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Bear with me, Dear Reader.
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The first step to a season of renewal in our land is the absolute and utter repudiation of Trump and his vile enablers in the 2018 election by electing Democratic majorities.
People tend to think of the Holocaust as an event, or a constant: Hitler came to power, next stop Auschwitz. This is far from historical fact, however. The Holocaust was a process, with a beginning, a middle and, if not an end, then at least a near-culmination. There was an arc that took European societies from accepting Jews as neighbors, fellow citizens and even prominent members of the community — if with a dogwhistle here and there, and occasional down-home Jew-hating talk — to wholesale slaughter, with a side serving of unbridled abuse, rape, torture and gleeful psychological sadism. It didn’t happen overnight.
“I am not a monster,” said every monster ever.
The Serious Journalists of the Both Sides Do It variety know that in the past two weeks, with the avalanche of news of baby jails, baby torture, ICE and Border Patrol straight up disappearing migrant girls, children crying for their mom and dad, fascist goons making fun of children crying for their mom and dad, and more baby torture, the question you’ve really been asking yourself is “But can the best and the brightest among those fascist goons even get laid in the liberal hellhole that is the District of Columbia?”
Take heart, — Serious Journalists of the Both Sides Do It variety have got you covered.
This week, Politico ran a whimsical variation of the Cletus Safari, exploring the amorous trials and tribulations of millenials working for the Trump administration in DC. It will not surprise you that things are tough for the MAGA demographic in the part of the country where they are slightly less popular than necrotizing fasciitis.
I am not going to summarize the article — go and read it for the much-needed dose of schadenfreude — but I do want to focus on this:
When being vague doesn’t cut it, staffers can always straight-up lie, as one young administration official learned to do while working out of New York during the campaign. “I told people I was an auditor down on Wall Street, and people just stopped asking me questions after that,” he recalls. When it comes to disclosing their affiliation with Trump, no ground is more fraught than courtship.
Let’s emphasize: Trump supporters lie to their dates to get them into bed. They lie about something that’s crucial to those dates’ decision on whether or not to get intimate, something that if those dates knew, would be an absolute deal-breaker.
Rape-by-fraud is on the books in only a handful of jurisdictions, and as far as I can tell, DC isn’t one of them. Even if DC had a law like that, I doubt lying about one’s political affiliation would qualify. Still, imagine, for instance, finding out that your new lover is a neo-Nazi who deliberately misled you about what he really is — and you are from a family of Holocaust survivors. I don’t know about you, but I think most people in such a situation would feel violated. It is astounding that these DC Trumpers reveal tricking people into sex, and even relationships, and expect the public to feel sorry for them; the authors of the article appear to share this attitude. This is remarkable, given that while what these DC Trumpers are doing is technically not illegal, this shit skates pretty fucking close to sexual assault. Remarkable, and yet, not surprising in light of everything we know about these people.
It gets worse, though.
Young staffers have had to develop a keen sense of just when to have “The Talk” with romantic partners. “I’ve still been able to hook up with women,” says a male former White House staffer. “But I know that I need to be careful about broaching the Trump stuff. I just know that going in, I need to be able to get it out at the right time and not get it out too early to the point where it’s like, ‘Hey, I worked for Trump, you should stop talking to me,’ but late enough in that eventually they know that there is this information floating out there that I worked for this guy and hopefully you have now seen that I’m not a horrible person and we can go further with this.”
So, not only do Trumpers lie to people to get laid, they make it worse with nakedly egotistical and ongoing emotional manipulation. And again, this is presented as a reason to sympathize with the Trump supporters. Mind games are hard work!
I wonder how the aforementioned “male former White House staffer” reveals his true self to a woman, once he feels he’s put in a long enough performance as a Not Horrible Person. Does he break out his “Fuck Your Feelings” t-shirt? Does he say “womp womp”? Does he call her a “snowflake”? Does he use the fact that she cares about him — feelings that he cultivated through deception — to bully her into conceding that he is “not a horrible person”, all while trivializing her values and disrespecting her boundaries?
Far from inspiring sympathy, this revelation about the MAGA horde infesting DC offers three takeaways:
- It illustrates precisely why normal people find Trump supporters loathsome.
- It illustrates precisely why normal people don’t want to have sex with Trump supporters in the first place.
- It does nothing to dispel the notion that Trump supporters are pathological liars with no values, and not the slightest fucking clue as to what makes a person “not horrible”.
In conclusion and in summary, liberals are mean, this is why Trump won, both sides do it, etc.
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This post was born out of my vague but unrelenting depression over the suicide of Anthony Bourdain (and the predictable Trumpist reaction to it, which I am not going to link to). I wanted to lighten the mood, so I started making a list of some “out there” foods and drinks that I’ve enjoyed (not always literally) over the course of my life.
And you know, a strange and wonderful thing happened.
Those who read my blog know I don’t have a particularly sunny disposition. I tend towards gloom and pessimism, and I absolutely abhor mental exercises meant to be inspirational and uplifting. So it came as a surprise when it occurred to me after making this list: my life has been AWESOME. I’ve been so focused on tragedy, danger, melancholy, anxiety, that I forgot, for a long time, to stop and look back and marvel at what an amazing adventure it’s been so far. I am at once overjoyed, and not a little creeped out by the fact that this unexpected ray of sunshine came into my life from such horror and sadness.
Naturally, when it comes to defining “weird” and “unusual”, your mileage may vary. I quickly decided to exclude stinky cheeses (because boring), and some of the foods won’t raise eyebrows everywhere. So basically, this post is aimed at American eaters, and specifically the subcategory that thinks sausage shouldn’t be made of scraps.
So here is what I’ve eaten:
BLOOD SAUSAGE
I thought I’d start with something I had at Anthony Bourdain’s old restaurant, Les Halles. I am not talking about your regular black pudding, which is mostly flour. The thing I’m referring to is sausage made entirely from congealed porcine blood mixed with pork fat to create a paste, which is then stuffed into casings and pan fried in butter.
This type of sausage is completely black when cooked and has the consistency of tofu and a flavor that’s astonishingly rich. It is a bit too rich, in fact, combined with its butter-like texture. I would treat myself to this dish about once a year when Les Halles was still in operation, and I could never eat more than half a link, about 1/6 of the portion.
SWIM BLADDER
There is a whole ritual involved in eating Russian dried fish. First of all, it’s dried to be point of being rock-hard. A well-made vobla can double as a mallet. Second, it’s served whole, unprepped. That is, the fish is gutted before drying, but is otherwise served with scales and skin on, and bones still inside it. It is a long and arduous process — peeling the leathery skin, pulling strips of amber flesh off the bone, pulling out smaller bones — accompanied by friendly conversation and abundant beer. Using a Russian newspaper as a tablecloth is absolutely mandatory.
There is, however, one internal organ that the Russian drying process leaves behind — and that’s the swim bladder, a two-chamber gas-filled organ that helps fish regulate their buoyancy.
Yum!
Without going too deeply into piscine anatomy, you have to completely deconstruct your fish in order to reach the bladder. Consuming it is the final stage in the ritual. And you can’t just hork it down. You have to light a match (or a lighter, if you are a philistine) and scorch the bladder. It sizzles and shrinks to the size of a pea.
It looks like a booger, but when you eat it, it’s an explosion of umami.
MILT
Milt is fish semen. Surprisingly, various cultures treat it as a delicacy, and there is a variety of ways to prepare it (including sushi, apparently). I had it as a little girl (“It’s like caviar, but from boy fish” was how my mother explained it to me); it was heavily seasoned and pan-fried.
Okay, so what’s it like? Pan-seared milt has the consistency and bland flavor of soft tofu — mostly, it’s a vehicle for seasonings — but with a distinct metallic aftertaste and just a touch of grossness.
