Greetings from the far left coast! Portland’s Rose Festival is in full swing with parades, carnival rides, Fleet Week, art exhibitions, a rose show, a ukulele jam, Royal Rosarian Honorary Knighting Ceremony, Queen’s Coronation…and dragon boat races!
The newsletter previously sent to a small subscriber list from my old Portable Bohemia website moves today to my Substack site with its larger but still modest subscriber list. Personal notes, brief commentary on breaking news, reading and film recommendations, and sundry other this and that will be featured in the newsletter on the first and fifteenth of each month. I will continue to post what I hope are substantive essays on specific themes or topics and the occasional poem at the customary irregular intervals throughout the month. Feedback is always appreciated. We will see how it goes.
Trump trial. Guilty on all counts. Sentencing is scheduled for July 11, four days before the start of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, where the party of law and order is expected to nominate a convicted felon as its candidate for president.
The right is highly agitated by the verdict. Howls for vengeance and violence ring through the halls of Congress and the wider realm of MAGA with demands for a list of Democrats to be imprisoned, execution of Judge Juan Merchan, and shooting leftists. Constitutional scholar Mike Johnson expects Justices on the Supreme Court, many of whom he says he knows personally, to “step in” and “set this straight” to restore faith in the justice system. How this would affect faith in the justice system on the part of the many Americans who believe the verdict is correct does not concern Johnson.
Joe Biden addressed the verdict with the gravitas it warrants:
They found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts. Now he will be given the opportunity, as he should, to appeal that decision, just like everyone else has that opportunity. That's how the American system of justice works.
And it's reckless, it's dangerous, it's irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don't like the verdict. (Bennett, Brooks and Capeheart)
I do not have a clue what any of this portends apart from a rough road ahead.
Anthony Adragna, Johnson in Trump verdict aftermath: ‘I do believe the Supreme Court should step in,’ Politico, May 31, 2024
Geoff Bennett, Brooks and Capehart on Trump’s guilty verdict and what’s next for American politics, PBS News Hour, May 31, 2024
William Brangham, Ali Schmitz, Trump convicted on all 34 criminal charges in New York hush money trial, PBS NewsHour, May 30, 2024
Robin Levinson-King & Kayla Epstein, Who is Juan Merchan, the 'no-nonsense' judge overseeing Trump's hush-money case?, BBC News, May 22, 2024
On Thursday the PBS NewHour aired an interview with Stacy Gilbert, former senior civil military adviser in the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, who resigned after a twenty-year career in the State Department because, she wrote, “I cannot continue working for a government that denies and enables Israel's deliberate carnage in Gaza.”
Nick Schifrin, Ex-State Department official explains resigning over U.S. policy in Gaza, PBS NewsHour, May 30, 2024
Ruy Teixeira revisits the term “epistemic closure,” used during the Obama presidency by “many on the left and some dissenting conservatives” to characterize
fierce advocacy in GOP ranks for even the most dubious right-wing takes on the perfidy of the Obama administration as the product of an intellectual ecosystem that was sealed off from the real world—existing in a bubble through which reasonable criticisms could not penetrate.
While there is still “plenty of epistemic closure going on” in Republican ranks, the phenomenon has spread leftward. Teixeira illustrates this with what he calls the Fox News fallacy:
This is the idea that if Fox News (substitute here the conservative bête noire of your choice if you prefer) criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often. The problem is that an issue is not necessarily completely invalid just because Fox News mentions it.
“Nowhere,” Teixeira writes, “is this epistemic closure stronger than on the progressive left which has had extraordinary success making its views ‘That Which Cannot Be Questioned’ within the Democratic Party mainstream.” Liberal and more moderately progressive critics of dogma about intersectionality, all-encompassing narratives of oppressor and oppressed, the antiracism dictates of Ibram Kendi, etc., are denounced for “punching left.” Dissent is anathema.
The Right Stuff for the Left, The Liberal Patriot, May 23, 2024
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce conducted another show hearing. Committee Republicans savaged university leaders at Northwestern and Rutgers who negotiated with campus protesters instead of immediately bringing in police to bust heads. Committee chair Virginia Foxx and Elise Stefanik led the charge, with Foxx warning that their willingness to negotiate “created a perception” that “encouraged other universities to cave on this” (Ma, Binkley, Rutgers, Northwestern) and Stefanik shrieking about “unilateral capitulation to the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, antisemitic” activists (Lonas, House Republicans). It is almost enough to make one wonder if they are nostalgic for the glory days of Kent State.
Lexi Lonas, House Republicans rail against Northwestern, Rutgers for cutting deals with protesters, The Hill, May 23, 2024
Annie Ma, Collin Binkley, Rutgers, Northwestern defend deals with student protesters: ‘We had to get the encampment down,’ AP, May 23, 2024
Florida spearheads the Republican campaign to undermine public education. The DeSantis program is a model for other red states.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling.
Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools. (Andrew Atterbury, School choice programs have been wildly successful under DeSantis. Now public schools might close, Politico, May 26, 2024)
Memo from the cinema desk: Undine (2020). Directed by Christian Petzold, with Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski. Petzold draws on the European myth of Undine, “a water nymph who becomes human when she falls in love with a man but is doomed to die if he is unfaithful to her” (Britannica).
Undine (Beer) is a historian who gives lectures to visiting groups at a Berlin institute on urban development. The film opens at a café where her boyfriend is breaking up with her because he has met someone else. She does not take it well, warning that if he leaves her, she will have to kill him. Later that day she meets Christoph (Rogowski), an industrial diver who is smitten when he attends one of her lectures.
Petzold strains willing suspension of disbelief but draws me in nonetheless as an improbable sequence of events unfolds into tragedy. The denouement is bleak, its darkness relieved only by faint light in the closing moments.
Paula Beer (b. 1995), who has cited Nina Hoss as a major influence, is compelling. Already she has put together an impressive body of work. Among her other films are Frantz (2016), directed by François Ozon, and Petzold’s Transit (2018) and Afire (2023). She received several nominations for her breakthrough role in Frantz and won the Best Performance Award by an Emerging Actress in Venice. For Undine she earned a Silver Bear at the Berlinale and Best Actress at the European Film Awards.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
middle section is pretty depressing.