Oops

Michel Foucalt, who brought a lot of bad ideas into the world, learns that equating things with prison isn't the same as actually being in prison.

Ignorance

So earlier today the president tweeted (the placement of those two words together should tell us one of the major things wrong with politics in the 21st century) an idea he had in response to the complete mess of a Congressional primary in New York that featured voting by mail. If one primary could bring so many problems, what would a national election do? Some parts of the country have had mailed ballots for some time and so they'd probably handle it OK but if there's a large margin of error in, say, Michigan or Ohio, will we ever really know who won? Perhaps, President Trump said, we should consider postponing the election until we were sure we could conduct it safely and accurately.

While I share the president's dim view of the reliability and accuracy of an election with a large number of mailed ballots, his proposed solution is ridiculous. We held an election in the middle of a bloody civil war and we can hold one now. Plus there's not much chance the US Postal Service will solve in a few extra weeks the myriad problems that have been beyond its ken for decades. I saw several commenters suggest that President Trump was not really serious about the idea and knew it was unlikely to happen. He was more likely attempting to set the stage for which of his heirs or offspring might seek the Republican nomination in 2024: "They" stole the election in 2020 so we need to make that right this time! It's a dumb strategy and is more likely to weaken that hypothetical candidate that help them, but when we move outside the areas of self-promotion and infidelity we tax the president's faculties overmuch.

But the real ignorance came from the volume of people who viewed this tweet as a genuine threat to the Republic. My FB feed is filled with sage political savants -- or at least it has pretended to be for the last few years -- but it seems like none of them remember a single thing about their high school government classes. The election date is set by law and can only be changed by law and guess which branch of government handles laws (or used to, anyway)? The legislative one, one house of which is controlled by the opposition party. In conversation online I tried to be genteel about holding the idea that a Nancy Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives would assent to a delayed election but here I'll be plain: That's about as stupid as you can get without your brain activity falling below the level needed to sustain autonomic function.

And even if it were to happen it wouldn't matter. When a president's elected term ends he is no longer president and presidential terms end at noon on January 20 of their fourth year. It's in the Constitution, the document that so many people have claimed devotion and attention to and knowledge of in recent years. Even if President Trump convinced Congress to delay the election until after Inauguration day he would no longer be president because the Constitution says so. Fears of literally any other outcome are of less use than fears of being simultaneously struck by lightning and a meteor. The 20th Amendment doesn't explicitly cover such a scenario -- its creators weren't as smart as Facebook commenters -- but we'd probably have as an interim president the senior GOP Senator who was not up for election this year. I think that's Chuck Grassley but I'm not sure.

I understand why millennials and Zoomers don't get this: nobody's taught civics in school since Newt Gingrich mattered in Congress. But I've seen people my own age who lay claim to great wisdom and insight so misunderstand some of our government's most elementary features that they do all but wail and gnash their teeth over the chance that they will not be governed by a doddering plagiarist come 2021.

This whole daylong tempest reinforces my belief that one of the worst features of having Donald Trump as president has been his elevation of some of the least consequential and appealing elements of our national life -- not just as his supporters but as his enemies.

Testimony

When Rachel Denhollander stood during Dr. Larry Nassar's sentencing hearing in January 2018 and spoke of his abuse, its effects on her and on his hundreds of other victims, she included notes of her pity for him and hopes he would seek forgiveness for his wrong, because she knew that God would accept his genuine repentance as he accepts any who repent. Many Christian writers highlighted her words, even though they had to squirm a little uncomfortably later when Denhollander described how her own church did not support her stands on dealing with the reality of abusers in their midst.

Both aspects of this story are laid out in her 2019 memoir, What Is a Girl Worth? which she titled based on a phrase and idea from her victim impact statement. She asked the judge in the case to impose the maximum sentence possible on Nassar as a sign to other abused and assaulted women and girls that they were not worthless, despite their treatment by those who exploited and manipulated them.

Denhollander doesn't limit her book to just the time she spent competing in gymnastics and was Nassar's victim, and then the later years of the trial and its impact on Nassar's employer, Michigan State University and the United States Gymnastics Association which used him as a staff physician. She offers a brief sketch of her career as a gymnast, including the nagging injuries that developed for which she was sent to Nassar for treatment. She also outlines how she met and then developed a relationship with her husband, trying to describe how the abuse she suffered at 15 affected her ability to trust and relate to him. She notes that the long-distance quality of their relationship may have actually helped them because they could advance in levels of intimacy at a distance that didn't set off as many of her alarms and flight responses.

