[ by Charles Cameron — a quarter century of chyron and metaphor posts — Booker, 81 at Stanford, is now a legit sports metaphor for politics — finishing up with Beto and the Cult of the Dead Cow !! ]
.
Ari Melber, the Beat 3/18/2019:
My notes on what happened which day are seriously confused at this point. I hope I can go back and rescue a chyron “Trumped” from the very start of this show, ami I right?
Quotes:
he sits at the center of a crime syndicate ..
John Flannery: to pin the tail on the donkey, the [ .. ] in the West Wing ..
Hardball 3/18/2019:
Cory Booker:
just another example of his moral vandalism ..
Ron Reagan:
What is it about John McCan that sets him off? John McCain was everything Donald Trump isn’t. John McCain wasa man ofn integrity and a man of great courage.
Meghan McCain:
My father waas his kryptonite in life, and is his kryptonite in death..
We now need, more than ever after this President, more than ever we need a revival of grace in our country, a revival of civic grace in our civic spaces..
I suppose this image is now a sports metaphor for politics
I got into Stanford because of a 4.0, 1600 — 4.0 yards per carry, 1,600 receiving yards..
at 27, not on my download to verify: I see this as whiffle-ball ..
at 38/9, sonny liston vs muhammad ali
40, we want to see some white smoke, some hope
40, the goose-eggs add up
59 steve king?
**
Uncertain sources &c:
The house is just going to be a bear-pit ..
kasie:it’s a home game for him, not an away game
does he have what it takes to go the distance ..
i wasn’t born to run, but i am running ..
we are not trying to hide the ball here at all ..
**
Three that I may have posted before, forgive me:
**
And saving the best [??!!] for last:
As “PsychedelicWarlord,” O’Rourke spent most of his time posting thought-provoking essays, song lyrics from punk albums, and the occasional poem. At one point, he and another member interviewed a neo-Nazi. And in one post, he gave “The True Story of Cult of the Dead Cow,” in which he claimed authorship of the name..
[ by Charles Cameron — chyrons, headlines and quotes as before — including that damn elite schools admissions fraud — some moving in the direction of micro-essays with graphics toppings — in other words, don’t miss them! ]
.
What I’m after here is understanding how reading between the lines corresponds with knowing the known unknowns, and how those two mutually compatible metaphors triangulate with a more distant pair, following trails of breadcumbs and connecting dots.
Somehow our writer found all four necessary to outline — there’s another one — her insight.
So: what can we learn?
Perhaps the most curious detail comes elsewhere in the G.R.U. indictment, when Mueller notes how one particular spear-phishing attempt aimed at the Hillary Clinton campaign was both a “first time” effort, and conducted “after hours.” These may seem like bread crumbs to a popular audience, but they’re more significant Morse-code tappings to jurisprudential scholars, suggesting that the hackers’ strategy could have shifted at a crucial moment.
This investigation is a classic Gambino-style roll-up,” a source close to the White House observed in November 2017, as the probe was heating up. This approach has also created immense political uncertainty surrounding the outcome of his final report. In the G.R.U. indictment, for instance, prosecutors for the special counsel’s office wrote that Russian intelligence officers “knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury” in order to interfere with the 2016 election. Does the fact that Mueller hasn’t charged those “known and unknown” people mean that he can’t make his case, or that he’s just been working his way up the food chain?
With the two-year anniversary of Mueller’s appointment this spring, some of the juiciest—and arguably most consequential—questions about Russian election interference and the Trump campaign remain unanswered. But every bizarre detail or curious omission from Mueller to date could be a bread crumb leading to what the special counsel is preparing next. The investigation’s known unknowns are an investigative road map.
**
Just for the tone / phrasing of the chyron:
**
Okay, let’s back off politics for a moment, and track just a few instances of Life Imitates Art from the New Yorker archive:
Hollywood has had character problems for years: a Shrek maced a group of female tourists, a Chewbacca head-butted a tour operator, a Batman kicked out the windows of a police car. “We’ve arrested Captain America, we’ve arrested Sponge Bob,” Captain Bea Girmala, the commanding officer of L.A.P.D.’s Hollywood Division, said. “Over the years, many of the costumed people we have arrested have had felony convictions, sex-crime-related convictions.” She went on, “We’ve seen characters walk off the boulevard, and hit the coke pipe or shoot up.” Intense competition for tips can turn the street into a crossover comic come to life. Batman vs. Kato: Chest kick—boom! Cartwheeling arms—pow! tight on: A puddle of blood congealing on the Walk of Fame.
In the snow-globe-like tourist zones of America’s cities, character crime is on the rise.
