Too Long TL;DR Didn’t Read

But when the leading priests and the elders made their accusations against him, Jesus remained silent. “Don’t you hear all these charges they are bringing against you?” Pilate demanded. But Jesus made no response to any of the charges, much to the governor’s surprise.

-Matthew 27:12-14

I’m being persecuted…What’s happened here is a fraud…

-Trump, Civil fraud trial, New York, January 11, 2024

Pontius Pilate was surprised for the same reason that Judge Engoron was not, the defendants before them both fully in character.

…kangaroo tartare, stirred with a rumbling African spice blend…If it makes you nervous, you might want to leave before the camel course. READER’S COMMENT…God the restaurant scene in this city has gotten so boring.

-Best New York City Restaurants of the Year, reviewing Foxface Natural, specializing in exotic meats, The New York Times

I wonder how New York foodies would review KhairAllah’s cooking style when he pulled the hump off the coals that had been roasting overnight and dagger-sliced the raw liver cut straight from the camel’s stomach, sprinkled with red pepper and lemon. Bismillah, In the Name of God, one says before eating on the Darb.

Nakba. A Hurt [of the Foot] by a Stone, Causing a Bleeding. A Disaster, An Affliction, A Calamity

-Lane’s Lexicon, citing the lexicographers Ibn Sidah (c.1007-1066) and Ibn al-A’rābi (c.760-846)

I hope that the Gaza War is teaching Israelis and Americans the meaning of the Arabic word Nakba, of which it amazes me they are still unaware, it being a word with the same resonance for Palestinians that the word Holocaust has for Jews and which is its near contemporaneous counterpart. And while the word Holocaust has its linguistic root in Biblical imagery, a burnt sacrifice made in fire and then extinguished, followed by the birth of the state of Israel, Nakba’s first meaning given by Lane is an image of constant, never ending pain, a reminder in the body of each Palestinian that each step of each day again brings forth their own blood.

Pierre, your life is made up of disagreeable nights and disagreeable days.

-Guilhelm Bélibaste addressing the shepherd Pierre Maury, quoted from the Inquisition Register of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, France (1318-1325), and later Pope, as Benedict XII (1334-1342), cited by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in Montaillou: An Occitan Village, 1294-1324

French historian Le Roy Ladurie’s recent obituary sent me to his magnum opus, whose religious source is also an inadvertent ethnography of 14th C Pyrenean shepherd life. “We can guess one of the reasons for the shepherds’ attitude toward poverty,” he wrote, “…the fact that they were nomads. They carry their fortunes on their backs.” Yusuf the young Khabīr said the same about old Bilal, Look at him, Still running, Still penniless.

Important remains of Roman occupation have been found in the north of Greenwich Park...including...hypocaust pilae…tesserae of red cubes…green porphyry…blocks of oolite…three diminutive columns…one cup of Samian ware…and many bones of camels.

-Victoria County History of Kent (London, 1932)

Now it is settled, Camelus dromedarius arrived in the British Isles four millennia after Ovis aires…the Darb al-Arba’īn, Way of the Forty, we are talking forty hundred years here, not a mere forty days.

At six o’clock, darkness already falling, Humaitá, pitch black but charming. Why on earth are some towns charming? Humaitá is delightfully charming right away, with a mayor who wears his goodness on his clothes. We were welcomed in the dark, with people carrying gas lanterns, deliciously between ridiculous and jolly.

-The Apprentice Tourist: Travels Along the Amazon to Peru, Along the Madeira to Bolivia and Around Marajó Before Saying, Enough Already, Mário de Andrade, 1927

Almost fifty years later I found Humaitá after dark charming too, when our boat down from Porto Velho, loaded with empty Coca Cola bottles that rattled round every river bend, destination Manaus, stopped to give its 3 man crew some R&R in the bars (for this was in 1976, before the Transamazônica reached town and any of its Love Motels had opened), and we tied on a big cachação, and they had to carry me back on board sometime past midnight, but when I awoke midmorning just having passed Pirapetinga, I found that my damned summer sore throat had been charmed.