Another time, I tried pickled herring milt. Best I can describe that experience is that the horror defies description. Pickled milt was one of the worst things I’ve ever put in my mouth.
HAGGIS
I’m getting hungry just looking at this picture
My husband and I were on a short trip to Scotland, and ordered haggis out of pure curiosity — because outside of Caledonia, haggis is considered joke food. Haggis looks and sounds disgusting, and tastes absolutely delicious. Criminally delicious. For weeks afterwards, I was nostalgic for haggis. Nothing tasted as good as haggis.
Where I live, you can’t find authentic haggis, because offering sheep’s offal for sale is illegal here (and yes, I know that because I’ve looked into how I can get me some haggis at home). So from that vantage point, I can confidently say that haggis alone is worth the airfare to Scotland. If you’ve never had real haggis, put it on your bucket list. It’s that good.
TRIPE
This is one I hesitated putting on the list. Tripe is really common. Ordinary garden-variety chain supermarkets carry it. And yet, everyone I know thinks tripe is weird and gross. Tripe by itself is bland virtually to the point of being tasteless — but in soups, it will contribute a peculiar aroma that some find unpleasant. Soups like mondongo and flaki have that distinct whiff of offal (though I do love flaki). The legendary French medieval dish tripes à la mode de Caen also has that slightly odoriferous quality. Strong-flavored ingredients — tomatoes, chilis — overpower this aroma in stews such as menudo and trippa alla romana, and pack the tripe full of flavor. Mostly, tripe is all about texture. It is chewy and slightly gelatinous, and that’s the quality that seems to divide people. For me it all depends on how it’s prepared. I’ve had tripe dishes that were fantastic and some that were so-so.
ESCAMOLES
Escamoles are larvae and pupae of certain species of ants. Yeah, ant eggs. It’s a delicacy in Mexico City and surrounding areas. Escamoles reminded me of milt. A smidgen less disgusting, but still very similar in flavor, texture and that low-key but perceptible aversive quality. There is a wealth of wonderful recipes for escamoles out there, but to be frank, they are wonderful mostly because of all the other ingredients: garlic, cilantro, lime, mojo de ajo. I had them just once, and I ate a respectable quantity under the curious eye of the waiter, but I realized in the midst of my meal that I was dumping an awful lot of garnishes on my escamoles — because I wanted to hide and overpower them. I guess it wasn’t terrible, but I wouldn’t order it again.
WHALE MEAT
Whale tastes like a cross between lean beef and beef liver. I had mine as a steak smothered in bordelaise, and it arrived at the table full of smoky aromas. But — whale meat also has a certain fishy finish, and as is generally true of the flesh of game that subsists exclusively on smaller marine life, that fishy flavor accumulates in your mouth. It starts out barely perceptable, and over approximately half a dozen bites, becomes really bothersome. Another couple of bites, and I was done.
PICKLED WATERMELON
I love watermelon. I am a big fan of pickling! But watermelon and pickling, together, is like two rights making a wrong. Hell, it’s like two rights had a bastard child. Pickled watermelon has no right to exist. Its soggy texture, in combination with a kind of sweet-and-salty (not sweet-and-sour) flavor that’s just … wrong. To me, it just reeks of urine.
Pickled watermelon is popular among Russian people, and a staple of the Russian delicatessen, so quite a few people enjoy it. My husband loves it. But to show you that I’m not alone in my hatred of this abomination, he once ordered it in a fancy Brighton Beach restaurant when we were having dinner with a non-Russian friend who had never tried Russian food before. She took a bite of the pickled watermelon and immediately began retching. Not only did she spit it out, she rubbed her tongue and the inside of her mouth with her napkin, like a maniac. So yeah, I’d say this is definitely an acquired taste.
HUITLACOCHE
Perhaps the strangest of edible mushrooms, huitlacoche is corn smut. It is a parasite that turns corn into this:
Bon appetit
This fucked up corn, however, is a delicacy in Mexican cuisine. The bluish fungus is cooked over low heat until it turns into a tender black paste almost free of starch. Huitlacoche tastes earthy and mushroomy. It is frequently likened to truffles, although I must say you would never confuse the two. It is delicious. If you can get past the fact that it’s a parasitic fungus, you will enjoy it.
PANI CA MEUSA
It’s the one on the left
You have to go to Palermo for this one.
Pani ca meusa is a sandwich made with veal spleen that has been boiled, sliced into strips and fried in lard. It is very yummy (the meat is tender and deeply flavorful), but the knowledge that you consuming approximately a month’s worth of calories somewhat detracts from the experience.
KVASS
Kvass is an ancient Russian drink, mentioned in medieval sources, along with medovukha (honey-wine) and sbiten’ (herbal and berry tea). Kvass made from mashed and fermented black sourdough rye, sometimes additionally flavored with honey and berries.
This is not to be confused with soft-drink kvass sold out of barrels on the street in the former Soviet Union, or in Russian grocery stores.
The latter is a fairly conventional caramel-and-citrus flavored soft drink, very similar to cola, but slightly less sweet, more acidic, and more “yeasty”. It is not, to my knowledge, actually made from fermented rye. (By the way, definitely try it; don’t be turned off by the “yeasty” part. Also, except for the pointed lack of zero-calorie or low-sugar versions, Russian soft drinks ROCK. So if you ever sin against health by treating yourself to a sugary soda, try a Russian one. Non-alcoholic kvass is the king of them all, a godsend in hot summer weather, but there is also Tarhun, which I loved as a child (green and tarragon-flavored), Duchesse (peach-flavored) and whatever that rosewater-flavored thing is.)
Real, traditional kvass is, different and, to my knowledge, not made for mass production. It is slightly alcoholic (about 5% by volume), brownish, cloudy and tastes strongly of yeast. I like it, but it’s not for everyone.
In a particularly bizarre twist, the traditional summer soup “okroshka” is made by pouring chilled kvass over a medley of chopped sausages, cucumbers, hardboiled eggs and radishes.
So imagine a soup that consists of cold beer with sausages and eggs swimming in it. Actually, a lot of people will probably think that’s awesome.
SALO
Yes! Pure unrendered pork fat!
Salo is extremely popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. It is made by heavily salting and curing slabs of raw fatback in temperatures that hover around freezing. Apart from the salt, the curing ingredients vary. There is the “Hungarian-style” salo, caked in hot paprika ground to such fine powder that it forms a paste around the slab. My favorite, though, involves studding the salted fatback with slivers of garlic and rolling it in coarsely ground black pepper.
In the old days, before refrigeration, pigs were typically slaughtered in late fall. Fatback would be salted and seasoned, wrapped in muslin cloth impregnated with wax and cured in a barn or a larder. Salo would be ready for consumption by early to mid-December, and provide valuable additional calories during the severe Russian winter. These days, salo is cured in a refrigerator, wrapped in wax paper. It is ridiculously easy to make; my parents often made their own salo from raw fatback when we lived in Russia.
Properly cured salo is gleaming-white, with a bit of pink in the middle. It can keep indefinitely in the freezer, because it doesn’t get frostbite. Good salo does not taste greasy. It has a firm, non-chewy texture and a flavor similar to but more delicate than that of bacon. There are many ways to eat it, but my favorite is an open sandwich made from black rye and curled, paper-thin shavings of frozen salo, with perhaps some additional fresh garlic. And for godssakes don’t put any dressings or condiments on it.
BEEF TONGUE
Cooking it is a long, complicated process, but beef tongue dishes are fantastic. The muscle fibers of beef tongue are tough, but at the same time, it is very well marbled, so it’s a cut that manages to strike the perfect balance between tender and chewy. It also absorbs flavors remarkably well. Pretty much every beef tongue dish I’ve had — smoked tongue with truffle oil, boiled tongue with sautéed cabbage, stewed tongue with plum sauce, Russian head cheese — has been amazing.