**
Also from the New Yorker, a different Life imitates Art angle, which also adds to our Sanctity of the unsavory collection:
David Grann, The Old Man and the Gun Forrest Tucker had a long career robbing banks, and he wasn’t willing to retire.
The outlaw, in the American imagination, is a subject of romance—a “good” bad man, he is typically a master of escape, a crack shot, a ladies’ man. In 1915, when the police asked the train robber Frank Ryan why he did it, he replied, “Bad companions and dime novels. Jesse James was my favorite hero.”
**
**
Headliners:Mueller MSNBC docu:
He led that charge, and it was like turning the Titanic .. [turning FBI to CT]
He has the ability to just raise everybody’s game ..
And a couple of spares:
Meacham, 11th Hour, date uncertain but close: Even Dante might be flummoxed by the number of [criminals] 23 have here [ie in the cabinet, around DJT]
I think he [Beto] runs and he kicks it out of the stadium in his first three weeks .[fundraising?]
**
MTP 3/11/2019:
Eric Swalwell:
He’s a different President than he was in the last two years, in that he’s not completely restricted but we’ve put an ankle-monitor on him; now when he does this outrageous conduct we can actually check and put balances against him ..
[??]
It depends a lot as to what the President’s game theory of what Mueller has and wants to do already is. I don’t know what that is ..
[??]
And if Mueller comes out and doesn’t have a smoking gun, or if he has a smoking gun and is not getting impeached, doesn’t he feel bullet-prooff?
Ari Melber, the Beat 3/11/2019:
We begin with Mueller grinding down two former Trump aides..
There’s other developments, though, that are also knocking up in the Mueller probe this week. This is part of why people, some people, say it’s like the ninth inning ..
I wonder if you would handicap both of these ruling this week ..
I think the hammer is going to fall, and it’s going to fall very severely ..
Do you expect Judge Jackson will hit Manafrt for what happened elsewhere, or is she going to stay laser-focused on these charges? ..
She’s going to call this one a foul tip ..
What jumps to you about the foul tip analogy is interesting? ..
How much of this could be the fault line of the Democratic primary? ..
It’s a warning shot ..
Hardball — Chris Matthews:
And they say you gotta play to win, unless you’re Donald Trump and you own the golf course..
Trophies for everyone ..
Anyway, how he won the gloves championship without even competing ..
And let’s close with..
**
Operation Varsity Blues:
This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the steady application of wealth combined with fraud. There can be no separate college admissions system for the wealthy, and I’ll add there will not be a separate criminal justice system either.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of hard-working, talented students strive for admission to elite schools. As every parent knows, these students work harder and harder every year, in a system that appears to grow more and more competitive every year.
And that system is a zero-sum game. For every student admitted through fraud, one honest, genuinely talented student was rejected.
[ by Charles Cameron — CPAC and Fox, Kushner and the Judiciary Committee, India and Pakistan, even a mention of epistemology, still plenty going on ]
.
Misc:
BrownPundits:
It puts India and Pakistan on the same moral plane, right?
You talk about India and Pakistan being rivals. It’s just both sideisms of the most mendacious kind.
??:
No doubt Trump‘s dealing with Cohen and Kim are leading stories about now, so this headline deserves to lead this post, but — wait for it —
— it’s the bit about muscling reality into submission that caught my attention. Just muscling into submission would be metaphor enough for me to take notice — but when it’s reality itself that’s being wrestled down, we’re clearly in epistemological territory, perhaps of the variety Michelle Goldberg: talked about the other day:
..The epistemological terrorism that the Trump administration practices on us every day to keep us in this state of kind of derangement and feeling slightly off-center and not being able to get your bearings in this moment.
Terrorism? Not in the usual natsec sense — but hang on, terror itself is a framing of reality, located in the mind-heart-brain complex, and that’s the stage par excellence on which epistemological experience plays…
**
If I could access it, there’s a dueling breaking news chyron at the end of Bryan Williams’ 11th hour for February 26th.
**
Dom Donilon:
North Korea of course is the combination of a cult and kind of a mob operation
It is admittedly difficult, while watching “Leaving Neverland,” to hold in mind two contradictory but equally imperative ideas: that victims should be believed, and that the accused are innocent until proved guilty. The first is wildly crucial if we wish to protect the disenfranchised from egregious abuses of power. The second remains the crux of the American criminal-justice system. Can these two ideas coexist? Right now it feels as if they have to, which means that we are sometimes required to make personal choices about how we accept or dismiss the information made available to us.
The ability to hold in mind two contradictory but equally imperative ideas is a strong version of F Scott Fitzgerald‘s definition of genius — strong because Fitzgerald didn’t insist on the ideas in question being imperative.
