hold of our destiny and begin controlling development.' He wouldn’t try to force changes, but encourage referendums and create a legal advisory board of lawyers to sit with select citizens to consult with the sheriff’s department. 'We either have a participating democracy or a police state.'... To Thompson, a 'freak' was 'not a beast roaming the streets chewing drugs, but someone who is spiritually disenfranchised, who has not wanted to participate in government.'... Thompson’s individualism... feels at odds with the community spirit and citizen participation required to realise the ascendancy of the collective good.... 'Unfortunately,' Thompson said in his 1970 concession speech, 'I proved what I set out to prove… that the American Dream really is fucked.'..."

From "Hunter S Thompson’s freaks have overrun America/The pioneer of gonzo chronicled his people’s wild descent – and saw what his country has now become" by. Barney Horner (New Statesman).

The boldface is my nudging to tell you that I see what maybe you see: "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

"She later cast doubt on the suicide ruling, saying his death had been 'a big mistake' and that they had planned out their life together."

"Mr Thompson penned what friends believed was a suicide note, which was published by Rolling Stone soon after his death. 'No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun,' the note, which was addressed to his wife, read. 'No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won’t hurt.'"

From "FBI to re-examine suicide of Hunter S Thompson at wife’s request/Anita Thompson wants fresh inquiry into death after writer was ruled to have shot himself 20 years ago, leaving a note that was published by Rolling Stone" (London Times).

There's no new evidence of foul play. It just seems to be a widow's interest in seeing the self-shooting as an accident. I'd say I don't see why the FBI should expend its resources on this, but the article doesn't mention the FBI, only the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. That's the kind of confusion I wade into when I look for news of America in the London Times. Maybe they don't call anything the "Bureau of Investigation" over there. Anyway, it seems to me that the written note should be the last word. Yes, it's humorous, but that doesn't mean it was only a joke.

"[Nixon's] men broke into the Democratic National Committee in 1972—so what?"

"Lyndon B. Johnson’s men almost certainly bugged Barry Goldwater’s campaign plane in 1964. The John F. Kennedy administration authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. for its own political reasons. The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration surveilled Charles Lindbergh when the famous aviator led the America First Committee and contemplated a presidential run in 1940. Did Nixon try—albeit unsuccessfully—to obtain the tax returns of political adversaries? Well, Roosevelt successfully ordered the Internal Revenue Service to investigate opponents such as William Randolph Hearst, Huey Long, and Charles Coughlin. Nixon operated a clandestine unit inside the White House—the so-called plumbers—to trace and stop officials who leaked to the media, you say? Under previous administrations, the FBI acted as a giant government-plumbing agency, surveilling troublesome journalists such as Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. Indeed, a probably core reason for the exposure of the Watergate break-in was that the long alliance between Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover faltered after 1971, for complex reasons, obliging Nixon to use amateur investigators for the Watergate burglary and other black-bag jobs that, under past administrations, the FBI would have conducted for the president...."

Writes David Frum in "Richard Nixon Was Unlucky/The Watergate scandal forced his resignation 50 years ago. Today, he’d probably have gotten away with it" (The Atlantic).

Nixon gave his resignation speech 50 years ago last night.

ADDED: The Atlantic homepage has a link to Hunter S. Thompson, "He Was a Crook/A scathing obituary of Richard Nixon, originally published in Rolling Stone on June 16, 1994."

On the occasion of Nikki Haley's calling Vivek Ramaswamy "scum," I look into the history of "scum" in my archive.

1. October 23, 2019 — blogged here — Trump called his antagonists "human scum":

The Never Trumper Republicans, though on respirators with not many left, are in certain ways worse and more dangerous for our Country than the Do Nothing Democrats. Watch out for them, they are human scum!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2019

2. On October 24, 2019, I wrote "Troubled by Trump's use of the phrase 'human scum,' I decided to trace its usage, over the years..." This post traces the use of the phrase "human scum" in the NYT archive, beginning in 1897. I note: "The epithet rarely appeared until 2003, when it began coming up repeatedly in statements from the North Korean government. The first person called 'human scum' by the North Koreans was John Bolton."