Ginni: First I just want to thank the committee for your patience while I recovered from hip replacement surgery…I don’t remember anything specifically…I can’t think of anything specifically…Not that I can recall…I don’t remember any conversations I had…

-Transcript of Interview with Virginia Thomas, September 29, 2022, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, explaining why her testimony had been delayed for months

A week later, when it only takes me/A couple minutes to get out of bed,/…I suddenly get it that the head of my/Femur is gone- I could never find it again,/Even if I could go through the hospital garbage—

-Hip Replacement Ode, Sharon Olds

Take it from a double replacer, once you’ve stopped taking Oxy on the second day post-surgery, you are okay to say anything to anybody, and even if you can’t find the head of your femur, you surely can find the truth.

It kind of had a 9/11 bit to it, where everybody just came together.

-Participant in a Republican focus group on political division in America, commenting on the wide support for injured Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin

Is that what it has come to in America? Football as nothing but the continuation of war with other means? And all its attendant faux solidarity, enforced patriotism, and concussive amnesia.

Jared: Like I said, I basically, you know—I—look, messaging was not my area of expertise so, you know, instead of— I didn’t want people to come to me and say, “He, this is what the President should do”, and then it seem like I had a magic button, would press it, and then he would do that…

-Transcript of Interview with Jared Kushner, March 31, 2022, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering questions about what people were telling him that Trump should say after the 2020 election was called against him

Yes, Jared had such a magic button because it was always in his pocket, a direct dial telephone from the Kremlin.

Guilfoyle: I have no direct knowledge because my accountant would handle that. Q: Who is your accountant? Guilfoyle: I have several accountants. We have a number of accountants. Q: How many possible accountants could there be? Guilfoyle: There’s also accountants for Don, for me. So there’s a lot of accountants, because we live together and—. Q: More than—. Guilfoyle: —do a lot together. Q: —five, less than five accountants? Guilfoyle: I can’t speculate on how many.

-Transcript of Interview with Kimberly Guilfoyle, April 18, 2022, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering questions about the $30,000 speaking fee she received for the “Stop the Steal” Rally

Guilfoyle and Don, Jr., who also earned $30,000 for speaking that day, were supposed to be Trump Campaign fundraisers, but as they learned from the Grand Master himself, Always be Billin’…even as the Capitol be burnin’.

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: But again, I go back to, let’s make sure that all the police forces have been employed and we’re really out of Schlitz…

-Transcript of Interview with Gen. Mark Milley, November 17, 2021, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering questions about a hypothetical future attack

Milley a Schlitz drinker? He must have been a Tiger Inn man, he sure wasn’t served that at Ivy Club.

Ivanka: Not that I can recall, but I’m quite sure no. Committee Lawyer: Okay. So that sounds like not a “don’t recall”, but a “quite sure that”-. Ivanka: Oh, no. The answer’s no, that I do not…Ivanka: Not that I recall…Ivanka: I do not recall that…Ivanka: No…Ivanka: No…Ivanka: No. I don’t know who said that or where that came from…Ivanka: I don’t have a recollection of having planned to have gone…Ivanka: They just asked…I said, “Okay”, and I went…Ivanka: I don’t recall having been—I recall actually that I wasn’t planning to go. But it—I—my memory of this is not perfect.

-Transcript of Interview with Ivanka Trump, April 5, 2022, Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, answering questions about her decision to attend the “Stop the Steal” Rally

Cassidy Hutchinson shook off the freely offered legal advice that she answer all Committee questions with “I don’t recall”, having been assured by Trump lawyers that what you don’t recall can’t send you to jail, and in so doing put the country’s interest in finding the truth before her own interest in protecting her ass. Ivanka, apparently, was a more compliant Trump client and thought she had a much prettier ass to protect.

