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[ by Charles Cameron — compare & contrast is a very basic mental practice, and one I’d like to sharpen into the cognitive tool or mental app I term DoubleQuotes ]
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This may well be the most significant DoubleTweet of the day — the very fact of its doubleness placing the issue into the category of Who Knows?

“@washingtonpost: Clinton and Trump will soon receive classified briefings. Here’s how that works. https://t.co/5SyBMa6Y5J”

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) July 29, 2016

“@McClatchyDC: GOP and Democratic leaders want to withhold intelligence briefings from Clinton and Trump https://t.co/PjcDQIJp5F”

— Mike Walker (@New_Narrative) July 29, 2016

— both tweets, as you see, come to us courtesy of Mike Walker, former acting SecArmy & deputy FEMA director — and since this is Friday, let me say #FF him at @New_Narrative.

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A French-language DQ worthy of note and our support:

Céder à la panique = tomber dans le piège des terroristes, alimentant leur propag, accroissant leur force d'attractº https://t.co/Fw03UV7Hmg

— Jean-Charles Brisard (@JcBrisard) July 29, 2016

We no longer publish terrorists' claims, images of their propaganda or their photos, @lemondefr says. J'approuve. https://t.co/fWdiblVApN

— Rob Pegoraro (@robpegoraro) July 29, 2016

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A Trump trumps Trump DQ:

To be in charge, you have to take responsibility, you have to instill confidence. It’s like being a conductor–set the tempo.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2013

Trump to NYT after Democratic convention w/higher ratings, production values: "I didn’t produce our show. I just showed up for final speech"

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) July 29, 2016

— hat-tip to @pourmecoffee.

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Another Trump on Trump, this one caught by Adam Serwer:

Mike Bloomberg is doing a great job as Mayor of New York City. Ray Kelly is a great Police Commissioner. @MikeBloomberg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 16, 2012

"Little" Michael Bloomberg, who never had the guts to run for president, knows nothing about me. His last term as Mayor was a disaster!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2016

FWIW, I’m sure there are Clinton on Clinton DoubleTweets too..

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An entire, detailed NYT comparison between the two election campaigns demonstrates the power of extended compare and contrast thinking, aided and abetted by the graphical ease of digital capture and analysis —

— but you’ll need to click through and read it to get the full effect.

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And while we’re on the subject of patterns, here’s a great quote which I got via Jessie Daniels:

"My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." -William James

— ?? (@Shibumizo) July 24, 2016

A fine use of the ouroboric form to hammer home the significance of an observation — and also a powerful contemporary creation myth!

[ by Charles Cameron — also a tweet asking for a DoubleQuote & getting one ]
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As so often, Part I of this post is a somewhat playful teaser for Part II, which is where my real interest is to be found.

Part I, then, is about someone inquiring about two tweets Donald Trump made, asking in effect whether anyone had DoubleQuoted them:.

Has anyone juxtaposed that Trump tweet about Muslim sports stars and his tribute to Muhammed Ali yet?

— Martyn (@moc_moc_a_moc) June 4, 2016

I like this question because it shows that DoubleQuoting — and indeed it’s subset, DoubleTweeting — is not some lonely idea of mine, but a more general form of inquiry that I’m aiming to fashion into a specigic and teachable tool for thinking.

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As it happens, one Chris Taylor responded to Martyn’s question the next day, putting the two tweets in question together. Sadly for my purposes, he did this by screengrabbing the pair of them, thus making it impossible to click through to Trump’s two originals. I’ve therefore gone to Trump’s timeline, and present them here as they originally appeared there:

Obama said in his speech that Muslims are our sports heroes. What sport is he talking about, and who? Is Obama profiling?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2015

Muhammad Ali is dead at 74! A truly great champion and a wonderful guy. He will be missed by all!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2016

I see this juxtaposition as having some mild merit as political argument, but mainly as a sort of nit-picky point-scoring — so I’ll leave it at that.

For anyone who’s interested, here’s a storified compilation of Donald Trump’s tweets on Islam, Muslims and the Middle East — I haven’t verified its contents or up-to-date-ness, but ran across it in my rooting around, and thought it might be of use to some here.

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Part II is where things get interesting.

In the DoubleQuote below, I have posted excerpts from two documents — in the upper panel, Donald Trump’s news release on the prevention of Muslim immigration, and in the lower panel, a couple of paragraphs from the Tablet magazine review of the late Shahab Ahmad‘s extraordinary book, What is Islam, published this year by Princeton UP, and described in a blurb by Harvard Law’s Noah Feldman as “Not merely field changing, but the boldest and best thing I have read in any field in years.”

Boiled down to it’s haiku-like essence, this twofer goes like this:

Trump: single page, single strand statement about banning Muslims

Ahmad: 550 page, multiple strand question as to how to define Muslims

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It’s inevitable that much of our popular — meaning “of the people, by the people, for the people” — discussion of Islam, brought on principally by the as yet but poorly understood connection between Al-Qaida and Islam, and exacerbated more recently by the equivalent link with the (so-called) Islamic (so-called) State — is framed in headlines and soundbites.

Such single-stranded short-form messaging cannot hope to convey much at all of reality, and to get a deeper dive into what the words Islam and Muslim point to, one could hardly do better than The Study Quran for Islam’s central scripture, Jonathan Brown‘s Misquoting Muhammad for the history and interpretation of the corpus of hadith — and Ahmad’s What is Islam for the amazing richness of the Islamic traditions across continents and centuries.