2. In December 2017, according to The Daily Beast, Facebook was banning women who call men "scum" (because it, supposedly, "classifies white men as a protected group"). I wrote: "I don't support what Facebook is doing, but I do think the use of the word 'scum' warrants a historical note on 'SCUM' — The Society for Cutting Up Men. The author of 'The SCUM Manifesto,' Valerie Solanas, wasn't joking....'The Manifesto argues that SCUM [a revolutionary vanguard of women] should employ sabotage and direct action tactics... "If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade."'" Solanas became famous for shooting Andy Warhol.

3. On December 11, 2020, I blogged about a Wisconsin State Journal headline "Sen. Ron Johnson called 'delusional scum' for considering challenge to election." I asked "why is the fact that somebody hurled one particular epithet the subject of a headline? If the insult-hurler isn't important enough to name in the headline, why put one nasty insult in a headline?"

4. Back in January 2015, I blogged the immortal words of John McCain: "Get outta here you lowlife scum!"

5. On May 24, 2022, I happened to revisit Hunter S. Thompson’s 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon. Thompson wrote: "Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. … You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful."

"Other than this one key fact that the rape described actually was a fabrication of this woman, the rest of the story was bulletproof."

Said Jann Wenner, quoted in "Jann Wenner Defends His Legacy, and His Generation’s/The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine on the legacy of boomers and why he chose only white men for his book on rock’s 'masters'" (NYT).

This is the interview that's been in the news — see "Jann Wenner’s Rock Hall Reign Lasted Years. It Ended in 20 Minutes. The day after the Rolling Stone co-founder made remarks widely criticized as racist and sexist in a Times interview, the Hall of Fame called an emergency vote and ousted him" — and that we've talked about already, but I'm calling attention to something I haven't seen discussed yet.

Here's the remark I've quoted in context. The interviewer, David Marchese, is in boldface. The rest is Wenner. I've put the above-quoted remark in red:

Was Virginia Heffernan's Wired article about Pete Buttigieg badly written?

I saw Wired's promotion of the article on Twitter 2 days ago (2 members of my family independently shared this with me, so it must be my kind of raw material):

With a remarkable blend of intellect and empathy, Pete Buttigieg brings a fresh perspective to the forefront of public discourse. https://t.co/mzbXgnvkSv

📷: ​​Argus Paul Estabrook pic.twitter.com/KzI3qKrIA2

— WIRED (@WIRED) May 18, 2023

I read the first few paragraphs of the article and felt stirred up to make fun of it, but then I stopped myself. This morning, I'm seeing a Legal Insurrection article by Mike LaChance that reflects the sort of mockery I nearly fell into: "Wired Magazine Gets Roasted for Cringeworthy Puff Piece on Pete Buttigieg/'he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.'"

Did I miss my chance to get in on the early mockery action or was I right to stop myself — because this thing might be brilliant writing? Is this something in the Hunter S. Thompson/Tom Wolfe tradition?

Legal Insurrection quotes the first, second, and fifth paragraphs and comments "It's so over the top." Yeah? And did the writer go over the top for a reason and with exciting, interesting words? Let's read the first 2 paragraphs and keep in mind that this might be great writing:

"Running Rolling Stone required special skills. Mr. Wenner had to mold the copy into something readable after drug-fueled interviews..."

"... like the one he did with Jimi Hendrix. And he had to edit the work of [Hunter S.] Thompson, who loved his cocaine and whose office supplies included Wild Turkey and beer on tap, and an air horn. Mr. Thompson’s first dispatch from D.C., when he covered George McGovern’s 1972 campaign, began like this: 'I feel the fear coming on, and the only cure for that is to chew up a fat black wad of blood-opium about the size of a young meatball.'... Mr. Wenner recounts one day early in the magazine when Mick Jagger stopped by for blow and a long visit. On another, [Annie] Leibovitz dropped three large rocks of coke on his desk as 'a gift from Keith for you.' 'Cocaine had a stranglehold on the music business,' Mr. Wenner writes in the memoir. 'Drugs were the coin of the realm, enabling bad behavior, bad relationships, and lapses of judgment all around.' Dinner parties might have silver trays of neatly arranged lines of coke passed around every half-hour. When John Belushi fell off a stage doing his samurai skit and ended up in the hospital, with his leg in a cast suspended by wires, he mischievously pulled out a vial of coke hidden in the cast to show his friend Jann."