In the informative supervision of the American citizen…we request that the following aspects be kept in mind…What data interests her…With whom she makes contact…Where she has been…With what persons she has relations…How and with whom she spends her free time…

-Romanian Ministry of the Interior, Hunedoara Inspectorate, Service III…marked, Top Secret, September 24, 1973, signed, Maj. Andreşescu Cornel

There were a half million linear feet of Stasi surveillance files kept in East Berlin. That’s three times the kilometerage of paperwork kept by the Securitate where there were a half million informants in Ceauşescu’s heyday, who by comparison with their German counterparts seem to have been a bit underproductive, but then again, Romanians are a Mediterranean-blooded, siesta-taking people.

American anthropologist Katherine Verdery examined her 2,781 page Securitate dossier- nearly the same length as all her published work, she notes with a touch of jealousy- opened in July 1973 when as a grad student she first went to rural Transylvania for her dissertation research.

Her book My Life As a Spy weaves together her file’s entries- it has on the cover a photograph taken by a hidden camera while undressing in her hotel room- with her contemporaneous field notes and found this entry for September 21, 1973 to be typically sinister, “Source: Poleanu. Informs that subject is missing from hotel at late hours (22:00-23:00). Room key present, motorbike absent. Does not know at the moment where she might be at that hour.”

Now we have Texas Senate Bill 8, the Abortion Snitch Law, which lets “Any Person”…sue…“Any person who engages in conduct that aids or abets”…an abortion…” regardless of whether the person knew or should have known” (Sec.171-208) for damages up to $10,000 in addition to legal fees.

And now we have Oscar Stilley, a disbarred attorney and self-proclaimed “disgraced” gadfly from Fort Smith, Arkansas- couldn’t he at least be from Texarkana?- suing a San Antonio gynecologist under that law. I wonder what kinds of surveillance techniques that Source: Popleanu might have taught to Source: Stilley, just as I wonder if the Romanian Securitate would have employed such a disgraced informer for the State…but then again, isn’t every informer for the state by definition a disgrace?

Peter (an obese man-child)- 9/11 changed everything. Brian (a talking dog)- Peter, you didn’t even know what 9/11 was until 2004.

-Family Guy, Season 6, Episode 6

Lines at checkpoints, fences around public buildings, an FBI manhunt for terrorists. They say on television that Bin Laden has changed everything in America.

But in these crazy times of unchecked viral spread and J6 support rallies, you can thank Trump for some of that too…the lines, the fences, the FBI manhunt for rioters, the Vax passports carded at schools, restaurants, and the movies. More people are dying every 36 hours from Covid, which could have been stopped had the right policies been implemented at the right time, than died on 9/11, which itself could have been stopped if an equally incurious president had been paying attention to his security briefings.

It hadn’t been since 8/24/1814, during the War of 1812, that the Capitol was attacked, but you can’t say that President Madison incited its attackers back then. The president guilty of doing that on 1/6/2021 worships his 58 story Golden Calf one Avenue over from Madison, on 5th, the same number as the amendment he might soon be pleading.

The US, after all, spent $143 Billion on “nation building” in Afghanistan

-Fintan O’Toole, The Lie of Nation Building

Much is said about nation building and exporting American democracy to Afghanistan, about whether Jeffersonian values could be taught outside a madrassa, or not. I remember thinking, when I first saw our mission-accomplished self-congratulation, when illiterate village women- Tajiks and Uzbeks, Pashtuns and Hazaras, Turkmen and others- were told to hold up ink-stained fingers and smile for the cameras, Great, This is Afghanistan’s first ethnic census, not its first election.

Sarah Chayes has shown how endemic corruption disqualified the worthy things we tried there, health, education, poppy replacement and the like. I recently asked a young Afghan woman, someone I’d met eight years ago in the Istanbul airport who is now in the US, if she knew any needy compatriots recently arrived on the evacuation flights whom I might help, if she could first vouch for their honesty. No, she said. So many were princes and princesses, as she called them, living off American war dollars, now fleeing the Taliban as much in order to protect their bank accounts as to save their lives.

Fintan O’Toole wrote that America’s democracy project failed in Afghanistan precisely because American democracy had already failed at home, that our presumption to offer such a flawed home-grown product in the foreign market- forget for a moment that it came at the point of a gun- is another reason that we are now its unfit exporters.