Brexit, at the moment, is an exercise in game theory. This week, both Prime Minister Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, grudgingly agreed to open the way for options that could help to break the current deadlock over the terms of Britain’s exit from the European Union. In May’s case, the option was a possible vote in Parliament to delay Brexit, which is now scheduled, ready or not, for March 29th; in Corbyn’s, it was a new referendum that might overturn Brexit altogether. Both May and Corbyn were acting because of rebellions within their own ranks, which escalated last week—when both Labour and Conservative M.P.s resigned from their parties—and threatened to spread. May reportedly made her offer because three members of her cabinet were about to quit, taking a dozen junior ministers with them.
Z
**
3-4-2019 MSNBC, a few items
MTP:
Pres Trump:
Russia, if you’re listening ..
Katy Tur:
It suredoesn’t seem as though the Russians thought it was a joke ..
43: RT is starting their propaganda campaign that mirrors WikiLeaks which then mirrors what Donald TYrump is saying..
Melber, The Beat:
Paul H:
We’re not at Impeach yet, but we’re definitely on the road, the car is on the road. And this is the gas for that car, this investigation.
Paul, if this is a car a lot of people thought Bob Mueller was driving it. Thelasttime people remember an Impeac hment proceeding,we had prosecutor Ken Starr now driving it. ARe you suggesting that Jerry Nadler is now really in that
[more — Clift, Hommer, Prius]
Eleanor Clift:
He knew the game was over ..
The document demand:
Ari:
That’s just Kushner..
Richard Painter:
We don’t haveconclusive proof that the President is a Russian mole, but it sure seems like it .
.
Hardball:
Sen Klobuchar: Rail, class one rail, down to four companies, the same number we’re seeing on the Monopoly board. And this consolidation that we’re seein in our country cries out for tougher action on anti-trust.
Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support. “Fox is not just taking the temperature of the base—it’s raising the temperature,” she says. “It’s a radicalization model.” For both Trump and Fox, “fear is a business strategy—it keeps people watching.” As the President has been beset by scandals, congressional hearings, and even talk of impeachment, Fox has been both his shield and his sword. The White House and Fox interact so seamlessly that it can be hard to determine, during a particular news cycle, which one is following the other’s lead.
Chris Matthews:
Chris M:
Who’s the toy here, the Presidentt? or Fox?
Chris M:
Why is the President of the United States working for Fox?
Jane M:
Despite the discouragement, Falzone kept investigating, and discovered that the National Enquirer, in partnership with Trump, had made a “catch and kill” deal with Daniels—buying the exclusive rights to her story in order to bury it. Falzone pitched this story to Fox, too, but it went nowhere. News of Trump’s payoffs to silence Daniels, and Cohen’s criminal attempts to conceal them as legal fees, remained unknown to the public until the Wall Street Journal broke the story, a year after Trump became President.
All In
Ken Liu:
We want to connect the dots and really put out a narrative of what happened, why it happened, and how we prevent this from happening again
Wajahat Ali:
That’s my slight concern about Biden and Bernie Sanders and Trump, that 2020 is like going to be the ticket of Bengay vs Vick’s Vapor Rub vs Metamucil .
Last Word, O’Donnll:
Frank Rich:
Well, look, everything that Trump is guilty of, he’s accused somebody else of doing — so he’s accused Hillary of having all the questions when he had them, he accused Barack Obama of playing golf all the time when he plays golf all the time, and many worse sins than that
Anita Kumar:
They don’t like her policies, but they say she (AOC) has political game
Katy Tur:
Is she going to be the white whale?
Seb Gorka:
That’s why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced the New Green Deal: it’s a watermelon, green on the outside, deep, deep, Communist red on the inbside.
Brian Williams:
One of his legal ppl:
I think she’s showing rmarkable patience. One day, Brian, Roger Stone will be a convicted felon, and this judge will be the one who decides how long he goes to jail. He’s playing a short game, she’s playing a long game.
3/5/2019 Brian Wms:
Gen McCaffrey:It’s amazing what’s available through unclassified commercial satellite photography [***** ourob][ .. ]
We’re being played by the North Koreans, and President Trump is negotiating with himself [ .. ]
Let’s .. talk about those exercises. The President now openly referring to them as war games –
Holding back the “war games” during the negotiations was my request because they are VERY EXPENSIVE and set a bad light during a good faith negotiation. Also, quite provocative. Can start up immediately if talks break down, which I hope will not happen!
[ by Charles Cameron — kushner’s clearance, the koreas, impeachment and other topics of interest, chyrons, screen-grabs &c ]
.