A snippet of the long article "Jann Wenner Wants to Reveal It All/The Rolling Stone founder talks about LSD, not reading the magazine anymore and how the Stones now look like 'Lord of the Rings' characters onstage" by Maureen Dowd (NYT).

The size of young meatball. Now, that was some choice writing. I suppose it was a young meatball the size of an old meatball. But who really cares about these old meatballs these days? They took a lot of drugs. It doesn't look glamorous from this old-meatball distance. The headline highlights the LSD, but I excerpted cocaine.

"[Hunter S.] Thompson... rightfully looms large for demolishing the idea that covering a campaign has to be objective day to day, or with the winner automatically cast as the hero..."

"... a la Theodore White’s 'The Making of the President' books. Along with unabashed drug taking, hoaxing other reporters, and honing a cultivated but nonetheless genuinely menacing edge, Thompson quickly grasped the fact and advantage of being shunned by press corp heavyweights. 'Thompson’s determined to turn liabilities into assets: 'I’m not gonna do what everyone else is doing. I’m gonna write about what I see, present the unvarnished truth as I understand it'.... That truth still resonates... and is perhaps best summed up in this from Thompson’s 1994 obituary of Richard Nixon in Rolling Stone: 'Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective journalism — which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. … You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.'"

From "The gonzo journalist who forever changed political campaign coverage" by Jason Vest (WaPo). Vest discusses the new book "Savage Journey: Hunter S. Thompson and the Weird Road to Gonzo" (by Peter Richardson).

The notion that "rotten" is an especially bad word called to mind a passage in the delightful old movie "Design for Living": 

"I'm going to jump up and down on your ego. I'm going to criticize you with a baseball bat. I'll tell you every day how bad your stuff is 'til you get something good, and if it's good, I'm going to tell you it's rotten 'til you get something better."

The 2 male artists she's talking to protest and defend their work only to hear her repeat the 1-word criticism "Rotten!" And much later, at the end, after various high jinks that take them apart and get them back together, they ask her "Can you still say 'rotten'?" and she says "Rotten!"

"We just went out with our friend to walk the dog, and you’re wearing a mask, everyone’s wearing a mask. The dog is the only one who’s completely alive!"

"He’s living the dog’s life. The rest of us are afraid to die, and afraid to kill, so we’re masked up and we’re injected, and so forth. It’s the most challenging time of this life cycle for us. We didn’t have a world war or a depression, the things our ancestors had. This is the hand we got dealt and if you fold, you can’t win."

Said Bill Murray, quoted in "Bill Murray: ‘We are afraid to die and afraid to kill’/The comedy great sits down with classical cellist Jan Vogler and talks to Kevin EG Perry about the pandemic being this generation’s ‘most challenging time’, his cure for depression and shooting a majestic concert movie at the Acropolis of Athens" (Independent).

Also: 

"I remember my friend Hunter Thompson..."

Ah, the other Hunter. 

"Hunter S. Thompson was an idol of mine. I believe he has a very famous quote that says I don't condone the use of drugs or alcohol to anyone..."

"... but they've always worked for me... Keith Richards has been a role model for me. He's one of my favourite guitarists and a great role model... I have always been interested in the counter-culture and many literary heroes of mine, including Chaucer, who was an opium addict, and Thomas De Quincey, author of 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater', were into this subject."

Said Johnny Depp, quoted in "I decided to divorce Amber Heard when she defecated in our bed: Johnny Depp calls his ex-wife a 'narcissistic sociopath' who attacked HIM and denies ever hitting her at blockbuster libel court showdown" (Daily Mail).

Was Chaucer an opium addict? That's my first question. You?

"As I lay there, I could feel the medicine take over my entire body, as if an extraterrestrial had entered my bloodstream and was taking over. I could feel it doing its work on my brain, repairing the virus known as addiction."

Says a user of Ibogaine, quoted in "Silicon Valley’s psychedelic wonder drug is almost here/A new startup called MindMed could have the key to providing the upsides of psychedelic drugs for both focus and addiction treatment—while cutting out the downsides of tripping" (Fast Company).

