Yesterday’s and today’s New York Times headlines alone were enough to cause the formation of a dangerous slippery condition on the floors of Column HQ here in Eastern Pennsylvania.
JFC!!! Sick to my stomach! The Moonies are so dangerous. They always have been but knowing that the sons have somehow been able to get licensing to produce weaponry is scary as hell! Please tell me how shit like this happens?
Apropos of nothing, I was thinking about the Overton Window lately. The Overton Window is the center part of a bell-shaped continuum of acceptable thoughts, ideas, concepts. EG, My neighbor's lawn really needs mowing, and I hope he does it soon. That is well within the Overton Window. Renting a tractor and plowing up my neighbor's longish lawn is not.
Lucian's observations tonight makes me wonder: Where is the middle of the Overton Window anymore? Everything seems to spin out and dance toward the extreme edges. Just look at the absurd political crisis over raising the debt limit ceiling. Or look at MTG. Or at Donald Trump.
Arguably Yeats didn't live long enough to experience some form of metanoia and repudiate his political lurch to support for Mussolini, I am thinking about others who had that opportunity, for example:
Arthur Koestler, CBE (UK: /ˈkɜːstlər/, US: /ˈkɛst-/; German: [ˈkœstlɐ]; Hungarian: Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism.
*****
Origins and early life
Koestler was born in Budapest to Jewish parents Henrik and Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles). He was an only child. His father Henrik Koestler was born on 18 August 1869 in the town of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary. His paternal grandfather Lipót Koestler, was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army.[7] In 1861 he married Karolina Schon, the daughter of a prosperous timber merchant. Their son Henrik was born several years later. Henrik left school at age 16 and took a job as an errand boy with a firm of drapers. He taught himself English, German and French, and eventually became a partner in the firm. He set up his own business importing textiles into Hungary.[8]
Arthur's mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague. Among her ancestors was Jonas Mischel Loeb Jeitteles, a prominent 18th-century physician and essayist, whose son Juda Jeitteles became a well-known poet. Beethoven set some of his poems to music. Adele's father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family to Vienna, where she grew up in relative prosperity until about 1890. Faced with financial difficulties, her father abandoned his wife and daughter, and emigrated to the United States. *****
[Koestler] began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Travelling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a "crazy party" in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists [and fellow-travellers] of the era, including Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but he did not die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940 Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s he helped to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Melvin Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.
Anne Applebaum, reviewing Michael Scammell: Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic[6] *****
Palestine, Paris, Berlin and polar flight, 1926–1931
For a few weeks Koestler lived in a kibbutz, but his application to join the collective (Kvutzat Heftziba) was rejected by its members.[14] For the next twelve months he supported himself with menial jobs in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Frequently penniless and starving, he often depended on friends and acquaintances for survival.[15] He occasionally wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German. In early 1927 he left Palestine briefly for Berlin, where he ran the Secretariat of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party.
Later that year, through a friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem, where for the next two years he produced detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage, for his principal employer and for other newspapers. He was resident at this time at 29 Rehov Hanevi'im, in Jerusalem.[16] He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents and prime ministers,[17] and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. As noted in his autobiography, he came to realise that he would never really fit into Palestine's Zionist Jewish community, the Yishuv, and particularly that he would not be able to have a journalistic career in Hebrew.
I read _The God That Failed,_ to which Koestler was one of six contributors -- all male, btw, though I didn't notice that till quite a bit later -- at an impressionable age, like when I was about 20, immersed in the antiwar movement, and surrounded by lefties of various stripes. (This was ca. 1971, long before "leftist" became synonymous with "liberal" or "Democrat.") A couple of years later, I read for the first time Milton Mayer's _They Thought They Were Free,_ about the Germans under Hitler. It too made a big impression; I've read it several times since and recommended it to others. What I learned, and have kept learning in the decades since, is to be deeply suspicious of any ideology or individual that sets itself up as The Answer.