CHICKEN FEET
Delicious, but too much work.
MEDOVUKHA
Konstantin Makovsky, “A Cup Of Honey” (1880’s)
Medovukha is a slightly alcoholic drink made from honey fermented with yeast. I was 10 when my father and I went to visit Sergeyev Posad — basically, the Russian Orthodox Vatican. On our way out of the citadel that afternoon, we came upon a couple of matushkas ( i.e. presbyterae), swaddled in black from head to toe, selling homemade medovukha from a makeshift stand. My father bought himself a mug, but when I asked for mine he said I couldn’t have any because it was alcohol.
“It’s only 5%. You can buy her one,” said one of the matushkas.
“Five percent, are you sure?” asked my dad, eyeing the amber-colored liquid in his mug with suspicion.
“Maybe six,” conceded the matushka.
“No more than seven,” said matushka #2.
“We give it to our kids all the time,” added matushka #1.
Now my dad had been backed into a corner for it is unthinkable to doubt the word of a matushka or to impugn her parenting, however obliquely. So he bought me a mugful.
The medovukha was very sweet and fizzy, and immediately made me want to sit down. I waddled over to our bus, climbed into my seat and immediately passed out. My father could barely get me to wake when the bus got back to Moscow.
From the bus station, he dragged me home like a semi-tranquilized mule, cursing about “hooch” the whole way. I slid into sweet, pleasant somnolence in the metro, on the train, on the local bus. Meanwhile, my father was working on a cover story.
“Don’t tell her I gave you anything to drink,” he said several times during our journey. “Tell her you’re just tired.”
“Okay,” I would say before dozing off.
“You didn’t drink anything.”
“Okay.”
I climbed the stairs to our apartment on viscous legs, savoring the thought that I would be in bed in a few minutes.
“Don’t tell her I gave you anything to drink.”
“Okay.”
“Just say you’re tired if she asks.”
“Okay.”
When my mom opened the door, I immediately announced:
“Hi, mom. Dad didn’t give me anything to drink. I’m just tired.”
“What …?” she started.
“I didn’t drink any hooch,” I assured her before sinking onto a chair, where I immediately fell asleep.
R.I.P.
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This week, the voters of Santa Clara County, California, recalled Judge Aaron Persky by a large margin. Good riddance.
In 2016, Persky presided over the trial of Brock Turner, a Stanford freshman convicted of rape assault with the intent to commit rape and “penetration of an intoxicated woman”. The case generated a tornado of media coverage, and featured a shattering victim impact statement, an obnoxious dad and sanctimonious victim-blaming. Persky sentenced Turner to six months in jail (he ultimately only served three) and three years’ probation. The sentence was widely condemned as shockingly lenient, considering the circumstances of the crime, and ultimately cost Persky his judgeship.
During the nasty, messy recall campaign Persky’s defenders have been both vocal and eloquent in their opposition. The argument of the anti-recall campaign boils down to the idea that Persky merely followed California’s sentencing guidelines, which enumerate factors relevant to considering leniency.* Another, frankly paradoxical, justification for Persky’s sentence is that the guidelines simultaneously give judges a lot of discretion in sentencing AND somehow tie judges’ hands. If you care about this case, I urge you to read not only the victim’s impact statement, but also Brock Turner’s statement and Judge Persky’s sentencing decision. Having read all those, here is where I believe Persky and his defenders went wrong:
I
Brock Turner committed a violent crime.
Rape — whether “rape-rape” (with a dick, and punches to the head) or “quasi-rape” (with objects or fingers, of a person who cannot resist because she is unconscious, comatose or paralyzed) — is not like selling a bag of weed, pilfering a tablet from Staples or operating an unlicensed gambling den. Rape is a violent crime. It is absolutely astounding to me how many people, even now, nearing the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, can’t wrap their mind around this fact.
Brock Turner committed a violent crime.
Everything else about him must be viewed through that lens. This is not to say that it is impossible for a violent criminal to demonstrate redeeming qualities — but there is no rationale I can grasp for considering the supposed evidence of his good character in a vacuum, as if he were applying for a camp counselor’s job, as opposed to, say, asking for a discount on the sentence for having committed a violent crime. Brock Turner is not a nice boy. He is not a promising young man. He is a violent fucking felon, and whatever else he’s done in his young life has to be weighed against that.
This, in my opinion, is the most fundamental problem with former Judge Persky’s decision. He simply brushed aside the fact that Turner committed an incarceration-worthy crime, and never acknowledged the fact that the crime was a violent one. He treated his conviction, and the facts of the case, almost as if they were irrelevant.
II
Persky’s finding that Turner had demonstrated remorse is absolutely mind-boggling to me. Turner’s statement does nothing of the sort. Oh, sure, Turner was sorry that this “20 minutes of action” (as his father put it), turned out so badly for him. He was sorry he had lost a chance at a Stanford education, or a career in professional sports, or a life of easy bourgeois respectability. He was sorry he had to be so sad now. But at no point did he express regret for the victim having to live with the consequences of his violent act perpetrated upon her.
His letter is not merely devoid of remorse and brimming with self-pity. It is positively oblivious in its treatment of the victim as an afterthought.** (And, lest you think his egotism is accidental, keep in mind this letter was minutely examined, edited and polished by his lawyers.)
Persky did acknowledge this fact to some degree in his decision, but credited Turner for the “honesty” in how the perpetrator saw the events (something bad that happened to him), and deemed that “honesty” an acceptable substitute for actual remorse. That is something the guidelines, quoted by Persky in his decision, do not even remotely justify. He simply injected his own personal belief that candor about one’s lack of a conscience is as good as having a conscience.
As nutty as Persky’s take was, Turner’s statement was not even candid. It is untruthful on its face. Turner claimed that growing up in a small Ohio town (cue a fucking banjo or whatever), he never experienced alcohol-fueled party culture, and thus arrived in jaded California a naive country boy. A few paragraphs later, he claimed he didn’t think imbibing alcohol liberally was a big deal because he had spent his whole life around people who drank every day. So which is it? Everyone in Norman Rockwell country, including minors, gets sauced every day, but at parties they only drink lemonade, because of reasons? I admit I’ve never lived in a small town in Ohio, but this does not seem believable to me.
Turner claimed he was drunk during the incident (the insinuation being that he did not know what he was doing) — but at the same time, he recounted the events in minute, excruciating (and of course, self-serving) detail. So which is it? He was so drunk, he didn’t realize shoving his meat hooks (and dirt, and pine needles) into the vagina of a passed-out woman is wrong, but he was sober enough to preserve a photographic memory of every tiny detail of how he’s innocent? And sober enough to bolt when caught in the act?
Turner claimed he had never been in trouble with the law enforcement prior to his arrest for assaulting Emily Doe. That too, was false.***
Turner’s claim that he had never taken illicit drugs and never engaged in hard partying in Ohio: also a lie.
His statement was glaringly, demonstrably false in several respects. Lack of candor to a tribunal is as clear an indication of a lack of remorse as it gets. Persky ignored Turner’s multiple falsehoods.
Also not remorse: blaming impersonal, amorphous forces for one’s actions. Turner blamed the “party culture”. He blamed alcohol. He blamed California. He blamed his innocent upbringing. He blamed casual sex. Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, he deflected the blame onto abstract concepts. Neither casting oneself as a victim of circumstances, nor disclaiming responsibility for one’s actions can be reasonably interpreted as remorse.