Ibogaine is found in a woody West African shrub that sprouts orange fruits like upside-down tear drops. In Gabon and Cameroon, members of the Bwiti religion eat rootbark from the Iboga Tabernanthe bush as part of a ceremonial confirmation of their faith. Americans have sought out this rite of passage for decades in hopes of enlightenment. In blog posts and on Reddit threads, ibogaine enthusiasts detail how the rootbark renders intense visions, hallucinations, and deep vortexes of memory followed by introspection. It can take days to go through.

Ibogaine? Isn't that the drug Hunter S. Thompson said Ed Muskie was on... back in the days when fake news was trippy and funny — a way to smoke out the squares who couldn't see a joke:

While in Wisconsin covering the primary campaign for the United States presidential election of 1972, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson submitted a satirical article to Rolling Stone accusing Democratic Party candidate Edmund Muskie of being addicted to ibogaine. Many readers, and even other journalists, did not realize that the Rolling Stone piece was facetious. The ibogaine assertion, which was completely unfounded, did a significant amount of damage to Muskie's reputation, and was cited as a factor in his loss of the nomination to George McGovern. Thompson later said he was surprised that anyone believed it.

I have that text. Excerpt:

The Muskie nightmare is beginning to look more and more like a major political watershed for the Democratic Party....  Big Ed was supposed to be their ticket to Miami, where they planned to do business as usual once again, and keep the party at least livable, if not entirely healthy. All Muskie had to do, they said, was keep his mouth shut and act like Abe Lincoln.

The bosses would do the rest. As for that hare-brained bastard McGovern, he could take those reformist ideas he’d been working on, and jam them straight up his ass. A convention packed wall to wall with Muskie delegates—the rancid cream of the party, as it were—would make short work of McGovern’s Boy Scout bullshit.

That was four months ago, before Muskie began crashing around the country in a stupid rage and destroying everything he touched. First it was booze, then Reds, and finally over the brink into Ibogaine … and it was right about that time that most of the Good Ole Boys decided to take another long look at Hubert Humphrey. He wasn’t much; they all agreed on that—but by May he was all they had left.

Asking "how."

Google put out a glossy video based on the Google searches beginning with "how" that people did in 2017:



I watched it this morning because there was a Metafilter post about it, here, where people said things like:

When I type "how" into Google, the first auto-complete which comes up that I know isn't mine is, "how to hard boil eggs".

Thanks, Google. I know that some of my other searches may put me into "can't tie his own shoes" categories, but I do know how to hard boil eggs. I'm slightly less useless than that.

But there are fine points to hard-boiling an egg. You might want to check unless you already know whether to put the egg in at the beginning or only after the water boils. Do you really know the exact number of minutes to go after the water boils and is that with the water continuing to boil or with the heat turned off? Now that I think about it, I bet if you Google, you'll find your method of tying your shoes called into question.

Speaking of which... "how to tie a tie" — along with "how to make slime" — is one of the most common search completions on Google. Another Metafilter commenter said:

Top three "how" autocompletes for me are:

"how to tie a tie"
"how to lose weight"
"how to kiss"

I think Google has a misapprehension about me. I bloody hope so.

I blame the fact that I'm on the Internet connection at my parents' new vicarage where they've only just moved in, so maybe this is a picture of the single vicar who was here before?

So I did my own "how to..." search, and Google gave me:

how to tie a tie
how to make slime
how to buy ripple

How to buy Ripple?! You mean how to stumble into a low-rent liquor store?



I prefer this song about Ripple:



And for you "Sanford and Son" fans, here's a full glass.

Ah, but I'm living in the 1970s. Google is right now, kicking 2017 to the curb and moving on to 2018. And Ripple, I learn this morning, is another cryptocurrency, that is, another subject that fails to convince me to ground myself in the present.

"Ripple is huge in Japan and Japanese interest in crypto currencies in general has skyrocketed (based on trading volume) over the past six months... Ripple has been one of the first cryptos to really recover from the Christmas doldrums... Ripple is still a buy-and-hold.... Disclosure: I own some Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ether."

Ether... to get back to the 70s....

This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel ... total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue – severence of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally ... you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can't control it.

"But the scene has changed... and political activism is going out of style. The thrust is no longer for 'change' or 'progress' or 'revolution,' but merely to escape..."