Now I'm hoping that in the next few years we'll see a new "God That Failed" anthology, undoubtedly with a different title, and its contributors will be people who once followed, believed in and/or acted like they believed in, Donald Trump but came to see that it was leading them down a very bad path.
actually, his friends called him Willie. certainly, Maud Gonne did. and, although I know it's very apt, "The Second Coming" is quoted EVERYWHERE nowadays. I'd declare a six-month moratorium on using it to describe "current events." besides, in Yeats's weird system, the "rough beast" presages a time of wonderful things (or at least that's what I remember from my deep involvement with Yeats for many years...even going so far as to read "A Vision," which ain't easy to do).
...this from someone whose life as a doctoral student in English Lit. is getting close to having been terminated a half century ago.
The ‘Overton window’ is a term from political science meaning the acceptable range of political thought in a culture at a given moment. It was the creation of Joseph Overton, a think-tank intellectual based in Michigan, who died in 2003 at 43 after a solo plane accident. His crucial insight, one which both emerged from and was central to the work of the think tank Right, was that the window of acceptability can be moved. An idea can start far outside the political mainstream – flat taxes, abolish the IRS, more guns in schools, building a beautiful wall and making Mexico pay – but once it has been stated and argued for, framed and restated, it becomes thinkable. It crosses over from the fringe of right-wing think-tankery to journalistic fellow-travellers; then it crosses over to the fringe of electoral politics; then it becomes a thing people start seriously advocating as a possible policy. The window has moved, and rough beasts come slouching through it to be born. *****
How an obscure libertarian idea became the go-to explanation for this year’s crazy politics.
ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH BARCZYK
There are, by now, more than a few theories about the rise of Donald Trump, and how views long considered too extreme for national politics earned him the Republican nomination for president. But perhaps no concept appears to explain this process as neatly as the Overton Window. Best known until recently as the title of an overheated political thriller by Glenn Beck, in the last year the Overton Window has been cited everywhere from The New York Times to The Rachel Maddow Show. Despite its peculiar origins and limited applications, pundits increasingly invoke it to describe not only Trumpism, but the Sanders surge, Brexit, and more.
The Overton Window refers to the range of policies on any given issue that are, at that moment, popular enough for a politician to campaign on successfully. Just outside of the window lie “acceptable” policies, and beyond those the “radical” and “unthinkable.” Joseph Overton, a libertarian think tanker who developed the concept at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan in the mid-1990s, sought to move this “window of political possibilities” and bring unpopular ideas into the mainstream. The most effective way to do this, he proposed, was not to advocate for minor, incremental changes to an already accepted idea, but to make the case for a currently “unthinkable” idea, stating it cogently and provoking an informed discussion. These efforts would make radical ideas look more normal, nudging them into the “acceptable” category, and eventually making them politically viable.
Trump’s candidacy, many liberal commentators have suggested, exemplifies Overton’s strategy. By floating extreme policies (build a wall on the Mexican border, ban Muslims from the United States), he has seemingly forced public debate sharply to the right. Meanwhile, the resurgence of socialist politics embodied by Bernie Sanders and British politician Jeremy Corbyn, as well as the passage of right-to-work laws in several states, increasing restrictions on abortion, and the UK’s referendum on EU membership are said to fit the same pattern. Rachel Maddow devoted a segment to the Overton Window before her interview with Sanders last December, explaining how he could shift the consensus leftward. After the jolt of Brexit, John Lanchester began his 5,000-word lament in the London Review of Books with a primer on the concept.
An interesting method of blending 2concepts. Well-done.
Overton re-imagined the linear, left, middle, and right as the linear north, central, and south. Always found the linear approach to be in search of a nebulous middle, rather than understanding it is the set of reasonable/rational people who do not view their world through the sole lens of politics nor appear on a linear line on the X or Y axis., but rather through see through their own kaleidoscope. Perhaps Overton revealed just that by his own multifaceted explanation of when Newton's Law of Gravity meets a Moral Precept.
One can enjoy Yeats yet as reader(s) have pointed out, it's helpful to further understand the man, as well as the poet and playwright.
"Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W.B. Yeats." Will not characterize the take beyond it is a worthy read.