He cites the contradictions and hypocrisies embedded in our stated purpose there- kill Osama bin Laden without sending sufficient soldiers for fear of casualties, build the future patiently while war profiteering quickly, prioritize gender rights of women while ignoring our allied warlords’ rape of boys, promote a free press there while the post-9/11 press here lay supine, and worst of all, grow our democratic mission there while decisions here are made undemocratically, behind the backs of voters and without a declaration of war.

I won’t forget what that Afghan woman’s answer implied, that what had once been a largely rural society prizing dignity, restraint, honor, and respect for elders had become a youthful frenzy of urban gamblers and grifters playing for easy money. And I thought of that Arabic verb I’d just learned, which should have a Pashto equivalent even if it does not…Tatā’ashā, One Vied with the Other to Bear His Thirst Longer, and how it is rarely used when war dollars are on the table.

So long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people

-Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence

I’ve been thinking about Charles Glass’s book title, Tribes with Flags, about the origins of the fractured modern Middle East in World War One, of Arab against Turk and Arab against Arab. In the movie there were certainly some impressive flags- blue, red, green, and one that looked like the Taliban flag’s Shahadah, ‘There is No God But God…’ but here white on black, not black on white- flown in that Arab attack on Turk-held Aqaba.

And then I thought of January 6, of the flying of all those Trump flags- blue, red, yellow, and others, Gadsden, POW-MIA, and that Mother of them all, the Confederate- carried into battle on another seat of neo-imperial power.

And I thought of Ross Douthat’s column on the Taliban takeover of the Kabul airport, of how their soldiers, usually in sandals and perahan turban, dressed themselves in looted US army gear, recognized only by their long hair and kohl-rimmed eyes, that reminded him of the Vandal sack of imperial Rome in 476 CE, of how animal-skinned tribesmen from dark northern forests kitted themselves out in cast-off Legionaire body armor and silver helmets, and that reminded me on January 6 of the Capitol police riot shields used as battering rams, and the wolf pelts worn by Aaron Mostofsky and the QAnon Shaman seemingly raided from Davy Crockett’s closet after he too was caught up short at the Alamo in another Lost Cause.

But mostly I thought how often that POW-MIA flag has flown in other battles, unending post-Vietnam proxy battles of betrayal and double-crossing, of the grunts by the brass, of the have-nots by the haves, of the flown-over by the bi-coastal fliers, of the aggrieved by the aggrievers, and how their nonsense about Americans left behind in tiger cages resounds today as similar nonsense about hundreds of Americans- Amcits they’re called in rightwing jargon- left behind in burqas. And how this talk only makes those Americans into little people and, in the eyes of the world, all Americans into silly people.

They alleged that all the maids in England wished to become concubines. Harlots had flocked to the king’s vicinity, they said, hoping for rich rewards. It appears, the cardinal said dryly, I must add to my crimes the degradation of the married state…

-The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel

Cardinal Wolsey banished Henry VIII’s pregnant mistress Elizabeth Blount (“fair as a goddess and not yet fourteen”) from court before giving birth to his bastard Fitzroy and bringing shame upon the king, which reminds me of presidents past, their bimbo eruptions and stripper hush-ups, interns at rope lines and trailer park character assassinations. But Trump didn’t much mind causing scandal, in the end he couldn’t be shamed, finally throwing his own mistress-fixer Michael Cohen out of the inner circle just as Henry did Wolsey. Teen beauty queens undressing backstage, blonde aides leaning over the Resolute desk, Fox News girls pitching softballs, all accepting invitations to the king’s vicinity…the 45th, now on his 3rd, isn’t so different from the 8th and his 6.

This is Donald’s problem. He got himself into this mess. He can fix it himself.

-Melania, quoted in I’ll Take Your Questions Now, Stephanie Grisham

This sounds like something an ex-wife would say, if her distraught husband were to ask when being shown the door (flipping the Rhett and Scarlett script), Where shall I go, What shall I do? But we are all the ex-wives of this one, and it’s not enough to say, Frankly my dear, I don’t... Even better would be to say as Jalen Hurts did after his big loss to the Cowboys, You take you a deuce, you don’t look at it, you flush it and move on. Melania, I suggest you flush twice. And America, you’ll need at least three to get him all down.