III
This leads to the other relevant factor listed in the guidelines, whether the perpetrator poses a risk for reoffending. Statistically, most rapists are repeat offenders, so it’s a crime with a documented high risk of recidivism. Add the aforementioned lack of remorse. Add the fact that Turner was quickly released into the bosom of his family, who believe their good boy deserves pity because he’s lost interest in eating red meat. The likelihood that Turner will commit another sexual assault is high. He is just going to be craftier about it.
IV
Former Judge Persky is not known for right-wing lunacy. He is not an overt misogynist. And I believe he was well-meaning in sparing certain defendants from having to do time in a state notorious for its overcrowded prisons, even for a country which is generally notorious for mass incarceration, obscenely long sentences and brutal prison conditions.
That said, I have stated before that I feel very queasy about people adopting the arguments of social justice in favor of leniency for the perpetrators of crimes that have a history of being trivialized, ignored, underprosecuted and even underreported — which would include, of course, the rape of any woman slightly less virtuous than the Virgin Mary by a privileged young buck with a “bright future”. American sentencing and prison systems are in need of a reform, but it can’t start with those kinds of crimes.
Overincarceration is a problem in the American justice system, but so is insidious misogyny, which informs the judgment of even superficially progressive people; people who will outwardly reject the notion that women are inferior, but somehow assume that certain crimes aren’t real crimes. And what do you know, Persky had a history of going easy on rapists, child molesters, wife-beaters and girlfriend-punching college athletes.
V
Where states permit judges to substitute probation or “time served” for a prison sentence, one of the factors prescribed by the guidelines is the degree of harm that would result to the defendant from the incarceration. Obviously, anyone who goes to prison is harmed by it. Prison is harmful by nature. Persky acknowledged as much in his decision, but then he just kind of dropped it. (It is but one of several instances of laziness expressed in his opinion.) What legislatures have in mind when enacting such guidelines is convicts who are more vulnerable than the general population, and would therefore suffer extraordinary harm from incarceration. This category would include people who are mentally ill, very elderly, those suffering from life-threatening physical illness, pregnant women, etc. It’s harm to those kinds of defendants that judges have an opportunity to prevent. Young felons in good health being deprived of mommy and their favorite comfort foods isn’t the kind of “harm” that makes incarceration inadvisable.
VI
For the life of me, I can’t understand why character statements play a role in sentencing at all. Brock Turner is an unapologetic rapist. That is his character. Glowing testimonials of all the nice things he has done for himself (his grades, his athletic achievements, his love of steak) only reinforce the notion — reflected in Turner’s own statement — that what “happened” is all about him. Don’t punish him too harshly, Mr. Judge, for the awful thing he’s done to himself — look at all the non-awful things he’s done for his future! It’s as if he is the only person affected by the crime; as if the very concept of accountability — to others — is incomprehensible or offensive.
Character statements are full of platitudes. They are invariably positive. They do not give an accurate picture of the defendant’s character, because those who have a negative opinion of him are not invited to comment. If, prior to the rape, he’s ever done things that are disturbing, despicable, and so forth, character statements won’t mention them. These letters pass through the defense team, so nothing that contains any negative information whatsoever gets through to the judge. The authors of such letters do not get cross-examined. The facts they assert (to the extent they assert any) are not verified.
Any reasonably “together” middle-class family can organize a letter-writing campaign on behalf of their felonious baby. Brock Turner was a star athlete in a small town. It’s not surprising his parents managed to get 38 people to write letters about what a swell guy Brock was.
Another factor that casts doubt on the credibility of letters by friends and neighbors is that such people are pressured to write them simply by virtue of their relationship to the family. The aftermath of the decision showed that at least some of the authors did it as a nice gesture and were not terribly committed to vouching for Brock Turner’s stellar character. A friend of his from high school, a musician, apologized for her victim-blaming diatribe once the blowback began to affect her gig bookings. Another “character witness”, a guidance counselor … excuse me, excuse me, a guidance counselor??? What insights into one’s moral character would a guidance counselor have? I was a star student in high school, and I met my guidance counselor maybe three or four times. Whatever that woman knew about me came from my manicured college applications — which were, by their very nature, self-serving. Anyway, Brock Turner’s guidance counselor also stepped back from her boilerplate, wisely figuring that advocating for a rapist to skate wasn’t the hill she wanted to die on.
Bottom line: while I don’t discount the possibility that a letter coming from a completely independent source and recounting specific events that demonstrate good character, on balance, character letters are bullshit.
VII
The discretion to consider “the role of alcohol” is yet another manifestation of sex crimes being treated as quote-unquote different. Judge Persky should have been careful not to make it yet another tired argument about how sometimes, men just can’t help themselves. It’s not that different from the repugnant “truism” that the fly of a man’s pants (or some petting, or a kiss, or the sight of a cleavage) is a sexual Rubicon beyond which it is simply unrealistic or inhumane to expect a man to stop. There is a depressingly effective answer to this argument.
One of its proponents once painted a familiar hypothetical in a debate with me. Imagine, he said, a man and a woman flirt all night. She is seductively dressed. They go back to her place, they make out. She undresses to her underwear, the man pulls down his zipper. He’s aroused. And then she’s like, haha, joke, I dunwanna. Think the man would be able to stop?
To which I responded with a similar hypothetical. Imagine, I said, a man and a woman flirt all night. She is seductively dressed. They go back to her place, they make out. She undresses to her underwear, the man pulls down his zipper. He’s aroused. And then her father walks in. Think the man would be able to stop?
Something similar happens with alcohol. While Brock Turner was assaulting he victim, two cyclers came upon him. As soon as they shouted at him, he bolted and ran. After his arrest, he had the presence of mind to lie to the police. In other words, while alcohol may have altered his assessment of the likelihood of being caught, it certainly did not impair his ability to act in his own self-interest. (Not to mention the fact that he had a prior arrest for underage drinking and was aware that it was illegal for him to drink.)
Rape is not an impulsive crime. It’s a crime of opportunity. If the assailant is lucid enough to take steps to get away with it, he’s lucid enough to understand that what he’s doing is wrong.
Brock Turner’s behavior at the scene and immediately after his arrest shows that he understood that Emily Doe did not consent. His level of alcohol is irrelevant under these circumstances. That it was unreasonable for him to think he wouldn’t get in trouble isn’t equivalent to him believing he wasn’t doing anything wrong.
But what about the fact that alcohol impaired his judgment? you might ask. The problem with putting it like that that the commission of a violent crime in any state is a manifestation of poor judgment. Alcohol is an explanation, not a mitigating factor.
FIN
With all due respect to Persky’s defenders, I don’t think we have to worry about the “precedent” of judges being recalled for rendering unpopular decisions.**** He is the first American judge to be recalled since 1977 (and his predecessor in that honor likewise lost his judgeship over sentencing in a rape case). The precedent that we should worry about is letting rapists — particularly rapists from “respectable families”, rapists with a “bright future” — off with a slap on the wrist. Because that is a precedent that actually exists. And it is that precedent — of treating violent crimes by men against women as not a big deal — that Persky’s recall is likely to change.
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*Tangentially, a bit of law stuff: the sentencing guidelines enumerate the factors that a judge may evaluate when determining the appropriate sentence. They do not actually prescribe how those factors are to be determined. It’s less “if the defendant was drunk, then no jail time” and more “the court may consider the role of alcohol in the commission of the crime”. So it is not like former Judge Persky submitted to the guidelines; rather, he used them as a framework for his shameful sentence. Also, parenthetically, while judges take the recommendation of the parole officer seriously, this doesn’t mean they should just rubber-stamp it. All the flaws I discussed in Persky’s decision apply equally to the parole officer’s report, and Persky should have identified and rectified them.
**From Brock Turner’s statement:
I can barely hold a conversation with someone without having my mind drift into thinking these thoughts. They torture me.
