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Globe editorial: Keep calm and carry on, world

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Critics should also focus on attacking Mr. Trump’s positions on their merits, not on his rhetoric. Take the threat he poses seriously, but don’t exaggerate it. Each and every Trump pronouncement is not one step closer to the end of the world.Above all, don’t respond intemperately. The President’s shock tactics encourage both followers and opponents to go overboard. But there is no victory in retaliating in a similar fashion, or in becoming enraged by his calculated hypocrisies and lies, which are only meant to provoke.

Source: Globe editorial: Keep calm and carry on, world – The Globe and Mail

Krugman: Donald the Unready

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Real crises need real solutions. They can’t be resolved with a killer tweet, or by having your friends in the F.B.I. or the Kremlin feed the media stories that take your problems off the front page. What the situation demands are knowledgeable, levelheaded people in positions of authority.

But as far as we know, almost no people meeting that description will be in the new administration, except possibly the nominee for defense secretary — whose nickname just happens to be “Mad Dog.”

Source: Donald the Unready – The New York Times

When the best of the bunch (of Trump’s Cabinet appointments) is named “Mad Dog”… there might be a problem. Just sayin’…

A Few Thoughts on Entering the Trump Era

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From Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo:

And yet here we have the opportunity to be its guardians and protectors at a unique moment, perhaps a moment of especial peril. Who would not embrace that challenge? We know the curse: may you live in interesting times. We are living in interesting times. Most of us would not have chosen it. But we have it. I think many of us look back at critical momentous moments in our history, the Civil War, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement and other comparable passages in the country’s history and think, what would I have done? Where would I have been? Well, now’s your moment to find out. We are living in interesting times. We should embrace it rather than feel afraid or powerless. We have a fabric of 240 years of republican government behind us. We have the tools we need.

Source: A Few Thoughts on Entering the Trump Era

Looking to literature on inauguration day

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Today’s a rough day for a lot of people. I’m not going to get into this in detail at this point, but I will point out some resonant quotes from literature that I’ve come across recently.

From Chapter 9 of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

From the movie version of The Two Towers, spoken by Sam Gamgee as Frodo is losing the ability to continue:

It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.

From Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (via Bette Midler’s Twitter Feed @BetteMidler):

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

Barack!

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In my absence from blogging, I pretty much missed the 2008 US election campaign except for a couple of posts in January (and a couple on the Exvisu blog: [1], [2]). That’s not to say that I haven’t been following the campaign very closely, however.

Of the hundred interesting stories and analyses of Obama’s stunning victory last night, though, there’s one in particular that seems to have been underplayed: the role that Howard Dean has played in the Democratic resurgence.

Obama is a unique leader, but so was (and is) Howard Dean, and well beyond their formal political relationship (Dean is the chairman of the DNC), there is clearly a sympatico between the two and their basic approach to politics and their vision of how not just to win elections, but to address a much wider public than many Democrats have attempted to address.

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