Dolchstosslegende (Stab-in-the-Back Story)

-Hitler

Mail ballots, they cheat. People cheat.

-Trump

Thrusting Daggers, Deep States, Cosmopolitan Elites. Mein Volk, My Generals. Missouri, Manhattan. Assortive Dating, Assortive Mating, Assortive Locating. Double Legacies, Ivies and Juvies MBA, DUI. No Income, Child Services, Double Income, No Children, Not from Eva, Not from Stormy. Berghof, Bedminster, Führerbunker, Mar-a-Lago, Eagle’s Nest, 721 5th. America First, Double Bogey, Third Reich, Four of a Kind, Five Eyes, Sixth Sense, Seven Days in May, Behind the Eight Ball, Nine Lies, BOOM. Narcissism, Paranoia, Meglomania. Rallies, Parades, Flags. My Struggle, My Vietnam, My Kampf, Trumpf, V-2, VD. No tobacco, No alcohol. Chicken fingers, Fat fingers. Gassy, Brassy. American Carnage, Götterdämmerung. Richard Wagner, Lee Greenwood, Deutchland Über Alles, God Bless the U.S.A. Lord knows we need it.

Tweedle-Dee Dee, he’s on his hands and his knees, Saying, “Throw me something, Mister, please.” “What’s good for you is good for me”, Says Tweedle-Dee Dum to Tweedle-Dee Dee.

-Dylan

They say it’s like sausage making, half for you and half for me. But we shouldn’t have to beg and we shouldn’t have to kneel in order to protect our climate or care for our children. Just ask Humpty and all his MAGA hat wearing men, trying to put his grift together again.

The revolution will not be televised…The revolution will be no re-run, Brothers, the revolution will be live.

-Gil Scott-Heron

Not only was it televised, but the President watched it on a jumbo screen, liking what he saw, liking the size of his crowd. His aides tried to get their pet proposals discussed on his favorite TV show, preferably by the one in the middle wearing the short skirt, because they knew she was best to get his attention. He was always watching her cross and recross her legs. Imagine if they could have gotten Stormy to sit there too and uncross her arms and say, Carried Interest.

…there’s a tendency to personalize our conflicts, to say, “The real problem is that the upper middle class have become a bunch of latte sippers…”

-Matthew Stewart, The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture

Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. But even in Southampton, Playground of the Wall Street Whales, a MAGA “Own the Libs” caravan drove through town last Sunday, honking horns and gunning engines and waving flags, this a town where they also sell day-old bread at Stop & Shop and in some of the finer restaurants you have to tell your waiter how to make a macchiato. No foamed milk, just a bit of steamed. Otherwise it’s a latte. And that would be a real problem after your expensive meal.

I’m traveling- and I wake up suddenly before dawn in a strange hotel room, in a poor country where my language isn’t spoken, and I’m shaking and shivering- Why?…I kneel down in front of the toilet and vomit. Then I’m sitting, shivering, on the bathroom floor, this cold square of tile on a hot night in a hot country, and I can’t stand up to go back to bed- I can’t stand up- so I sit there quietly, shivering as if I were sitting in the snow…

-The Fever, Wallace Shawn

It was in a hotel in Dushanbe, in Tajikistan, which is not a hot country but still a strange city, where a law required that all vehicles arriving from the rural provinces be scrubbed clean of their rural dirt or otherwise be heavily fined. I remember arriving long after dark from Khorog, Badakhshan Province at the doorstep of the High Pamirs after a twelve hour drive, and instead of dropping me at my hotel straight away, the driver had to look for a car wash. My companions and I later went to a restaurant I’d been to before that served tasty lamb kebabs, but the meat must have been off because I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, and I remember feeling glad that its ceramic tile felt cool against my forehead when I dropped it to the floor.

Today I met American Envoy for the Horn of Africa Mr. Jeffrey Feltman.