I am happy that a writer and thinker I admire is, like me, and probably you, afraid of the nuttiness careening around our world. I do wonder how a Moonie center could be in PA., and ... that their leader has show biz leanings whereby he not only sings, but throws in that show-bizziest of shtick: Yiddish slang. (See: schlong.) I have believed we were in danger since a disturbed and stupid man became president as a vanity project, and that millions of people voted for him. I don’t think he will be elected again -- but, really, he doesn’t have to. The damage he brought remains.
Here are some Yiddish words that you might be using without realizing that they are Yiddish: bupkis, chutzpah, klutz, kvetch, mensch, nosh, oy vey, plotz, schmutz, schlep, schmooze, schvitz, shtick, spiel, tchotcke, and tuches (or tushie).
my dad was very fond of referring to a bad person as "a real mal hamovitz" ("Angel of Death," but he really meant "really shitty person). it's Hebrew, but is the same in Yiddish, according to the old Yeshiva guy at the piano in my avatar.
Hadn’t heard that before, but then I don’t speak Yiddish, only some words that are common. Too bad I didn’t ask my MIL for lessons while she was alive. Yiddish was her first language.
I would say, “That guy’s a real putz!” Your dad’s expression is certainly more creative.
Both of my parents spoke Yiddish. They thought my sister and I didn’t know what they were saying but we figured it out. They thought they were so secretive. 😄 Schmuck is another lovely word that was used frequently in our house along with Oy Vey Esmir!
Re your parents speaking Yiddish so the kids wouldn't understand, there's actually a name for what they were doing: "Nischt for the kinder." The German origins of that phrase are obvious. The meaning, of course, is "Not for the children"
I hope the Yiddish speakers gathered here appreciate the irony of discussing this subject under the aegis of a host named "Truscott IV!"
Often I see news stories attributed to the Washington Times. Beware! Don't open them!
In case you didn't know:
"The Washington Times was founded on May 17, 1982, by Unification movement leader Sun Myung Moon and owned until 2010 by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate founded by Moon. It is currently owned by Operations Holdings, which is a part of the Unification movement."
I was going to mention that, but you beat me to it.
I must disclose that my right-wing military historian first cousin has published book reviews and occasional "think pieces" in the same "Washington Times."
Now, I'm wondering: to whom should I forward this column? Whose night and day do I wish to ruin by filling their heads with the image of King Whatsisname!
I'm 70 years old and I'm pretty much done. I'll still vote in every election until the fascists make it impossible. I'll donate what I can to worthy causes. I'll vote blue. But I'm done. We have passed the tipping point.
When I saw that 74,000,000 voted for Trump AFTER having closely observed and heard him for over five years...well, that is when I decided that this country was going to die of its own stupidity. That and that gd Electoral College.
I think the Electoral College is doomed anyway - not in my lifetime perhaps (I'm 82), but it is coming..... Texas keeps importing people from other states, especially for tech jobs. Most people who work for tech companies are younger, and most of these are more tolerant and even liberal than the average. At some point, Texas will turn purple for national elections and then blue. When Texas turns blue for national elections, the Republicans will see that they will never take the White House again with the Electoral College - Texas and California (both blue) would have 1/3 of the electoral votes needed to win the election, and even the conservative Republicans will see the wisdom of moving a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College.....
Shlong???? He said Shlong??? I had to laugh, Lucian, as a Jewish New Yorker.....but your fine article does illustrate so vividly how far our society has fallen. I hated the dad and now the son even more. I once saw a Moonie mass marriage in Central Park. Cults can be so powerful and is the reason Bullethead has decided to bigly join the Magats. Thanks for sharing your insight into yet another revolting part of our “evolution”. Shlong???? Really???
Maybe King Bullethead will be holding his rod of iron during a lightening storm ⚡
Greg, what a great image!!!!
"Rod of Iron" makes me think of Moses using an AR-15 to divide the Red Sea.
Based on LT's reporting it would not surprise me if that was one of the "tenets" of this "church"
JFC!!! Sick to my stomach! The Moonies are so dangerous. They always have been but knowing that the sons have somehow been able to get licensing to produce weaponry is scary as hell! Please tell me how shit like this happens?