"... to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been... The flourishing hippy scene is a matter of desperate concern to the political activists. They see a whole generation of rebels drifting off to a drugged limbo, ready to accept almost anything as long as it comes with enough 'soma.' Steve DeCanio, an ex-Berkeley activist now doing graduate work at M.I.T., is a good example of a legion of young radicals who know they have lost their influence but have no clear idea how to get it back again. 'This alliance between hippies and political radicals is bound to break up,' he said in a recent letter. 'There’s just too big a jump from the slogan of "Flower Power" to the deadly realm of politics. Something has to give, and drugs are too ready-made as opiates of the people for the bastards (the police) to fail to take advantage of it.' ... Meanwhile, like most other disappointed radicals, he is grimly amused at the impact the hippies are having on the establishment. The panic among San Francisco officialdom at the prospect of 200,000 hippies flocking into the Hashbury this summer is one of the few things that ex-Berkeley radicals can still laugh at. DeCanio’s vision of the crisis was not written as prophecy, but considering the hidden reality of the situation, it may turn out that way: 'I can see Mayor Shelley standing on the steps of the Civic Center and shouting into TV microphones, "The people cry bread! Bread! Let them turn on!"'"

From "The 'Hashbury' Is the Capital Of the Hippies," by Hunter S. Thompson, published in The New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1967. (You can also find that essay in this collection of Hunter S. Thompson essays, which I recommend.)

Tomorrow is the first day of summer, and it is the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. I'll be carrying on a retrospective. My usual "50 years ago" blog posts are "50 years ago today" and hit the precise date. I'll try to do that once summer comes, that is, tomorrow. Over the weekend, I had posts for each of the 3 days of the Monterey Pop Festival, but today I'm reaching back to May 14th. Why? Because I was researching the NYT archive for the emergence of the word "hippie" (or "hippy" as Thompson has it). This isn't the oldest thing I found, but it's the first one I really wanted to share.

What I like about it is its resonance today: Left-wing activists intent on roping young people into their agenda of "change" and "progress."* Young people skeptical of being put to use and dreaming of happiness. A profusion of drugs offering to take the world in a love embrace.
_______________

* Thompson put those words in quotes, and it still seems like the right thing to do, doesn't it?

"President Trump's private comment earlier this week that the House healthcare bill was 'mean' is having a lingering, and potentially devastating, effect on his credibility among House Republicans."

"Members are still talking about Trump's comment, and their frustration that he'd throw them under the bus is likely to damage his ability to negotiate on major items like infrastructure and tax reform."

ADDED: Doing the tags for this post I started to type "mean" and was pleased to see it autocomplete to "meanies." I wouldn't make a new tag for "mean" at this late date in the life of the blog, but it was great to see that there is a "meanies" tag and to use it again. I had not used it since August of last year, when I had a post titled "The 3 meanest men Hunter S. Thompson ever met — one was Jimmy Carter" — "He will eat your shoulder right off," said Thompson, who also had this description of Hubert Humphrey that amused me by sounding like Trump:

His hair was bright orange, his cheeks were rouged, his forehead was caked with Mantan.... No! I thought. This can't be true! Not now! Not so soon! Here was this monster, this shameful electrified corpse – and raving and flapping his hands at the camera like he'd just been elected president.

Not so funny now that Trump actually is President... or is it?

I've only used the "meanies" tag a few times over the years, perhaps because I don't think of it unless the word "mean" is used. I see I had it here in January 2014, when Ron Paul said that the media will "get meaner and meaner when you run for president" and "pick you apart," and I wondered — assuming the media was going to be very mean in the 2016 election season — who we'd enjoy seeing bullied. Maybe Trump did well because he absorbed and deflected meanness better than anyone else.

The post that caused me to make the new tag "meanies" happened in October 2013: "Are Republicans following a 'don't be mean' strategy, and — if so — is a good strategy?" Very interesting! The Republicans do have a complicated issue around meanness! And, look, it was about Obamacare:

I think the obvious answer is no, but "Is It Okay to Make Your Seder About Trump?"...

... seems to be an issue worth examining to Jonathan Chait.

Is this just another variation on the perennial Thanksgiving columns about sitting down to dinner with your right-wing uncle? Well, it's not just the standard problem of sitting down to dinner with relatives, because "the sitting president [bears] such an uncanny resemblance to a villain from a traditional Jewish narrative."