GOOD. That’s how you become a better person.
***The link about Brock Turner 2014 arrest is to an article published in 2016. However, Judge Persky would have known about Turner’s prior criminal history had he done his minimal homework. Whether or not someone has been arrested is an easily resolved factual issue. It would have taken Persky’s clerk minutes to find out.
****Persky infamously compared his sentencing of Brock Turner to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The comparison is ahistorical. Racists tend to be vocal and destructive out of all proportion to their numbers. In reality, the idea of desegregation wasn’t nearly as unpopular in 1954 as Persky’s comment would suggest. Contrary to his insinuation, most Supreme Court justices are mindful of larger societal trends and hesitant to issue rulings that would be intensely unpopular with the majority of the country’s population. Here is an in-depth discussion of that subject from the vantage point of marriage equality. (Of course, the long-standing unwritten rule of judges’ sensitivity to the feelings of the majority of Americans is liable to change under Trumpism.)
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Library of Sarajevo, 1992. Muscular and ethnic identitarian ideas well-represented.
Why are American colleges and universities so liberal? That’s one college-related question you hear right-wingers ask often. “Why are there so few conservative professors?” is another. Why are conservative viewpoints not being taught? Why are college students so “intolerant” of free speech, specifically speech that advocates white “identitarianism” and “political incorrectness”? Why are the academia such snowflakes?
Now, I could go into great detail about how conservatives actually do have a sizable (and loud) presence on college campuses, and how extreme allegations about colleges “indoctrinating” students or “teaching communism” come from people who have never set foot in the academia. But, while this is true, I want to acknowledge that at the end of the day, the academia does lean markedly left. The purpose of this entry isn’t to dispute the degree of the lean; it’s to explain why it leans left at all. So if you are a conservative and you are wondering why college students and teachers are generally hostile to conservatism, here is your multipart answer.
1. Conservatives have NOTHING to offer college students, professors and graduates. Let’s start with economics, because while the culture wars may be fun, money is what ultimately shapes politics, at least for people who have a minimum of two brain cells to rub together. The present situation of college students and graduates, and those who teach them, is nothing if not economically calamitous. Tuition rates have grown by leaps and bounds — base tuition at my alma mater has nearly tripled since I graduated 19 years ago — but wages have stagnated and employment prospects, if anything, have grown worse. At the same time, even while raising tuition to Everest-level heights, universities across the country have been cutting back on actual academics (which you’d think was a university’s whole raison d’être). Massive influxes of funds have gone towards a bewildering construction frenzy and an equally bewildering administrative bloat, while teaching positions have withered away and instructors who do the heavy lifting of educating college students — i.e. postdocs and adjuncts — suffer a kind of poverty that’s nothing short of obscene. Speaking of indoctrination, wealthy businessmen and corporations have been encroaching on the academia, supplanting traditional charitable donations designed to support scholarship with “endowments” intended to strong-arm schools into abandoning honest academics in favor cultivating propagandists. And in the media, conservative blowhards, far from acknowledging the financial burdens that the academia faces, have reviled college students and college instructors for the gall of wanting to get paid for work at all.
Can you think of any Republican policy or idea designed to alleviate these hardships? Nothing, apart from bog-your standard Republican “give huge tax cuts to bloated 60-year-old billionaires, and good-paying jobs for everyone will magically appear”, comes to mind. In fact, Republican economic policies are explicitly designed to do the opposite. Republican politicians relentlessly attack the ability of teachers to negotiate better wages, they deregulate the lending industry and they do everything in their power to enable predatory for-profit and financing schemes. Meanwhile, ideologically, conservatives never cease to attack college students and graduates as entitled and lazy, even while unpaid internships and even unpaid jobs proliferate.
College students, graduates and instructors are not stupid. They know on which side their bread is buttered, and they know the conservative assault on scholarship under the guise of “fighting political correctness” doesn’t do squat for their ability to survive. Even for those who feel their school is too Politically Correct, the ability to publicly call women “fat bitches” and having people nod in approval doesn’t mean much if you can’t afford rent. The entire Republican economic and regulatory policy is a huge “fuck you” to the academia and all its constituent parts (except for administrators who do no academic work). Republican policies do nothing to alleviate the mounting financial burden on college students and their families, stabilize non-tenured instructors’ wages or improve the job market for teachers and college graduates. And, if all that weren’t bad enough, Republicans are also fighting college students’ ability to engage in non-procreative sex without severe financial repercussions (never a winning strategy with young people) and try to make it harder for college students to vote. So … why should the academia be welcoming to conservatives? Seriously, what’s in it for the academics? Since conservatives claim to love the free market so much, perhaps that’s the lens through which they should look at the problem. If people aren’t buying what you are selling, the problem is with your product and your pitch; don’t blame the buyer.
Last but not least, in enacting Trump’s tax cuts (for the ultra-wealthy), Republicans came within an inch of imposing huge tax penalties on graduate students, of all people, in an effort to gut the academia. The proposal to tax tuition waivers on people who earn poverty wages while keeping this country at the forefront of scholarship was not just mean to graduate students; it was an all-out assault on higher education. Had it succeeded, American universities would have been destroyed, period. And while this egregious measure ultimately did not pass (this time), Republicans have studded their tax bill with other, somewhat lesser measures designed to hobble universities and discourage charitable donations to them.
Perhaps the most bizarre facet of this complaint by conservatives that the academia is hostile to their ideology is that conservatives have never treated the academia as a constituency. They treat it as an enemy, and then wonder why the edumacated folk are mean to them.
2. There are few conservative academic scholars because conservatives do not value academic careers. I remember College Republicans at my alma mater always bitching that there were far fewer conservative professors than liberal professors on campus. Incidentally, none of them wanted to become professors. They were all going to be Wall Street financiers. I imagine most of them are; and I doubt they encourage their kids to go into the academia. Becoming a professor — in any field of study — is a labor of love, not a money-making endeavor. It entails decades of hellish, grossly underpaid work, insane levels of competition, a great deal of uncertainty. The long-shot success consists of a job that’s secure and respected (mostly by liberals), but usually doesn’t pay that much. All this makes academic careers anathema to most conservatives. The conservative view of education is that you go to school to make money, the end. Anyone who learns for the sake of becoming learned is a fool and a freak. Is it any wonder most conservatives who could, theoretically, rise to professorship levels prefer more lucrative careers? One of the core beliefs of conservatism is that pursing any career path that isn’t a money-maker is a sign of moral degeneracy. But the dearth of qualified candidates doesn’t stop conservatives from blaming “liberal bias” for the disparity between the numbers of liberal and conservative academics.
If conservatives want more conservative professors, maybe they should stop trashing the academia and encourage their own to pursue careers in higher education. As of now, conservatives prefer to address this issue by advocating for some kind of affirmative action for conservatives, and, of course, gun laws designed to permit right-wing goons to engage in violent intimidation of students and professors on college campuses.
3. Conservatives have no respect for the sacrifices college students make. When I was in college, I worked in a cafeteria. On week nights, I would come home between 10:30 and 11:00 p.m., take a quick shower to wash the orange juice and mashed potatoes out of my hair and get started on my assignments. I considered it a good day if I was in bed by 3 a.m. Lectures started at 8 a.m. And I was by no means unique. While some students had the luxury of focusing entirely on the academics (which was no picnic either), most worked — in grueling, physically demanding jobs. Some waited tables. Some moonlighted as movers. Some drove taxicabs. Most college kids I’ve known spend upwards of 60 hours a week on academics and work physically demanding part-time jobs on top of that. To demand that they welcome, and respectfully listen to, someone who calls them entitled and lazy is an impermissible demand on their time, if nothing else.