Apropos of nothing, I was thinking about the Overton Window lately. The Overton Window is the center part of a bell-shaped continuum of acceptable thoughts, ideas, concepts. EG, My neighbor's lawn really needs mowing, and I hope he does it soon. That is well within the Overton Window. Renting a tractor and plowing up my neighbor's longish lawn is not.
Lucian's observations tonight makes me wonder: Where is the middle of the Overton Window anymore? Everything seems to spin out and dance toward the extreme edges. Just look at the absurd political crisis over raising the debt limit ceiling. Or look at MTG. Or at Donald Trump.
William Butler Yeats saw it this way:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
And then Yeats turned toward Mussolini and the spirit world.
Beats the hell out of me how reputations are made, and minds are lost.
Sometimes you just have to pull up the covers and hope the world
is still there in the morning. We were visiting a Kibbutz in Israel in 1976,
and in the middle of the night the planes were flying in rapid succession,'
We asked Harry's cousin why none of the kibbutzniks seemed concerned.
"It's a matter of which direction the planes are flying."
Arguably Yeats didn't live long enough to experience some form of metanoia and repudiate his political lurch to support for Mussolini, I am thinking about others who had that opportunity, for example:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler
Arthur Koestler, CBE (UK: /ˈkɜːstlər/, US: /ˈkɛst-/; German: [ˈkœstlɐ]; Hungarian: Kösztler Artúr; 5 September 1905 – 1 March 1983) was a Hungarian-born author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 after becoming disillusioned with Stalinism.
*****
Origins and early life
Koestler was born in Budapest to Jewish parents Henrik and Adele Koestler (née Jeiteles). He was an only child. His father Henrik Koestler was born on 18 August 1869 in the town of Miskolc in northeastern Hungary. His paternal grandfather Lipót Koestler, was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army.[7] In 1861 he married Karolina Schon, the daughter of a prosperous timber merchant. Their son Henrik was born several years later. Henrik left school at age 16 and took a job as an errand boy with a firm of drapers. He taught himself English, German and French, and eventually became a partner in the firm. He set up his own business importing textiles into Hungary.[8]
Arthur's mother, Adele Jeiteles, was born on 25 June 1871 into a prominent Jewish family in Prague. Among her ancestors was Jonas Mischel Loeb Jeitteles, a prominent 18th-century physician and essayist, whose son Juda Jeitteles became a well-known poet. Beethoven set some of his poems to music. Adele's father, Jacob Jeiteles, moved the family to Vienna, where she grew up in relative prosperity until about 1890. Faced with financial difficulties, her father abandoned his wife and daughter, and emigrated to the United States. *****
[Koestler] began his education in the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at an experimental kindergarten in Budapest. His mother was briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud. In interwar Vienna he wound up as the personal secretary of Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the early leaders of the Zionist movement. Travelling in Soviet Turkmenistan as a young and ardent Communist, he ran into Langston Hughes. While reporting on the Spanish Civil War, he met W. H. Auden at a "crazy party" in Valencia before winding up in one of Franco's prisons. In Weimar Berlin he fell into the circle of the Comintern agent Willi Münzenberg, through whom he met the leading German Communists [and fellow-travellers] of the era, including Johannes Becher, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht. Afraid of being caught by the Gestapo while fleeing France, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin. He took them several weeks later when it seemed he would be unable to get out of Lisbon, but he did not die. Along the way he had lunch with Thomas Mann, got drunk with Dylan Thomas, made friends with George Orwell, flirted with Mary McCarthy and lived in Cyril Connolly's London flat. In 1940 Koestler was released from a French detention camp, partly thanks to the intervention of Harold Nicolson and Noël Coward. In the 1950s he helped to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, together with Melvin Lasky and Sidney Hook. In the 1960s he took LSD with Timothy Leary. In the 1970s he was still giving lectures that impressed, among others, the young Salman Rushdie.
