Shades of New York‘s ultraorthodox cults! In both the well-established, ongoing theft of tax dollars by ultraorthodox groups in NY, and the more recently uncovered theft of tax dollars by Somali groups in Minnesota, fear of racism/religious bigotry-based lawsuits, and fear that being called out as racist will destroy one’s political career, has stayed the hand of governments in the face of staggeringly obvious crime.

‘Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.’ True, true, so the thing to do is continue stealing in the country that rescued you from that. Stealing from one of our least corrupt states, Minnesota.

The Stockton Look.

If he’d met her at a Catholic singles meet and greet; if she’d been in her mid-twenties… But… nah…

MARIE

You looked like a princess the night we met
With your hair piled up high I will never forget
I’m drunk right now baby but I’ve got to be
Or I never could tell you what you mean to me

I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie

You’re the song that the trees sing when the wind blows
You’re a flower, you’re a river you’re a rainbow
Sometimes I’m crazy but I guess you know
I’m weak and I’m lazy and I hurt you so
And I don’t listen to a word you say
When you’re in trouble I turn away

But I loved you,
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie
I loved you the first time I saw you
And I always will love you Marie

Quebec’s secularizing like mad, adding further restrictions on religious activity/symbols in public settings.

… Bill 21, which was passed in 2019 […] placed a prohibition on ostentatious religious symbols being worn by certain government employees, including teachers, judges, police officers, effectively banning kippahs, turbans, and hijabs. Bill 94, [which is about to pass], extended that ban throughout the entire school system, throughout the entire public education network, extending to cafeteria workers, parent volunteers, daycare personnel, janitors. […] It also imposed a ban on face coverings in the elementary and high school network, as well as banning the use of school property for religious purposes, meaning facilities couldn’t be rented out in the evenings and weekends for religious purposes by local mosques, churches or synagogues. And the Quebec government was very clear that there was more coming. 

… [There will be] a total ban on face coverings from daycare through to university. That means no kneecaps or burkas… Parents coming in will not be allowed to have a face covering. That’s being banned. What’s also going to be banned are halal-only food menus for daycares, the subsidized daycares, so that toddlers have a choice in what they’re eating.

As well, another ban on using the property, prayer rooms in colleges and universities: out.

*********************************

Nothing scandalous here, if the separation of church and state means a lot to you, as it does to Quebec.

*********************************

‘There has been some pushback from the Quebec bishops to the prayer ban. Bishop Martin Laliberté, president of the Quebec Bishops’ Assembly, published an open letter asserting that the “secular nature of the State does not require the secular nature of society.” In an opinion piece for La Presse, Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine wrote that state secularism does “not require the public erasure of faith in society.”

But in a province where only 2 percent of the Catholic population attend weekly Mass, and the political class is tone-deaf if not outright hostile toward religion, the Church is a weak voice in the “common culture” wilderness. One can hope that the saints of New France are interceding on behalf of the new, secular Quebec.‘

This is from the notorious First Things, vehicle of Vermeuleism, so whaddaya expect? Why, given high-profile nutbags running around calling for burning people at the stake, are you surprised that lots of people feel outright hostility toward religion?

And uh actually yes a secular state is overwhelmingly likely to want a shared public life (call it “society”) as free as possible from overtly religious prayers and parades and meetings and proselytizing and all. I wasn’t terribly happy, as a secular person walking around Salt Lake City, to be repeatedly approached by groups of Mormons inviting me to join their church. But I recognize Utah as a very religious state, and okay. Quebec on the other hand is a very secular province, and religious people there should extend the same sort of courtesy.

Even with the new laws, you are apparently going to be able in Quebec to apply for local permission to hold outdoor religious events. Particular municipalities will probably make their own decisions. ‘Short public events with prior approval are exempt.’

Sing it!

Into us is thrust a gun
Glock of squire dipsomal
See the carolers run-run-run
As they sing of Mary's son
As they sing of Mary's son

Answer: Frederick Seidel.

The Epstein story features not only an Epsteinian Harvard president; it features an Epsteinian poetry professor. ‘[Elisa] New discussed her personal projects at length with Epstein, soliciting thousands of dollars in funding from the child sex trafficker several times — years after Harvard said it had stopped taking contributions from Epstein.’ Indifferent, it seems, to his criminality, New excitedly praised and delighted in Epstein in her solicitation emails to him. She was happy – desperate, even – to take his money. She visited Pedo Island, as it was later known, on her honeymoon in 2005, traveling there with Ghislaine Maxwell.

One can only hope that among the poets New sought to tell her audience about was the man of the American Elites hour, Seidel, who rhapsodizes about – in the lilting alliterative words of New’s husband, Summers (in an email exchange with Epstein) – “life among the lucrative and louche.”

Maybe it seems difficult to you – poetizing the selfish lecherous arrogance of the obscenely rich one percent – but Seidel shows that it can be done. The muse of the money masturbators, the bard of the brackish, he versifies “his penchant for hand-built Ducati motorcycles, sex with much younger women, and expensive hotels.”

Let us consider one of his poems, “Widening Income Inequality.”

*****************************

I live a life of appetite and, yes, that’s right,

I live a life of privilege in New York,

Eating buttered toast in bed with cunty fingers on Sunday morning.

Say that again?

I have a rule—

I never give to beggars in the street who hold their hands out.

I woke up this morning in my air-conditioning.

At the end of my legs were my feet.

Foot and foot stretched out outside the duvet looking for me!

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

My feet were there on the far side of my legs.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I don’t really think I am going to.

Obama is doing just fine.