Chyrons:
Velshi:
Meet the Press:
Ari Melber:
Spares:
**
Quotes with associated chyrons, Melber:
Howard Fineman:
In the campaign, I spent some time on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, in Donald Trump’s office talking to Donald and some other people. And it reminded me of nothing so much as a somewhat more upscale back room at the Bada Bing!
It was Donald Trump sitting behind the desk, and various people milling around, nobody sitting down because Donald Trump had too many trophies and paintings and other things on the chairs and seats, there was nowhere to sit down, but everybody milling around the office and only one person who mattered and who was making everybody else argue with each other, and that was Donald Trump.
Fineman cont’d:
Is this basically a giant RICO case? That’s what we’re dealing with.
Barbara McQuade:
You know, Robert Mueller, and prosecutors in general, are scrupulously careful not to overplay their hand. And so they are correct, they are all correct that there was no direct statement by Donald Trump directing Michael Cohen to lie { .. ]
All they said is, the statement was not accurate. They did not say that President Trump did not in some way imply or indirectly indicate and instruct Cohen [ .. ]
[ .. ] because of statements Donald Trump had said, saying There’s no business in Russia, Michael, and in the same breath asking about the status of the negotiations with Russia [ .. ]
He sent a message to everybody, Get on board, that’s the message.
Barbara, cont’d:
It can be very difficult to prove when someone is so careful and maintains that plausible deniability by talking in code, it’s something that drug dealers do with each other, and mobsters do with each other — but if you can get enough people together to say, That’s how he communicated, then I think you can show his intent.
Ken Dilanian:
Conspiracy theorists on both sides of the Trump Russia story need to fall back.
This is a really complicated story, right, there’s a lot of ins and outs to the facts, and we can disagree, reasonable people can disagree on the implications of the evidence we have seen so far.
Dilanian, cont’d: But the people who need to fall back are those on the right who insist that the whole Mueller Russia investigation is a deep state plot and a coup against the President, and the people on the left who insist that Donald Trump is the Manchurian Candidate, that he’s a puppet of Putin. Because there’s no evidence to support either side of that.
Final chyrons from Melber:
I told you, this was a blizzard..
Hardball:
Ken Dilanian:
We have a new statement from Jared Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, who said at the time that Kushner got his clearance by the book, there was no special interference, he’s now saying that he, Mr Lowell, was not aware that the President had intervened. Speaking for himself now, not his client.
Mieke Eoyang:
What we saw in the Cohen testimony earlier this week is how exactly the President gives these kinds of instructions to people. What he repeats what he wants. He gives a meaningful look, he expects his order to be followed. SO when he says, I didn’t do this, he expects everyone to fall into line — even though we know now, he did.
Greg Brower:
I guess his [Manafort;s] team thought they had nothing to lose and perhaps something to gain by taking a swing at the Special Counsel, but I can’t believe it’s going to work..
Steve Kornacki:
Kornacki:
At the very bottom, there he is: Jimmy Carter from Plains, Georgia, the peanut farmer, the famous story. He went from worst to first, didn’t just win the Democratic nomination, but won the Presidency. That’s the most famous example, I think, of a dark horse who emerged..
AIsha Moodie-Mills:
Let’s remember that the point of impeachment proceedings is ultimately to open up a formal investigation, to be able to get to the heart of the heart1 of the things that Donald Trump is hiding. They also were able to pull out names, like Allen Weisselberg, and others, and also start to ask questions about Trump’s tax returns that really teed up the opportunity for them to follow up on some of the conversation that was politically feel like started at this hearing. So whether they feel like they are at a place to formally call it impeachment proceedings and to start that process, I think what we’re going to see is surely an investigation that mirrors the question-asking and the interrogation that impeachment would provide. [ .. ]
He’s literally being shown to act like a mobster in the way that he conducts himself with the people he works with.
Kornacki:
A felony was committed to conceal a politically damaging extra-marital affair.
David French:
You will see a complete flip-flop on both sides.[ .. ]
You’re going to see the waters being muddied with people who were a No on Clinton being a Yes, and Trump people who were a Yes on Clinton being a No on Trump, the only thing we can be sure of would be that hypocrisy would abound.
**
Okay, that’s Melber and Hardball, I’ll put the next programs in a separate post.
[ by Charles Cameron — from one thing to another — and it’s the gaps — the in-betweens — the leaps — the links — the bonds between them that truly matter ]
.