Anne Applebaum, reviewing Michael Scammell: Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic[6] *****
Palestine, Paris, Berlin and polar flight, 1926–1931
For a few weeks Koestler lived in a kibbutz, but his application to join the collective (Kvutzat Heftziba) was rejected by its members.[14] For the next twelve months he supported himself with menial jobs in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Frequently penniless and starving, he often depended on friends and acquaintances for survival.[15] He occasionally wrote or edited broadsheets and other publications, mostly in German. In early 1927 he left Palestine briefly for Berlin, where he ran the Secretariat of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Party.
Later that year, through a friend, Koestler obtained the position of Middle East correspondent for the prestigious Berlin-based Ullstein-Verlag group of newspapers. He returned to Jerusalem, where for the next two years he produced detailed political essays, as well as some lighter reportage, for his principal employer and for other newspapers. He was resident at this time at 29 Rehov Hanevi'im, in Jerusalem.[16] He travelled extensively, interviewed heads of state, kings, presidents and prime ministers,[17] and greatly enhanced his reputation as a journalist. As noted in his autobiography, he came to realise that he would never really fit into Palestine's Zionist Jewish community, the Yishuv, and particularly that he would not be able to have a journalistic career in Hebrew.
***** Read the rest here...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler
I read _The God That Failed,_ to which Koestler was one of six contributors -- all male, btw, though I didn't notice that till quite a bit later -- at an impressionable age, like when I was about 20, immersed in the antiwar movement, and surrounded by lefties of various stripes. (This was ca. 1971, long before "leftist" became synonymous with "liberal" or "Democrat.") A couple of years later, I read for the first time Milton Mayer's _They Thought They Were Free,_ about the Germans under Hitler. It too made a big impression; I've read it several times since and recommended it to others. What I learned, and have kept learning in the decades since, is to be deeply suspicious of any ideology or individual that sets itself up as The Answer.
Now I'm hoping that in the next few years we'll see a new "God That Failed" anthology, undoubtedly with a different title, and its contributors will be people who once followed, believed in and/or acted like they believed in, Donald Trump but came to see that it was leading them down a very bad path.
Bob, were I a betting woman, my money would have been on the last two lines:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Great minds, and all that.
My favorite poem and very apropos to the times in which we are living.
Really sorry I started this thread. Henceforth I will keep my comments closer to the center of our shared Overton Window.
Oh that Bill Yeats, poet of decimation— the master of the Euphemistically gibing understatement.
actually, his friends called him Willie. certainly, Maud Gonne did. and, although I know it's very apt, "The Second Coming" is quoted EVERYWHERE nowadays. I'd declare a six-month moratorium on using it to describe "current events." besides, in Yeats's weird system, the "rough beast" presages a time of wonderful things (or at least that's what I remember from my deep involvement with Yeats for many years...even going so far as to read "A Vision," which ain't easy to do).
...this from someone whose life as a doctoral student in English Lit. is getting close to having been terminated a half century ago.
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n15/john-lanchester/brexit-blues
Excerpt:
The ‘Overton window’ is a term from political science meaning the acceptable range of political thought in a culture at a given moment. It was the creation of Joseph Overton, a think-tank intellectual based in Michigan, who died in 2003 at 43 after a solo plane accident. His crucial insight, one which both emerged from and was central to the work of the think tank Right, was that the window of acceptability can be moved. An idea can start far outside the political mainstream – flat taxes, abolish the IRS, more guns in schools, building a beautiful wall and making Mexico pay – but once it has been stated and argued for, framed and restated, it becomes thinkable. It crosses over from the fringe of right-wing think-tankery to journalistic fellow-travellers; then it crosses over to the fringe of electoral politics; then it becomes a thing people start seriously advocating as a possible policy. The window has moved, and rough beasts come slouching through it to be born. *****
newrepublic.com/article/138003/flaws-overton-window-theory
Laura Marsh
October 27, 2016
The Flaws of the Overton Window Theory
How an obscure libertarian idea became the go-to explanation for this year’s crazy politics.
ILLUSTRATION BY HANNAH BARCZYK
There are, by now, more than a few theories about the rise of Donald Trump, and how views long considered too extreme for national politics earned him the Republican nomination for president. But perhaps no concept appears to explain this process as neatly as the Overton Window. Best known until recently as the title of an overheated political thriller by Glenn Beck, in the last year the Overton Window has been cited everywhere from The New York Times to The Rachel Maddow Show. Despite its peculiar origins and limited applications, pundits increasingly invoke it to describe not only Trumpism, but the Sanders surge, Brexit, and more.