Somewhere between the single words Muslim and Islam on the one hand, and the 550 pages of Ahmed’s erudition, aided and abetted by 44 pages of notes in small type and a substantial index on the other, there’s an awareness of rich complexity, perhaps sufficient for a 25-page essay or 125-page Oxford Very Short Introduction, that we could all benefit from applying to our political considerations of Islam in these fraught times.

[ by Charles Cameron — a DoubleQuote catches some WaPo weaseling with words ]
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This is a day or two late, but I’ve been sick, so here you go:

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It was David Auerbach who pointed out via Twitter that the Washington Post had changed its headline from an unseemly to a more seemly version:

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DoubleQuote! — in fact, DoubleTweet! since WaPo still has its original tweet announcing its Wonkblog article, and also a revised version:

Brexit is a reminder some things just shouldn’t be decided by the people https://t.co/R3r9Ikb4Xn via @Wonkblog

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 27, 2016

and:

Brexit is a reminder that some things just shouldn’t be decided by referendum https://t.co/BLA6RTdhfT via @Wonkblog

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 28, 2016

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So what?

Somehow, Washington the Post and We the People are not coterminous, although together they make for a nice alliteration. Government of the people, by the people, for the people is less convincing when some things just shouldn’t be decided by the people, ne?

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I dunno. Because then again, there’s Andrew Sullivan, Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic, and Roslyn Fuller‘s response, America Needs More Democracy, Not Less.

Forget Plato for a moment — what would Socrates say?

[ by Charles Cameron — in using the word apocalyptic to describe mundane (or zombied) disturbances such as Brexit, we lose sight of the beauty and mystery it conceals & reveals ]
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In fact, not so much as a whiff of fresh napalm in the morning.

Tim Furnish has been on a mini-crusade recently against the misuse of the word apocalypse, tweeting examples along with this meme-image:

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Here are two examples of the genre. which Tim featured last night because each comments on Brexit in apocalyptic terms:

Sources:

Financial Post, Trump, Clinton and Brexit — the three horses of democracy’s Apocalypse

Japan Times, Brexit: The Apocalypse … or not

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Tim is right.

The word apocalypse properly refers the vision John, the seer of Patmos, had, tearing away of the veil which so often hides the divine glory from mortal eyes: the Greek word apokalypsis is appropriately translated revelation, and the first verse of the book called The Apocalypse by Catholics and The Revelation of John in the King James Version runs as follows:

The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John.

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Consider the beauty — and the otherworldiness — of this image from Albrecht Durer. illustrating the “woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars” of Revelation 12.1

:

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The imagery of this final book of the Bible does not show us the usual world of our senses, but a realm of great symbolic beauty, far beyond the reach of unaided eye or camera — as the great literary critic Northrop Frye notes, when he calls the book “a fairy tale about a damsel in distress, a hero killing dragons, a wicked witch, and a wonderful city glittering with jewels” in his Anatomy of Criticism, p 108.

Like the works of the English visionary William Blake, Revelation is more poetic than literal, visionary in the best sense — and it is hardly surprising that Blake is among its foremost illustrators:

Blake, Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne, The Tate Gallery

Brexit simply cannot match the darkness of Revelation’s Babylon in its final throes, nor the “new heaven and new earth” that succeed it — “for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away”.

[ by Charles Cameron — the Holland Tunnel arrest and the beat poet’s Howl — a note on semiotics ]
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A Dodge SUV registered to Higher Ground Tactical sits in the Port Authority impound yard near the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City on June 21, 2016. Photo: Chad Rachman/New York Post

The SUV is somewhat eye-catching, to be sure, and the photo presumably good for clicks — but is using the image also a sort of dog-whistle, for or against those who decorate such vehicles, train with such guns, etc? I certainly posted it here to add color to the page.. and to raise such questions.

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So there was an arrest outside the Holland Tunnel, and reports variously claimed Group Caught With Weapons In Holland Tunnel Claimed To Be On Vigilante Mission and No link to terrorism is suspected, also Man Stopped in Gun-Laden Truck Was on ‘Mission to Help Other Families’ After Daughter’s Drug Death, Friend Says. Different strokes for different folks?

Here’s a brief rundown:

Heavily armed and angry about the heroin epidemic, the owner of an Upper Milford gun range who said he was on his way to rescue a teenage girl in New York City was stopped by police Tuesday at the Holland Tunnel.

John Cramsey, 50, of Zionsville was one of three people in a truck decorated with anti-drug dealer and pro-gun logos and banners from his business, Higher Ground Tactical.

Around 7:40 a.m., Port Authority police stopped Cramsey’s truck on the New Jersey side of the tunnel after spotting a cracked windshield.

Police found weapons in the vehicle — five pistols, an AR-15 rifle and a 12-gauge shotgun — as well as marijuana and a marijuana pipe, according to a news release from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Authorities also found body armor and knives.

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Here’s what caught my attention, and what it reminded me of:

Ginsberg and an anti-drug crusader?

These details are of interest to those who track and analyze “signs” — likewise the two place names, Emmaus and Zionsville, both of them Biblical, likewise the name Higher Ground Tactical, with “higher ground” having both metaphorical (moral) and military meanings — and likewise the vivid imagery of the SUV itself, with its decals & detailing.

We speak with our gestures and the imagery we use, not just with the plain literal sense of our words.

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DoubleQuote Sources:

The Morning Call, Emmaus area gun range owner stopped at Holland Tunnel

Allen Ginsberg, Howl