YUK YUK YUK

It is very difficult to think deeply and seriously about Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim while watching an impossibly small car drive into the center ring under the big tent out of which climb an endless stream of clowns in funny costumes with big noses and huge flapping shoes on their feet.

So two shady characters are picked up at Dulles as they attempt to flee the country, charged with various campaign finance violations and suspected of complicity in the Ukraine disaster and of course it turns out they were spotted yesterday at Trump’s Washington Hotel having lunch with Crazy Rudy.

Who wants ideological analysis?  What I need is a whoopee cushion with a buzzer that tickles your rear end when you sit on it.

ELIZABETH WARREN'S LATEST FIGHT

You will have noted Warren's claim that in the '70s pregnant women lost their jobs, a claim denied by the Right.  In 1968, my first wife lost her job in the Queens College English Department in New York because she had our first son, Patrick.  The stove-piping of Academia being what it is, I could not do anything about it since I was in Philosophy, so I did the next best thing, I got the APA to establish a Standing Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession.  [Jack Rawls declined to co-sign the letter to the APA.]

SOMETIMES I AM REMINDED OF THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE

Days after Bernie  suffers a heart attack, his forty-six year old daughter-in-law suddenly dies of cancer.  I am exhausted after one day of travel and teaching that pales in comparison to what he, and others, have been doing for months in pursuit of the Democratic Party nomination.  There is really nothing to say save that I hope he can survive these blows.  Today Bernie announced that he would be cutting back on the pace of his campaigning.

It is mean-spirited and beneath me to say that I hope Trump suffers comparable blows, but there it is.  Nobody ever accused me of being a nice guy.

THE DEEP STATE

Now that I have completed at Columbia University my four week exposition of the thought of the greatest social theorist ever to live [a.k.a. Karl Marx] and Todd Gitlin is about to commence his wrestle with the second greatest social theorist ever to live [a.k.a Max Weber], I thought this would be an appropriate moment to say a few words about that bugaboo of the Far Right, THE DEEP STATE.

The deep state, according to Steve Bannon and his confrères in the Alt Right, is a malevolent collection of secret career government officials who, having wormed their way into the middle ranks of State, Justice, Treasury, and every other branch of the Federal Government, are now undermining Trump’s efforts to totally transform American domestic and foreign policy, thereby negating the will of the people.

Does this cadre of Civil Service boll weevils exist?

Of course it does!  As Max Weber taught us in his greatest work, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, it is customarily called The Bureaucracy, and it is the universal structural feature of all modern societies, capitalist and [if there actually are any] socialist alike.  Every modern government is a bureaucracy.  Every modern army is a bureaucracy.  Every modern corporation, university and hospital is a bureaucracy.  The Roman Catholic Church is a bureaucracy [and has been for at least a millennium.]  The Boy Scouts are a bureaucracy, The Red Cross is a bureaucracy.   The Democratic and Republican Parties are bureaucracies. 

What we are witnessing today, newsbreak by newsbreak, is the revolt of the bureaucracy.  When the reformers I support win elections, they fume against the entrenched resistance of the bureaucracy, and entertain fantasies of digging it up, root and branch, so that the will of the people can be made into law.  But when evil men seize power and seek to destroy what remains of our fragile democracy, and dedicated Civil Servants step forward to bring them to account, I cry

            Thank God for the Deep State.

LET US PRETEND I DID NOT SAY THIS

What in hell was Hunter Biden doing being paid $50,000 a month to sit on the board of a Ukrainian gas company?  

PASSING THE TIME

I assume that many of you are as mesmerized as I by the speed with which new information surfaces about Trump’s efforts to get foreign rulers to dig up dirt on his 2020 rivals.  There have been endless comparisons to Watergate, but I lived through Watergate, and for the most it was as riveting as the melting of a large pile of snow in the Spring.  This has more the character of a volcanic eruption.  It is hard for us bloggers to write about it because in the time it takes for me to tap out a comment on my keyboard new information will probably have surfaced on CNN or MSNBC.

Rather than try to tame a whirlwind, I thought I would pose two puzzles to which I would love solutions.  I am encouraged by the quality of the replies to my post on the vagaries of senior moments.

Puzzle 1:  Why do clouds develop in discrete layers, sometimes three deep and ranging from 20,000 feet down to 1000 feet?  Everyone who has taken an airplane has noticed this, but I have no idea at all why it happens.

Puzzle 2:  How does friction work?  For example, if I put on a T shirt, it slides smoothly over my back and settles properly on my torso.  But if I have just taken a shower and my back is still damp, it catches and bunches up and I must twist into contortions to grab the hem and try to pull it down.

Surely these are well understood phenomena.  Anybody have a clue?

MEANWHILE ...

I have been absent from this site for several days not only because of the effects of my weekly trip to New York but also because I have been transfixed by the rapid development of the impeachment process.  Tuesday evening, as I sat slumped in my seat at LaGuardia waiting for my flight, I saw on a TV screen the announcement that the State Department Inspector General had just delivered a cache of new materials to a Congressional committee.  Because my phone was about to die, I was forced to try to lip read the announcement by the CNN talking head.  What will happen next?  Lord knows.  Probably while I type these words with my two forefingers new revelations are being announced on the TV in the kitchen.  But the outcome is now certain.

Trump will be impeached by the House, probably before Thanksgiving and probably as well with virtually no Republican votes.  Then Mitch McConnell will take the Senate at breakneck speed through the Senate trial mandated in the Constitution.  I visualize the Senate trial as rather like a lovely scene from the old Danny Kaye movie, The Court Jester.  [I can still recall the famous phrase, “The chalice from the palace has the potion with the poison but the flagon with the dragon has the brew that is true.”]  At one point Kaye, the Court Jester, is challenged by a knight but he cannot fight because he is not a knight, so he is frog marched double time through the ordinarily leisurely knighting process in order to be eligible to take part in a duel.

Trump will be acquitted by the Senate.  That is a foregone conclusion.  The four or five Republican Senators up for election will have to make an impossible choice.  I suspect that whichever way they choose they will suffer in November 2020.

And then, everything will depend on the relative degree of eagerness to vote of the Democratic and Republican bases.  Right now, it looks good.

One final word, about Bernie.  I hope to God he is all right in the aftermath of his arterial procedure.  He and his wife will have to decide whether he can return to the crushing schedule and unreal effort of a full speed presidential campaign.