Like the Pharaoh, Trump is a builder fond of exploitative labor practices and an arch-nationalist, with a nasty habit of making deals then welching on his side of the bargain. To be sure, Trump bears an even stronger resemblance to Purim’s vain, sexually entitled, easily manipulated King Achashverosh.

Both Passover and Purim lend themselves easily to Trump-bashing because they revolve around a common theme deeper than the particulars of their stories: They celebrate a minority group’s survival against persecution, and contain larger warnings about the kinds of conditions that give rise to such persecution....

By the way, speaking of minority groups... is it "welching" — as Chait has it — or "welshing." My research shows both spellings — going all the way back to the 1860s. I'm looking at the (unlinkable OED), which says the word is "Sometimes considered offensive in view of the conjectured connection with Welsh people." But the etymology is "uncertain" and only possibly based on the "alleged dishonesty of Welsh people."

I had thought that "welsh" was the correct spelling and those those who used "welch" were trying to cover up the insult to the Welsh, but now I think "welch" should be preferred, because it's a good, pithy, meaningful word and the ethnic slur origin isn't established and shouldn't be encouraged.

Also, I've read all the quotes at OED, and my favorite one — from Hunter S. Thompson — spells it with the c: "You're 100% right in saying I've ‘fucked up’, but a little ridiculous in implying that I'm welching."

ADDED: If you accept the analogy that Trump is equivalent to the Pharaoh, you are saying that  ordinary working Americans are the equivalent of slaves. That is disrespectful to the suffering of slaves — and there are many slaves in the world even now — and should be anathema.

IN THE COMMENTS: Ambrose said:

Isn't Passover about a large number of undocumented people LEAVING a country? Didn't the Pharaoh want them to STAY AND KEEP WORKING FOE SLAVE WAGES? I think that makes the Pharaoh the complete opposite of Trump. No two people in history have ever been less alike.

The 3 meanest men Hunter S. Thompson ever met — one was Jimmy Carter.

"He will eat your shoulder right off...."

ADDED: Here's the Rolling Stone article he's talking about, from June 3, 1976, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '76/Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey." Excerpt:

There was not much anger in his voice when he started talking, but halfway through the speech it was too obvious for anybody in the room to ignore. But there was no way to cut him short, and he knew it. It was the anger in his voice that first caught my attention, I think, but what sent me back out to the trunk to get my tape recorder instead of another drink was the spectacle of a Southern politician telling a crowd of Southern judges and lawyers that "I'm not qualified to talk to you about law, because in addition to being a peanut farmer, I'm an engineer and nuclear physicist, not a lawyer....… But I read a lot and I listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding about the proper application of criminal justice and the system of equities is from Reinhold Niebuhr. The other source of my understanding about what's right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. Listening to his records about 'The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll' and 'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' I've learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society."

At first I wasn't sure I was hearing him right and I looked over at Jimmy King. "What the hell did I just hear?" I asked.

King smiled and looked at Paul Kirk, who leaned across the table and whispered, "He said his top two advisers are Bob Dylan and Reinhold Niebuhr."

AND: Doesn't this description (not of Carter) sound like Trump:

His hair was bright orange, his cheeks were rouged, his forehead was caked with Mantan.... No! I thought. This can't be true! Not now! Not so soon! Here was this monster, this shameful electrified corpse – and raving and flapping his hands at the camera like he'd just been elected president.

"El Chapo Speaks/A secret visit with the most wanted man in the world," by Sean Penn begins with an epigraph from Montaigne.

The epigraph is: "The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom."

Here's the article, in Rolling Stone, in case you want to make sense of the aphorism. Me, I can't wade through this stuff. First paragraph:

It's September 28th, 2015. My head is swimming, labeling TracPhones (burners), one per contact, one per day, destroy, burn, buy, balancing levels of encryption, mirroring through Blackphones, anonymous e-mail addresses, unsent messages accessed in draft form. It's a clandestine horror show for the single most technologically illiterate man left standing. At 55 years old, I've never learned to use a laptop. Do they still make laptops? No fucking idea! It's 4:00 in the afternoon. Another gorgeous fall day in New York City. The streets are abuzz with the lights and sirens of diplomatic movement, heads of state, U.N. officials, Secret Service details, the NYPD. It's the week of the U.N. General Assembly. Pope Francis blazed a trail and left town two days before. I'm sitting in my room at the St. Regis Hotel with my colleague and brother in arms, Espinoza.