Bryan, lately of Vermont and now at Georgetown, is our keenest observer of the higher educational future. He coined the term peak higher education in 2013 — like peak oil, but for education, right? — and has been tracking it since then. At some point, he added the notion of queen sacrifice — “A queen sacrifice is when a college or university cuts faculty, especially full-time professors, usually as part of shrinking or ending certain academic programs” — and has made at least sixty posts in which queens are sacrificed, and one on a knight or rook sacrifice? (sports). Bryan‘s latest post is Casualties of the future. In it, he writes:
That academic phase hasn’t been clearly replaced yet. The new phase’s nature isn’t fully evident. Perhaps its outlines will become apparent after several years of change. I’ve speculated on what that next higher education phase might look like here and elsewhere. But for now, let’s consider the present as a moment in between those two phases. That’s our time, right in the midst of a switching period, a liminal space, marked by uncertainty and instability. We’re in a boundary zone.
Okay: a gentleman scholar as wise as he is bearded — and that’s a considerable double-barreled compliment — sees fit to emphasize the liminal in his latest broadside on higher education and its current obsession with cutting arts and humanities programs and various faculty members — ahem, bringing new and far broader meaning, in fact, to the concept of cutting classes. And why?
Why provide a graphic of brick wall(s) unless, somehow, the idea of breaks, gaps, thresholds, borders, leaps, in short the liminal, is of intrinsic importance?
Is citizenship a kind of subscription service, to be suspended and resumed as our needs change? Are countries competing service providers, their terms and conditions subject to the ebbs and flows of consumer preference? Edmund Burke long ago articulated an ambitious vision of society as a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Does any of that still resonate? Or is it a bygone idea of a vanished age, dissolved in a globalized world?
We can consider the cases of women from the US, UK and elsewhere who volunteered for ISIS and now wish to return home.
**
Here’s a paragraph to transition us smoothly:
How easy should it be to give up your citizenship? In the era of Oswald, it could be difficult—like joining an especially selective monastic order that turns away aspirants until they kneel in the snow for a few days outside the monastery or consulate’s doors. Now a U.S. citizen can stop being American with a single visit to a consulate. (Most renounce not for ideological reasons but to avoid the complications of living as an American expatriate, subject to dual taxation and bureaucratic requirements far more onerous than for expatriates of almost any other country.)
That’s a liminalissue, questions of citizenship and borders are liminal. And Bryan is talking liminality when he talks education.
**
Here’s a quick liminal zing from Abigail Tracy, in the title and subtitle of here Atlantic piece:
I’d have been happy to include this in my chyrons and headers collection, but between the lines is too nicely liminal to miss.
**
A limen is a <threshold: it ‘s neither one thing nor the other, it’s in-between. And in-between is a time or state of transition, often tricky — think of the interregnum between the election of a President and his or her Inauguration — and often deeply human — we’re stuck with human nature, every one of us, which as Solzhenitsyn noted has a fault line in it more significant perhaps than even the fissure that separates our left and right cerebral hemispheres. Stunning us, he wrote:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
There’s liminality for you.
**
Here’s how Bryan ends his post:
Babylon-5:
Listen:
There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.
The war we fight is not against powers and principalities — see my earlier post today on spiritual warfare. And The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation — the horror, the blessing of liminality.
SEAL training is the great equalizer: If you want to change the world, measure a person by the size of their heart — and that deep sense of being equalized by sand. tide, and fatigue, brings with it fine-grained humility and profound bonding with ones’ fellows.
**
Victor Turner was the anthropologist who made liminality the corner-stone of his great work, The Ritual Process — see how closely his ideas correspond with McRaven‘s SEAL training. Back in my early post on the topic here on ZP, I wrote:
Basing his own work on van Gennep‘s account of rites of passage, Turner sees such rites as involving three phases: before, liminal, and after.
Before, you’re a civilian, after, you’re a Marine — but during, there’s an extraordinary moment when you’ve lost your civilian privileges, not yet earned your Marine status, and are less than nothing — as the drill sergeant constantly reminds you — and yet feel an intense solidarity with your fellows.
Before, you’re a novice, not yet “professed”, after, you’re a monk — but during, you lie prostrate on the paving stones of the abbey nave as you transition into lifelong vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
There are two things to note here. One is that liminality is a *humility* device, the other is that is creates a strong sense of bonding which Turner calls *communitas*: in one case, the Marine’s esprit de corps, in the other quite literally a monastic community. Part of what is so fascinating here is the (otherwise not necessarily obvious) insight that humility and community are closely related.
**
earlier Zenpundit posts on liminality and borders, among them:
But go back to that first post, Liminality II: the serious part, and read the whole thing. The story of the USS Topeka, SSN-754 alone is worth the effort..
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
width=”600″ height=”318″ class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-63260″ />