4. Academic communities are understandably hostile to people who seek to destabilize them. That’s an understandable reaction on behalf of any community, despite whatever differences of opinion exist within them. The stated aim of most right-wingers who try to break into the college lecture circuit — epitomized by men like the now-mostly-defunct Milo Ya-whatever and Richard Spencer — is to stir shit up. That’s all. Their explicit aim is to create chaos. Imagine how receptive you would be to a visit from someone who just wanted to set your house on fire. Not out of malice, of course, but to provoke a discussion.
5. Conservatives are unique and extra-special snowflakes. What right-wing, and even mainstream media usually omits from these discussions is that college communities react strongly to any speaker perceived to be extremist, not just American right-wingers. The most massive protest at my school during my time in college was not against any right-wing visitor, but against a visit by Al Sharpton (who, I think, was much more radical then than he is now). When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University in 2007, there were intense protests by members of the Columbia U community — so the reception he encountered was certainly less positive than the reaction Ben Shapiro usually elicits; and Ahmadinejad’s blatherings, unlike Shapiro’s, were preceded by a lengthy statement from the university president, pre-emptively denouncing what he was about to say.
Conservatives claim that they encounter unique persecution on campuses, yet experience does not bear out those claims — which explains why these claims seem to perform best among people who have never been to college. College Republicans at my alma mater never ceased screeching about the unfairness of the existence of Muslim student groups, and anti-Israel student groups, and feminist student groups, and generally, student groups whose philosophy and purpose did not hew to conservative orthodoxy. Of course, there were also religious groups on campus; and pro-Israel groups; and conservative groups who also got funding, space and freedom to operate. College Republicans themselves got the exact same treatment as the organization of Iranian-American students, whom the College Republicans suspected of double loyalties. It didn’t matter. In conservatives’ view, the very existence of organizations that aren’t conservative is an act of ongoing oppression of conservatives. When called on this, conservative “intellectuals” will point to pre-1960’s First Amendment jurisprudence, which allowed room for sedition laws, and the destruction of subversive literature, somehow co-existing with freedom of expression. That such a “balanced view” of free speech is a petard that can hoist conservatives as well as liberals doesn’t enter their thinking — yet another sign that a “conservative intellectual” is an oxymoron. They do not bother with constructing a sound argument to justify their view of “fairness” requiring that only ultra-conservatives be allowed a voice. “Free speech” as conservatives understand it is where conservatives say and do whatever they want, and no one else is allowed to express views that are contrary or upsetting to conservatives. By its adherents’ own philosophy, conservatism can only thrive when every other viewpoint is suppressed.
That plays well with people who aren’t in the habit of thinking, not so much with the academic set. Which explains why authoritarians have always hated real intellectuals.
6. Conservatives like provocation until they don’t. When I was a senior in college, the newspaper published by College Republicans ran a “controversial” cartoon. This was still in an era of mostly print media, and I can’t find a copy of that edition online, so you’ll just have to live with my summary of it: the cartoon implied that abortion kills way more black people than trigger-happy cops, so abortion is the real racism. Sound familiar? I mean, it’s a well-worn conservative trope, like all conservative tropes. I am not going to tell you how you should feel about it, but suffice it to say, a lot of people on campus felt that the cartoon was both racist and misogynistic. After the cartoon ran, an African-American activist removed a bunch of copies of the conservative paper that had been deposited in a public place and demonstratively burned them. Ritualistically burning literature is not an action I agree with, but that’s besides the point. College Republicans demanded that the university investigate and punish the evil-doer. The administration declined, because it reasoned: (a) publishing an offensive cartoon is a form of protected expression, but so is symbolically burning it; sometimes controversial expressions clash, get over it; and (b) since the paper in question was free, and the copies were taken from a place where they had been deposited to be accessible to all, the papers weren’t “stolen”; (c) maybe try having a dialogue instead of calling the cops.
As I said, I don’t like the notion of burning literature, because book-burning is a distinctly authoritarian, illiberal reaction to arguably offensive ideas. Still, to borrow a common right-wing justification for extremist stunts, maybe the point was to provoke a discussion? (In fact, the activist who burned the papers said something in that vein.) Right-wingers love “edginess” for the sake of provocation — a.k.a. trolling — don’t they? Alas, not in this case. That anyone found their cartoon offensive and dehumanizing — oh well, tough shit, freedom of speech, deal with it. That someone ritualistically destroyed a bunch of copies of that cartoon — now, that was an intolerable assault on human liberty and conservative dignity, and could not be cured with a mere robust discussion. Nothing short of the perpetrator being forced to commit seppuku in the main quad would right the wrong.
And this was far from an isolated incident. Conservatives on campus lost their shit in 1996, when both the Citadel and Virginia Military Institute were forced to change their policies and start enrolling female cadets. Their newspaper ran a column which argued that there should be no co-ed education, period, and that the presence of women at our own university was an intolerable “distraction” to male students; that women — who constituted nearly 50% of the student body and a good chunk of the faculty — contributed nothing to the institution, but made it harder for men to learn. A few issues later, the same paper ran a column about mean college women not wanting to date conservatives, and how this was a sign of feminism run amok. And that was the pattern. Conservatives would publish something outrageous, then whine that no one wanted to fuck them. They would do their level best to get a rise out of people, then shame people who were understandably provoked. It was the conservative modus operandi then, and it is their modus operandi now, both on campuses and elsewhere.
Since conservatives love brutal honesty, they should internalize this bit of reality: when you deliberately try to make people hate you, don’t then complain that people hate you.
7. Conservatives are ideological philistines. We liberals are often told that we should engage conservatives respectfully. Not too long ago, I tried to have a respectful dialogue with a conservative about what’s really taught in Women’s Studies courses (it was actually called “Gender Studies” in my school). I pointed out that in the academic circles, feminism is reversing the default erasure of women from scholarly discourse; and more broadly, the study of the immense influence that gender has had on culture. In passing, I mentioned that most authors I read in Gender Studies courses weren’t even self-described feminists, and at least half were men. I gave a few examples, and my interlocutor began trashing those (male) authors — none of whose works, mind you, he had ever read. Here is the idea that I simply could not drill into his thick skull: I don’t give a squat if you don’t like Jacques Lacan; my larger point is that Women’s Studies isn’t about what you think it’s about. It was a notion the conservative just could not grasp. And that is because conservatives understand college to be a place where malleable young people are put in a trance-like state and taught a set of mantras; where every assigned text is taught as gospel; and therefore, the best way to hurt me in my feminist feelings parts is to call Jacques Lacan a “Marxist cuck moron”. (And while we are on the subject of philistinism, take note of this little fact: conservatives’ most durable contribution to culture in the past thirty years or so is introducing the word “cuck” into the general parlance.)
This little anecdote illustrates conservatives’ inability to comprehend, much less to accept, the very concept of education and scholarly inquiry. They call upon people to think critically, they describe liberals as “lemmings” in thrall of the MSM — but conservative politicians consistently try to push bills that would make it illegal for professors to assign texts or discuss ideas that would lead students to question their a priori beliefs. They think the purpose of higher education is to reinforce those beliefs, not impart knowledge or expose students to different viewpoints.
To conservatives, education is simply giving students a set of talking points. That’s why they are so upset about there not being an equal number of conservatives faculty, and they think they are being eminently reasonable when they demand that conservative talking points be given equal time in college. Look, they say, liberal physics professors spend hours each day telling young people the rich are evil and that fat women should be able to marry their cats, so can we please have some conservative chemistry professors telling students that brown people are inferior and women shouldn’t go to college?
To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To conservatives, every pursuit is ideological. It’s not merely that they hate scholarship, though they do hate it with a passion — they don’t understand the very concept of it. And that includes conservatives with college degrees — because, contrary to one of the favorite conservative accusations leveled against the academia, no one is excluded from college on ideological grounds.