The Overton Window refers to the range of policies on any given issue that are, at that moment, popular enough for a politician to campaign on successfully. Just outside of the window lie “acceptable” policies, and beyond those the “radical” and “unthinkable.” Joseph Overton, a libertarian think tanker who developed the concept at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan in the mid-1990s, sought to move this “window of political possibilities” and bring unpopular ideas into the mainstream. The most effective way to do this, he proposed, was not to advocate for minor, incremental changes to an already accepted idea, but to make the case for a currently “unthinkable” idea, stating it cogently and provoking an informed discussion. These efforts would make radical ideas look more normal, nudging them into the “acceptable” category, and eventually making them politically viable.
Trump’s candidacy, many liberal commentators have suggested, exemplifies Overton’s strategy. By floating extreme policies (build a wall on the Mexican border, ban Muslims from the United States), he has seemingly forced public debate sharply to the right. Meanwhile, the resurgence of socialist politics embodied by Bernie Sanders and British politician Jeremy Corbyn, as well as the passage of right-to-work laws in several states, increasing restrictions on abortion, and the UK’s referendum on EU membership are said to fit the same pattern. Rachel Maddow devoted a segment to the Overton Window before her interview with Sanders last December, explaining how he could shift the consensus leftward. After the jolt of Brexit, John Lanchester began his 5,000-word lament in the London Review of Books with a primer on the concept.
*****
An interesting method of blending 2concepts. Well-done.
Overton re-imagined the linear, left, middle, and right as the linear north, central, and south. Always found the linear approach to be in search of a nebulous middle, rather than understanding it is the set of reasonable/rational people who do not view their world through the sole lens of politics nor appear on a linear line on the X or Y axis., but rather through see through their own kaleidoscope. Perhaps Overton revealed just that by his own multifaceted explanation of when Newton's Law of Gravity meets a Moral Precept.
One can enjoy Yeats yet as reader(s) have pointed out, it's helpful to further understand the man, as well as the poet and playwright.
"Passion and Cunning: An Essay on the Politics of W.B. Yeats." Will not characterize the take beyond it is a worthy read.
Thanks for being one of the oases of sanity, Lucian.
I am happy that a writer and thinker I admire is, like me, and probably you, afraid of the nuttiness careening around our world. I do wonder how a Moonie center could be in PA., and ... that their leader has show biz leanings whereby he not only sings, but throws in that show-bizziest of shtick: Yiddish slang. (See: schlong.) I have believed we were in danger since a disturbed and stupid man became president as a vanity project, and that millions of people voted for him. I don’t think he will be elected again -- but, really, he doesn’t have to. The damage he brought remains.
Some people use Yiddish words without knowing that they are Yiddish words.
Here are some Yiddish words that you might be using without realizing that they are Yiddish: bupkis, chutzpah, klutz, kvetch, mensch, nosh, oy vey, plotz, schmutz, schlep, schmooze, schvitz, shtick, spiel, tchotcke, and tuches (or tushie).
my dad was very fond of referring to a bad person as "a real mal hamovitz" ("Angel of Death," but he really meant "really shitty person). it's Hebrew, but is the same in Yiddish, according to the old Yeshiva guy at the piano in my avatar.
Hadn’t heard that before, but then I don’t speak Yiddish, only some words that are common. Too bad I didn’t ask my MIL for lessons while she was alive. Yiddish was her first language.
I would say, “That guy’s a real putz!” Your dad’s expression is certainly more creative.
Both of my parents spoke Yiddish. They thought my sister and I didn’t know what they were saying but we figured it out. They thought they were so secretive. 😄 Schmuck is another lovely word that was used frequently in our house along with Oy Vey Esmir!
Somehow, the Yiddish expressions seem more evocative.