I don't need to visit the interior of the Mind of Sean Penn. Do they still make movie stars? No fucking idea! It's 6:31 in the morning. Another pre-dawn in Madison, Wisconsin. No lights, no buzzing, no cops, no popes. I'm hanging out here with my husband, Meade... oh? Do you think I should get to some point?

What I like about this article is that it's the article that everyone must read but no one will read. Or, maybe, if you scroll down about 20 screens worth of blabber you will get to the boldfaced questions and read some of that. These questions are prefaced with: "Of the many questions I'd sent El Chapo, a cameraman out of frame asks a few of them directly, paraphrases others, softens many and skips some altogether." So what's it worth? Example:

Did your drug business grow and expand when you were in jail?

From what I can tell, and what I know, everything is the same. Nothing has decreased. Nothing has increased....

With respect to your activities, what do you think the impact on Mexico is? Do you think there is a substantial impact?

Not at all. Not at all....

Do you have any dreams? Do you dream?

Whatever is normal. But dreaming daily? No....

The answers are flat and opaque — unrevealing — even as the questions get more Barbara Walters-y. Look at this one:

If I ask you to define yourself as a person, if I ask you to pretend you are not Joaquín, instead you are the person who knows him better than anybody else in the world, how would you define yourself?

Well, if I knew him – with respect, and from my point of view, it's a person who's not looking for problems in any way. In any way.

Yes, it's perfectly inane. I skipped over a lot of text, but I never saw anything that justified the high-tone epigraph: "The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom." El Chapo wasn't revealing much and Sean Penn couldn't pull any story out of him. I think El Chapo got played by his own vanity. He wanted to be the subject of a biopic. That's why he made this connection. And from what I'm reading elsewhere, Sean Penn seems to have led the authorities to recapture El Chapo. I guess whatever role he played there is not something he wants too much attention for.

Anyway... epigraphs: "In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component." That's from Wikipedia, which warns: "Not to be confused with epitaph, epigram, or epithet." An epigraph, to me, implies that what follows will benefit from being looked at through that brief statement. It's tantalizing, no?

Wikipedia gives a few examples of epigraphs, including the Samuel Johnson quote — "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man" — that begins Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was originally published in Rolling Stone, and reading Sean Penn's hyper-personal raving style — "Do they still make laptops? No fucking idea!" — I had the feeling he aspired to Thompsonesqueness... to make a beast of himself, perhaps, and get rid of the pain of writing like a professional journalist.

Do they still make professional journalists? No fucking idea!

ADDED: The night the Rolling Stone article goes up, Sean Penn appears at a fundraiser... alongside his ex-wife Madonna. The Daily Mail article with the photos says Penn "unwittingly led the Mexican authorities to" El Chapo and that he's "now under investigation." Madonna and Sean, together again — a good move for both of them.

"I understood my mother’s feeling of helplessness in the face of his strength, his intelligence, his lies, and his malice, and I hated him."

"I hated him deeply and completely. If I could have called down a god’s wrath on him and destroyed him with a lightning bolt at that moment, I would have done it."

From the memoir of Juan Thompson, the son of Hunter S. Thompson, quoted in a NYT book review. Juan was in the house when his father committed suicide in 2005:

“I heard a weird cry and a crack,” Juan writes. “I thought nothing of it. Hunter was famous for his peculiar vocalizations, and the thump was probably a book he had dropped or thrown.”

Juan reports that there was, in fact, very little blood to clean up, which was something I'd worried about at the time. I said:

I have a hard time thinking of this suicide as a rational act, like that of a person in the advanced stage of a painful, fatal disease. He kills himself while he's in the middle of talking to his wife and trying to get her to come home and help him do his work. He doesn't say goodbye. And he shoots himself in the head, leaving the gory remains to be cleaned out of the kitchen. And meanwhile, his son, daughter-in-law, and 6-year grandson are in the house, doomed to come upon the scene before the wife comes home from the health club. That seems like a sudden, impulsive act that expressed some strong feelings toward the wife. 

But apparently there's a way to shoot yourself in the head that doesn't leave a lot of gory remains. Assuming Hunter S. Thompson knew about it and took care about that, I stand corrected.