-Dr. Mariam al-Sadiq al-Mahdi, Foreign Minister of Sudan, Tweet, October 23

Dr. Mariam is no longer Foreign Minister, having been arrested in a military coup d’état on October 25 before dawn while Feltman was flying out of Khartoum, just after stating he had found reason for optimism in the political standoff between the weak civilian cabinet and Sudan’s strongmen. Dr. Mariam herself is a strong woman, I had first met her some years ago in the Park Lane Hotel as she was wheeling around the lobby one-legged on a knee scooter after she’d fallen hard in the streets of New York while there for a UN conference.

We had tea and talked about camels in Dar al-Kababish, the same thing I’d talked to her father about not long before that in his Khartoum garden. I told him then that he had made it possible for us to make Voice of the Whip in 1988 when he was Prime Minister, having reopened the country to people like me who wanted to roam around without being hassled by the secret police, before he too was deposed and arrested in a coup. I screened it in his nightly assembly and he gave me a ring right off his finger with a ruby-colored stone, like something the Pope might do. If I ever see Dr. Mariam again I should return it to her, whose family lineage goes back before General Gordon’s last day on those palace steps, not far from her father’s garden.

Build back better, Blah, blah, blah. Green economy, Blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050, Blah, blah, blah. Climate neutral, Blah, blah, blah.

-Greta Thunberg, at COP26

We should all have her sitting at our dinner table. What did you do today at school, Blah, blah, blah. How much homework do you have tonight, Blah, blah, blah. You know your mother and I love you very much, Blah, blah, blah. A NYT columnist wrote that she’s glad she’s over 60 because she won’t live long enough to see the coming cataclysm. Female life expectancy in Sweden is 84 years. Greta, you’ve got only 66 more before you’d better blast off this blasted planet. You can ask Bezos for a ride.

The pyramids were, for once, camel-less. Only the stray dogs remained.

-New York Times, November 19, 2021, about Prince Charles’ carefully choreographed visit to Giza

After reading this it is not easy to refrain from quoting that tired Arab proverb about camels and canines, The caravan passes…The dog barks, but even more à propos might be, You can put lipstick on a pig but…, because this is what Egyptians do best…put a modern gloss, rouge and talc, rose water and kohl stick, on their 5,000 year old Pharaonic treasures and then call it a day. No real forward progress, nothing newly built with any real endurance. Pity all that plate glass and chrome signage on their new hotels overlooking Khufu and Khafre…who will wash them of the Khamsīn’s wind-blown sand and grit? Surely not the Kilāb, the Dogs.

Les bustes son beaux, bien faits, souples et gracieux de mouvements. Les bras son bien dessinés, les reins [sic] souples et d’une sculpture parfaite.

-D’Alger au Congo par le Tchad, 1898-1900, Esquisse Ethnografique, On the female physiognomy of the Tuareg de l’Aïr, Fernand Foureau

Eight hundred pages of scientific description, twenty five hundred miles of travels across the Sahara and Congo, two years on the march and par pinasse, thousands of botanical and geological specimens, countless pack camels left behind for dead, “a journey without parallel in the annals of French colonialism” in the words of his biographer…yet Foureau still misspells the word for Breasts. (I doubt he is writing about kidneys.) Or was it a printer’s typo? In any case, for a Frenchman to get that wrong…Incroyable!

‘E look like you. ‘E got white face. ‘E tall man.

-A Tanna Islander in the New Hebrides talking about John Frum, a mythic American worshipped as God in a WW2-era Polynesian cargo cult, quoted by David Attenborough in Quest in Paradise

Trumpers as cargo cultists, in their god’s absence they wear his branded merch made overseas and washed up on these shores, they strain at wireless sets to catch his Twitter-censored voice coming over the air to them from afar, awaiting a triumphant return to reclaim his rightful place atop the fire-breathing volcano that is the White House, throwing themselves into that very volcano on the January anniversary of his last appearance before them. How else to understand MAGA, other than as primitive religion foisted on the ignorant by the apotheosis of a tall white huckster?