Re your parents speaking Yiddish so the kids wouldn't understand, there's actually a name for what they were doing: "Nischt for the kinder." The German origins of that phrase are obvious. The meaning, of course, is "Not for the children"
I hope the Yiddish speakers gathered here appreciate the irony of discussing this subject under the aegis of a host named "Truscott IV!"
Perhaps. The Moonie MAGA rapper, however, surely knows that the word "schlong" is not Korean. (That word would be eumgyeong.)
isn't that why Lennie Bruce used to say that EVERYONE in NYC is Jewish?
Often I see news stories attributed to the Washington Times. Beware! Don't open them!
In case you didn't know:
"The Washington Times was founded on May 17, 1982, by Unification movement leader Sun Myung Moon and owned until 2010 by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate founded by Moon. It is currently owned by Operations Holdings, which is a part of the Unification movement."
The Washington Times - Wikipedia
I was going to mention that, but you beat me to it.
I must disclose that my right-wing military historian first cousin has published book reviews and occasional "think pieces" in the same "Washington Times."
and yes, the correct response is "ew."
Seriously, how did Jews become lovers of the right-wing obnoxious party? Sickening! My parents are turning over in their graves
Now, I'm wondering: to whom should I forward this column? Whose night and day do I wish to ruin by filling their heads with the image of King Whatsisname!
Go ahead, Judith. King Bullethead. The names get more and more, I don’t know, dinosaur like?
god-damned if I don't owe you a letter. and you'll get a chuckle from my avatar. if you haven't already. have I said this before?
An advantage to having a cat -- you can pull up the covers but they'll come get you when it's time for breakfast.
I thought dogs did that.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
I’m genuinely nauseated by any of the possibilities..
Take Graycie, the kittens, and Ruby with you....
The Post Magazine did a cover feature about this group several years ago. I thought they were all insane, ambitious, and dangerous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2018/05/21/feature/two-sons-of-rev-moon-have-split-from-his-church-and-their-followers-are-armed/
These people are nucking futs.
I'm 70 years old and I'm pretty much done. I'll still vote in every election until the fascists make it impossible. I'll donate what I can to worthy causes. I'll vote blue. But I'm done. We have passed the tipping point.
When I saw that 74,000,000 voted for Trump AFTER having closely observed and heard him for over five years...well, that is when I decided that this country was going to die of its own stupidity. That and that gd Electoral College.
I think the Electoral College is doomed anyway - not in my lifetime perhaps (I'm 82), but it is coming..... Texas keeps importing people from other states, especially for tech jobs. Most people who work for tech companies are younger, and most of these are more tolerant and even liberal than the average. At some point, Texas will turn purple for national elections and then blue. When Texas turns blue for national elections, the Republicans will see that they will never take the White House again with the Electoral College - Texas and California (both blue) would have 1/3 of the electoral votes needed to win the election, and even the conservative Republicans will see the wisdom of moving a constitutional amendment to eliminate the Electoral College.....
The curse of humanity is to believe in what does not exist and to use brute force to protect fantasy.
Freedom of speech allows insanity into the public space.What is the solution? Encouraging everyone to read Lucian Truscott and to act responsibly.
Bear repeating:
"The curse of humanity is to believe in what does not exist and to use brute force to protect fantasy."
The curse of humanity is to believe in what does not exist and to use brute force to protect fantasy."
"The curse of humanity is to believe in what does not exist and to use brute force to protect fantasy."
Please stop, fools. I can't begin to understand this madness. Have they no decency and common sense?
No sense, common or uncommon. Decency? Oh, heck no.
That’s too much to ask for from the cray-cray crowd.
The next generation Moonies are worst than the first! I could vomit
Leslie, I just vomited....couldn’t hold it in after reading about Bullethead. Do you believe that name??? OMG
Shlong???? He said Shlong??? I had to laugh, Lucian, as a Jewish New Yorker.....but your fine article does illustrate so vividly how far our society has fallen. I hated the dad and now the son even more. I once saw a Moonie mass marriage in Central Park. Cults can be so powerful and is the reason Bullethead has decided to bigly join the Magats. Thanks for sharing your insight into yet another revolting part of our “evolution”. Shlong???? Really???