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No characteristic of authoritarian regimes is more enduring, more consistent than the hatred of educational institutions. Conservatives love to warn us of “tyranny”, as the threat that can only be neutralized with private gun ownership, but history shows that tyrannical governments care far more about the potential of independent thought than about the potential of rifles against their power. Tyrannical governments don’t rush to disarm the population; after all, you can always co-opt the power of the mob against the regime’s enemies, as the Trump regime is trying to do right now. Rather, tyrannical governments decimate libraries. They close universities. They persecute professors. They restrict publishing and book ownership, and subject them to government oversight. An armed mob can easily be turned into an extra-legal oprichnik force; people whose job is to overanalyze everything, not so much. That’s why, when authoritarian governments consolidate power, it’s not armed farmers and gun-carrying middle managers and yes-men they target with terror and coercion; it’s journalists, teachers, artists, scientists, writers — the best and the brightest. Armed or not, an uneducated populace — in the immortal words of the late Turkmen dictator and strongman Saparmurat Niyazov — is easier to govern.
The modern conservative movement is unabashedly authoritarian — which explains why there is no love lost between the academia and the bydlo. In the battle for the soul of humanity, authoritarianism and scholarship are natural adversaries.
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I’ve been hesitating to write about this incident for some time. I have a couple of guidelines for my Halloween posts that are not easy to meet: the post must be horror-themed, it must be about a true story, but it may not treat human suffering as a source of amusement. (I guess that pretty much encapsulates the problem with Halloween as such.) I therefore must apologize to my readers in advance that this post deals with an absolutely horrific death that I wouldn’t wish on my own worst enemy. If it makes any difference, the victim was a very, very bad person. Very bad. So bad, in fact, that „the Bad“ became his royal moniker. I am, of course, talking about Charles the Bad a/k/a Charles Le Mauvais(*) a/k/a Charles II, King of Navarre from 1349 to 1387.
Actually, this story popped into my mind when someone sent me a link to this nonsense about using vodka aerosol to “freshen up” fabrics. Like most normal people, I hate the word “hack” when used in any context other than chopping or computer stuff. “Life hacks” and “kitchen hacks” often represent the height of stupidity, but sometimes the advice doled out by bleary-eyed interns, tasked with churning out a weekly listicle of helpful tricks, is downright dangerous.
Anyway, back to the story. Charles was a high-ranking member of the French royal family. His maternal grandmother was the wife of the Dauphin and even a de facto Queen of France (albeit very briefly, before being murdered on her husband’s orders). In fact, her husband Louis X of France was likely Charles’ grandfather, though this is not certain. His father was also a prominent Capetian. Despite being such a high-born royal, Charles was barred from inheriting the French throne, by reason of dynastic machinations that are very interesting, but, I’m afraid, so complex, it would probably take me approximately 800 single-spaced pages to lay them out. So suffice it to say: Charles’ background made him the kind of cousin whose presence at family reunions makes everyone avoid eye contact with everyone else. Under different circumstances, he would have been first or second in line for the throne, after all of Philipp the Fair’s sons clocked out. As it is, however, he was relegated to ruling a small, landlocked, poor, rustic little statelet of Navarre in the Western Pyrenees. On the map, it looks decidedly like its bigger, more powerful, more glamorous neighbors’ rejectamenta.
Yeah…
Charles grew up with the knowledge of what might have been, and how events beyond his control deprived him of his legacy long before he was born. Needless to say, his default mood is best described as très énervé about the whole thing.
The 1300’s was a very dark century in the history of France. The early part of the century saw an economic depression and a succession crisis – the very crisis that made it impossible for Charles to ascend the French throne (at least not by peaceful means). Then the Hundred Years War started, and it was decidedly not going well for France in the 14th century (France would do much better in the following century, and ultimately win the conflict). Then, in the 1340’s, the Black Death arrived, wiping out at least a third of Western Europe’s population, and possibly as much as half. One very stupid King of France would be captured and imprisoned by the English in 1356 – then travel personally to strip his own beleaguered kingdom of silver and other valuables to pay the ransom (judging himself to be more valuable to his people than all of his country’s assets combined). French peasants, exasperated by the multiple predations of their own ransom-paying king, the aristocracy, and strategic pillaging by the invaders , would revolt in a fantastically bloody civil war in 1358. In other words, this was one of those historic periods that are very enjoyable to read about, but a nightmare to live through.
In such horrid times, bad men find their opportunity. Not an opportunity for heroism, mind you, but for self-dealing and indulging their serial-killer instincts. Charles II looked at the havoc that the English were wreaking in his cousin’s kingdom and thought to himself, “Hmm, I bet I could use that to my advantage.” And then he set about playing the various factions involved in the Hundred Years’ War, including England and France.
Like any aspiring psychopath, Charles began his adult career with a murder. It was a murder committed not for any political or material gain, but purely out of spite – which gives you a good idea of the man’s personality. Over the course of his life, Charles would commit murder on the regular – sometimes personally, sometimes using assassins.
He constantly switched allegiances and sold out his allies almost as soon as he made them, in a game that, remarkably, he pursued almost to the end of his life. He used an army of hired goons to wage private wars while France was being ravaged in an existential conflict; and, when convenient, he resorted to weaponizing the mob. After he no longer needed his mercenary army, he balked at paying them – and murdered its captain.
That first (known) murder he committed, of a French royal favorite, set the tone for his future career. I suppose his overarching ambition was to carve out some sort of a deal in the Hundred Year’s War, where he would either become the King of France, or have France dismembered and be rewarded with a large chunk. Given the chaos engulfing much of Western Europe at the time, this would not have been an unrealistic plan. Alas, Charles’ own rage-prone, impatient personality made it impossible for him to pursue a long game; his insatiable bloodlust and love of cutting the legs from under those around him (including allies), consequences be damned – he would have made a successful reality TV host in our own day — took precedence over calculated self-interest.
It’s all about the spectacle.
A thin-skinned, narcissistic, impulsive, violent, hateful man, Charles’ adult life was one long series of betrayals, reversals, backstabbing and stomach-churning acts of violence.
By his early fifties, Charles had been abandoned by everyone, living in his provincial petty kingdom and suffering from some very unpleasant decrepitude. We don’t know exactly what his health problems were, but he had lost mobility in his limbs. His physicians devised a perfectly sensible medieval treatment for this malady: have Charles wrapped from head to toe in bandages liberally soaked in brandy and rest by the fire.
So, there are two versions of what went down.
According to one, this being the age before Velcro or snap fasteners, the wrapping had to be secured by actually sewing the end of the bandage to the rest of the mummy outfit. One night, a maid was just completing the regimen when she absent-mindedly used a candle to sever her sewing thread (it was, apparently her custom when sewing things).
According to the other, Charles’ bed was being warmed with a pan of coals, which was also a standard medieval practice.
Alcohol + flames + man tightly wrapped in a mummy suit = you can see where this is going.
Whatever triggered the blaze, Charles went up in flames likes the goddamned Wicker Man. And, because his wrappings were so generously saturated with fuel, it took some effort to put out this human torch. Although, according to the first version, the poor servant girl who set the king on fire ran away in terror when the patient, engulfed in flames, began dashing about the room, thereby delaying the rescue.
According to chroniclers, Charles the Bad survived the initial incident. For the next twelve days, he suffered in unimaginable agony from the horrific burns to pretty much all of his body. On New Year’s Day in 1387, he finally died. (That must have been one sucky Christmas.)
Lessons to be learned from the story:
- Anyone familiar with this arcane trivia will know better than to spray their shirt or their couch with vodka.
- Beware of off-label use. Brandy is for imbibing, not sponge baths.