When the story gets to the initial newspaper account about Nassar that began to uncover the depth of his crimes and the complicity of supposedly controlling organizations in covering up the abuse, Denhollander moves to more of a diary format, walking through the phases that moved from news story to accusation to trial to testimony and then to her sentencing speech. Here her voice is that of a strong adult rather than a victimized child; her abuse affected who she is and left her with scars that may not disappear for a long time but it does not define her. She can note the irony her discovery that her research on the therapy Nassar claimed he was using meant that she knows more about it than he ever did, since nothing of how he abused his victims is a part of that technique.

The story may seem a little unfocused to some readers, but Denhollander wants to try to answer people who legitimately wonder how abuse victims such as herself don't go to authorities and how the abusers might get away with their crimes in full view of parents, guardians or chaperones. She offers a powerful story of how predators such as Nassar capitalize on the trust of their positions and the desire of good people to believe that no one could really be that kind of a monster. She also highlights how his enablers, even though they might have been deceived themselves, can effectively render the powerlessness victims feel permanent by not fulfilling their roles of governance and protection.

Her book is something of a hybrid of reporting and memoir, an attempt to show the impact of these events on a larger public scale and on her own personal history. It includes the significant role played by her faith, both as a place of unfortunate human failing and the eventual source of the true answer to her title question: Everything.

Pi Poetry

The good folk at The Aperiodical created a contest for poetry similar to the well-known Japanese format of haiku. Only instead of the usual 5-7-5 syllable arrangement, they altered it to 3-1-4 -- the first three digits of the mathematical term π or pi -- and called it "pi-ku."

A couple of them are pretty clever. The winner was not only mathematical in composition, but also in subject matter:

Statistics
Lies?
Or, perchance, truth

Back in the Day

Artist Jelena Popovic, working on a project for Budget Direct Travel Insurance, used computer imaging to reconstruct what six endangered ancient sites would have looked like when they were first built and being used.

Every time I think I should just delete my browser I run across stuff like this. Well played, Internet. Well played.

Matthew 11:17

"We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn."

Revelation

When Quinn Colson returned to his hometown of Jericho, Mississippi, in 2011, his desire to learn more about why his uncle, the Tibbehah County sheriff, took his own life led him to uncover dark and ugly deeds beneath the surface of the small town. Over the next several books, as Quinn took on, lost and regained the role of sheriff himself he started peeling back the layers of the fetid onion of corruption that went from Tibbehah County all the way to the top of the state and its movers, shakers and fixers. In recent Colson novels, Ace Atkins hs ramped up the confrontation level as Quinn became more and more of a problem to those folks and their attempts to deal with him kept failing.

The ninth Colson book, The Shameless, ended with Quinn clinging to his life following an ambush. As The Revelators opens, we find time, effort and support from his friends and family have Quinn ready to take advantage of the mistake his opponents made: Leaving him alive. But he finds that political maneuverings will be tougher to handle than he thought. The power brokers installed an acting sheriff in his stead and have taken the reins of authority in Tibbehah County in a firm grip. Though federal agents close in on both the corrupt behind-the-scenes players and their more overt agents and operations, Quinn's resources will be small. The popular law-and-order moves of his replacement and his handlers make that the people of Tibbehah County less happy with Quinn's more nuanced approach as well.

The Revelators earns credit for not following the pattern of earlier books and for creating some final resolution in the long-building feud between Quinn and the corruption of Mississippi politics. Whether this arc was a part of Atkins' plan all along or something that developed a few books into the series, it's dominated the most recent half of the Colson novels and not always to their benefit. More than one story of Quinn uncovering the nefariosity of the supposedly respectable folk of Jericho, and the protection the powerful offered to those clearly disrespectable folk wound up with a tag that promised more of the same. Atkins' increasingly suffocating use of his local color trappings have made what started as a tight series into a set of repeated wearying marches through the same grimy morass. Yes, The Revelators ends with a tag that suggests some of the old sleaze will slide into the newly created vacuum, but with the Big Bad of state corruption and its connection to organized crime gone the series has a chance to recover some of its momentum.

As for The Revelators itself, the plot hangs on a main villain who's a thinly disguised Donald Trump with some Boss Hogg seasoning. Quinn's replacement taps into what Atkins presents as barely-veiled racism on the part of everyone in the county except for Quinn and his friends and family, indicting everyone for the villain's misdeeds. In earlier novels Atkins used that reality to give tone to his work but for whatever reason by the time we get to The Revelators it's just the constantly clanging gong dominating any other note.

Atkins has created several series over his career, as well as producing fictionalized treatments of some real-life crimes and events. Following the death of Robert B. Parker, he began writing novels with that author's mainstay literate tough-guy Boston private eye Spenser. The Revelators completes a Colson arc and could be a good stopping place for this particular series. Especially if Atkins maintains the interest in repetitive political commentary and stereotyped characters that have dominated the last four or so entries.