I don’t think I’m going to.

Get up. Giddyup. Get going.

I can see out the window it isn’t raining.

So much for the endless forecasts, always wrong.

The poor are poorer than they ever were.

The rich are richer than the poor.

Is it true about the poor?

It’s always possible to be amusing.

I saw a rat down in the subway.

So what if you saw a rat.

I admire the poor profusely.

I want their autograph.

They make me shy.

I keep my distance.

I’m getting to the bottom of the island.

Lower Broadway comes to a boil and City Hall is boiling.

I’m half asleep but I’m awake.

At the other end of me are my feet

In shoes of considerable sophistication

Walking down Broadway in the heat.

I’m half asleep in the heat.

I’m, so to speak, wearing a hat.

I’m no Saint Francis.

I’m in one of my trances.

When I look in a mirror,

There’s an old man in a trance.

There’s a Gobi Desert,

And that’s poetry, or rather rhetoric.

You see what happens if you don’t make sense?

It only makes sense to not.

You feel the flicker of a hummingbird

It takes a second to find.

You hear a whirr.

It’s here. It’s there. It hovers, begging, hand out.

************************************

Abed, lazy, post-coital, airconditioned, the poet describes his constant trance-state, barely awake even when he eventually goes out to the hot city streets. Infantile, he contemplates at length his feet and their habit of being at the bottom of his legs, and though he tells them to giddyup, they just lie there. Why should he go anywhere? The president is running the country just fine, maintaining the poet’s life of privilege. He thinks maybe – who knows? who cares? – the poor are getting poorer, but for him they represent celebrities, dramatis personae in a play about poverty whose autographs he covets. They’re not real. He admires his fancy shoes as he walks.

He notes, laconically, that he’s no Saint Francis, who gave up his personal wealth to live among the poor; au contraire, he could care less. Nor does it bother him that he himself is a big fat nothing, a Gobi Desert, though maybe he could make something poetic of that comparison… yawn… wake me up when this poem’s over…

And as for nature. As for the beauty of the natural world… that’s all beggars again. A world of people and animals holding out their hands to you asking for food or money or whatever… Fuck them. I live a life of appetite too, but mine is satisfied.

… a picture of him with IM Pei at the 1972 Harvard commencement.

Lawrence Summers has so frequently been airbrushed, and has himself so frequently airbrushed others, it’s a miracle he and his cronies continue in the realm of visibility at all. Harvard law prof Lawrence Lessig (that’s him in my headline) doesn’t really care about that, though:

There’s little need to reform Larry Summers. He will, I suspect, pass quickly from Harvard’s orbit. But it is the culture that would have allowed Larry Summers to be protected that must now be called to account. How could Harvard have allowed this production of Hamlet without the Prince? And will it now commit to a practice that will not protect the elite among us… ?

As you know, UD has wondered for years how Harvard could have airbrushed so corrupt a figure as Summers for so long; she has also long speculated that the appointment of Ma Ingalls (à bas “excessive materialism”!!!) right after Summers was a crude reverse engineer.

I mean, crude but effective. Lasted for years, until Summers’ grody to the maxness eventually sucked the air even out of the most elite of airbrushes. You can sort of see the supersecret superelite Harvard Corporation secretly gathering back then to brushbrushbrush its president’s rep. You can see them sweeping dual-action, adjustable pressure tools over Summers glossies. Keep spraying! Tell no one! Tell Drew Faust to name her price!

Not sure, though, about Lessig’s Hamlet thing. He seems to have in mind a production of Summerskrantz and Epsteinstern.

***********************

An enlargement of this theme.

People are right to sense that, as the [Epstein] emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. 

And C. Lasch, 1995.

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

That Summers, the university’s former president, cultivated Epstein’s presence and money on the Harvard campus and flew on Epstein’s jet has been in the public record for years, but the new dimension of ick shown in the emails released by a congressional committee has set students and faculty aflame.

... Bushmaster.

It's made me quite vertiginous
To find I'm fake indigenous.
Let's hope - with this new clarity -
The real Canadian Cherokee
Aren't feeling too litiginous.

… sounds like the first line of a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song:

When shooting rats with a pellet gun

Watch out for Temple Ben Zion.

And also something else the matter:

Windows hit by bullets shatter.

No one, certainly. And yet the rise to great public positions in our once great republic of Donald Trump, Lawrence Summers, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and other nasty pieces of work, forces the question of personal viciousness and the survival of liberal democracy. If Matt Ford is right that

At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.

then we need to return, at the very least, to Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices and its meticulous anatomy of what’s worst in us, as we try to forge American civic life despite it.

[Summers] is so convinced of his own genius, and he is so convinced that he is smarter than anyone else, that he is very bad at listening to other people, people who might be able to stop him, prevent him from doing really stupid things. I’m sure that he had people telling him, don’t be emailing Jeffrey Epstein, that’s a bad idea. But he would just go ahead and do it anyway because he has that kind of hubris, right?

He did one of the world’s worst ever fixed income trades when he was president of Harvard, where he decided that he was going to build a massive new campus across the river. And he knew that this massive new campus was going to cost a lot of money. And he was also convinced that interest rates were very low and they wouldn’t go down any further. And in fact, they were going to go up further.

And so he reckoned that when Harvard in the future was going to borrow money to build the campus, he wanted Harvard to be able to borrow the money in the future at the interest rates today. So he entered into this incredibly complex sort of future forward swap thingy. And then, of course, interest rates went down rather than up. He had to unwind the swap because they never built the campus. And he cost the university about a billion dollars.