- Jesus Christ, 40-proof liquor is inflammable. Stands to reason you probably shouldn’t spray it on clothes. True, it isn’t jet fuel, but it can still ignite and burn long enough to give you nasty, possibly deadly, burns and set your residence/office/train station lounge on fire. Though I understand it isn’t a “life hack” unless it involves you risking life and limb to save a few bucks or avoid the inconvenience of doing laundry.
Happy Halloween!
A similar incident which took place about 6 years after Charles II’s death. The star of THIS adventure was also named Charles, albeit VI, of France (the crazy one). He and five of his buddies had the brilliant idea to come to a masquerade ball costumed as “savages” — i.e. sewn into skin-tight bodysuits impregnated with resin and covered in flax. They caught fire right quick, and it didn’t help at all that the six men were chained to each other. Charles was saved by the quick-thinking Duchess of Berry, who threw her voluminous skirts over him. Four of his friends died.
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*As an aside, the English word “bad” just doesn’t capture the palpable, oozing, purulent badness of the French “mauvais”.
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“Tell me what company though keepest and I’ll tell thee what thou art.”
~ Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Chapter XXIII
This past week’s news cycle has been dominated by the mind-numbing scandal over whether presidents call the families of fallen soldiers and which presidents do it better (or at all). To recap, this is how it all went down, following a by-now well-trod path familiar to kindergarteners: first Trump insinuated that Obama never called any families to offer condolences for fallen service members; next, this allegation was proven false; next, Sarah Huckabee Sanders doubled down on the false claim; then a Democratic Congresswoman from Florida, Frederica Wilson, accused Trump of making an insensitive remark to a military widow during a phone call; in response, Trump accused Wilson of fabrication; and it went downhill from there. As much as I despise Trump, this was, initially, an example of the outrage machine going into overdrive. It is well-known that Trump is inarticulate and has an obnoxious delivery, so he couldn’t convey a sensitive statement like one of condolences for a loved one if his life depended on it. Trump made a doody on Twitter, because it’s just another day (in paradise).
What was remarkable, however, was his Chief of Staff, John Kelly’s deeply shameful press conference on Thursday. In his statement (that the reviled Librul Fake News Media for some reason tended to characterize as “moving”), he essentially confirmed Wilson’s account of Trump’s phone call to the widow, but then attacked Wilson with a fresh claim that was proven false within hours. I don’t want to rehash all the back-and-forth. Here is a good summary.
I’ve never been enamored of John Kelly. The popular take on him is that he is one of the few “adults” in the administration, who has taken on the unenviable task of managing Trump and his rage-monkeys for the sake of the country. That’s one way to look at it, I suppose. Another way, a more sober one, I think, is that Kelly’s function is to add a veneer of respectability and seriousness to an administration that is corrupt, un-American, hateful, cruel and massively incompetent. And there is nothing honorable about that. There never was. Kelly’s Thursday speech merely confirmed what should have been obvious on the face of the fact that he chose to work for Trump: that he is a person without character, without shame, without values; in other words, just another Trumpista.
Thursday’s conference was a sickening display. Kelly denigrated civilians — i.e. people who are, pursuant to the Constitution, actually his real boss; people who made his military job necessary in the first place. He then would only take questions from reporters who have some kind of a connection to Gold Star families — everyone else being too morally and intellectually inferior to question him, a position the White House doubled down the next day. He was brazen enough to lament that women aren’t being held “sacred” anymore — an obvious dig at Harvey Weinstein and all the liberals who personally raped all the women with Weinstein’s dick. This was a remarkable degree of shameless from a man who decided to serve as a goblin to a draft dodger with a well-documented history of misogyny, including boasting of sexual assault, and one who repeatedly and explicitly disrespected members of the military when they dared criticize him.
On the other hand, as jaw-droppingly insulting Kelly’s performance was, it was not inconsistent with him being Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff. And to that extent, I disagree with the Atlantic piece linked above. Gen. Kelly didn’t besmirch himself at the Thursday’s conference. He besmirched himself when he signed up to work for the Trump Administration. He obliterated his reputation when he decided to use his stature, his good speaking abilities and the inherent respect Americans have for the military to legitimize an administration that came into power under the cloud of suspicion of collusion with a hostile foreign government; an administration being led by a civilian (!) who repeatedly rejected opportunities to serve his country in war, a man who repeatedly attacked a former POW and feuded with a Gold Star family, a man who bragged about sexually assaulting women, faced his own slew of accusations of sexual exploitation and publicly called a former beauty contestant a “pig”; a man who claimed he knows more about how to conduct warfare properly than all “his” generals (Kelly included, presumably); a man who has no respect for truth and has repeatedly and outrageously lied about things both major and minor.
Choice quote among so many choice quotes:
When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. [ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME, DID HE REALLY SAY THAT???? OH YES, HE DID SAY THAT. THE FACT THAT HIS GRIMY LIPS DIDN’T STICK IN SAYING THIS PROVES THERE’S NO GOD.] That’s obviously not the case anymore, as we see from recent cases.
And, to add insult to the injury, Gen. Kelly lobbed a provably false accusation against a Trump critic and mischaracterized her 2015 speech as making other people’s sacrifice “about herself”. This, from the servant of a guy who has reframed every single event in our times as being about himself and his popularity. Was Gen. Kelly even there, as he claimed, to listen to Rep. Wilson’s 2015 speech that he so profoundly mischaracterized and lied about? Who the hell knows. I know — hope — that members of the Mean Fake News Media are checking his 2015 schedule as we speak. Given all the other lies he’s uttered and the constant lying by the administration he serves, I think it’s just as likely as not he wasn’t there. But maybe he was, and just misheard and misapprehended Wilson, because he was too distracted by reminiscing about the halcyon days when black people were held sacred — as mammies and entertainers — before progressives ruined it all and black people got all uppity in getting themselves elected to Congress and demanding that the cops stop killing black people for bullshit reasons, and acting like black people are more important than the flag and the national anthem, and now no one holds black people sacred anymore. I suppose it’s possible, but it doesn’t make much of a difference.
Except of course, in the entirely likely case that Kelly wasn’t there, that would mean that at least some White House staffers were ordered to put aside the business of governing this country for a few days and to busy themselves with oppo research on Rep. Wilson. That finding dirt on a member of Congress most Americans had not heard of until a week ago, because she was being mean to Trump, would become a national priority, ahead of North Korea, Iran, healthcare, taxes and everything else, is something that wouldn’t surprise me in the least about this administration. And when they couldn’t find any dirt, Kelly just made it up.
I am going to depart from the tradition here and not preface or conclude my entry with a disclaimer of how much I respect Kelly’s military service. Fuck that noise. His military service doesn’t earn him points redeemable towards lying and being a fascist goon. And, to the extent that he is a public servant (not Trump’s), any civilian is perfectly within his rights to call him on his misconduct. I’m sorry he lost his son, but that’s something I would have said about anyone, regardless of how their kid was killed, or whether or not they were a decorated member of the military. This is a tragedy by any measure. And it’s unfortunate, frankly, that Gen. Kelly is so loyal to Trump that he invoked that personal tragedy in an effort to justify Trump’s dishonesty, disrespect for the citizens and general lack of character.
At best, Kelly is a political whore. More likely, though, he’s in Trump’s camp because he embraces Trumpist values — racism, misogyny, cruelty, xenophobia, war-mongering and authoritarianism. He may be more articulate, and less impulsive in his attacks on critics, but he is just as profoundly immoral as Trump, and just as utterly devoid of honor or any sense of shame.
Nothing about this man is worthy of respect. Not the least his mischaracterization of his career as a “sacrifice”, especially now that it’s been deployed in support of sheer monstrosity that threatens to destroy this country.
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